Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense Page 3

  I just know I saw Rachel walk on water that night.

  6

  I’ve neatly placed a collection of snapshots in rows of five on the motel room’s desk. Wide eyes and closed ones. Baby toes and yellowed teeth. Cut-off heads and the blur of legs, running. Some are filler, to sift out Carl’s lies. Some are mute witnesses who can speak only to him.

  This is Carl’s first test. After a couple of hours of my driving, he fidgets in the chair, eager to get this over with and watch TV without having to barter with Mrs. T’s other houseguests.

  There are twenty photographs in all. Nothing arty, just normal point-and-shoot. There are at least fifty others in the lime green Tupperware container in the trunk of the rental car.

  Family picnics and birthday parties, Christmases and Easter egg hunts, graduations and weddings. When the camera sees happy smiles, I imagine the worms wriggling underneath. The mean daddies, the cheating brides, the rotten eggs, the thoughtless presents.

  “That’s me.” This is true. I point to an adolescent girl reveling in the corn chip smell of two puppies my dad let Rachel and me pick out at the animal shelter. I named one Biscuit because he was the color of a biscuit. My sister instantly named the other Gravy.

  No response from Carl. I push aside a scratchpad on the desk that unabashedly reads Waco’s Dollar Inn: By the minute, by the month and spread some of the pictures a little farther apart. “That’s you in college.” I stab at an image of five boys in Kappa Alpha T-shirts, raising Bud Lights in the air. “You’re the one on the far right.” He stares at the face blankly. I’m lying. I have no idea who these boys are.

  I pick up the picture next to it. “This is Uncle Jim and Aunt Louisa in front of their house.” True. Someone has written Uncle Jim & Aunt Louisa in pencil on the back.

  “Pretty crappy house,” he says. “Are they dead? Bet they wish they were dead.”

  It’s after nine, a very bad time to be starting my project if he “sundowns” as the books say. The word sets me on edge. Dementia isn’t a pretty evening sky. It’s an ocean fog, an endless midnight beach run and a stalker you hear padding in the sand behind you. Keep running, or wade into the black waves. The correct verbification of dementia would be “Stephen Kinging.”

  I can’t help myself from pushing Carl tonight. We didn’t get out of Mrs. T’s until six, wiping out almost a whole day. He napped or pretended to on the hour-and-a-half drive from the halfway house in Fort Worth to the outskirts of Waco. He wolfed down a Dairy Queen dinner in near-silence, complaining briefly about how the sweet tea tasted like creek water laced with pancake syrup.

  This, even though I know for a fact he loves Dairy Queen. It is No. 4 on his list of conditions. I had caught him staring at me from the booth while I placed our order with the teenage waif at the counter. Not a benign stare. A cold, memorizing one. He was sizing me up, making his own plans.

  He begins to stack the pictures squarely on top of each other. “This motel is a dump.”

  “Well,” I snap, “you’re not paying.” The books say, Don’t snap.

  When I pulled $4,000 out of my savings account two days ago, it seemed like a fortune. $2,000 of it is now rolled into wads in the spare tire in the trunk, another $500 tucked behind my underwear in one of the mesh pockets of my new suitcase with the combination lock. I stuffed the rest into the wallet next to the credit cards in my real name that I won’t be using on this trip except for an emergency exit.

  But already I am worried. Counting. $12.62 for the Dairy Queen Dudes, fries, and iced tea. $100.29 for two bare-bones rooms with beige plastic bathtub liners and scratchy maroon-striped polyester bedspreads. $38.66 to fill up the car because I set rules for myself on this trip and one of them is to never let the tank fall below half.

  Another $3,000 from my savings was shot when I made a little run to Houston a few days ago. I’d handed off the cash to the preppy college student who met me behind an Indian restaurant in Houston’s Rice Village. In person, he struck me as the guy at the top of his class in business school, or maybe the kid giving the mafia of Asian pre-med girls a run for their money.

  I’d hooked up with him on the Dark Web, where the cockroaches of the earth do their untraceable Internet business. It took only three minutes to download a search engine that allowed me to skip in the shadows like a schoolgirl alongside terrorists and arms dealers, libertarians and twenty-something entrepreneurs.

