World Tree Girl

by Kerry Schafer

  “We’re looking for her,” I say. “Her van’s in the lot and we’re hoping she’s around somewhere.”

  “If she was here, do you think I’d be doing this? Not my job to shine up the showroom. She’s been around precious little these last few weeks.” His smoldering gaze levels on me. “Ever since you showed up in town, in fact. Now. I’m a busy man. Got two bodies waiting to process downstairs, and here I am up here, polishing coffins. She ain’t here. So unless you’ve got something else to say—”

  “Do you have any idea where she might be?” Matt asks.

  Lysander’s eyes narrow. His complexion is fading to something approaching normal, the expression on his face more thoughtful than outraged. “Why are you here?”

  I also don’t buy the idea of Lysander Swiffering coffins, whether Sophronia has failed in her duties or not. He’s got at least one other staff member he can boss around. Or at least he did have. I hunt around in my brain for the guy’s name, buying time by pressing my hand down on the red satin plush interior of a coffin that would do Dracula proud.

  “Where’s Craig?”

  A short bark of a laugh escapes Lysander. “You think I’d let Craig in the showroom? He’d scare off the customers. Good worker, but hot damn, not so good in the looks department.”

  “I didn’t think your customers would scare so easy.” I swing around to face him. His bulldog face is still set in stubborn lines of irritation and anger, no surprise, no evidence he’s hiding knowledge about the undead.

  “Families are mighty particular who they deal with. Craig is purely night shift material. Trust me on that.” He brushes the dust off his shoulders. “If you see Sophronia, tell her to get herself back here and help out, or she can start paying me rent.”

  “I don’t know that we will see her,” I tell him. “Or that you’ll see her either. That’s the thing. She’s…having some difficulty.”

  “Suppose you tell me what you mean by that.”

  “Do you know who Ravenna is?”

  “Rav who? What sort of name is that? And she’d better not have gone off anywhere. I need her help. She lives here free, the least she can do is help out a little.” His eyes narrow, his jaw juts forward even further. “There’s more. What happened? What would make her run off all of a sudden, like you say?”

  Matt opens his mouth, but Lysander brushes him off with a hand gesture. “Not you, you’re a blatherer. Her.” He stalks toward me and plants himself right in the confrontational zone. His eyes are a muddy shade of brown. Low brow, jutting jaw, thick lips. Sophronia has none of his genetic structure. Eyes, bones, hair. She’s tall, slim, green-eyed, her hair jet black.

  “You. Talk.”

  “Sophie must look like her mother,” I tell him.

  Lysander’s jaw clamps hard, the muscles bunching. I expect to hear teeth cracking, but he just breathes loudly in and out through flared nostrils.

  “Get out.” His voice offers the prospect of violence. I watch his hands, his eyes, braced for the moment he reaches the decision point to smack me with the Swiffer.

  “I was just wondering whether your daughter’s special gifts come from you or her mother. Such things usually have a genetic component.” I offer him my most infuriating smile.

  “Her mother abandoned us both when she was eight. We don’t talk about her.”

  “Abandoned you. Or fled. Or worse. Look, Lysander, I don’t like you much, but I will be honest. How much do you know about Sophie’s special abilities?”

  “To avoid work, you mean? Or playing dress-up with dead people? Oh, yes, I’ve caught her at that little game more than once. Listen, maybe the two of you have nothing better to do with your time than to stand around gawping, but those bodies in my basement aren’t getting any fresher. Are we done?”

  “I was wondering,” Matt says, “whether Sophronia has any siblings.”

  His voice sounds strange, and I shoot him a glance. He’s fixated on the mirror gloss of the black coffin, his pupils so large his brown eyes look black, his face softened, as if in sleep.

  Lysander drops the duster, both hands clenching into fists. “What’s it to you? Get out.”

  I elbow Matt in the ribs, and he snaps to with a visible start just in time to duck as Lysander takes a swing at him. Lysander is furious and a bull of a man, but it only takes Matt about three casual moves to lay him out on the floor, curled into a ball and gasping to get a breath.

