Free Spirits (6 page)

He smiles, and it lights up his blue-gray eyes. “Well, pharmacists get asked all kinds of strange questions, so go right ahead.”

“We were wondering…do you remember anybody coming into the store and buying a large amount of Ex-Lax?”

He chuckles a little. “Now that is a strange question. Why do you want to know?”

“It’s because of a prank somebody played,”Adam says.“We’re trying to figure out who did it.” Adam may not be as good as I am at asking adults questions, but he’s way better at answering questions adults ask, without exactly lying or giving too much away.

“Kids and laxatives, that’s a dangerous combination, all right.” Mr. Henderson chuckles. “Well, I guess I could check the receipts for you.”

“Would you? That would be great,” I say. “It would be from May fifth or maybe a couple of weeks before.”

Mr. Henderson goes to the back of the store and comes back about five minutes later, shaking his head. “Didn’t find anything,” he says. “Maybe your culprit bought everything at the Wal-Mart in Morgan. Goodness knows that’s what most people do.”

“Well, thank you very much for checking,” I say, disappointed.

“You’re welcome,” Mr. Henderson says. “That’s definitely the most interesting question I’ve been asked all day.”

Outside, I say, “So much for that idea.”

“Yep,” Adam says, twisting the top off his Coke. “And when you think about it, we have no way of knowing that our guy even bought all the laxatives at the same time. He could’ve been stockpiling them over months, buying a box here and a box there so nobody would get suspicious.”

I sigh. “So basically, what we’ve got is nothing.”

“That’s what we’ve got.” Adam takes a swig of his Coke. “But unlike the police, at least we’re trying.”

Mom’s car sputters and wheezes as she starts it. “I don’t like the sound of that,” she says. “I keep putting off taking it to the shop because I’m afraid of what they might say.”

“Like Dad’s patients who have cardiac symptoms for years but have been too scared to go to the doctor,” Adam says.

“Exactly like that,” Mom says.

Adam’s riding shotgun and I’m in the backseat, holding the hand mirror with Abigail in it so she can see outside. Abigail is as excited as I’ve ever seen her because we’re taking her out for pizza and a movie.

Morgan, the next town over, is about three times the size of Wilder, which, Adam is always reminding me, means it’s still really small. “Just because it’s big enough to have a McDonald’s and a Pizza Hut doesn’t make it a major city,” he says.

It seems kind of cruel to take Abigail to Pizza Hut when she can’t eat anything, but she wants to have a regular kids’ night out and that includes pizza, even if all she can do is look at it.

Once we’re seated in the restaurant, I move the mirror around so Abigail can see. “Oh, I love the checked tablecloths,” she croons. “And the little candles on the table are so romantic.”

“She says it’s romantic here,” I say to Mom and Adam.

“Well, she doesn’t get out much,” Adam says.

When our pizza (half pepperoni for Adam, half mushroom for Mom and me) arrives, I hold the mirror over it. “Well, you can’t taste it or smell it, but at least you can see it.” I move my arm around over the steaming pizza so she can get the full view.

A gray-haired, heavyset woman stops her walk past our table to stare at me open-mouthed. And no wonder. Who wouldn’t stare at a person who, for no apparent reason, is waving an antique hand mirror over a pizza?

Adam smiles at the woman, then nods his head in my direction. “She doesn’t get out much,” he says.

It’s a lot easier to make Abigail a part of the moviegoing experience without attracting attention. After we choose our seats, I prop the mirror up on my lap so she can see the screen. It’s too dark for anybody to see how strange I look.

The movie is really kind of babyish for Adam and me, but there are only two movies to choose from in this theatre, and the other one is rated R. This is one of those live-action kids’ movies where they use real animals but animate their mouths so it looks like they’re talking. In this movie, the talking animals are all dogs. It’s cute, but it’s not much on plot, and my mind wanders.

I hop into Adam’s mind long enough to know he wishes it were a horror movie instead. But I knew that anyway. I move into Mom’s mind and find that she’s thinking about Dad, about a time they sat together in the dark of a theatre, and he put his arm around her and leaned in for a kiss. Hi, Miranda, Mom says silently. Get out of my head and watch the movie.

