Hungry Ghosts

by Susan Dunlap

  He fingered his last fry, held it up halfway to his mouth, studied it, put it back on the plate. A tray of dishes clattered in the distance behind him. A woman’s shrill laugh stabbed through the reverberating chatter. “Tia never said anything about him that I didn’t know. But the thing is, Darce, I always felt there was something she was keeping back. Could have been a theory, some fact she knew about him back then, something she heard. I couldn’t even get that far in finding out. And, dammit, when I was with her I didn’t want to spoil things by pushing. I could have, but I didn’t. I kept telling myself that it was only my gut feeling that she had anything at all, and if she did it couldn’t be important after all these years. There was plenty of time to ask. But if I did start to ask she kind of shriveled away from me. So I put it off.”

  What did that mean? I wondered.

  The waiter came with the bill. “The clams were terrific, Allard,” Gary said, laying down four twenties without glancing at the bill.

  “Fortunate we hadn’t run out during your delay, Mr. Lott.”

  So that is what it meant. “Your reservation, Gary, that was for you and Tia, right?”

  He nodded sadly. “I thought I had forgotten her, but when she called it was the old excitement all over again.”

  “She called you? When?”

  “I dunno, couple of days ago. The day you got here.”

  “So, the day before yesterday.”

  “Yeah, because I put her off in case . . . uh . . . you . . . needed anything.”

  “In case I needed? Really?” I was amazed. I’d always been such an add-on in the family, the kid born after the midlife surprise kid, the shock after the afterthought. And I was touched at how hard a time my big-time lawyer big brother, a master of cross-examining witnesses and swaying juries, had had admitting it. Now I did put my hand over his. “Thanks.”

  We pulled on jackets. Outside the fog was waiting. The valet brought his car.

  “I’ll drive,” I said.

  “I’ve only had a—”

  “It’s not that. Occupational hazard. I’ve been in too many car rolls, accidents, gas tank explosions. Most of the time I’m doubling the passenger, sitting in the death seat so that I can spot impending disaster and leap out at the last possible moment. Trust me, you don’t want me there while you’re driving.”

  “Okay, but no racing or rolling my car.”

  “It’ll be like riding with an aunt who learned to drive when she was eighty.” I had also won the To Hell and Back, the stunt doubles’ auto race from the top of a nearly vertical canyon to bottom and back, no holds barred, no route too risky. But I felt it was better not to mention that just now.

  Gary’s car had all the things I never see on the cars we’re about to crash on a set: padded leather seats, air bags, air conditioning, four speakers, and automatic transmission. I twisted the heat knob, another item there’s no need for in stunt junkers, and pulled out onto Montgomery Street. Downtown San Francisco is dead after six. I swung across all four lanes of the Financial District’s main drag as if I were making a right, hung a left on Market, and focused on avoiding the potholes and streetcar tracks, while Gary fiddled with the knobs on the console.

  When he’d found one of the early Radiohead songs, shifted it to the rear speakers, and settled back in his seat, I asked, “Gary, what did Tia talk about when she called?”

  “It was weird,” he said, as if he’d been waiting for me to get to this. “She wanted to see me. That wasn’t the weird part. But she suggested meeting at the old Letterman Hospital, in the Presidio, even though she loathed the changes they made when the Park Service took over from the Army and tore down the high-rise part.”

  “I thought everyone was ecstatic about the Park Service getting the land, and especially nabbing Lucas Films to be in there. As for Letterman, it was an ugly old building. Wasn’t it there during the First World War? It looked like a place you’d have expired in during the flu epidemic of 1918.”

  “I didn’t have time to drive across town, wander through the grounds, and then hunt up a restaurant out there. So I left a message telling her to meet me at Tadish’s. I have no idea why she wanted to meet at the Letterman site. You’re right, it was pre–World War I, old and bland. But to Tia it was vile.”

  “Vile! I love it. Jeez, I’m going to miss her. Not merely pedestrian, or ugly, but vile! If the Park Service could only hear that. Vile! Gary, did she give you any clue what she wanted?”