  “If Sophronia should come home, you might be wary,” I tell him, for her sake, not his. “I suspect you know that her skills go beyond playing dress-up with the dead. I don’t see that you’ve given her much reason to spare you if she should happen to go on a rampage.”

  His face turns purple, between the oxygen deprivation and fear. We leave him on the floor, flopping like a stranded fish.

  Craig is waiting for us by the front door. “Where is she?” he asks.

  “We were hoping you might know.”

  He shakes his head. His good eye, so perfectly beautiful in the wreck of his face, stays focused on me. “She’s in trouble. I’m worried.”

  “If you’ve got any information that would help us find her, now is the time to spit it out.”

  He knows something. I can tell that from his posture, the way his gaze slides away, but he doesn’t answer.

  “Who’s Ravenna?” Matt asks.

  “Ravenna?” Craig shakes his head. “I don’t know about any Ravenna. But—Sophronia has been getting letters. Unsigned.”

  “What kind of letters?”

  “She’ll hate me forever if I tell you.”

  It takes a minute as he weighs all of the options. Then his back straightens. His shoulders square. He digs into his pocket and pulls out a folded envelope.

  “I took one from her room. I was thinking maybe I could help her.”

  “You did the right thing.” I pull a type-written sheet out of the envelope, promptly wishing I could put it back and undo its delivery.

  “She had more like this?”

  He nods. “They’re gone. I looked.”

  I pass the letter to Matt, watching the horror dawn on his face. I can only imagine the effect of a missive like this on a girl like Sophronia.

  Pulling out my cell, I dial Jake.

  “Is Jill still alive?”

  “So far. Why?”

  “Don’t leave her alone. More in a bit.”

  Craig waits, quietly. It’s impossible to read the expression on his face, but I don’t think he’s surprised.

  “Can we see her room?”

  He nods, and leads us through the hallways and to a staircase that takes us up to the family living space. It’s cluttered, but clean. In the kitchen, a pot half full of congealing soup appears to be the remains of Lysander’s dinner. There’s one bowl and one spoon in the sink. Craig leads us through a living area with a couple of bookcases, a TV, a coffee table, and unremarkable furniture.

  Sophronia’s room looks more like a cell in a nunnery than something belonging to a teenage girl. The walls are painted white and the only decoration is a poster print of something Egyptian involving the jackal-headed god of the dead. There is a twin bed, neatly made up with a white coverlet. Judging by the dog hair, a folded blanket at the foot of the bed is the sleeping place for Morpheus. A neatly arranged bookcase contains a mix of fantasy novels and textbooks on Egyptology, mythology, and anatomy. There’s a closet containing only clothes and a couple of pairs of shoes. The only other item of furniture is a student desk. Nothing of interest in the drawers. The top is clear of everything except for one of those Himalayan salt lamps.

  “Her backpack is missing,” Craig says. “Her favorite jacket. And her copy of The Book of the Dead.”

  He flushes under the look I give him. “Somebody needs to keep an eye on her. Lysander doesn’t.”

  I’m pretty sure there’s more to his motivations than that, but I let it pass. “Look, Craig, if she comes back, call me.”

  He nods, but not with any co
nviction.

  “Call me, and stay out of her way.”

  At which, unexpectedly, he laughs. “What can she possibly do to hurt a guy like me?’

  Oh, grasshopper, I think. You believe you are suffering already. You have no idea.

  • • •

  Jake is waiting for us outside the hospital, a lit cigarette between two fingers. One good look at his face and my heart convulses. He’s drawn as tight as a wire about to snap.

  “No change. Did you find Sophie?”

  “Her van’s there, she’s not. Looks like she came home for some of her stuff and then left.”

  Jake drops the cigarette to the pavement, half smoked, and grinds it out with his heel. “Let me guess. Lysander didn’t have a clue. Will he let us know if she comes home?”

  Matt and I exchange a glance and Jake sighs, elaborately. “What did you do?”

