by Etta Faire
“You look bald,” she replied. “I already told Carly Mae. We can’t help you, Louis, no matter how much food you bring to the table.”
“That’s not true,” I said, grabbing a stack of paper plates from the bag. I handed everyone one, then when neither of them moved toward the food, I opened all three of the styrofoam boxes. Pasta, bread, shrimp. Yummy smells came from all over. Mr. Peters was probably sick of this kind of food and Rosalie probably couldn’t eat a thing in the tight shapewear she was wearing. I dug in while I had full control of the yumminess, explaining to Mr. Peters all about the sapientia spray we were going to use to determine the entity in his basement.
“That’s wonderful,” he said. He barely took his eyes off of Rosalie. “Thank you. Will you be able to get rid of it once we determine what it is?”
I looked at my boss. She threw her hands on her smoothed-out-thanks-to-Spanx hips. “I think he’s asking you a question, Carly.”
I had just taken a bite of my favorite and was letting it sit in my mouth a second. “Yes, absolutely,” I said, mouth full of shrimp. “We will be able to get rid of anything you want.”
She glared at me. “I guess you got your answer, Louie. Carly will be helping you out on this one. But don’t think that includes me. My experience doesn’t come for free, unless it’s for someone very special.”
I nodded and mouthed the words, “She’ll help,” to Mr. Peters, mostly because I knew she would. This was the kind of paranormal project Rosalie lived for.
After he left, my boss grabbed a plastic fork and dug in. “So much for my diet. I mean, my healthy eating,” she said, moaning while she chewed. “But then, if I wear this shapewear, I don’t need to eat nearly as healthy.”
She smoothed her hands along her dress. I stared at her a second and she seemed to sense my thoughts. “Just so you know, I didn’t wear makeup because I want him back,” she said, breaking off a chunk of bread and dipping it into the creamy Alfredo sauce. “I just wanted an eat-your-heart-out moment. I deserve that. Someday I’ll tell you about it.”
I nodded. “Well, you got your moment. He looked back when he left,” I said, because I really had noticed.
“Good.” She lifted up her dress and peeled off her shapewear, rolling and tugging it along her hips, a white puff of belly popped out as she wiggled the shape wear down. “Oh God that feels better. I can finally enjoy food in the comfort of my old belly.” She tossed the beige lump onto the floor and pulled her dress back into place. “The real demon here is whoever made that God awful thing. But I can say it was worth the look-back moment.”
I didn’t tell her I noticed she looked back too.
Chapter 8
Flying the Coup
The next day, I checked online to see when George’s barbershop closed before I headed out to the Winehouse’s to do more research on my ghost.
It says a lot about your life when you have to plan your day around a bird meeting.
Mrs. Winehouse had reluctantly agreed to let me look through the family’s photo album from the 1920s for the book I was writing, but only after I promised to buy a lipstick from Shelby to cheer her up.
I stood in front of the Winehouses’ door, with the golden eagle knocker in my hand, mostly worried about seeing Shelby. She was going through quite a depression, and I didn’t know what to say or do to help her out of it.
Shelby answered in her pajamas, which wasn’t a good sign seeing how it was almost eleven o’clock in the morning.
“You okay? I heard you’re not back to work yet,” I asked as we both sat on the couch. The photo album was already on the coffee table next to Shelby’s makeup sample basket and some brochures. The baby was playing quietly in the playpen by the fireplace.
She rubbed her eyes like she wanted to head back to sleep. “I’m fine. I’m going back to work later today. I just needed a little time off to get used to being a single mom again.” When she took her hands away from her eyes, I could see she had really been hiding the tears that were forming.
I hugged her. “It’s going to be okay. You have your parents and me and Mrs. Carmichael. We’ll help.”
“I’m just tired of it, that’s all. It’s hard.”
One of the brochures on the table was from the nursing program at Landover University. I picked it up.
“My mom wants me to go back,” she said. Dark bags circled her eyes. “She told me I don’t have to worry about rent or food while I’m living here. I just need to work part-time at Spoony’s and get my nursing degree.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” I said.
“It is. It’s just not the me I thought I’d be right now in my life.”
“No one is ever that person. Well, I mean I am. I totally planned on being divorced without kids and working minimum wage even though I hold a master’s degree at age 31. And let me tell you, my mother is even more thrilled than I am.”
The door opened and Shelby’s four-year-old twins rushed in followed by her mom, carrying bags of groceries. “Let me put away these groceries and get these boys some lunch then we can go through that old album,” she said, hugging me hello. “Did you find that new lipstick you were looking for yet?”
She winked and I dutifully looked through the makeup basket that was full of teeny tiny lipsticks. “I need a new look,” I said.
“All the latest colors are right there,” Shelby replied, snapping into salesperson mode. “Matte, shimmer… I think you’d look good in a coral.”
Mrs. Winehouse had been right. Shelby did seem happier just talking about making a sale.
I put on the orange lipstick she was calling coral. One of Shelby’s twins came up beside me, chuckling. “You look like a clown,” he said.
“Jacob!” Shelby scolded.
I quickly checked myself in my phone’s camera app. It was true. I did. I wiped the lipstick onto the back of my hand and tried a red one.
