Spooky Little Girl (28 page)

After the accident, Alice felt that even by breathing, it was a lie. Everything was a lie. It was simply not possible for things to continue on when so much she had loved had stopped existing and vanished. She found herself furious one day at a potted plant she had placed on the mantel because it got decent sun there. It had been there for years, growing, twisting, opening, living, and Alice looked at it one day and thought,
How dare you. How dare you go on like you were the same as you were last week, how dare you stay there, the same, while such a horrible thing has happened, and everything has changed. How dare you not be affected by this
. And in her anger, she pulled the plant off the mantel and put it outside, where the sun was not so kind and giving.

Time wasn’t supposed to move forward, time wasn’t supposed to pass, Alice thought. A world, a life, without her sister was ridiculous, preposterous. After Lucy’s death, there were moments that would seem normal again, but as soon as Alice got comfortable, the grief came roaring back, slapping her for even thinking anything could be right. When she thought of Martin, she seethed. It was damage enough that he had thrown Lucy out and caused all of this, but to never answer her letters, to never respond was unimaginable. To not even reply with condolences was unforgivable. A reaction from him was needed, and on a couple of instances, Alice sent another letter to remind him that her sister was dead. The letters never came back, and she never heard a word. What had Lucy been doing with a man like that? Alice had wondered bitterly. Lucy had had a knack for bringing home terrible boyfriends, but this one was so far beyond that. He had put on a good show in front of Alice, but his actions had changed her life forever and caused exceptional loss. There were times when, in her fury, she was convinced that she needed to drive down to Phoenix and let him know just how much of a
bastard she thought he was, that he needed to know just what he had done. But she eventually realized that with his resounding, silent indifference, nothing she could possibly say would matter to him, and by the same account, he didn’t deserve to understand how angry he had made her.

He wasn’t good enough to know how much she hated him.

Alice patted the nylon bag, trying to release the dust and make the cover clean again. She coughed. She zipped open the side, and there was the shiny white plastic top of Lucy’s computer. Alice was sure it still worked, and felt around for the power cord, which was tucked into a pocket on the inside.

She knew just what to do with it, and when Jared came home that afternoon from school, she handed him the bag and the computer, because she knew that if Lucy’d had a say, she would have wanted him to have it. Her sister had died with less than $400 to her name, but in her typical but reckless generosity, she had bought Jared an iPod with what little money she had the day before.

Alice heard Lucy’s voice.

“Give it to the kid,” she said.

To say that Lucy was inconsolable was an understatement. She wanted to punch Martin in the face for letting Nola get away with that. He had done some stupid things—as in pairing up with Nola—but this was unforgivable, giving away her dog.
Their dog
. Tulip was a member of the family, and to surrender her, even to a good friend, because she’d tripped an unbalanced woman was simply criminal in Lucy’s eyes. For days, Lucy roamed around the house lifeless, not wanting to do anything but sit in the memory of Tulip. Lie on the cushions she’d lain on, and collect whatever hair she could find on the couch and rugs and hold it in tight furry little bundles in her hand.

Naunie did whatever she could to bring Lucy out of it, telling dirty jokes, doing little dances, singing songs, and reenacting Nola’s remote control hissy fit, but after a while, even she figured that she needed to back off and let Lucy grieve. Lucy needed to work through this in her own time, in her own way. Even if that meant curling up on the living room rug like a dog, her nose buried in the fibers, for hours on end.

All of that was going to need to change, however, and rather quickly. A couple of weeks after Jilly took Tulip, Nola brought a friend home after work. It was odd enough to entertain the thought that Nola could even make a friend, but that she had brought one home puzzled Naunie. Lucy was burrowed into the couch, and Naunie had to pull her arm to get her attention.

“Who’s this?” Naunie said, pointing to the strange woman now in the house, who Nola was leading back into the kitchen.

Lucy saw the back of the woman’s head, with long stringy hair, go by as she walked into the hallway. “I dunno,” Lucy said, sniffling.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” Naunie said. “She doesn’t look like Nola’s type. She’s wearing some crazy big floor-length skirt, long feather earrings, and a ton of turquoise. Something’s not right.”

“How do you know?” Lucy muttered, not even looking at Naunie. “What would Nola’s type be?”