I do.

Abigail is the only one of us whose attention doesn’t wander. She laughs hysterically at every little slapstick gag on the screen. Sometimes she squeals with delight.

Once the movie’s over and we’re back in the car, I ask, “So did you have a good time, Abigail?”

“It was wonderful,” she says, “utterly astonishing. What I want to know, though, is when was it discovered that dogs can talk?”

Adam and I laugh, but I can tell that like me, he’s trying not to laugh so hard that Abigail will feel like we’re making fun of her. Finally, once we’ve gotten our breaths and answered Mom’s questions about what’s so funny, Adam launches into an explanation of how the dogs’ mouths are animated through computer graphics and actors’ voices are dubbed in. It’s a long, drawn-out explanation, which is not surprising since Adam will talk forever about anything that’s technical.

When at last he finishes, Abigail says, “Well, call it what you like, but it’s still magic.” Then she says, “Miranda, could you ask your mother if we could stop by the river? I’d like to see if those spirits are still there.”

When I ask her, Mom checks her watch. “Okay, but it’ll just be for a few minutes. We’ve got to get home by midnight so Adam’s dad can pick him up.”

There are no streetlights by the riverbank, and the sky is black velvet. Mom gets a flashlight out of the trunk so we won’t trip over roots or rocks. I hold the flashlight in one hand and the mirror in the other as we make our way to edge of the water.

“There he is!” Abigail says. “Do you see him, Miranda?”

I shine the light near the figure, but not directly on it. It’s a boy, a couple of years older than Adam and me, maybe, wearing a Confederate Civil War uniform that hangs loosely on him because he’s so thin. His cheeks are sunken in, and his eyes are hollow even though he looks young enough to still have baby fat.

“Hold up the mirror so I can talk to him,” Abigail says, and I do.

“Hello,” Abigail calls. “I’m in the mirror. Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you.” It’s an older boy’s voice, on the verge of changing, with a Kentucky twang.

I look back at Adam and Mom. “Can you hear him?”

Adam nods.

Mom shakes her head, which isn’t surprising since she can’t hear Abigail anymore either.

“My name is Abigail,” Abigail says from the mirror. “I died of scarlet fever when I was twelve. I usually stay in a house, but my friend Miranda has discovered that I can travel if I’m inside a mirror.”

“Hit’s a pretty mirror,” the ghost boy says. “My mama had one just like it. My name’s Virgil Thomas. I was a soldier camped out in these parts.”

“Did you drown in the river?” Abigail asks.

Virgil laughs. “Drowning was what got me in the end, but it was kind of a race to see what was gonna do it. I got caught where some mini balls blew up some fellers and a bunch of their teeth and chunks of their bone got stuck in my arm, and I got real sick. Took a fever, got the flux. One night I woke up in my tent just burning up and feeling like I’d die right there if I didn’t get me a drink of water. I couldn’t hardly walk I was so weak from the flux, so I crawled to the river. I musta passed out from the fever, face down in the water. So it was a drink of water that kilt me.”

“Is this riverbank where you stay when you’re in the earthly realm?” Abigail says.

“Yes, miss. I can’t go no farther than them trees over yonder.”

“When I was here before I saw other spirits, too,” Abigail says.

“They’re around here somewhere,” Virgil says, but he pronounces “somewhere” like “summers.” “Adahy’s the little Injun boy’s name. He got bit by a water moccasin in this river— that’s why he’s here. He’s real shy when it comes to the living, but he’s a right nice little feller. Can’t speak no English, but he can kindly act out things so I can understand them. Now the other one—she don’t speak no English neither, but she speaks a different tongue than Adahy does. She paces and cries more than she talks. She ain’t been here as long as me and Adahy. Sometimes she’ll let him sit next to her and hold her hand, but she screams bloody murder if I try to get close to her. I try to tell her I don’t mean no harm, but she can’t understand me no better than I can understand her. I don’t even know her name.”

