Ghost Flower (24 page)

“It wasn’t a secret conversation. And I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Then how do you explain that he spent the rest of the night quizzing everyone about what had happened to trouble you, and then he started asking questions about the party three years earlier. We wasted a lot of time carefully answering those questions. No one wants to have to do it again.”

I was struck by the word “carefully.” I said, “Everyone knew I was upset. I didn’t mention anything about the séance or Stuart,” I added. “And you don’t have to worry about me talking to him. I’m pretty sure that won’t happen again.”

“Not pretty sure. Completely sure.”

Her insistence seemed a bit extreme, but at the time I didn’t think to question it. “Fine, completely sure.”

“Good. Bain and I have discussed this ghost thing, and we think it can be a great distraction from the story of your return. As long as people are talking about the ghost, they won’t question you. The right attitude is for you to be casual about the phone call and treat it and any subsequent calls you get like a joke. That’s what Aurora would have done.”

“Okay,” I said. I decided not to tell her about the hands clawing at the door. Somehow in the bright light of day it all seemed so… improbable. Like a strange dream. But it had been real, hadn’t it? I glanced at the clock and saw it was after eight thirty. “But I have to go.”

“Where?”

“Coralee is taking me to the spa.”

“I didn’t approve that.”

“Althea did,” I told her brightly.

I pulled on some clothes and was halfway down the stairs when my phone buzzed again. The screen flashed “Coralee Gold.”

“Hell—” I began, but she didn’t even let me get it all the way out.

“Question: Where are you when you’re not with me?”

“Are you the Riddler now?”

“Answer: not where you are supposed to be. What’s keeping you?”

Before I could think of an answer, I could hear stomping up the stairs toward me. Coralee must have been waiting in the courtyard below. She was wearing an orange tube top jumpsuit with a gold-and-green necklace that looked like she’d lifted it from some maharaja’s stash and a gold bracelet on her upper arm. “It’s nice that you’re practicing for your Madame Tussauds wax figure audition, but we have footage to shoot.” She ran her eyes over my outfit, made a “turn around” gesture with one orange-and-gold-tipped fingernail, and marched me back into my room.

“Wha—” I tried to ask, but she held up her hand like a maestro demanding silence and stalked to my closet. She pulled out an electric blue tube dress and red platform sandals. “This dress, those shoes. And your jacket from last night,” she said, lifting the black fitted motorcycle jacket from the back of the chair where I’d left it. “Or maybe this one,” she said, pulling a cropped brown leather jacket out of my closet.

“I don’t need a jacket. The weather report says it’s ninety.”

“Yeah, here’s the thing. I know it’s called YouTube, but it’s actually MeTube. You do what I say.”

I put on the dress and shoes and took the jacket.

“Hot,” she said, smiling. “Very. You’re lucky I’m not worried about being upstaged. Come on, we’re late.”

I took a second to make sure you couldn’t see the note from Bain in the thesaurus where I’d moved it after Bridgette’s mention of the mattress or the photo strip I’d put in there with it. Coralee leaned around the side of the door, made a typing motion with one finger, and said, “Question: What does caps lock sound like?”

I stared at her.

“Answer: ANY DAY NOW. Come
on
.”

“I
s that your new tagline?” I asked Coralee as we walked across the courtyard and out the front door. There was a white Range Rover parked in front of Silverton House with a chrome CG set into the grill that I assumed was hers.

“I’m trying it out.” She glided a lip gloss wand around her lips and made a
swack
sound. “It’s a little cumbersome, but the uniqueness might compensate in terms of retention.”

I watched her use her phone camera to check her makeup. “You’re so smart. Why are you purposely acting dumb?”

She said, “I think if you reverse those sentences you’ll find the answer.”

Huck was in the driver’s seat of the Range Rover, and Grant was in the front passenger seat. When he turned to say hi, I felt myself blush. He was wearing a greenish-grey T-shirt that hugged his body and brought out the gold flecks in his grey eyes. There was a faint shading of light brown stubble on his cheeks, and his eyes had the slightly bruised look of someone who hadn’t gotten much sleep. He looked cute, really really cute, and I couldn’t help but think about
how I had acted the night before, thinking he wanted to kiss me when it was so obvious he didn’t—and wouldn’t.