“The only thing she even owns aside from her fake nurse’s uniform is a pair of sweatpants and a Hello Kitty T-shirt,” Naunie reminded her. “That friend woman had bracelets on.
Like, forty of them.”

“Leave me alone,” Lucy whimpered. “I’m pretending that Tulip is here.”

“You wanna pretend? Okay,” Naunie said agreeably. “Let’s pretend there’s some hippie dippy psychic sitting at the kitchen table listening to Nola’s story about a picture frame boomeranging back
at her. All right, then, don’t pretend. You don’t have to, because there is a hippie dippy psychic in there right now.”

And with that, Naunie grabbed Lucy’s arm, yanked her off the couch, and led her, stumbling, into the kitchen.

“Holy shit,” Lucy gasped immediately.

“No kidding,” Naunie agreed. “What did I tell you? She’s already taken her shoes off. That is disgusting. Her feet are filthy. Only a hippie has feet like that. They’ve got more dirt on them than an archeological dig.”

“No, not her feet,” Lucy said, peering around the refrigerator. “I know that woman. She’s a patient of Dr. Meadows’s. It’s Almighty Isis! She was always trying to give me readings and tell me my future. She did that to everyone in the office to try and drum up business.”

“Wasn’t much to tell there, huh? ‘Beware of buses, Lucy,’” Naunie added. “What do you think she’s here for?”

“Oh.” Lucy laughed sarcastically. “Us. She is here for us. Nola’s got the picture frame in her hand.”

“How is your tea?” Nola asked Isis.

“Orgasmic,” Isis replied. “It would be meta-orgasmic if you had any simple agave syrup for sweetening.”

Nola shook her head and frowned dramatically. “No, I don’t have that, but I do have Sweet ’N Low,” she offered. “Shall I get it?”

Isis ignored her. “Now tell me, Nora, what you have been experiencing that you feel is paranormal.”

“Well,” Nola said, very impressed with herself that she had a story to tell that someone wanted to hear. It was clear that she was about to tell her tale of the supernatural in detail, not sparing one little iota that might be crucial in Isis’s expert diagnosis. “I was standing—”

“I sense something,” Isis interrupted quickly.

“Is it the spirit?” Nola said, sitting up in her chair, her eyes darting about the room. “Is it here?”

“It is you,” Isis said, stretching the “oo” sound in “you” out for an unnecessarily long period of time. “You have medium tendencies, don’t you?”

Nola’s eyes got sad, and she shook her head. “No,” she said, clearly ashamed. “I’m an XXL. It’s really hard to find work pants with a good fit. They get all bunched up right here.”

And then she pointed to her crotch.

“I’m referring to your antennae, your ability to pick up on things otherwise unseen,” Isis explained. “Your gift to sense things perhaps not of this world, but of the next.”

“I guess sometimes,” Nola gave in. “I certainly did see that picture frame coming at me.”

“Now,” Isis said, reaching into her Guatemalan fabric purse with the very dirty bottom to pull out an enormous pad of paper and a sparkly pen. “Recount the incident for me.”

“Well,” Nola said sharply, then stopped to take a deep breath. “I was just standing in the living room when the frame fell out of my hand. All of a sudden, it was flying over across the room, and it turned around and then came back at me. Directly at me. I ducked, and it landed on the big blue recliner out there.”

“And you didn’t have a window open? There wasn’t a breeze blowing?” Isis investigated.

“No,” Nola said. “It was early in the morning. There was no breeze.”

“And no one else was in the house?” Isis continued. “You were alone, Nora?”

“I was,” Nola confirmed.

“May I see the frame, please?” the psychic requested.

“Oh, of course,” Nola replied, and handed it over.

“Was it already broken like this when it flew across the room?” Isis queried.

Nola nodded with a crooked, forced smile.

“Can I turn it on? May I see what’s on here?” the psychic continued.

Nola nodded again and directed her to the switch on the back of the frame, which Isis turned on.

“I didn’t take those pictures, though,” she explained. “And I haven’t gotten a straight answer about who did.”

Isis pressed the manual button at the bottom of the frame and flipped through the photos, one by one, noting each frame and studying them with interest. Suddenly, her brow furrowed mightily.

She looked up at Nola. “Have you looked through these?”

“Just enough to know that they aren’t my photos,” Nola offered.

