Burn All Alike

by Nene Adams

  Due to the late summer temperature spike, she’d taken to leaving her inherited 1972 Datsun 510 in the multilevel municipal parking garage two streets away from her apartment above the bakery. While the garage wasn’t significantly cooler, at least the car’s steering wheel, dashboard and seats weren’t exposed to unrelenting sunlight, which made the interior seem hot enough to fry bacon by early afternoon.

  She walked down the sidewalk to the end of Main Street. Not much going on, she noted—too early for the lunch crowd, too late in the season for most tourists. At the corner, she came to the Southern Spirit liquor store and paused to glance in the display window.

  Mama’s birthday is coming up. Maybe I should get her a bottle of that awful Irish Cream she likes so much. Mackenzie wrinkled her nose. The liqueur tasted like melted ice milk mixed with a thimble of whiskey and usually gave her heartburn.

  After a moment, her focus shifted. She realized she could see her wavering reflection in the plate glass, a dim, shadowy version of herself. She started to smile and felt the expression freeze on her face as a chill raised the fine down on her arms.

  The eyeless monk’s ghost stood right behind her and a little to her left.

  She felt a sudden sympathy for stalking victims.

  No drums this time, nor did the monk whisper Japanese words in her ear. He simply stood there in his robes and sandals, the dark pits of his eyes trained on her. Somehow, his silent presence felt creepier than Osame’s open hatefulness.

  Mackenzie didn’t let herself react, just walked away from Southern Spirit and continued on to the parking garage. Each storefront window she passed, each reflective surface showed the monk gliding in her wake. She resisted the temptation to run.

  At the parking garage, she found her recently repaired Datsun with its brand-new tires and opened the driver’s side door to let out the stale-smelling hot air before she gingerly climbed inside. The seat didn’t quite burn through her jeans and the steering wheel wasn’t molten, so she rolled down the window, started the car and gave it some gas. As usual, the vintage Datsun handled like a tank, but she figured the exercise was good for her.

  About a mile out of town, she finally dared glance in the rearview mirror. The monk’s placid, eyeless face stared back at her from the backseat. Spooked by the unwelcome passenger, she turned on the radio to a classic rock station and continued driving to Copper Ridge and Kyoko-ji Buddhist Sangha, trying not to peek into any mirrors.

  The monks owned a piece of land hard by the foothills with the heavily wooded, blade-shaped ridge rising to one side. She drove to the graveled parking lot, left the car and walked under a high, red painted structure resembling a stylized bird perch. A torii gate, she recalled from the book she’d bought at Miles of Aisles.

  Once through the gate, she went along a path winding through a garden which didn’t look artificially landscaped, but as natural as though the flowers, ferns, bushes and trees around the ponds, bridges and mossy rocks had grown themselves in pristine order over the years. She understood what Veronica meant by “peaceful.”

  Pausing to admire a busy koi pond, she took the opportunity to check her reflection. To her relief, she found no hint of the monk’s ghost. Thank God for small favors.

  At the end of the path stood the temple. The architecture seemed familiar to her eyes, similar to buildings she’d seen in the kung fu movies of her youth: a sharply peaked roof with upturned eaves supported by slender columns and perched on a low, square wooden building open in the front with a long veranda. A stone Buddha sat cross-legged on a pedestal out front, a hand raised in what she assumed was a benediction.

  Mackenzie hesitated on the covered veranda. What looked like pairs of flip-flops were neatly lined up in a row by the entrance. Should she take off her sandals? Yes. She left the sandals and walked barefoot into the temple.

  The large interior space, lit by the sun trickling in through the entrance, featured an altar supporting a larger Buddha statue glinting gold in the dim light. She couldn’t identify the other objects placed in front of the statue. The floor planks were painted dull vermilion, matching the exposed rafters crossing the high ceiling. Clouds of woody, sweet incense smoke tickled her throat, leaving the taste of sawdust in her mouth. She sneezed.

  Several men and women at the back of the room stared at her. A black-robed monk with the group gave her the dirtiest look since Mrs. Lemaster, the high school librarian, caught her and Opal-Jean Norwood canoodling in the reference section.

