Hungry Ghosts

by Susan Dunlap

  She swung like a dancer into one of the welcoming armchairs, her chin-length brown hair giving a final sway into place, and before I could broach anything, said, “You must have just about dropped your teeth when you first spotted Eamon Lafferty. I sure did.”

  Smiling, she had jerked the rug out from under my plans. I’d forgotten that habit of hers, infuriating but so intuitive that you ended up thinking she was just saving you trouble. But I wasn’t ready to talk about Mike or pretend not to while discussing Eamon. And I couldn’t shift enough to deal with her accident, my guilt. I said, “Tia, what made you leap into that wretched tunnel?”

  “It was your fault.”

  “My fault?” For an instant I thought she had read my mind about her accident. But the tunnel, my fault? “I never—”

  “I was looking down that first hole, the one in back of the zendo that went to the sewer or whatever, thinking, anyone would be mad to jump in, and then you shoved forward insisting you were the professional.”

  “That’s crazy. I never wanted to jump in, I just thought—”

  “But you looked like you would. You looked great, strong, fearless. So—” She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. “This is so childish. You know, Darcy, I wouldn’t admit this to anyone but you, but after that bit with the hole, when I saw the ladder down into the tunnel, I knew that was something I could do. My arms are strong now, stronger than anyone might imagine.”

  Strong enough to compensate for her mangled back! “Oh, God. Tia, I am so sorry.” I reached for her hands. “If it hadn’t been for me doing that cable car—”

  “Forget it!”

  “If I hadn’t—”

  “It wasn’t about you.” She didn’t pull her hands free; they lay cold, unmoving, in mine.

  I was an idiot. I wanted to tell her how bad I felt about stealing her dignity, too. I wanted . . . I was just an idiot. I sat, sweat lathering my back, waiting for her to move.

  She remained still, neither looking away nor even shifting in her chair. “It really wasn’t about you last night, Darcy. It was about Eamon.” Then she eased her hands free. “Like I said, this isn’t super-mature. But I was tired from standing, I hobbled out of the reception, and I didn’t want Eamon to leave with the impression that I was a cripple. I had to change the story line. It worked, see?”

  I had to jam my teeth together to keep from saying I was sorry again.

  “Darcy, listen to me. It’s not your fault. Believe me! I’m almost insulted you think it is! No, don’t answer. I’ve made my choices, I live with them, and—” She led my gaze around the room—“do it damn well, in Pacific Heights. But I don’t take foolish chances.”

  “Yeah, well,” I contradicted her. Her mouth tightened ever so slightly, ready for the obvious comeback about her accident. I went on. “What about running into the dark in the tunnel and hitting the end?”

  She laughed, relieved. “Okay, not often.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “Why not?”

  “No, really, Tia, why?”

  A small jade frog stood guard next to her glass; she ran a finger up its lumpy back. “What did you think?”

  “You were crazy.”

  “Crazy loco, or crazy tough?”

  “Both.”

  “Good enough.” She smiled and caught my eye in a way that said my “good enough” mattered. “Listen, Darcy, I’m glad you’re back. We could have been friends, in school, if . . .”

  “If Mike’s disappearance didn’t destroy everything.” The words were out before I realized it.

  She nodded slowly and rubbed her finger gently back and forth across the jade. I understood the comforting gesture, and that she had trusted me with things she worked to conceal. And there was something about her that made me trust her with what I hadn’t even revealed this way to Leo. “Mike walked out the door into the fog over twenty years ago, and it’s like yesterday. There’s not a day I don’t think of him. He was my buddy, my protector in the family. And when he vanished, everything stopped. No one in the family talked about him, not after the initial flurry. He was totally gone. And I was utterly alone. It seemed like only I cared.”

  She laughed.

  “Tia?”

  “Sorry, I’m so sorry, really. It’s just that you couldn’t possibly have been more wrong. Gary and John, they never let up. You must know that now, right?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m stunned. I don’t— They— They never said anything to me. Never let up how? It’s like I’ve walked into an alternate San Francisco and the real one is over to the left somewhere. I didn’t even know you knew my brothers.” I looked down and realized I was digging my fingers into the armrest.

