Blunt Impact

by Lisa Black

  The one person pushed the other over the edge.

  The long hair trailed her body as the earth pulled her down to it. Arms and legs waved wildly but the empty air wouldn’t hold her up.

  Long hair.

  Ghost wanted to close her eyes but she didn’t, because closing her eyes had never done her any good. Maybe if she watched, something would catch her mother. A trampoline or a swimming pool or a tree full of leaves that she could grab on to – catchhercatchhercatchher—

  All at once Ghost felt aware of every single thing around her. Her skin tingled with awareness as she watched her mother fall. The wind was there but not strong enough, it whispered instead of moaned. Summer bugs, already hatched, formed a light cloud around the street light along East Sixth, nowhere near as bright as the security light whose rays caught and illuminated the gleam of her mother’s face. The man on the building looked down at his handiwork, the front of him illuminated by the street lights and the back of him disappearing into the gloom of the inner building as if he were part of it. A car horn bleated from a block away, the rest of the city going on as usual without the slightest idea—

  Ghost’s lungs began to ache from not breathing, as if she could possibly think about breathing when her mother—

  The woman hit the ground.

  The impact seemed to shake the earth all the way over to Ghost, making the dirt underneath her quiver as if with electric shock, and the sound – both a thud and a crunch and the snap of a bunch of broken bones all at once. All the sounds were ordinary in their way, but taken together in one quick cacophony they turned into something alive and more horrible than anything Ghost had ever heard.

  Time seemed to stop, the bugs stopped buzzing, the distant cars receding to their own reality.

  Ghost looked up. No one. She did not see the other person, could not even be sure what floor they had been on. No movement broke up the darkness or gave a flicker of reflected light. It was almost as if the other person – the one who pushed – had been swallowed up by the deep murk of the building’s interior as if he were part of it.

  She moved out from beside the dumpster, across the patchy grass, up on to the flat concrete slab and toward the person lying there without hesitation. It would not be her mother. It could not be her mother.

  Even though it was her mother’s hair, her mother’s face, her mother’s scuffed shoes and her favorite jeans and the silly friendship bracelet of colored string that Ghost had made for her in art class months and months ago.

  This didn’t make sense. Her mother worked up on those high floors every day. She wouldn’t have fallen. Nobody would have pushed her—

  But her eyes were open, so maybe she’d be okay. Ghost knelt down and shook one shoulder. ‘Mom,’ she said, calmly, in an even tone, the first sound she had made. ‘Mom.’

  No response. Her mother didn’t even blink.

  Ghost kept shaking. ‘Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom—’ her voice rising in timbre and level until she was screaming, her throat rasping and the frantic shakes causing the growing puddle of blood to splash and fling itself about—

  And then suddenly the monster, the shadow man, appeared next to her. She looked up but the security light blinded her until he seemed to be only a fuzzy black outline of head and arms and legs, artificially elongated until they could surround her, both her and her mother, and pull them into the center of his darkness.

  He spoke to her, in a sibilant hiss of incomprehensible sounds. A star flashed at her from inside him and she turned her face away.

  She would never remember what happened after that.

  FIVE

  Theresa stood for a moment startled into utter paralysis. Whatever she had thought she might find, this child was not it.

  ‘Honey.’ Theresa dropped to her knees and began to pat the thin arms and shoulders. ‘What happened? Are you all right? Are you hurt?’ The blood had soaked the girl’s pants from the knees down until they were as stiff as thin cardboard. Dried. Obviously the source of the flakes. Heavy smears coated her forearms and hands, marked her cheeks and dark blue polo shirt. None of it wet. Any injuries had since clotted.

  Unless this blood wasn’t from her at all. Of course it wasn’t; the kid would be passing out if she’d lost that much—

  The girl gazed up at Theresa and spoke, grim, hopeless, shell-shocked: ‘Where are you taking her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mom. Where are you taking Mom?’

  The implications of this struck Theresa completely dumb. How—? Why—?

