Forgotten Spirits

by Barbara Deese

  But it wasn’t. Watching Cate’s departing figure, what stuck in her mind was the worry on her friend’s face.

  Something else gnawed at her sense of security, too. Cate wasn’t the only one with intuitive powers, she thought, as she pulled wine glasses from the cupboard and sliced some cheddar cheese to go with the apple pie she’d baked earlier. The first time she’d served him this, Bill had said, “Apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze.” It was a little corny and a little sweet, and now it had lodged in her brain, to pop up like an advertising jingle at the oddest times.

  Just then, the thing she’d been trying to remember scuttled across her mind, and she knew she wouldn’t fully relax until she’d checked it out. Her heart pounded as she retraced her steps, back down the stairs and out the door onto the porch. Intuition, she believed, was just a matter of noticing things subliminally and pushing them back into the subconscious, where they hooked up with other images until just the right mix of memories, observations, and analysis came together.

  Flipping on the porch light, she saw it was there, precisely as her subconscious mind had recorded it, a single, unfiltered butt in the blue glass ashtray her landlady left there year round. Picking it up with all the disgust of a reformed smoker, she made a face. She snatched up the ashtray, stumbling over the leg of a wicker chair in her hurry to get back upstairs.

  Having lived much of her adult life on her own, Foxy had never been a particularly fearful person. Back in the safety of her apartment, she took a couple of deep breaths. By the time she’d disposed of the cigarette butt and washed the ashtray, she convinced herself it meant nothing. In fact, when she thought about it, she was embarrassed by how quickly she’d turned a few phone calls and a cigarette butt into a big melodrama.

  Looking at the clock, she smeared on some lipstick and set the table. By the time Sheriff Harley’s vehicle pulled up, she had gathered herself together. She checked herself in the mirror before meeting him at the door.

  “Foxy,” he said, taking her hands and looking at her with warm eyes.

  Enjoying the strength of his arms around her and the smell of her favorite aftershave, she closed her eyes. For most of her adult life she’d prided herself on handling, all on her own, whatever life threw her way, and yet sometimes, like this moment, she wondered what it would be like to give in and simply let someone take care of her.

  He tossed his jacket on the bench by the door. Following her to the kitchen, Bill perched on a stool and watched her finish preparing their dinner of poached salmon and quinoa salad, food he once swore to her he’d never eat.

  Sheriff Harley was clean-shaven and trim, definitely in better shape than when she’d first met him. He’d just turned fifty—four-and-a-half years younger than she was. Foxy took credit for introducing him to the ideas that donuts did not constitute a food group and cross-country skiing could be fun. When she actually stood back and took a realistic look at him, as she did now, she had to wonder why it was so hard for her to consider a more permanent arrangement.

  She worked at the counter with her back to him. He stood, buried his face in her hair and kissed the back of her neck. She was almost embarrassed to feel a warm and familiar surge. She was almost fifty-six, for Pete’s sake!

  Okay, she was still in excellent shape for her age, but she was still her age! Never, in her younger days, could she have pictured having passionate sex with a man who had ear hair and age spots. Before she’d met Bill, she’d believed she was aging with grace, accepting the few extra pounds and softer jawline, the flat shoes and reading glasses. But once she’d gotten into this relationship, she’d become acutely aware of every little wrinkle, every consequence of gravity on her body, and she felt ridiculous. She couldn’t pin those feelings on anyone but herself. Bill never judged her harshly. In fact, he treated her like an unexpected gift, wrapped up and left for him under the Christmas tree.

  At dinner, she looked at him across the table, with the planes of his face sharpened in the candlelight. She considered asking him to spend the night. The trouble was, if he stayed over, she’d have to boot him out early in the morning so she could get ready for the book club lunch at Robin’s.

