Nothing but Ghosts (3 page)

D
ad’s got himself a new painting. It arrived today in a U-Haul truck, courtesy of some local museum that itself got the painting courtesy of some anonymous donor. He says that it came all mummy wrapped, not as tall as me, but more than twice as wide as I am tall. It’s so messed up, he says, that you can only see dark shadows of things—figments, he calls them, that suggest a world.

“What kind of a world?” I ask, waiting for him to
finish his lemoned asparagus, which he eats with his fingers as if each stalk were a carrot stick.

“A metropolis,” he says, raising his eyebrows and wiping his hand across his apron lap before reaching for a roll.

“Which metropolis?”

He’s sprinkled capers on the veal, like olive-colored salt pills.

“None that I’ve ever seen.” He slaps half a stick of butter on his warmed-up bread, which is something he and Mom would have fought about, except that they hardly ever fought. “At least I’ll die happy,” he’d say if she wrinkled her nose, but he’ll never say that again, because happiness, we know this absolutely now, is not what dying is about.

“So this is it now? This painting? Your next big thing?”

“Biggest canvas I’ve ever worked on.” He smiles. “A veritable mystery. It arrived at the museum wrapped
in shower curtains. Polka-dotted shower curtains that had a crust of mildew.”

“Weird,” I say.

“Which reminds me,” he says. “How is our Miss Martine?”

“Same as always.”

“Another figment, wouldn’t you agree?”

I nod and shrug at the same time. “I was up around her house today.”

“Did you knock?”

“No way. You kidding?”

“I knocked once.”

“You did?”

“Your mom sent me out with a basket of fruit. She’d heard it was Miss Martine’s birthday.”

“When was this?” I ask, and I’m about to say, And why did you never tell me?

“Your mother was pregnant with you at the time. She’d been talking to somebody who knew somebody
who knew about Miss Martine’s big day. She said that if nobody else was going to throw the heiress a party, she at least could send her some fruit.”

“Except that she sent you.”

“She did. That’s true. Because she was pregnant and I insisted.”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing happened. No one opened the door.”

“Not even Old Olson?”

“Not even.”

“That’s strange.”

“Figments,” he says. “I’m telling you.” He puts the last of the butter on his little shelf of roll, then wipes the leftover juices from his plate. He chews away and swallows down, then unties his apron. “I should go on one of those reality TV cooking shows,” he says.

“Right.”

“I should,” he says. “I would be famous.”

“I thought you already were.”

“There’s famous, and then there’s famous. I’m thinking of going for the second kind.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a painting to restore first.”

“I’ve got a painting,” he says, “to resolve.” He looks at me, and I see the dark beneath his eyes.

“I’m on cleanup duty,” I say.

“I’ll trade you cleanup duty for a call you make to Ellen or to Jessie. I’ll give you the car. I’ll lift the curfew.”

“Hey, but no thanks,” I say.

“You sure, Katie?”

“I’m sure.”

“You’re a good kid, you know. You don’t have to be a perfect one. I’m okay here, on my own.”

“Will you get out of here?” I tell him, reaching to collect his plate. “You’ll miss your show.” He looks at me with his sad eyes and drinks down the rest of his lemonade.

The weird thing about cricket song is how the sound never stops but there’s still space between the beats. On the front stoop I sit and think about this, try to picture the crickets in the grass, the way Mom once explained them to me. She said that crickets think in terms of trills and pulses, that they use their abdomens and their wings to sing, and that cricket singing is a big male thing; the females can’t get a note in. “These guy crickets just sit around all day waiting for their chance to sing,” she said, and I remember that she was brushing my hair, that we were sitting out on the stoop together, both of us in our summer pajamas; I might have been six, maybe seven. On the warmest nights, Mom said, crickets chirp the fastest, and tonight being warm, the songs are high and rapid, the songs are swelling everywhere and from all directions.

Through the door I hear the sound of the TV, the gusts of buggy laughter that have a rhythm all their own. Across the street I hear Mrs. Mack going after Sammy, begging him to climb down from the flat part
of their roof. She uses logic and kindness before she starts promising treats, and then she gets into her desperations, her bleating, as Dad likes to say, and Sammy knows it, Sammy’s king, and now Mrs. Mack is going to have to wait for her kid to get bored with her defeat. It’d be better for us all if Sammy’s dad were home more.

Then again, Sammy isn’t all bad, because he’s dropped some gifts our way, not that he would know it, or understand the irony. It was because of Sammy that Mom said that we’d all had enough. That we had to get away last summer and not just for some weekend at the shore. I was lying on my bed with a book when she poked her face through my door. “Babe,” she said, “I’ve had an idea. Let’s go find your father.” Her green eyes were full of light, the way they got when she was feeling certain. Her auburn hair was knotted back. Mom always wore skirts, even on nothing days. She had on a pair of rhinestone flip-flops.

