Unquiet Ghosts

by Glenn Meade

  She looked at Tanner over her coffee cup. “I was still feeling low for months after Kyle moved to Serenity Ridge. One summer evening, I went to see his dad. I needed someone to talk to. The colonel understood. He’d lost both his wife and Kyle. We sat down by the lakeside dock on a blanket and talked, and we had a glass of wine. Actually, I had a few too many glasses. I was feeling teary, lost, and that’s when . . . well, that’s when it happened.”

  “What?”

  “You ever see a resemblance in your family members?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, right then, I saw Kyle in his father’s face. The same eyes, the same look and gestures, the same mouth and cheekbones. Kyle looked like his dad. I mean, I don’t know where my reasoning went, but all of a sudden, I was seeing Kyle, and I was reaching out, pulling Kyle’s dad toward me, kissing him, tearing at his clothes.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He’s a man. A young woman was throwing herself at him. And I guess he’d been without a woman for such a long time, and he felt lonely, too. He seemed pretty shocked, in a trance, but he kind of went with it.”

  Courtney paused. “We were going at it like a pair of love-hungry teenagers, kissing and stuff, until he pulled back and said, ‘Courtney, we can’t do this. It’s not right. I know you’re lonely, but it’s just not right. I’m sorry.’ But I was drunk and paid no heed, just kept kissing him. And that’s when it turned crazy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kath came home. We never heard her drive up. She walked in on our little red-hot scene and couldn’t believe what she saw—me and her old man lying on a blanket, with an open wine bottle, some of our clothes unbuttoned, me showing more cleavage than I should. I mean, what would you think if you saw your father in a situation like that?”

  Tanner frowned. “Me? I wouldn’t blink an eye. Used to see it all the time. My dad was a serial womanizer who was running a half dozen girlfriends at the same time he was married to my mom. She used to call him Velcro Fly. My old man went through his life with a closed mind and an open zipper.”

  Tanner’s face became more serious. “I hated what he did to my mom. That’s why she finally had enough and moved us to New York. I never saw him again after that. But I guess Kath kind of freaked out, seeing her dad and you locked in an embrace, huh?”

  Courtney nodded. “I don’t think she’s ever gotten that image out of her head. But I told her the truth, that it wasn’t her father’s fault, it was mine. I was just drunk and feeling sorry for myself. I saw Kyle’s face in his father’s, and I guess I just lost it and wanted to be near Kyle again.”

  Tanner reached over and gently patted the back of her hand. “I get it.”

  Courtney looked at him. Their eye contact lasted just a few beats too long once again.

  Tanner reluctantly let his fingers slide away. He took a quarter from his pocket change and balanced it on his thumb, ready to flick the coin into the air. “Toss you for it.”

  “The check?”

  “Naw. Heads we see Riker first, tails it’s Dr. Kevin.”

  Courtney’s cell phone rang.

  Tanner held off on tossing the coin.

  She answered her phone, listened, her face drawn with concern. She nodded her head a few times.

  Finally, she said, “When?”

  She listened some more, nodding, and gave Tanner a long, worried look. “You’re sure about all the details, Sergeant?”

  A pause, and then Courtney said, “Call me right away if there’s anything else.” She flicked off the phone, her face ashen.

  Tanner palmed the coin. “For a second there, I thought you were angry with me.”

  “You? Why?”

  Tanner shrugged. “By the look on your face, it’s bad news, right?”

  “Yeah, that was Sergeant Stone.”

  “And?”

  “As of thirty minutes ago, Kyle’s missing, and two female employees at Serenity Ridge were shot dead.”

  84

  * * *

  Fazil Tarik was busy in the mortuary working on the bony, emaciated corpse of an elderly woman. A fragrant joss stick was lit, masking the stench of death.

  His cell phone rang. Tarik finished applying rouge to the woman’s hollow cheeks and wiped his hands on the damp towel by his side. He saw that the call was from an unknown number, and he answered. “Yes?”

