Poltergeist g-2

by Kat Richardson

  I took the lighter back to the bum on the bench.

  "This yours?"

  He stuttered and fumbled, fearful and uncertain how to answer. Then he blurted, "I dint trow it etcha! Hones'! It jus' kina…"

  I nodded with a rueful smile. "I know. It just got away from you. They do that." I looked down at the crumpled cigarette in the gutter between us and shot another quick look for Celia, but the thing had moved away. "That yours, too?"

  He looked down and his face fell to the verge of tears as he saw the mud-soaked cigarette. "Yeah," he moaned.

  I dug into my pocket for the change from my coffee and handed it to him with his lighter. "Take care of this. Don't lose it, OK?"

  His eyes glowed and he offered me a snaggle-toothed grin on a raft of fetid breath. "I will. I will! Tank you, Miss. God bless you!"

  I backed away, starting for my office again with a shrug and a mumbled "thanks." Sliding on the mucky cobbles, I hurried on through the October thickness of ghosts.

  I was going up the stairs when my cell phone jiggled on my hip. I snatched it and answered.

  "You have to do something."

  "What? Excuse me, Dr. Tuckman, but we closed this case last night," I answered, shoving the phone under my jaw as I unlocked my office door.

  "Yes, I know. But something must be done. You seem to be the one who understands this thing—"

  "No, Tuckman. You understand it. You just don't want responsibility for it."

  "Ms. Blaine!"

  I reminded myself that his check hadn't cleared yet and heaved a sigh. "What's the problem?"

  "Celia is bedeviling the subjects."

  ' 'Bedeviling'? Just how badly are they being pestered?" Maybe the relative calm around me now was the reflection of Celia's action elsewhere. I threw my things on the floor behind the desk and sat down.

  Without his villain act to bolster the impact, he just sounded peevish and unpleasant. "Considering the range of injuries they've all sustained recently, it takes very little 'pestering' to make someone miserable. They've all called—every one—with one story or another of the poltergeist doing unpleasant things."

  "Great. Look, Tuckman, as I understand it, the poltergeist is a collective phenomenon, yes?"

  "Yes," he snapped at me, impatient and annoyed.

  "Well then, if it exists because they believe it exists, the obvious thing to do is get them to stop believing in it."

  "And do you think that's likely when they are being pummeled and assaulted by this make-believe ghost?"

  I laughed. "You put it there, Tuckman. I can't do anything to help you on that score. You taught them to believe, you'll have to teach them to be skeptical again. Why don't you tell them it was a hoax? That you had the room rigged and almost nothing that they experienced was real? That should shake a few of them up. If you can get them to stop giving it credence, maybe it will stop harassing them." I didn't say a damned thing about its harassing me, too. The entity had gone off on its own with its master and I doubted that the rest of the group could do much more than weaken it by any lack of faith, but I wouldn't say it wasn't worth a try.

  Tuckman remained silent, brooding.

  "Dr. Tuckman. Seriously. You need to convince them to stop giving it their support. You have to. It's taken on a life of its own, but if you can break down their belief, you may weaken it enough to stop its doing anything worse. Be brutal. You have to."

  "You've been no help at all," he spat.

  "Then I won't charge you. Good luck, Dr. Tuckman. Remember that this is no longer a game. Your ghost killed one of your assistants. This thing has to cease and it's up to you to break it. Not me."

  I could almost hear the slow boil of his vexation. Then he hung up on me. I didn't mind. If I was lucky, I'd never hear from Gartner Tuckman again.

  I worked for a while, periodically fending off the random attacks of random objects. At one o'clock, I went to catch Phoebe at her parents' restaurant. Hugh had told me she'd be there, and I needed Amanda's address. I could have just called, but that wouldn't help me mend any fences—Phoebe might take it as another attempt to dodge my rightful dose of her wrath and that wouldn't be good in the long run. Besides, I loved the Masons and needed some kind of break from the grinding horror of this case.

