“Ella’s very smart.” This was true so it wasn’t like I was pimping for my case. “She’s raised three daughters, all on her own.” (It should be noted that I did not add the word successfully to this statement.) “And she keeps things at Garden View running like clockwork. Only Ella…” I wrestled with the idea of glossing over the truth, or laying it on the line. A teenager deserved to have things sugarcoated. Especially a teenager who’d died too young. Then again, Lucy’d had forty-five years to come to grips with how tough the world could be. The way I figured it, she could deal.
“Ella’s a believer,” I told her. “It’s one of the things that makes her an annoying boss. And a really good friend. She thinks that one of these days, she’s actually going to find out that you’re alive.”
“Poor Little One!” Lucy shook her head. “Did you tell her?”
There wasn’t any amusement in my laughter. “What? That I know for sure you’re dead even though the police were never able to prove it? Or that I’ve been talking to your ghost? I may not be as smart as Ella, but I know that either way, admitting that would give whole new meaning to the term ugly truth. Believe me when I say this. I know. I once had a guy walk out on me because I told him the truth about how I talk to ghosts.”
“Creep.” Lucy grumbled the word. It was kinder than the ones I used when I thought about Quinn.
Rather than get into it, I stayed focused on my case.
“I think the only thing that will make Ella face the truth is if we find your body,” I said.
Lucy’s blue eyes lit. “You’re going to help? You’re going to prop me up in my hour of need? Answer my call for help? Help lift me out of the darkness by shining a light on the truth? You’re going to—”
It was cut her off or risk drowning in the sea of drama. “I’m going to look for your body,” I told her. “But you’re going to have to help.”
Lucy’s golden eyebrows dipped. “I’m not sure I can. I’ve told you everything I remember.”
“Tell me again.”
She did, start to finish, from running out on the field at the concert to those last terrifying moments in the trunk. And when she was done, she looked at me, hope gleaming in her eyes. “It makes more sense this time, right? You know what to do? Where to look?”
“Nope. And nope.” The rapid was nearing a stop. Not mine, but a stop. I motioned Lucy aside and slid out of the seat. “But we’re going to find out. And we’re going to do it by starting at the beginning.” I waved her to follow me to the door. “We’ll get off here and take a rapid back in the other direction. That way, we can get off at the stop you got off at that night and walk through everything you did. It may not give us all the answers—”
“But it’s a start.” She nodded and grinned.
The train stopped, the doors swished open, and I stepped out on the platform. “It shouldn’t take long for another train to come along in the other direction,” I told Lucy, glancing over my shoulder to see that she was just about to step off the rapid. “We’ll just—”
My words dissolved in the end of a gasp of surprise. But then, who wouldn’t be surprised to see Lucy get as far as the door of the train and run into what looked like a wall of blinding white light?
She jumped back just as the train doors slid closed.
“What’s going on?” I called out.
Her eyes filled with tears, she shrugged and sobbed. “I don’t know. I’ve never tried to get off the train before. Oh, Pepper! I’m afraid…”
The rapid started up and Lucy stood there at the door, tears sliding down her face. Her last words echoed in my ears.
“I think I’m stuck here on the rapid. Forever.”
4
There are only so many ways a detective can try and reason through things that are completely unreasonable.
Like the magic woo-woo that wouldn’t allow Lucy to get off the train.
It’s not like I didn’t rack my brain to make sense of it. Believe me when I say I did. I spent the rest of that day and all of that night tossing the idea around in my head and got nowhere at all. I would have done just as much thinking (and probably just as much getting nowhere) the next day if my job didn’t interfere.
It has a way of doing that.
Instead of trying to figure out a way to get Lucy off that train and onto my investigation, I spent that Wednesday morning dragging around Garden View Cemetery from angel sculpture to angel sculpture with the senior outreach group from Saint Basil’s parish in tow.
And that was just before lunch.
It was spring, after all, the weather was finally improving, and (woe is me!) tour groups were coming out of the winter woodwork. That afternoon, it was the women’s committee from the local Botanical Society. They weren’t as interested in angels as they were in daffodils, so I trudged around Garden View from one spectacular spring planting to the next. They were, predictably, thrilled and went on and on (and on) about the differences between jonquils, daffodils, paperwhites, and narcissus.
Whatever.
By the time it was all over, I was glad to get back to the administration building, where I could put my feet up and get back to thinking about what happened to Lucy and, more important, where it had happened and where I could find her body.
I would have done it, too, if I hadn’t walked into my office and found a…
Struggling for a word here, and since a polite one is not forthcoming, I’ll go with—
Creature.
I found a creature in my office.
This particular creature was about as big as a minute. She was wearing black jeans that even I—always a believer in a girl making the most of her figure—wondered how she was able to move in, much less breathe in. The same applied for her Barbie-pink T-shirt with the name of some rock band on it that I’d never heard of. Not that she had anything to flaunt in that department. She was as flat as a pancake.
Her inky-dark hair hung well past her shoulders. A couple hefty hanks of it were dyed a hideous color somewhere between maroon and magenta. Her bangs had been trimmed with a lawn mower. They hung over her forehead, completely covering her right eye. I could see her left eye, though, and behind her heavy, dark-rimmed glasses, I saw that it was outlined with what looked like an entire stick of eyeliner. Her eye shadow matched her T-shirt.