  About a year ago, a hairdresser named Tiffany, who had a “bit of a boyfriend-and-Discover-Card problem,” told me about an illegal website she was going to use to reinvent herself as a Lola or a Francesca. She was trying out a blue-black rinse on me at the time, and I listened out of one ear. I wondered if the “bit” referred to her boyfriend’s penis.

  I never returned to her salon again, but I typed the password she mentioned—Pamperzzz—into mommyzhelper.com. For a careful planner like me, it was a risk. A tip from a Tiffany.

  I could have been contacting a baby-napping adoption ring, a guy with a diaper porn fetish, a cop on the other end ready to sting. How could I really be sure that all the signals in the Dark Web bounce around like grasshoppers on cocaine?

  A chat box had popped up almost instantly: “I’m Tom, your Texas Helper. Can I change you?” I didn’t get the diaper reference until days later, after I’d sent three headshots into the ether. I was told I could pick up my package in Houston.

  At our rendezvous time, I’d brought a Subway bag stuffed with $20 bills and a toasted ham and cheese with lettuce, mayo, black olives, green pepper, jalapeños, and Swiss. Tom’s special order. I traded for a manila envelope that contained three fake driver’s licenses, three MasterCards with names that matched, and three sets of shiny new Texas plates. Three’s always been a good number for me.

  “I threw a little Larry G in there for the road.” Tom had gestured toward the envelope. “Customer appreciation. Spread the word.” I didn’t know if Larry G was like a Flat Stanley for adults or something moody for the CD player.

  I didn’t ask because my head was filled with other questions for him. Don’t you know you could go to prison for a very long time? Don’t you know you could ruin everything and never, ever recover? They are questions I constantly ask myself.

  Before I could deliver a little food for thought, Tom touched my shoulder and advised, “If you think someone isn’t buying what you’re selling, don’t panic.” He gestured to the manila envelope. “The pic of you as a blonde? It has the least cred.”

  My cheeks had gone hot—a grateful rush of emotion at the idea that this stranger cared about my outcome. Instant intimacy, like with the doctor who sees you in a blue paper gown and kindly lays a hand on your shoulder but would never recognize your face in an airport. The warm feeling hung on until he snaked his way back across two lanes of Houston rush hour traffic and disappeared.

  One of the credit cards and a driver’s license worked like magic a few hours later on the ditzy Avis agent who rented me a car at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. I don’t know if they will fool the police if I get stopped. Absolutely no speeding, that’s another rule.

  I’d switched the license plates in the back of a Walmart parking lot on the way from DFW to Mrs. T’s. I’d cut the first fake credit card, whose job was done, into sharp, jagged bits and let pieces fly out the car window at thirty-second intervals. Maybe all of this is overkill, but how can I know? I want a life after this. Ten days, that’s how long I have. Almost down to nine.

  We will need gas and food and two motel rooms every night no matter the cost because I am sure as hell not sleeping in the same room with him. I’m already adding in other items I didn’t account for ahead of time. Things that will make him blend in. Good athletic shoes, toiletries, and a haircut. There are the extra conditions he added at the last minute. And miscellaneous.

  My father had always reminded me to be sure to add a separate line for miscellaneous when I was making budgets. What would that be in this case? Bribes? Extra bullets? Bandages?
Shovels? Red licorice and BIGS Dill Pickle Sunflower Seeds from every Buc-ee’s truck stop along the way?

  The pictures are back in a tidy pile. Carl didn’t really study the images, just organized them by size, the largest ones at the bottom. Landing on top, a wallet-size school picture of a boy with sleepy eyes and a crooked part in his hair. The boy is Alexander Lakinski, the son of Nicole Lakinski, the woman Carl was put on trial for kidnapping from a park in Waco. Alexander was left behind with a broken arm. He said he fell off a swing. His mother was never seen again.

  Carl stands up. Stretches both arms in the air.

  “May I go to my room, please, ma’am?” He’s already halfway across the carpet to the door that will stand between us tonight.