  The lunch rush had thinned to a trickle by the time I arrived and the family was, once again, revving up for Friday night. I seemed to be spending all day in restaurants, but this I wouldn't mind. I loved the company of the Masons. Even when they were in their weekly uproar, they were a warm and welcoming crowd. They laughed at full volume and smiled with infectious ease.

  As the patriarch, Phoebe's father had taken his usual seat at the family table in back, his arthritic hand clutching a glass of tepid water, which he used more for emphasis than hydration. «Poppy» was gnarled and weathered, as brown as hand-rubbed walnut, and still ran the whole family merrily ragged without lifting anything but the glass and his voice. The clan fluttered around the table, flying in and out the kitchen doors like giddy fruit bats, somehow managing not to careen into one another while acceding to Poppy's every command. He spotted me as I came in and waved me to his table.

  "Harper! Come on back here, girl. Where you been? I thought maybe you finally gone wasted away t'nothin' and blew off on the wind." His accent was still as thick as breadfruit—full of «de» and «dem» and soft Rs, lilting and bouncing like reggae—though he'd now lived thirty years in Seattle.

  I wound through the crowd of family and sat down next to him against the kitchen wall, which was deliciously warm after the exterior chill. "No, Poppy. I still stick to the ground most of the time."

  He uncurled his index finger from the glass and poked me in the shoulder, scoffing. "Barely. I suppose them foolish white boys you date don' know better. Too bad t'see a nice girl like you goin' t'waste."

  I made a mock sad face. "Well, I just have to make do—Hugh is taken."

  His body shook as he roared laughter. He was loud for a little old man in his seventies. He wound down after a minute, chuckling, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

  "Girl, I knew you could."

  That confused me. "Could what, Poppy?" I asked.

  "Unfreeze yourself."

  I gaped at him. "What?" I squeaked.

  "Harper, ever since you come out the hospital, you been hard and chilly like steel in the freezer—I'm surprised you got a man a' all. You built up some icy walls like you spect someone goin' t'hurt you some more, but when you ain't lettin' nothin' in to hurt, you ain't lettin' nothing in to love you, neither. Then you be stayin' away from here, like you don't need your family no more—'cause you family, even if you are thin like an of broom."

  I stared at him for a while, this old man with sharp black eyes. I hesitated to ask. "You… can see some kind of wall around me?" If I had erected such a thing, surely I had good reason to keep the world at a distance. And maybe it was the same for Ken—even tough guys can't take it forever.

  Poppy laughed and poked me again. "That's a metaphor, little girl! But spiritual walls be just as hard and cold as the real thing. Why you go look so sad now?"

  I jerked back, swamped with bleak memory. "My dad used to call me 'little girl'."

  "Harper, I'm sorry. I'm not presumin' on him. How long he's been gone?

  "A long time. I was twelve when he died. Now there's just me and Mom and we don't get along."

  "That I know. So… that why you don't be comin' round? We're too clingy?" Then he sat back and winked at me. "Or maybe you don' like Miranda's cookin' no more?"

  I snorted a laugh, relieved to be off the subject of me and my wretched family—even if it did mean dealing with the oddities of the surrogate one. "I love your wife's cooking and I'd be twice as fat as you want me to be if I ate it as often as I'd like to. And three times as fat if I ate it as often as you'd like me to. Things have been a little strange since I got hurt and I've been busy. And Phoebe's mad at me."

  "Oh, she don't be so mad a
s dat."

  A plate of steaming food was shoved onto the table in front of me.

  "I am too as mad as 'dat."

  I looked up into Phoebe's scowl. Or rather, her attempt at a scowl that broke up into a smile as I watched. She put down her own plate and sat across from me. One of the family slid some glasses of water onto the table for us as they passed. Another dropped off rolls of utensils and napkins, never missing a beat on the cleaning and prepping for drinks, dinner, and dancing that took over the place on Fridays and Saturdays.

  Noises came from the bar area and the front of the dining room as the tables were rearranged to make a dance floor and stage for the band. Shouts and laughter gusted out of the kitchen with every swing of the doors. Phoebe and I had to lean toward each other to speak at a normal volume.

