Ghost Detective

by Scott William Carter

  “I can’t say more right now,” the priest said.

  “When will she be back?” Then a sinking dread came over me. “Did something happen to her?”

  “She’ll explain everything in her own time, son.”

  “Explain what? Give me some answers here!”

  The priest sighed. The doctor, saying he’d be back with some of his associates in a moment, got up and bustled past the priest without a glance in his direction. The nurse muttered something about fetching doctor so-and-so and left as well. She looked as if she wanted to cry. Even the orderlies, standing at the door like two bouncers at a bar, drifted out, closing the door quietly behind them, leaving just me and the priest. Except for the beeping and whirring of my machines and the faint hum of an air conditioner, the room was still.

  “Father,” I said, “please.”

  “I know you want answers,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t give them to you right now. I just wanted to be here when you woke up to tell you that everything will be all right. You’re going to see some very strange things now, Myron, and there’s no way I can make it easy for you. I’m afraid you’ll have to get through it on your own. It’s the only way your mind will accept it.”

  “Accept what?”

  Rather than answer, he bowed his snowy white head and turned to the door. I pleaded with him not to leave, but he kept on walking.

  In fact, he kept on walking right through the door—passing through it instead of opening it.

  Chapter 5

  With the Higher Plane Church of Spiritual Transcendence mercifully quiet Thursday morning and no rain beating on the window, the only sound in the office was me drumming my fingers on the desk. The planet Saturn wall clock, a gift from Alesha when I first rented the place, read 8:02 a.m. At 8:04 a.m., I heard creaking on the stairs, and even now, after so many years, I still had to remind myself that it didn’t guarantee it was a living, breathing person. Even when ghosts were out of sight, I often heard them in the same way I did the living.

  At 8:05 a.m., Karen walked straight through my closed door, looking radiant in a burnt orange suede suit jacket, a skirt of the same color, and elaborate leather sandals with spidery straps that extended most of the way up her elegant calves.

  “What?” she said. She clutched a beaded orange handbag to her chest. “You look disappointed.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “Would you prefer I open the door? I just thought, after yesterday—”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I was just expecting … Never mind. Please, just take a seat. I’ve been waiting for quite a while.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry. Am I late? I thought you said—”

  “Five minutes is late in my book, lady. Did you bring the picture again?”

  “What? Oh, yes, of course.”

  Flustered, she scurried into one of the office chairs across from me, sinking into the seat and clutching her bag like a teenager bucking up her courage to face the principal. She fluttered her eyes at me, her eyelids laced with just a touch of orange eye shadow. I had to admire her stylistic commitment to her appearance. Even her hoop earrings, which I glimpsed briefly inside her blond curls, were orange.

  “So,” she began hopefully, “did you decide to take the case?”

  I was formulating my answer when I heard another pair of feet creaking up the stairwell. I waited, and sure enough, Billie materialized through the door in paint-spotted blue overalls, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and no shoes. Looking like she wanted to be anywhere else but there, she slumped into the other office chair, one leg slung over the arm. Green paint flecked her forehead, and red paint flecked her bare feet.

  “Thank you for joining us,” I said.

  Billie shrugged. Karen clutched her purse tighter to her chest, as if she was afraid Billie had come to take it.

  “Hello,” she squeaked, “I’m Karen Thorne.”

  Billie rolled her eyes. “Who else? You got the picture or what?”

  “Oh. Yes, of course. Are you his—”

  “Just give me the picture.”

  With a gulp worthy of a cartoon, Karen fetched the photo from her purse. Billie snatched it out of the air and glanced at it idly, as if she couldn’t even be bothered to turn her head, but she quickly did a double take and stared at Anthony Neuman with more intense interest. I hadn’t seen her look at anything that way in my presence in months. Years, maybe. I’d forgotten the way her forehead, normally so supple and smooth, furrowed like the lightly raked sand in a Zen rock garden.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “He’s just … not what I expected, I guess.”

  “What did you expect?”

  She shrugged. “Well, based on your description—”

  “I’ve always told you that was a disguise.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s in the eyes,” I said. “I can tell by looking at the eyes.”

  “Excuse me,” Karen piped up meekly, “but can I ask what you’re talking about?”

  Billie, ignoring us both, gazed at the photo in her lap. I felt the beginnings of a headache, the familiar rising pressure, like a moth fluttering in the gully between the two hemispheres of my brain. I wanted Billie to believe me. I saw, from her point of view, how improbable it must have seemed, me recognizing my shooter in the photo in front of her, but I didn’t appreciate the dismissive tone.

  “It’s nothing,” I said to Karen. “We were just … I said he looked a little like Al Pacino, that’s all. A younger version.”

  “Oh, yes,” Karen said, “I’ve thought the same thing myself. He’s very handsome, isn’t he?”

  Billie harrumphed noncommittally. Apparently her harrumph hadn’t been noncommittal enough, because Karen looked annoyed.

  “I did some searching for him on the Internet,” I said. “I couldn’t really find any photos of him under that name.”

