by Elia Seely
My eyes widened. “The ghost?”
“That’s what I thought, since you and I had talked about that. But then Margo let out kind of a shout and I clearly heard her say ‘No, I’m not talking to you anymore’ and then Gadget sort of moved her away. It was fascinating and strange at the same time. Gadget was exactly like she’d be with a foal. Their connection stayed strong the whole time. She turned Margo away and then Margo kind of sank down to her knees and I ran over to her.”
“Was she all right? What happened?”
“She was—is—fine. Honestly. I got down on the ground with her and just touched her little shoulder and she sort of shook her head and rubbed her eyes and then looked at me and said ‘what?’ Like she didn’t realize what had just happened. I asked if she was okay and she said yes. She looked up at Gadget who had moved off a little and then she stood up, dusted off her jeans, and asked if she could go feed the chickens.”
“So, she didn’t—you didn’t ask her what happened?”
“I wanted to wait a minute. She seemed kind of out of it and I didn’t want to force it. We went over and got some chicken feed together—those hens love it when she’s around, life is so easy for them. And we scattered the feed and she seemed to settle herself and I asked her if she had been talking with her spirit friends or if she had seen the ghost again. She just said no and gave me a funny look. I don’t know if she’s holding out on me, or if she sort of disassociated there for a few moments or what. But I wanted to tell you, of course, in case … well, whatever.”
I took a long drink of beer and began to pull my hair out of its braid. I finger-combed it out and rubbed my head to relieve some of the tightness of the day’s tension. I felt washed out and now newly unsettled. “I’ll talk to her. Maybe I should take her home tonight—”
“No, Shan, it’s fine. She’s fine. Let them stay. We won’t do any more with the horses. You need a break—let me help you. Is your mom coming?”
“Yeah. It was no problem, actually. I was surprised. She seemed a lot more engaged, or something. She’s going to drive up tomorrow. So—we’ll all just go home tonight, give you your space. Dan can stay with Margo one more day. Maybe she can have a playdate with one of her little friends. I’ll try to arrange that … it would be good for her to just do something normal—no offense.” I didn’t want to tell Naomi about Rabten’s scary interest and knowledge about Margo; didn’t want to confess that I wanted my little girl right next to me in bed in case—in case of what? Rabten’s spirit or whatever trying to take her away?
“Sure, yeah.” Naomi finished her beer and set the bottle down carefully. I could feel her thinking.
“What?”
“I just wonder—I just think that maybe Margo could use some help, you know? Not a shrink, I’m not saying that, exactly, but maybe with all this ghost stuff, maybe there’s some energy or something that needs to be cleared away from her.”
“Oh God, Naomi, I just can’t deal with any more of this psychic new age whatever the hell it is talk anymore. Margo is sensitive, I’m stressed … those damn pot brownies … but—”
She leaned forward and interrupted my objections. “Just hear me out. I know this woman who lives up at Sheep Creek. She’s the daughter of one of my abuelita’s old friends. She’s kind of a medicine woman healer person. Her name is Marion. She’s totally legit—really. People have been going to her for years for help with—you know, evil spirits or grief that won’t pass or things like that. She’s just a little grandma lady, very helpful, not weird or anything.”
“You think Margo has evil spirits attached to her?” I didn’t like the drum of fear, however ridiculous I thought this idea was, that started in my belly.
“No. I don’t know. I mean, this ghost, right? I’m sure he’s not evil like the devil or anything, but, well, it happens. He’s sad, he’s found her as a way to speak for himself, and from his perspective nothing’s happening, so he can’t leave … I don’t know. I understand that this sounds out there, but I don’t think it would hurt. After the case is finished. When you’ve got a minute to think.”
“This isn’t what I want to be thinking about right now. It’s not helpful. I don’t believe in this stuff and between Margo and this goddamn case—”
“I’m sorry, Shan. I didn’t mean to make you angry. It’s absolutely your call, of course. Maybe she’ll tell you what happened today and it will be totally clear and fine and nothing to worry about. I’m sorry, really.” She placed her hand on my arm.
“I appreciate the spirit of the suggestion, Naomi. I do. But it’s too much right now. I just can’t deal with it. I’ll talk to Margo, of course I will. But please—just leave it, okay?”
“All right.” She gave me a smile mixed of sadness and a knowing I didn’t want to even try to understand.
“You know,” I said, as I stood and took my bottle over to the bin she kept the empties in, “I feel like the more spiritual people become the less they are attached to reality. Like being closer to God or Buddha or whatever is a way to escape from life. I haven’t seen one person up there that seems better off for being steeped in the rules of their religious life.” I saw Pema’s shining eyes, remembered the Rinpoche’s warm and peaceful gaze. Maybe that wasn’t always true, but it seemed that people’s lives were more complicated the more they tried to free their souls or whatever they called it. It didn’t matter the tradition: I couldn’t think of one path that I knew of that made people free instead of fettered. Even Naomi, with her new age talk of energy and spirits, it still seemed like a prison to me, created out of thoughts that had no basis in reality.
“No, I know. It’s hard to say, though. It’s an individual thing, at the end of the day. And we can’t know another person’s heart,” Naomi said. She stood too. “Let me get the kids’ stuff together and you go out and get them.”
