Ghost Flower

by Michele Jaffe

  “So you came to the party to see her?”

  Coralee nodded. “Yeah. She finally called me back that morning and said you were having some kind of nervous breakdown, so she couldn’t leave you. Something about Colin and a breakup? That’s how I knew about you and Colin, actually. Liza had told me about picking up his notes for you from the Old Man and leaving yours for him, so no one would know you were in a relationship. We weren’t the only people in Tucson keeping things secret.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Anyway, I was desperate to talk to her. I hadn’t seen her in two weeks, since Victoria got home, and when I heard she was out with you, I got jealous. So I went up to the party to just, you know, talk to her, but when I got there I couldn’t find either of you. All I managed to see was your cousin, talking to J.J.”

  I remembered Grant mentioning a J.J. “The J.J. who worked at the golf club? He was at the party?”

  “He was, but not officially. That was kind of J.J.’s thing, right? Sure, he worked at the golf club, but mostly he was kind of a thug of all trades. People like Bain love hanging out with people like J.J. because it makes them feel cool and edgy, and they like to imagine that J.J. wants to be them.”

  That sounded about right for Bain.

  I sat up on one elbow. “Was that the J.J. that Madam Cruz channeled at the séance?”

  She laughed. “Yes and no. It was that J.J., but I told her what to say. So she wasn’t channeling him.” She saw my expression and rushed to add, “She’s a real medium; she could channel people. But she’s also a friend of Mom’s, so she agreed to pretend to get in touch with J.J. as a favor to me. She kept it separate from the rest of the séance because she didn’t want to upset any real spirits.”

  “Why?”

  Coralee yawned, as though this confession had tired her out. “I just wanted to see what Bain would do. It was delicious, with the strangling and then Grant coming over and ghost whispering. ‘Vitamin Must-See TV.” She turned serious. “Don’t tell Grant he isn’t a ghost whisperer, okay? He has so few pleasures. Besides you. But you’re going to break his heart, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “L-O—nevermind. I’m too tired.” She yawned.

  “But no one saw you at the party. Why didn’t you go in?”

  “And say what? That I was looking for my girlfriend? I don’t think so.” She yawned again. “I’m beat. Would you mind if we went to sleep now?”

  “No.”

  She lent me a blue camisole and matching shorts to change into and slid into a nearly identical yellow set herself. We crawled under the covers, and she stretched to turn off the beside light. “Goodnight, Ro.”

  “Goodnight, Coralee.”

  I hadn’t quite drifted off to sleep when she said, “You know, Liza wanted to tell you. About us. She thought you’d understand, and she also said you were starting to get mad because you knew she had a secret and it made you feel bad she wasn’t telling you. I wasn’t sure. I thought you were kind of a bitch, but Liza said I didn’t understand you.” I heard her let out a deep breath. “I guess she was right.”

  The next morning I was up before her. I tried to be as quiet as possible getting ready, but as I went to leave, she said, “Thank you. For letting me talk about Liza. I miss her, and it—it was great to be able to think about her again.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Hugsbye,” she mumbled sleepily.

  “Hugsbye.”

  In the car on the way to the hospital, I checked my phone. When I saw the battery had died, my mouth went dry, and my chest got tight.

  Don’t ignore me, I heard Liza’s voice. Pay attention.

  You’re being nuts, I told myself, taking slow deep breaths. Nothing will happen.

  I was wrong.

  Liza was standing at the foot of Althea’s bed when I walked into her room.

  CHAPTER 43

  TUESDAY

  “Liza?” I breathed, rushing toward her.

  She didn’t smile, just looked at me somberly and shook her head. “No. I’m Ellie. Her little sister. You probably don’t remember me.”

  “Ellie,” I breathed, nearly collapsing. “You liked to walk around reading books all the time,” I said, quoting what Roscoe had told me.

  Her eyes got minimally less somber. “You do remember.”

  I glanced at Althea, who still seemed to be sleeping, and then back at Ellie. Close up, she only looked a little like Liza, with the same blue eyes and golden hair but slightly less generous features. Or maybe her mouth just got less practice smiling.

  I looked around for Victoria or her father. “You live in Tempe now, don’t you? How did you get here?”

  “I took the bus. No one can know I was here, okay?”

  My eyes widened. “Sure. Are you—are you okay? Is something wrong?”

  Her fingers knit together, and she bit her lip. “I think—” she began. “I think I killed Liza.”

  For a moment I couldn’t speak. She said, “Can we walk?”

  I shook myself out of my shock. “Sure.” We stepped out into the corridor. “Can you tell me how you—I mean—”

  “I didn’t mean that literally,” she explained. “I don’t think. I don’t know. See, that’s the problem. Do you understand?”

  Her voice should have been pleading, but instead it was flat, like she was asking me if I understood algebra or checkers.

  I said, “I’m not sure. Can you tell me more?”

  “I just think I was responsible for her death.” She reached into her pocket. “Because of this.”

  She held a piece of paper out to me. It was light blue with a darker blue star in each corner. It said, “I’ve got everything ready. We leave Friday. 9pm at the old Five and Dime. I love you.”