  “You promised, Carl.”

  “Promised what?”

  “To try. You promised to try. You told me you didn’t remember what you did, but you wanted to. That you were all in. Never mind. Just take your pills, OK? I’ll get them. They’re in my purse.”

  He’s fiddling with the chain lock on my side, sliding it gently back and forth on its track. Considering.

  “You have to take your pills, Carl. That’s the deal. If not, you’re back at Mrs. T’s watching insects on the Discovery Channel.”

  “Did you know houseflies hum in the key of F?” he asks. “I’ll be happy to take my pills.”

  He’s going to give me this. Carl knows I’m lying—that I’m not about to throw in the towel on our very first day.

  He told me once that my gray eyes remind him of someone he used to know. Smoke and mirrors, he said. Makes it hard to know what either of you will do next. Rachel had green eyes with a sprinkle of gold.

  I’ve caught intelligence, sanity in Carl’s. Over the chessboard, at Dairy Queen, while we drank canned iced tea in Mrs. T’s backyard that he said tasted like Triaminic, whatever that is.

  Carl used to be a talented artist. His eyes remind me of a mossy pool of muck in one of his photographs. The police dug around at that spot and several others, trying to link Carl and his camera to other disappearances in Texas. But they gave up too soon.

  Carl knows I’m lying about why we’re on this road trip. There’s not an ounce of him that buys that I’m his crime-solving long-lost daughter compelled to know what kind of DNA is churning in her blood. That once I know the truth, I’ll just walk away.

  He’s putting the pills in his mouth one at a time, swallowing them dry, even though I offered to unwrap the cellophane from the cup on the dresser and fill it with water out of the bathroom faucet.

  I could lay it all out—that every time I look in his face, I feel a merciless itch in my brain. How it’s just one reason I’m sure he’s the one who took my big sister when the sun was shining. Rachel was going to French-braid my hair that night for a party. She was going to be a famous actress. I was going to have a niece named Sophronia.

  Don’t feel.

  Keep his mind dancing.

  Carl is a curious man.

  Why is my puppet string.

  He’s on the other side of the door now. Starting to hum.

  7

  I’m inching open the door. A faint slice of light spills like bleach from my room to his, across the floor and up the stripes of his bedspread.

  It’s after eleven. I’m worried the light is going to strike his face and wake him up if I nudge the door open much more.

  Did he really swallow the pink pill that makes him sleep? Or did he spit it out? It seems ridiculous to treat him like a child, although Mrs. T said, You have to treat him like a child.

  I slip through the crack as soon as I can fit, raking my belly on the doorknob. Push the door behind me as far as it will go without clicking in place. I’m perfectly still, not breathing, letting my eyes adjust. I can’t see much. The curtains are pulled shut. The air conditioner under the window is rumbling like a truck that wants to die. I’m assaulted with the smell of mildew and feet, the fuck you of underpaid maids.

  I don’t sense any movement or sound from his bed, but would I? The window unit is laboring, working both for and against me.

  In my own room, while Nigella yapped from the TV about goujons of sole, I practiced six times. Carl and I have duplicate spaces, as cookie cutter as prison cells. There are ten careful steps from this spot to the foot of the bed. I take them. My knees fall to the scratchy carpet. I lift up the bedspread, thrust my head underneath, flip on my tiny flashlight, and cast the beam around.

  I’m not disappointed. There’s a trail of popcorn, a child’s Mickey Mouse pacifier coated in hair, and Carl’s suitcase just where I thought it would be. Habits are hard to break for dementia patients and obsessive compulsives and serial killers. He is at least one of these things, maybe all of them.

  I slide forward on my stomach so I can reach it. The suitcase lies flat under the right side of the mattress, which means less chance of disturbing him when I slide it out. Carl sleeps on the left. I saw the indent in his pillow at Mrs. T’s more than once, and it was an odd detail in the testimony of his cleaning woman, Irma, who had worked for him on and off when he lived in Fort Worth, about six miles from my childhood home. What serial killer has a maid? Carl’s defense lawyer had asked that excellent question of the jury.

