by Laura Ruby
Her mother put her bag on the table. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to fix this chain. You could probably do it faster.”
“You’re doing fine. Pinch the link a little tighter and I think you’ve got it.”
Lily angled for a better grip on the pliers. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Wesley told the police that he’d hidden Katherine’s will a million years ago, right? So how did it end up in the trunk? Katherine couldn’t have buried it.”
Her mother opened up her purse and began digging around inside. “Max probably buried it.”
“That’s what I thought. But he couldn’t have buried it while he was alive, because she hadn’t written it yet. It had to be after he died. When I was talking to him, he told me that he had made a deal with Captain Kidd, right? And the chest we dug up was really old, really, really old. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“That Max swapped the treasure for the will.”
“If you say so.”
“But if that’s true, what happened to the treasure?”
Her mother put down her handbag and laughed. “You’ve grown quite an active imagination in the last month. I guess it was the bump on the head.” She stretched.
Lily almost dropped the pliers. “Imagination? Wait a minute,” she said, incredulous. “Are you saying that you don’t believe there are ghosts?”
“Well, honey,” her mother said, “I guess that the world would certainly be a much more interesting place if there were.” She patted Lily’s hand and walked, humming, into the kitchen.
Lily was so stunned that she told Vaz. “Even after Katherine untied and set her free! Even after Katherine left her the tarot card, she doesn’t believe it! Even after what she saw at the beach.”
“Maybe she can’t believe it,” Vaz said. “Not everybody can be as open-minded as you.”
“Maybe,” said Lily. She squeezed Vaz’s hand, he squeezed back, and her heart squeezed in on itself.
When the glorious Cape May summer came, Lily and Vaz haunted the beach, collecting shells, playing Frisbee, riding the waves. At dusk they sat in the huge lifeguard chairs and thumb-wrestled between kisses, but mostly they left out the thumb-wrestling.
Lily also started dragging her mother to the water. Her mother soon adopted Diamond Beach, a stretch of sand where you could find tiny stones that could be cut and polished to look like diamonds. (Trinket soon became famous for its Diamond Beach Design line.) They wore it when they set up sand chairs in the living room to have picnics with the cat.
Sometimes, with the diamond ropes around her neck and the Indian rupee necklace in her fist, she curled up in her big bed, marveling at herself. Just a few months ago she wouldn’t have believed they would find a place to stay a while, maybe even forever. Too excited to sleep, she would turn on the light and flip open the new book her mother had given her, To Kill a Mockingbird. She had to admit that the book wasn’t half bad (though not as cool as the microscope she was saving up for).
As exciting as Lily found her new life, she still liked to go to the beach alone. Watching the waves roll in, pull back, and roll in again caused a bittersweet ache inside her, the same ache she felt hearing Julep’s odd quacking meow, watching her mother’s intelligent hands twist wire into whimsy, feeling Vaz’s hand curling around hers. Sometimes, when the tide went out, leaving only a shallow puddle to lap at the beach, Lily thought of her father. She knew that someday she would track him down and ask him why he had to go, why he’d chosen to become a ghost. But for today, her mother, Vaz, Kami, her cat, and the beach were enough.
* * *
The couple watched as the girl walked down to the water.
“She looks happy,” said the man with the big belly.
“Yes, she does,” said his wife. “But I wish she hadn’t done that to her hair. It’s awful.”
“What’s wrong with the hair?” the girl in fishnets said indignantly. “I like it!”
The wife harrumphed. “You would. And scoot over, you’re hogging the whole sheet.”
“Here’s what I think,” the girl said. “You guys heard of Ghostbusters, right? How about we make our own crime fighting team, except we fight living criminals. Get it, ghosts who chase men instead of the other way around? I’m thinking of calling it Manbusters.” She clapped her hands. “What do you think? Totally awesome, right?”
“Totally cracked,” said the man.
“Cracked? Is that, like, good?”
The wife arranged the skirted bathing suit on her lap. “Don’t you have something you need to do?”
The girl in the fishnets laughed. “Do? What’s there to do here? Do! Ha! That’s a funny one. That’s..that’s…” Suddenly, she jumped to her feet, pointing at an extremely tall black woman in a lifeguard jacket. “That’s Steffie! Omigod! It’s her! I swear it is, on my mother’s grave. Or on my mother’s future grave, if she’s not dead yet.” She performed a few high kicks, spraying sand everywhere. “It looks like I’ve got something to do after all. See you guys later.”
And she ran off, fuchsia skirt flapping.
The man gaped. “She’s crazy as a bedbug.”
“You sound surprised,” his wife said dryly.
He met her eyes. “I’m surprised about you. You were something, you know. The way you went after those bad guys. There goes the bedsheet! Right over the head! They didn’t even see you coming!”
“You were great, too,” said his wife. “Who knew you were such a demon with sand toys? Loved the trick with the net.” She patted the man’s knee. “Don’t look now, but there’s your friend.”
The man turned and squinted. “What friend?”
“Your pirate friend? The one with the sword and the feather in his hat?”
The man in the hat was reading off a yellowed piece of paper and counting to himself. “One hundred fourteen, one hundred fifteen, one hundred sixteen.” He flung the paper aside, dropped to his knees in the sand and began to dig.
