Spooky Little Girl (29 page)

“Marcus Welby is not happy you are in his house,” Isis replied. “I think he’ll do anything to get rid of you. The frame was just the first level in his wrath. Things could get very dangerous for you here. I think a cleansing is in order right away. And I can help you.”

“What a sales pitch!” Lucy said, amazed that she had just seen such a spectacle.

“You can?” Nola breathed, clearly quite relieved.

“Certainly,” she said. “I’ll have to consult my removal team and see what works with our schedule, but as soon as I have a date, I’ll call you and let you know.”

“That’s wonderful,” Nola said. “I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight knowing that Marcus Welby is dangerous.”

“Here is my own brew of ghost repellant,” Isis said, pulling a spray bottle out of her purse with a label on it that had obviously been printed on her home computer. “It will keep you safe from Marcus Welby and other spirits until we can get them all where they need to be, and that’s out of here!”

Nola took the bottle, sprayed a tiny amount, and then sniffed it. She wrinkled her nose immediately, smelling something familiar.

“This is what you’re wearing, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It is,” Isis confirmed. “I need protection constantly. I am an open portal and am therefore quite vulnerable to spirit attacks and hostile takeovers. This keeps me safe.”

“And it will keep me safe, too, from Marcus Welby?”

“Very safe,” Isis counseled. “But be generous with it. The more you use, the more you are protected. And I can always make more!”

Then she tapped the bottle with the tip of her dirty fingernail.

“Thank you, Isis!” Nola said, relieved.

“That’ll be twenty-nine ninety-nine,” Isis replied, reaching into her giant Central American bag. “Cash, check, Visa, MasterCard, or American Express?”

“Um … Visa?” Nola said, a little confused, and then reached for her purse.

“Perfect,” Isis said with a perky smile, drawing a portable credit card processor terminal from her brightly colored hobo knapsack.

“Piece of cake,” Naunie said after Isis had bamboozled Nola out of a hundred bucks for a “consultation” fee and then had left the house. Nola had also left, opting to wait out the rest of Martin’s shift at the local Starbucks rather than be left alone in the house with the terrifying and ominous Marcus Welby. “She’s absolutely nothing to worry about. She was nothing like the last psychic I encountered. She didn’t make up some 1970s television series doctor and pretend he was haunting the house, oh, no. She zeroed in right on me, knew where I was sitting, knew what I was doing, and she certainly heard every word I said to her. But this one—Isis—she’s no better than a nickel fortune-teller at a school yard carnival. We have nothing to worry about.”

“I agree,” Lucy said cautiously. “But I think we need to be careful about this all the same. She did spot something in the picture with Tulip—and even though she identified me as a middle-aged man, I didn’t see that in the picture, you didn’t see it, and Nola didn’t originally see it. There may be some skill there. Agreed—it’s minuscule, but it might be something. I don’t feel good going into this blind.”

“Oh, what’s she gonna do?” Naunie scoffed. “Spray some of that hippie Glade room freshener on you and toss some glitter around? Really, Lucy. You’re too easily spooked for a spook. She’s after the money. Let her have it. ‘Nora’ in there deserves to get bilked.”

“Of course she does, but I don’t want to end up as a space rock circling Saturn for all of eternity next to the last bozo who was certain he could outfox a fake medium,” Lucy decided.

“Fine,” Naunie said, sounding half-insulted. “But I’m not making the call.”

“I have a feeling you never do,” Lucy said, then cupped her hands around her mouth. “RUBY!” she yelled, figuring if it had worked to get her out of a funeral home, it would work in this mess, too.

Within five minutes, Lucy and Naunie’s spook schoolteacher walked out of the bathroom.

“That’s so odd,” she said as she walked into the living room, smoothing her long black robe. “I’ve never had the elevator let me out in a bathtub before. You people must have a thing with restrooms.”

“We may have a slight problem,” Naunie began very nonchalantly.

“Good to see you, too, Clovie,” Ruby said with a smile. “What did you send flying through the air this time?”

Lucy sighed and rolled her eyes. “You did the same thing before?” she said somewhat angrily.

“What can I say?” Naunie said as she shrugged. “I have an MO.”

