A Shade in the Mirror

by Tracey Lander-Garrett

  A SHADE IN THE MIRROR

  Tracey Lander-Garrett

  Copyright © 2019 Tracey Lander-Garrett

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN 978-1-7334545-1-3 (print) | ISBN 978-1-7334545-0-6 (ebook)

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First printing, 2019

  Glass Carousel Press

  Pflugerville, TX 78660

  Cover Design: Steven Novak, Novak Illustration

  For Sam

  the most unexpected goldfish of all

  Prologue

  1992

  The girl lies in bed, the back of her head to the doorway.

  Her head rests at an unnatural angle. Straight brown hair partially obscures her face, the rest of its length fanned across the white and black paisley pillow. Her skin is unnaturally pale. It’s not a lovely alabaster or creamy ivory; instead there is a chalky, almost gray whiteness to her skin.

  Her limp hand dangles off the bed, fingernails gone blue. This much is visible from the bedroom doorway. This is what the landlord sees when he enters the apartment in the morning to fix the leaky kitchen faucet, as he’d promised the day before. The landlord calls the police.

  A closer look reveals her eyes are open. A petite brunette with golden brown eyes in her late teens or early twenties. The bedclothes are pulled up to just below her nose. Beneath it, where her mouth and neck should be, runs an angry red and gray ruin of veins and tubes and ligaments that were never, ever meant to see the light of day. It is as if her jaw has been torn off and her throat has been ripped open by some curious animal that then took the time to dissect it.

  Beneath this desecration, there are no other wounds. She wears a tank top and shorts. The tank top is white and stained with red, contrasting with the gray of her skin.

  But where is the rest of the blood? The paisley sheets . . . the mattress . . . they should be soaked through, sopping with red. There’s not a drop on the bed. Hardly any in the girl. Hardly any at the scene. Her lower jaw is found beneath her head as soon as the coroner moves her. The sight is so disturbing to a rookie policeman on-scene, he bolts for the bathroom.

  The coroner estimates—based on temperature and the progression of rigor mortis—that she has been dead only four hours.

  Soon the detectives will determine she was killed elsewhere, then brought to the bedroom. But not in the tub. Not a drop, not a smear there. There are three drops of her blood in the entryway. Just three tiny drops. No blood of any quantity elsewhere in the apartment, not in the drains, not in the toilet, not outside the windows to the fire escape. No fingerprints found at the scene other than those of the apartment’s occupants.

  Robbery is ruled out as a motive almost immediately. Her purse and wallet are in the kitchen, her jewelry in plain sight in the bedroom. There are no signs of forced entry, although a lamp in the entryway has been knocked to the floor, presumably as the killer carried her body into the apartment.

  Who would want her dead? The roommate is out of the country. A rival at school has a rock-solid alibi. A boyfriend identified as a person of interest cannot be located. They don’t even have his last name. There isn’t a single lead. Not a single foreign hair or fiber on her body. The lack of evidence baffles forensic experts.

  The sun sets, and rises again. Days pass. Weeks. Months.

  The case is left unsolved. It goes into a cold case file, forgotten.

  Such a violent, unthinkable murder.

  Her spirit is left unsatisfied, malcontent, disturbed. Rooted to the spot. Unable to rest.

  And when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead thins . . .

  She haunts.

  Chapter One

  2017

  There are many things you tell yourself when you’re afraid of something you can’t see, something that can’t be there. You tell yourself that you’re just imagining things. That you didn’t hear or see the thing you saw. And you can forget telling anyone else about it. Why would they believe you? You don’t even believe it yourself.

  On the night in question, I came home late from work just as I usually did. My roommates were already in bed, also as usual. Because I was hungry, I went to the kitchen. The pull-chain light came on with a buzzing noise that began to decrease in volume, but then the light flickered and buzzed loudly. Not for the first time, I wondered if the halo-shaped fluorescent bulb was about to die.

  I’d been living there about a month. I didn’t know the protocol. Call the super? Fix it myself? Was there a stepladder in the apartment I could use? And where would I get an old-fashioned halo-shaped bulb anyway?

  It was an old building. The water pressure wasn’t great. The radiator hissed and clanked. The other lights dimmed and flickered. Kara, one of my two roommates, thought there was something wrong with the wiring.

  I poured some cereal into one of Julie’s bowls. Ate with one of Kara’s spoons. That’s how roommate situations work. Everybody adds a little something. Kara brought the TV. Julie brought the couch. I brought a change of clothes and what I’m told is a lovely smile.

  I selected a glass tumbler from the cabinet and filled it with water, then took a swig.

  I put the glass on the counter, next to Kara’s toaster oven and Julie’s blender. I couldn’t remember which of them brought the glassware. Were the tumblers Kara’s and the wine glasses Julie’s? Or was it the other way around?

  As I stood munching away, I heard the familiar creak of one of the kitchen cabinet doors opening behind me. I thought I must not have closed the glassware cabinet door all the way. But the open door was a different cabinet. Strange, but whatever. I closed it and went back to eating my cereal.