  Worry about that later. What seemed obvious right now: this child had either found her mother’s body or witnessed her actual death, was now in shock and required immediate medical attention.

  ‘Where are you taking her?’ The child’s voice rose a note or two, and at least the effort brought the first tinge of pink to her bloodless cheeks at the same time a tremor ran through her body. ‘Where are you taking her?’

  ‘To my office,’ Theresa blurted. ‘We’re going to take her to where I work. We’ll take really good care of her there.’

  The girl blinked, and something in her expression changed. She seemed to see Theresa clearly for the first time. ‘Your office?’

  ‘Yes. It’s where we take care of people who are hurt like your mother’s been hurt.’

  The girl’s eyes narrowed, just a millimeter. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’

  Theresa’s voice caught in her throat. She had never had to do this before. Dealing with families and the loved ones left behind had always been Frank’s job, not hers. The worst news she’d ever had to deliver to Rachael involved her cat. But this little girl deserved the truth, quickly and cleanly. ‘Yes, she is.’

  No response at first, and Theresa used the pause to dial frantically. Then the girl’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I want to go to your office too. I want to go with her. I want to go with her!’

  ‘You’ll see her again, honey, don’t worry about that. You will. Right now I – Frank, I’m over by the dumpsters, get over here right now – I need to know your name. What is your name?’

  The child whispered: ‘Ghost.’

  It took some gentle prodding but Ghost allowed herself to be shed of her backpack and wrapped in a blanket, then set in the back of Frank’s police car. Frank shut the door and took a few steps away before conferring with Theresa. ‘I made some calls. Apparently she lives with her mother – Samantha – and Samantha’s mother. Victim advocates are understaffed as usual and are tied up with a shooting in Solon. We could call Families and Children if you think she’s in shock.’

  ‘I don’t know! Children in shock are not my field – or if she’s trembling because she’s chilled to the bone after being out here since “early”, she says. I don’t know if that means since long before dawn, maybe back to the wee hours,’ Theresa told him, the little bit she’d managed to learn spilling out of her. ‘But if Samantha committed suicide she changed her mind about taking her daughter along because Ghost says she was definitely on the ground when she saw her mother fall.’

  ‘She saw it happen?’

  ‘Every agonizing moment, it sounds like. And she is definitely going to need medical attention. Her responses are reasonable but she’s still trembling and zoning out.’

  ‘Okay, okay, slow down. We’ll get her help, but let’s get her home to her grandmother first and get that blood washed off. That’s probably the best help we can provide.’

  ‘And she says her mother was pushed.’

  ‘What?’

  Theresa nodded emphatically. ‘Pushed.’

  ‘By who?’

  Now Theresa added, without emphasis: ‘A shadow.’

  ‘A shadow. Terrific. Well, what’s she supposed to think when her mother drags her out of bed to come witness her suicide?’

  ‘I’m not so sure. She says she didn’t come here with her mother. She walked.’

  ‘So she gets up in the middle of the night and walks unaccompanied halfway across the downtown area
of a major city in, again, the middle of the night, just in time to watch her mother plummet to the earth. Excuse me if I find it much easier to believe that her mom wigged out.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Theresa sighed. She returned to the car and opened the rear door, taking the little girl’s blood-crusted hands in hers again. ‘Ghost, this detective – he’s my cousin – is going to take you home to your grandmother, okay?’

  ‘I want to go to your of—’

  ‘I know, but your grandmother is really going to need you right now, so we need you to go there first. Don’t worry about your mother, you will have time to say goodbye to her, but right now you need to see your grandmother.’

  The girl turned white – again – and her words sounded as if her throat had closed up. ‘She – Nana – I don’t know how to tell her!’

  Theresa squeezed the tiny hands, imagining the horrors the child must now be enduring at the thought. ‘Honey, you don’t have to do that. We’ll tell her. You don’t have to. That’s grown-up stuff.’

  A gasping breath, only partly of relief. ‘Will you come with me?’

