Die Job (6 page)

“Yeah. But it still sounds like a stupid-ass idea to me,” he said, shaking his head. “Ghost hunting? What’s the point of that? I can’t see where it matters if there’s ghosts or not. What were they going to do if one showed up? Put it in a zoo?”

Maybe it was because I was sleep-deprived and worried, but what Hank said made a certain amount of sense. Scary. “I don’t know,” I said. “It was for science.” I propped my elbows on the table and let my head fall into my hands.

Hank snorted. “So, what were you doing there?”

“Chaperoning.”

“Damn fine chaperone you are.”

His words scraped my raw emotions. I’d already been beating myself up for agreeing to chaperone in the first place and for failing so miserably at it. It was at least partially my fault that Braden McCullers was in the hospital. “Thanks a lot,” I muttered.

“Not that it sounds like you could have prevented the accident,” he added graciously. “The fireworks, now . . . We’re going
to have to ticket the kid who set those off when we catch up with him. All the other kids say it was”—he checked his notebook—“an Alonso Farber.”

I was concerned that Lonnie still hadn’t turned up, but it was Hank’s first words that caught my attention. “Accident? You’re sure it was an accident?”

Hank worked his lips in and out. “Of course. What else would it be? You certainly don’t believe that ghost—Cyrus or whatever—”

“Cyril.”

“—shoved him off the landing?” He guffawed. “You need more than caffeine, Grace—you need some shut eye. Let me take you home.”

Riding home with Hank was not high on my list of things I wanted to do, but neither was sleeping in the hospital waiting room. “Okay, thanks. Just let me see if there’s any news on Braden,” I said.

When we got back to the ICU, a tall woman in surgical scrubs was talking to Braden’s parents. “A coma?” his mother said in a horrified tone, and slumped forward in a faint. The doctor and Mr. McCullers caught her before she hit the floor. A line of plum-sized plastic jack-o’-lanterns strung over the doorway wavered.

“Guess we won’t be able to talk to the kid any time soon,” Hank said, hooking his thumbs in his utility belt. He approached his partner to tell her he was running me home. She looked over, suspicion in her dark eyes, and I remembered that she’d seemed interested in Hank the last time we met. I couldn’t think of a good way to tell her she was welcome to him, so I gave a little wave and tried to look nonthreatening. After the night’s adventures, I felt about as glamorous as a manatee and was sure I had circles under my green eyes and a pasty complexion from lack of sleep. My light
brown hair was a tangled mess and my shirt had blood on it from when I’d tended to Braden. Apparently, I looked as bad as I felt because Officer Qualls smiled, said something to Hank, and turned back to the family member she was interviewing.

Hank and I rode home in the patrol car in silence. The loblolly pines lining both sides of I-95 turned the highway into a dark tunnel, and traffic was light at this hour. Hank pulled into my landlady’s driveway and got out when I did. “It feels just like old times, Grace,” Hank said. “Like when we’d come home from a date and I’d walk you to the door. Remember how your mom used to flash the porch light when we were ki—”

“It’s late and I’m beat,” I said, not wanting to encourage his romantic reminiscences. I had all those memories locked in a corner of my mind labeled: “Big Mistake. Keep Closed.” I started briskly toward my apartment, a former carriage house slightly offset from my landlady’s Victorian home.

“Maybe I could come in for a cup of joe,” Hank hinted, catching up to me easily.

“No.” I stopped at my door, unwilling to open it while he was there.

He looked taken aback but recovered quickly, giving me a broad smile. “Sure. You’re tired. Another time.”

Before I could tell him there wasn’t going to be another time, not in this life or any other where I had free will, he leaned close enough so I could smell the coffee on his breath. “Then how about a good-night kiss, for old time’s sake?”

I stared up at him, incredulity and anger fizzing through me. “What part of ‘divorced’ don’t you get?” I asked. “Not married. Not related. Not interested.”