  He recognized the voice and listened before saying bluntly, “There can be no mistakes. You must be certain they are there.”

  “Look, I’m as certain as I can be. It’s your best shot. Any change, and I’ll let you know.”

  Tarik considered, then removed a notebook and a pen from his pocket. He grunted and said, “Give me the details.”

  The caller spoke for several minutes, and Tarik jotted down the notes he needed. “I’ll send word when I’m ready to move. Call me at once if you learn anything more.”

  He ended the call, a kind of sexual excitement building in him, as it always did when he sensed imminent death or violence. He washed and dried his hands, massaged them with an alcohol gel, and hurried to his office, where an American flag hung limply in the corner. He picked up the internal phone. “Come here, Kiril. Bring Mehmet and Abu.”

  When he put down the receiver, Tarik crossed to the sturdy Centurion safe in the corner. The safe was a ploy, really. Nothing of value was kept in it except a small amount of cash. Next to the Centurion was a gray filing cabinet. He opened the bottom drawer and plucked out a black rubber suction tool. It was made of two suction pads with a release lever. He placed both pads firmly on one of the heavy gray tiles in the middle of the office floor and pushed hard.

  When the sucker gripped, he heaved up the tile to reveal a combination safe sunk into the concrete beneath. He dialed in the combination and hauled open the safe door. This was where he kept his real valuables. He removed a bulky locked metal box from inside.

  He placed the box on his office desk and unlocked it with a silver key he kept in his pocket. Inside the box was a green velvet sack. He loosened the sack’s strings and hefted out the contents.

  A centuries-old Immortals mask.

  Cleaned and polished, its disturbing beauty spoke to Tarik down through the ages. The turquoise from Khorasan Province, the gold from King Solomon’s mines. But it was more than that.

  His Sunni father was once a curator at the National Museum in Baghdad. He was a keeper of many ancient artifacts, but the three Immortals masks he watched over were irreplaceable. Part of his genesis. The blood of Tarik’s own tribe flowed back to the Immortals, so his elders always told him. The masks were under his guardianship, but the Sunni in his blood was why his tribe fought so hard against the Americans. Until the day his elders played a dangerous game that went badly wrong.

  Tarik gained a fortune that day when the Americans wiped out the convoy—gained a fortune in his escape but lost so many relatives, among them his wife and two of his children.

  He shifted his gaze to the American flag in the corner. Hatred sparked in his eyes. He hawked, filling his mouth, and spit across the room with such ferocity that a gob of spittle landed on the flag. It dribbled down the red, white, and blue. Tarik smirked. He despised the Americans.

  The FBI had the second mask. But that was a problem to worry about later.

  He wiped his mouth as he heard the footsteps out in the hall. He slipped the velvet cover over the mask and replaced it in the metal box. The door opened, and his son Kiril entered, followed by Mehmet, his bulldog face aggressive as ever. Abu stood there with muscled folded arms, like an immovable rock.

  Kiril said, “Father.”

  “It’s time. We’ll know where the woman is soon.” Tarik handed over the jotted notes and explained his intentions. “You know what we must do.”

  A steely glint flashed in his eyes as he looked in turn at Kiril,
Mehmet, and Abu. “Work quickly. Then kill them all.”

  85

  * * *

  I felt a slap sting my face.

  “Wake up, Kath.”

  Another slap, and then a pungent acid smell attacked my nostrils, hurting my lungs the second I breathed. My eyes snapped open, a fire raging inside my skull, and I gasped for fresh air. I coughed, almost choking, until I sucked life into my lungs.

  A man stood over me. Mid-forties, probably, dressed in grubby work overalls. His face and arms, seared brown by the sun, gave him the look of a farm worker. A tattoo was emblazoned on his right arm, two intertwined black and red serpents.

  His face was flecked with tiny pink scars, and one of his eyes was badly stitched at the far edge, giving him what looked like a permanent squint.

  He screwed the top back onto a miniature brown bottle, popped it down on a desk, and sat on a chair next to me. “Smelling salts, in case you’re wondering. How are you feeling?”

