Hungry Ghosts (15 page)

“Surely,” I insisted, “Tia must have told you—”

He turned toward me so that he was driving with half an eye on the road. “There's something; it's dangling at the edge of my mind. Not from last night. I'll remember later. But last night I only stayed at her place a little while. She seemed distracted, nervous, I assume, about the way she treated Jeffrey. But she didn't talk about that and it was none of my business. So we just talked about her installation. She was a great artist. It was a knockout installation, wasn't it? I had no idea she was that good.”

“So you knew her before you learned she was an artist?” Maybe he did know more about her than he was saying or than he even realized he wasn't saying. “How'd you meet?”

“The usual way.” He shot me an assessing glance. “Usual for me. She spotted me in Baltimore and did that Mike double take. I've seen it so often now it's almost like a greeting, but then it was a shock.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, six, maybe seven years ago?”

“Funny, she said yesterday what a shock it had been to see you. I just assumed that'd happened recently, I mean, here. Why was she in Baltimore? Some kind of treatment? Johns Hopkins?”

“No, no. She was taking the airporter, and there was a waiting area where I worked.”

“Was she there for medical—”

“Nothing like that. It's a lab—weapons research. And anyway, she was just visiting a guy, one of the scientists. They'd just gotten back from some kind of adventure weekend. Both of them had that exhausted, exhilarated look, you know? So when she spotted me, she was wild. She ran across the room.”

I could imagine how excited she'd have been. But I had to focus on what I was asking. “What kind of adventure?”

“Darcy, you don't get the picture. She really thought I was Mike. I had no idea what she was talking about. And then, when I did, I was blown away. When I got home I Googled him. The first stories were from San Francisco newspapers, with pictures. It was like looking in the mirror. I couldn't get it out of my mind. And then I kept watching for more, hoping, you know, like it was half me that was missing. Every year or so there'd be a story, always with pictures: once with John in uniform by a patrol car, another with Grace when she was the city liaison at the Letterman lab, and the last time with your mom outside the house—pictures to jog Mike's memory if he had amnesia. Katy told me that later.”

“My sister, Katy, planted stories?”

“To keep him in the news. All the stories had his picture. Didn't you ever see them?”

I shook my head. He couldn't have seen that, but he didn't ask again, and
I felt a rush of gratitude when he went on. “When I ended up coming out here, one of the first things I did was check the library just in case I had missed something en route, an article about him being found. I was really hoping—” He swallowed. He was looking ahead now, not so much concentrating on the road as not looking at me. “Darcy, I'm so sorry he's not back. I keep wishing, not like you do, I don't mean to say that, but just . . .”

No wonder the family had welcomed him into the fold. No one else cared this much anymore. I wanted to keep talking about Mike, to know about every news article, bask in every mention of him as long as I could. There was so much I didn't know. So much I didn't know about any of them—Mike, my siblings, Eamon himself.

“Eamon, ten, fifteen years ago you were a lab grunt, right? Now you own a building in the Barbary Coast. How'd that happen?”

“Not own, lease.” He looked toward me and grinned. “Still a big step. And your family's made everything easier. But I am good at bringing people together, seeing connections. You know, I'm actually grateful for that tedious time in the lab. It made me keep an eye out for a connection, like seeing who could be better off somewhere else.”

“So, you're a head hunter?”

“More like a head spotter—spotting heads that go together.”

Was it just modesty? Or was there more to moving these lucrative heads around? I remembered Jeffrey's observation about him letting the building inspectors think he was related to John. But that was such a small deception. “Still, you lease this pricey building and then you give it to the zendo—and you're not even a Buddhist.” I tapped his shoulder and waited till he looked over. “So, how come?”

He stretched his fingers and took his time placing them back on the wheel, as if using the time to come to a decision. “Don't go repeating this. Agreed?”

“Okay.”

“I did it as a favor to John.”

“My brother John?”

“The same.”

“Why? The world would come to an end before John Lott would ever sit himself on a zafu.”

Eamon threw his head back and howled. “Too true! It definitely wasn't that he cared about meditation. The thing was, he heard Leo was leaving the monastery in the woods. Leo had to go somewhere. He knew you were his assistant. And your mother wanted you back here.”

My mouth hung open. “It's all for me? I'm the reason for the entire zendo? There was no need for a zendo? It's just there so I would come back to San Francisco?”

“Not no need,” he said quickly. “People are coming already, aren't they?”

I nodded. My thoughts swirled. I hoped Leo didn't know the Lott family was behind his being here. Mom wanted me back that much? And John . . . I could barely take it in. And Eamon's incredibly generosity. “That's a huge favor you did for John. I've heard it called a bad luck property. Someone was telling me about it being boarded over, about ghosts and snakes—”

“Portland! That's it! I knew there was something Tia said about Mike! It was in the back of my mind; I just couldn't get it. If we hadn't been talking about coming home, I would never have made the connection. Tia said she had seen me getting on a plane in Portland. But the thing is, Darcy, I've never been in Portland.”

My whole body went light. “Really? Did she think she really saw Mike?”

“She did at the time. He was getting on a plane, so there was nothing she could do about it.”

“A plane to where?”

“She didn't say?”

“Didn't you ask?” I demanded.

“I should have. I'm sorry. The conversation went in a different direction.”

Damn! “Did she say when that was? What year, even?”