  “Good morning, Ms. Cross,” said Abbot Imamura from behind her.

  She turned, thinking he still sounded like he ought to be on British television with that upperclass accent. “Good morning,” she said, mimicking his greeting—making a slight bow with her hands pressed together as if in prayer. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  Behind the lenses of his glasses, Imamura’s eyes squeezed almost shut. He gestured to the right. “There is a shared meeting room this way.”

  The meeting room was much lighter and brighter. An entire side was open to another veranda at the back of the building. Beyond, she saw more plantings, more ponds and the converted barn serving as sleeping quarters for the various monks who lived here year round.

  As soon as Imamura entered the room behind her, she said, “This is about Osame—” and broke off when she heard the deep, full-throated gonging of a bell. The sound pulsed through her body and rattled her teeth. She tried to compose herself, but figured the effort wasted when Imamura stared wide-eyed at something behind her.

  No. Someone.

  Seemed she hadn’t managed to shake her ghostly stalker after all.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Despite the skin-crawling presence at her back, Mackenzie found Imamura’s reaction to the monk’s spirit amusing. “You can see him? The ghost, I mean. Who is he?” The voice in her ear murmured. “Ee-chee-row,” she repeated aloud.

  Imamura spun around to face the outside, gazing at a rectangle of cleared ground in front of the veranda where sand had been raked in spiral patterns around three rough, irregular chunks of granite. “Ichiro is a common name given to sons.” Even his plummy British accent couldn’t disguise the false note in his voice.

  Mackenzie frowned. “I get the feeling you know a whole lot more than you’re telling.” When he failed to answer, she continued, “I didn’t catch most of what you told me at my apartment the other day. Mind explaining yourself?” His lack of response annoyed her. “What about this thing?” She pulled the brocade bookmark from her pocket.

  “Ms. Cross.” He produced the familiar double string of beads, clicking through them like a Catholic worrying a rosary. Several moments later, tension bled from his rigid posture. His shoulders relaxed a trifle. “That is an omamori, an amulet of protection from evil. It contains a special blessing. You should carry it with you at all times.”

  “Fine. Thank you.” Finally, he throws me a bone. Mackenzie relaxed slightly. “Now quit stalling and tell me what else you know. Everything this time.”

  He sighed. “The spirit is my father, Ichiro. He became a monk and traveled to America after my mother died twenty years ago. He told the family he had an obligation. Giri—a moral obligation, a duty, a burden of debt. The concept is difficult to explain.”

  “I sort of get it.” Mackenzie thought about the tangled network of familial and social obligations binding her to close relatives, distant relatives, honorary relatives, friends, other loved ones, and even strangers she hadn’t met yet. In the complicated genealogy of the South, everybody was related to everybody else in some way.

  Imamura went on, “I, too, took vows and came here following my father’s death. He left me a letter relating a story about a young woman who disappeared during the war. I believe you know the circumstances surrounding her murder.”

  Mackenzie nodded.

  “In the letter, my father claimed a spirit was responsible for many fires in the late forties and an incident known as the Big Burn. He said he pe
rformed the necessary rites and instructed me to found a temple in this spot to continue praying and making offerings to the spirit. To me, the story was a fairy tale. Regardless, I did as he asked. But when the fires began weeks ago, I wondered.” His hand tightened on the beads. “I feared. And then…then the spirit marked your door. I knew my father told the truth. The onryō was not a fairy tale.”

  “The what?”

  “When a person dies in sustained fear, pain, anger or hatred, they may become a wrathful spirit bound to the world of the living, an onryō wishing only vengeance.” Imamura shot a quick glance at her—and presumably the ghost still standing behind her—and resolutely returned to facing the garden. “The desire for revenge consumes the onryō, giving it power, but that desire is unfocused. Anyone or anything may become a target.”

  “Considering what happened to Osa—I mean, the young woman,” Mackenzie hastily amended at his grimace, “I can’t say I blame her for being angry. But like you said, she’s unfocused. Her next target is an old folks’ home.” Briefly, she explained the parallels she and Veronica had discovered between the fires in 1945 and the fires happening now.