  "Hey, girl," she said.

  "Hey, yourself. Thanks for seeing me."

  "Oh, like I'm goin' t'hold a grudge. I was mad. But I understand." She had picked up her father's accent again.

  I'd already explained myself and resisted any impulse to do so again. "How are you doing?"

  "Fine. I'm goin' back to the shop tonight. How's it lookin'?"

  "Fine. Your cousin told me I could get Amanda's home address from you. I need to talk to her."

  "Oh, that Germaine! When Hugh told me he sent that good-for-nothing to my store I thought I'd have to strangle him!"

  "Which one? Hugh or Germaine?"

  "Both of them! How could he do that to me?"

  "He's just trying to help."

  Poppy laughed, breaking into the conversation. "He's trying t'make you stop feeling sorry for your own self, girl! You come in here all long-faced a week ago and crying f'your friend. That's OK. That's right. But now you jus' being stubborn-sorry f'yourself. You're like your ma, Phoebe—ya got t'be busy."

  "I am busy, Poppy."

  "You is busy with everything but you. I love you, girl, but it's time you go home." He fixed his sparkling eyes on me. "You goin' t'make her go back t'her own place, ain't you, Harper?"

  "I don't know, Poppy… She's pretty muleheaded."

  "That d'truth!"

  "You two! Worse than Hugh and Mamma."

  Poppy cackled.

  "Phoebe, you know you should."

  She made a face. "Yes. 'Specially since everyone be bossin' me about it!"

  Hugh came by with a tray full of glasses for the bar and bent down to kiss Phoebe on the head as he passed. "You get back what you dish out, big sister."

  One of the glasses did a backflip out of the stack and darted toward me, trailing a familiar yellow strand. I snatched it. Phoebe put it back onto Hugh's tray with care, keeping one eye on me.

  "You got you a duppy now, too?" Phoebe asked.

  "Just the garden-variety poltergeist," I replied. "Nothing so nasty as a duppy—they are nasty, right?"

  "They be the nastiest things ever," Poppy answered for his daughter.

  "What makes them so bad?" I asked him, picking at my plate of food—it was delicious, but I couldn't concentrate on eating, my brain going in so many directions: the poltergeist, my dad, psychic walls…

  Poppy leaned back in his seat, gesturing with his water glass. "Dup-pies, they're the spirits what don' make it to heaven. They got lost somehow on the nine nights and they settle back to earth. But they got no heart t'feel with, no brain t'think with—their soul, it be broke in two. Half here, half the other place. They don' feel the Tightness or wrongness o' somethin'. They don' think what happen. They just do what they want. They come slap you or pinch you or make f'break things."

  "How do you know it's a duppy?"

  "You see them. Like skeletons wearing fog. The—what they call it here? Willow wisp? — That's the thing they look like. Ancestor spirits, you can't see them—they as pure as air. But the duppy be tainted and evil. And they just get eviler and eviler the longer they hang round. Dogs be howlin' when they about and you feel the spiderweb on your face. That's the duppy sign."

  I didn't know if I would call the yellow thread spiderweb, but I recalled the sensation on my face the first time I fell into it, when I investigated the room; I had thought of the feel of it as cobwebs then, myself. The idea of a ghost that grew more and more evil from a lack of conscience seemed to match the behavior of Celia—and its psychopathic master—to a T.

  "Why you keep askin' 'bout duppies?" Phoebe demanded. "Maybe that's why they're botherin' you now."

  I tried to calculate the response to any possible answer, but I'd never been very good at the elusive math of relationships. I stuck to the easier side of truth.

  "Mark's project was about ghosts and I think there's a connection to his death. This duppy thing seems a lot like the ghost they made and maybe—"

  "They made a ghost? That's crazy."

  I shrugged. "Maybe it is. But I thought I'd better talk to Amanda about the night Mark got hurt."

  Phoebe stared at me. "You think some ghost-thing hurt Mark. For real?"

  "I don't know. But you don't get answers unless you ask questions. I need Amanda's address."

  Phoebe pushed her lips together and frowned. "OK, but you be nice t'her!"