  “Matt asked a question. Lysander tried to answer with his fists. The result was a learning opportunity.”

  “Does he need a hospital?”

  “What do you take me for?” Matt asks. The silence is just long enough for us all to remember that he is more or less responsible for the deaths of two good men.

  “I didn’t say you did anything. Thought Maureen might have shot him.”

  “Very funny. The question that got Lysander all riled up was about other children. Whether Sophie is an only child.”

  “Ahhh, you struck a nerve with that one.” He pulls a pack of Camels out of his pocket, starts to tap one out into his hand. Stops. Puts it back. “I never did see why Jaz married Lysander.”

  “He might have been good looking once.”

  “Could be. Plus, he was on the football team. All the girls loved him, couldn’t seem to see that mean streak. I guess he kept it buried better back then. If I’m honest, maybe he loved her too. He was—softer—the first year they were married. How did you think to ask about kids?”

  I glance at Matt. “I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

  He stands with his back to us, staring at the houses across the street. “Just a hunch.”

  “Huh,” I say, remembering the weirdness in his eyes just before he asked the question. But Jake goes on, and his answer requires my attention.

  “Jaz and Lysander had a baby, one year to the day after they got married. It died. Crib death, far as anybody could tell. Jaz changed some after that. Still sweet, but always had a look on her face that made you want to cry. Lysander reverted to rage. It’s what he knows. It’s like he took that baby’s death as a personal insult. Got himself arrested a time or two over the next year for various assault charges. Bar fights. That sort of thing. Gossip said they were trying to have another baby. Doctor visits. A specialist in Spokane. Special meds. And then Jaz was pregnant again, and nine months later there was Sophronia.”

  “You’d think he’d have an extra-special love for a child that hard to conceive.”

  Jake passes a hand over his head and massages the base of his scalp. “You’d think. Even when she was a baby, though, before he could have been put off by any indication of her being special, he didn’t seem to want anything to do with her. You’d never see him holding her. If anything, he got meaner. That’s when Jaz started showing up with black eyes and bruises and every lame excuse in the book as to how she came by them.”

  “And then she disappeared.”

  He nods. “And then she disappeared. Sophie was already a weird kid. Those huge green eyes, always staring off at things nobody could see. An imaginative child, her teachers called her, but you got this sense that her imaginary friends weren’t so imaginary. She was unsettling.”

  “And now she’s a lot more unsettling.”

  “Around the time she turned thirteen she started hanging out at the hospital when somebody was about to die. It was uncanny. She didn’t go into the ICU or the ER so much; she’d just quietly slip into a room in the adult care unit. When the nurse would come in later, she’d be sitting there, holding the patient’s hand, and they would have passed. Some of them started calling her Angel of Death, always behind her back. Those were the kind ones.”

  “Psychopomp,” Matt says.

  “What the hell is a psychopomp?” Jake asks.

  “A soul guide. Someone who leads the soul to the doors of the afterworld and helps them go through.”

  That’s what I’d thought, soon after I met her. But that was before I watched her suck the soul right out of a body—somebody who needed to die, mind you, that was intent on killing all of us. But still. Psychopomps don’t have that kind of power.

  Jake reads it in my face. “So, what happens if a guide decides not to wait for souls to cross? Or to rush them along a little?”

  When neither Matt nor I answer, he continues. “What’s wrong with Jill is nothing the doctors are going to fix, I take it. And if she dies, then Soph—” He can’t finish, but he doesn’t need to. We’re all thinking the same thing.

  “Sophronia’s not going to come back here,” Matt says, still staring out into the dark. “And she’s not going back to Lysander.”

  Jake looks from Matt to me. “There’s more. What are you not telling me?”

  Reluctantly, I hand him the letter. I can’t stand still to watch him read and start pacing, grateful for the pain in my leg.

  Sophronia:

  What an unusual name for a girl, but then, I hazard to guess that you are an unusual girl. Is this so? Have you felt that you don’t fit in with the rest of the twittering flock?

