Ghost Flower

by Michele Jaffe

  She is crazy, I thought to myself. She’s absolutely insane. I said, “So you made her destroy your father’s collection?”

  “I wanted her to feel what it was like when you ruined something other people loved. That other people had spent time cultivating. That’s what she was doing to us. By trying to leave, she was ruining the family. She needed to stop being so selfish.”

  “But she wasn’t trying to leave. The note was for me.”

  Victoria waved that off. “She would have left at some point.” She flicked a piece of dust from her sweater. “I was just trying to teach her discipline. It was for her own good. But even then she was selfish. She knew if she didn’t destroy those records, I would be forced to hurt Ellie. I made that clear. It was the only way she’d learn. But did she care about that, about my pain or Ellie’s? About what a bad example she was setting? No. She still went as slowly as possible, breaking each record into as many tiny pieces as she could because she felt bad about what she was doing. She felt bad. She could never stop thinking of herself.” She sighed and shook her head. “So I wrote a note of my own pretending it was from Colin and put it where I knew she’d find it.”

  This was it. The missing piece. The single element that had set everything else in motion. “What did it say?”

  “That he realized he didn’t love her and had been a fool to think of running away with her.” She waved a hand dismissively as though this one thing, the crucial act that had cost more than one life, was trivial and hardly mattered.

  But there was a smug satisfaction barely concealed beneath her tone that caught at me. “You hated her,” I said with sudden recognition. “You hated her because she wouldn’t listen to you, because she was good and kind and people liked her and did what she said because they wanted to, not because they were forced to.”

  Something flashed behind Victoria’s eyes, something like fury, but it vanished almost before I could name it and was replaced by hurt confusion. “You’re wrong,” she said, sounding near tears. “I loved her. I wanted to help make her better. I was trying to save her. Save our family. She was destroying us. Like a cancer. I had to remove the cancer. Grant understood when I explained it to him. He wanted to help me.”

  I stared at her. Did she believe what she was saying? I wondered. I began to see the contours of her pathology. Whatever had happened was Liza’s fault. Liza made her do everything.

  This was why Liza dressed like her sister when Victoria was home and didn’t call her friends. It wasn’t because she idolized Victoria. It was because if she didn’t, Victoria found some way to make her pay. I remembered all her injuries, but only now did I realize they seemed to take place around holidays. School holidays. I’d thought they had been inflicted by Liza’s dad, especially after his performance with the police, telling me to stay away, but—

  “Your father knew you killed her,” I said. “That’s why he wanted it to be ruled a suicide and stay a suicide. He was protecting you.”

  She rolled her eyes. “As though I needed his protection. If he had been able to protect the family, I wouldn’t have had to do what I did. He’s sweet, but he has really never understood me. When you came back, I was worried you might remember something, so I decided to make sure your memory wouldn’t seem trustworthy.”

  “By making me think I was being haunted.”

  “And making you think that you’d been the target. That way if they did reopen an investigation they would be looking for who wanted to hurt you and never think about Liza.” She said it all in the same calm voice she might use to order lunch. “When I saw you really didn’t remember, I realized I could use you. Grant was becoming a liability, and I saw that you could help me take care of him.”

  “You used him too, though. That first day, when you appeared in front of me at the mall and then vanished, he must have spliced the footage before showing it to me, so I didn’t see you go in or come out of the dressing room.”

  “Grant was a very good editor,” she said in the same tone an elementary teacher would have said a slow child plays well with others. “He would never have been a great director or filmmaker, but he had his uses. He just lacked the breadth of vision.”

  “Not like you.” She nodded without irony at my compliment. She was clearly enjoying this and felt no remorse at all. In her mind, she hadn’t done anything wrong. It all made perfect sense to her, and she was completely justified. The pretty young woman standing next to me was a psychopath.

  I said, “How did you make Stuart’s hands blister?”

  “That was so easy. I just had to rub poison oak on his steering wheel. Wait a couple of days and voilà, blisters.”

  “And the writing on the sign here? That appeared and disappeared?”

  “Hairspray. I barely got away before you came down. I hadn’t expected you to try to rub it off. I just thought it would stick and then disappear when the hairspray evaporated. The way it happened—” She hugged herself. “It was pretty amazing, wasn’t it?”

  It was extraordinary watching her, captivating and horrifying at once. Because it was clear to me now that this wasn’t real to her. Liza, her family, me, Grant—we were all just pawns to her in a big game. Life and death didn’t mean anything to her because we weren’t real individuals. We were just there to serve her ends. Cast member and audience at once. “And the attack on you,” I went on. “That was what baffled the police, what convinced me that Liza was really a ghost. But really, it was the simplest one of all.”

  She chuckled but not modestly. “I couldn’t wait to do it. I knew it would play well.”

  “And Colin?” I asked. “Why did you get involved with him?”

  Now she gave me a radiant smile. “That was all because of you.” Her eyes twinkled mischievously. “I don’t like loose ends, and when you disappeared that night as we were loading Liza into the car, you became one. The danger was minimal—you were probably dead, and even if you did come back, Grant was sure you hadn’t seen him. But I still wanted to be careful. So I started writing to Colin while he was deployed to see if he’d heard from you. I considered writing as myself, but decided to make up the character of Regina instead—people will tell strangers things they would never tell their friends, you know.” She gazed at me as though she were interested in my opinion of this random fact, and I felt myself nodding. It was like being hypnotized.

  “After a few months,” she went on, “I realized he needed me. You’d broken his heart so badly, he was lost and at sea. He needed someone who could guide him. He was throwing himself into the most horrible assignments, volunteering for the worst kind of jobs because he felt guilty about what happened to you. God knows why. Anyway, when he was injured I went and met him, and we’ve been together ever since. And we will continue to be. Happily ever after.”

