Leaving Time: A Novel (52 page)

I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, letting myself come back to this world slowly. Reality is frigid; I have to dip one toe at a time and grow accustomed to the shock before wading in further.

My gaze falls on the one remnant of my past life that I have with me in South Africa. It is a club roughly two and a half feet long, maybe eight inches wide. Made from a length of a young tree; the bark has been stripped away in random swirls and stripes. It’s quite beautiful, like a native totem, but if you stare at it long enough, you would swear that there’s a message to be decoded.

The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, which became the home for our animals, had a website that let me track their progress, and also raised awareness of the work they were doing with elephants that had suffered in captivity. About five years ago, they held a Christmas auction to raise money. An elephant who had recently died had loved to pass the time by stripping trees of their bark in the most unlikely, delicate patterns; pieces of her “artwork” were being sold as donations.

I knew right away that this was Maura. I had watched her do this very thing dozens of times, pinning the logs we gave her for playtime against the bars of the barn stall, dragging her tusks to peel away the silver birch, the crusted pine.

It wasn’t odd for the Msali Elephant Orphanage in South Africa to want to support the sanctuary’s cause. They never knew I was the woman behind the check that was mailed; or that, when I received the item along with a picture of the elephant I had known so well—
R.I.P. Maura
written delicately across the top—I had cried for an hour.

For the past five years, that cylinder of wood has been hanging on the wall across from my bed. But as I watch now, it falls off the wall, hits the floor, and breaks into two clean halves.

At that moment, my phone rings.

“I’m looking for Alice Metcalf,” a man says.

My hands turn to ice. “Who’s calling?”

“Detective Mills from the Boone Police Department.”

So this is it. So now everything has caught up with me. “This is Alice Metcalf,” I murmur.

“Well, ma’am, with all due respect, you are one tough person to find.”

I close my eyes, waiting to be blamed.

“Ms. Metcalf,” the detective says, “we’ve found the body of your daughter.”

One minute I am standing in a room at a private laboratory with three other people, and the next, I’m alone in that same room, on my hands and knees looking for a tooth that has fallen.

“Can I help you?”

I jam the tooth into my pocket and turn to find a bearded man in a white coat. I approach him hesitantly, tap him hard on the shoulder. “You’re really
here
.”

He recoils, rubbing his collarbone, looking at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I am. “Yes, but why are
you
? Who let you in?”

I am not about to tell him my suspicion: that the “person” who had let me in was an earthbound spirit, a ghost. “I’m looking for an employee named Tallulah,” I say.

His features soften. “Were you a personal friend?”

Were
. I shake my head. “An acquaintance.”

“Tallulah passed away about three months ago. I guess it was a heart condition that wasn’t diagnosed? She was in the middle of training for her first half marathon.” He puts his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. “I’m really sorry to have to break the news to you.”

I stumble out of the lab, passing the secretary at the front desk and a security guard and a girl sitting on the concrete wall outside making a phone call. I can’t tell who is alive and who isn’t, so I look down at the ground, refusing to make eye contact.

In my car I turn the air-conditioning on full blast and close my eyes. Virgil had been sitting right here. Jenna had been in the backseat. I had talked to them, touched them, heard them clear as a bell.

Clear as a bell
. I take my cell phone out and start scrolling until I get to the list of recent calls. Jenna’s number should be there, from when she rang me in Tennessee, scared and alone. But then again, spirits manipulate energy all the time. The doorbell rings when no one is there; a printer goes on the fritz; lights flicker when there’s no storm.

I hit Redial, and get a recording. The number is out of service.

This just can’t be what I think it is. It can’t, I realize, because plenty of people saw me in public with Virgil and Jenna.

I turn the ignition and scream out of the parking lot, driving back to the diner where the rude waitress had serviced our table this morning. When I walk into the building, a bell jangles overhead; on the jukebox, Chrissie Hynde is singing about brass in her pocket. I crane my neck over the high red leather booths, looking for the woman who had taken our order this morning.

“Hey,” I say, interrupting her as she is serving a table full of kids in soccer uniforms. “Do you remember me?”

“I never forget a three-cent tip,” she mutters.

“How many people were at my table?”

I follow her to the cash register. “Is this a trick question? You were by yourself. Even though you ordered enough to feed half the kids in Africa.”

I open up my mouth to point out that Jenna and Virgil ordered their own meals, but that’s not true. They had told me what they wanted to eat, and had each gone to the restroom.

“I was with a man in his thirties—his hair was buzzed short, and he was wearing a flannel shirt even in this heat … and a teenage girl, who had a messy red braid …”

“Look, lady,” the waitress says, reaching beneath the till to hand me a business card. “There are places you can go for help. But this isn’t one of them.”

I glance down:
GRAFTON COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES
.

•  •  •

At the Boone Town Office, I sit down with a Red Bull and a stack of records from 2004: births, deaths, marriages.

I read Nevvie Ruehl’s death certificate so many times I think I might have memorized it.

Virgil’s death certificate is the one I find next. He died in early December.

Jenna Metcalf does not have a death certificate, of course, because her body was never found.

Until that tooth.

There was no mistake in the medical examiner’s report. Nevvie Ruehl was indeed the person who died at the sanctuary that night, and Alice Metcalf was the unconscious woman Virgil had brought to the hospital, who subsequently disappeared.

