Swoon 02 - Swear

by Nina Malkin

“Hey!” she calls out breathlessly. “Hey! You guys! Did you see Char?” She skips up to her sister, and Marsh bends to her, magnetized. “I know I’m not supposed to interrupt, but we were playing hide-and-seek and I looked everywhere. So if Char’s here, she interrupted first!”

  “Nope, she’s not in here,” Marsh says. “You probably didn’t look very hard.”

  “But I did. I looked really hard. I looked everywhere.” Marsh crouches to get eye to eye. “What do you mean everywhere? You were supposed to stay in the great hall with Mrs. Williams.”

  Willa swings her arms; Willa stomps her feet. “Mrs. Williams got tired. Mrs. Williams said she took a pill and had to lie down.” Willa wiggles; Willa squirms.

  This is . . . not right. This is . . . very wrong. I know by the cold, hard squeeze on my heart. I know by the hot stars behind my eyes. I know because of a certain scent and a certain tune, the nasty familiarity of both.

  “So I was it, and I looked and I called and I even did ‘olly olly oxen free,’ but she still wouldn’t come out.” Willa rubs her nose; Willa scratches her butt. And when she does that, three crushed, wilted scraps fall from her grasp.

  By now Marsh has sunk all the way to the floor, clutching her littlest sister in a sort of stranglehold. I hunker down and pick up . . . rose petals. “Hey, Will—what are you doing with these?” I ask her quietly.

  With one finger she touches the fragment of flower and looks at me, like: What’s that got to do with the price of tea in Tibet?

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I found them looking for Char.” Her skinny shoulders rise and fall. “They’re all over the place.” It’s not that I don’t believe her when I stand and head for the door. I wish I didn’t believe her, but I do, so I’m not surprised when I pull it back and a flood of petals falls across the threshold.

  XXVII

  And so a séance ensues. Not immediately, no. First, Marsh and Pen whisk Willa off for a sleepover at 9 Daisy Lane, while the boys and I split up for a top-to-bottom, inside-and-out search, in case I’m delusional and Charlotte’s snug as a bug in an armoire or gazebo.

  It occurs to me that two of our scouting posse (namely, Tosh and Sin) might be inclined to exit through a rear door and keep on going. Neither one has much invested in this, their only connection to the whole quagmire being me. Poor Tosh didn’t sign up for any of it—he just wanted to do music. As to Sin, he’s shown no sign that he forgives me (nor have I asked him to), and bottom line, he owes me nothing. All I know is, boy drama can’t be my priority right now. The rose garden is, and I tear through it, calling for Char. I’m on my way back—empty-handed—when Pen pulls up the drive.

  Part Bambi, part zombie, Marsh runs toward me. She doesn’t ask. I don’t tell. I simply put an arm around her. We walk a few steps, and then she stops. “I’m not going in there,” she says.

  “All right, it’s cool,” I tell her. “How about the porch?

  We’ll sit on the porch and wait for the guys . . .” A mourning dove coos an unconvincing lullaby. Weeds make treacherous advances across the front lawn. Evening arrives like a friend who’s not your friend anymore—she’s just someone you know.

  One by one, Duck and Tosh and Sin find us, nobody making a sound till somebody does.

  “That bitch.” It’s Marsh, wounded yet willful. “I’ll kill her.” No one mentions that her enemy’s already dead. “My boyfriend, my sister . . . I don’t get it—what does Antonia Forsythe have against me?”

  It sure seems like a vendetta. I think back to the Marshalls I’d met in Swoon in the summer of 1769. Marsh’s malevolent ancestor was a horse trader—a horse thief, according to Sin.

  What if he had some drama with the Forsythes, and it’s taken their daughter this long to try and settle the score? A question worth following, I suppose, but if Antonia was as timid and sheltered as Sin describes, I doubt she’d have had much personal interaction with the likes of Patrick Marshall.

  “If only I could talk to her.” Marsh begins to pace, holding herself at the elbows, holding herself together. “Reason with her, beg her . . .” Her voice breaks like a balsa model airplane.

  “Come on, Marsh.” Pen steps up and stills our girl, sits her down again. Then she looks at me and utters the S word. Like I was the star pupil in some spiritualism elective at Swonowa.

  Really, to me, medium is a burger order. Above all, let’s remember the last time I played ritual roulette—what a major fiasco that was.

  “I . . . I don’t—I never.” I flatten my lips. “What if I screw up?”

