“That’s easy,” said Charlie. “If she’s still alive, she’s old.”
“So?”
“Old people are easy to fool,” Charlie said with a shrug.
I kicked him under the table and said, “Daddy’s joking, Warren. Old people are no different from any other people.”
Charlie snickered into his glass of switchel and dropped the subject. But when we came downstairs after tucking Warren in he said, “Do a search on that sister.”
I did, and found her both still alive and still living in the area. Charlie grinned and shooed me away from the computer. Twenty minutes later he came into the living room with a very professional looking report—the headers and logos were lovely—that I would never have guessed he made up, typed up, and printed up in less than half an hour. I should have scolded him, but instead I laughed. “Let’s hope she’s as easy to fool as you think she is.”
I called the next morning and introduced myself as Caroline Bingley (it was Charlie’s idea to use a fake name), and asked whether Miss Litauer might be willing to meet with me to discuss Jeffrey. Her cranky voice immediately perked up at the mention of her brother, and she told me I could come at ten, “when I’m done watching my shows.”
Accordingly, I pulled into her driveway at 9:57. The place looked as much like a haunted house as any I’d ever banished a ghost from. It was completely unkempt. There were actually windows on the second floor that were boarded over.
Greta Litauer had fluffy blue slippers and a face that looked like crumpled paper. When I said yes to her offer of tea she asked me if I’d get her a cup, too. Her mugs were dirty and her tea leaves smelled like mildew, but it seemed too late to back out, so I gamely made it while Greta shut off the blaring television and waited in her living room.
You could make a game out of trying to guess which splotches on the couch were part of the floral pattern and which were stains. Once I was settled on this monstrosity, I handed Greta a file folder, took a deep breath, then told her I was her brother’s long-lost granddaughter, the child of an illegitimate daughter he never knew about.
“Everything is all there. The lab report that proves we’re related is on top. Then there are copies of my birth certificate and some pages from my grandmother’s diary.”
Greta scowled at me, then at the file through thick glasses. I hoped she didn’t have a scientific background. The “lab report” was comprised mostly of phrases Charlie made up, with a couple of graphs thrown in to make it look official.
“I’m not asking for money or anything,” I said. “I just wanted to know if you had something small of Jeffrey’s that I might be able to keep and pass on to my children. I have so little of my family history...” I drifted off and went for a forlorn expression.
Greta bought it, no doubt because she wanted to. As we talked it became clear that she worshipped her brother, and was delighted to have someone express a positive interest in him. “I never believed that self defense thing for a minute. You know what that girl was?” She leaned forward and showed me a mouth with, as far as I could tell, four teeth left in it. “A sex tramp.” She leaned back again and waved her hand. “No offense to your grandmother, of course.”
“None taken.” I gave her a sympathetic smile and asked, “What was he really like? All I have to go on is the court documents, and I don’t believe them any more than you do.”
“Oh, Jeffrey was a fine man. Grew into it from a fine boy. Do you know when he was twelve, he started his own business? Jeffrey was so smart.”
“What kind of business?”
“Pest control. He’d go into people’s crawl spaces and attics, take care of mice and snakes and bats. Do you know how much they charge for that nowadays?”
“Quite a lot,” I agreed.
“And he looked out for me. Always such a gentleman, Jeffrey. I’m sure if he’d known your grandmother was in a family way, he’d have looked after her too. He once pulled out a boy’s teeth for me.”
I blinked at her. “He what?”
“When I was sixteen, Cal O’Rourke asked me to a dance,” Greta said. “And then what do you think, but he stood me up, and took another girl instead. Oh, I was so heartbroken. So mad.”
“So Jeffrey... took out his teeth? You mean punched him and knocked some of them out?”
“Oh no,” Greta said. “One punch would not have done for Cal O’Rourke. Liars have to be severely punished. Jeffrey tied him up and pulled out seven of his teeth with a pair of pliers from our father’s toolbox.”
“And he...” I stopped and coughed, hiding my face behind my hand until I could get the look of disgust off it. “He didn’t get in trouble for that?”
Greta shook her head and gave her knee a triumphant slap. “Cal never told anybody who did it. Too scared. Jeffrey was nineteen at the time, and so strong.” She sighed and took a swallow of her tea. “Cal was a liar.”
I could think of only one response to this, and I doubted you’re just as fucking nuts as he was you nasty old loon would endear me to Greta. So I just smiled and drank my tea, which was as gross as I’d feared. After a minute Greta set her cup down and gave me her four-toothed smile. “I have some of his things upstairs. The room on the left when you get to the top, there’s boxes in the closet. There’s one marked Jeffrey. You’ll have to bring it down here, I don’t cross the stairs anymore.”
I wondered just how long it had been since Greta “crossed the stairs.” The second floor was a disaster of dust and dirt and drifting leaves that must have come through one of the broken windows before she had it boarded up. There had to be a hundred ladybugs on the windowsill in the bedroom, most of them dead, the few who were alive vying for space with a trail of ants. The bedspread, which might once have been blue but had faded to a dank gray, was full of holes too big for moths to have made. I didn’t want to think about what might have been snacking on it. I found the box as quickly as I could, wishing I had a pair of rubber gloves, and went back downstairs to Greta.