He reared back like I’d slapped him and his smile turned to a sulky pout. “You know you don’t—”

The radio attached below his left shoulder crackled to life and spouted cop talk. Hank responded and I took advantage of his momentary distraction to open my door and slip inside, closing it firmly and leaning back against it. To think that I’d been anxious to get out and about on a Saturday night, I thought wearily as Hank stomped back toward his patrol car. I should have stuck with my original plan of a DVD, ice cream, and real estate listings.

I stepped into my small living room/dining room combo. The kitchenette sat beyond it and my bedroom was to the right. It was small, but it was more private than a unit at a huge complex and I got a break on the rent for helping Mrs. Jones with her yard and garden. Fixing myself a tuna salad sandwich, I poured a glass of milk and settled at the dinette table, too wired to sleep, despite my weariness. I eyed the packet of MLS listings, but then my gaze drifted to the box from Rothmere. Wiping my hands on a napkin, I opened it. I thought about rummaging through the box to find more letters from Clarissa but decided to enjoy the anticipation of coming across them in turn.

I unfolded the stiff paper, conscious of the creases ironed in by time. Gently spreading it flat on the table, I glanced at the signature. Spikier and darker than Clarissa’s rounded script. I began to read.

October 18, 1831

Huh. Clarissa’s mother seemed to think her daughter was losing it after Cyril’s death. Well, wouldn’t anyone be knocked off-kilter by the circumstances? I wondered who Angus was as I sifted through the box’s contents. The next few items were receipts for household purchases—boxes of beeswax tapers; sugar; Finest India tea; American secretary cabinet desk of Cherrywood, one hundred dollars; rat poison; nails; and “a large and muscular black man, Amos, for seventy and a half.” I dropped the paper, realizing it was the bill of sale for a slave. It gave me an eerie feeling. I’d enjoyed history mildly in high school and college, but it had never felt as
real
to me as it did now. Something about these documents, written by real people who used to live near St. Elizabeth, made the past seem more immediate than my stodgy history texts had, despite their glossy photos and scholarly interpretations. History and the present seemed to merge in a way I’d never noticed before.

[Sunday]

I MUST HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP AT THE TABLE BECAUSE when the phone rang, I struggled awake, disoriented, feeling stiff from hours spent slumped over the sharp-edged table. I groped for the phone, knocking one of the Rothmere ledgers to the floor. Lucy would kill me.

“How’s my favorite hair stylist?” Marty greeted me.

I smiled at the sound of his voice and pushed my hair out of my face. I pictured him relaxed in his leather recliner with his laptop on his lap—he was
always
working on a story—long legs extended, sandy hair flopping onto his forehead.

“I’m good,” I said. Well, I would be after a shower and a stretch. “And how’s my favorite reporter?”

“Bushed.”

I could hear the weariness in his voice. “Big story?”

“Um-hm.” Voices from the Sunday-morning talk shows
mumbled in the background. “The usual: politicians, corruption, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.”

I laughed, then sobered and told him about the ghost hunt and Braden.

“God, that’s awful,” he said when I finished. “I hope the kid comes out of it.”

“I’ve been reading up on Rothmere and what happened to Cyril and it’s fascinating. Listen to this.” I read him part of Annabelle’s letter.

“Sounds a little cold, doesn’t she?” he said.

I skimmed the letter again. I hadn’t been thinking of Annabelle as cold. “How do you mean?”

“Well, the bit about marrying off her daughter rather than trying to help her work through her grief. Who is the Angus guy?”

I admitted I had no idea. “Maybe I could make copies of some of the letters and bring them with me when I come up next weekend.”

A moment’s silence made my stomach knot up.

“About that . . . I don’t know if it’s going to work for this coming weekend, Grace.” The
squee
of a door opening—his closet?—came over the phone. “This story I’m on is heating up and I’m going to be balls to the wall on it for at least another ten days. You’d be bored sitting in my condo while I chase down sources, so let’s postpone, okay?”

