The Chick and the Dead (7 page)

"Fuck!" The big girl hopped around on one leg, and when the other kids laughed, she glared at them.

"It's mine," Harmony said, making another grab for the notebook. "Give it to me, Shayla. Right now."

"Give it to me. Right now." Shayla echoed Harmony's words in a singsong. She waved the notebook back and forth, careful to keep it just out of Harmony's reach.

And I had seen enough.

"Damn, but there's nothing that makes me madder than seeing somebody big and dumb pick on somebody small," I said, sauntering forward and making sure I acted like I knew what I was doing and like I belonged there.

Of course, neither was true, and if these kids thought it through, they would have realized it. But hey, I was older than they were by ten years or so. And because there were no tours scheduled at Garden View that day, I wasn't wearing the standard-issue khakis and white polo shirt. I was dressed in my own clothes—denim skirt, hot pink shirt, and a pair of darling Moschino Cheap & Chic pink polka-dot slingbacks that added another two inches to my height.

Needless to say, I made an impression. Especially in that neighborhood where they might know cheap, but they had no concept of chic. I was a princess in a sea of badly dressed (and poorly groomed, I might add) frogs, and just as I expected, the whole first-impressions thing worked like a charm. Though she acted tough on the outside, Shayla was apparently a marshmallow in the middle. She wasn't going to take the chance that I was either a social worker or a cop. She took one look at me and chucked the notebook onto the pavement. She walked away, and the show over, their fun spoiled, her posse followed along.

"You shouldn't have done that." I was so busy feeling as if I was the David who'd whomped on Goliath, I almost forgot Harmony was there. I turned to find her glaring, not at Shayla, but at me. "I didn't need your help."

"You could have fooled me." I poked my hands in my pockets and rocked back on my heels, hoping it was a less assertive pose and thinking it might smooth Harmony's ruffled feathers. "Guess I got it wrong."

"Guess you did." Harmony stooped to make a grab for the notebook, but I was too fast for her. I scooped it up off the pavement before she could.

It had opened when Shayla tossed it down, and I found myself staring at a pencil drawing of flowers. Daffodils and tulips rendered in detail and with amazing skill. I had seen the genuine article, and I knew that in real life, the flowers were sad and stunted. In the drawing, they were transformed. I felt as if I could reach out and touch each silken petal.

I looked at Harmony in wonder. "Did you draw this? These are the flowers in front of your house." She backed up and eyed me carefully. "How do you know where I live?"
I found you because of a ghost.

It was the first thought that sprang to mind, but of course, I couldn't say it. I shrugged instead and decided to play on the image I'd already established. "My name is Pepper. I check on foster kids." It wasn't really a lie. For reasons I still didn't understand, I was checking on
this
foster kid. "I just wanted to make sure that things were going well. You know. At home."

"With the Millers?" Sometime during her scuffle with Shayla, Harmony had lost her cigarette. She lit another one. "They're all right."

"They didn't worry about you not being in school today?"

She concentrated on taking a deep drag on the cigarette. "Doug and Mindy—the Millers, you know—they both work. They don't know I called in sick." She studied me through the thatch of brown/black hair that fell over her eyes. "They're okay people. They're not going to get in trouble because of me, are they?"

This, I couldn't say. Rather than doling out false hopes or hollow promises, I thumbed through Harmony's sketchbook. Page after page was filled with drawings, each of them emotionally charged. There was one of the house where she lived, and I could practically see the hopelessness of the neighborhood with every stroke of her pencil. There was another of a dog with a long snout and shaggy fur that made me want to scratch it behind the ears. There was even one of Harmony herself, and written underneath it in curling teenaged script were the words
Harmony in the Mirror
.

"You're really good." I flipped through a few more pages. At the back of the book was a drawing of Shayla. It wasn't a caricature; it was too precise for that. Still, it conveyed the big girl's personality perfectly, a cross between Baby Huey and the Jolly Green Giant. I smiled.

"Don't let her see that one." Harmony looked over my shoulder, and I realized that Shayla and her gang weren't gone, they'd just backed off. They were hanging around over near one of those Salvation Army drop-off bins, the kind that look like giant mailboxes. "I don't want to hurt her feelings."

