A Ghostly Light

by Juliet Blackwell

  If any of this was true . . . I felt overwhelmed with sadness for Ida and Franklin.

  “Enough, Ida,” I said. “Stop pushing Thorn down the stairs. I know I said you should feel free, but you’ve done it a few times now, and I really think that’s enough. I mean, not that I don’t see the sweet justice in a tumble or two.”

  No answer. Not that I really expected one, but it would have been interesting.

  “Did George hurt you, Ida?”

  The window cracked. Slowly. A high-pitched screech of glass splintering.

  “Did he hurt Franklin?”

  It shattered.

  “Oh, Ida, I am so, so sorry.”

  There was a far-off, disembodied sob. “Frankliiiiiiiiin! Where are youuuuuuu?”

  I walked over to the crate of books where I had found Treasure Island. To a one, the books were about adventure on the high seas or in exotic lands.

  “And what about the maps? Were those a game you played with Franklin?”

  Suddenly she was right in front of me. Not tormented now as much as hopeful, as though wanting me—willing me—to understand.

  “He loved these stories, didn’t he?” I guessed.

  She nodded, caressing the tomes like precious artifacts.

  “And he dressed like a little pirate,” I said.

  I thought of the bottle, the glass marble, the coins we had unearthed. Trinkets, really—maybe they hadn’t been dropped by accident or washed in on the tide. Could they be a mother’s humble gifts to her treasure-hunting son? Part of an imaginative game of treasure seeking to keep a young boy busy and happy, despite the boredom of the island, the reality of being stuck out here, isolated, a violent drunk their only other companion?

  Maybe Ida kept making the maps, I thought, long after Franklin had disappeared and she had dispatched George. Perhaps that’s why there was a whole box of them up here. Which made me wonder . . .

  “Ida, why haven’t you chased me out of the attic?”

  She didn’t say anything, but collapsed on the floor, despondent and sobbing.

  I thought about how I would have felt if Caleb had wandered off as a boy. I would have been distraught. I would have been consumed with guilt and anguish and a yearning beyond reason.

  As I had said to Landon, this ghost stuff was a lot more about the heart than the mind. So even though I knew Ida was not corporeal, I knelt and put my arms around this ghost, this specter, this spirit.

  Because there were no words.

  • • •

  By the time I came downstairs and locked up the house behind me, Caleb was frantic. Stephen and Olivier were helping him look for his backpack.

  “I left it right by the storage shed, I know I did. Right where I was reading!”

  “What was in it?” I asked. I was running short on patience; my time with Ida had wrung me out emotionally and I wanted to get off this island and regroup. The last thing I felt like doing was spending another half an hour searching for a missing backpack. “You didn’t have your computer in it, did you?”

  “No. But everything else. My iPod. And other stuff, too.”

  Caleb, Olivier, Stephen, and I continued looking, and a few of the workers still on-site pitched in as well. No sign of it.

  “Are you sure you couldn’t have set it somewhere else?” I asked. A misplaced backpack was not exactly unheard of—we had spent many a frazzled morning before school looking for lost items.

  “I mean, where else would I have put it? I was pulling those stupid nails all day with Stephen, and then I was sitting over by the storage shed reading. I went up to check out the tower but I didn’t take my backpack with me, I left it here.”

  “No one on my crew would have taken it, Caleb. I know them all pretty well.”

  “No, but maybe one of your ghosts, or even a murderer or something. I wish I hadn’t even come.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way. It will probably turn up, but for right now, Duncan’s waiting on us. Tell you what, in light of all the work you did today I’ll buy you a new iPod, courtesy of Turner Construction.”

  “You have no idea how much iPods cost,” Caleb muttered as he stalked off toward the harbor.

  “He’s got a point,” said Stephen as we walked down the rocky path.

  “It’s like a little music thingee, right?” I said. Techie, I’m not. “How much could it possibly cost, twenty bucks?”

  Olivier made a snorting noise.

  “Yeah, this is what I’m talking about,” said Stephen with a laugh, putting his hand on my shoulder. “It’s like you’re from a different century, Mel. Luckily, a beautiful gown is ageless. I can’t wait for you to try it on tonight! I’ll be up most of the night sewing, this I know, but I’m so excited!”

  • • •

  “I hear there’s a doozy of a storm coming in this weekend,” said Duncan as he piloted the Callisto towards Point Moro.

  “Yes, I heard that, too. Sunday, right?”

  “Starting Saturday night, I think.”

  “We won’t be working this weekend, anyway.” I wondered . . . if the storm started early enough, maybe the ballet gala would be canceled. We Californians were scaredy-cats when it came to bad weather. “Best to keep the boat tied up tight, I guess.”

  About halfway to Point Moro, my cell phone started working. I called Ellis.

  “Yes, Alicia’s been charged,” he said. “But Marla feels sure the judge will grant bail, as Alicia poses no threat to the community. So she should be back home soon.”

  “I hope so. How is she taking it?”

  “Remarkably well. She has a lot of faith—perhaps too much faith—in the system. And in me.”