  Silence. Clearly my capacity for error is legend. Then someone points out, “Things couldn’t get much worse.” How’s that for a vote of confidence?

  We’ve all seen the same movies. Which means we don’t know jack. So a pit stop in Duck’s room so I can log on for research.

  This takes all of three minutes.

  “You got a dish or a jar or something?” I ask. “Preferably not plastic.”

  Duck dumps a cache of butterscotch from a crystal bowl onto his dresser and hands it to me. “Might this do?” I heft it. “Better not be a priceless antique.” If we do make contact and Antonia’s in a mood, I wouldn’t want her smashing it into a million pieces . . . against anyone’s skull. I indicate the pillar candles arranged along his headboard. “Grab a couple of those, too.”

  Once ensconced in the tower room, we settle onto the floor. Boy-girl-boy-girl—funny, it just works out that way, me between Tosh and Sin. Never have I felt so intensely sandwiched, but I readjust my focus. I gaze about in the splish-splash light.

  Newly finished ceiling above, shapeless humps under drop cloths, torn-apart hearth. Antonia’s carved mantel is nowhere in sight; it must have been removed for safety while the workers fix the fireplace.

  “Apparently it’s smart to start with a prayer of protection,” I say, positioning the crystal dish in the center of our circle.

  “Guess we can skip that.” After all, we’re courting a potentially evil spirit. “So, basically, I’m going to ask for access, and whatever I say, just think on it, with me. No stray thoughts.” I look to Marsh. “No jumping ahead to, ‘Where’s Charlotte?’

  ‘Where’s Crane?’ We need to be . . . present with the presence.” Squelch the gadgets, huddle in a little closer, everybody’s fingertips on the rim of the bowl. Here we go, WTF, I wing it.

  “We in this circle respectfully ask permission to make contact with the dead.” I pause a beat. “We mean no harm to anyone, alive or deceased.” Another beat. “We’re reaching out to a spirit we believe is in this house.” Beat . . . beat . . . beat . . . “If you can communicate with us, please move this planchette, or—” Whooooooooooo!

  Whoa, that was fast. The moan is low, but loud enough, coming from everywhere at once. “Are you the spirit of this house?” I ask. “Are you—”

  Whooooooooooo! Louder now. Across from me, Marsh’s features tense with a rigid mix of terror and determination. On either side, Sin and Tosh lean forward and in, their shoulders cinching mine. The whole circle tightens, like a noose.

  Whooooooooooo-hooooooooo!

  Huh? I don’t see Antonia Forsythe as the whoo-hoo type.

  And why is the mocking moan vaguely familiar?

  Booooooo-yaaaaah! And then a cackle—a cackle I know exceedingly welll. . .

  “Yo, what you playing? Duck, duck, goose or some shit?” Black muslin, white apron—the modest garb of a pre-Revolutionary housemaid sure doesn’t suit the ghost who strikes a pose above our heads.

  “Hey, Rubes,” I say. “Nice dress. So what brings you all the way to the east wing?”

  She answers my question with a question—quintessential Ruby. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?” Glancing around, I can’t tell if they’re scared or stoked or what. Mostly, they seem bewildered by our haunted hook-up—as in, how do I know this girl? And what should I tell them: Meet my bestie from the city, who’s awesome except for the fact she tried to kill me once? I keep it s
imple. “This is Ruby. We go back.” Then I latch her eyes. “The way you eavesdrop on my life, you ought to know everyone. And no offense, but I can see you anytime.”

  “None taken, chica, but you need me now,” she informs.

  “Why you think I have this stupid getup on?” Actually, I’m stymied.

  She wiggles her neck. “Damn, Dida, you’re not going anywhere without a spirit guide, and clearly that’s me.” She lifts her muslin skirt and curtsies. “I’m here to serve, m’lady. So come on, let me in.”

  Does she mean to sit among us, join the circle? I didn’t see anything online tipping me off to that. Wide-eyed with wonder, my friends trust me to do what’s best. Only Sin, who knows the whole sad Ruby story, regards her with narrowed, skeptical appraisal.

  Focusing on me, she flips in the air to hover upside down.

  “Look, first, you can lose the crystal ball, I mean bowl.” She picks it up, examines the label. “Waterford, huh? Nice. But unnecessary.” She returns it to the floor. “It’s more effective if you hold hands. So come on, scooch over . . .” Sin addresses her warily with just one word: “Why?” Somersaulting into a crouch she lets her gaze linger on his, irises of lucid amber holding steady against his onyx ore. “You know why.”