“She threw a digital picture frame at my boyfriend’s girlfriend,” Lucy explained.

“I did not,” Naunie protested. “I merely returned it to her.”

“Sure you did,” Lucy agreed. “At forty-five miles per hour.”

“Clovie, that temper of yours is going to throw you and your granddaughter into orbit if you don’t watch it,” Ruby warned.

“A ‘psychic’ was here today, talking about cleaning the house,” Lucy began, and the news made Ruby wince.

“That’s not good news,” Ruby replied.

“No, that’s the bad news,” Lucy reiterated. “But the good news is that she ID’d me as Marcus Welby, an angry middle-aged male ghost.”

“Marcus Welby, the kindhearted doctor from the seventies TV series played by Robert Young?” Ruby asked. “I saw every episode. He was never angry, and had a terrific bedside manner. You look nothing like him.”

“Which is more good news,” Lucy added. “She’s clearly not that skilled or fine-tuned. But the bad news: She did see my outline in a photo when neither Naunie nor I had.”

“So she may be remedial, but not that powerful,” Ruby said, thinking.

“And don’t forget the ‘ghost spray,’” Naunie reminded Lucy. “It protects her from ‘hostile takeovers.’ And she sells it.”

Ruby burst out laughing. “All right,” she started after she wiped the tears from her eyes. “If she didn’t sense you soon after entering the house, I don’t think there’s too much to be worried about. I think it’s a sham, but, to be on the safe side, you should be prepared. The best way to combat a psychic is to present a powerful front. Clovie, you’re the more powerful of the two of you, so you need to take charge in this. Together, if you combine your forces, you can fight it off, depending on how strong the light is, but that will depend on how strong the medium is.”

“That’s all?” Lucy asked. “That’s all we have to do—stick together? That sounds easy, unless we get sprayed with ghost mace, of course. Are you sure?”

Ruby shrugged. “That’s about it,” she said. “The only other thing that can add to your power is gathering energy through thought.”

“That seems simple. We need to stave off the white light by thinking about it?” Naunie asked.

“No, not exactly,” Ruby cautioned. “It’s not your thoughts that give you energy. It’s the thoughts of other people when they’re
thinking about you. Can you do something to encourage something like that?”

“Great,” Lucy said, not exactly folding, but sensing that this tactic was useless. “Everyone is angry with me for flaking out and disappearing. No one gives me a second thought. You can count me out on that front. Just in case Isis becomes the real thing overnight, I want to be prepared.”

“What did you say? Her name is Isis?” Ruby asked, holding her side and wheezing. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place.
Isis
? You have nothing to worry about. No self-respecting medium would ever call themselves that. If her name was Andrea or Dee Ann, I’d worry. But Isis? Please. She made that name up, just like her magical abilities.”

“She has a credit card terminal in her purse,” Naunie added.

“I would be surprised if she
didn’t,”
Ruby said. “You’re going to be fine. Don’t worry. Hopefully, you’ll get a couple of laughs from the whole thing.”

“Thank you, Ruby,” Lucy said, giving her teacher a hug. “I’m sorry if we bothered you.”

“Naw,” she said with a grin. “I was just getting ready to demo pulling sheets off a bed in the middle of the night.”

“I loved that section,” Naunie said with a gleam in her eye. “Maybe I’ll have to try that tonight!”

“You are going to behave,” Lucy demanded. “Unless you can get the whole world talking about you.”

Ruby said goodbye, walked back to the bathtub, and went back to teaching new ghosts how to pull sheets off the beds of the living.

The sun had just gone down, and Lucy and Naunie were busy watching Nola’s newly recorded makeover show before they erased it, when their laughter was interrupted by the shrill, still-unfamiliar sound of the telephone ringing.

The phone rang four times before the answering machine picked up.

Lucy heard a voice she knew, a voice she liked, on the other end. She motioned to Naunie to mute the TV, and when she did, she heard Jilly’s voice suddenly bloom and take over the entire house.