Putting the book aside, I followed her down the long
hall, down the wide, curvy stairs, which drop beneath the photographs of my mom’s family history, beneath the portraits—bright as candles—of her mother and her father. We cut out the side door and over the drive to the garage, where Dad was at work with the radio on, singing along with some old song. “To what do I owe,” he said, looking up from his bottles, his brushes, the canvas, “the pleasure?” He snapped off the radio and removed his glasses.

Mom said, “Katie and I have some news.”

“A conspiracy,” he said.

I looked at Mom, because I still knew nothing, and because she was keeping us waiting, like she did—everything was a show with her, everything having to sparkle. “Barcelona,” she announced finally. “I’ve already bought us the tickets.” She threw her long skinny arm across my back and pulled me in tight against her.

“Barcelona?” I repeated, and the word echoed in the bigness of Dad’s work space. “Barcelona?” I
searched my head for something I might know, but in tenth-grade history we’d focused on the U.S. of A.

“When, honey?” Dad asked.

“Saturday,” my mother answered. “And it’s entirely unrefundable.”

“But Claire,” Dad said, glancing back at his canvas with a sudden look of panic. “Claire. Honey.”

“It’s all right, Jimmy. I called the Kazanjians. They’re willing to wait an extra month. They’re not even going to be around most of the summer.”

“A
month
?” Dad said. “You’ve made arrangements for a month?”

“One complete Sammy Mack–free month,” she said. “In the very heart of the Gothic quarter.”

“When did this happen?” Dad asked, still more stunned than happy. “And how?”

“Google is my new best friend,” Mom declared. Long strands of her hair had gotten loose from the clip. She shook it out, then bunched it up again. She walked between all the jars and brushes and things
and planted a big kiss on Dad, his forehead first, and then his lips. All I was thinking was how little-girl she was, how she had lately seemed, at least to me, the youngest of us three.

“I’ve always wanted to see Barcelona,” Dad said finally.

“Picasso,” she said. “Gaudí. The Rambla.” And the truth is that she was pale even then and her skirt fell loose, that if I had been smart enough, I would have known to worry, I would have guessed. But all I could see was the light in her eyes and the way Dad kissed her back and how the hair fell out of the clip again and it made her even prettier.

Sammy Mack was the excuse; that’s all. She knew. Thinking back on it all tonight, I’m certain. Sitting here on this stoop I wonder if I’ll ever be so brave as her, if she passed along her courage.

I
wasn’t hanging around for that head-banging bird; I just wasn’t going there this morning. I got out of bed when it was still dark, went downstairs, tiptoed past Dad, threw some lunch into my backpack, stuffed a granola bar into my pocket. “See ya,” I wrote on a note to Dad. “Have a blast.” Then I was on my bike, and that’s where I am now, smashing molecules with my silver zipper, breaking the atmosphere apart. It’s all big estates between our house and Miss
Martine’s. Even though it’s August, the lawns are mostly green, the border flowers mostly on fire, and I can’t hear if the cicadas are out; there’s too much wind in my ears.

The road dips, banks, straightens, banks up, and now I’m pedaling hard against an upward slant, not smashing anything. I stand and lean over my handlebars. By the time I reach the two stone posts on either side of Miss Martine’s drive, I’m completely out of breath, but here the angles work in my favor again, and I roll through, just like I always do, and start to zipper down again, rising near the house on the back of borrowed speed and sailing back down to the shed on the other side, where I park and chain my bike. Old Olson keeps some of the big machines here—the mowers, the whackers, the chain saws. The little minicart is gone, which means Old Olson is out there somewhere, and I go off toward the stream, sticking close to the dark ridge of shade. I stop behind the big birch tree and
take a long look at the house. Some of the windows are on fire with the morning sun. The big old door is shut. Nothing emerges from the shadows. No one.

No Yvonne, no Amy, no Peter yet. Maybe not even Ida or Reny. It’s an hour too soon for Danny and Owen, whose mother, power broker that she is, drops them off five minutes late each day, jabbering away on her cell phone. Beside stalks of blown-to-dust cattails I walk. Next to the windberry. Past something Yvonne calls prairie-drop seed that smells like black licorice.

At the edge of the watercress stream, by the crossing stones, I stop and make my way, looking for turtles and little green frogs and the snakes that make alphabet shapes. I’m quiet, and that’s why Old Olson doesn’t see me, doesn’t even guess that someone’s there, watching him watching the dirt that is the hole. He’s squatted down to the ground, pitched out over the edge, sifting the soil with his hands, and I get a picture in my mind of the old gold miners in my history book, searching
for their lucky strike. I can’t imagine what’s there, what Old Olson might be mining. If I ask him, I’ll destroy the quiet. The nasty bugs haven’t swarmed in yet, but there’s a bunch of butterflies—monarchs with their stained-glass wings, twirling low and high. Old Olson, I think, is not as old as his name. His arms look strong beneath his shirt. His back is as broad as Owen’s.