“Will somebody please explain all the darned digging?” the man said.
“Shhh,” said his wife.
The pirate dug and dug and dug. He reached into the hole he had made and hauled out a doll in a red dress. It had no head.
“What the heck?” said the man.
“Quiet,” said his wife.
The pirate hefted the headless doll to his chest as if it were a very heavy child. Then he stood and began to walk toward the ocean, passing right in front of the couple. A few silver coins with strange markings fell from the doll’s neck and dropped to the sand, but the man didn’t seem to notice. Soon he was up to his knees in the churning sea.
“Now I’ve seen everything,” said the woman, floppy flowers flying. “I’ve seen all there is to see.” She looked at the coin trail the man had left. “Should we pick them up?”
“Nah, leave ‘em for the kids,” said the man. He leaned towards his wife. “Listen, I’ve got an idea.”
“I’m all ears,” said the woman.
“What do you say we go find the car and call it a day?”
His wife smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Boo
Lily strolled down the beach, inhaling the wonderful salty air. Out of habit, she scavenged for shells and used them to dig troughs in the cool, soft sand. She moistened the sand with ocean water she carried cupped in her hands, began another house with windows and a stone walk.
“Lily,” a voice whispered.
She turned. It was near dusk, and the wide beach was empty.
Suddenly the house in front of her changed. As she watched, an invisible hand added a porch and a pebble driveway. Windows popped from the third floor. Red and purple stained Popsicle sticks flew through the air and stuck themselves into the sand to form a picket fence.
206 Perry Street.
Lily sat back on her heels, chills running up and down her spine, but pleasantly for once. “Hi, Max. You forgot the people. A house is just a house without
the people.”
She felt a tug in her chest and knew — though she couldn’t have known, though the only sounds she heard were the cries of the gulls and the crash of the sea — that both Max and Katherine were there with her on the beach, but were leaving for good. That it was time to say good-bye.
“Bye, Uncle Max,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “Bye, Grandma Katherine. Thank you.”
She stood. The sense of loss was quickly replaced by a sense of fullness. She would see them soon enough.
She looked down at the beautiful sand house, but its perfection only made her yearn for the less-than-perfect real thing. She turned and ran up the beach, her feet fast and light. As she approached the promenade, she heard the words that made her turn one last time.
“Good-bye, Lily. Welcome home.”
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the good people of Cape May, New Jersey, who let me toy with their history and geography to suit my story. Laura Blake Peterson for sticking it out, Clarissa Hutton for signing me on, Kristin Marang for stepping in, and Janet Frick for checking up. My amazing writer’s group: Gina Frangello, Zoe Zolbrod, and Cecelia Downs. Gretchen Moran Laskas, author, confidant, counselor, queen. Tracey George, dear friend and Melissa Ruby Horan, dear sister, my biggest cheerleaders. Linda Rasmussen for listening to me talk about characters as if they were real people and not once suggesting medication. Annika Cioffi who gave me “nines,” — but only when I deserved them. Katy McGeeHee, reader extraordinaire. The incomparable Andrea “Coco” Ohrenich, and all the Ohrenichs, for letting me stay in their lovely house and then letting me make stuff up about it. My parents, Joan Ruby and Richard Ruby, and my in-laws, Fran and Ray Metro, for putting up with my general preoccupation and occasional gloominess. And to Stephen Metro, who brought me coffee, baked me cookies, and chased the ghosts away.
Coming Soon:
The First Volume in The Wall and the Wing Series
The Chapter Before the First
The Professor Remembers
In a vast and sparkling city, a city at the center of the universe, one little man remembered something big.
He was very old, this little man, his full name forgotten over the years. He called himself The Professor. His specialties were numerous, and included psychology, criminology, mathematics, history, aerodynamics, zoology, and gardening. He also collected soda cans.
Other than the delivery boy who left his groceries at the back door, The Professor hadn’t seen anyone in at least ten years. It was just as well, since a hair-growing experiment had left him with a head full of long green grass. Also, he didn’t like clothing, so he wore ladies’ snap-front housedresses and rubber flip flops with white socks. He spent much of his time fiddling in his workshop, feeding the many kittens that popped out of his pockets, and looking things up on eBay.
Today, he stood in front of his blackboard — which was covered with mathematical equations — tugging at a dandelion that had poked up through the lawn on his scalp. Suddenly, his eyes widened. He scrawled a few more equations. Yes! He saw it. Right there, in his many calculations.
A child.
He stared at the figures dancing across the board, his forehead creased with annoyance. How on earth he could have forgotten that such a thing, such a person, existed was beyond him. But The Professor simply didn’t like people. Not their company, not their conversation, nada. Anything having to do with people made the roots of his teeth pulse with irritation. And here on his blackboard was proof that a very particular sort of person had been born into a cruel and stupid world filled with cruel and stupid people.
Frankly, The Professor wanted nothing to do with any of them.
But facts are facts and The Professor liked to keep his straight. Shaking his head at himself, he sat down at his lab table, pulled his notebook from underneath a large tabby cat, and made a few notes. Approx. once every century or so, he wrote. Wall. Usually, but not always, female.