“No.” His voice was ragged; he dragged out the word as if he was raking through his memory for any scrap of a clue. My stomach was leaping, my skin quivering. It was all I could do to keep from grabbing his arm and shaking him. “I can't tell you why, but I have the feeling it wasn't recent, because . . . wait . . . because she didn't say she couldn't get to him because of her leg; she just sounded like he'd been unreachable. But that's just assumption on my part. I'm sorry. I wish I'd jumped on this, but at the time . . . and I'm really sorry, but the thing is she didn't say she was thinking it was Mike, she was couching it like she'd seen me but she couldn't be sure because I was getting on a plane. I'm sorry, but here's the truth: I just thought she was flirting.”

I felt like a thousand pounds was crashing down into the seat. So damned close! I took a breath and forced myself to take what there was. It wasn't Eamon's fault, really it wasn't. “It's okay,” I forced out. “That means he's alive! I've always known it! But this, this is proof! This changes everything. Omigod!” He braked. We were at the set—already. I hadn't even realized we were in North Beach. I looked out at the roadblock, then at my watch: 4:35
A.M
. I was already late. “Damn! Where will you be later?”

“Around the zendo. But I told you every bit I know.”

“You might remember more.”

“I won't. I'm sorry. But I don't want to get your hopes up. That's all—”

“Finally!” Robin Sparto was rapping on the car window.

I held up a hand to him and turned back to Eamon. “Thanks for everything. Really.” I shrugged at Eamon and got out.

Sparto had moved away from the car and it was a moment before I realized he'd seen Eamon and backed off. But now it was just him and me, and he was yelling. “Come on! Did you think this was a 10
A.M
. call? It's fucking twenty to five! We've only got the site till six. And then there's the light. This is a night shot, dammit!”

“So, where's the staircase?”

“I thought you lived here. Don't you know your own city? It's over there.”

I hurried over to the circle of light. The staircase was still lit only by streetlamps, but even so I could make out the steps. They were cement, the railings metal with supports every six feet—just far enough to get up enough speed to smack them hard—and the staircase had no landings. It was three stories unbroken.

This was the stair fall from Hell.

C
HAPTER
15

“W
HERE DO
I get padding, Robin?” The set was empty but for the second unit and the general support guys. The cameras were staked at the top and, presumably, bottom of the staircase and one had been suspended beside it, on a runner line, to follow the action. The street, lined with flats and small apartment buildings, had been blocked off and the company's vans and wagons were double-parked behind us. Their lights were off and they stood as dark rectangles in front of the larger dark rectangular dwellings. The permit the company had gotten would require as little light and as much silence as possible at this hour, before residents were awake. The location set looked deserted.

“Costume wagon's over there,” Robin said, pointing downhill and behind us to a van the size of a weekender for an intimate couple. “Just get the wig and the outfit. It's a skin shot. No place for pads.”

“No padding! All that saves stair falls is padding.”

“What saves them is skill. If you're not good enough . . .”

I didn't have time to waste arguing. In the costume wagon I slipped on silk drawstring pants, made to be worn lower on the hips than any nineteenth-century Chinese courtesan ever dreamed of, a camisole with all inessential cloth in tatters, and the black wig. No shoes. Even with long camera shots, there was no way to pass my sturdy stands off as tiny aphrodisiacs. There was no makeup because the camera would
never be on my face. It would catch the rolls, the arms and legs flailing, the slams into the steps and the pole railings, the head over heels, the exposed skin. And if they were lucky, the blood.

It was 4:50
A.M
. I strode to the top of the stairs. “Flashlight?” I asked the bulky blond lighting tech who was adjusting the bank of night lights.

“Don't have!”

“A lighting tech without a flashlight? On a night shoot?”

The guy shrugged.

What kind of operation was this? I had had some question about the catcher bag placement in my last gag, but that could have been just a mistake. Now, when the crew didn't have the basic equipment . . . I was on the verge of demanding, “What if that fine bank of lights started to wobble? How would you check the stand?” But I didn't have time to waste on him. I barely had time to scope the stairs and do a practice run. I needed a torch. But there was no time to comb the set.

After last night in the dark tunnel, I'd grabbed the smallest of the family stash of flashlights. I hadn't expected to need it so soon. It was meant to illumine a door lock or show a woman the makeup in one quadrant of her face. I flashed it on the steps. Unadulterated cement steps: no padding on the edges, no thin foam cover, not even a sprinkling of leaves and mulch to prevent the cement from scraping skin. Robin should have made sure the edge of every step was padded. I illumined the pipe railing uprights. The crew should have been here an hour ago spreading a strong temporary glue on the uprights' “north side”—the side invisible to the camera—to hold a strip of padding the same color as the pole, just thick enough to cushion the blow when I rolled into it. There was nothing: no padding, no glue.

“Robin!” I yelled as I stalked toward him. “What the hell is going on here? There's no padding anywhere. As long a shot as you're going to have to take on this, you could have padded the hillside.”

“This is not the spa; it's stunt work.”

“It's incompetence! Either get some padding on the uprights—”

“Hey, if you're not tough enough—”

“You'll what? Call the crowd of applicants you had waiting if I didn't call you back at eleven o'clock last night?”

“You want to have any rep in this business—”

I lowered my voice. “I already have a rep in this business, and it's for doing things right. We don't have much time. Get me glue and pad strips, and I'll do the setup myself.”

His hands were weaving back and forth, lost in their emptiness. “Fine! You set the whole thing up, but plan to do the gag in one take, because the sun's not going to wait for you to cushion every edge.” He stalked off, followed by an assistant.