“Oh.” Disappointment surged through me. Was this a brush-off? I didn’t have the guts to ask. “Sure, another weekend will work fine.”

“Great.” Relief tinged his voice.

Because I hadn’t made a fuss? Clicking noises filtered to my ear and I realized he was typing on the keyboard. Anger tightened my jaw. “You sound busy,” I said stiffly. “I’ll let you go.”

“I
miss you,” Marty said.

But he didn’t try to persuade me to talk longer, didn’t set a new date for my trip to DC. “Me, too,” I whispered.

I hung up and headed for the shower, feeling low. The thought that Marty and I might be growing apart made me sad. I was “in like” with him, if not in love, and I enjoyed spending time with him. The last weekend I’d spent with him in Atlanta, we’d visited the zoo where he had been a volunteer in the ape house for years, apparently. I’d stared at him in astonishment when he told me and he laughed, saying that hanging out with the apes was an intellectual and ethical step up from politicians. He’d taken me “backstage” to visit with a six-month-old orangutan named Tanga, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had such fun. Marty had an intensity about him, especially when he was probing something, trying to get to the truth, which appealed to me. His eyes fixed on me when I was talking like I was the only person in the world and that was a treat after being with Hank, whose gaze tracked every attractive woman who walked by.

We’d deliberately left things kind of loose when he moved to DC. My divorce was too fresh and his drive to succeed in his new job too powerful for us to push the still-new relationship.

“DC will be teeming with beautiful, interesting women,” I’d said on our last morning together before he left, rolling over in bed to prop myself on his chest. His skin was pale, slightly freckled, and sprinkled with wiry, sandy hairs. Sunlight streaming through the vertical blinds of his Buckhead condo striped the floor and the navy sateen coverlet.

“So?” He craned his head up to kiss my chin.

“So, we’re not . . . you know.”

“Lawyers and lobbyists? No temptation.” He pulled me down to nibble on my neck.

“I’m just saying . . .”

“I know. No strings. We’re both free to date other people.” Threading his hand through my hair, he pulled my face closer and kissed me for a long, long time. “Thing is,” he said with a smile lighting his hazel eyes when we broke apart. “I don’t want to.”

“Me, either,” I whispered.

I heard the echo of that conversation now and wondered if he was dating someone else—or a couple of someone elses—or if it was his passion for his job pulling him away from me.

Marty’s call, plus one I made to the hospital, made me late, and I arrived at the First Baptist Church barely in time to pull my choir robe over my clothes and do a few warm-up “mi-mi-mis” with the group. I sang the anthem mechanically, my mind on Marty. Part of me wanted to drive up to DC that afternoon to talk to him face-to-face, and part of me wanted to bury my head in the sand and pretend everything was hunky-dory. Replaying every word of the conversation, I walked over to Doralynn’s Café and Bakery to meet up with Mom, Althea, and the salon’s manicurist, Stella Michaelson. She goes to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church but frequently joins us for breakfast after Mass. Sometimes Rachel comes, too; I didn’t spot her this morning and figured she was at the hospital. I’d called to check on Braden before church and been handed off to an aunt who told me he was still in a coma caused by his head injury and that he had a compound fracture of his tibia and three broken ribs. The head injury, though, was the big problem. His aunt cried as she said the doctors didn’t know if he’d come out of the coma today, next week, or never.

I reached Doralynn’s as a party of at least twelve straggled out the door. A St. Elizabeth’s fixture, Doralynn’s was hugely popular with tourists and residents alike. Lots of windows and booths and tablecloths in blue and white and yellow made it cheery even on the grayest day. Ruthie Steinmetz, the owner, was chatting with customers at the register. I caught her eye and waved. Although the tourists celebrated Doralynn’s as the quintessence of Southern cooking and hospitality, Ruthie described herself as “a Jewish grandmother from Germany by way of New Jersey.” She’d opened Doralynn’s over twenty years ago and such was the power of suggestion and savvy marketing that many people believed the charming café on the square was a Southern institution.