The ride back to town was thankfully normal, with Dan chattering on about how he was going to start work for Naomi now and then stay up there when his arm was healed and how that was way better than the MC anyway. He didn’t mention his dad but I felt a mix of feelings on his behalf; his dad’s obvious failings had to be painful for him. I told them their grandmother was coming and they were both surprised but seemed glad. We saw my family once a year, if that; though we were a day’s drive away, none of us had tried to be close.
Once home it felt good to have Dan banging open doors and cupboards and grubbing for food. Margo went straight to her little garden and started watering, and I promised her again that we would go and get a sprinkler.
After dinner Dan plugged into the Atari with the sound down low and I started laundry, putting fresh sheets on my bed. Margo helped me.
“Why don’t you sleep with me, tonight, Bear? Okay?”
She nodded and I encouraged her to get ready for bed. She was tired and brushed her teeth willingly. When I got her settled, clean sheets crisp and cool on the bed, I asked her how the playing with the horses had gone.
“It was fun,” Margo said, chewing on the end of her ponytail. “I had to go all empty and relaxed and walk around and sort of be talking to Gadget without talking and using my body to talk to her and then she started to walk with me and that was nice. It was like I was a horse too and she was a person and I started to see out of her eyes ‘cause things got a little funny the way they looked but it was pictures instead of thinking.” She looked up at me. “You know?”
I didn’t, of course, but I nodded. “Then what?”
She frowned and looked off, trying to remember. “I think then that man came and he tried to make me go with him but I remembered that you said no strangers and I popped out of Gadget’s head and I felt the man instead and he didn’t feel good and I told him to go away and Gadget got between us and then he left and then I sort of felt dizzy so I sat down.”
“Which man? The one who got the cutting up?”
“No. The man from the dream who was trying to grab me. He’s kind of red.”
“That�
�s good you remembered about not talking to strangers. I’m proud of you. So, was he scary, like the dream? Grabbing? Or just asking you to go somewhere?”
“He’s …” she struggled to explain.
Poor kid. Eight years old and her brain was busting with spirits or whatever the hell they were coming and going. I felt a surge of anger. Who gave them permission to stalk my little girl?
“It’s okay if you can’t remember,” I said.
“I remember. I can see him. He’s red and has really blue eyes but he doesn’t feel sad or scary but he is just—he doesn’t have any feeling. Not like the cut up man who is sad.” She looked up at me, under her lashes.
I needed to play this carefully. Margo could shut down like a door slamming in the wind if she felt a vibe she didn’t like, especially from me. The trouble was, I was never sure what that vibe was going to be.
“When you see the man, what is it like? A movie in your head?”
“I can see it like when you have a dream.” She snuggled into the crook of my arm. “But the man was like a ghost too, only not cut up. And he felt cold. And not sad or mad or anything.”
“Empty?”
She considered. “Maybe.”
“What did he want to talk to you about?”
“He wanted me to go out of my body and come with him.”
A deep chill went through my body. Careful. Breathe. Neutral. “To where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is he a ghost too, or what, do you think?”
“No. Not a ghost. He has a body but he can go out of it. That’s different.”
“Right, you’re the expert.” I gave her a little tickle. But I felt anything but playful. “Why did he want you to go with him?’
That look under her lashes again. “To see the blue fire man and some other people. A green lady. A lady with extra arms. I mean, I kind of wanted to but I knew what you would say and I didn’t like it when I went out of my body before, in the dream. I didn’t want to get lost again.” She sat up abruptly. “Don’t be mad.”
“Bear—I’m not mad. Not at all. I just want to understand this ability you have to travel around and see people and stuff. I can’t do it, so I have to ask questions to see what it’s like. Get it? But I’m not mad at you. No way. You are a wise and good little girl.” She sprang into my arms and I held her very, very tight.
“You were exactly right not to go with the man. Until we know more about this stuff let’s take it slow. And I don’t know who might come visit you, so we have to figure out who are good playmates and who not, all right?” Oh, I knew who the man was. And I had seen the Vajrapani, of course, and the green lady too. In the thangka paintings. Probably the many-armed lady was there as well. I didn’t know what Rabten hoped to gain by visiting my daughter out of his body, but every sense I had was on alert. And hadn’t she said, if he was the same man as in the sleepwalking dream, that he was the man who had maybe done the cutting up? None of what Margo explained made sense to me, but I could see Rabten’s red robes and blue eyes in my mind’s eye as clearly as if he were standing in front of me.
It didn’t matter whether I believed in the special powers or liked them or not. Rabten had upped his game a level, and though I couldn’t meet him on this other-worldly playing field, the power I had was in reality. The power of finding his weakness, exploiting his vanity somehow. The power of putting him away.
Chapter Forty-Three
I had a sleepless night and woke up to check on Margo about one hundred times. Dan slept on the couch again and sometime around 2 a.m. I turned off the TV, frozen on the Space Invaders almost on the ground. A metaphor if ever there was one; my life had turned into a kind of Twilight Zone freak show and I hated how helpless and ignorant I felt. Well, today we’d hopefully have something worth bringing Rabten in for, probable cause to arrest and hold him through the weekend. I shuddered. Not that being in a jail cell would keep him from zooming around the universe frightening my daughter.