  I had to press my elbows into my waist to keep my hands from shaking as I read it.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  “From their secret hiding place. Colin and Liza’s. That big cactus called the Old Man,” she said. “They left notes for each other there. It was romantic.”

  It took me a moment to realize she’d called it Colin and Liza’s secret hiding place. I remembered what Coralee had said, about Liza picking up and dropping off the notes. Ellie must have seen that and gotten it confused. She thought the note was for Liza.

  But really it had been for Ro.

  “I know it’s wrong,” Ellie was going on, “but sometimes I read the notes. Just to see. And I always put them back.”

  “Except this one?”

  Ellie stopped walking. “She was going to leave.” Her face was stricken. “She was going to leave me. She promised one day we would run away together, but she was going without me. I—I just didn’t want her to.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” I wrapped my arms around her. “What did you do?”

  “I showed the note to Victoria, and she told my dad. I figured they would stop her, you know? But instead—” She started to sob again. “I didn’t think it would make her kill herself. I didn’t think having to stay with us would make her kill herself. If I’d given her the note, she would still be alive.”

  “No,” I told her, wiping the tears off her cheeks. She had to be thirteen now, but with the sadness on her face she looked about ten. “This note had nothing to do with what happened to her.”

  “It didn’t? How do you know?”

  “Because the note wasn’t for your sister. It was for me.”

  “But—”

  “She picked up notes and dropped them off for me. Because I didn’t want anyone to know I was going out with Colin.”

  “That can’t—”

  “Trust me.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive,” I said. And then for reasons I couldn’t explain even to myself at that moment, I added, “Don’t tell anyone about giving me the note, okay? It’s better if we keep this between us. I mean, it was supposed to be mine.”

  She n
odded. “I guess that’s true.”

  I smiled at her. “I bet you could use some breakfast.”

  “Um, I just—I’d rather get back home. If that’s okay? I don’t want to run into anyone and have them find out I was here.”

  She’s afraid of something, I thought. She’s terrified. But not of me. And not of killing her sister. It was something else. I remembered the photo of Liza with the broken fingers over Christmas, the broken leg over Easter. I said, “Is everything okay at home? With your father?”

  She tensed. “Everything with Dad is fine. I’m just going to go.”

  “You’re sure? Do you want me to get you a car to take you back?”

  “No, the bus goes in half an hour.”

  She finally consented to letting me drop her at the bus station in a taxi and buy the ticket, but that was all.

  I took the same taxi back to Silverton House. I kept my hand on the note she’d given me the whole way as though it were a magical object that might disappear. The writing on it looked familiar, and I realized I must have seen Colin’s somewhere. It proved Colin hadn’t been lying. He really hadn’t thought he and Ro had broken it off. He’d been planning to run off with her.

  So why did Ro get so angry she’d scratched his face off? And why had he texted Liza the night of the party?

  I paid off the taxi and was walking around to the back door of Silverton House when I heard two people arguing. I spotted a silver VW Bug and next to it, Bridgette and Jordan North.

  Bridgette was using wide, uncontrolled gestures I’d never seen her use before, and her hair was unbrushed. I thought I caught “out of control” on Jordan’s side and “you don’t understand” and “please” on Bridgette’s, but those must not have worked because Jordan said something I couldn’t hear and walked to her car.

  She spotted me before I could move. I said, “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

  She was holding a pile of clothes in her arms, and she looked exhausted, like she’d been up all night crying. “Listen all you want. The entire fight was about the danger of secrets, so the more people who hear the better.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She opened the passenger side door of her car. The car I’d seen that night at the cabin when Bridgette had been with her lover.

  I remembered Bridgette at the dollar store talking about how nice secrets could be.

  “Can I help?”

  Jordan’s beautiful face was a picture of sadness and loss. She glanced back at the door Bridgette had been standing in, which was now closed. “No. No one can help. Unless you can convince her”—she tilted her head in Bridgette’s direction—“that what her family thinks, and how much money her grandmother does or doesn’t leave her, is unimportant.”

  So that was why Bridgette was doing this. “How long were you two going out?”

  “A little more than three years. That night, the party? That was one of our first dates.” She wiped her cheek on a blouse on top of the pile. “We spent the whole time together. Well, until the Silverton Show started.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Have you noticed how whenever Bain and Bridgette are together, they have to fight? It’s like contractual?”

  I laughed. “Yes.”

  “That night Bain and Bridgette had this huge fight. She’d found out about Bain locking you and Liza up in the wine cellar, and she was furious.”

  “It was Bain who locked us in there? Why?”

  “I don’t know. It had something to do with Jimmy Jakes—J.J.? Some scheme they’d been working on. But it didn’t go according to plan, and when Bain got back there, only Liza was still there. You were gone, and he was mad.”

  “That’s not what the police told me.”

  “We all agreed the police didn’t need to know anything about that. Well, Bain and Bridgette agreed. The rest of us went along with it.”

  Naturally, I thought. I said, “So I left and Liza was still at the party. Do you know what happened next?”

  “The last time I saw her, she was talking to him.”

  “Him as in Bain?”

