Silent Echoes

by Carla Jablonski

  Haley looked at him sharply. “But you still get over there, right?”

  “Oh yeah.” Flip sighed.

  They settled on a grassy spot, and Lindsay noticed kids piling into the park. School must be out. At least now they’d be less conspicuous.

  It also meant that it wouldn’t be much longer before Tanya arrived.

  “So, uh, where do you guys…live?” Lindsay hoped this wasn’t a terrible question. “I’m kind of in between places myself.”

  “Well,” Flip said, “if you ask my caseworker, I live in the group home over on Avenue A. But I wouldn’t call that a life.”

  Haley snorted. “Please. You got eighty-sixed out of there two weeks ago.”

  Flip shrugged. “I can go back whenever I want.”

  “Ya think?” Haley sounded dubious. “Whatever.”

  “What about you?” Lindsay asked Haley.

  Haley eyed her. “Wherever. You know. Around.”

  “Me too,” Blair said. “Around.”

  This didn’t sound too promising—they weren’t going to be much help in finding a place to stay.

  “Hey, Lindsay!”

  Lindsay looked up and saw Tanya approaching with a broad smile on her face. As she got closer and her eyes scanned the group, her smile faded.

  Lindsay stood. “Hey, Tanya. This is Haley, that’s Blair, and this is Flip.”

  “Hi,” Tanya said uneasily.

  “Well, you’re a big piece of gorgeousness,” Flip said.

  “Huh?” Tanya looked from Flip to Lindsay. Lindsay shrugged.

  “You have a cigarette?” Haley asked.

  “I don’t smoke,” Tanya said.

  “Good for you,” Haley replied.

  “Haley and Blair helped me out when a creep was bugging me earlier,” Lindsay explained.

  “Big perv. Thought she was a hooker and didn’t want to take her word for it that she wasn’t,” Haley explained.

  Tanya’s expression went from uncomfortable to shocked. “Are you okay, Lindz?”

  “I’m fine,” Lindsay said. “I’m just really glad Haley and Blair showed up when they did.”

  “Yeah, you owe us,” Haley said. Lindsay couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.

  “Oh, enjoy that Baileys,” she replied. That should remind Haley that she had kind of repaid her.

  “We’ve got to get going,” Tanya said. “We have to be at the library.”

  “Library?” Lindsay looked at Tanya. “Right.” She turned to Haley and the group. She didn’t want Haley and her friends to think they were purposely ditching them, even if they were. “We’re working on this problem I have, so we have to do some research.”

  “Whatever. See you around,” Haley said. “Watch out for pervs.”

  “You bet I will. Thanks again.”

  They had made it a few steps away from the group when Tanya said, “Your mom called.”

  Lindsay’s heart tightened. She could actually feel it squeeze in her chest. “And…?”

  “The hospital told her you were missing, and she thought you might have contacted me.”

  “Well, we figured she would, right?” Lindsay worried that now that parents were involved, Tanya would revert to her more-normal “good girl” behavior.

  ‘She sounded really, really worried about you,” Tanya said. “Like out-of-her-mind scared.”

  “Or just out of her mind,” Lindsay muttered. She kicked a bottle out of her path; it rattled along the pavement until it clanked against a park bench.

  “No, really,” Tanya said. “She was crying.”

  “She wasn’t mad?” Lindsay asked.

  “Not even a little. I mean, she might get mad after she stops being terrified, I guess. My mom’s like that. You know, the ‘you had me so worried and now I’m going to kill you’ syndrome.”

  “Yeah.” Lindsay shoved her hands deeper into Tanya’s oversize coat pockets. Could she do it? Try talking to her mom?

  “What else did she say?” Lindsay asked.

  “Not much. She had to get off the phone.” Tanya’s eyes flicked to Lindsay and away again.

  Tanya didn’t have to elaborate; Lindsay knew exactly what had happened. The Husband came home or started yelling or something. He’s probably thrilled I skipped out of the hospital. Any way to get me out of the picture.

  “Maybe…maybe this is a good sign,” Tanya offered. “Things might be different. Maybe you should try going home.”