"Why not?" I closed the notebook. "Shayla deserves to have her feelings hurt. She's a bully." Harmony's eyes were blue. She looked away. "I don't have many friends," she said.

"And you want to hang with them?" I looked over my shoulder toward where Shayla and the rest of them were standing ten feet from the clothing bin, seeing who could light a match and toss it—still flaming—into the container. Luckily, none of them had very good aim. "They're jackasses." Harmony wrinkled her nose. I guess there was nothing she could say.

I decided to change the subject and opened the sketchbook again. "You planning on studying art in college?" I asked.

Harmony laughed. Not like it was funny. More like I was the jackass this time. "Doug and Mindy can't afford to send me to college. They can't even afford to keep me with them after I'm eighteen and the state stops paying for my care. I'll get a job…" She shrugged. "I dunno. Somewhere." It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that she needed a better plan than that. After all, aside from the fact that at Harmony's age, my plans had been more in the ballpark of
rich husband
than
job
, we were both on the same road.

And I knew for a fact that it led to ruin.

Or at least to a dead-end job in the deadest of all places in town.

I hated to sound like Ella—honest—but I felt the first words of a lecture twitch against my lips. Shayla's voice stopped me.

"Hey, Harmony! Come over here, will you?"

"You're not going, are you?" I looked at the girl in wonder when she started across the parking lot.

"I told you," Harmony said, "I don't have many friends." She snatched the sketchbook out of my hands and went to join the troop of her former tormentors, and that's when it hit me: the time I'd done pretty much the same thing.

Sophomore year in high school.

Tiffany Blaine and her buddies. The coolest, best-dressed, most socially influential girls at Beachwood High School, and I was dying to find my way into the inner circle.

Even when it meant sharing (a polite word for
cheating)
on the geometry exam.

"What do you think?"

The sound of Didi's voice snapped me out of my thoughts. I found her standing right beside me.

"About Harmony?" I shook my head. It was one thing caving in to the demands of the wrong crowd when you had Daddy's influence and Daddy's money to cushion the fall. It was another when you had no one but yourself. "She's headed for trouble."

"You think?" Didi stepped back and watched what was going on across the parking lot. Shayla and Harmony were talking, and I was poised and ready to jump in should the big girl decide to get physical again. Much to my surprise, the two girls came back across the parking lot together. Shayla's head was bent; she was saying something in Harmony's ear. They stopped at the door of the grocery store, and Shayla waited. Harmony walked in alone.

I went right inside after her.

I didn't want Harmony to know I was there, so I made sure I kept my distance. I trailed behind her, through the produce aisle, past the canned goods, all the way over to a section of the store that someone who'd never seen the inside of Saks had the nerve to label "Cosmetics." In their dreams, I told myself, and watched around the corner of a display of Puffs as Harmony looked over the ninety-six-cents-a-bottle shampoo and the two-ninety-five nail polish. She glanced toward the front of the store, and when another shopper came by, she reached for a bottle of conditioner and pretended she was reading the label. When that shopper disappeared, she went for the nail polish.

I knew she would.

It was the smallest thing there, and that meant it was the easiest to pocket. Didi was nowhere around. Too bad. I wouldn't have minded a little input on the right way to handle this sticky situation. It struck me that like Harmony, I had nobody to fall back on but myself, and I trusted my instincts and followed Harmony to the checkout.

There were only two registers and one was closed, the lane blocked by a cart full of boxes of cheese crackers. The only way to the door was past a male clerk with a bad overbite and an eagle eye that looked Harmony up and down and stopped at the bulge in her jeans pocket. His thin lips twitched into a predatory smile. He made a move to come around the counter. I was faster.

Before he could step away from the register, I'd already plunked a five-dollar bill on the sticky conveyor belt (I didn't want to think about sticky with what) in front of him.

"Harmony," I said, startling the girl, who didn't know I was right behind her, "let me get that. Remember, I promised I'd pay for your next bottle of nail polish."

Harmony's spine stiffened. She reached in her pocket, pulled out the nail polish and slapped it onto the counter.