  His accent had a hint of Chicago. I was lying on a frayed corduroy couch. My mouth felt bone-dry. I licked my parched lips, my voice hoarse. “Where am I?”

  “The farm next to Jack’s place. I’m his neighbor. Name’s Kevin Borovsky. Just call me Kev if you want. Or don’t.” He fought a smile.

  “I . . . I think I saw you come out onto the porch.”

  His fingers felt for my pulse. “Yeah. I was asleep when my dog started barking, so I grabbed my twelve-gauge. I’ve got security cameras all over my property.”

  He gestured to a TV that was turned on in the corner. The screen showed a half dozen different camera images. Two shots of a gate from different angles, another at the front of a house and a driveway. Others showed what looked like a barn and some woods.

  “My early-warning radar.”

  “You saw me on-screen?”

  “Yeah, if anything moves out there, I see it, even in darkness. The cameras have infrared. There’s also a bunch of alarm sensors that trigger if anyone unwelcome shows up.”

  I had a vague recollection of a black curtain closing in on me at Amy’s grave, right after I screamed. “Did I pass out?”

  “You sure did. It happens often enough when someone experiences a profound shock.”

  I felt the sobs, the tears, grow within me again, the disbelief and shock. I tried to fight it, but Amy’s face seemed burned into my retinas. The last day I saw her, as she helped me pack her little Barbie backpack. Her smile as she looked up at me, so excited about her trip with her father. That poignant image was not going away.

  Kevin examined my wet eyes, raising each eyelid in turn with a thumb. The dog was padding about the room. A big, friendly, overweight yellow Lab.

  The room seemed to serve as Kevin’s office. The furniture was outdated, a man cave totally bare of a woman’s touch, the walls unfinished, half-painted a pale gray, full of clutter, and lined with hideous mustard-colored laminate shelves stacked mostly with medical books.

  The dog stopped right beside me and started to lick my hand. The man ushered him toward the door. “Outside, Murphy. Outside, boy.”

  The dog left. I wiped the wet hand on my jeans.

  “Don’t worry, dog saliva’s often less deadly than the human kind. I guess that’s why our moms always warned us about the dangers of French kissing, huh?”

  “You ever think of doing stand-up?”

  “Hey, those salts really perked you up, didn’t they?”

  They sure did. But my spirits felt so low, and my mind felt clouded, as if the blaze inside my skull still hadn’t been damped down. “You’re a doctor.”

  “Yeah, well, actually, I was. Past tense. Was doing pretty well, too, until I got disbarred five years ago.”

  He tossed the smelling-salts bottle into a scuffed black leather bag. On one of the unpainted walls, I noticed a graduation scroll in a glass frame. It declared that Kevin was awarded a doctor of medicine in the Harvard class of ’89. Another framed scroll dated two years later said he graduated as a neurosurgeon.

  “Why?”

  “Disbarred? In case you’re wondering, it had absolutely nothing to do with my terrific taste in interior decor.”

  “I’ll take your word.”

  “More a slight misunderstanding about my prescribing too many pills.”

  I looked at him.

  His squint became a grin. “I ran a pain clinic. Helped folks relieve their ailments, imaginary or otherwise. With Xanax, hydrocodone, OxyContin, amphetamines, you name it. The usual suspects that quell all the mysterious maladies to which the South seems especially prone—heck, the whole country is prone. We’re a drugged nation. You might think it was an easy way to make money. But more often, it had nothing to do with that.”

  He shook his head. “I liked to think of it as a practitioner’s commitment to alleviate a patient’s suffering. Except the feds didn’t quite see it that way, even though most of my patients were military vets with PTSD problems. Fortunately for me, the judge figured that a hefty fine, disbarment, and probation were punishment enough.”

  “Why the farm?”

  “My alternative lifestyle by default. Raising chickens, growing organic, sitting on my porch contemplating my sins and the universe. Sometimes I reckon that judge did me a favor.”

