Embers (20 page)

Of course it was. It was a perfect hippie name. If it wasn’t Felicity, it would have been Meadow or Skye.

“I’m Anya. I think. . .” Anya’s brow wrinkled. “I think I remember you from when I was a kid. My mom was in reference.”

“The girl with the salamander!” Felicity grinned. “I remember you didn’t want to talk to us, but this little guy would follow us around after you fell asleep in the window seats. He likes to play hide-and-seek.”

Sparky oozed down to the floor and licked Felicity’s outstretched fingers. His tail wagged.

“I wasn’t allowed. My mom had a thing about talking to ghosts.”

“Most parents do.” Felicity stroked Sparky’s back. “We actually get a lot of kids in here who can see us. . . until the parents convince them otherwise, anyway.”

“I, uh. . . I’m sorry he took away your friends,” Anya said. It felt odd to be consoling the dead over a non-death. But she had sympathy for Felicity’s aloneness.

Felicity’s mouth quivered. “He just. . . he acted like it was nothing. He hunted them down like he was looking for candy in couch cushions. I saw him take Marlo. . . she ran from him. He pulled her apart, like she was taffy. And I heard Sjorn yelling at him downstairs, and Stan. . . it was just. . .” Insubstantial tears welled up in her eyes. “They were being killed and no one could hear them. It was horrible.”

Anya swallowed. “He’s doing the same thing in the outside world, too. He’s setting fires. A firefighter got killed. I’m trying to catch him.”

The hippie librarian’s eyes were hard with grief. “What can I do to help?”

Spoken like a true librarian.

“Well. . . you could show me the way to the local periodicals section. I want to see what this guy’s been doing in the society pages.”

Felicity wrinkled her nose. “It figures a guy like that would be part of the Establishment. Follow me.”

The ghost gestured to Anya to follow her down the stairs into the basement. The periodicals room opened to a huge reading area of current newspapers and magazines, dotted with overstuffed chairs and lounge furniture. Felicity led her around the reading area, back to the archives. This room was lined with metal cabinets, with microfiche and microfilm reader stations parked on one side of the room. A layer of dust coated the machinery. Even Sparky had no interest in machinery that old. Only the PC beside them looked to have been recently used.

“Isn’t that rather old-school for a world-class library?” Anya asked, only half kidding.

Felicity shrugged, her long dark hair sliding over her shoulder. “While it’s true that many records are now created both in electronic and hard-copy formats, many older records have yet to be converted. Plus, formats change so often that data is lost. It helps to be able to go back to the originals.”

Anya flipped open her notebook. “Our suspect’s name is Drake Ferrer. He’s an architect, a few years older than I am. Seems to have been quite the celebrated intellectual. I’m looking for anything you’ve got on him.”

“I’m on it.” Felicity walked into a cabinet, disappearing into its depths. Anya thought she detected a rustle of film and paper as she dug.

Anya pulled up a worn wooden chair at the computer terminal. This terminal was set up to do periodical searches. She searched for mentions of Ferrer in recent issues of the local newspapers. To her disappointment, the databases only ran from current issues back five years. She found a reference to him in an obituary three years ago, where he was named as his deceased mother’s only surviving child. Beyond that, the only hit she received was a mention of a showing of some of his art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The article was a text-only blurb in the metro section, titled “Reclusive Architect Seeks Personal Renaissance.” It mentioned that several of Ferrer’s blueprints and sketches of Detroit city life would be shown at a charity auction. The article was from last week; the showing was scheduled for this Friday.

“I’ve got some goodies for you.” Felicity carefully balanced a stack of microfiche in her palm.

“That’s a nice trick,” Anya said, impressed. “Most ghosts can’t move substantial objects like that.” The librarian’s ghost was stronger than Anya had given her credit for.

Felicity smiled. “They’re light. But you should take them before I drop them.” She inclined her pointed chin at the microfilm machine. “You know how to use that antique?”

“You bet. I’ll yell if I run into trouble.”

“Shhh. Not too loudly.” Felicity placed a finger beside her lips and ducked back into the cabinets. The contents rattled like baseball cards flapping in bicycle spokes.