He shook his head sadly. “Getting worse. You look like that creepy clown from the movie with the red balloon now.”
“I’ll just take a nude.” I told Shelby.
“A nude?” This got both the twins laughing. “She wants a naked one.”
Sometimes when I’m around kids, my uterus cries out that it wants a baby too. This was not one of those times. I flipped open the album and ignored them.
“Nude it is,” Shelby said, a smile escaping her lips when her kids’ laughter got louder.
She leaned in to me to see the album better. Her pink pajamas almost matched her hair color, except the brown roots. “I remember this now. Bobby and I looked through this very album when I was pregnant. We were just curious about what the baby was gonna look like…” Her voice trailed off again in a depressed way, letting me know buying naked lipstick hadn’t completely brought her out of her funk.
She tapped at the photo. “Bobby said this guy here, the tall one with the suspenders, was probably his great uncle, Boyd. Weird, huh? Our distant relatives knew each other.”
“Do you know the names of anyone else in the photo?” I said, mostly to Feldman. I’d asked him to come with me, but only if he could ride along without making me feel like I was going to die in the process. So I wasn’t exactly sure he was here.
“Aside from the man I know was my grandfather, Terry Winehouse, nope. And he died a long time before I was even born. This is my dad’s side of the family so you’d have to ask him when he gets home, and I’m not sure he’d be much help anyway. He was the youngest of nine kids.”
Feldman appeared beside me, scowling. “How nice. My brother had such a big, happy family. Two wives and nine kids. Must’ve been wonderful to live long enough to spread love around like that.”
I didn’t acknowledge the bitter ghost even though I was happy he was here.
Shelby was still going on about how old these photos were, and how her dad hadn’t been born until the late 50s.
I turned the page and recognized Chez Louie instantly. The old pharmacy had looked a little like
a Cracker Barrel then too. A group of about eight people stood in the snow in front of it.
“That was the night of my murder,” Feldman said, and I almost dropped my phone because I couldn’t get the camera app on fast enough.
I peeled back the scrapbook’s plastic protective coating and snapped a couple photos of the page.
Feldman turned his head to the side, like he was studying it in an almost human way. “I’m not in this photo. Everybody wanted to be in it, so Terrance and I took turns with the camera. He obviously only kept the photo with him and the gang. But this is that weekend. One of these people in this photo did me in.”
Feldman ran a ghostly finger along the three women and five men in the black-and-white photo. “My good friends, these ones. Slicing my throat. No one coming forward to report the crime or give any information about it.”
“Sorry,” I said then kicked myself for talking to an entity only I could see.
Shelby stopped talking, and looked around. “Sorry about what?”
“That I’m coming over here, intruding on your family, for my book. I know this is a hard time.”
“It’s okay. It’s good to talk about something else,” Shelby replied.
I turned the page and took as many photos of the speakeasy and the people involved that weekend as I could. “There’s Feldman Winehouse,” I said. “Your grandfather’s brother. He’s the ghost I’m featuring in the book.”
Shelby nodded.
“I’d do anything for my brother,” Feldman said, pointing to a photo of him and Terry standing arm in arm.
I didn’t say anything.
“Terry was always so jealous of me, though. He thought our mom liked me best. And she did. It was true. Feldman was her maiden name, so she kind of thought of me as special.” He paused, looking down at the photo book. “That’s not true, actually. The truth is, my mother was a gambler. It’s where I get it from. Her folks, the Feldmans, were a big banking family with a lot of money. My father had nothing. So when my mother married my father, they cut her off. Naming me Feldman was her way of trying to get them to like us. Sometimes, you lose when you gamble. And your kid is stuck with a weird name.”
“Feldman is an unusual name. Do you know how he got it?” I asked Shelby.
“You’re kidding, right?” Shelby chuckle-sighed. “I didn’t even know he had a brother.”
Mrs. Winehouse yelled out from the kitchen. “I think it was Grandpa Terry’s mother’s maiden name or something like that. Some of the Feldmans still live ‘round here.”
Feldman’s story was checking out all over the place.
“Grandpa Terry,” Feldman said, the name crawling off his tongue. “I sold my part of that bar to help Grandpa Terry get a leg up in life, change his path…”
“It looks like it worked,” I said, motioning around. Shelby sat forward, and I checked the pictures on my phone like I’d been talking about that. “Let me try again, though, just to make sure,” I said, clicking another photo. “Oh yeah, it worked.”
Feldman went on. “Yeah, he got a leg up, all right. I can’t say I cared for the way I got thanked for it. It was a real pain in the neck, actually.”
I wanted to ask him about that. From the brief research I’d done, which mostly consisted of looking through old, gruesome Yahoo Answer pages, having your throat cut was not an easy way to go out. The victims usually didn’t die immediately and had time to scream and flail around. Feldman must have seen something before he died.
But Shelby was there, turning pages. And I could see the photo album pretty much skipped right to Terry’s first wedding after the speakeasy. So I thanked her and her family for their hospitality and headed out to work with my new nude lipstick.
Potter Grove is the kind of town where everybody knows what kind of car everybody else drives, down to their license plate numbers and cutesy cat decals, so they can keep tabs on each other around town.