We hadn’t even exchanged two words, and already, I was exhausted by the encounter. Not to mention offended, appalled, and outraged in the name of fashion. I was tempted to mention that any woman who wants to be looked at as a woman and not as an alien from outer space pays more attention to her wardrobe, her makeup, and her grooming. In the name of peaceful coexistence, I controlled my opinions and my exasperation and marched to my desk. In an office as small as mine, it didn’t take long to get there.
I dropped into my chair. “Hello, Ariel,” I said.
Ariel flipped her hair. When she pouted, the silver stud in her lip poked out at me.
I averted my eyes. It was that or upchuck.
I pretended the papers I was shuffling around my desk were actually important, the better not to have to look at the girl. Now that I’d seen the lip piercing, I knew my sense of the bizarre would demand that my gaze automatically travel to her left eyebrow. And eyebrow piercings give me the heebie-jeebies.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her.
I heard her sigh, right before my guest chair creaked. When I dared to look up again, Ariel was draped in it, her head thrown back with one hand on her forehead. “I’m misunderstood,” she said.
“Maybe that’s because you don’t explain yourself clearly enough. You know, like when someone asks you what you’re doing here.”
Another sigh, and she rearranged herself into another dramatic pose. “My mother…” She groaned these words. “My mother says I have to come here to the cemetery every day after school. How stupid is that? How stifling to my inner life? Does she really expect me to give up my social life? To travel through the cold fog of my existence
without the companionship of friends who understand how awful my life is? Spending my days in this place…” This time, she didn’t stop at a sigh. She added a mournful groan. “It’s going to turn my heart to stone.”
I sort of got that. After all, I had to spend my days at Garden View, too.
Ariel was not a person I wanted to confide in, so rather than do that, I said, “It’s your own fault. If you hadn’t run away—”
“If I ran away, it wouldn’t have been to Sandusky.” As if that tiny body of hers actually weighed six hundred pounds, she hauled herself out of the chair. “I would have gone someplace mysterious, like the vast expanses of Canada, where I could be alone with my thoughts. Or the deepest, darkest rain forest of South America, where I could get in touch with my artistic side by communing with nature. That, at least, would have fed my soul.”
“I guess you should have thought of that before you opted for Sandusky.” Oh yeah, I smiled when I said this. Not that I was feeling particularly chipper, but according to Ella, Ariel was going through a phase that was all about angst. I knew nothing would mess with her head as much as smiling. “And now you’re paying the price. The office every day after school, huh?” I nodded at the backpack that was tossed in the corner. “How about you go into the conference room and do your homework.”
“My mother is in the conference room,” she informed me. “She’s with Jim, her boss. Your boss.” Ariel looked at me through the curtain of her bangs, and in spite of the syrupy eye shadow and the black nail polish, she suddenly sounded very much like the little kid she was. “Wouldn’t you love to know what they’re meeting about?”
To prove how much I didn’t care, I shrugged, and just in case Ariel didn’t get it, I was quick to add, “Whatever it is, I’ll find out soon enough.”
“Oh, you will.” She nodded as vigorously as a teenager can who’s trying to pretend that every moment of her existence is unbearable. “But I know now. I saw a note from Jim. On my mother’s desk.”
“I suppose you looked through my desk, too.” I actually wasn’t as upset about this as I tried to sound. I had the newest issue of Marie Claire in my top desk drawer. With any luck, Ariel had found it, and had paid attention to the article called “Fifteen-Minute Hairstyles.” Fifteen minutes, a bottle of shampoo, and a really good beautician…it could do wonders!
“Your desk is boring.” This didn’t stop Ariel from perching on the edge of it. “You don’t have interesting notes on your desk. You know, like notes from Jim to my mother.”
“Why don’t you go back in her office and look around some more.”
Ariel’s shoulders dropped. “My mother…” There was that groan again. “She says I have to be with someone every single minute I’m here. She says someone has to watch me.” She harrumphed like only a fifteen-year-old can. “Like I’m a little kid or something.”
Far be it from me to take anybody under my wing. Especially when that anybody is a body as pathetically miserable and as miserably pathetic as Ariel. Still, I couldn’t help but give it a try. Thanks to my soft spot for Ella, I was already dealing with one ghostly mystery I would rather have avoided. I wasn’t about to sit here and listen to her daughter diss her. The least I could do—for Ella’s sake and my own—was try to talk some sense into the girl.
“You want to stop being treated like a little kid, stop acting like one,” I said, and I guess Ariel wasn’t used to anyone laying it on the line so bluntly because she shot me a look. “Oh, come off it!” I rolled my eyes. Juvenile, yes, but warranted in this situation. She needed to know that she didn’t have a lock on the melodrama. “You can’t pretend that disappearing for the weekend wasn’t dumb. It was. And it upset your mother. A lot. You know she had that friend who disappeared.”
It was Ariel’s turn to roll her eyes. “That was about a million years ago.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier for your mom to forget how painful it was.”