Anya switched on the microfilm machine, then waited for the bulb to warm up. One by one, she looked through the sheets of film that Felicity deposited at her side. What she found was enough to piece together the fragments of a life.

From vital statistics reports in the paper, Anya learned that Drake Ferrer had been born in 1970, at Henry Ford Hospital. No father was listed on the birth certificate. Anya put her chin in her hand. That, at least, was something they had in common. Henry Ford Hospital was not a place where wealthy women went to have their babies in private suites. The address listed on the birth certificate was a tough neighborhood. Ferrer had not had an easy start.

School enrollment records showed he started first grade at age five, a full year before most students began. Ferrer had distinguished himself enough to be placed in an experimental magnet school for math and science by the fifth grade. A newspaper article describing the new school showed the first class. Ferrer was in the third row. He was a thin, serious kid with a wooden face in the grainy photo.

High school enrollment records showed Ferrer had skipped another couple of grades, graduating high school at age sixteen. He was easy to pick out: the shortest kid in his graduation photo, wan gaze focused on somewhere distant. He’d won a full-ride scholarship to the University of Michigan as a National Merit Scholar—his SAT and ACT scores had been near-perfect. He’d finished his undergraduate degree in short order, double majoring in architecture and urban planning. Anya found a couple of scattered mentions of him in the
Michgan Daily
. . . an op-ed piece railing about the lack of affordability of low-income housing, and a snapshot of him from the shoulders up in a sea of underclassmen running the annual spring tradition of the Naked Mile through campus.

The research archives showed a number of published papers from his graduate career. Anya skimmed the titles and abstracts, printing out the full papers for later reading:

“Toward a New Paradigm of Affordable, Sustainable Housing,” “Art Deco Structural Preservation,” “The Impact of Traffic Flow on Exploitation of Public-Use Landmarks.”

He’d given several talks in Chicago and Boston on gentrification of declining neighborhoods. He seemed to be a singly focused man, passionate in what he did.

When had that changed? Why hadn’t he stayed in the ivory tower in Ann Arbor, away from the ills he’d surely know in Detroit? He could have easily won a tenure-track teaching position with his qualifications.

But that was not the road he took. He returned to Detroit. A press release from a local architectural firm welcomed Ferrer aboard. The blurb said that the firm was

“enthusiastically looking for opportunities to work with Ferrer’s fresh ideas.”

Felicity had found some black-and-white slides, diagrams of plans filed with the Historic District Commission. Anya had to admit, his work was beautiful. He’d restored a number of run-down drug houses to their original visages. But such charity projects took money. She found that the money flooded in from grants, from larger projects like office buildings and banks. Even in these new designs, she saw a respect for the old designs, congruent with Detroit’s early twentieth-century construction boom. Ferrer romanticized that, breathing new life into Deco and Nouveau.

But he breathed new life into more than that. Name registrations showed he created a nonprofit corporation, the Motor City Phoenix Foundation. The aim of the organization was to create a downtown renaissance. He intended to attract private investors and public grants to rehabilitate decaying residential and commercial space to attract new jobs and create affordable housing. She glanced at a local magazine photo of the ribbon-cutting at the foundation’s headquarters. It was a local-boy-done-good piece, little of substance, but she could see the hope in Ferrer’s smile.

Once upon a time, Ferrer had been a builder. A community leader. And then. . . and then, he disappeared. There were no mentions of his actions after 1999, after the attack that had nearly killed him. He’d been turned upon by the very people he’d been trying to help.

Anya chewed on her lower lip. Why did he stay? Why not begin again, somewhere else that would appreciate his efforts? What hope kept him in this place?

She stared at Ferrer’s grainy picture, so glowing and young, so different from the broken creature she’d met. And she wondered. . .

Why did any of them stay? What kept all of them from abandoning this sinking city? Was it memory? Habit?

She had no answer.

Anya called ahead to make sure there were no other visitors for Brian at the hospital. She didn’t relish the idea of another confrontation with Jules or seeing the hurt look in Max’s eyes. She’d eventually try to smooth things over with Katie and Ciro when she had a moment to breathe. But she was done with DAGR for good. Nothing they said would make a difference.

