Spooky Little Girl (21 page)

“I’m ready!” she said as she turned to Naunie.

“Oh!” Naunie gushed, squeezing Lucy’s shoulders. “This is going to be so much fun!”

The office looked like it had the first day Lucy had gone to work there; not a thing had changed. As Naunie and Lucy followed Nola in, Lucy noted details that had remained intact and stagnant, despite the great change there had been in her own world. The patients’ chairs in the waiting room were the exact ones that had been there for years, and in the same arrangement. The silk flowers on the reception counter in front of Marianne’s desk sat where they always had in shades of forest-green, red, and pink, with excelsior moss shoved haphazardly to mask the Styrofoam brick beneath the blooms.

It was the sameness of the office that alarmed her. Everything around her had been kept intact, kept the same; only she had been plucked out of the scenario.

Nola, always the early arriver and keeper of the time clock, got to the office about a half hour before everyone else, including Dr. Meadows, Lucy remembered. She made sure everything was in its place for the start of a bright, new dental day. As they moved through the technical rooms of the office and back toward the admin section, Lucy kept her eye out for any trace, any
thing
that
signaled she had once been there. She didn’t remember doing anything specifically to mark her spot, but you never know, she reasoned. It’s the unconscious things we do that are the most telling. They passed by the individual chairs and stations where Lucy had spent so much time assisting Dr. Meadows with gauze, the suction tool, and finding the right drill bit.

Nola passed her own work area, which was set up in an alcove next to the break room, and plopped her worn fake leather purse on top of the desk. Without stopping, she continued on to Dr. Meadows’s office, where she entered and, without hesitation, began opening the drawers of the dentist’s desk.

“Look at that!” Lucy cried to Naunie, who pushed up against Lucy in the doorway to get a better view. “She’s spying! She’s going through all of his things, like a thief!”

“That woman has no shame,” Naunie added. “What could she possibly be looking for? Money? Drugs? Dirty pictures? Wouldn’t it be great if she was blackmailing him?”

Nola ruffled through another drawer before the question was answered.

In Nola’s hands were a cloth rag, a spray can of something, and a feather duster. She used the duster first and twirled it over the pictures, clock, phone, and calendar that were precisely arranged on Dr. Meadows’s desk. She immediately straightened any item she may have knocked out of alignment. Then she deployed what was in the spray can on the rag and wiped down his desk, his chair, the oak file cabinets, and the additional two chairs that faced his desk, one in which Lucy had been sitting when she was falsely accused.

Lucy couldn’t believe what she was seeing; Nola, the chieftain and holy ruler of Dr. Meadows’s dental office, was also his maid.

“I can’t believe it,” Lucy whispered. “I had no idea she did this.”

Before Lucy and Naunie knew it, Nola came marching at them,
and the two separated barely a moment before she would have passed through them. From a closet in the break room, Nola pulled out a vacuum cleaner and headed right back to the office.

“I’ve seen enough of this show,” Naunie said, pretending to yawn. “I’m going to go explore.”

Lucy nodded, and wandered off to the cubbyholes where everyone in the office kept their personal stuff. It was all as she remembered it. She meandered up to Marianne’s desk in reception and poked her nose around, although she was not even remotely tempted to open a drawer. Marianne had a new, single picture up by her phone, and Lucy leaned in closer for a better look. It was of Jilly and Marianne drinking enormous piña coladas on chaise longues in the warm sand of the beach. Lucy knew the picture, even though she had never seen it before.

She had taken it during their vacation in Hawaii.

It was a quarter to nine, the rest of the office were due to arrive in fifteen minutes, and the bustle of the day would begin. Lucy had looked over almost the entire office, noting the familiar things, and surprised by the new things. In the hallway was a boastful, behemoth piece of equipment, what Lucy could only figure was a brand-new panoramic X-ray machine, top of the line. This certainly had not only a bell, Lucy thought, it had whistles, spotlights, and fireworks attached to it. It would have been fun to have been able to use it, she thought as she poked around the gargantuan piece of equipment that was now stationed just outside the door of the break room. Just by messing around near it, Lucy felt the pull of it and sensed the tingling in her hands that was the first sign of gathering power.
That thing just must suck it in
, she thought.
I bet their electricity bills doubled. It’s amazing what can happen in a year
.