  She’d debated whether or not to tell him about the calls, but concluded he’d feel compelled to chide her for not having a real lock on the porch and an electronic security system. But the real reason she chose to say nothing was that he was sure to ask questions. That was a given, and being in law enforcement, there was no such thing as a casual question to Bill. Maybe he’d even go snooping into her background, something he promised he’d never do, even though he had, at his fingertips, the means to do it.

  While they ate, Foxy made sure they kept the conversation light. Snuggling together on the sofa after dinner, they listened to classical piano music. His fingers stroked the back of her neck and wandered down the front of her sweater. Her body came alive wherever he touched. She again was about to ask if he wanted to spend the night when her phone rang. Regretfully, Foxy disentangled herself from his embrace and walked barefooted into the kitchen.

  This time, the person on the other end did not hang up. Foxy knew immediately it was bad news.

  “Yes, of course I remember you, Mr. Brady. What’s wrong?”

  He was blunt in delivering the news. “Sierra’s dead. My daughter is dead. I thought you should know.”

  Dead? Foxy wondered if she’d misheard. It took a few beats for it to make sense. “Sierra? Dead?” she echoed stupidly.

  She could hear him try to say something and then choke on it.

  “What happened?”

  “She took her own life.” His voice got stronger, more definite. “She was at home.” He cleared his throat. “You do know she moved to Minnesota, don’t you?”

  “Yes, we’ve been in contact.”

  “The thing is, she killed herself at her home, well, in her garage. She’d been drinking, the police said, and then she went out to the garage and turned on the car engine. She died of carbon monoxide.”

  Foxy wondered if she’d misheard. “It must have been an accident.”

  Bill hovered in the doorway, his eyes questioning her.

  She turned away and covered her mouth as tears spilled over.

  Bill tucked his body up close to hers and began to rub her shoulders.

  “She left a note.” Mr. Brady forged on, determined to get his message out.

  “A note?”

  “She said she was sorry, but she couldn’t think of any other way.”

  Foxy listened with growing sadness and confusion, as Sierra’s father told her more than necessary about his daughter’s death, from what she was wearing when her son, Beau, found her to the position of her body in the car and the boiled, red appearance of her skin. Perhaps focusing on the factual details was an effort to exorcise his demons, but by telling her, the demons had become hers too. She had no words of comfort to offer him.

  Sometime in the late evening last Sunday, Sierra had eaten a meal of chicken and salad. She’d been drinking. In her intoxicated state, she’d gone out to the garage, gotten in her car and turned on the engine, he told her. She stayed there with the garage door shut. She’d been sick, but couldn’t purge herself of the toxins in time. A nearly empty vodka bottle on her kitchen table explained her blood alcohol content.

  She mumbled the obligatory words of condolence. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked, expecting him to decline offers of help.

  “Yes, yes, that’s the reason I’m calling. When she moved to Minnesota over the summer, she left some boxes for us to store. We went through them last night, and one of them is addressed to you.”

  “What?”

  “She left a box addressed to you,” he repeated. “We’re down here in Rochester right now going through some other things. Beau found her. I told you that. He’s still te
rribly upset.” He went on, talking about Sierra’s son. “We’re taking him up to our vacation place in Alexandria for a few days. We’re leaving here shortly, heading up there tonight, and I want to stop by with that box. We won’t stay. Beau and my wife are taking this all pretty hard.”

  “Uh, sure. Of course.” She began to give him the address, but he said it was on a slip of paper inside the box.

  Clicking off the phone and wiping mascara smears off her cheeks, she turned to Bill, who enfolded her in his strong arms.

  After she told him about the call, she found herself playing the scene over and over in her mind. It didn’t hang together right. After a colorful life, Sierra had supposedly chosen death by a colorless alcohol and a colorless gas. It was peculiar to the point of being ­incongruous. Carbon monoxide, as a means of death, wasn’t as ghastly as some, but suicide was cruel on so many levels. She pictured Beau coming home from spending the night with friends, as his grandfather had described it, and finding his still-beautiful mother slumped over the center console of her car.