  I don’t know what they’ve told you of the circumstances of your birth, but I will be direct. You are not fully human. Yes, you were conceived of a union between two human beings, and delivered of a human mother in a hospital, but I contributed to your DNA. And my genetic makeup being what it is, I can only guess what you are experiencing, isolated and trapped among lesser beings as you are.

  I must ask.

  Have you killed yet? By this, I do not mean helping a soul cross over. That’s bread and butter to those of our kind. Have you actually tasted a soul? Maybe kept some of it for yourself? I’m sure the humans have indoctrinated you with all sorts of notions about right and wrong, but they do not apply. Embrace your origins. Go where your desires take you.

  I am sorry I have not been able to be there with you, to watch you grow. When you are ready, come find me…

  “Oh, hell,” Jake says, when he’s done. “Do you think this is that Ravenna person who texted her? I’ll run this for fingerprints, but I’m pretty sure we won’t find any beyond Maureen’s and mine.”

  “And Sophronia’s. And Craig’s.”

  “Craig?” Jake sounds startled. “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “He gave us the letter.”

  “We have got to find Ravenna,” Jake says, which is all fine and good, but I’ve got no more idea of how to do that than how to find the World Tree Girl. I can only think of one place to start. Jake will protest, on ethical grounds, so I attempt to spare him.

  I yawn and stretch. “Well, I’m headed home. Long day and all that.”

  “I’ll drive you,” Jake says. “Matt can stand watch for a bit.”

  There’s not going to be any point objecting, so I get into Jake’s car.

  “You know if you find anything, it won’t be admissible in court,” he says, about halfway up to the Manor.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, come on Maureen. Don’t play games with me.”

  “Manor rules say I’m permitted to search a resident’s belongings at need.”

  “Jill is hardly a resident.”

  “She’s residing at the Manor, something she insisted on. Come on, Jake. What I find might save her life.”

  “But that’s not why you’re looking.”

  “No, I’m looking because we are damn short of leads in this case. Maybe Jill is here because of Phil. Maybe she’s up to something.”

  “You don’t think maybe she just came home to get her father’s ashe
s?” I give him a killing look and he very nearly smiles. “I’d think you might have some affection for Phil’s daughter.”

  “I barely know her. She wants to take the Manor from me.”

  “And that’s it?”

  I don’t answer, and he lets it lie.

  Chapter Seventeen

  All is peaceful when we enter the Manor. The temperature is normal. A few of the residents are still out and about, apparently free of harassment from invisible sources. Even when I turn the key in the lock and open the door to Jill’s room, nothing happens, not so much as a blink of the electricity.

  “Are they resting up for another attack?” Jake asks, following my thoughts.

  “I have no idea what they’re doing. I’m not good with ghosts.”

  Jill’s room is a disaster zone. Clothes strewn across the bed and hanging over the backs of chairs. Cosmetics scattered all over the bathroom vanity. It looks to be her own work and not that of restless spirits.

  Her suitcase is already open. Jake, still protesting, looks on over my shoulder, but he doesn’t stop me. I sort Jill’s possessions into piles on the bed, taking mental notes of exactly where each one was located. Best if she doesn’t know I’ve been through her stuff, although if she’s absorbed anything at all from her father, she will expect this.

  Searching a suitcase and putting everything back in order is easy when someone is neat. Jill is not. In fact, she’s a downright messy packer, and for somebody who traveled all the way from France she certainly hasn’t brought much with her—just one suitcase and a carry-on.

  “You think there’s more luggage somewhere?” Jake asks.

  “This is all there was in the rental car. Maybe she planned to buy clothes when she got here?”

  “I doubt she’ll be shopping in Shadow Valley.” He holds up a cashmere sweater with a designer tag sewn in. “Can’t imagine why she wants the Manor.”

  “Me, either,” I say. But I can’t help remembering the way she whispered, “He chose you over me.” Maybe Jill is still questing for her dead father’s love. Maybe that’s why she resents me for having the Manor.