“Hey,” I say finally, because it feels like spying, and just like that, Old Olson bolts up straight.

“You’re early,” he says when he turns to find me.

“Yeah, well,” I say. “I guess.” His eyes are truly very tiny, blacker than blue in this light. He doesn’t seem all that glad to see me. “I’ve got this bird,” I try to explain. “This bird that wakes me up.”

“Parakeet?” he asks me.

“Finch,” I say.

He looks at me as if I’m crazy. “Come back in an hour,” he says. “With the others.”

I take the backpack from my back and sling it up
against a tree. “Outa here,” I say, and he watches me go; I feel his little eyes on me. I go back over the stones, to the stream’s other side. I walk down and down, inside the shade. I don’t turn to apologize or wave, I don’t turn for a thing.

What just happened? I ask myself.

What is Old Olson hiding?

I take another long look back at the house and decide that it’s wrong, it just is, that something as barren and sullen as that has been planted in a garden fat with color.

I
take the long road back on my way home and stop midpoint at the library, which isn’t as pretty a building as a library should be, but is huge and therefore full of something my dad calls capacity. Ms. McDermott glances up from the oak circulation desk, then gives me a longer-than-usual stare. “Sorry,” I say, because clearly my dirtiness concerns her. “I already washed my hands. I swear.”

Ms. McDermott is the coolest-looking librarian
ever—tall and thin, with straight highlighted hair and one of those noses you usually only see on magazine covers. When she puts on her glasses, it looks like she’s doing an ad for fancy glasses. When she comes out from behind her desk, you get to see her magnificent shoes. But as stylish as she is, Ms. McDermott has never been married.

“What have you gotten yourself into, Katie D’Amore?” she asks in her low librarian voice, and I tell her that I’m spending the summer at Miss Martine’s, working on the excavation team.

“It’s for a gazebo,” I explain, feeling less than lovely in my own muddy work boots and my borrowed Boston U cap.

“A gazebo,” she repeats, and her nose crinkles. “And how can I help you with that?” Ms. McDermott is perpetually helping me. Even when the school library has the goods, I prefer to come here, for her brand of advice. Most of the kids from high school do.

“Research,” I tell her. “I’m just trying to get a sense for the history of the place.”

“The history of Miss Martine’s?”

I nod.

“Well, it’s not like there’s a book on that,” she says. “Or any encyclopedia entry.”

“I once read a little,” I tell her, “on microfilm. Local newspaper stories.”

“Well, yes.” And now I can see that Ms. McDermott is thinking, that she’s forgotten for the moment about me being a filthy mess. Bringing Ms. McDermott a challenge is like doing public service. Nothing pleases her more. “Give me a minute,” she says, and she goes back into the office that sits right behind her desk, an office with windows for walls so that now I watch her work, bringing big books down from triple-thick shelves and checking the computer. She stands with her hands on her hips for a few minutes, then writes down a few things. Now she opens the door and comes
back out to the desk, and the eyes behind her glasses sparkle. Brown eyes full of light.

“We may be in luck,” she tells me, “though I can’t be sure.” She gestures for me to follow her as she leaves her post and begins to walk toward the basement steps. “Julia,” she says to the girl who is putting returned books on a shelf, “will you take over for a sec?” Julia nods, and Ms. McDermott keeps walking—a quick walk in high heels all the way down the carpeted steps. I feel a tingle of excitement.

Figments, Dad had said. Maybe. Or maybe something else.

“The story is this,” Ms. McDermott says, halfway down the steps. “A few months ago we received an anonymous gift. Big boxes marked
LOCAL LORE
just sitting outside under the overhang when I came to work one morning. Julia and I took a preliminary look, and it seems to be all twentieth-century stuff. Diaries mostly, and newspaper clippings, little ribbons and awards,
some plaques. The records of what I’d have to call an amateur historian. I just took a look at our computer log. Looks like there are references to Miss Martine in there.”

“You’re kidding,” I say, and now the tingle is a prickle.

“I am not.” Ms. McDermott laughs. “But here’s the thing: We’re understaffed this summer, Julia and I. We haven’t taken much more than a cursory glance at this gift, and so far I can’t report a rhyme or reason to it. It’s as if someone tossed an attic’s worth of papers into however many boxes were required, then drove it all here to us in the dark and disappeared before we could ask questions.”