  “Not really. The thing is, Darce, I haven’t talked to her in a while, so I could be wro—no, I’m not! There was a touch of desperation in her voice. I mean, I was pleased and I was insulted that it took that kind of crisis to make her call. Still, I know how much she hated driving downtown and hassling with parking, and I figured if she was willing to come to the heart of the Fnancial District, she really needed to see me—”

  “About?”

  “I assumed she’d tell me at dinner.”

  I nodded resignedly, not that Gary was likely to notice in the dark. We had passed the Castro District and were going up the steep part of 17th Street now, over Twin Peaks. Even Gary’s moose of a car was panting its way up. Had it been daylight on a rare day when there was no fog at all, we could have seen all the way to the end of the avenues, across the Great Highway to the Pacific, or at least imagined we could.

  As it was, I headed down into the thicker fog, watching our cones of light extending less and less far from the grill and listening to what I took for foghorns, and realized was Gary snoring. I was very glad to be away from the zendo, the crime scene, going home. I was even more glad that Mom was still gone and I wouldn’t have to tell her about Tia. I knew I was numb—that tomorrow Tia’s death would hit me again, harder—but now I noted fuzzy red and green lights in the fog, found myself compulsively checking both sides of the street for pedestrians bursting from between cars, motorcyclists cutting me off, squad cars squealing in front of me. As always, my left foot was poised on the brake.

  Soon I’d be sitting in the kitchen sipping a bit of Powers, wishing I had room for some of the stew that Grace was heating up. Soon everything would be all right.

  I pulled up in front of the house, poked Gary awake, and got out. The house was dark. The only light inside was above the note board in the hall, where messages had been tacked as long as I could remember. Now it held a single sheet with my name. I unfolded it:

  Darcy,

  1. Call Jeffrey Hagstrom.

  2. Robin Sparto wants you for a stair fall at 5:00 A.M. Grant & Francisco. He said to be on the set at 4:00! Eamon can take you then—no earlier. I told Sparto you’d be there at 4:30 and he should be thankful!

  3. I called Jeffrey Hagstrom, left message that you had a pre-dawn gig and you would have to get back to him later. Okay?

  I laughed. And then remembered laughing with Tia.

  I reread the note. Eamon could take me at four in the morning? Did he live near here? Was he staying here? The ride downtown would take about twenty minutes. Good thing, because I had plenty to ask him about the zendo building and about his drive home with Tia.

  Something had shifted in me. For the first time I had thought about Eamon not as Mike, but as our landlord, as, perhaps, the last person Tia had trusted.

  CHAPTER 13

  LEO HAD RACED out too fast to bother with a jacket. Now the cold bit into his skin. He was alone, but that wouldn’t last. This was just a respite before the barrage began again.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the tight flow of his breath, to the whir of the air, felt the cold metal on his spine. He should plan his next move, consider his options. He smiled, almost laughed. That wouldn’t take long. But no, he would not do that.

  He recalled a night colder than this one, foggier, in which he had felt more desperate. In Japan, at the monastery, when he couldn’t make the grade and couldn’t go home to America, couldn’t . . .

  It was Yamana, his mentor, who had told him the story.

  A monk ca
me to see the roshi in dokusan. “Roshi,” he said, “it is time that I leave and study with another teacher, as is our custom.”

  “Go with my approval,” the roshi said. “But first I will give you a gift.”

  Leo remembered the surge of excitement he had felt at the idea of a special farewell gift chosen by the exalted head of the great monastery for this young monk.

  The roshi picked up a pair of tongs, plucked a hot coal from his fire, and held it out to the monk.

  The monk stared at the red-hot coal. Then he jumped up and ran out.

  But he couldn’t leave the monastery, not without the roshi’s blessing. So he sat in meditation for a full week. He tried to figure out the meaning of what had just happened. How had his teacher expected him to react? How could he have accepted his teacher’s strange gift and still managed not to burn his hands? What did the whole thing mean?

  At the end of the week, he marshaled his courage and came back to dokusan.

  “Roshi,” he said, “it is time that I leave and study with another teacher, as is our custom.”