"I changed my mind," she said. "This stuff is shit. I don't want it."

"But it's exactly the color you were looking for." I smiled and added the little lilt to my voice that guys always found so irresistible. It worked on the clerk (who was so busy staring at my chest, he hardly paid any attention to what Harmony and I were talking about). Lilt or no lilt, it didn't do a thing to cool the fire that shot from Harmony's eyes when she glanced over her shoulder at me.

"I said I don't want it," she hissed.

"And I said I'll be happy to pay for it for you."

She walked away.

I grabbed my five and followed.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?"

It was the question I should have asked, but Harmony beat me to it.

"What do you mean, what am I doing?" I was filled with my share of righteous indignation, and when we got as far as the row of gumball machines lined against the wall near the front door, I stopped, my fists on my hips. "I'm trying to save you from a criminal record, that's what I'm doing. Did you think you were going to get away with that?"

Harmony raised her chin and looked me in the eye. "I would have. And now…" She glanced outside. Shayla had been waiting by the door, watching. Her lip curled, she turned and left. All the other kids did, too.

Seeing them walk away, Harmony's shoulders slumped. "She said I could hang out with them." she grumbled, "if I could prove I wanted to bad enough."

It sounded so much like what Tiffany Blaine had said to me all those years before, it made my stomach bunch. "Shoplifting doesn't prove anything," I told Harmony, ignoring the fact that for me, cheating had proved to be my entree into the in crowd. "You're going to get in trouble."

"Fuck off," Harmony said. She turned her back on me and walked away. I had no choice but to follow her out of the store, but I made sure I stayed far behind. When it came to counseling skills, I was a zero; there was no use belaboring the point. I plunked down on the bench outside the front door of the grocery store and watched Harmony head back toward home.

"Too bad the kid doesn't have more to look forward to in her life." Didi was right beside me.

"I was a fool to think I could make a difference," I admitted, and wondered if anyone who happened to glance my way thought I was talking to myself like the old guy I'd seen standing on the corner. "Nothing's going to change Harmony's life."

Didi's sigh rippled the spring air. "She'll try anything to show that she's worthy of Shayla's friendship, and when nothing works, she's going to turn to someone else for approval. I'm thinking that one tall, skinny boy. The kid with the dark hair and the little mustache. She'll get in trouble before she's a junior in high school. Guaranteed."

"You seem to know an awful lot about her."

"I know there's something that could make a difference."

I wasn't so sure, and I told Didi so. "Nothing's going to change her life."

"Money might."

I turned to my companion. "You're asking the wrong person about money."

"Am not." She smoothed her skirt and tugged at her gloves. "See, I know something you don't know." I wasn't in the mood for games. I gave her a no-nonsense look.

She gave up without a fight.

"Harmony is my granddaughter," Didi said. "She's my daughter, Judy's, girl. Judy's dead now. Cancer. When Harmony was no more than five. The girl's father was a loser. That's why Harmony is in foster care. And she's headed down the same hopeless road as my daughter. No education. A mother too young. But you know, I could still make a difference in her life. You could make a difference in her life. If you prove I wrote
So Far the Dawn
, she'll collect the royalties. Then she'll never have to worry about money—or nosebleeds like Shayla—again."

How big of a chump did Didi think I was?

Apparently, a pretty big one.

And apparently, she was right.

My heartstrings thoroughly tugged, my scruples outraged on Harmony's behalf, I agreed to do what I could to see that justice was done.

Too bad I didn't know where to begin.

The next day, I sat at my desk and drummed my fingers against the papers that sat on top of it in precarious piles like windblown snowdrifts. I'd come into the office early, raided the cemetery archives, and even spent some time doing Internet research. I Googled both "Deborah Bowman" and "Didi Bowman" and turned up nothing useful. I checked the Garden View database, and though many of our residents' files contained notes about their families or their former occupations, Didi's said nothing about either. If my latest ghostly nuisance was a mother (and thus, could have had a granddaughter), no one bothered to make mention of it. If she had ever been associated with the writing of So
Far the Dawn
…