OK, I’m not exactly warm and fuzzy when it comes to these sorts of situations, but I’m not a complete moron, either. I saw the way Ariel’s shoulders stiffened just a little. I knew I’d hit a chord, and I went in for the kill.
“Your mom loves you,” I pointed out, and then because I thought maybe that was too touchy-feely, both for Ariel and for me, I quickly added, “She’s nuts about you. About all you girls. She’d do anything for you. She already has. She’s raised you single-handedly, and she works hard here to make sure you have everything you need.”
Ariel made a face. “She loves this stupid place.”
“Not nearly as much as she loves you.”
She crossed her stick arms over her chest. “My mother should know that I’m mature and responsible. She didn’t need to spend the weekend worrying about me.”
“I bet that’s what Lucy would have said about her mother, too.” This was, technically, not true. As far as I could tell, though Lucy was plenty annoying in her own drama queen way, she wasn’t nearly as headstrong, unruly, or hygienically challenged as Ariel. But Ariel didn’t know that. And I was trying to prove a point.
“But I bet Lucy’s mother did worry. I don’t know if the woman is still alive, but if she is, I bet she’s still worrying. That’s sort of what mothers do best.”
“They shouldn’t.”
“Agreed.”
“But—”
“Come on, Ariel. I know your mother, and I know she’s told you about Lucy. You should have used your head and figured out that when you disappeared, your mother would be upset. But then maybe that was your plan, right? That’s why you went away for the weekend and didn’t call? You wanted to hurt her. You wanted her to freak. Well, congratulations, because you did a bang-up job of it.”
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, her voice no more than a whisper. “Did she? Freak, I mean?”
“Big-time.”
“Really?” The silver stud in Ariel’s lip wobbled. Of course, I wasn’t supposed to notice. Of course, she wasn’t going to take the chance that I might. She hopped off the desk and turned her back on me. She took a couple moments to compose herself, but hey, I’d been a teenaged girl once, too. Ariel might try to hide the tears in her voice, but I caught on. So the kid had a conscience after all! Who would have believed it?
I was shrewd enough not to point out what I’d discovered.
She was devious enough to still play the game.
“So now my mother’s going to get even by making my life miserable?” Ariel wailed. “Just because I refuse to conform to her outmoded parenting paradigm? It isn’t fair. It isn’t.” She spun around to face me, daring me to challenge her.
But hey, I’m the one who talks to the dead, whether I want to or not. Fair and I aren’t exactly on a first-name basis.
Ariel mistook my silence for opposition. She threw her hands in the air. “What am I supposed to tell my friends? How am I supposed to explain it when, every day after school, I have to come over here? I could be back at school doing something. Or I could be hanging out and getting coffee with my friends after school. Or—”
“School.” Sure, Ariel looked at me a little strange when I said this. But then, Ariel looked a little strange to begin with, so I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I continued to think out loud. “What else does a seventeen-year-old have except school?” I asked, not looking for an answer. “I mean, her whole world would pretty much be school, wouldn’t it, so if something happened to her…” I wasn’t sure where this train of thought was heading, I just knew I wasn’t ready to jump off yet.
I snapped my gaze to Ariel’s. “If something happened to her, it would probably have to have something to do with school, right?”
She took a step back. Apparently, hanging around at Garden View was one thing. Dealing with the crazy tour guide who worked there wasn’t part of the deal.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
Ariel already knew the story, so for once in my ghostly-encounter investigations, I didn’t have t
o make up a lie to cover my tracks.
I grabbed my purse out of my bottom desk drawer as I said, “Lucy. What happened to Lucy must have had something to do with school. It must have. School is pretty much all a kid has. So if I check out her school—”
“Why do you care what happened to Lucy?”
Who would have expected a kid that weird to be so perceptive?
I stopped in my tracks. Again, I thought about concocting a lie, and was grateful I didn’t need to. “Your mom told me about Lucy. You know, after you disappeared. I care because she cares.”
This satisfied her. And that might have been a good thing except that when I got moving again and got to the door, Ariel was right behind me clutching her backpack.
Nerve-wracking enough, because those piercings gave me the creeps. Worse, because I had a bad feeling about what it meant.
I was holding out hope when I asked, “When I leave, you’re going back to your mother’s office, right?”
Ariel shook her head. “You remember what my mom said. I can’t be left alone.”
“But—”
“There’s nobody else for me to stay with. Jim and my mom are in a meeting. Jennine out at the front desk is helping some people pick out a plot for their grandma who just died. If you leave me alone—”
“Your mother will freak again.”
Her expression brightened. It might have been because she liked the thought of Ella freaking, but I think it was more because of what she saw as a get out of jail pass. Excited and trying hard not to show it, Ariel shifted from black Converse to black Converse. “I’ve heard the stuff my mom says about you, Pepper, about how you help people out with all kinds of mysteries. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? You’re trying to figure out what happened to Lucy. And now, we’re going to investigate, right?”
“Right.” I didn’t like the self-satisfied look on her face, so I was quick to add, “Except for the we part. You’re going to come along. And you’re going to behave yourself. And you’re going to stay out of my way.” I looked at her hard. “Promise?”
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