Swimmer (3 page)

‘Thanks, TT,' said Jim. ‘It's nice to know that there's somebody even messier than me.'

He knelt down to pick up the cards, but while he was shuffling them back into order, TT picked one out of the deck between her teeth and walked off into the kitchen with it.

‘The hell—' said Jim, and followed her.

TT was standing over her water bowl. With great care she dropped the Grimaud card into the water, and watched it as it sank.

‘Great move,' said Jim. He knelt down and picked the card out of the water, and shook it. It was the death card, the card of the empty-eyed skeleton, the nine of clubs, wrapped in a dark gray sheet with a scythe over his shoulder and an hourglass in his hand.

‘What's this?' Jim asked her, holding up the dripping card. ‘All of a sudden you're playing boats?'

TT stared at him as if she couldn't believe how stupid he was.

‘What, then?' he demanded.

She came up to him and flicked the card out of his hand with her paw. Then she picked it up in her mouth and dropped it back in the water bowl.

‘Death in the water,' said Jim. ‘That's what you're telling me, isn't it? Death by drowning. And more than one death.'

He fished the card out of the water bowl and shook it. ‘Listen … I'm going to see Jennie and try to find out what happened. But I can't do anything more than that. I'm still leaving for Washington Wednesday, and when I'm gone, I'm gone for good. And nobody else in the world is ever going to discover that I can see their recently deceased nephew playing ball on their lawn.'

J
ennie looked smaller and much more pale than he remembered her – as if the laughing, suntanned, provocative girl that he had taught in Special Class II all those years ago had died, and this was her ghost. She was sitting in the corner of the café with a glass of mineral water, staring out of the window, and it was only when Jim walked right up to her table that she lifted her eyes, and focused them, and gave him the faintest suggestion of a smile.

‘Well, well. Jennie Bauer.'

‘Jennie Oppenheimer these days.'

Jim sat down, and ordered a Coors. ‘What happened to your son … that was terrible. I had some friends in San Fernando who lost their daughter in their pool. Tragic.'

‘You mean that she was deliberately drowned, like Mikey?'

Jim sat back in his chair and looked at her in just the same narrow-eyed way that he looked at all of his students when they flew off on some over-imaginative tangent. ‘You saw the bushes move, and you saw some wet footprints beside the pool?'

‘Somebody was there, Mr Rook. Somebody or something. I could feel it. It was cold. It was very evil. And I swear to God I'm not making this up.'

Jim's Coors arrived, in a ridiculously tall, frosted glass. Personally, he preferred it straight out of the can. All the same, he scooped up a handful of pretzels, chewed them until they were mush, and then sluiced them down with a cheek-bulging mouthful of cold beer.

‘Let me tell you this, Jennie. In my experience, spirits are not half as interested in our world, the physical world, as we are in theirs. They've lived their lives, okay? They're gone. They're too busy worrying about ridiculous little undone details, like Why didn't I tell my father I loved him when I had the chance? They don't threaten us – not very often, anyhow. And they very seldom try to hurt us. Most of the time, they can't. They don't have the … whatdyacallit? …
substance
.'

‘But somebody drowned Mike, I swear to God.'

Jim laid a hand on her arm. ‘I don't know what to say. You saw the bushes move. You saw some wet footprints beside the pool. You had the weird feeling that somebody had walked through your yard. But none of that amounts to any kind of real evidence, does it? I mean, let's be serious about this.'

Jennie stared at him. He remembered her eyes: they were such an extraordinary blue, like the windows of heaven before they broke.

‘My son drowned. You don't think I'm serious?'

‘I don't know … You're making me feel guilty. I always used to give you guys in my class the general idea that there's a mystical explanation for everything that happens. But maybe there isn't. Maybe life is just life, and accidents are accidents.'

‘You don't believe that, do you?'

Jim shrugged, and looked away. Across the crowded, brightly lit café, a pretty young girl with short blond hair was throwing her head back in laughter, and he had a sudden pang for the life that he had never lived, accidents or no accidents.