I went in early, after waking Dan and putting the house on DefCon 4: absolutely do not leave your sister alone and pay attention to what she is doing at all times and remember to feed her, grandma is coming, help me out for one more day. He was brown from his day of messing around at Naomi’s, and I felt absolute love and pride in him. Most fourteen-year-old boys were hell on wheels.
In the office before anyone else, I reorganized interview notes, typed up a report summarizing the case so far. It didn’t look great on paper; we didn’t. We’d made mistakes and were lucky that we had any idea who had killed Choden, although whether we could actually prove it was another thing. I called Jim at eight, on the off chance he’d be at work on a Saturday. He was and confirmed that the blood on the clothes Butch had found matched Choden’s blood type, but it was ‘O positive,’ so technically could have belonged to half the population of the planet.
“Can we prove who the clothes belonged to? Are there any magic tricks you have to do that?” I asked, knowing that the answer was probably no.
“DNA evidence testing is in its infancy. It’s probably going to revolutionize forensics, but for now, what testing exists is expensive and you’d wait months for it and likely get nothing useful. Unless someone saw him wearing the clothes and will swear to it—or unless, of course, he claims them—there’s nothing more I can do for you.”
I called Eli next and reminded him to check the size of Jerome’s jeans against our blood-stained clothes. I worried that Jerome would tell Eli about our little evening, but what could I do? It was better on several levels that someone else speak to him at this point. The office was blissfully quiet; all the weekend dispatch traffic went through the hospital center unless it was rodeo time, New Year’s, or graduation.
Tsewang showed up promptly, looking out of place in her red robe and smaller than she had on her home turf. She also looked older, and not terribly pleased to be meeting me. I greeted her, offered her a cup of coffee, which she refused, and suggested that we chat upstairs in the atrium area. She shrugged and agreed, and we went up the old marble stairs to the second floor.
We sat on the mauve and beige sofa where Steven had waited for me yesterday afternoon.
“You were a public defender, right?” I asked her.
“For a time,” she said. Her gaze stayed on me; she showed no curiosity about the surroundings.
“Miss it?”
“Not at all.”
She clearly wasn’t going to bite on the pleasant small talk, so I dove in.
“I’ve asked you here for an informal conversation; as I’m sure you’re aware you are not obligated to speak to me. But we need your help. In the course of our investigation, we’ve been led repeatedly back to the senior monks and to these Unfolding Lotus sutras that Choden was working with. I have some questions I think would be best answered by someone who is familiar with the monastic life.”
Her eyes narrowed. “All right.”
“For example, it’s come to light that several of the senior monks seem to have habits which I find surprising, and I suspect are in conflict with the 253 vows that Lobsang told me you take. Yet questionable behavior seems to go on, and no one seems to care. Is this a normal practice? Are the vows a lip service kind of thing only? And do you think it would be a stretch, once some rules were broken, to break bigger ones?”
“Like murder?”
“Yes, like murder.”
Tsewang sighed and looked away toward the enormous 19th century landscape painting that dominated the atrium. “I believe that murdering another human is a common taboo shared across cultures from time immemorial. Of course, taking a vow to abstain from this grave error would make it less likely, perhaps, that a person would commit it, but if you overcome the basic human taboo, I think it hardly matters if you’ve taken a vow as well.”
I nodded. This made sense.
“In reference to lesser transgressions,” she looked at me again, “one hardly leads to the other. Or does not necessarily lead to the o
ther.”
“But you are aware that ‘transgressions’ are happening. Is the Rinpoche? Is there no corrective action?”
“We among the managing staff at the monastery do our best to insulate the Rinpoche from the pettier concerns of the community. He travels a great deal, and despite how he appears, he is quite an old man.”
“So, he doesn’t know about, say, Tenzin’s sexual predilections, or Lobsang’s smoke breaks? All managing staff, of course. How convenient for them.”
She gave me a disapproving glare. “We have personal lives, Deputy. We have our personal struggles, our personal demons. We all try and fail, inevitably, to attain the perfection of the Buddha. But the pain and suffering of failing is what ultimately leads to letting go of the ego, attachment, all the illusion that pervades consciousness. The Rinpoche is well aware of this. But, quite honestly, he has bigger fish to fry.”
Though curious what that meant, I let it pass. “But isn’t the point of being a monastic that you’re better at life than a regular person? That you want to be—enlightened? More than anything else in the world?”
“Choosing to become a ‘monastic’ is complicated and it’s rarely, in my observation, about a single pointed focus toward enlightenment. There are all kinds of reasons why people choose to take religious vows—but certainly no-one who is already ‘perfect’ does. What would be the point, if one had already found Buddha-hood? It is not a requirement of release to be a monk or nun. It’s a … a lifestyle choice, in many ways, if I may be so glib.”
Her face, pinched and lined, seemed anything but ‘glib.’ “Okay … so, the vows and rules are sort of like, ‘follow these if you can’ kind of thing? But don’t worry too much about it?”