Lucy couldn’t help but feel hurt as she rummaged through the
break room cabinets. She told herself she had every right to feel that way; here she was, dead a year, and although her best friends hadn’t gone as far as Martin to erase all traces of her, they didn’t have even one thing around to remember her by. It was a stupid idea to come here, she realized. What did she think she was going to find? Did she really expect to see some shrine of herself in the lobby or a huge Lucy portrait in the break room?

While scanning the coffee mugs to see if her favorite was still there, Lucy laughed out loud when the thought crossed her mind that, at the very least, the guilt Dr. Meadows ought to have felt for firing a girl in the last hours of her life could have been expressed with something small, yet tasteful. A plaque with an impression of Lucy’s upper and lower teeth etched onto it would have been a nice remembrance, or just a bronze-dipped suction tool with Lucy’s name and dates of service engraved into it would have been a nice gesture.

But no, there was nothing except Lucy’s favorite coffee mug, which she pulled out of the far back of the cabinet with the energy from the unexpected charge from the X-ray machine. The mug had a very light layer of dust on the bottom, as it had been placed that side up for apparently a lengthy period of time. It had a picture of Paul Bunyan and Babe, his blue ox, from one of the only times she’d been able to talk Martin into stopping at a roadside attraction the year before last when they’d driven up to the redwoods. She smiled when she thought of him scowling as she handed over the fifteen dollars for the overpriced mug, but Lucy had been living at the moment and had thought it would be a fond memory of their trip. Now it was the only hint in the whole office that Lucy had ever been there, and it was hiding deep in the back, gathering specks of age.

Just then Lucy had an idea. She put the mug on the counter,
right side up, went back to Marianne’s desk, and opened the cabinet she had seen Nola open on Lucy’s last day in the office. If no one was going to have any kind of remembrance to Lucy, she decided to make one herself. She propped the picture of Marianne and Jilly in front of the mug, spelled her name on the counter using the brightly colored letters that Marianne stuck on the spine of every patient’s file, and as a finishing touch, she slipped a drug test right into the mug, where it landed with a tiny
clink!

Lucy smiled as she looked at her rather playful tongue-in-cheek hello. If some things had still remained the same, she knew that Jilly would be the first one to see her “memorial” when she went to make the coffee, as she did first thing every morning.

She heard Jilly and Marianne laughing as they entered the front door, their voices continuing to chatter as they moved through the office, Marianne stopping at her desk, then Jilly continuing on back to the break room.

Lucy could hear Jilly’s soft, muffled footsteps approaching, hear her getting closer as she said, “Morning, Nola,” and passed the alcove, and then suddenly, there she was. Lucy’s best friend. There was Jilly, walking right past Lucy, so close that she could reach out and touch her.

If Lucy had had any breath, she would have lost it. Seeing Jilly in the flesh was so overwhelming that it shocked her. Lucy had had so much happen, had been to so many extraordinary places and done so many things that all she wanted to do was run right up to her best friend since dental school and spill it all right out in front of her. Lucy realized that if there was one thing she really missed about living, it was the living. She wanted to throw her arms around Jilly and be the friend she used to be, and then, in the next second, she wanted to pull back and demand,
What the hell, Jilly? Where were you? I was at my funeral. Why weren’t you?

Jilly stopped at her cubby, placed her purse inside, threw her lunch bag into the fridge, and then turned around, moving toward the coffeemaker. Lucy had seen her do this a thousand times, rinsing out the pot, tearing open the foil packet, tossing the coffee pouch into the machine. Jilly then went back toward the cabinet that held the mugs, with Lucy’s little hello directly beneath it on the counter.

Just then, Lucy heard some rustling, and there was a woman, older than either Lucy or Jilly, her gray hair pulled tightly back into a bun, her office scrubs flashes of teal, pink, and orange, some sort of abstract design. Obviously, Lucy’s replacement.

“Howdy, Jilly,” the woman said with a smile.

“Hey, Marcia,” Jilly replied. “Oh! I brought that book I told you about, the mystery about the Russian girl with the art gallery? It was fantastic. I read it in two days.”