“I don’t mind,” I say.

“There are seven boxes, Katie.”

“It’s not like I have to get all my research done today.”

“Here is what I’m thinking, then. I’ll set you up
in a study room—we’ve got plenty of spare ones in summer. You come in when you can and come to circulation for a key, and you can do your investigating on your own. All I ask is that you leave the boxes neater than you find them. Organize as you go, if you would, by dates or by themes, whatever seems best, and when you’re done, lock up, give us the key. Let us know if you stumble onto something big.”

“I will,” I promise. Ms. McDermott studies me for a moment, pulling her fingers through her hair. She balances on top of her fabulous shoes. Then she continues down the hall, stops at a door, turns the lock with the key that hangs from the ribbon around her neck. When she flips on the lights, I’m beside her. I see a room full of cartons, boxes, books that have escaped their bindings.

“You have just been introduced to the library’s dirty laundry,” she says.

She walks toward one long folding table, where the
seven boxes sit, each one marked, as promised,
LOCAL LORE
. “This is it,” she says. “I’ll have them transferred to a study room tomorrow. Bring your own paper. Use pencils only. Be careful, as you can never tell what treasures might be found.”

“This is awesome,” I say. “I mean, like, totally unexpected. Like I didn’t really think that I would find
this
much.”

“Remember something, Katie,” Ms. McDermott cautions. “History is never absolute truth. It’s parcels and string and suppositions. It’s what you make of it.”

“Okay.”

“Miss Martine is a legend around here. Things have been rumored and whispered. But before she was a legend, she was just a girl, and after that, she was just a young woman. “

“I guess so.”

“Don’t come to any quick conclusions is what I’m
saying. Whatever you’re searching for, don’t be too quick to find it.”

“Thank you, Ms. McDermott.”

“Tomorrow,” she says, “we’ll be all set up for you.”

“You know, Babe,” Dad says when I finally walk in, an hour late at least, probably more, “you shouldn’t keep your personal chef waiting. Did you know, for example, that roast beef cooks itself, even after you remove it from the oven?” Dad has his jewelry of many eyeglasses around his neck, his thickest pair high on his head. He’s way overdue for a haircut. Dinner has been sliced, scooped, served. He has removed his apron.

“I didn’t know.”

“We’ve lost our pink center.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“You’ve got a phone,” he says. “You could have called.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“I should hope not.”

Sitting down to a meal all sweaty and muddy is not my idea of polite. But if I go upstairs to shower and change, I’ll leave Dad waiting longer. Gingerly, I pull out my chair.

“Were you having tea with Miss Martine?” Dad asks.

“You’re funny,” I say. “Ha-ha.”

“Or a date with one of those Santopolo boys?”

“Yup. Dressed like this. I’m such a turn-on.”

“So where were you, then?”

“At the library, with Ms. McDermott.”

“You stood me up for books?”

“That wasn’t my objective.”

“What were you thinking?”

I slice into the roast beef, pushing a portion into the pillow of mashed potatoes that Dad has made from scratch, judging from the looks of the counter behind
him. “There was this weird thing that happened at the estate today. Something that went down with Old Olson.”

Dad’s face goes from angry to worried in an instant. “What was that?”

“It’s just that—I don’t know. This morning I was early, right? And I thought I’d just get working. But when I got to the excavation site, Old Olson was alone. He was at the edge of the hole we’re digging, sifting for something with his hands, but that wasn’t the thing that made me wonder. It was what happened afterward.”

“Which was?”

“He turned and saw me, and he wasn’t happy. He asked me to come back in an hour. Basically insisted on it.”

“Didn’t want your help?”

“Wanted me gone is more like it. Probably it’s nothing, but still, I couldn’t shake this feeling.”

“What feeling?”

“Like he was hiding something.”

“I see. And how does Ms. McDermott figure?”

“Research.”

“Okay.”

“Just a little investigating.”

“What do you imagine that you’ll learn from the past?”

“Something more about Miss Martine and her secret.”

“Why are you so sure that she
has
a secret?”

“Well, I mean, isn’t it obvious? Beautiful rich woman disappears and never so much as shows her face all these decades later?”

“You think you can find the truth in a library?”

“I think that I can try.”

“You think it’s any of your business?”

I nod.

“Why?”

“Everybody’s story is a lesson,” I say, quoting from Mr. Weisler at school. Mr. Weisler is a total pain-in-the-butt kind of American lit teacher, but still you remember what he says.

“It’s summer,” Dad says. “Give yourself a break.”

I dig deeper into my mashed potatoes, take a bite of the green beans with their fancy almond slivers. I sigh and don’t talk for a while. “Dad,” I say finally, “this is one luscious dinner.”

“Imagine it warm,” he says.