  “Yes,” Karen said, “Tony was weird about pictures. He didn’t like them. And what do you mean, under that name? “

  “Well, I couldn’t find anything of him on the Internet, period. Kind of odd in this day and age, don’t you think?”

  “Oh,” Karen said, clearly offended, “that doesn’t mean he’s some sort of—”

  “I don’t know what it means yet. I’ll have a friend at the bureau do a little more background digging, but in the meantime I want to get out and talk to people. I asked Billie if she could draw him, so I have something to show people until I come across a real photo—a photo in the living world, I mean. What do you think, Billie?”

  With a sigh, Billie motioned with the photo to the end of my desk. I opened the third drawer and took out the drawing pad and one of the Conté compressed charcoal sticks, a brand she claimed was easiest for her to control. While Karen watched, perplexed, I opened the pad to a blank page and set it and the black stick on the end of my desk. Billie made us endure one of her painfully long stretching routines—wrists, shoulders, fingers, joint by joint, muscle by muscle—until finally, with another sigh, she stood over the pad with her legs in a wide stance and her fingers fanned over the paper.

  I’d learned the hard way to be patient. Once I’d made the mistake of asking her why she needed to stretch when she didn’t really have a body, and she didn’t speak to me for two days.

  She closed her eyes, breathed in and out deeply, then curled the fingers of her right hand as if holding an invisible pencil. Then, when the hand holding the invisible pencil began to move, the real pencil suddenly sprang to life and scratched its way across the pad in unison. Any living person who walked into the room at that moment would have seen me alone with a haunted pencil.

  “Wow,” Karen said, “nice trick.”

  Billie cracked one eye open to glare at her. “Levitating the pencil is the easy part. But you also have to have artistic ability to draw something good.”

  “Well, I know I couldn’t do it,” Karen said. “I’m pretty good at moving objects, but I can barely draw st
ick figures.”

  At least somewhat mollified, Billie returned to concentrating on her drawing. We watched her for a few seconds, then I turned back to Karen. Outside, a truck with a bad muffler roared down Burnside, and I waited for the sound to pass.

  “Did you bring the other thing?” I asked.

  “Oh, right, the list,” Karen said.

  She retrieved a second piece of paper from her purse, a spiral sheet folded into quarters, smoothed it out, and held it out to me. I shook my head and pointed to the table. Blushing, she set the paper in front of me. There were two columns, twenty or so names on the list, descriptions of those names on the right, including whether they were alive or dead and my best bet in finding them. I took a yellow pad out of my desk and began transcribing the information.

  “Bernie Thorne,” I said, reading the first name on the list. “That’s your father?”

  She nodded.

  “And that’s the one who’s going to pay me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand I don’t work until I get paid, correct? Half the estimate up front, the other half plus expenses upon completion.” It probably wasn’t true in this case, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell her that.

  “Yes,” she said, “you explained this yesterday.”

  “It never hurts to explain it again. So what are the magic words?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What do I have to do to get him to pay?”

  She started to speak, but her eyes misted and she looked away, gathering herself before trying again. “You tell him … tell him that I finally got that diamond pony I’d always been wanting.”

  “Diamond pony?”

  “He’ll know what it means. Just be gentle with him, okay? He’s been through a lot. You sure you don’t want me coming along?”

  “No, I work best alone.”

  Billie made a strange noise, and we both stared at her. She continued to draw without looking up, leaving us to wonder what she meant. I gave up and studied the list. The rest of the names included her mother, three sisters, some clients of her father’s, a pair of dentists who lived in the condo next to theirs who often came over for dinner, and some other assorted folks. It was a good starting list, honestly better than I’d expected.

  I finished my list at the same time Billie finished her work. I glanced at the drawing of Tony and, as usual, was impressed. It was a very good likeness.

  “Good job,” I said.

  “It’s crap,” she said.

  “You’re always so hard on yourself.”

  She rolled her eyes. “We done?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  I’d barely said the words and she was already out the door.

  “Nice to meet you,” Karen called after her.

  Her voice was so earnest and hopeful, I felt bad for her when Billie passed through the door without even a backward glance. But what could I do? Like me, like all of us, she was a prisoner to Billie’s changing moods, and her moods were many and always changing.

  “Sorry about that,” I said to Karen. “She’s not one for small talk. She’s not really one for any talk, actually.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” she said, smiling furtively, and I could tell it wasn’t all right at all, that Karen Thorne wasn’t the sort of woman who was used to people resisting her charms. “Your assistant is … interesting.”

  I laughed. In Karen Thorne’s world, I knew that qualified as an insult. “Yeah, that’s one word for her. And she’s not my assistant. She’s my wife.”

  “Oh,” Karen said, and then, when the full implications of what I was saying dawned on her, “Oh. How did—”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I said.

  “Oh. I wasn’t—I wasn’t thinking about me and Tony—”

  “Sure you were. Why wouldn’t you? A ghost and a living person apparently living in heavenly matrimony? Assuming he can even see you, which is a big if, it’s got to make you wonder if a similar arrangement could work for you.”

  She was quiet a moment.

  “And does it?” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Work,” she said.