  She nodded. “That was the last time I saw him that night too.” She glanced back toward Bridgette’s room. “I have to go.”

  “Of course,” I said, stepping back so she could get the door open. “I’m sorry about the fight.”

  “It was time.” She sighed. “Things couldn’t keep going the way they had been.”

  She had the car in reverse when I realized I’d forgotten to ask something. I stopped her, and she rolled down her window. “You said Jimmy Jakes. As in James Jakes. He’s dead. isn’t he?”

  She nodded. “He committed suicide.”

  That’s where I’d heard the name before. In the police station. He was the other person who had committed suicide off of Three Lovers Point.

  CHAPTER 44

  I went into the house, plugged in my phone, and reached for the thesaurus, in which I had hidden the original paper ripped from Bridgette’s Filofax with the note from Bain about the one hundred thousand dollars. I slid the note Ellie had given me in next to it and stepped into the shower.

  There was something about it that bothered me. Something that sent my mind spinning back across everything I’d heard the past few days. As the water washed away the grime from the accident, my mind replayed a cacophony of voices—

  Xandra saying that Liza had been getting texts from Colin.

  Jordan talking about the Silverton Show.

  Uncle Thom at the police station saying, “First a watch, now a button.”

  Suddenly, I gasped. I hopped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around me, and was reaching for the thesaurus when the phone rang.

  Like a dog conditioned to come at a certain command, I grabbed for it. My pulse quickened when I saw N. Martinez’s name on the screen. I told myself it was because he was the one person who could help me, but I knew that wasn’t the real reason.

  When I answered, he didn’t bother with niceties. He said simply, “We have to talk.”

  “I know. I think—”

  “Where are you?” he asked, cutting me off. I realized his voice sounded more taut and serious than I’d heard.

  “At home.”

  “You need to get out of there. Meet me in the lobby of the hospital.”

  My knees went soft. “What is going on?”

  “Just get here,” he said. “As soon as possible.”

  My hands started to tremble, and the thesaurus slid from my fingers to the ground. The original note from Bain fell out, as well as the note from Colin that Ellie had just given me.

  I held the notes up side by side, not sure if what I was feeling was hope or dread. The writing on the note from Ellie was familiar not because I’d seen Colin’s before—but because it was the same as Bain’s.

  The note from Colin was forgery. And yet he had acted like he and Ro were leaving together.

  All of a sudden all the pieces clicked into my brain with painful precision. And each click echoed with the same name.

  Bain. It was Bain’s writing on the forged note. Bain who was missing his watch. Bain who was the last person to see Liza that night.

  Bain, who was now standing in my bedroom doorway, slapping the flashlight against his palm.

  “So you’ve been doing some investigating,” he said.

  I wrapped the towel tighter around myself and went to lean against the desk. I wanted to look unafraid, but I needed it to keep my knees from shaking.

  “Not intentionally. You should have hidden your tracks better if you didn’t want anyone to find out.”

  “And just what do you think you’ve found out?”

  Stall for time, I told myself. “You knew your cousin and Colin were dating?”

  “Colin told me. Told me all about how he was in love with Aurora, how you left notes to keep it secret from Grandmother. We were friends. Of course that all changed after Aurora disappeared.”

  “So you take Colin’s real note a
nd substitute one of your own, telling Ro to meet at the old Five and Dime, which is pretty deserted. How am I doing so far?”

  He weighed the flashlight in his hand. “Not bad.”

  “Then you give your watch to James Jakes—J.J.—to get him to snatch your cousin from the Five and Dime while you enjoy a fail-safe alibi at the intimate party you’re throwing miles away in your Model Property.”

  He sat forward, looking interested. “You’re good at this.”

  “But for some reason, Aurora doesn’t go where you want her to, messing up your plans, and shows up at the party instead. That doesn’t stop you, though. You somehow manage to get Ro and Liza into the wine cellar, where you lock them up. Then you call J.J. and give him new directions to come and kidnap Ro while you are seen talking to her best friend.”

  He nodded slowly. “It sounds good when you say it.”

  “Which means, you were the last person to see Liza alive before she went off of Three Lovers Point.”

  He pulled himself up. “What? No.”

  “And a few months later, your other associate that night, J.J., dies the same way in the same place. Wearing your watch. That sounds a bit suspicious.”

  “Whoa.” He put up a hand. “First of all, whatever happened to Liza, J.J. killed himself. Ask the cops. Secondly, as I told the cops when it happened, if I had been there, I would never have let him die with my watch on. Are you kidding? Grandmother drives me nuts about it.”

  I had to admit, that rang true. “Why did you want him to kidnap Ro?”

  Bain relaxed again. He let the flashlight roll out of his hand and leaned back, palms flat on the bed. “I needed the money. I had a bad run of luck at some tribal casinos and in a few private games—stop looking at me like that; it reminds me of my sister.” He sat forward, elbows on his knees, getting very earnest and trustworthy. “You’re making a face like it sounds bad, but it was all going to be very professional. J.J. wasn’t going to hurt her, just keep her for a few days, get the ransom from my grandmother, and return her.”