  This stumped Theresa. She should stay with the crime scene; talking to relatives was not her job, handling bereaved children was not her job, keeping a construction project locked down while she comforted the next of kin was not her job. But she couldn’t send this tiny, bloodied child off locked behind a metal grate while contemplating how best to break the news to her second mother – ‘Yes. Yes, of course I will.’

  In those wee hours of the morning, when he descended from his aerie and the machinery for the zip lift cut off, he had heard the wailing. He hadn’t intended to take a ground-floor look at his handiwork – the view from above having been too sharp and clean to diffuse – but followed the sound across to the east side of the darkened building. Not that it worried him. Nothing could worry him at that moment. The night flowed over his body, infusing each pore, the front of his pants wet from that glorious moment when he’d let go of Samantha, when his fingers unclenched from the mass of her hair and she floated backward into space, one last tendril licking at his hand in a final supplication. In vain, of course. He had no intention of letting her live, of letting her escape the void he had reserved for her.

  The act had been incredible.

  It had been even better than he had imagined, and he couldn’t wait to do it again.

  So when he saw the child weeping, pale, delicate, bathed in the whitest light, it seemed completely appropriate. An angel had descended to grieve for poor broken Samantha, for the sultry body and the doomed, bitch’s soul, its keening a song from another dimension. Or perhaps it represented Samantha herself, the good, innocent, childlike part of her now separated from the weak flesh and formed into a pure but small being on the brink of escape to heaven. The two of them made such an exquisite picture that he watched in fascination for a moment before moving closer. He had to see this angel for himself. Or demon. A demon would also be small and might weep for a bitch.

  He got up close, reached out to touch her, even more enraptured by the child/angel/demon than by Samantha’s broken corpse, but the thing gave a shriek straight out of hell and disappeared into the night. It moved like a rabbit, so fast you couldn’t comprehend it. Nothing human moved that fast.

  With one last look at Samantha, he turned and walked towards home.

  It wasn’t until much later that he began to wonder what had happened to the screwdriver, and whether or not the angel might have been more than a euphoria-induced hallucination.

  SIX

  Frank’s partner, Angela Sanchez, returned in time to join them, without – as she quietly discussed with Frank as they drove – much to show for herself. The Federal Reserve had had the only surveillance cameras in the area; not surprisingly, they were angled to protect the Fed and gave her a terrific view of the sidewalk and the streets outside the eighty-nine-year-old building and nothing else.

  ‘No ATMs?’

  ‘Not a one. Go out one block and we’re ringed by them. But on those four pieces of street, nothing.’

  Frank turned on East Thirty-First. They were only a mile and a half from the construction site. Ghost hadn’t said another word during the trip, only stared at the back of the seat in front of her. But Frank noticed that she did not let go of Theresa’s hand.

  The next half-hour proceeded every bit as painfully as Frank would have expected. Ghost’s Nana, Betty Zebrowski, sobbed and clutched the child for several minutes until the girl’s wails subsided, then sent her upstairs to shower and change clothes. ‘Immediately,’ she said and the order seemed to calm the girl, assure her that adults were once more in charge. Theresa went upstairs with her, leaving the two detectives to obtain some badly needed background.

  ‘Her name’s really Anna,’ the woman began. ‘When she was little she used to like to sneak up on us, and she was pretty good at it. Scared the life out of me once or twice while still in kindergarten. You couldn’t believe such a small child could be that quiet. Sam said she walked like a ghost and we let the name stick. Shouldn’t have done that, I suppose. It’s no sort of name for a girl.’

  Betty Zebrowski was fifty-four, widowed, and wheelchair-bound. She remained on the ground floor of the elderly bungalow that matched its unassuming neighbors on the outside but had been well-maintained on the inside. The dining room had been turned into her bedroom and a half-bath turned into a full one. ‘Sam did that for me, even the plumbing,’ she added, one of many statements that brought choked-back tears and a hand to her mouth.