  Imamura listened while continuing telling his beads. The rhythmic clicking should have been annoying, Mackenzie thought, but she found the sound almost soothing.

  After she finished, he said, “The onryō clings to her grudge and has become locked in a cycle of repeating past actions, unable or unwilling to escape the pattern of negativity.”

  “What can we do about it? I mean, do you guys—” Mackenzie vaguely waved a hand to indicate his shaved head, his robes, his beads, “—perform exorcisms?”

  “Were the onryō possessing a living person, I would seek to counsel the spirit, not trap, banish, or otherwise cause harm, and to guide it to enlightenment through Amida’s saving grace. In the current case, an exorcism isn’t necessary or possible.”

  “Maybe you could do those rites, the ones your father did back when, ’cause I figure that’s probably what kept the onryō quiet all these years until those construction guys disturbed the grave.” Mackenzie rubbed her tingling ear when the ghost breathed a word to her. “Um, Ichiro says ‘hi,’” she reported, feeling like an idiot. Seriously? Go to all the trouble of coming back from the dead, that’s the best you can do?

  Imamura tucked the beads away in his robe. “In folklore,” he said without reacting to the strange message, “a troubled spirit returns to the land of the dead once its purpose has been fulfilled or when the proper funeral rites are carried out.” He turned to regard her with an almost flinching movement.

  She realized he’d expected to see the ghost of his father, so she checked over her shoulder. The monk wasn’t there.

  “You said her grave was disturbed.” Imamura looked sick.

  “Her remains were found over by the Renaissance Two assisted living facility.” Mackenzie consulted a mental map of the area. “About two miles that way.” She pointed west. “The county reburied her bones in Potter’s Field.”

  He nodded. “My father made an ihai, a memorial tablet for the woman. I’ve been offering prayers, sacred readings and incense,” he explained as led her back to the large altar presided over by the gilt Buddha. After rummaging among the scattered objects, he suddenly stiffened. “The ihai is broken.” He showed her a handful of thin wooden splinters.

  Mackenzie whistled. “I’m guessing that’s what your father meant by ‘hi.” Is it too much to hope the damage was done by termites?”

  His expression pinched, Imamura laid the splinters on the altar. “A new ihai can be made, of course, though that will prove somewhat difficult since I don’t know her family name. The situation is very irregular,” he added. “Normally, the body would be brought to the temple for the rites and then taken to the crematorium.”

  “Not possible, I’m afraid.” Probably reams of bureaucratic red tape were required for the legal exhumation of a corpse, she thought. Hell, getting a dog license needed a triplicate form reading like movie subtitles badly translated from Mandarin to English via IKEA assembly instructions. “What if you went to the Potter’s Field where she’s buried?”

  Imamura pursed his lips. “Obon would be better,” he said after a moment. “A three-day festival to honor one’s ancestors,” he added in response to her risen eyebrows. “The temple will host traditional dancing, music and a food bazaar, but I’ll have time to deal with the onryō. And I’ll need to have another memorial tablet made.”

  “Do we need to go to Potter’s Field?”

  “I will call the spirit to the temple.”

  Mackenzie thought that was the worst idea she’d ever heard. Facing the terrors of the Potter’s Field behind the old Oak Grove Cemetery and committing grave robbery seemed preferable to inviting a pyromaniac spirit to a public festival. However, Imamura remained adamant he could control the situation. She quit arguing. The man was an abbot. He had to know his business, right? Still, the uneasiness in her gut wouldn’t quite go away.

  “In the meantime, take some ofuda with you.” He opened a box on the altar and removed a handful of paper slips, each covered in brushstrokes of Japanese writing. “From a Shinto shrine in California. These are supposed to protect a residence against fire.”

  The heavy, cream colored paper felt thick, almost like felt under her fingertips. Handmade, she supposed. “How does an ofuda work?”

  “Hang them up around an area you wish to protect.” He peered at Mackenzie over the top of his eyeglasses. “Ofuda and omamori are sacred and should be treated with respect.”

  Mackenzie had been about to shove the talismans in her pocket. His words made her pause. “Sacred?” She hastily smoothed the crumpled papers. “More superstition?”