‘I don't know what to say to you, Jennie. When they
do
harm us, spirits almost always do it for a very good reason … in my experience, anyhow. Usually they harm us out of revenge. I can't think what a nine-year-old boy could have done for a spirit to want to drown him.'

‘So that's it?'

‘That's it, I'm afraid. What you saw, what you felt … maybe it was some kind of spiritual manifestation. But there's no evidence that it had anything to do with Mikey's death. And think about it: if there
was
a spirit there, it could have been trying to rescue him, not drown him. Every child has a spirit watching out for him: what some people like to think of as a guardian angel. Maybe Mikey's couldn't do anything to save him.'

Tears were sliding freely down Jennie's cheeks. ‘Is there any way to tell?'

‘Well … I've heard that some mediums can do something they call a “spirit-trace”. It's a way of, like, sniffing out a spirit's scent. That would tell you for sure if there
was
a spirit there, and it might give you some idea if the spirit meant to do Mike any harm. But apart from that, I don't think that spirit-traces are very specific.'

‘Can you do one? I could pay you for your time.'

‘A spirit-trace?' Jim shook his head. ‘Way beyond my expertise, I'm afraid. I just see things, by accident. You need a real full-blown mystic for that kind of thing.'

‘Do you know any full-blown mystics?'

‘I used to. But that was long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.'

Jennie reached across the table and took hold of both of his hands. ‘Mr Rook – Jim – please help me. I have to know how Mike died.'

‘Well, there's a psychic fair in De Longpre Park tomorrow. Maybe somebody there will be able to help you.'

‘Will you come with me?'

‘I don't know, Jennie. I'm not sure that this is really the right way to go.' Jim didn't really like having anything to do with full-time professional mystics, who always made him feel as if he was a charlatan – in spite of the fact that his psychic talent was probably far more potent than theirs.

Apart from that, he had been planning on taking his fellow teacher Karen Goudemark up the coast for the day, to Captain Flynn's Famous Seafood Shack, followed by a romantic walk on the shore. He was intent on trying to persuade her to quit her job at West Grove and come with him to Washington. Karen was the most delectable woman he had ever met. Soft, warm, feminine, funny. She had cheekbones like Garbo, with honey poured over her head for hair.

‘Please, Jim. I'll do anything.'

Jim picked up his napkin and dabbed away the tears on her face. ‘Okay. How about twelve o'clock?'

Jennie lifted his hands and kissed his knuckles. ‘You don't know what this means to me. I've been feeling like I'm going crazy.'

‘Sure,' said Jim. ‘Happens to me all the time.'

‘A psychic fair?' Karen repeated in disbelief.

‘We don't have to stay for long. I just have to find somebody who can do this special kind of spirit thing.'

‘Jim … you know I don't have any time for all of that hippie-mystical stuff.'

‘Yes, I know. But I promised. It's Jennie Bauer. She used to be in my class, about seven years ago. Her kid drowned.' He told her all about the moving bushes and the footprints, and Jennie's feeling that ‘somebody was there … It was cold. It was very evil.'

‘When did this happen?'

‘Two days ago. The poor girl's still in shock.'

‘Two days ago? And you're taking her to see a
psychic
? For God's sake, Jim, she needs a fully qualified counselor.'

‘But she's convinced that what she saw was real, and nobody else believes her. Not even her husband.'

‘And you think that somebody at a psychic fair can do that for her? Come on, Jim, you know yourself that all of this seance business is a scam. She's going to end up even more broken-hearted than she is now. And probably poorer, too.'

Jim shrugged. ‘I don't know. She's so totally sure that some evil presence came into her yard. What worries me is that if
I
don't help her, she'll go looking on her own for somebody else who will. And then – yes, I agree, there really
will
be a danger that she gets ripped off.'

Karen shook her head slowly from side to side, so that her blond hair swung across her forehead. ‘You're impossible, you know that, don't you? You seem to think it's your personal responsibility to cure the whole world of illiteracy, dyslexia, cultural alienation, lack of appreciation of Longfellow, acne and poor self-image – as well as every supernatural manifestation from Angels to Zombies.'

‘That's not true. I never said I could cure acne.'