  Then I heard another creak. Did we have mice? It was another cabinet door, this one beneath the counter. I took the last bite of cereal and put my bowl in the sink, then peered in the cabinet. I wasn’t brave enough to reach in, but the usual array of pots and pans sat undisturbed without signs of rodents, and that was good enough for me.

  I closed the cabinet and took a second drink. This is important. There was nothing wrong with the glass when I drank from it either time. It was just like any other glass of water. It was just like any other night. Except for the cabinets, of course, but there had to be a rational explanation for that, didn’t there?

  I set the glass down and washed up. I left the clean things in the dish rack and dried my hands. Then I heard the distinct plink-plunk of liquid hitting the tile floor coming from behind me.

  I’d left the glass on the counter. I distinctly remembered placing it near the back, in front of the toaster oven. Now it leaned two inches from the counter’s edge, tilting on its base at a strange angle. The water slowly dripped from the mouth of the glass, spilling onto the floor in droplets. I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing at first.

  Glasses of water don’t tilt by themselves. My mind searched for a rational explanation and came up with nothing.

  As I watched, the glass leaned more and more, until it was nearly horizontal and the water started to pour out of the glass. My face and hands went cold in fear.

  The glass hung, tilting on the counter’s edge for several seconds while the overhead light crazily flashed from bright to dim, every change accompanied by a low buzz. Then the light went back to its usual brightness. The glass, seemingly suspended a
t the edge of the counter, suddenly crashed to the floor, shattering.

  I screeched.

  Julie’s room was closest to the kitchen, and a sleepy, “Everybody okay?” came from that direction.

  My mouth was completely dry and it took a few swallows for me to speak. “I’m fine,” I said, my voice oddly high-pitched. “I . . . just broke a glass.”

  She called again. “Need any help?”

  “No. Thanks, though,” I said. “Sorry I woke you.”

  “No worries. Goodnight.”

  No worries. Right. The glass had . . . what? Committed suicide? Gotten tired of the serving life? Could a glass have feelings? Ridiculous thoughts like these ticked through my mind while I located the dustpan and quietly swept up the broken bits of glass and dried the floor. The lights in the kitchen flickered again, going dim, bright, and then back to normal.

  What the hell was happening? It wasn’t just the glass; it was the lights, and the cabinets, and the strange noises I heard in our building at night, and the way the lamp near our front door was always cold to the touch, even when the room was eighty degrees.

  Ghost, my mind said.

  Kara and Julie, who had been roommates in college, had been living in our three-bedroom Brooklyn apartment for two months longer than I had, but they always had some reasonable explanation for these things: bad wiring, old pipes, a pesky draft.

  But how could they explain away what I’d seen the glass do? I was reasonably certain that the laws of physics couldn’t cover it. So what could? Psychic powers? I didn’t think I had any, and even if I had, I wouldn’t be likely to pour out the water I wanted to drink. One of my roommates? As ridiculous as telekinetic roommates seemed, the idea of a water-pouring ghost was preposterous. Then I thought of Poltergeist, the movie.

  Then I didn’t get any sleep that night.

  Two days later, I was standing in the hallway wearing sweats and an over-sized t-shirt, listening to Kara complaining. She was standing outside her room, ready for work, her light brown hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail, wearing a pair of black slacks and a bell-shaped blouse that hid her just-showing pregnancy.

  “Maddy,” she said, “I just don’t get it. I went to bed last night, and the mirror was on the wall to the left of the bed and the mask was to the right. This morning, it’s the opposite. They switched places.”

  I peeked into the room. The mask on one wall, white plastic with eye holes and a wide, beak-like nose. The mirror dominated the other wall. It was an antique, about three feet by four feet and sixty pounds of glass and gold-embossed wood.

  I certainly hadn’t moved the damn thing. It was too unwieldy and heavy. I may be tall for a girl, at five-nine, but I’m no bodybuilder. I couldn’t move it, so there was no way that Julie, our five-foot-two and maybe one-hundred-pound roommate, could have.

  I said as much and, as if on cue, Julie came out of the bathroom wearing a robe, her dark hair twisted up in a towel. “Don’t look at me,” she said, holding her hands in front of her and retreating to her room. Kara had already interrogated her.

  “Dammit, I’m not crazy,” Kara said, furrowing her brow.

  “Maybe Mr. Delgado moved it during the day yesterday?” I suggested. “And last night you were too tired and didn’t notice.”

  Julie’s hairdryer clicked on in her room and the lights in Kara’s room dimmed. “I’ll ask him, but I doubt it,” Kara said. “I should really talk to him about the wiring in this place anyway. Julie using a hairdryer shouldn’t do this.” She gestured at the flickering lights.

  “It shouldn’t?” I wondered if maybe Kara had been using a hair dryer the night the glass had jumped to its death. But I hadn’t heard any noises like that.

  “No. And have you noticed in the kitchen when you make toast? Same thing. I hate to think what putting in an AC unit or two this summer will do.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t have even thought of that.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I’m here for. In the meantime, would you mind giving me a hand?” She stuck her thumb out at the mirror.