  I said, “You sound so sure. But the story isn’t over yet.”

  “My part, no, but yours is.” She leaned toward me conspiratorially. “Would you like to know how it ends?”

  I thought, No, but nodded.

  She clapped her hands. “Feeling guilty about having abandoned your dear friend Liza to a murderer, you came to the place where her body was found and threw yourself off. It was a last act of penance.”

  “Like J.J.?”

  Her eyes got huge, and she shook her head. “Oh J.J. He saw Grant up at that house where the party was after he was supposed to have left. He was a swine, Jimmy Jakes, the kind of creature that has spent so much time rolling in filth he can spot the tiniest daub on someone else. And of course Grant is easy prey for someone like that.” She sighed sadly. “Poor Jimmy. He was so confused. He wasn’t sure what he’d seen, but he thought it was something. He and I met here, and he must have misinterpreted my intentions because he tried to take my clothes off. Can you imagine? He pawed me.” She paused at the memory and swallowed. Her face had gone pale, and her eyes were hurt. “I resisted, and he—he tripped and fell down.” Her expression got momentarily bleak. “He touched me. He never sh
ould have done that. If only people knew how to behave.”

  “What about Grant? Why did you kill him?”

  “I didn’t do anything of the kind. You were there. Did you see me?” She gazed at me as though I were a slightly disappointing pet. “I really had imagined you being more clever. More engaging. I’d hoped we could be friends. But instead you call me out here to accuse me of the vilest things. I can’t let you walk around saying things like that about me.”

  “You don’t have a choice. I have proof that you were behind Liza’s murder, and you can’t have it unless you let me walk away.”

  She laughed. “That is the oldest bluff in the world.”

  “The police subpoenaed your phone records. They can prove you were the one behind the ghost phone calls to me. And the ghost knew things only the killer could know.”

  One of her shoulders came up. “Doubtful. And even if it were true, pointless.”

  “They know that the shoes Liza was wearing were yours, not hers. They were two sizes too small.”

  “They said LAWSON in them. Maybe they were hers from before. Won’t work.”

  “They also found the real hammer you used to kill Grant. Not the one you planted next to him that still had Liza’s fingerprints on it from before she died. From the time you made her smash your father’s records.”

  There was the slightest flicker of doubt in her eyes. If I hadn’t been watching closely, I probably wouldn’t even have suspected it, and I would almost have doubted myself when she laughed at the next moment and said, “That’s impossible.”

  “Really?” I looked down at my nails. “When was the last time you checked it?”

  It was enough. She didn’t relax her grip on my arm, but she pulled out her phone and dialed. “Hi, baby,” she said. “Can you hear me? Colin? I know the connection is bad. Listen, have there been any police at your house? There haven’t? Good. It’s just that they were at my place and were asking questions about you. I know, I’ll be glad when it’s all over too. Thank you, baby. Love you too.”

  She hung up and looked at me triumphantly. “Nice try,” she said. Then without warning, her leg snaked out and caught mine behind the knee. I staggered to the edge of the ravine, sending a shower of stones plunging to the bottom. “Goodbye, Aurora.” I felt a hard, swift kick to my lower back and heard oof and began falling headfirst into the canyon.

  My arms flailed out wildly, and I stretched for the edge of the canyon. Three of my fingers closed on some kind of root, and I stopped moving.

  Looking down, I saw my feet were dangling above empty space with nothing for a hundred feet to break my fall.

  The ground swam in front of my eyes. My heart was racing. My shoulder burned, and my fingers got sweaty and started to slide.

  “I’ve got you,” a voice shouted, and a hand wrapped around my wrist. I was being hauled up by N. Martinez.

  Victoria was sandwiched between two cops, looking at them with wide, scared eyes. “I was trying to help her. Didn’t you see? She tripped, and I was trying to—”

  I realized I was still clinging to N. Martinez. I let go and stepped hastily away.

  His face registered nothing. “There’s a car going to Colin’s house now to retrieve the hammer,” he said. I wasn’t sure if it was him or me, but we seemed to be having a hard time looking at one another. “You handled that very well.”

  “Thank you,” I said, keeping it formal. Professional. “For saving me.”

  “You are welcome,” he said in the same tone.

  Ask him on a date. Ask him to dinner. Ask him to the movies, my mind raced. You have nothing to lose now; there are no more secrets. I said, “I know you don’t like me, but would you maybe want to get a coffee with me some time?”

  He said, “No. I’m afraid not.”

  I felt like I’d been punched. After everything, that was where this would end. I felt like my smile was glued onto my face. “Oh. Okay.” I turned to go, but his touch on my arm caught me.

  He swung me back to him. His fingers laced through mine; his body pressed against mine. I felt like I couldn’t stand and like I could fly all at once. “I don’t want coffee with you. I want more.”

  My throat went dry, and my tongue suddenly felt huge. “You said you would never be able to understand me and that I drive you nuts.”

  “Those are good things.”

  I let that sink in. I could feel his heart beating against my chest. When my voice came out, it was barely a whisper. “And you told me your name.”

  He gazed down at me with his bottomless brown eyes and said, “I told you because I wanted to hear you say it.”

  My heart stopped. “Napoleon,” I said.

  A slow smile spread across his face like the sun cresting a hill at dawn. “Aurora.”

  Warmth spilled over me. “When you say more, you mean like—?”

  “Like this,” he said and bent his mouth over mine. “Aurora,” he murmured.

  I am Aurora. I am awake. I am home.