And I was no different. After work that day, I checked for Shelby’s Cadillac as soon as I pulled into the parking lot that the Spoony River shared with the barbershop, relieved to see it was there.
But I was careful to make sure no one else saw my car there. They’d wonder why I was at the barbershop, and I didn’t want to have to explain that I was spying on George. I circled the parking lot, checking the other cars to see if any busybodies were here before finding the most obscure spot at the back of the lot.
These were the kinds of problems I never had in Indianapolis. Something to be said for the obscurity that a big city gives you.
It was 6:30, and old George was just turning the open sign to closed. Band-aids dotted his grayish face from yesterday’s bird attack. I darted around back and waited until he was done taking the trash out to the dumpster before heading over to the back door to listen in.
Feldman appeared by my side. I’d forgotten he was tagging along today. “Look who the real crook is around here,” he said. “You casing this place?”
I shushed him even though I was the only one who could hear the ghost.
I needed all my senses to listen in.
A cold breeze blew by me and I zipped my jacket up, looking around before casually cupping my hand over my ear and placing it against the window. Years of grime coated my hand but I tried not to think about it.
I didn’t hear anything at first. Maybe I was being crazy thinking a bird meeting was about to take place at a barbershop. Or, more likely, maybe the meeting was being held in the front of the barbershop while I was waiting in the back.
I took a step back, just about to run to the front door when I heard something.
Old George’s voice was shaky and low. “I already told you I’m not caving,” he said, or something close to that. I put my ear back on the cold, dirty window so I could hear better. “Last time they tried a coup, it backfired. Backfired in the worst way. People died.”
“People were supposed to die,” a woman’s voice said, almost bored. It was calm and no-nonsense with a familiar crispness to it that I couldn’t place. “Please tell me you know that’s generally how a coup works. A violent overthrow of a system…”
“I’m not a violent person,” George insisted.
“No one here enjoys violence,” a male voice chimed in. “But we’ve tried things the non-violent way. We can’t keep hiding forever, living in fear. We believe the sparrow is here now.”
The woman’s voice took over again. “You know better than anyone. It’s not the only sign that it’s time to take sides,” she said. She sounded an awful lot like Delilah Scott, the 90-year-old woman who lived near the Purple Pony, but that would have been impossible. She went on. “Just know, there are consequences for choosing wrong this time.”
“What? Are you and your thugs going to peck my head open like you did the others sixty years ago?” George replied.
“That wasn’t me. But, it’s me now. It’s me today. We know you’re friendly with those… beasts. We’ve all seen it. We can only guess how friendly, though.”
She paused for George to answer. He didn’t.
“There’s a saying that applies here. You’re either with us or against us. The bears have already let us know they’re getting ready. What are we going to do? Back down again? Pretend we don’t notice? You should join us. Take a stand. Help us find those bears.”
I saw Feldman shaking his head out of the corner of my eye. “Interesting. You said there were bear skins staked somewhere?”
I nodded. “Yes,” I pointed to the fence behind us that separated the back of the strip mall to the main road. “Right back there. What does it mean?”
He shrugged. “How should I know? I’m not a shifter. My bar catered to both the bears and the birds, though. And, let me tell ya, they did not always get along. I think the skins are a sign the bears are about to weed out their sympathizers or they’ve started. I forget which. It’s a warning and a sign. Shows they’re getting ready for war.”
“They kill their own?” I bit my lip, thinki
ng about Bobby and his brothers.
“All shifters do. You either go along with the clan or you leave, one way or another.”
It hit me, and I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t thought this through earlier. “So, George is a shifter? A bird shifter?”
Feldman looked at me sideways, like maybe I wasn’t as smart as he thought. “One way to find out for sure.” He hovered through the door, leaving me there, staring at peeling white paint and a dirty window. Sometimes I forget that ghosts can go through walls.
The chain on the inside unlatched and the knob turned.
“What the…” someone inside said.
The door flung open, but it was too dark to see anything. Before I could ask Feldman to find a light switch, the sound of large birds flapping crazily suddenly filled the room, shaking the walls like the kind of thunder that rumbles foundations and sends kids running to their parents’ rooms. There must’ve been hundreds of birds trapped in there somewhere or it sounded like it. I threw myself against the wall, mostly in an attempt to move out of the birds’ way as the sound grew louder around me.
I covered my head, making sure to protect my eyes, but just when I expected to feel the searing pain of skull-crushing bird pecks, the noises stopped. And everything went silent.
It all happened so fast that it took me a second to realize I was safe.
“George?” I asked, taking a deep breath as I called into the darkness.
The lights flicked on, and I saw him, leaning against the backroom of his barbershop.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “It sounded like the birds were back.”
“Birds? What are you talking about? I was taking a nap.”
I looked around while the man lied. I’d never been back here before. It was just a break room with a microwave, refrigerator, and coffee pot. But it didn’t smell like food. It smelled like hair tonic mixed with a bird sanctuary.
“Sorry, Carly Mae,” he said with a pronounced yawn. “Like I said, I just woke up. Everything okay? How on earth did you get in here?”