Isis scooted her chair closer to Nola’s until they were side by side and Nola could fully experience the aroma of Isis’s patchouli, the same aroma that clings to ancient recently unearthed Egyptian mummies or is infused to the mold that grows inside cheaply built houses.

“I’d like to show you something,” Isis said as Nola held her breath, not figuratively, but as a survival mechanism.

“We start out here with just basic shots, not much to them, of the couch, the chair, and in all of these, we are seeing these circular blurs—we call them orbs,” Isis explained as she went from frame to frame. “They’re in all of these, these light spheres. They are supernatural anomalies, and they are quite often captured on film when there is a paranormal presence at work.”

Isis continued to flip through the photos, pointing out the orbs to Nola in each one.

“Oh, that’s odd,” Isis muttered to herself when she flipped to a
photo of the pink electric toothbrush resting on the open toilet seat with a splatter of orbs glowing brightly like Christmas lights.

She continued on through the pictures, until she stopped at one.

“Well, look at that,” she said, with one eyebrow raised. “What do we have here?”

“What? What?” Nola asked anxiously.

Isis paused for a moment, thinking. “In all of the other photos,” she said carefully, “orbs abound. But in this one—this must be your dog—it’s just a picture of the dog with no orbs. Yet, there’s something behind it. Can you see that?”

“I’m not sure,” Nola said, still trying to not take a breath or get too close.

“What I’m seeing is in this area right behind the dog,” Isis said, circling her hand over the area on the screen. “There’s an outline there. In fact, it’s more than an outline. Do you see it now?”

Naunie looked at Lucy with alarm. “I think we should see this,” she said, and Lucy followed right behind.

On the screen, in the area where Isis was pointing, was a somewhat hazy spot up and to the left of Tulip. It was completely transparent, and difficult to make out, but there, slightly layered on top of Martin’s blue La-Z-Boy, were a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth.

Lucy gasped. “It’s me!” she said to Naunie. “There I am! Damn it.”

“Uh-oh,” Naunie warned. “This is not what we needed. I should have known better. You’re hugging Tulip, and transferring energy from her, whether you meant to or not. Not enough for a full manifest—just enough to suggest an image if you really want to see one.”

And it was clear that Isis really,
really
wanted to see one.

“I can make out a face right here,” she pointed out to Nola. “Eyes, nose, mouth, shape of the head. It’s obviously a man, with that jawline, wouldn’t you say?”

Nola nodded vigorously as her face turned purple.

“I think it’s an older man,” Isis said thoughtfully as she studied the photo. “I see a receding hairline and some jowls. Do you, Nora?”

Nola didn’t answer per se. She was too busy choking and trying to catch her breath after her will to survive kicked in right before she was due to lose consciousness.

“A man, huh?” Lucy said, trying desperately to resist picking up the frame herself and throwing it at Isis. “She thinks I’m a man? She is such an idiot. You deserve your periodontal disease, and I wish I had stayed alive long enough to root plane you.”

“She’s an asshole,” Naunie said.

“Oh, yeah, that’s certainly a man,” Isis said to herself, and nodded. “In his fifties, maybe sixties. Older. Frustrated. Resentful that he is no longer alive.”

Lucy leaned over toward the psychic’s frizzy head and bellowed, “Isis, you’re a jackass!”

Somewhat recovered and now breathing through a paper towel she had plastered over her face, Nola couldn’t have agreed more.

“A man! That would explain how the frame could have been thrown at me with such force,” Nola concluded.

“I’m getting an
M,”
Isis said as she closed her eyes and laid her palm flat on the screen. “Ma … Mar …”

“Martin?” Nola questioned, her eyes widening.

“Mar … cus!” Isis concluded. “Marcus … I’m getting a
W…
Waaaahhhh … Wahhhhh … Wel … Welp … Welby!”

“Marcus Welby?” Naunie questioned. “I suppose that makes me Barnaby Jones, then.”

“Marcus Welby.” Nola breathed with awe at Almighty Isis’s unbelievable skills of pulling names from a thirty-year-old
TV Guide
.

“Is it familiar?” Isis asked. “Does it at all sound familiar to you?”

Nola bit her lip and shook her head.

“What a fraud,” Naunie said, laughing. “I can’t believe we were afraid of that!”

“Is he an angry spirit?” Nola asked, afraid to know the answer.