“Great!” Marcia replied as she opened the fridge door and set her lunch on the top shelf. “Are we still on for Saturday night? I’m making Warren’s favorite—Gooey Butter Cake!”

“He’ll be thrilled. He loves your cake!” Jilly laughed as she opened the cabinet and reached for a mug. “He would have joined the Manson Family if they’d baited him with a slice of—”

Lucy saw Jilly staring at the mug, her mouth dropped, her eyes unmoving.

Jilly pointed at the mug. “Who did this?” she questioned.
“Who did this?”

Lucy at once realized what a terrible, horrible thing she had done. What she’d meant as playful and goofy was not that at all. It was a bad memory, a hurtful reminder.

“Marianne!” Jilly called. “Come back here!”

Marcia stood there, not saying anything. Marianne made it to the break room in seconds.

“Look at that,” Jilly said, pointing to the shrine. “Did you do that?”

“No,” Marianne said, shaking her head, looking as in shock as Jilly did.

“It’s your picture,” Jilly pointed out. “Is this supposed to be funny?”

“I d-don’t know,” Marianne stumbled. “I didn’t do it, Jilly.”

Jilly bit her lip and thought for a moment, then marched right past her co-workers, right past Lucy, and into Nola’s alcove. Lucy followed right behind her. They found Nola on the phone, imploring, “Hello? Hello?” while Naunie sat on the corner of her desk, watching her intently.

Lucy snuck behind the panoramic X-ray machine.

“Nola,” Jilly said starkly, standing before the desk rigidly.

“Yes,” the office manager replied, preoccupied with dialing a number. “Oh. Thank heavens! It’s ringing this time.”

Naunie leaned over, her crooked finger poised and rapidly going for the disconnect button.

“Hello? Hello?” Nola pleaded, then finally slammed the receiver down. “WHAT is wrong with this phone? I can’t make any calls out!”

“I think someone is playing a joke on me,” Jilly explained. “Who was here last night when you left?”

“No one, just me,” Nola answered. “I locked up.”

“Then who was here this morning? There must have been someone here. I don’t know, landlord, the cleaning people, was there a repair person here?”

“That’s ridiculous. It was just me,” Nola said as she picked up the receiver again. “There was no one here. The office was empty like it always is in the morning. Ow! Ow! Something is biting me! I’ve been bitten! They must have followed me to the office! That dog has fleas. They’ve been waging war on me all morning!”

“Someone has taken Lucy’s mug out of the cabinet and spelled out her name in chart letters in front of it. And I want to know who did that and why,” Jilly informed her, then turned around. As she began to walk back to the office, she glanced past the X-ray machine. Lucy quickly slunk back, just in time to miss being caught in Jilly’s double take due to the charge Lucy was pulling from the machine.

“How would I know that?” Nola called after her. “She’
s your
friend.”

“Was
my friend,” Jilly said almost beneath her breath.

Still perched behind the giant X-ray machine, Lucy watched as Nola chugged into the break room to see the display for herself. Once she caught a glimpse of the mug shrine, her brow tensed.

“I don’t know what that’s all about,” Nola huffed. “Why on earth would you think I would have anything to do with that? I’m the
last
person who wants anything to do with
that
person. I have to deal with her enough as it is. She’s still everywhere I look. This morning, I found a Lucy Fisher sticker on my lunch bag.”

She snatched the drug test out of the cup, threw the mug into the trash, gathered up the letters, and shoved them into the pockets of her smock.

“Now it’s gone,” she announced. “Problem solved.”

No one said anything as Nola stormed out of the break room and back to her alcove, tripping in the doorway on her suddenly untied and extended shoelace.

After a long silence, it was Marcia who spoke first.

“So …,” she started. “I take it this is the Lucy you told me about.”

Jilly nodded. Lucy moved out from behind the machine into the doorway of the break room.

“We’re not supposed to talk about her in the office,” Marianne whispered, gesturing her head toward Nola’s way.

“Do you think Nola did that?” Jilly asked, also in a whisper. “Just to get a rise out of us?”

“I don’t know,” Marianne answered simply. “It’s kinda weird.”

“Marianne, the whole thing is kinda weird,” Jilly said rather firmly.

“She did look shocked when she saw it,” Marianne concluded. “I don’t think it was Nola.”