  Lindsay stopped walking. “I can’t.” She lowered herself to a bench, and Tanya dropped down beside her. “You know that!”

  “I know it sucked that they put you in the hospital, but now that you know—”

  “Know what?” Lindsay demanded. “That the voice isn’t a hallucination but some weird ghost or someone I can talk to across time or something?” She shut her eyes and leaned back against the bench. “They’ll still say I’m crazy. I mean, that sounds crazy to me.”

  “But what if you tried to get your mom to believe you? She has a pretty open mind. Remember she was into that paranormal stuff for a while?”

  Lindsay opened her eyes and stared at the fancy electric streetlight designed to look like an old-fashioned gas lamp. It’s going to get dark earlier and earlier, she realized.

  “We could put all the proof together first, and then you can go to your mom and—”

  “I can’t!” Lindsay was surprised by the shout that came out of her, by the way her hands smacked the bench on either side of her. “I can’t go home. The Husband. He hits her. She hits him too.”

  “Oh, man.” Tanya let out a long, slow sigh. “And your mom’s drinking is worse?”

  Lindsay sat back up and nodded. “I can’t tell if she’s drinking more because he hits her or if he hits her because she’s drinking more.”

  “Lindsay, you have to tell someone. Some grown-up. There are places to go. People to help you.”

  Lindsay stared at her. “Are you kidding me? First, I have my little hospital stay on my record. They’ve already diagnosed me, and no matter what our theory is, they’re still going to go with their own. And second, I ran away. Which makes me a problem kid. Oh yeah, and three? If they take me away from Melanie, where am I going to go? If it’s not the hospital, it’s what, foster care?” Lindsay shuddered. “No way.”

  The long silence between them made the sounds in the park sharp, pointed. “I guess you’re right,” Tanya finally said. “But what’s your plan? I mean, if you can’t go home…where are you going to go? What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” Lindsay shivered. Tanya made the bare facts way too clear. Lindsay hadn’t been able to think past the first step—running away from the hospital. Now she was going to have to figure out some kind of plan.

  “Hey, did you get my ATM card?” Lindsay asked.

  “I got you the card, I got you some books, I got you some socks, and I even got you clean underwear. Tomorrow I’ll try to find some stuff of mine that might fit you. You’re going to get awfully tired of those jeans and that sweatshirt.”

  “You totally rock,” Lindsay said.

  Tanya stood. “So let’s get to the library.” She slung her backpack over her shoulder. “We have a freaky mystery to solve.”

  A few minutes later Tanya and Lindsay sat at a large table surrounded by books of old maps, histories of New York City, rolls of microfilm, and Lindsay’s notes.

  “Every time I heard Lucy, it was in someplace that existed in her time too,” Lindsay said. “Riverview Hospital was already there in 1882.”

  “I wonder why she was at the hospital,” Tanya commented.

  Lindsay shrugged. If the girl was a ghost, then being at a hospital wasn’t a big stretch. She ran her fingers across the grainy black-and-white photo in front of her, then studied a floor plan in another book. “And it looks like I was in the old part of the Museum of Natural History.”

  Tanya leaned across her to take a closer look. “The museum looks so weird without its turrets.”r />
  “What’s weirder are the sheep and goats all around it,” Lindsay said. She leaned back in her chair, imagining what it must have been like back then. “People were still farming on the Upper West Side.”

  Tanya nodded. “And it’s not like it was that long ago.” She grinned.

  “So, why did I hear her in my closet, like, all the time?”

  Tanya opened an enormous architectural guide to New York City. “Where did she say she lived?”

  “Clinton Place. I have no clue where that is.”

  Tanya flipped through pages. “That’s because it doesn’t exist anymore,” she said excitedly. “It vanished when Sixth Avenue was extended near Eighth Street. But there used to be a whopping big mansion there. And guess what it was called.” Her dark eyes twinkled, her whole body radiating the same kind of energy Lindsay felt when she was closing in on the solution to a physics problem.

  “The Van Wyck mansion?” Lindsay whispered.

  Tanya didn’t answer. She picked up the book, held open to a photo of a very familiar building.

