Ghost Flower

by Michele Jaffe

  Detective Ainslie glanced at me with raised eyebrows. “Or Juliet and Juliet.”

  Before I could ask if Liza and Ro—if she thought Liza and I—had been lovers, Dr. Jackson’s pleasant voice said, “The week before Liza killed herself, Mr. Lawson said in the press that he was out to destroy your family. That had to be upsetting for you, Aurora.”

  Uncle Thom leaned back in his seat. “Or maybe what was upsetting to Liza was her father’s single-minded interest in his lawsuit rather than his family. Surely that could be the significance of her committing suicide in that particular place.” He draped his elbow along the top of the chair, obviously feeling like he’d scored a point.

  Detective Ainslie shrugged. She bent forward, across the table toward me, tepeeing her fingers. “All we know for sure is two girls went to Three Lovers Point alive—”

  “Two girls might have gone,” Uncle Thom interrupted. “You cannot place my client there.”

  “—And only one came back.”

  “But it was ruled a suicide,” I said. My tone sounded desperate, but I didn’t care.

  “The family pressed for that,” Detective Ainslie said.

  I turned to gape at Uncle Thom. “Not our family,” he said emphatically, shaking his head. “Hers. We just want the truth. That’s why we helped then, that’s why we came today, that’s why we’ve been sitting through these inane questions.” Beside me, Uncle Thom got busy collecting up papers. “But that’s enough. We have been more than generous. Aurora, we’re going.”

  I was just pushing my chair back when the door of the room burst open. A man with sandy brown hair came in, took one step, and stopped. “I’m sorry, detective,” N. Martinez said, trailing after the man. “I tried, but I couldn’t—”

  The man stood staring down at me. His eyes were light blue and watery, and his jeans and yellow polo shirt looked tousled, like he’d slept in them. “My God,” he said. He rubbed his hand over his chin, which was covered in light stubble. “I—when I heard last night, I drove right down from Tempe. It’s true. It’s—” His mouth worked for a moment, but no sound came out. He turned to look at Uncle Thom. “I congratulate your family on getting Aurora back, Thomas.”

  “Thank you, Leo,” Thom said. He glanced at me uncertainly. “You remember Leo Lawson?” he prompted. “Liza’s father?”

  “Mr. Lawson,” I said. I stood up, seized with an overwhelming urge to hug him, but at my slightest gesture he pulled back. A sharp chill wrapped itself around me, and my hands dropped to my sides. I said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” It sounded ridiculous.

  His eyes roamed my face, the most intense scrutiny I’d gotten since I’d been in Tucson, like he was looking for something.

  Something I couldn’t give him. In a cracked voice he said, “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?” The pain on his face was awful. I wanted to turn, run away. This wasn’t what I had agreed to when I told Bain and Bridgette I’d impersonate Aurora. I had no idea what I’d be doing to these people.

  “Reopening it. Reopening this whole mess.” His eyes moved from me to the photos on the table of Liza. I wished someone had covered them up.

  I felt worthless, mean. “That wasn’t my intention, Mr. Lawson. I—the police just wanted to—”

  His gaze returned to me, and now it was different. Composed, determined. Cold. I had the sense he’d made a decision. His hands came up and rested on my shoulders. “My daughter committed suicide. I have to live with that. But I will not live with having it dredged back up. She died by herself. All alone, my sweet girl. You left her alone then. Why can’t you just leave her alone now?” Mr. Lawson’s feverish eyes sought and held mine. “Don’t do this. Leave her be. If anything else happens, it will be on your head. Your head. Do you understand?” His grip was furious, his tone almost menacing.

  But his gaze was—scared. He was afraid of something.

  “That’s a threat,” Uncle Thom declared. “I want it noted for the record that he laid his hands on my—”

  “Fear in a handful of dust,” I said, the words coming out of my mouth before I’d even realized it, and I felt the relief you feel when you remember the lyrics to a song that’s been eluding you.

  Then I looked in Mr. Lawson’s face. The color had drained from it, and he was a pale, sickly white. “What did you say?” His fingers dug into my shoulders as though if he let go he would fall, and his voice was jagged like it had to be dragged out of him. “What—why did you say that?”