Karen said, ‘All right, then. I'll come along to this psychic shindig. But only on one condition: that we still make it up the coast in time for lunch at Captain Flynn's.'

‘Deal. Done. Absolutely. And I love you for it.'

He led her out of her house and opened the door of his saddle-bronze Eldorado convertible with a flourish. ‘You won't regret this,' he told her. ‘Some of these psychic fairs … well, you can pick up some terrific bargains. Knitwear, pottery. Magic crystals.'

‘Let's just do it, shall we?' said Karen.

Jennie looked even paler today than she had yesterday, especially since she was wearing a black linen dress and a black chiffon scarf around her hair. She acknowledged Karen with a wan, distracted smile, and sat in the back of the car saying nothing at all as Jim drove them to De Longpre Park.

‘You heard any more from Lieutenant Harris?' Jim coaxed her.

‘Nothing. Not a word. He probably thinks I'm hysterical.'

‘You're not hysterical. If you saw something, you saw something.'

‘But that's the point. I didn't see anything, and neither did Tracey. That's why I want you to try this – whatever you call it, this spirit-trace.'

‘
Spirit-trace?
' asked Karen, with a skeptical lift of her eyebrow.

Jim leaned back in his seat as they swerved on soft, worn-out suspension around the corner from Santa Monica Boulevard into Cherokee Avenue, under the flickering shadows of the yucca trees. ‘Sure. It's a thing that professional exorcists do. Like, any spiritual manifestation will always leave some kind of evidence that it was passing by. A vibration in the air. A fragment of ectoplasm. Even a fingerprint, or a footprint. A really good psychic can pick these things up, and tell you if a spirit's been around, and what kind of a spirit it was. That's the theory, anyhow. It's a kind of psychic forensics.'

Karen took a breath, as if she were about to say something, but then she obviously changed her mind. Jim grinned at her. He guessed that she probably didn't trust herself to come out with anything polite.

They found a parking-space on the street two blocks away from De Longpre Park, in between a VW bus decorated with sunflowers and a three-wheeler motorcycle with coonskins hanging from the handlebars. The psychic fair was crowded with bearded men in bandannas and women in kaftans and children with finger-painted faces and long curly hair; as well as earnest-looking types in glasses and crumpled linen suits and Birkenstock sandals. The smell of marijuana and herbal cigarettes wafted between the tents and stalls, and brightly colored balloons bobbed up into the morning sky.

‘My God,' said Karen. ‘It's the summer of love all over again.'

‘How do you know?' asked Jim. ‘You weren't even born in 1967.'

‘And how old were you? Two?'

‘I was an early developer.'

They wandered between the stalls offering crystal healing and palm-readings and i-ching lessons and vegan meditation-burgers. In the far corner of the park, a band was playing Love's old song ‘Andmoreagain'. Jim approached a table where an elderly woman with wild gray hair and huge hoop earrings was selling psychic necklaces and dangly gipsy bracelets. ‘I'm looking for a medium.'

She took a deep suck on a suspiciously bulky cigarette. ‘You came to the right place, captain. We're wall-to-wall mediums here. Wall-to-wall.'

‘I'm looking for a special kind of medium. One who can do a spirit-trace.'

‘Spirit-trace? Wouldn't know what
that
was if it bit me in the ass. But try some of those tents along the back. How about a psychic necklace before you go? Only a ten-spot. Wear it when you go to sleep tonight, and you'll dream the day when you're going to die. Guaranteed.'

‘Guaranteed? So, if I don't die, I can bring it back for a refund?'

‘That's right. But be warned, captain. Nobody never came back yet.'

‘Okay, I'll take one. Karen, how about you?'

‘Forget it, Jim. I know when I'm going to die. In about twenty minutes, if I don't get some lunch.'

Jim handed over $10 and the gray-haired woman gave him a necklace of coins, freshwater pearls and colored beads. As he took it, however, he noticed a young woman in a low-cut black dress staring at him from the end of the next row of stalls. She had feathery black hair, layered and shiny like a raven's wing, and a startlingly white face. She stared at him for a long moment, and then she turned away and disappeared into the crowd.