  Mr. Brady said the first thing the boy saw when he opened the door to his mother’s car was her lovely face, now bright red, the hallmark of carbon monoxide poisoning. In his phone call, Beau told the police it looked like she’d gotten a nasty sunburn. He smelled the vomit and the smell of death and jumped back, turning around just in time to throw up on the garage floor.

  Never in a million years could Foxy imagine Sierra doing that to her son.

  Chapter 2

  Cate waited until Foxy waved from the window to let her know she was fine. Still, all the way home, Cate tried to quell her feeling that Foxy was in danger. Others, over the years, had mocked Cate’s visions and hunches, but those flashes of insight had served her well at times and she knew better than to ignore them.

  She found her husband at their heavy wooden table in the dining room, working on a stack of Christmas cards. A self-adhesive postage stamp was stuck to the forearm of his sweater. Cate picked it off and stuck it on his nose. Noticing the plate next to him with a sampling of the cookies she’d spent three days making, Cate sighed. “You’re leaving some of those cookies for family, I hope.”

  Erik looked over his glasses at her. The silver hair that had, until recently, been only at his temples, was starting to insinuate itself into the rest of his dark hair. With a bemused smile, he said, “Catherine, honey, you do this every year. You spend days making enough cookies to fill a bakery. You guard them with your life when they’re fresh out of the oven. You count them and put them in containers I’m not allowed to touch, and then you spend weeks protecting them from me.”

  It was hard to take him seriously with a Christmas wreath stamp on the end of his nose.

  “And then, after the holidays, you look at all the leftover cookies and wonder why nobody ate them.” He put a crisp gingersnap between his teeth and crunched down.

  She pulled off her hat, letting her dark hair tumble onto her shoulders. “You’re right.” She kissed the top of his head. Then she reached out and snagged two frosted cut-outs in the shape of angels. After hanging her jacket and hat on a peg and kicking her boots into the mud room, she settled into the big leather chair in the den.

  In an attempt to distill her earlier feelings about Foxy, Cate closed her eyes and waited for an image to appear in her mind. Breathing deeply, she tried to empty her mind of her surroundings. Suddenly, through her closed lids, lights swirled and flashed. She had a wave of dizziness. Her eyes flew open. “Erik, did you do something with the lights?” she called out.

  “Nope. You must be hallucinating,” he teased.

  Hallucination, vision or aging eyes—whatever it was, the flashing lights made her reach over, snatch up the phone and punch number two on speed dial. She needed to talk over her unsettling premonition with the person she had always turned to.

  Cate and Robin went all the way back to college days. Their friendship had lasted over thirty years, and they’d been fortunate enough to marry men who were close friends. Robin was also one of the No Ordinary Women, the name they’d given to their book club years ago.

  Robin knew Cate’s hunches could be wrong, but there was no denying Cate had some ability to see beyond what others saw. It came, her father had believed, from the fraction of her blood that was Cherokee.

  Of course, there were those times her intuitions had been utterly or partially wrong. Over the years, Robin had accompanied her on more than one wild goose chase, following some idea that proved erroneous.

  Robin picked up on the fifth ring, saying she was putting her phone on speaker so she could keep cutting fruit for the compote she was making for tomorrow’s book club luncheon.

  Cate wasted no time telling her about Foxy’s hang-up calls and the shadowy figure who’d been watching Foxy from the street.

  “She could stay here,” Robin said. When Cate said she’d already offered her a place to stay, Robin responded, “Well then, I think she should ask Sheriff Harley to sleep over.”

  Cate snorted. “I think he’s on his way. They have a date tonight and she’s fixing him dinner, but if it’s a sleepover, she’s certainly not letting on.”

  Robin giggled. “A sleepover? You mean they’re going to do each other’s hair and paint each other’s toenails?”

  Cate made a face. “Thanks so much for planting that visual in my head.” One of the wonderful things about their friendship was that one of them would be worried or unhappy, and the other would throw in a ludicrous comment to lighten the mood, while still understanding the seriousness of the situation.