  I blinked a bunch of times, my head still fogged, and noticed photographs on the shelves: Kevin in a camo Army uniform and sunglasses, wearing a desert shemag around his neck as he sat on a Humvee hood with a red cross on the side parked beside a mobile medical tent. Others of Kevin with a beautiful preppy-looking wife and two bleached-blond kids. “Your family?”

  He folded his arms, snapped a nod. “After my disbarment, Cynthia hung around long enough to empty my pockets, right after the judge took the court’s share. I guess good old Robin Williams got it right.”

  “Robin Williams?”

  “His definition of divorce: ripping out a man’s testicles through his wallet. Do I sound bitter? Shouldn’t, really. Got a good life here, if only my kids would care to visit more often. But I guess manure and market gardening don’t quite do it for teens as much as the bright lights of Nashville.”

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Fourteen hours.”

  I stared back at him.

  “Or thereabouts. A combination of shock and exhaustion. You passed out. The body’s way of dealing with a truckload of distress. The brain shuts down, retreats. Seeing Amy’s grave was part of it.”

  My eyes became wet again. I closed them tightly. I felt as if I was having a breakdown. When I opened my eyes again, Kevin handed me a tissue from a box on the desk.

  I dabbed at my face. His big, meaty hand touched my shoulder but felt surprisingly gentle. “Losing a child, that’s up there with the big ones we never truly get over.”

  “I keep thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “What were Amy’s last moments like? Were they terrifying? Did she call out my name, in fear, in pain, in desperation?”

  I felt like breaking down again.

  Kevin squeezed my shoulder. “You think you could try standing?”

  “Why?”

  “You need some fresh air.”

  And then it suddenly hit me. “Where . . . where’s Jack? And Sean?”

  “We’ve got some things to talk about.”

  86

  * * *

  They say people die only when we forget them. That what you remember saves you. But I never found it to be that way. What I remember cuts my soul to the quick. To me, gone is the saddest word in any language.

  On the back patio, the sun was beginning to fade. I guessed it was six or seven. It was a simple wooden patio, long ago painted a pastel green. An ancient mosquito zapper hung from a nail in the patio beam, the cold ultraviolet bars crusted with burned mozzies. On a frayed cane coffee table stood a
half-full bottle of Four Roses bourbon. A dented old silver-toned storm lamp, the kind that runs on oil, hung from a rusted nail hammered into the wooden wall by the patio door.

  I could see the distant valley, but the headstones were hidden by trees. A peaceful view, but my mind felt wretched.

  Amy, my beautiful Amy. Gone. I’d hoped so much, prayed so much. Tears welled up. All I kept thinking of was her grave—her angel face, my beautiful daughter, lying in the cold, unfeeling earth. Grief felt like a boulder crushing me. I wanted to lie down on the earth beside her, feel its coldness seep into my bones the way it had seeped into Amy’s. I looked down at my hands. They were trembling.

  The patio door opened, and Kevin came out from the kitchen carrying a cluttered tray. It clinked as he set it down. A jug of ice water, glasses, two mugs of coffee, cream and sugar, a couple of spoons. He set a bowl of ice next to the bourbon.

  I saw him glance at my shaking hands. He leaned across, felt my wrist. “Your pulse is low. Drink lots of water. It’ll help you rehydrate after sleeping so long.”

  He smiled. “I’m not suggesting you have a whiskey, because it sure won’t help you rehydrate, and it may not be good for your mood. But in case you really felt like a drink, I thought I’d play the Southern host.”

  “Water and coffee are fine for now.”

  “Hey, that’s a sensible gal talking.” He squeezed my shoulder, then poured me a glass. I felt the shock of the ice water drench my dry throat. My hands still shook. It wasn’t just hydration I needed; my nerves felt as if they’d been scoured with a wire brush.

  From a round tin, Kevin took a chunk of chewing tobacco and held it between his fingers. “A dirty little habit I acquired in the South. You mind?”

  I shook my head. “Where are Jack and Sean?”