She gave me two things. The first was a little decorative box, painted wood, which I thought was surprisingly charming for a Litauer possession. Until I opened it and found a lock of chestnut hair tied with a yellow ribbon. Maybe not such an unusual thing for someone to have, except that this one had something that looked an awful lot like skin stuck to one end. I suppressed my cry as Greta smiled at me.
“I never knew who the young lady was, but she must have been very special for him to have kept that. Your grandmother, maybe?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. What I was really unsure of was whether I wanted that awful box. Greta would probably give it to me if I said the hair was my grandmother’s, but the thought of it in my house was disturbing. On the other hand it was something of Jeffrey’s, something that must have been important to him. “It could be. Her hair was gray all the time I knew her, but this is the same color as my mother’s.”
“Well, I’m sure a man like Jeffrey had a lot of sweethearts.”
Yeah, I’ll just bet he did.
“But you should have that,” Greta went on. “Just in case it is your grandmother’s.”
At least the second thing she gave me probably wasn’t a trophy taken from a victim. It was a volume of poetry, old and very battered. “That was his favorite. He got it when he was just a boy, and kept it all his life. I’m too old to read. You take that too.”
As I was leaving I made the mistake of trying to hold my purse in the same hand that already held the box and the book, so I could use the other to fish for my keys. I dropped everything. Greta made clucking noises while I picked it all back up. The book had fallen open to a page about two-thirds of the way through. It must have been used to opening there; the page was lined with smudged fingerprints and stained with what I hoped was coffee. It was an excerpt from The Tempest.
Not a soul but felt a fever of the mad, and play’d
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plung’d in the foaming brine, and quit t
he vessel,
Then all afire with me: the King’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair-upstaring,-then like reeds, not hair-
Was the first man that leap’d, cried, “Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here!!”
I couldn’t get out of that house fast enough. I no longer had any doubts about Jeffrey being True Colors. Which meant if I didn’t do something, Call-me-Sherrie’s daughter was in serious danger. And who knew how many other girls, as the Octobers stretched out into infinity?
When I told Charlie about my visit with Greta, I tried to downplay how creepy it all was, but it’s hard to characterize pulling out teeth with pliers in any other light. Charlie’s face had clouded over long before I got to my suspicions about True Colors. I debated not telling him that at all, but I had to. I knew he’d ask me not to go. I had to show him how important it was that I did.
“I thought we agreed, Lydia,” he said as he paced back and forth. For someone who hated cats, he sure had a feline look about him sometimes. “No more life-threatening situations.”
“But Charlie, surely you can see that this monster has to be taken care of.”
“Sure! But not by you. We have Warren to think of. Do you think it’s fair to risk having him lose you too?”
“Charlie, there’s a twelve-year-old girl in that house, and this apparition has taken a very unwholesome interest in her,” I said. “And what about all the other girls? The ones he has killed, the ones he still will kill, if we let him carry on? They all have parents, too. I might be the only one who can stop him. You think I should walk away instead?”
“Yes!” Charlie said. “Absolutely. It’s too dangerous.”
We talked in circles, each saying the same thing a few more times before we agreed that it was getting late and we should sleep on it. But I didn’t have what you’d call a restful night. I dreamed that I was out trick-or-treating with Warren, who was dressed in his zombie costume. He held my hand in his rubbery rotten one and giggled. It was Roderick Turner’s laugh. I tried to pull his mask off, but he twisted away from me to run up the porch steps of the next house. My hand came away with a chunk of flesh and three teeth in it. Helen Turner answered the door and cooed, “Liars have to be severely punished,” while she dropped a lock of hair into Warren’s bag. He came back down to me, laughing in Roderick’s voice as the rest of his teeth fell out one by one and pitter-pattered onto the sidewalk like rain.
Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!
I called Sherrie the next day, told her I had managed to get something of Jeffrey’s, and made an appointment with her for the following Tuesday morning, just after her kids and mine had gone to school.
I figured Charlie would forgive me, eventually. When I came home alive. Assuming I did.
THREE
* * *
The heat came about halfway through the first verse.
Sherrie’s house had been quiet when I got there and stayed quiet while I set up on her faux-weathered farmhouse table, lit the fire, and started the ritual. I began to hope that Jeffrey was still worn out, that this would all go fine after all, that I’d even have time to stop by the farmer’s market over on Wainwright Street for some fresh yams on my way home.
But then the heat came, sudden and intense. It wasn’t the humid heat of a Carolina summer day, but a brittle heat that made you feel like any moment you might crack and fall apart and blow away. And I don’t care what they try to tell you, dry heat is worse. I heard Sherrie gasp as she felt it too. My mouth felt full of ashes and dust. I could hardly force the words out, but I kept going.
Things got worse when I dropped the remnant in the bowl. (I’d chosen the lock of hair, figuring something so disgusting must have been dear to Jeffrey.) First that dorky laugh came again, from everywhere at once, and the louder it got, the lower the flames burned. But Sherrie, I have to hand it to her, was ready with more oil, and then a match. No, it wasn’t Sherrie who screwed up. It was me.