  “My pleasure. Did I mention they’re both wearing baby doll pajamas?”

  “Now that’s a disturbing picture!”

  “Here’s an even more disturbing thought,” Cate said. “Maybe I’m letting my imagination get away with me, but is it possible Bill’s the one making those hang-up calls?”

  “Bill Harley?” Robin laughed. “Oh, come on, Cate. We know him!”

  “We know he’s good with animals, which I never disregard, and he seems like a nice guy, but what’s to say he’s not checking up on her?”

  “You don’t mean ‘checking up on her.’ You mean ‘stalking.’ Does he strike you as the jealous type?”

  Cate crunched on a frosted angel wing. “Not jealous, exactly, but I think there’s some hurt, and even anger, just under the surface. And let’s be honest, how well do we really know him?”

  “Hmm.” Robin hesitated before asking, “Is your intuition telling you something?”

  “About Harley?” Cate shrugged. “I admit he’s not a likely suspect, but we have to consider every possibility, don’t we?” She laughed at herself. Looking around her home, with its clean lines and rich woods, her dogs asleep in front of the stone fireplace, and her husband at the table munching on cookies after an early dinner, Cate felt foolish. Here in the safety of her home, the idea of danger seemed preposterous. She brushed cookie crumbs off her sweatshirt and put them on a napkin. “Maybe we’re making too much of it. The two things could be unrelated.”

  “That’s why I’m wondering what Foxy’s really worried about.” Robin said. “It isn’t like her to worry. She’s usually kind of a cool customer.”

  Erik appeared at Cate’s side with a stack of addressed envelopes, sealed and stamped. “I’m going to bed. Got an early morning.” As an anesthesiologist, his early mornings were absurdly early to Cate, who had always been a night owl.

  After dropping the envelopes in the basket for outgoing mail, he gave her a one-armed hug and kissed the top of her head. He smelled like gingersnaps. “Good night, Robin,” he yelled so she could hear him over the phone.

  Robin returned the greeting as Cate held the phone to Erik’s ear. Cate watched him climb the stairs.

  Robin said, “We’ve known Foxy for years, but she’s a quiet one, isn’t she?”r />
  “Or maybe she’s just quiet in comparison to us.”

  “Yeah, I suppose it’s hard to get a word in edgewise sometimes. But really, what do we know about her?”

  Cate rested her head back in thought. “We know she grew up in a small town up north—Pine something. Her parents were Christian fundamentalists.”

  “I got the impression the whole community went to that one church, didn’t you?”

  “Exactly, and it sounds like it was pretty repressive. The way she tells it, running off to Vegas as soon as she graduated was the only way she could break free. We don’t know much about her time there except that she was some kind of dancer, right?”

  “A showgirl! How could I forget? Remember when she dropped that on us? My God, we were speechless!”

  “I remember,” Cate said, twirling a finger through her hair. “Remember how Grace’s mouth fell open and stayed that way? I wish we could get Foxy to tell us more about those days.”

  “What exactly does a showgirl do?” Robin asked. “I know she wasn’t a stripper, but some of those showgirls are topless. Do you think she was one of those?”

  Cate snorted into the phone. “I’ve never gotten up the nerve to ask, but somehow I can’t picture Foxy going topless.”

  “Okay, she probably didn’t go topless, but she was a showgirl. They do those big, theatric productions. It’s genuine dance, I know. Foxy said she studied ballet for years.”

  “I picture showgirls wearing feather headdresses, bikini tops, rhinestone G-strings, that kind of thing. Can you picture Foxy—?”

  “They put rhinestones on G-strings? Wouldn’t that be painful?” Robin asked.

  “The rhinestones wouldn’t be—Robin, do not derail me! What else do we know about Foxy? I know she was either married or in a serious enough relationship to refer to the guy as her ‘ex.’ Do you remember his name? It started with V. Vito or Victor, maybe. And they didn’t have any kids, obviously.”