  “You’re doing everything you can for her, Ellis. That’s all you can do. She’s lucky to have you on her side.”

  “Thank you. The same can be said for you—you’re searching for the true killer?”

  “I’m looking, but I’m not having much luck.” I considered mentioning the possibility of supernatural help in this regard, but decided against it. “I’ll keep poking around, though, to see what I can find. I wonder—is there any way you can find out the names of attendees from the Palm Project?”

  “You’re wondering if Thorn might have made an enemy there?” Ellis was a quick study.

  “I am. Thorn was so new to the area that I keep thinking even he couldn’t have made a mortal enemy here that quickly. But he did spend a lot of time recently at the Palm Project. Apparently he knew someone there who went by ‘Bear,’ but that was his Palm name, a fake moniker adopted for the sake of anonymity.”

  “We’ve made some inquiries, but there are strict confidentiality laws at inpatient clinics.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ll try some back channels. In the meantime, I’ll keep the security detail—Buzz and Krauss—out on the island whenever you’re working out there.”

  “Thank you, Ellis.”

  “Thank you. And watch your back.”

  • • •

  I dropped Caleb and Stephen off at Dad’s, then drove across town to the Grand Lake neighborhood, to meet Brittany and Landon at the John Hudson Thomas house.

  They had both beat me there and had introduced themselves. I found them wandering through the overgrown, weedy garden when I arrived. I told Brittany about my mother living here as a child.

  “But I don’t understand,” she said. “Your mother lived here, but you’ve never been here?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s possible we drove by at some point, but there’s no logical explanation for all the memories I felt while walking through the house.”

  “Then you think . . . what? That you’re channeling your mother?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “But maybe . . . sort of. I think there’s a link, anyway. Let’s go in, and see what we see, now that we kn
ow what we know.”

  We entered the house through the back door, which led to a servant’s hallway with a small maid’s room to one side, and the kitchen to the other.

  Now, with the knowledge that my mother had been a little girl here, the house felt different. It was striking before—it would be hard for such a beautiful house not to impress, even with kitchen’s harvest gold linoleum tile—but now that I wasn’t scared of my feelings, I could open myself up to its warmth, the welcoming hum. Landon and Brittany lingered downstairs while I took my time roaming the second floor, looking into nooks and crannies and allowing the “memories” to flood my senses.

  “I love this house,” said Landon when I came back downstairs. “There’s such a lovely feel to the place. Good energy.” He paused, seeming slightly embarrassed. “Now I sound like you, Mel.”

  “Maybe it’s the Berkeley ethos getting to you,” Brittany teased. “It’s true though, it really does feel like it has good energy. I’m in real estate, and I can tell you the truth: Not all houses ‘feel’ good, ghosts or no ghosts.”

  I sat on a built-in bench by the fireplace, and looked down at my hands.

  I put them through a lot: concrete work and carpentry, hitting them with hammers and poking them with splinters. I kept my nails short for practical reasons, and looking at them now, I wondered if I should get a manicure for the gala tomorrow night. I wasn’t what one might call “girlie” that way, but I didn’t want to be totally out of place. Landon was right; even if I preferred my spangly dresses or dusty coveralls, it didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy playing princess dress-up from time to time.

  So when I looked down at my hands, yes, they were my mother’s hands. They looked like hers had. Not like she was at the end, of course, but the way I always remembered her, when I was a child and she was—now that I thought about it—about my age.

  In fact, I looked a lot like my mother, in a lot of ways. And that was okay.

  “You’re right, Landon,” I said. “It’s a beautiful place. It feels like . . . home.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I couldn’t sleep. Finally I kicked off the covers, taking care not to wake Landon, and slipped out of the bedroom.

  From the top of the stairs I could see the lights in the living room blazed, and I heard the hum of the sewing machine. Stephen was still hunched over my promised gown, I was sure. After getting home last night we had had a fitting, and the dress was very tight. Stephen claimed it was supposed to be that way, but I made him promise to reinforce the sides so I didn’t spill out of it in the middle of the ballet. I kept envisioning sneezing and losing the entirety of my costume right in front of San Francisco’s historic families. It seemed like a classic Mel Turner move, somehow.

  A strip of light shone under Caleb’s bedroom door. I knocked.

  “Come in,” he said.

  He was sitting up in bed reading, his near-black hair sticking up every which way, his bedroom looking like a cyclone had touched down.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about your backpack today, Caleb. I was really tired; I shouldn’t have been so impatient. I apologize.”

  He shrugged.

  “And most of all, I’m sorry that you’re sorry you came out to the island. It meant a lot to me that you came. And you did some good work getting those nails out of the baseboards.”

  “It’s gonna take a lot of putty and sanding to make them look decent.”

  I smiled. “I know. It’ll be worth it. Sometimes the hard things are worth the effort. What are you reading?”

  “Treasure Island, still. Almost finished.”

  “So you didn’t leave it in your backpack?”

  He shrugged. “It was in my jacket pocket.”

  “Well, that’s lucky.” I thought for a moment. “That woman on the island, Terry—wasn’t she interested in the inscription?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Could I see it?”