Our poltergeist finally made his appearance. For a second that was okay. Almost funny, even. Jeffrey did not look scary. Jeffrey, with his ill-fitting clothes and his one snaggle tooth giving him a snarl that was more pitiable than menacing, looked like he would have invented the personal computer if only he’d lived long enough. My voice gained more confidence.
Until he laughed again. It twisted his face into something horrible. It didn’t even look human anymore. He laughed through the next three lines of the incantation, a real belly laugh, like I was telling the funniest joke he’d ever heard. Then he shouted.
That was bad. Only a particularly powerful apparition can summon a voice. Considered alongside the laughing and the not getting sucked toward the canteen, Jeffrey shouting was really bad.
What he shouted was even worse. It was something harsh and throaty, and although I didn’t recognize the word, it sounded a lot like the language I used for the incantation. In the rush of that one word, the heat was yanked from the room—the air went instantly frigid—and driven straight into me. My stomach and chest felt aflame. I was burning from the inside out, sure that any second I’d smell the crackling of my own fat and skin.
How in seven fucking hells would Jeffrey Litauer know that language?
It was while I was wondering this that I stopped speaking.
You can’t stop the incantation. It’s even worse than letting the fire go out. Stop the incantation, and the apparition wins.
Jeffrey won. I screamed and doubled over, then fell to my knees, overwhelmed by the burning pain that was so far beyond me I nearly couldn’t bring myself back from it. Jeffrey’s laugh filled my ears again. It was Sherrie’s shrill scream rising above it that snapped me back to reality.
“Run!” I croaked, and half scrambled, half ran myself, pushing her ahead of me out of the dining room. “All the way! Out of the house!”
I almost didn’t make it. I was coughing and retching now. I thought smoke would come out of my mouth. It didn’t, but some blood did. My eyes had clouded over by the time I reached the front door, and I might have died just a few steps from safety, but Sherrie pulled me out.
“Car!” I breathed.
She pushed more than helped me into the 2GR8KIDSmobile. Luckily she had a spare key in the glove compartment. I thought I could still hear Jeffrey laughing as we drove away. I was sure he would follow us. If he could get far enough outside his house to kill a girl, he could get far enough to overtake us.
“Drive fast,” I said. I sounded like an old woman who had smoked all her life. “It doesn’t matter where.”
My stomach and lungs had finally begun to cool by the time Sherrie pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall, turned off the engine, then collapsed sobbing against the steering wheel.
I patted her shoulder, squeezed her arm, murmured all the comforting things I could think of, but she showed no signs of stopping. She was headed straight for a breakdown. Shit, what do I do? I looked helplessly around, as if the answer would be on Sherrie’s sun visor. It turned out it was, in the pictures tucked there, and the sneakers in the back seat, and the one ancient hardened gummy worm on the floor mat. Everywhere, signs of the 2 GR8 kids. “Sherrie, I need you to pull it together. We have to make arrangements. For your children.”
She looked up, although she didn’t stop crying. I glanced at my watch. “Call your husband and have him meet you with a credit card,” I said. “Buy everyone a change of clothes and a toothbrush, then go get a room at a hotel. But watch the time and make sure you pick up your kids from school before they can get on a bus. You can’t let them go home.”
“Ever?” Sherrie drew in a jagged breath.
“Just for tonight. You can go back tomorrow.” The look she gave me did not show a lot of trust, so I added, “It takes a lot of power for apparitions to interact physically. What Jeffrey just did was extreme. He won’t be able to maintain that level of energy for long.” I realized as I said this that it explained the long gaps between killings—if it
took a lot of energy to slam a door or move a lamp, I could only imagine what it might take to kill a person, cut her heart out, and nail it through her wrist—but those didn’t seem like the kinds of details to discuss with Sherrie at the moment. Instead I said, “At sunrise tomorrow, your house will probably be the safest it’s been since you moved in.”
“And then what?” She reached across me to pull a tissue out of her glove compartment and asked, “Why couldn’t you do it?” in a tone that suggested she’d consider taking her business elsewhere, if she knew anybody else in my business.
“It must have been a bad remnant,” I said, then when she looked blankly at me, “The personal item. Either it wasn’t his or he didn’t care about it. But I have something else his sister gave me, a book.”
Sherrie blew her nose but didn’t say anything. Her hands, even her shoulders, were still shaking. It occurred to me that we were very lucky she hadn’t crashed her gargantuan SUV.
“Take a day off to recover,” I said. My lungs felt seared, my stomach full of lava, my throat clogged with ashes. Every breath was a painful struggle, and it must have showed.
“You seem like you could use it yourself,” she said. “Is one day even going to be enough? You look awful. You’re all flushed. Have you got a fever?”
“I’ll be fine. We’ll try again Thursday with the other remnant. He’ll still be weak then, which gives us an advantage.”
I hoped that would be enough, but my smoking innards suggested I might be kidding myself.
“There was a new boy at school today.”
Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1) Page 3