  Irma, in a forlorn little apartment with her well-dusted pig figurine collection, had nothing useful to say by the time I got to her. She clearly had residual affection for Carl, who’d paid her $25 an hour. Her apartment smelled like collard greens. I couldn’t stop staring at the pig in the center of the mirrored shelf above her head with the chipped white ear and the near-fatal hairline fracture around its neck. Irma had made an extreme effort to save it. What did this pig say about Irma? That she loved the person who gave it to her too much to throw it away?

  Irma made me leave after an hour of fruitless questioning so she could get back to a good part in her erotic romance. “Sex every fifty pages, like clockwork,” she’d told me. “It’s a rule.”

  I turn off my flashlight and pick up the case by the handle. One- two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight steps to the bathroom door. The tile under my feet is cold and sticky.

  I shut the bathroom door until it clicks and lay the case gently on the bathroom rug. The suitcase zipper sounds like a buzz saw. I pause for a good two minutes to make sure Carl didn’t hear before I travel the flashlight over his clothes, so tidy and creepy.

  On top, one of Mrs. T’s sauté pans, which must be the shiny thing I’d seen him slip into his suitcase. My hand wriggles into every crevice, every pocket, between every layer of clothing. I feel the soft edges of the picture of the girl with the key. But I can’t find the lighter or the knife, the red exercise band that I have imagined around my throat.

  I had planned to steal these one at a time, hoping he would forget, think he misplaced them.

  I don’t believe he abandoned any of these things along the way. He’s hidden them in this motel room, somewhere in the dark.

  Another round to Carl.

  In less than a minute, I’m back at the adjoining door, ready to leave, the suitcase snugly back in place.

  Movement. Not from the bed.

  From the other side of the room.

  He’s awake.

  My heart begins a steady punch to my chest.

  I picture my room, so I can picture his.

  Carl’s in the darkest corner, sitting in a plastic chair that he said was the color of a Dreamsicle when we first walked into the motel room four hours ago. He had then added a Dreamsicle to his conditions. After he explained the cool collision of vanilla and orange in his mouth, I wanted one, too.

  I reach for the knob and yank. The door opens two inches and revolts. He’s thrown the chain.

  I flip around. I can’t make out anything but a shadow, so my imagination sketches in the details. Maybe he’s found my gun. Except a gun would make a noise, and Carl wouldn’t want that, would he?

  There is only ominous stillness from the corner. I close the door because I have
no choice. I’m counting how many steps it might take for him to reach me in the dark and slip the red exercise band around my neck or jut the pocketknife under my ribs. All the while, I’m fiddling with the fragile necklace on the door.

  And then I’m falling into my room, slamming the hollow door between us, twisting the tiny lock in the knob, working at the flimsy chain on my side three times before my shaking fingers get it right.

  I press my ear to the wood. The air conditioner’s rumble swallows everything.

  I stagger to the bathroom. In the mirror, my pupils, dilated and glassy, look nothing like Rachel’s. I turn my hands over and over in running hot water, until they stop trembling. In the bedroom, I snap off the TV. I straighten the pen and the Bible on the desk. I grab my dirty clothes off the floor and begin to painstakingly fold them to put away. Anything to keep my hands busy, to make this night pass faster.

  When I lift the lid of my suitcase, I choke down a scream.

  Carl has left me a present.

  Lying on top, the scarf that was wrapped around Lolita’s pretty neck at Mrs. T’s.

  For seconds, I don’t breathe. The pink and white snails march innocently across the fabric, their smiles like tiny eyelash curls.

  I remember another piece of fabric, swirling in water in one of Carl’s photographs. A missing girl named Violet. My head jerks toward the door that connects my room to Carl’s. Chain in place. Knob, still. When I turn back to my suitcase, Lolita’s sweet, youthful smell drifts up and with it a silent, panicked prayer that she’s alive, that I have not stirred up a hibernating killer.

  In the bathroom, I grip the scarf by its edges and hold it up to unforgiving light. I search every happy snail for a spot of blood. There’s nothing. Just a faint mustard stain, the scratch of a pencil mark.