  “I said, ‘Fear in a handful of dust.’ I—I don’t know why. It’s a poem, I guess, that I’ve been trying to figure out. Do you know what it means?”

  “It was Liza’s favorite poem. The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot. You knew that. You must have known she had that stanza written down and tacked on her wall.”

  Liza’s favorite poem? Why would that have been what I was trying to remember? How?

  The terror I’d felt the night before when I saw the door handle moving by itself flooded back over me. I stared at Mr. Lawson.

  The agony of his expression was almost unendurable. His fingers gripped my shoulders. I didn’t know if I wanted to hug him or flee. I stood there, shaking, my mind reeling. “I’m so sorry,” I said, falling back on my prepared script as my mind staggered around like a drunk unable to cope with reality. “I didn’t remember. I didn’t know.”

  “He’s hurting my client,” Uncle Thom squawked somewhere in the distant background.

  N. Martinez stepped forward, and Mr. Lawson’s hands dropped from my shoulders. “I’m going. It’s done.” He kept his agitated gaze on mine, repeated, “Please, just stop,” and stalked out.

  There was silence for three beats. Uncle Thom stood up. “We’re done here.”

  He and Detective Ainslie did some jockeying about would we or wouldn’t we be hearing from one another, and she handed me her card and told me to call if I remembered anything. I said the things I needed to say, but I wasn’t paying attention. My eyes were glued to the close-up picture of Liza in the middle of the conference table, to the way she was half-smiling up at me. As though she and I shared a secret.

  It had to have been a coincidence, me thinking of that poem. It was the photos, the dust on the rocks in the desert. Just a coincidence and not worth thinking about anymore.

  I felt myself being propelled toward the door, and when I came out of my haze I realized Dr. Jackson was speaking to me. “It was nice meeting you, Aurora,” she said. “Good luck.” She held out her hand.

  We shook, a strangely formal gesture, but it momentarily made my lethargy evaporate because when I got to the door I remembered something. I half-turned, my hand on the lintel, and said, “It’s uncommon, isn’t it? For people to commit suicide by jumping?”

  Dr. Jackson nodded. “It is. Despite what you see on TV and in the movies, less than 10 percent of suicides happen that way.”

  “Although Three Lovers has become a popular spot for it,” Detective Ainslie said. “There was another suicide there after your friend’s. A man named James Jakes.”

  “You already tried to pin that on the Family without success,” Uncle Thom said. “You couldn’t link anything to Bain then, and you won’t be able to link anything to Aurora now.” He put a hand on the small of my back and pushed me the rest of the way out the door.

  As he and I stepped out of the police station, the dazzling sunshine and warmth hit me, and I stood there for a moment breathing them in. The wind had picked up slightly, tinged with the faint smell of smoke.

  “Wildfire season,” Uncle Thom said. “They’re predicting a bad one this year.” He spoke casually, as though we hadn’t just endured something strange and uncanny. Because, I realized, he hadn‘t.

  How had I known that poem?

  I shivered, suddenly cold despite the heat.

  There was a knot of people at the bottom of the stairs, some of them holding signs that said, “Send Silvertons to Jail Not Senate.” They spotted Uncle Thom and me and sta
rted booing. A woman in a blue baseball cap shouted, “Murderers!” as we went by, and several others joined in.

  I looked at them and heard them, but it was as though they were behind glass. Like I was observing from a great distance, with someone else’s eyes, someone else’s body. I kept feeling the tickling of that other voice in my head and picturing the girl lying at the bottom of the rust red ravine. I wondered if that was what it felt like to be haunted.

  Haunted. I shivered again. There is nothing to be afraid of, I told myself. You just thought of a poem because the images matched the photo. There is no such thing as being haunted. There is no such thing as ghosts.

  And for the next forty-three minutes, I believed it.

  CHAPTER 20

  It took eleven minutes to drive from the police station to the mall where I was supposed to meet Bridgette. After Uncle Thom had told me that I’d done a great job and I’d mumbled something appropriate, we spent them in silence.