Dumb slut
, Stuart’s voice said in my mind.
Dirty little
—

“So there’s been a change of plans,” Coralee said as Huck steered the car down the driveway. Grant was twisted around from the front passenger seat, shooting Coralee with a handheld camera. “The footage from the séance already has twenty thousand hits.”

“Twenty-two thousand,” Huck said from the driver’s seat.

Coralee held her wince long enough for the camera to get back to her and capture it. “Huck, what have I told you about talking off camera?”

“But I thought given your new concept—”

Coralee thought about that. “You have a point.”

“What new concept?” I asked, and the camera swung toward me. “Whiplash filming?”

“Not one of your best,” Coralee told me objectively. “I’ve decided we should shelve the feud and do more of a
Blair Witch
kind of thing.” She was pretending to be looking at me but was really looking at the camera in this strange three-quarter profile way. “We’re going in search of the ghost. We’re going to solve the mystery of what really happened to Liza.”

My mind flashed to the scrabbling around my door the night before. I didn’t want to get any closer to Liza than I already had. I stared directly at her. “We know what happened to Liza. She committed suicide. There is no ghost. The phone call last night was just a joke.”

“If you really believe that, then you won’t mind participating in a little experiment.”

Her tone and her expression—what I could see of it from the weird way she was facing me—made me nervous. “What does your experiment entail?”

“You just show up and look photogenic.”

“Huck, would you please stop the car?” I said.

Coralee rolled her eyes. “Fine. We’re going to shoot at the one place the ghost is nearly guaranteed to try to make contact with you. Three Lovers Point. Where Liza’s body was found.” Coralee’s orange-and-gold-tipped pinkie was gesturing frenetically below the sight line of the camera, urging me to look at it rather than her.

“But anyone could go there and pretend to be a ghost or call me while we’re there.”

“They could. Except no one but the people in this car know that’s where we’re headed.”

“Coralee tweeted that we were having breakfast at Maria’s,” Huck supplied with a hint of admiration in his voice.

“I said I was getting the corn cakes and you were getting the waffles,” Coralee informed me.

“Why does it matter what we’re not having for fake breakfast?”

“Later we’ll see if one or the other has a sales spike, and we can use that to assess our relative popularity. Market research.” Before I could even begin to imagine what to say about that, she kept going. “Since no one knows we’re going to be at Three Lovers Point, if the ghost shows up, that proves she’s real. And she is really haunting you.”

“And if she doesn’t?” I asked.

Coralee shrugged. “Then it’s probably a prank, and we shift from
Blair Witch
format to a
Law and Order
and find the culprit. Either way, it’s must see YT.”

“YT stands for YouTube,” Grant supplied for me from behind the camera.

Our eyes met for the first time that morning, and my heart leapt a little. Then he looked away, fast, and the knot in my stomach tightened.

Stop being an idiot
, I told myself.
He’s not interested in you at all. How could he be? You’re a—

“Anyway, I have a feeling she’ll appear,” Coralee said, breaking into my thoughts.

“Who—I mean, why?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” she said with a sly, almost dangerous smile.

Coralee spent the rest of the ride discussing camera angles and approaches with her crew, and my mind flipped between the nervousness growing in the pit of my stomach and what a fool I’d made of myself with Grant.

The parking lot for the trail to Three Lovers Point was empty when we pulled in, so Huck decided to mic us there. While he was busy with Coralee, I leaned against the side of the Range Rover, arms crossed over my chest, and watched as the light breeze kicked the red dust of the path into eddies that blurred the edge of the parking lot, like the ocean coming to meet the shore. Grant came around the car and leaned against it next to me.

I tipped my head and glanced toward him sideways. He gave me a nice, sort of shy smile and said, “Are you okay with this?”

I moved my eyes back to the ground, studying the lines of rust-colored dust already creeping over my feet and the toes of his navy PF Flyers. “Sure, I’m fine. What could be more fun than visiting the place where your best friend leaped to her death?” The words were out of my mouth before I’d really thought about them. I realized it was getting easier for me to be Aurora.

Grant crossed his arms over his chest, giving me a chance to admire the lean tendons of his forearms beneath the sleeves of his grey T-shirt. “Gee, when you put it that way, it does sound great.”