  Again, the roshi picked up a pair of tongs, plucked a hot coal from his fire, and held it out to the monk.

  The monk stared at the red-hot coal. It hissed with steam. He trembled all over. Sweat ran down his face. He looked over his shoulder to the door, which he could open and run through again. He looked back at the roshi, trying to see the lesson for which this skin-searing coal was a symbol. He knew better than to put gloves between himself and his teacher’s gift. There was no way to stall long enough for the coal to cool. No way to get the blessing without the burn.

  The monk did the only thing he could. He bowed, put out his hands, and accepted his teacher’s gift.

  Leo, Garson-roshi, put out his hands and prepared to face the hot coal of what came next.

  CHAPTER 14

  THURSDAY

  I ROLLED OUT of bed at three forty-five, brushed my teeth, pulled on clothes, and was downstairs before four. In our kitchen, coffee waited hot in the pot—it always did—but I’d get brew three times stronger from the lunch wagon on the set. Instead, I dialed the zendo. I’d wake Leo, and he wouldn’t be pleased. But he was a priest; he’d pick up any call, particularly one in the middle of the night when it could be from someone desperate—like me.

  Leo didn’t answer.

  Suddenly I was more awake than if I’d swallowed a quart of on-set coffee. Where was Leo? He wouldn’t have just wandered off. Panic squeezed me. Had he been killed, too? Could he have . . . No, I couldn’t let myself go diffuse with speculation. I forced myself to focus the way I did at the brink of a new gag, looking out over a fifty-foot blind drop or eyeing a junker I was about to roll. I exhaled, felt the tightness. Usually there was a crack.

  Through that crack came a new set of thoughts. Of course, Leo couldn’t sleep in his room—it was the crime scene. He wouldn’t have slept in the only other bedroom, mine, lest I came back. So, he was probably curled up in the zendo. Traditionally monks have slept in the zendo, on their mats. Leo wouldn’t think twice about it. And the zendo was too far for him to hear the phone. Leo would be at morning zazen in a couple of hours; we’d talk then. I was so relieved, I headed for a cup of coffee on principle. And so distracted, I almost walked into Eamon Lafferty putting his cup down.

  “What are—?”

  “Sorry. I must have shocked you. I’ve got a key.”

  “For driving me at this appalling hour, you should have a medal,” I said. But it did shock me, him standing in the kitchen like Mike, his having a key.

  I followed him outside. Unlike Gary’s mobile parlor, Eamon’s ride was a two-bucket muscle car. I’d barely snapped in the seatbelt when the car leapt away from the curb. At four in the morning, the street was empty. Streetlights seemed to flash on Eamon’s face, sometimes revealing a tired-looking stranger, but at instants showing him so like Mike I had to turn away.

  I stared through the windshield and the memories of last night—of seeing Tia dead—flooded in. “All that blood! I just can’t believe it.”

  “I know. God, I still can’t believe she’s dead.” His voice was taut and ragged. “This time yesterday morning I was sprawled in bed dreaming of her. I woke up smiling, figuring I’d call her for dinner.” He looked over at me. “Darcy, how can she be dead?”

  I had to jam my teeth together for a moment before I could even speak. “The way she died; so vicious. So personal. Who could have done that?”

  He shook his head. “You were around the zendo before, right? Down in the tunnel with the movie people?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you see Jeffrey?”

  “Jeffrey? Why him? You don’t think that Jeffrey killed her?” I asked, shocked.

  “No! I was just trying to figure who knew her best, who’d have a bead on her friends or anyone who had it in for her.” He hung a left on Geary and as soon as he was on the boulevard, glanced over at me and added, “I’m not pointing the finger—Jeff’s my friend—but Tia really roller-coastered him that night by the tunnel.”

  “Yeah, what was that all about?”

  “I heard you saw him afterwards. What did he say?”

  I sat, feeling the heat on my shins, staring out at the dark shop and restaurant façades. “He wasn’t angry, at least not at Tia. Really, he was more emotional about how his father treated him and how pissed his father’d be to know he was using his inheritance to sell weird chairs. I guess his thinking of using that revolting tunnel under the zendo to store his father’s things says it all.”