  Sin must debate internally, then he shrugs. “I believe we must allow her,” he says. “Physical contact produces energy. Energy is the essence, the substance of the human soul. Whether in living body or spectral figment or sequestered in an object, a place.

  A tree, for instance.” His case, for centuries. “Or a house.” The matter of the moment. “Of all our senses, touch is beyond intellect, beyond emotion, pure spirit.” Ruby gleams at me. “Touch, Candida!” That winsome wheedling. “I want to get corporeal for real. Touch! Even if just for a minute. Touch. It’s what we miss most, all of us—the dead and the restless. Touch. That’s what we crave here in the trenches of eternity. Touch! I know he did.” Again she tilts her chin at Sin. “I know I do.” Her smile glows with truth. “And so does she. Ooh, yeah—her especially. She craves it like crazy.”

  XXVIII

  Have you hugged your best friend today? Do it. She feels good, doesn’t she? Solid, maybe a little moist—flesh, bones, muscle, pulse. She feels like what she had for lunch and the patronizing speech she got from some authority figure and the zoom in her mood when she tried on those cute shoes she doesn’t need. She feels real. That’s how Ruby feels to me when I reach up and pull her from the air to the floor. That’s how I feel to her. The two of us on our knees, in our arms, among other people who, despite varying degrees of desperation, at this very second, don’t even exist. It’s just us. The only difference between how we feel right now and the way you feel with your girl is we know how fleeting it is. You think you’ll be there for her and her for you forever.

  Yeah. Well. We used to feel that way too. Now the tighter we hug, the less we can hold on.

  “I really want to help,” Ruby says, into my eyes, into my heart.

  Of course she does. She wants to help find Char and Crane, which is crucial, and she also wants to set right what’s wrong with us.

  “Come on then,” I tell her. “We got business.” So now she’s settled between Sin and me, everybody holding hands, and she intones, “I am open . . .” And I feel her open, become conductive, agar in a petri dish, inviting whatever disturbance or impulse I might beckon from beyond.

  “I am given,” Ruby says to the unseen spirits of Forsythe Manor. “I am able. I belong to the souls of the circle and the souls surrounding the circle; I am the circle. I am yours. Use me.”

  So I do. “Is there someone in this house that will communicate with us?” I ask. We wait. I rephrase, putting the imperative into the situation, adding a “please.” I start again: “Please, if there is—”

  “Relax, relax, won’t you? I’m coming.” The voice rises from Ruby’s throat—arched, bright, and clipped—and with a slight electrical tingle, she transforms. “Yes. Well. Here I am. Hello. How do you do?”

  The hand now in mine is a lily—soft, delicate, and white. This can’t be the hand of Antonia Forsythe, devout horticulturalist.

  “Who are you?”

  “Why, I’m Earline Hampford, of course. Call me Early.

  Everybody does, because I am so ahead of my time. But if you don’t know me, hmm—you don’t look like friends of Reg’s, but surely anything’s possible. Do you know my husband, Reginald Hampford? Dreadful bore that he is.”

  Ghost Girl sure can gab. Well, it’s not like she has to breathe.

  And who wouldn’t be an ego storm after years of dead quiet?

  Sin was a tour de force of self-involvement, yakking till dawn to deliver his story when I first summoned him. Across the circle I sense Marsh’s frustration—it’s Antonia she wants, not this chatterbox; I try to send calming vibes. Right now it’s Earline Hampford or nobody, and maybe she’ll prove a fruitful lead.

  “Would you like the nickel tour? Drafty old house, I hope not,” Early prattles on. “Can’t imagine why Reg bought it except that it was cheap, the old piker—you should hear him brag. I detest, simply detest, when he speaks about money. Terribly boring, money. I don’t know a thing about it, except how to spend it. Fortunately, Reg doesn’t require me to know anything. All I have to do is look pretty.”

  She does. A soigné sylph, twenty, tops, with a cap of corrugated platinum hair worn close to her scalp. Pausing for praise, she poses with her knees swung one way and her torso the other, lips painted crimson. And here’s a dress Ruby would approve of: slim cut, sleeveless, adorned by beaded fringe that reflects the candlelight. A matching purse dangles by a chain from one shoulder. I’m about to give Early the flattery she’s fishing for, but let’s just say her attention’s been diverted.