  He passed it over.

  I flipped through the book again. There was the treasure map, like the ones Ida had drawn for her son. And there was her inscription to her “little pirate.”

  “Not that one,” said Caleb. He took the book and opened it to the title page, then handed it back to me. There was another inscription, much more faint, which I hadn’t noticed before.

  To little Captain George Vigilance,

  for whom Captain George North is named.

  May you always dream of lighthouses and treasure

  In memory of a lovely summer,

  Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883

  “It’s signed by the author,” I said, feeling a sense of awe that I was holding in my hands a book that Robert Louis Stevenson had once held in his.

  “That’s cool, though, right?” said Caleb.

  “Yes, it certainly is,” I said slowly. “You know, this book might be worth a lot of money.”

  “You mean maybe someone stole my backpack to get this book? You think Terry stole it?”

  “It’s possible.” There were other old books still up in the Keeper’s House attic, and I had brought a few home with me. I hadn’t thought about it before . . . but what did I know about valuable books?

  “Should I not be reading it?” Caleb asked.

  I handed it back to him with a smile. “You should definitely read it. Just remember, while you’re doing so, that it’s a piece of history. And use a bookmark—absolutely no dog-eared pages.”

  “’kay.”

  “And . . . maybe don’t show anyone else you have it. If it’s okay with you, I might borrow it in the morning and have a friend of mine take a look at it.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m almost done anyway, I’ll finish tonight. It’s a good story.”

  “Do you find Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver to be morally ambiguous?”

  “I might, if I knew what that meant.” He smiled a reluctant smile. “Don’t look at me like that! Of course I know what that means. I knew what a ‘numismatist’ was, unlike some people. Aced my SATs, remember?”

  I smiled. “Have you heard back from any colleges yet?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’ll get in. And then you’ll leave me, and then where will I be?”

  “You can always visit.”

  “You bet I will, Goose.”

  • • •

  Saturday morning I drove into San Francisco for my second acupuncture treatment. A few nosy questions to the office staff revealed that Dr. Weng had gotten divorced two years ago. There were no children. It was amicable.

  Luz was at a conference today, so there was no dim sum orgy. Which was probably for the best, because I didn’t think I’d be able to fit into my gown tonight if I indulged like last time.

  Afterward I headed north over the Golden Gate Bridge, back to Tiburon. I had called Cory Venner this morning, and though he claimed not to be an expert, he admitted that yes, he was familiar with collectible antique books, and that he would give me his opinion, as best he could, about my Treasure Island. He sounded excited. I had also brought along the other books I’d taken from the attic.

  When I arrived, Cory donned white cotton gloves and laid the book carefully on a satin cloth. He opened the volume as though it were a holy object. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him it had been carted around in a teenager’s backpack for the last couple of days. Let him blame several decades in an abandoned attic for any damage.

  Cory turned on a small digital recorder, and started murmuring:

  “Cassell and Company, 1883. First edition, first impression. Gray-green cloth cover, gilt-lettered spine, black-coated endpapers.”

  He opened the book to the treasure map, and let out a happy gasp. “Frontispiece map—intact tissue guard—with captions printed in red, brown, and blue ink. A few old splash marks on the cover, inner joints superficially split but sound,
light foxing, a few leaves lightly creased but no significant damage.”

  He clicked off the recorder, and passed me a list. “Would you read that aloud to me, please?”

  “Sure . . . ‘dead men’s chest’ not capitalized on pages two or seven.”

  He turned to those pages. “Check, and check.”

  “Page forty, the first letter of ‘vain’ broken in the last line so it looks like ‘rain.’”

  “Check.”

  “The ‘a’ not present in line six, page sixty-three; the eight dropped from the pagination on page eighty-three; the seven overstamped on page one hundred twenty-seven.”

  “Check, check, and check,” Cory said, sitting back and looking very satisfied. “Now this, Mel Turner, is a real treasure.”

  “So the editing errors are considered a plus?”

  “They help to authenticate the volume. And, like mistakes on a collectible stamp or a baseball card, they do make it even more valuable.”

  “How much are we talking?”

  “I looked online before you came, and an original first edition Treasure Island can be worth many tens of thousands of dollars.”

  “Wow.”

  “But what makes this book truly special is that inscription.” He shook his head. “I’m not even sure how much it might bring in, to tell you the truth. I’ll give you the name of a true book expert for an exact estimate; I’m very fond of rare books, but I don’t keep up with their current market value the way I do coins. I would think you’d want to put it up to auction. But I would imagine at least in the hundreds of thousands, if not more.”

  “Robert Louis Stevenson’s signature is worth that much?”

  “It’s not just his signature, Mel—the inscription suggests Robert Louis Stevenson knew George Vigilance.”

  “Okay, but why would that add value?”

  “Because Robert Louis Stevenson first published Treasure Island as serialized adventures in a magazine called Young Folks, under the pseudonym of Captain George North.”

  “So the inscription means that Stevenson’s nom de plume was inspired by George Vigilance?”