  “He told you that!”

  “About the stuff, yeah.”

  Eamon shook his head. “That’s Jeff in a nutshell. He hates the old man, but still he can’t bring himself to toss his stuff. I knew his father when he was a civilian in the military lab. He wasn’t running on all cylinders even then. He was sure they were out to cheat him. I don’t think he ever came up with anything he could patent, but he totally believed if he did, the military would grab the rights. You know how that kind of man is, full of excuses for his own failure: ‘I could have been Pasteur or Salk, but what’s the point? They’ll only snatch the profits!’”

  “You worked for him, right?”

  He nodded. “The thing is, he wasn’t that far wrong about the military in general. They never cared about anyone’s potential. Even I could see it, and I was barely out of college. There were some brilliant scientists, with lots of ideas, chomping at the bit to exploit them, just waiting for someone to open the right channels. It was such a waste. What they needed was someone—Sorry. You’ll be thinking I’m not so close to sane either. So, Jeff seemed okay? Not upset, unnerved?”

  “Not enough to keep him from making me coffee and heating up focaccia. But what about Tia? I mean when you drove her home. What’d she say?”

  “Nothing I can—”

  “Eamon, something happened before you two left the zendo. She made a point of inviting me to lunch yesterday. There was something she was going to tell me. She’d kept a diary the year my brother, Mike, disappeared. She was going to get it. And then she disappeared.”

  “Yesterday? She was going to tell you something yesterday?”

  “Yes. She went downstairs and never came back. Lunch was still on the table. But my point is, she asked me over there to tell me something and now I have no clue what it was. Did she say anything, anything, to you? Even if it seemed insignificant.”

  He raked his lip with his upper teeth. After a string of green lights and then yellows, we were finally coming to a light I thought he couldn’t make. But he hit the gas and shot through as it turned red.

  “Surely,” I insisted, “Tia must have told you—”

  He turned toward me so that he was driving with half an eye on the road. “There’s something; it’s dangling at the edge of my mind. Not from last night. I’ll remember later. But last night I only stayed at her place a little while. She seemed distracted, nervous, I assume, about the way she treated Jeffrey. Bu
t she didn’t talk about that and it was none of my business. So we just talked about her installation. She was a great artist. It was a knockout installation, wasn’t it? I had no idea she was that good.”

  “So you knew her before you learned she was an artist?” Maybe he did know more about her than he was saying or than he even realized he wasn’t saying. “How’d you meet?”

  “The usual way.” He shot me an assessing glance. “Usual for me. She spotted me in Baltimore and did that Mike double take. I’ve seen it so often now it’s almost like a greeting, but then it was a shock.”

  “When was that?”

  “Oh, six, maybe seven years ago?”

  “Funny, she said yesterday what a shock it had been to see you. I just assumed that’d happened recently, I mean, here. Why was she in Baltimore? Some kind of treatment? Johns Hopkins?”

  “No, no. She was taking the airporter, and there was a waiting area where I worked.”

  “Was she there for medical—”

  “Nothing like that. It’s a lab—weapons research. And anyway, she was just visiting a guy, one of the scientists. They’d just gotten back from some kind of adventure weekend. Both of them had that exhausted, exhilarated look, you know? So when she spotted me, she was wild. She ran across the room.”

  I could imagine how excited she’d have been. But I had to focus on what I was asking. “What kind of adventure?”

  “Darcy, you don’t get the picture. She really thought I was Mike. I had no idea what she was talking about. And then, when I did, I was blown away. When I got home I Googled him. The first stories were from San Francisco newspapers, with pictures. It was like looking in the mirror. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. And then I kept watching for more, hoping, you know, like it was half me that was missing. Every year or so there’d be a story, always with pictures: once with John in uniform by a patrol car, another with Grace when she was the city liaison at the Letterman lab, and the last time with your mom outside the house—pictures to jog Mike’s memory if he had amnesia. Katy told me that later.”