  I tried to concentrate on the scenery to blot out the image of the girl lying at the bottom of the canyon. There was a geological quality to Tucson, moving from the flats upward, as though it had been developed in layers. I watched the buildings go by with exaggerated interest, first the old adobes, newly gentrified: a turquoise one with a green door, a red building with a red door and a massive cacti peering over a tall fence, and a yellow house with an electric blue door flanked by bright fuchsia bougainvillea on either side.

  This didn’t look like Aurora’s world—but I could imagine living in the house with the blue door, doing homework at a carved desk and waiting for my mother to come in from painting in her studio. I’d make us macaroni au gratin avec lardon for dinner, and we’d eat off of plates with brightly colored horses or camels painted on them. And later we’d sip tea from wide mugs and watch television together on an old oversized green couch covered with mismatched pillows.

  Then we were past the houses and into the next layer, low-slung strip malls whose tenant lists could be the template for a game of suburban American Mad Libs, [dry cleaner], [nail place], [smoke shop], [pet spa], with the occasional Native American Gallery or Gem Depot to remind you that you were in Tucson. From there, closer to the mall, we moved into a realm of stucco-covered townhouses that somehow managed to look dirty despite being painted the color of the dirt.

  Uncle Thom dropped me in front of Macy’s. It took me seven minutes to find Bridgette in the back corner of the designer section. I was sure she’d been saving up a barrage of fury for me, and there were a lot of things I wanted to ask her, like about the party she hadn’t mentioned to me, and the boy in the photo strip with his face scratched out. But when I found her, she was deep in conversation on her phone. She was, of course, perfectly put together, each reddish brown hair perfectly in place, her blue eyes subtly outlined with brown shadow, her high-waisted wide-leg jeans and cream eyelet top creaseless, her brown undoubtedly designer sandals unscuffed.

  Without pausing in her conversation, she motioned me over, pointed toward a bottle blonde salesgirl whose name tag said “Maisie,” and turned her back.

  “Your cousin started a dressing room for you,” Maisie told me. Her quietly chic off-white skirt and top looked like they aspired to grow up to be Bridgette’s wardrobe one day. Her tone was close to worship, but she seemed a little shell-shocked. “She’s very energetic.”

  At least I wasn’t the only person Bridgette had that effect on. “Yeah.”

  The dressing rooms were separated from the sales floor by a wide cream-colored arch. It led into a subdued hallway with dark burgundy flocked velvet walls and thick carpeting that looked like you’d have to vacuum three times to really get it clean. A row of star-shaped lanterns that seemed to create more shadows than they eased hung from hooks along the wall. It felt like a boudoir, not a corner of a department store.

  There were four curtained alcoves off the hallway, and Maisie led me to the first one, nearest the arch. “She put you in No. 1,” she said, pulling aside a heavy velvet curtain as though she were unveiling a new home spa on a game show. “It’s our nicest changing suite.”

  The “changing suite” was large—large enough for an overstuffed chaise lounge and small table near the entrance, a console table against one wall, and a kind of dais in the front where the three-way mirror stood. The corners were in shadow, but the part of the room with the mirror was well-lit. The console table held a velvet jewelry case with necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, and next to it stood six pairs of shoes and three purses. There were four sets of bars to hang clothes on, and they were all full. I’d never seen so many beautiful clothes in one place before.

  “She has day wear on this side,” Maisie explained, pointing to what looked like ten outfits, arranged by color. “Going-out clothes over here.” Another ten outfits, also arranged by color from light to dark. “And the gowns are back here, although she said you might just have to have some made.”

  That sounded like gowns plural. “Did she say where I would be wearing gowns?” I emphasized the last syllable.

  “Many of our ladies have black tie affairs to go to, and there are the dances at the club. But I think she mentioned something about your eighteenth birthday party.”

  “Oh. Of course,” I said. And for some reason that both delighted and relaxed me. After everything I was learning, it was reassuring to have some evidence that Bain and Bridgette intended to stick to at least some part of their original proposal.

  “She said to start over here”—she pointed to her left—“and then go around, so you are moving clockwise.”