  Frank and Angela perched uncomfortably on a worn blue couch, their knees almost touching a low coffee table scattered with issues of Cosmo and Walter Drake catalogs. The house appeared comfortable and relatively tidy. No doubt any moment Mrs Zebrowski would offer to brew some coffee for them, but Frank had learned long ago to keep the questions coming. It staved off the hysterics of grief, sometimes. In quick succession they learned that Samantha had come home as usual after work the evening before, had had dinner with her mother and daughter, then gone back out. She had not mentioned a specific date, just ‘out’. She had her favorite bars and bistros and would often run into friends there. Nor was her mother much concerned when she woke up to a silent house. Sam would occasionally stay out overnight ‘with friends’, as she explained with a curl to her lip that showed she knew exactly the gender of said friends. She was not so sanguine about Ghost having already left as well, but: ‘—she does that. She’s supposed to take the school bus, it stops right at the corner, but she sneaks out of her room to walk to school. I don’t know why she does it, Lord knows her mother and I have flat-out yelled at her often enough. She’s not supposed to even be in the yard unless one of us is watching. This neighborhood isn’t what it used to be.’

  Frank nodded, having noticed the activity at the house next door, and the baseball bat propped behind the front door. Mrs Zebrowski looked liked she could have played a mean game of softball in her day.

  ‘But she’s like her mother, I guess,’ the woman went on. ‘There’s only so much you can do.’

  ‘She had this backpack with her.’ Angela held it up.

  ‘That’s for school.’

  ‘Just some homework papers, a pen and a screwdriver.’ The detective held up the tool.

  ‘That would be Sam’s. Her initials scratched into the handle – yes. Ghost imitated Sam all the time with the tools and the fixing stuff. I had hoped that would be all she’d imitate.’

  ‘You conflicted with Sam a little bit over her – lifestyle?’

  The woman gave a rueful smile, adjusting her chair’s position with a flick of the wrist, the way a person might recross their legs. ‘My daughter lives – lived – a little more carefree than girls in my day. I always thought, especially after her father died so young, that she was looking for something she never found. But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression – she was a wonderful mother. She always took good care of Ghost. She took good care of me.’ Again, the voice
cracked on the last word.

  ‘Do you have any other children?’ Angela asked. ‘Is there anyone you’d like us to contact?’

  ‘My son, but I’ll call him. He moved out to New Mexico years ago and never came back.’

  ‘How long have you lived here?’

  ‘Since I married. The neighborhood wasn’t much then and it’s not much now – there’s good people here, but there’s bad ones too. After my husband died so young I couldn’t afford to move. Neither could Sam. Her work was too sporadic and, well, she wasn’t much of a saver.’

  ‘She’s always lived here with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She never married?’

  ‘No.’ A frowning regret passed over her face. ‘She was only eighteen when she had Ghost. Told me the father shipped off to the Army before she knew she was pregnant and then got killed in a training exercise. That’s all I could ever get out of her on that score.’

  ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

  ‘Nothing steady, not at the moment. Her last serious boyfriend, I think that was almost two years ago now. He moved out of state. How did she fall off that building?’ the woman suddenly asked, an unexpected sob escaping her. ‘She loved that building.’

  ‘Did she often go there on her own, not during working hours?’ Angela asked.

  Betty Zebrowski considered this. ‘I think so. She’s mentioned it once or twice, walking by it at night when she’s out with friends. She loved her job. It sounded awful to me, like hard labor and then so high up sometimes, but she just loved it.’

  Angela got to the heart of it. ‘Did she seem upset about anything lately? In her work life, her personal life?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’ The woman wiped her nose, then looked up sharply. ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re just trying to figure out why she was there. And how Ghost – Anna – wound up there as well. You say they didn’t leave the house together.’

  She wasn’t about to be deflected. ‘Sam was happy. Sam was perfectly happy. We may not be living in clover but we have what we need. She was young and healthy and loved her daughter.’ She stopped short of saying she would not have killed herself, and Frank couldn’t blame her.