  But Tia wasn’t watching out for her upholstery; her whole attention was on me. Without moving, she seemed to be reaching toward me. “Know is too strong a term. Except for Gary. John found me the summer between junior and senior years in high school, the year after Mike disappeared. You were still around, so I just assumed you’d know. I was out of college when Gary called. I had the impression he thought he could ferret out more than his brother had.”

  Despite everything, I laughed. “That’s Gary, all right. And Grace? Did my sister hunt you down, too?”

  She eased back in her chair. “Grace was a fluke. She was a resident in the ER when I had my accident. I was so scared I was looking for anything to distract myself. I saw her name and, oddly, remembered you saying that you and Mike were the curly redheads and the rest had the straight black hair. Hers was long, tied back, and dead straight. So I asked. And then she asked.”

  “Did she ask you about Mike, too?” Grace had never mentioned this. None of them had.

  “Oh, Darcy, I don’t remember. They all came at it from different directions.”

  I was still clutching the arm of the chair. I eased my fingers off the fabric. “Tia, this is going to sound silly, but I’d like to know those directions. I’ve spent years searching for Mike. I’ve hired detectives, tracked down his college friends, chased strange red-haired men down city streets, but no one else—” I swallowed. “Well, I assumed no one else did, that they just accepted that he’d gone. It’s because no one ever mentioned his name, so, see, I don’t know who knew what when, if anything.” I swallowed and focused on hooking my hair behind my ears.

  When I was composed enough to face her again, I had the sense that she’d been about to say or do something comforting, then thought better of it. Now she was shifting into the back cushion. She put down the little frog and said, “Sure. I kept a diary back then. I probably wrote down every question, or at least my reaction; my answer, their reaction to me. It’s packed away in a box in my garage downstairs or I’d get it for you.”

  It might have been the awkwardness of my admission or her shifting her weight, either to give me a moment of privacy or maybe because she couldn’t sit in one position longer, but I understood that she was cutting to the chase because there was something else she really wanted to talk about, the things she’d actually invited me here for.

  “But for now,” she said, “here’s what I told them—”

  “No. Tell me what you didn’t tell them.”

  Tia shrugged. “You always did see between the lines. In high school that made me very nervous. I’ll bet it’s had that effect on lots of people.”

  “Not so they mentioned.” I grinned.

  She smiled. “Your brother John, the cop, caught me coming out of school. He was—excuse my saying this—young and taken with his authority.”

  “One out of two. John was born middle-aged. Now, probably, he’d admit he loved flashing his badge back then.”

  “He was a cute cop, though, and I didn’t want to seem like a silly high school girl who had a crush on his brother, a guy I barely knew. Mike and I did a little pas de deux watching a track meet of yours, but it led to nothing. That was unusual for me. I have to admit, I was affronted. So I set out to show him the error of his lapse—in the nicest possible way, o
f course. That’s how come I called you to borrow homework I’d already finished, and came to your house for it. Do you remember?”

  I laughed. “I figured you had to be desperate.”

  “The whole ploy was a failure. Mike was on his way out, and then I had to spend an hour copying your equations, which weren’t all correct, either!”

  “Hey, you could have clued me into that. I wasn’t distinguishing myself in advanced math at that point.”

  “I owe you.” She motioned toward the dining room table. “So that’s what I did not pass on to John.”

  I was surprised at how essential she made me feel, as if I were the long-lost friend who made her whole. No wonder guys were so enchanted. No wonder Jeffrey Hagstrom kept coming back after her flings. Like Jeffrey, I knew she’d invited me here because she wanted something. But I was glad she had, glad to help, glad we were going to be friends. I stood and gave the lunch a closer look. A pass-through counter had been cut into the wall between the main room and kitchen. On it was a clear bowl piled with calamari salad. Garlic bread sat atop a wooden slicing board. Two cups on heaters held melted butter. And three bottles of white wine awaited inspection. “What about Gary? What didn’t you tell him?”