Following this logic, I finally know for sure why Alice Metcalf would not have communicated with me—or even Jenna, for that matter. Alice Metcalf, most likely, is still alive.

The last death certificate I look up belongs to Chad Allen, the teacher whose unattractive baby Jenna told me she’d been babysitting. “Did you know him?” the clerk says, looking over my shoulder.

“Not really,” I murmur.

“It was a real shame. Carbon monoxide poisoning. The whole family died. I was in his calculus class the year it happened.” She glances at the pile of papers on the table. “Do you need copies of these?”

I shake my head. I just needed to see them with my own eyes.

I thank her and walk back to my car again. I start driving aimlessly, because really, I have no idea where I go from here.

I think about the airline passenger en route to Tennessee, who buried his nose in his magazine when I started to have a conversation with Virgil. Which, to him, would have sounded like a crazy lady ranting.

I consider the time we all visited Thomas at Hartwick House—how the patients could easily see Jenna and Virgil, but the nurses and orderlies had spoken only to me.

I remember the very first day I met Jenna, when my client Mrs. Langham bolted. What was it she’d overheard me saying to Jenna? That if she didn’t leave immediately, I was going to call the cops. But of course, Mrs. Langham couldn’t see Jenna, plain as day, in my foyer. She would have thought my words had been directed at
her
.

I realize I have pulled into a familiar neighborhood. Virgil’s office building is across the street.

I park and get out of the Bug. It’s so hot today that the asphalt is swimming beneath my feet. It’s so hot that the dandelions in the cracks of the sidewalk have collapsed.

The air in the building smells different. Mustier, older. The pane of glass in the door is cracked, but I never noticed before. I walk up to the second floor, to Virgil’s office. It is locked, dark. Posted on the door is a sign:
FOR RENT. CALL HYACINTH PROPERTIES, 603-555-2390
.

My head buzzes. It’s like the beginning of a migraine, but I think it is actually the sound of everything I know, everything I believed, being challenged.

I’d always thought there was a great divide between a spirit and a ghost—the former had made it smoothly to the next plane of existence; the latter had something anchoring it to this world. The ghosts I had met before were stubborn. Sometimes they did not realize they
were dead. They’d hear the noises of people living in “their” houses, and assume
they
were the ones being haunted. They had agendas and disappointments and anger. They were trapped, and so I took it upon myself to help them get free.

But that was when I had the ability to recognize them for what they were.

I’d always thought there was a great divide between a spirit and a ghost—I just didn’t realize how small the gap was between the dead and the living.

From my purse, I take the ledger that Jenna had signed when she first came to my apartment. There’s her name, the adolescent cursive round as a string of bubbles. There is the address, 145 Greenleaf.

The residential neighborhood is exactly as it was three days ago, when Virgil and I had come to talk to Jenna, only to find that she didn’t live at this address. Now I realize that it’s entirely possible she
did
. It’s just that the current owners wouldn’t know that.

The same mother I spoke with before answers the doorbell. Her little boy still clings like a barnacle to her leg. “You again?” she says. “I already told you, I don’t know that girl.”

“I know. I’m sorry to bother you again. But I’ve had some … bad news recently about her. And I’m trying to make sense of some things.” I rub my temples with my hands. “Can you just tell me when you bought your house?”

Behind me is the soundtrack of summer: children screaming as they squeal down a Slip’n Slide next door, a dog howling behind a fence, the drone of a ride-on lawn mower. In the distance is the calliope song of the ice cream truck. This street, it’s teeming with life.

The woman looks like she’s about to shut the door in my face, but something in my voice must stop her and make her reconsider. “Two thousand,” she says. “My husband and I weren’t married yet. The woman who lived here had D-I-E-D.” She glances down at her son. “We don’t like to talk about that sort of thing in front of him, if you know what I mean. He has an overactive imagination, and sometimes it keeps him up at night.”

People are always afraid of things they don’t understand, so they dress them up in ways that are understandable. An overactive imagination. A fear of the dark. Maybe even mental illness.

I crouch down so that I am face-to-face with her son. “Who do you see?” I ask.

“A grandma,” he whispers. “And a girl.”

“They’re not going to hurt you,” I tell him. “And they’re real, no matter what anyone says. They just want to share your house, like when other kids at school want to share your toys.”

His mother yanks him away. “I’m calling 911,” she huffs.

“If your son had been born with blue hair, even though there had never been blue hair in your family tree, and even though you didn’t understand how any baby could have blue hair because you’d never come across it in your life … would you still love him?”

She starts to close the door, but I put my hand on it, pressing back to keep it open. “Would you?”

“Of course,” she says tightly.

“This isn’t any different,” I tell her.

Back in my car, I pull the ledger out of my purse and flip to the last page. Very slowly, like stitches being pulled, Jenna’s entry disappears.

As soon as I tell the desk sergeant that I’ve found human remains, I am ushered into a back room. I give the detective—a kid named Mills, who looks like he has to shave only twice a week, tops—as much information as I can. “If you look in your files, you’ll find a case from 2004 that involved a death there, back when it was an elephant sanctuary. I think this might be a second fatality.”

He looks at me curiously. “And you know this … why?”

If I tell him I am a psychic, I’m going to wind up in a room next to Thomas at the mental institution. Either that or he’ll slap handcuffs on me, sure I am a crackpot ready to confess to committing a homicide.

But Jenna and Virgil had seemed completely real to me. I had believed everything they said, when they spoke to me.