  “Ah.”

  Thinking this over, I glanced at the drawing Billie had left behind. She’d shown up, hadn’t she? Maybe she hadn’t wanted to, but she’d still come when I’d asked. She was still living in Portland with me. She hadn’t left when she could have left a long time ago. She could have left a million different times and yet she hadn’t. And there was no doubting how much I desperately needed her now.

  But did our marriage work? I wasn’t sure if Karen was asking about the whole living-with-a-ghost thing, or if she was commenting on how tense our relationship had seemed to her, but in either case the answer was the same.

  “It’s a work in progress,” I said.

  Chapter 6

  The ghosts came in all shapes and sizes, in all manner of dress, at every hour of day and night. They came when I was sleeping and when I was awake, when I was alone in my hospital room or when a crowd of doctors clucked and clamored over my chart. They came on good days and bad days and every day in between. It was impossible to say how many, because unless they made their nature obvious to me, I could not tell the living from the dead. I could not tell, not even a little, and it was the not knowing that was the worst part of it all.

  One nurse would take my pulse, her warm fingers on my wrist. The next would come in and reach to pat my arm, only to have her hand pass right through me. Mostly the ghosts were obvious but harmless; after the priest, a little girl in a deerskin dress and moccasins wandered into my hospital room asking if I’d seen her Ma. When I told her no, she curtsied and walked through the wall. Other times they were less friendly and more strange; a week after emerging from my coma, I woke to a Civil War Confederate soldier in full uniform screaming and pointing a rifle musket in my face.

  When I yelled at him to leave, he dashed to the open door of my tiny bathroom and dove headfirst into the toilet. I heard him screaming all the way down the sewer pipe.

  It wasn’t long before I was screaming, too.

  They gave me more Vicodin, then upgraded me to morphine, but it didn’t help. If anything, there were more ghosts. I woke one morning to find a truck driver with glass embedded all over his face in bed next to me. Three young men in heavy parkas and climbing boots rappelled out of the ceiling and straight through the floor, shouting about an avalanche. An entire Boy Scout troop, faces blackened and disfigured from severe burns, stood at the edge of the bed and stared silently at me, saying nothing, their eyes full of blame.

  I remembered them. My first year as a uniformed cop, their bus plummeted off an embankment in the Cascade Mountains. But I wasn’t there. I told them that—I wasn’t at the scene, not involved. They didn’t care.

  Doctors bustled in and out. There was lots of poking and prodding, lots of questionings, lots of tests of my mental abilities. I matched cards to words. I played chess. I played memory games. An army of psychiatrists—and I couldn’t say how many of them were real—asked lots of questions and nodded at all of my responses. I tried not to say anything about the ghosts. I tried very hard, telling myself it was all in my head, that it would pass. I was a rational man. Ghosts were just my subconscious mind’s way of dealing with the stress of the shooting.

  Eventually, everything became a continual blur, a smeared watercolor of faces and sounds, day and night running on a loop, time passing without any meaning.

  Alesha. My father. Other cops, some of whom I couldn’t recognize. I talked to them. I talked to the people with them, and often I got strange looks when I did. Who was I talking to anyway? The hospital blurred into my house with all my books and my French music and no Billie (where was Billie?) and my house swirled and spun and whizzed, lots of crying and screaming to leave me alone, just leave me be, no more doctors, no more questions, no more therapy, just le
ave me be leave me be leave me be.

  “Myron.”

  It was Billie’s voice. Opening my eyes, I found myself on the floor, face pressed against vinyl padding and drenching it with my slobber, arms pinned under me. I tried to move my arms and couldn’t. I rolled onto my back, squinting into the row of fluorescent lights, the room beginning to come into focus. I was in a small room indeed, not more than eight feet square, all the walls padded with the same gray vinyl as the floor, a small inset window on the similarly padded door. The reason I couldn’t move my arms was that I was wearing some kind of straitjacket.

  “Myron,” she said again. “Over here.”

  It took some doing, but with a groan I managed to rock myself to a sitting position. There she was, not by the door but crouching in the corner—in gray cargo pants, heavy hiking boots, and a green wool sweatshirt with the collar turned up. Mud smeared her pants and clung to the heavy treads of her boots. Her long black hair lay matted and tangled against the sides of her face, as if she’d been caught out in the rain. She hadn’t worn her hair that long in years.

  “Where have you been?” I asked.

  It was the only thing I could think to say, and her response was to shrug. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her. I remembered somebody saying something about her being gone, but when was that? Pulling any kind of memories out of my addled brain was impossible, and yet I saw both the room and her with vivid clarity. It was like being drunk and sober at the same time.

  “I could have used some help,” I added.

  “Sorry,” she said, but she didn’t sound sorry. She sounded angry.

  “What is this place? An asylum?”

  “Kind of,” Billie said.

  “I didn’t think we had asylums in Oregon anymore.”

  “It’s a private facility. Shady Grove Care and Treatment Center. It’s in Lake Oswego—nice place, lots of trees. Not far from where your parents live. Most people come here for drug abuse, I think.”