  “Well, well, aren’t you the big six,” she says to the boy on her right, splitting her lips into a gap-toothed smile, adorable in its imperfection. “What do they call you?”

  “They call me Sin.”

  A trilling arpeggio of laughter. “I bet they do!” Early performs a feline head butt to his shoulder, yet as she leans into Sin, her hungry eyes travel the circle. When they alight on Tosh, I think they might fall out of her head. “Eat my applesauce,” she murmurs. “I bet you’re a musician. Hmm? Do you play jazz?”

  “Uh, jazz?” Tosh seems embarrassed. “Not so much . . .”

  “No? Oh, that’s all right. You’re still the berries in my book.”

  “Hey!” This is from Pen, but Early’s occupied. “I said, ‘hey!’” My cousin is unaccustomed to being ignored. “You’re a flapper, right?”

  Early cocks her head. “Bearcat, sister,” she corrects. “No one says she’s a flapper. They call us that but, pfff, what do they know!” She lets go of my hand—the break in the chain having no ill effect on her density—and pulls several slim items from her purse. “Ciggy, anybody?” she says, offering a case around.

  Getting no takers, she sticks a smoke into a jeweled holder and lights it. “Say, how come we’re all sitting on the floor?” She squints through her ascending plume. “Some kind of game, hmm? Games are very big around here. Is it—oh!” She gasps delightedly. “I know! It’s a séance, isn’t it? I’m getting the heebie-jeebies already. Just leave it to Early Hampford to hostess a séance! I’ll certainly make the pages tomorrow—and I do mean the Hartford pages, if not all the way to Boston.” An allusion to the society section of the newspaper, no doubt. Makes sense, too. In my quick scan online earlier, I noted that spiritualism was a huge fad in the 1920s. As to Early’s continued presence without physical contact, I chalk it up to the magnetic energy of our rapt attention—as long as we find her fascinating, she’s got her hooks in.

  “Well, we reach anybody?” She seems to have ID’d me as running this spook show. “Hmm? Have we got us a ghost?”

  “In fact,” I say, “we have.”

  Early’s round eyes gape wider. “Really? Who?” I’m right in her face when I say, “You!” Then I lea
n back and let it sink in.

  “Me? Wh-what do you . . .” She chews it, swallows it, pats her sleek pelt of hair. “Hmm. Yes. Well. In all the excitement, I’d forgotten about that. I am dead, aren’t I?” I nod. “Sorry. And you must’ve died in this house—since you’re still here.”

  “And gruesomely, too.” Duck pipes up. “Since otherwise you’d be at rest.” Clearly he’s been reading up.

  “Was it gruesome?” Pen, a recent convert to gorno, naturally wants to know.

  “Oh, yes! Terribly gruesome!” Early hikes her knees up to her chest and dips her head to drain all the drama she can.

  “It was the hooch! An awful batch, but we were swilling it anyway—that was the game. The more of the nasty stuff you could handle, the more points you racked up, and I was doing splendidly, until I wasn’t, and old Reg had them put me on the chaise . . .”

  “Oh, I know about that,” Pen says. “With alcohol poisoning, you’re supposed to sleep it off on your side, not your back, so you won’t asphyxiate on your own vomit. Is that what happened?” The absence of dismemberment disappoints, apparently.

  Early’s shoulders hike and dip. “I turned the most ghastly shade of periwinkle, which clashed with my dress.” Nobody groans out loud or rolls their eyes, but the temper of our collective impatience must message Early somehow.

  “Say,” she says, crushing her ciggy in the Waterford bowl. “You people haven’t come to see me at all, have you?” I try a sympathetic expression. “Actually . . .”

  “Figures! Never could get any real swells to come out here to the boondocks after Reg locked me up and threw away the key.” She casts a theatrical glance toward the ceiling. “Now here I am, dead as a doornail, and I still can’t attract any good eggs.” She sighs and begins to fade. “Well, guess I ought to be getting back, then.”

  “No! Wait!” Marsh cries.

  Narrowing her eyes, Early appraises Marsh. Maybe she detects a resemblance, since she says, “It’s about the kid, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Marsh says quickly. “A little girl, my sister?” Early lights another cigarette. “Really, if I knew what people saw in them—kids, that is—I would’ve had one myself.” I put a hand on her arm. “Early, please,” I say. “Can you tell us anything about her, anything at all?”