  “If you believe, does it matter?” He let out a dry chuckle and grew serious. “Return the items to me when you no longer need them. I will contact you when I’m ready.”

  When Mackenzie left the temple, she didn’t know whether to be troubled or relieved, so she settled for mildly disgruntled.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  One day after her visit to the temple, Mackenzie’s nerves began to fray. Two days later, the tension headache became near constant. Three days later, she was ready to snap.

  As soon as she walked through the heat sink of the parking lot and entered the Little Giant Supermarket, cold air from the overhead vents rushed over her arms and legs, leaving her clammy and out of sorts. A thunderstorm muttered over the hills around town, increasing the humidity, turning the air to syrup and making her feel like she’d been hit in the face with a dirty wet mop. Rainfall couldn’t come soon enough.

  She shoved the shopping cart along an aisle, grimacing when a wheel kept sticking. “Pasta, ketchup, red wine,” she recited, trying to remember what she was supposed to buy since she’d stupidly left her list behind. “Toilet paper, tampons…” She stopped at the end of the aisle when she spotted Debbie Lou Erskine headed to the produce section.

  Instantly, her jaw clamped tight. A pulse beat in her head. Flames seemed to boil up from her belly to lick at her heart. In her head, conscience warred with fury.

  On her shoulder sat an angel whispering in Mama’s voice, “Ignore Debbie Lou, just finish your shopping and go home. Don’t cause a scene. Be the bigger woman.”

  The devil on the other shoulder said in a voice like the darkest, bitterest chocolate spiked with habanero chilies, “Fuck that noise. You need to mess that girl’s shit up!”

  She’d never been very good at listening to her mother.

  The shopping cart turned. Mackenzie marched to the produce section, weaving around the piles of bell peppers, corn, lettuces, lemons, tomatoes, watermelons. She glimpsed peroxide blond hair extensions and found Debbie Lou lingering over a display of cucumbers. The woman was surrounded by her usual aura of Love’s Baby Soft, hairspray, nicotine and the cheap liquor Certs breath mints didn’t quite disguise.

  Debbie Lou glanced up and grimaced. “Look what the cat dragged in,�
� she said sourly.

  Mackenzie’s throat tightened. She couldn’t speak.

  “You stinkin’ nark, I hear you’ve been real busy putting my baby brother in trouble with the cops,” Debbie Lou snarled, giving Mackenzie a hard, cold glare.

  The outrageous accusation was enough to unclog Mackenzie’s windpipe. “Turnip told me the whole mess was your idea in the first place,” she spat. “You and that goddamn greasy lawyer trying to rip me off and getting me involved in your hare-brained scheme—”

  “Purvis told me you can afford a measly half million dollars, Kenzie Cross! But you’re such a stuck-up, scrawny little cu—”

  “Stuck up? Well, I guess that beats a foul-mouthed, sorry excuse of a dumb bleach blond bimbo who thinks vajazzling is the highest form of art.”

  Debbie Lou reared back and shook a fist. “Go to hell!”

  Mackenzie stuck out her chin. Her brief past relationship—she claimed temporary insanity—with Debbie Lou Erskine had taught her which buttons to press. In her opinion, familiarity didn’t breed contempt, but good ammunition to use in a verbal slap fight. “You first. Go on—hit me, you stupid heifer, and I’ll beat your sorry ass into the ground.” Anticipation blossomed into an itch under her skin. Her rage congealed to ice so cold, her sternum burned. “Just don’t give me lice from that nasty, cheap weave on your head.”

  “Bitch! These extensions cost me five hundred dollars.”

  “And I’ll bet you earned every nickel on your knees.”

  “I could snap you over my knee like a twig.” Debbie Lou smirked. “Olive Oyl.”

  The hated nickname melted the ice and rekindled the wildfire in Mackenzie’s heart. She’d forgotten the familiarity thing worked both ways.

  Abandoning her shopping cart, Mackenzie took a step forward. Debbie Lou seemed to stand at the end of a long, narrow, red-misted tunnel. The need to wipe the offensive smirk off the woman’s face pulled her arm back, but common sense prevailed at the last moment. She didn’t want to break her knuckles on that lantern jaw. Was there a pineapple handy?