“—like you said, and I’m afraid you were right. I don’t have good news,” Jilly said. “Um, I’m so sorry to say this, but Tulip has several tumors on her leg, so the vet ran some tests. It turns out it’s cancer, Martin, and when they did X-rays, they saw it had spread to her chest cavity. Because of that, because it’s in such a risky spot, there’s little they can do except make her as comfortable as possible. I thought you should know. I’m sorry I had to leave a message like this, but I thought it was important to tell you right away. Call me if you want to. Goodbye.”

Lucy looked at Naunie, and Naunie reached over to the blue recliner and took her hand.

“I’m sorry, dear,” her grandmother said, tightening the grip of her paper-thin hands. “I’m so sorry.”

“I HAVE TULIP. YOU MUST CALL ME IMMEDIATELY.”

Jared read the subject line, the first in a long list of emails.

His mother had given him the laptop the day before, even though school was almost out for the summer. He had been anxious all day to come home and see what he could do on it, and the minute he and Alice had walked through the front door to their new apartment, he’d run right to the kitchen table and flipped it open. With rules firmly established by his mother and agreed upon by both parties, Jared had clicked his Internet connection and it had popped up in a second, just as it had the day before, along with the home page of the browser. And just as he’d been about to type in a different address, he’d seen something he hadn’t noticed the day before. It looked like an email address next to the word “username,” with a series of stars in the box underneath, next to the word “password.” Out of curiosity, he’d clicked the button in the third line, which read “Sign in.”

And up had popped Lucy’s email, the account she and Jilly had set up the night before Lucy had left for Alice’s, the email account that had gone unread and untouched for almost a year.

Lucy’s in-box was overflowing, each subject line still in bold, signifying that none of her emails had ever been read. It was a solid page.

“Come back!” one subject line read, along with “Where are you?” and “We miss you.”

And then, at the top, was, “I HAVE TULIP. YOU MUST CALL ME IMMEDIATELY.”

Jared stopped for a moment, unsure of what to do. Should he click on it and read it, or ignore it? It wasn’t his email. He knew he shouldn’t read it, but it seemed kind of important.

“Mom,” he finally called out from the kitchen table. “I think someone sent Aunt Lucy a ransom note.”

Alice couldn’t believe what she was reading.

It was truly incomprehensible.

She checked the date again. The year was this year. It was from the week before.

Alice’s mind was jumbled. Why would Jilly send such a message, any such message, actually, to her sister a year after? No matter how many times Alice read the email, it didn’t make sense to her. Was it
some sort of joke, or was it something else, maybe Jilly trying to deal with Lucy’s loss by emailing her, just as if she was alive?

Alice knew Jilly—not very well, but she had known her since Lucy had started dental school years ago. Alice had known her long enough to know that Jilly wasn’t a fruitcake or a psycho, metaphorically propping up a dead friend in cyberspace to have regular conversations with her.

Something definitely didn’t feel right.

Alice read the email again, and opened the next message from Jilly dated a week before the ransom note. It began like any other regular email, a cordial greeting, how are you, and then the conversational things people always put in letters—what had happened in her life, what she hoped would happen, the things she laughed about. Jilly narrated her life for Lucy, telling her the things she had done, stupid things Marianne had said, annoying policies Nola had put into practice at work. That Warren had fallen asleep in the sun and awoken with sunburned neck rings once he’d lifted his head. That she had heard from Martin, and that he had asked her for a favor.

Alice read through the next email and the next one, and the one after that. Jilly, it seemed, wrote to Lucy every week, catching her up on the latest news, gossip, and developments in the world that had been their lives. Alice scrolled all the way down to the first one Jilly had sent; it was the day Lucy died.

Jilly had done this for a year, fifty or so letters in once-a-week installments, all in the hopes that when Lucy decided to come back, she wouldn’t have missed a thing.

Jilly had no idea that her best friend was dead. And had been for almost a year. That she was writing to no one, and that she was never going to receive a reply, at least not from Lucy. Jilly didn’t
know what had happened, despite Alice’s letter to Martin and the news coverage,
both
in the papers and on TV.

Jilly, it was apparent, had never given up on Lucy, and was still waiting for her to come home.

Alice nearly hit reply, and then thought better of it. She wasn’t sure what to say, but she did know that she was not going to break the news to Jilly in a beyond-the-grave email from her sister.