  Tia didn’t respond. I turned back and was startled to see her struggling out of her chair, good leg braced against the far foot of it, both hands on the near arm trying to get enough initial thrust to swing herself up. Her hip jutted out, bony, with the idiosyncratic musculature of the injured. Her jaw was clenched and her face drawn in lines of frustration and fear.

  I gasped. It was all I could do not to race over and pull her out of her chair. Stepping aside was my penance. I’d gritted through my own injuries, broken legs, ribs, vertebrae, combinations thereof, and I’d known plenty of other stunt doubles on crutches, in wheelchairs and casts. But the worst temporary injury is joy compared to the most minor permanent one, and Tia’s was not minor.

  I turned quickly back to the table and tried to find something to say. “Last night, at the house, all three of them were there, bickering like always, this time about a dead body of John’s. Apparently the guy had gotten poisoned and fallen three stories down in the middle of one of those nineteenth-century oval staircases and either lay in the lobby till rigor mortis set in or went stiff as a board on the way down, and John . . .”

  I turned again in time to see Tia walking to the table as if nothing had happened. It was an impressive accomplishment. She moved with the same measured gait as she had at the door. The lines of frustration in her face had vanished. The reversion was so remarkable that for an instant I questioned what I’d just seen.

  “And John,” I hurried on, “was all pushed out of shape because the neighbors were trying to tell him the guy went stiff before he hit the ground.”

  “You know what, Darcy?” She came to a halt at the table. Only the slightest coloring on her cheeks, plus the shine on her forehead, betrayed the enormous battle she’d just won. Her hair had swung back in place, cupping her face. Was the reason she’d got that cut not understatement but practicality? “Give me a minute to look for those diaries. You can be moving the food to the table.”

  I didn’t dare offer to go down for her.

  “Oh, and remember, I wanted Grace’s phone number? I need to talk to her. Not about this,” she added with a dismissive glance at her hips, as if to dispel any thought of possible angling for free medical advice.

  “Sure. She’s living at home. I’ll write it down for you.”

  “Then how about serving up the lunch? Feel free to start. Pretend it’s the freshman trough!”

  I didn’t look at her as she made her way to the front door and on outside. Had she always had that self-control, or was it a side benefit of learning to hide pain? I remembered her at that long freshman lunch table in school, tossing back food like everyone else to grab a few extra minutes to gossip, flirt, or take a last scan at test notes—and before the hard and important tests, I remembered her laughing.

  The serving bowls were ready so I shifted them to the table and began scooping out salad. It would be hard for her—for anyone—to understand my family’s attitude toward Mike’s disappearance. I could remind her that John was already a patrol officer at the time and his colleagues had interviewed us all. And then there was the reporter. I added a slice of garlic bread to each plate. But still, there were always reasons. At first Mike’s being gone was unbelievable, an alternate universe that had settled on ours and would certainly lift any minute, leaving us crowded in the kitchen like always. It wasn’t possible at first that he could be gone.

  Then possibility seeped in and I felt like the biggest traitor in the world. I couldn’t mention it; I couldn’t be near anyone who mentioned Mike’s name. I couldn’t read, study, hold a conversation, do anything but run track, take gymnastics classes because they were so hard with my tight track muscles, and try out for basketball, soccer. I never rode the bus in those days, but bicycled or roller-bladed. I moved fast, as if I could outrun the truth. I was too busy avoiding to wonder how anyone else was handling things.

  But John had been thorough enough to find an acquaintance of Mike’s as distant as Tia. And, years later, Gary had been looking, double-checking. I sank back into one of the padded dining chairs. It let out a huh! The briny smell of calamari mixed with the overly sweet freesias. In the kitchen the refrigerator groaned on. My stomach roiled and I thought I wouldn’t be able to eat and that that would be so rude after all the trouble Tia had gone to. Learning my brothers had been looking for Mike for years, I should have been relieved, but I wasn’t. What did it mean and how could they be doing more than I had when I was the one who cared the most? Sweat coated my face. How could they have searched for Mike and not told me? Gotten leads, hopes, and not let me have them?