  “Th-that’s where we moved to,” Lindsay stuttered.

  “Instead of being demolished, it was broken up into apartments,” Tanya said.

  “The closet must have once been a room she spent a lot of time in,” Lindsay said.

  Tanya nodded very slowly. “Or maybe still spends a lot of time in,” she said.

  Lindsay cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

  “This could be evidence of that theory you told me about. The many-worlds interpretation.”

  “Alternate universes,” Lindsay remembered. “The past and the present coexisting.”

  Tanya was so excited Lindsay could see it was a struggle for her to stay in her chair. “I’ve seen this in movies all the time! You’ve done it, Lindsay! You’ve broken through!”

  Lindsay stared at Tanya. “You act like this is a good thing,” she said. “This ‘breakthrough’ has me totally, thoroughly, completely screwed!”

  Several pairs of eyes landed on her. She hadn’t meant to speak so loudly. She got up and sat at a computer terminal, not wanting to be anywhere near Tanya.

  “I’m sorry,” Tanya said, coming up behind her quietly. “You’re right. It totally sucks to be you right now. I got carried away with how amazing it is. But doesn’t it feel better to know that this really is possible? That you aren’t crazy?”

  “I guess….” Lindsay leaned on her elbows, holding her forehead. “But what good does it do me?”

  “What if we can prove it?” Tanya suggested. “Then they’ll have to believe you.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Lindsay asked.

  “Seriously. If we can prove this, you’ll be famous. Rich. Scientists will want to talk to you. Study you. Historians too. I mean, Lindsay! What an amazing discovery!”

  “Yeah…” She swiveled to face Tanya. “But how can we prove it? I’m not going back to the apartment. And I’m not going back to Riverview.”

  “There was something in your notes…. Hang on.” Tanya rushed back to the table and returned with Lindsay’s notebook. She flipped the pages. “You wrote down that she lived in a boardinghouse on Fourteenth Street before she moved into the Van Wyck place. Her father was living there again. She was wondering if maybe she should have moved back in with him.”

  Lindsay nodded, dimly remembering the conversation that the drugs had made nearly impossible. “She felt guilty about it. And nervous about not having him around.”

  “It could still exist,” Tanya said. “Did she tell you the name?”

  Lindsay shook her head. “Just that it was on Fourteenth Street near the El.”

  “The Third Avenue rail.” Tanya smiled. “Once a train was over there.” She twisted around and faced the other computer, her fingers flying over the keys. “This has to be it.”

  Lindsay scooted her chair over to look at Tanya’s screen. She had loaded one of the microfilms, and there was an advertisement for a “conveniently located” and inexpensive “lodging house.”

  Tanya hit a few more keys, doing a reverse lookup, and sat back in her chair when Belleclaire Hotel popped up. “That address is still a hotel. You might be able to contact her there.”

  Tanya called the newspaper up again. “Okay, on this day in 1882, that hotel was called Thorton’s. If you do manage to get her to talk to you, make sure to ask her if that’s where she is. It could help us prove…something.”

  “Okay.”

  Tanya scrolled through the newspaper. “These ads are hilarious. Check this one out. It’s for a séance.”

  Lindsay looked at the screen and gasped. “That’s her! The girl who’s talking to me. Lucy Phillips!”

  Sixteen

  Tanya and Lindsay stared at each other a long moment.

  “Aren’t séances for contacting the dead?” Tanya whispered. “We—we’re not dead, are we?”

  Lucy blinked a few times, then burst out laughing. “You’re going to have to give up your future membership in Mensa if you keep coming up with questions like that. How could someone in the past call ghosts from the future?”

  “It could happen,” Tanya said huffily. “I saw a movie once—”

  “You watch waaay too many movies for a smart girl.”

  “Okay, so maybe that was dumb. But maybe it’s because she’s a medium that she can reach you. Some kind of occult power.”

  “That’s why she keeps calling me spirit!” Lindsay realized. “She thinks I’m dead! That’s why she thought I could talk to her dead mom. Because she figures all the dead hang out together.”

  “She’s living in the right year for that kind of thing,” Tanya said. “The spiritualist movement was still going strong.”