  Bridgette couldn’t even let me try on clothes in my own order. I was increasingly glad that I’d decided to ignore her plan and come a week early. How incredibly annoying for her that must have been. “I’ll be sure to consider that,” I said.

  “Oh, and she said to tell you that your phone is in that bag by the chair.” I glanced at the brand new iPhone and wondered why Bridgette had bothered. It wasn’t like I had anyone to call—or who would call me. “It’s your old number; she just got a new handset. If you need anything, I’ll be right nearby. Although”—she looked around with clear admiration—“I doubt you will.”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling a bit disoriented.

  She pulled the heavy velvet curtain back into place with a discrete clicking of the large wooden rings it hung from. With it closed, the sound from outside was muffled, and it was like being in a little cocoon. I fingered an inky indigo silk dress with a row of pearl buttons that was in the middle of the “night” section and toyed with starting there. But since I was still a little afraid of how Bridgette would react to my show at Coralee’s party now that we were alone, I decided to follow her instructions.

  I was on the second of the “day” outfits when I heard a phone ringing. It was coming from the bag on the chair. With a jolt, I realized it was mine.

  Slowly, I walked to the chair, opened the bag, and pulled out the handset. “UNKNOWN NUMBER” blinked up at me from the screen. My heart beat faster.

  Who would be calling me? I thought again. Bain? Althea? Who else had this number or would know it had been reactivated?

  “Hello?” I said, trying to keep the trembling out of my voice.

  There was silence on the other end.

  At first I thought I had been dialed by mistake from the bottom of a purse.

  Then I heard, very faintly, the sound of breathing. Someone was there.

  “Hello?” I repeated.

  It was soft, faint breathing, as though coming from very far away. It reminded me of how my mother, my real mother, sounded when she’d call me from pay phones. The tinny, crackling sound of her voice making it seem surreal, inhuman.

  “Who is this?” I demanded.

  The breathing stopped. The line went dead.

  Super, I thought, setting the phone down. I’m not even here for twenty-four hours, and I’m already getting prank calls.

  I tried to laugh it off, but as I slid into a short-s
leeved cashmere sweater, I had to admit there was something unnerving about the call. If the breathing had been heavy and perverted, that would have been one thing. But it wasn’t. It felt like the breathing of someone asleep on the other side of the world.

  It took me ten minutes to work through the first three “day” outfits, and at that rate I figured I was going to be there until Aurora’s birthday. To speed things up, I decided to forgo fastenings, which is how I found myself trapped half in and half out of the silver grey blouse when I felt the air behind me move and something brush against my leg.

  I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t move my arms. I started to say, “Who—”

  A hand closed over my mouth, an arm locked around my chest, and a voice said, “Don’t scream.”

  CHAPTER 21

  No one who has lived the life I’ve lived would follow that order.

  I’d managed to keep my motorcycle boots on through all the trying, and now I kicked backward with one of them, making contact with a shin.

  “Stop it,” a girl’s voice said. “Ouch.”

  Scrambling my head out of the top of the blouse and plowing my arms into the sleeves, I turned around. I was face-to-face with Coralee Gold.

  “You are so violent,” she complained, massaging her shin.

  My heart was pounding, and my mind flipped from the fact that this was the girl whose graduation party I had ruined the night before, to what the police had said about her and Liza being enemies.

  She pushed clothes I’d discarded on the chaise aside, sat down, planted her arms behind her, and leaned back. She was wearing tight jeans, a billowing yellow top with gold-wrapped tassels at the sleeves—which was sheer and open enough to make it obvious she wasn’t wearing a bra—and one long beaded earring.

  My mind flashed to the picture of her parents—Gina “Domestic Diva” Gold, tall and Japanese; and the “adorable Bernie,” short and white—that showed up in every issue of Tucson magazine, and I realized Coralee’s looks were a perfect blend of the two. With her mother’s thick dark hair and features and her father’s piercing green eyes and cleft chin, she was more beautiful than pretty. I imagined that had been challenging when she was younger. Now she was a knockout, and the way she carried herself suggested she knew it. A little too much maybe, like she was making up for lost time. Or had an axe to grind.