She had expected to feel. . . lighter somehow, after she’d given up DAGR. Instead, she felt heaviness dragging at her steps. Perhaps the weight of Brian’s condition was too heavy; perhaps the dreams of Mimi and the unknown little girl were too tightly wound in her psyche; perhaps the burns on her skin would take time to fade. Whatever the reasons, the loss of DAGR made her feel very alone.

Slipping behind the curtain to Brian’s bed, she pulled up a chair beside him. He lay motionless, the machines pressing his chest up and down. She saw Katie had been here. Though flowers weren’t allowed in the ICU, she’d left him a small carved jade statue of Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, on the night table. A stack of magazines suggested the others had been here, too, keeping vigil over him.

But they were alone now. Anya stroked Brian’s cheek. His stubble had grown on his face and on his head, prickly under her fingers. The stubble on his chin was lighter, redder than the hair on his head. She would have to tease him about growing a goatee if and when he woke up.. . .

When he woke up. Period. She kept that thought firm in her mind, would not consider any other alternative.

“I don’t know if you can hear anything,” she said, rubbing her thumb on the back of his hand. “But I want you to know I’m sorry. About everything. I’d give anything to have a do-over.”

Sparky crawled up on the foot of the hospital bed, curling up on Brian’s feet.

“You can’t see him,” she whispered, “but Sparky’s keeping your feet warm. He’s worried about you.”

She dipped her head, holding her breath until she steadied. “There are a lot of things I’m sorry about. I’m sorry about some of the things I did as a kid. . . you don’t know the whole story, but it’s my fault my mom’s gone.” Some detached, observant part of her mind felt how much easier it was to confess to Brian, locked in his silence, than it ever had been to confess to a priest. “I left the Christmas tree lights on. . . and the house went up in flames. I guess. . . I guess I’m still doing penance for that. The firefighter gig and all.

“I’m sorry that I took the spirit of that little girl. Hell, I’m even sorry that my electric bill was late this month. But the thing I’m most sorry about”—she leaned forward, staring at him intently—“is pushing you away.

“I was afraid,” she confessed. “I was afraid I would hurt you. I was afraid you’d see what I am—what I really, really am—and walk away. I just couldn’t. . . risk that kind of hurt again.”

Tears dripped down her nose and she rubbed them away. “If you give me the chance, I swear that I won’t make that mistake again.”

She rested her palms on his arm, between the tubes and wires, and listened with every fiber of her being. She listened for a ghost, for his confused spirit caged by the machines. Her breath brushed the tape holding his eyes closed. “Can you hear me?”

The machines bleeped and whistled in their artificial rhythms that pumped breath and life into Brian, not giving Anya any sign that the shell of the man heard her. In that silence, she sensed nothing. No chill of a ghost. Either Brian was well and truly rooted in this physical world, asleep, or he was already past it.

She stayed until the visiting hour was over and the charge nurse came to dim the lights. Sparky reluctantly climbed off the hospital bed and plodded behind Anya down the hospital hallways.

Anya stood before the elevator to the parking garage, waiting for the elevator car to come back to the floor. A ghost shambled down the corridor in their direction, dragging an IV

pole. He was a bent elderly man, face covered in uneven stubble, eyes bleary with intoxication.

“Hey, lady,”
the ghost slurred.
“You got a dollar?”

Anya ignored the ghost and punched the elevator button again. Sparky coiled around her feet and hissed.

“Hey. I said, you got a dollar?”

Anya stared forward at the stainless-steel doors, willing them to open. The lighted number above the doorway indicated that the car was two floors away. Anya folded her arms, refusing to make eye contact. Irritation boiled in her chest. Why wouldn’t the ghost just leave her alone?

The spirit grabbed her elbow.
“I’m talking to you, you uppity bitch—”

Anya spun on her heel. Sparky launched himself forward, tearing into the ghost’s knee with his sharp teeth. The ghost howled, flailing and kicking at Sparky.

An incensed, unreasoning rage washed over her. Anya cast out her hand, reaching for the ghost’s throat. Her hand flamed amber, pure as sunlight, and black hunger growled in her throat. Her fingers tore into the ghost, and she felt the spirit pulling apart. It dissolved into a welcoming cold frost inside her throat, then sank into her belly. For that instant, the burn in her chest was quelled, smooth and unmarked as cool glass.