  "I will."

  Poppy wouldn't let Phoebe go to get Amanda's address until she finished eating and he wouldn't let me go with her to get it once she was done, either. As soon as Phoebe had disappeared through the kitchen door, he turned a searching gaze on me.

  "What you really think, Harper? You think some duppy killed Mark?"

  I turned my eyes toward the tabletop. "I don't know."

  "You can' go lyin' t'me, girl. You know somethin' that you wish you don' never know."

  "You don't need to know it, too, Poppy," I said, shaking my head.

  He put his free hand over mine. He waited a minute, but I didn't confide in him or look up. He patted my hand and sighed, sounding very old and tired. "Dem sure give you a basket f'carry water," he said, shaking his head.

  I made excuses to leave as soon as Phoebe returned with Amanda's information. Phoebe and her father both watched me go through narrowed, thoughtful eyes.

  CHAPTER 23

  It turned out that Amanda had been staying with her parents in Shoreline. Once I had the address from Phoebe—and had been fed enough food to fatten up most of Ethiopia—I drove to the Leamans'. Although Mark and Amanda hadn't dated in months, his death had thrown a veil of misery over her that tinted her eyelids a perpetual pink and her skin ashen. She had the house to herself at the moment, but preferred to sit on the porch swing nestled under the wide overhang of the front porch and watch the intermittent drizzle.

  "The house gets too stuffy," she said, pulling her feet up onto the seat and huddling over them with her arms wrapped tight around herself and a depressed olive green cloud clinging to her in the Grey. I sat on the other end of the swing, listening to it creak in time with the slight swaying we made.

  "Manda," I started, keeping my voice low, "do you remember the day Mark got hurt in the shop?"

  She kept her eyes on the mist. "Yeah. The detective asked me. I remember, but I'm not sure I told him everything right. I was still pretty freaked." Her voice was too bland. "Do you mind telling me, too?"

  She shrugged, setting the swing rocking aslant. "It was kind of late. Monday. A couple weeks ago, now. Mark was stacking some books in Biography and there was this guy talking to him. Arguing, I think. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but they sounded mad. You know—kind of snapping at each other and their voices going up and down. And then the guy kind of… threw out his fists. Like this. You know—like a cross." She spread her arms out straight from the shoulder and almost caught my cheek with the back of one closed hand. She didn't notice and dropped her hands back around her knees again. "And I saw something black flying through the air in the mirror. And it smacked into the bookshelf by Mark's head.

  "Then Mark started to turn his head and look at the guy—he'd been looking at the books—and this big book fell down off the shelf over his head and
hit him. He sort of… um… shied away from it like maybe he saw it falling. And I heard him shout. I don't know what he said, just some noise like he was surprised or angry. And then the book hit him and he fell off the stool. And the guy ran away." She slapped her hands against her shins. "That was it."

  "Did you know what the object was that flew through the air?"

  "Oh, yeah. It was one of the gargoyles from the fireplace."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I went back to help Mark pick up the books. He dropped the whole pile he was stacking. So I saw him pick it up and put it away."

  "What about the book that hit him? Do you know what it was?"

  "Umm… a biography of Schopenhauer, I think. Not sure. Mark didn't make a big deal about it."

  "Can you describe the person he was talking to?"

  "Not too well. The mirror makes people look kind of short and funny—you're always looking at the tops of their heads. Anyhow, I don't know how tall he was, but not very short or very tall, I think. Dark hair, wearing a dark jacket and jeans—I think it was jeans."

  "Did you get a better look at him when he ran out?"

  "No. I was going back to help Mark. I shouldn't have left the cash desk, but I didn't think of that, then."

  It wasn't much of a description, and the only people it let out of the suspect list were the Stahlqvists and Wayne Hopke. Even distracted, Manda would have noticed their pale hair.

  "Are you certain the person was male? Could it have been female?"

  "A woman?" She thought about it, rocking in the seat. "I guess. She couldn't have been very… curvy, though."

  "What about the hair? Was it long, short, black, brown?"