  I saw John sitting at the dining table holding out his plate for a slice of ham the Easter after Mike’s disappearance, asking about the traffic detour on 46th Avenue; Gary showing off his new Mustang when I came home at Christmas my freshman year in college. Now they seemed to me entirely different men, as if strangers had hijacked my memories. Rational explanations, common sense were way above me and I could only feel the small, poorly weighted anchor of my family being hoisted out of the water and flung aside. Thoughts swirled, emotions, recriminations, more emotions. I felt fifteen years old, not thirty-nine. I wanted badly to get out of here, and I was equally desperate to know what Tia had recorded in her diaries.

  Finally, I got up, went into the bathroom, and flung cold water on my face, leaving a great circle of damp on Tia’s yellow towel. I saw my watch face: 12:35. I’d gotten here exactly at noon. Tia and I couldn’t have talked more than ten minutes. What had happened to her? Had she gotten distracted by a neighbor? Fallen in the garage? I opened the front door and raced down the steps. “Tia? Tia, where are you?”

  No response. “Tia!” The garage doors were closed, locked. The courtyard was empty. I spent the next five or ten minutes pulling at the garage doors, running down the walkway between buildings, poking behind the shrubbery. But all along, I knew that she was gone.

  Just like Mike, she had walked out the front door and vanished.

  CHAPTER 9

  “I’M IN A TIME WARP. Tia was about to tell me about Mike. And then, just like he did, she walked out the front door and vanished.” I’d finally managed to get through to my brother, John, at the police station.

  “She’s been gone half an hour? Darcy, she could have gone to the store for milk, got caught in the line, forgotten her phone, and be on her way home right now.”

  “She walks with a limp now, John. We’re on the top of Pacific Heights. There aren’t mom-and-pop stores on the corners here.”

  “Maybe she got sick of you!”

  “She invited me for lunch. The food’s still waiting on the table.”

  “Darcy, we can’t take missing persons calls from acquaintances. Even from family there’s a required waiting period of—”

&
nbsp; “She said”—I suddenly remembered that this call could be recorded and made my comment more vague—“she had a diary she kept in high school, a thorough diary.”

  “I’m on my way. I’ll call you back.”

  “My number is . . .” I was talking to myself. How was he going to get back to me? Of course, my number would have come up on his screen, would be recorded in the police log: start time, end time, location. Knowing John, even though I’d never called him on my cell phone or given him the number, he already had it.

  For a moment I sat on the steps, watching the traffic on Broadway burst forward an instant before the light turned green. Obviously John remembered Tia Dru. And something she might have noted in a diary got him moving. Right now he’d be headed to his car. Which meant I had five minutes to find that diary before he grabbed it and dangled it out of reach as he had dolls when I was five, letters a decade later.

  The side-by-side garages comprised the ground floor of the duplex. Breaking into Tia’s would be bad enough, entering the neighbor’s—a stranger’s—worse. It would be made lots worse by the arrival of a police detective.

  I peered through the windows, hoping for an indication of which one was Tia’s. One unit held boxes, plastic bags covering lumpy things. In the other sat a white Volkswagen bug. If you live this close to downtown, you’re better off without a car. There’s always a bus or a trolley or a cable car within a couple of blocks. To most folks in this gentle climate garages are storage rooms, driveways home to cars.

  For Tia, a couple of blocks up the steep San Francisco hills would be like me scaling the Transamerica Building. I pulled out a tiny skeleton key and stuck it in the U-lock. In his speedy departure from the location set, Duffy’s former owner abandoned not only Duffy but what we all assumed to be Duffy’s dog bag. I figured I had inherited balls, blanket, dog shampoo, dog treats; instead I got a tiny skeleton key, larger skeleton keys, and other items for which I couldn’t guess the use and didn’t dare ask about. The smallest key I had dubbed the universal skeleton. It had yet to fail.