  Between the two of us, with a couple of rest breaks and several bad words from me, we pulled the mask and the mirror down and moved each back to the spot Kara wanted it. Julie’s hairdryer switched off and the lights in Kara’s room brightened once more.

  “Could Tad and Julie have moved it together?” Kara asked me.

  “Did he sleep over last night?” I asked.

  “No, he didn’t,” Julie said. She appeared in Kara’s doorway, this time dressed in slacks and blouse, her hair pulled back in a bun. “Look, Kare, I didn’t move the stupid mirror, and if Madison didn’t move it, maybe you moved it in your sleep or something. If I remember correctly, it wasn’t me who pulled pranks when we were at Smith—it was you. Whatever you’re up to? It’s not funny.”

  Kara’s mouth opened and closed. “You know what? I need to get to work.” She grabbed her jacket, keys, and bag. The door slammed behind her.

  “Bitch,” Julie mumbled, then gave me an apologetic look. “I need to go too, but I’ll give her a couple of minutes to get ahead of me. There’s nothing more awkward than standing on the platform with someone you’re mad at.” She pulled a tube of lipstick and a compact from her purse and began dabbing her lips with pink.

  “I didn’t move it, you know,” I said. “It must weigh fifty or sixty pounds.”

  Julie nodded. “Do you think she has baby brain or something?”

  “Huh?”

  “Pregnant women. They forget stuff . . . Hormones?”

  I shook my head.

  “When my sister was pregnant, she forgot all kinds of stuff. I guess you never hung out with a pregnant chick before?”

  “Uh, I guess not.”

  “Right, right,” she said breezily. “But really. Do you think she’s losing it again? Didn’t her doctor take her off her meds because of the baby?”

  Kara had been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown about six months before. But once she’d been discharged, she’d been fine. She seemed to like her job as an administrative assistant and, since she’d gotten pregnant, she’d been even happier. She was excited about the prospect of becoming a mother to “Little Bean.” She and her boyfriend Serge were even talking about getting married.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “She’s been doing pretty good. Plus, I’m pretty sure she couldn’t move that thing by herself.”

  “True. Are you working late today?” she asked. “Will you ask Mr. Delgado about it if you see him?”

  “Sure,” I said. “How about you? Got a job today?”

  “I’m taking my portfolio to an ad agency.”

  Julie had been temping while trying to get into modeling or acting, but had been having difficulty.

  “Let’s hope I’m not too ethnic this time,” she said. Apparently being of Korean descent qualified as “too ethnic” according to one casting agent.

  I wished her luck and considered going back to bed. Usually when I know I’ll be working late, I tend to sleep until noon. I’d woken earlier than usual and had been kept up by the business with the mirror. It was unsettling, to say the least. Was Kara having another breakdown? Had our landlord been moving her stuff around? Could the broken glass be connected? Was either Kara or Julie playing some kind of practical joke? Too many questions with no answers, while a little voice in the back of my head kept saying ghost.

  There was no way I was getting back to sleep.

  On my way out, I saw Mr. Delgado sweeping fallen petals from the dogwood tree in front of our building. I had to ask.

  “Hey, Mr. Delgado. Sorry to bother you, but have you moved anything in our apartment recently?”

  Mr. Delgado paused in his sweeping for a moment. “Why? What happened?”

  I explained about the mask and mirror changing walls in Kara’s room and he shook his woolly head when I finished. “I only comes into your apartment with your permission,” he said in his thick Brooklyn accent. “You can ask my Marie.”r />
  “That’s okay. We were just wondering. Maybe Kara was mistaken.”

  “Does that Kara ever sleepwalk?” he asked.

  So much for him.

  The next day, I stopped by an occult bookstore in Manhattan called Thirteen Books. The store was in Greenwich Village, just a few blocks away from where I worked. The space itself was clean and small, with books lining the walls and odd posters of UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle on the walls. The guy behind the counter was in his twenties, blond, with a bored affectation that seemed to say either “I’ve heard it all and seen it all,” or “I don’t believe any of this crap.” I figured he belonged to the latter school, and felt a little spark of triumph when he responded to my inquiries with a tone that was all apathy.

  “Yes,” he sighed. “We have books on ghosts. Yes, we have books on poltergeists, too.” He stood behind the counter and was enormously tall, at least six-four. “They’re this way.” He moved through the stacks toward the back left of the store and gestured to a shelf marked Ghosts, Poltergeists, and Spirits.

  “Can you, um, recommend any in particular?” I asked

  “What do you want to know?” It was more of a statement than a question, and one that indicated he really didn’t want to hear the answer.

  Being in retail myself, I wasn’t impressed with his idea of customer service.

  “I want to know if the weird shit happening in my apartment can be explained by something rational, or if the place is fucking haunted,” I snapped.

  He raised one blond eyebrow and turned to study the shelf. “We restock two of these fairly often. This one,” he said, using a single finger to nudge a book forward on the shelf, “debunks a lot of the common phenomena.” Then nudging another forward, said, “This one basically lists the common phenomena, and recounts a bunch of supposedly ‘true’ haunting stories to back it all up.”