There was a beat of silence. We both leaped into it at the same
time. He said, “So I wanted to apologize, last night, at the end, I—” right as I said, “I’m so sorry about last night, I—”

We both stopped and started to laugh. Our eyes met, and it was like that moment the previous night when the air was so full of possibilities, when I thought he’d kiss me. My breath caught in my chest, and my knees tingled.

“Is this a joke we’re going to want to get on video?” Coralee asked, coming over. She seemed keyed up, tense but more excited than usual.

“No,” we said in unison.

“Then go get mic’ed so we can start.”

Once that was done, Huck ran ahead to set up his equipment, and Coralee and I started up with Grant shooting from behind. The path was covered in a combination of gravel and the fine red dust from the parking lot that swirled around our feet as we walked covering everything in a layer of red. It was an easy slope and would have been a cinch in sneakers, but the platform sandals Coralee had picked out for me weren’t ideal. At least staying upright gave me something to concentrate on other than the growing sense that I should not be doing this.

There were no such thing as ghosts, I knew. This experiment of Coralee’s was going to end in nothing.

Wasn’t it?

Coralee had been talking nonstop, almost a parody version of herself. But as we climbed higher, she got more somber and quiet, and she only spoke once in the last two minutes, to point out a shortcut. At first I thought it was an act for the cameras, but glancing behind me I couldn’t even see Grant. Her preoccupation fed mine, and by the time we’d neared the crest of the trail my heart was racing.

The top of the hill came as a surprise as we rounded a corner.
One moment we were winding through a pair of red rocks that had been shaved to broaden the path. The next we were standing in open air on the edge of the point. Jagged, ochre-colored rocks jutted up all around, but Three Lovers Point itself was smooth and flat, extending like a plateau over the deep canyon below. It was windier up here than it had been below. Cool, still air seemed to rise from the canyon‘s mottled lavender shadows, untouched at this early hour by sunlight.

It looked just like it had in the police photos, only there was nobody there now. And where there had been just red rocks and boulders tracing the path of Liza’s descent—I recalled Detective Ainslie’s flat-accented comment, “She seems to have hit the wall here…. bounced off and rolled the rest of the way down”—there now were hundreds of fleshy white flowers. They cascaded like a frothing waterfall from where our feet stood all the way to the bottom of the valley. It was an extraordinary, otherworldly sight.

“They’re called ghost flowers,” Coralee said, as though reading my thoughts. Her voice sounded thin and somber up here. “No one knows why they grow where they do, but it’s said that they mark the places where the souls of the dead are restless.” Now she looked not at the camera but at me. “That’s why I think she’ll come. She’s restless. She’s been waiting.”

A
chill looped itself around my spine with lithe, sticky fingers. I cleared my throat. “Waiting for what?”

Instead of answering, Coralee said, “Is your phone on?”

It was, but Huck had forgotten the phone mic, so he ran back for it while Coralee, Grant, and I stood there, staring into the canyon. I wasn’t sure if it was something about the place or the errand that had brought us there, but the silence felt like something I could touch, or feel. Like it was full of potential.

“Are you here, Liza?” Coralee said unexpectedly, making me jump. “Can you hear me?” She spoke like a mother talking to a lost child. “I brought you Aurora. Ro-ro.”

Silence, deep and profound, answered her.

“Liza, if you’re out there, please give us a sign,” Coralee said. Her tone was more heartfelt than I would have imagined, which surprised me. Didn’t Bridgette say they hated each other? “Please, Liza. We want to help. We want to give you peace.”

Silence.

“Check your phone,” Coralee snapped at me.

“I just looked at it, it hasn’t rung—” I started to say, but she cut me off.

“Just check it.”

There was nothing.

“You try,” Coralee said. “You try calling to her.”

“Liza, it’s me, Aurora,” I said. “We spoke on the phone last night?”

From behind me, where Grant was standing, I heard a stifled laugh, and I had to admit it did sound ridiculous. But Coralee’s expression was dead serious, so I went on. “I was hoping we could continue our conversation. There’s so much I want to ask you. So much I want to know. If there is any way you can get in touch with me again, you have my number or—”