Mom touches my shoulder. “Tell Abigail we need to go.”

I do, and she says goodbye to Virgil.

“Goodbye,” he says to her, and then he nods to me and Adam, too. “Y’all come back and see me whenever you want to. It’s nice to get to visit with folks.”

Once we’re in the car, Abigail says, “How old do you think Virgil was when he died? Fourteen or fifteen maybe? That’s not so much older than I am.”

I’ve finally caught on to why Abigail wanted to visit the river. “Abigail, do you like him or something?”

She giggles, and I have a feeling that if ghosts could blush, she would. “Well, he is charming, isn’t he? And there’s something about those uniforms with all those shiny brass buttons…”

“Okay, boy in the car!” Adam says. “No giggling about boys while I’m here, even if the boy you’re talking about has been dead for over a century.”

“Well, so have I,” Abigail says. “It’s good that the two of us have things in common.”

“So, Mom,” I say, “I bet you never would’ve agreed to take Abigail out for pizza and a movie if you’d known she was chasing after a boy.”

“Well,” Mom says, “I’d definitely make you stay home if you were going to chase boys, but you’re just twelve. And Abigail is older than she looks.”

I’m in the garden with Granny, helping her loosen the ground for planting, when Adam rides up on his bike. “Hey,” he says to me, and then to Granny, “Hello, Mrs. Chandler.”

“The signs say it’s time to plant,” Granny says. She hardly ever says hello back to people. She just starts talking about whatever’s on her mind. “Does your family plant any special vegetables that come from your country?”

“Not really,” Adam says. “But Mom does grow cabbage for kimchee. It smells awful when she makes it.”

“She orta come over here and make it the same day I put up my kraut,” Granny says. “We’d stink up the whole county!”

Adam grins, then turns to me. “I was wondering if you might want to go for a ride with me once you’ve finished helping your granny.”

“She’s helped me plenty,” Granny says. “She can go.”

I wash my hands with the hose and get my bike from the barn. As soon as we ride off where Granny can’t hear us, Adam says, “So is that bike, like, a hundred years old?”

Adam’s bike is shiny and new, the racing kind where you ride around with your butt up in the air. Mine’s been repainted with purple spray paint, which doesn’t disguise its age. “It’s not a hundred. It was my mom’s when she was my age.”

“It’s got the weirdest seat I’ve ever seen,” he says.

“It’s a banana seat. They used to be cool.” I think about all the fashions from the hippie days that show up in magazines now. “They will be again, too.”

“You keep waiting for that day,” Adam says, showing how much faster his bike is than mine.

Once he slows down so I can catch up, he says, “So I had an idea last night. I was thinking, there are only two other restaurants in Wilder besides El Mariachi. What if one of the owners of the other two restaurants decided to cause trouble for El Mariachi? It would get rid of the competition.”

“Hm,” I say. “Well, it’s kind of a shot in the dark, but it’s better than anything I’ve got.”

“I was thinking we might go talk to Big Ed at the Burger Buddy…see if he says anything suspicious.”

I crinkle my nose in disgust. “If we’re going to get him to talk to us, we’ll have to order something.”

“Sodas should be safe,” Adam says.

The inside of the Burger Buddy should be white, but years of grease buildup have turned the walls the dull yellow of unbrushed teeth. The menu board on the wall is the kind where the food items are spelled out with stick-on plastic letters. Lots of the letters have fallen off and not been replaced, so it’s possible to order a “CHEE URGER” and “RENCH RIES.”

Big Ed himself is behind the counter, which he’s wiping with a greasy rag, to spread the grease around more evenly, I guess. His face has a few days’ growth of stubble, and he’s wearing a filthy yellow-white apron over a dingy undershirt. He takes a look at Adam as we sit at the counter and says, “We ain’t got no Chinese food here.”

I try not to wince. “That’s okay. We were just hot from riding our bikes and thought we’d stop by for Cokes.”

“Huh,” he says, like he doesn’t trust us somehow. But he gets us our Cokes in plastic glasses. When I pick up my glass I almost drop it, it’s so slick with grease.