After scribbling these notes, the Professor smoothed out a rumpled map. “One lived here,” he muttered to himself, putting a dot on the map, “another here. This one was born there and moved here.” When he was finished plotting points, he connected the dots, then took out a protractor to measure the angles between. Lost in thought, he tapped his teeth with his pencil. Something wasn’t quite adding up. Where could this girl be?
After working for two frustrating hours, he walked over to his filing cabinets, unlocked the bottom drawer, and pulled from it what looked like a human hand mounted upright on a black marble stand. The Answer Hand. He did not like to consult the Answer Hand and very rarely did. The hand, being a hand, could not speak and was therefore difficult to comprehend (it knew the Sign Language alphabet, but had to spell everything out. And then it talked in circles). The Professor could not deny, however, that the Answer Hand often had the answers to perplexing questions, which was exactly why The Professor had purchased it (on eBay of course, from some guy in Okinawa).
He put the mounted hand on top of the table and pointed at the equations on the blackboard and then to the map. “Where?” he asked.
The fingers on the Answer Hand drummed thoughtfully on its marble base. After a few moments the hand began rambling about a number of irrelevant topics: the average rainfall in Borneo, the merits of California wine, the fat content of hot dogs.
“Focus!” barked The Professor, pointing again at the black board.
Insulted, the Answer Hand made a waving gesture at the map. When The Professor still didn’t understand, the hand bent at the wrist and finger-crawled across the table, dragging its heavy base behind it. It grabbed the pencil from The Professor, scrawled a star on the map, and gave the pencil back.
There, that’s where, the Hand signed. Happy now?
“I’ve got to hand it to you,” grumbled The Professor sarcastically. He had the distinct feeling that this recent discovery was only going to cause him trouble. Plus there was the fact that one of his cats, Laverne — strong-willed, even for a cat — had somehow escaped the safety of his apartment and despite the flyers he had paid a service to hang around the city, no one had called. In his book, wandering girls and wayward cats added up to a whole lot of unhappiness.
Someone knocked on the door. The Professor scowled, as there hadn’t been a knock on the door since, well, the last time there was a knock, possibly months before, years even. The Professor ignored it.
The knock came again, louder. “I only take deliveries Tuesdays and Sundays. Go away,” grumbled The Professor. “Go, go, go.”
There was a crash as somebody kicked in the door, splintering the jamb. The Professor, always peeved when he was disturbed, was especially rankled. He liked the door the way it was.
Two men strolled down the steps leading to The Professor’s rooms. One was handsome, with thick gold hair and a rosy complexion. The other was impossibly tall and dark, a vicious and terrible scar like a huge zipper running diagonally across his face. Both looked familiar, but The Professor couldn’t remember where he’d seen them before. A book? A newspaper? And there was something odd about the way the scarred man moved. Not walking as much as drifting, or floating.
“Professor,” said the handsome one cheerfully. “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”
They were, now that he’d had a few moments to consider it, rather intimidating. “I have important work to do,” said The Professor, sounding not the least bit frightened, though his knobby knees had gone weak as egg noodles.
The handsome man stared pointedly at his head. “I see that you have some dandelion issues.” He patted the pockets of his overcoat. “I might have a weed whacker around here somewhere.”
“What do you want?” The Professor made more notes in his book: Two scary men. Need weapon. Sharpen pencil?
The handsome man hesitated, as if waiting for The Professor to say something else. “I’m being rude,” he said. “I’m Sy Grabowski.”
How do you do, Sweetcheeks? the Answer Hand
signed politely.
The Professor dropped his pencil to the floor. “Sweetcheeks Grabowski?”
“In the flesh,” said the man, obviously proud that his reputation had proceeded him. “This is my associate, Mr. John.”
“Odd John,” said the Professor. Odd John grinned. The Professor could see his teeth were tiny, like a child’s. And he could also see that the scar was not like a zipper, it was a zipper. The silver tab on his forehead glittered when he moved. The Professor decided he should not like Mr. John to unzip his face. No. That wouldn’t be pleasant, he was sure of it.
Sweetcheeks reached out and plucked the dandelion from the top of The Professor’s head, making the little man wince. “We’re a little curious.”
“Yes, you are. Um, I mean, what about?” said The Professor. He was trying not to focus on the Answer Hand, which was busily erasing the star it had marked on the map and putting another star somewhere in Brooklyn.
“About your research, of course.” Sweetcheeks eyed the cats warily, his lip curling up with disgust. “I thought these animals were rare.”
“They are,” The Professor said, and pulled a rambunctious marmalade kitten out of the pocket of his housedress. “Just not here.” He placed the kitten directly on top of the map, obscuring what had been drawn on it.
“Hmmmm…” said Sweetcheeks, before turning the notebook around to read what The Professor had scribbled there. He smiled when he came to the last bit about the scary men.
“I do lots of research,” said The Professor. “What are you interested in? Zoology? Psychology?”
“Oh, a scrap of this, a shred of that,” Sweetcheeks said. “I’m especially interested in this curious little thing that happens once every century or more. This very odd thing. Do you know the thing I’m talking about?”