  Lindsay’s body sagged.

  “What is it?” Tanya asked.

  “Nothing. It’s just—” She couldn’t explain why an unwritten civics paper on the relationship between women’s rights and the spiritualist movement had her close to tears. She smiled weakly. “She’s going to be awfully surprised to find out she’s the one who’s dead.”

  “For almost a hundred years.”

  “Let’s make copies of the newspapers off the microfilm,” Lindsay suggested. “She may take some convincing.”

  “Good idea.” Tanya dropped coins into the slot.

  “She asked me to find out about her mother. Is there any way to do that?”

  “Possibly. Where did she die?”

  “Kentucky.”

  “Hmm. We probably won’t have access to Kentucky birth and death records from that long ago from here, but we could try genealogies.”

  “You think?”

  Tanya nodded as she typed, checking Lindsay’s notes. “A lot of people are into doing genealogy research and posting it online. Hopefully someone in that family in the last hundred years got interested in their family history.”

  Lindsay leaned back in her chair, grateful she had Tanya’s help.

  “Aha!” Tanya read from the screen. “Annabella Phillips, formerly Martin. Daughter of Hope Sweetzer Martin and Franklin Martin. Married to Beau Phillips. One daughter. Lucy.” She looked at Lindsay. “There’s more. In both directions.”

  “She’s real,” Lindsay murmured, as if it took this final piece of evidence for her to lock it into place. “This is really happening.”

  Lindsay couldn’t bring herself to look at the screen, afraid of seeing the names in print, giving them the strange reality of being both alive and dead. It’s Schrödinger’s cat all over again.

  “Oh, man, I have to go!” Tanya stood quickly. “I didn’t realize it was so late. My mom is going to freak!”

  Lindsay’s stomach clenched. “Right.”

  “Are you sure you won’t come with me?”

  Lindsay shook her head. “Can’t risk it. Melanie probably talked to your mom too.”

  Tanya shifted her weight, bit her lip, uncertain. Then she glanced back up at the clock. “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t
worry about me.” Lindsay waggled her ATM card at Tanya. “I can go find a decent place to stay.”

  “If you’re sure…”

  “Let’s meet back here again tomorrow after school.”

  “Deal.” Tanya ran the zipper up and down her jacket. “Call me, right? When you go to sleep and when you wake up so I know you’re okay.”

  “What if your mom answers?”

  “Oh yeah.” She frowned. “Wow. This is really, really serious, isn’t it?”

  “Let’s just meet up here tomorrow, okay?” Lindsay said.

  Reluctantly Tanya turned to go, and Lindsay refreshed the page to bring the newspaper back up. She kept her back to the door, unwilling to watch Tanya walking away.

  Don’t bother with the old stuff, she told herself, scanning the microfilm images—corset ads, steamship arrivals, an entire column that seemed to be devoted to what buildings had burned down that day. Go online and find a place to stay. Her hand reached out, then stopped in the air a moment. She gathered her printouts, stuffed them with her notebook into the backpack Tanya had brought her, and headed for the Belleclaire Hotel.

  Lindsay mounted the narrow staircase to the room she’d rented for the night. If Lucy wasn’t here, there was no point staying any longer than that. The place gave her the serious heebies: it was smelly, dirty, noisy. The manager was an enormously fat balding man in a stained T-shirt. He’d barely looked up at her, just grunted the price and taken the money.

  As creepy as the place was, Lindsay felt pretty secure that no one was going to bother asking why a teenager was there on her own.

  As she climbed a flight of stairs, she could hear a couple arguing in a foreign language, music blasting. Shuddering, she opened her door and stepped inside.

  Could be worse, she told herself. A bed that at least seemed to have clean sheets. A dresser. A working lock on the door. What more does a runaway need? She looked around. Hang on. Where’s the bathroom?

  Lindsay stuck her head back out into the hall and saw a door at the end marked BATHROOM. That answered that. Walking out into the hall, she began her search.

  “Lucy?” she called, thinking that if anyone asked, she could claim she was looking for a friend. “Lucy, are you here?”