Ghost Flower (15 page)

“Are you sure you weren’t there?” Detective Ainslie asked me.

I fingered the button in its plastic bag. It was antique gold and faceted to look like the setting for a gem. In the center was a crystal heart. It was ugly, but it was also distinctive. “No. I’m not sure about anything.”

I realized that Detective Ainslie and Dr. Jackson were watching me, not like they were curious about what I remembered, but like they thought I was guilty and lying to them. “I don’t understand. She committed suicide. Why are you asking me about this?”

Detective Ainslie flipped her hand over, showing the palm. “Leaving your phone behind. Erasing all the messages. Emptying out your bank account. We have to wonder: Was it some kind of suicide pact? She went through with it and you didn’t?”

“Oh my God,” I said, jerking my hand back from the button. “I—no, it couldn’t have been.”

“You’re sure? That is more positive than not remembering.”

I wasn’t sure. How could I say I was sure? But I wanted to. The idea of it froze me from the inside. I felt like the walls were closing in around me. “I’m—that just doesn’t feel right.”

“I don’t like this,” Uncle Thom said.

Detective Ainslie ignored him and kept her eyes on me. “Were you aware of the legal battle between your family and Liza Lawson’s father?”

“What?” The chill intensified, and with it the idea that whatever Bain and Bridgette had been planning was not what they’d told me. I was starting to feel like an animal who has walked into a cunning hunter’s trap and stands there dociley as it tightens around her.

Next to me, Uncle Thom was flapping his arms. “Okay, enough. We sat through the rest, but that is outside the scope of this meeting. We discussed this last night.”

Detective Ainslie said, “Look, Thom. There are people who think it is quite a coincidence that Liza Lawson would kill herself in the very valley her father was currently suing the Silverton family to protect. It would be remiss of me and bad for you if I did not at least ask these questions.”

“Is that true?” I looked at Uncle Thom. “That Liza’s father was suing”—I paused, then made myself do it—“the Family.”

Uncle Thom’s lips were set in a thin line. “Not exactly.”

“Which parts of it are true?” I demanded, half dreading the answer.

“The Family is just one party to that lawsuit, and her father represented a bunch of environmental groups. It is needlessly reductive
to pretend it was some kind of battle between two families. This wasn’t
Romeo and Juliet
.”

Detective Ainslie glanced at me with raised eyebrows. “Or Juliet and Juliet.”

Before I could ask if Liza and Ro—if she thought Liza and I—had been lovers, Dr. Jackson’s pleasant voice said, “The week before Liza killed herself, Mr. Lawson said in the press that he was out to destroy your family. That had to be upsetting for you, Aurora.”

Uncle Thom leaned back in his seat. “Or maybe what was upsetting to Liza was her father’s single-minded interest in his lawsuit rather than his family. Surely that could be the significance of her committing suicide in that particular place.” He draped his elbow along the top of the chair, obviously feeling like he’d scored a point.

Detective Ainslie shrugged. She bent forward, across the table toward me, tepeeing her fingers. “All we know for sure is two girls went to Three Lovers Point alive—”

“Two girls
might
have gone,” Uncle Thom interrupted. “You cannot place my client there.”

“—And only one came back.”

“But it was ruled a suicide,” I said. My tone sounded desperate, but I didn’t care.

“The family pressed for that,” Detective Ainslie said.

I turned to gape at Uncle Thom. “Not our family,” he said emphatically, shaking his head. “Hers. We just want the truth. That’s why we helped then, that’s why we came today, that’s why we’ve been sitting through these inane questions.” Beside me, Uncle Thom got busy collecting up papers. “But that’s enough. We have been more than generous. Aurora, we’re going.”

I was just pushing my chair back when the door of the room burst open. A man with sandy brown hair came in, took one step,
and stopped. “I’m sorry, detective,” N. Martinez said, trailing after the man. “I tried, but I couldn’t—”

The man stood staring down at me. His eyes were light blue and watery, and his jeans and yellow polo shirt looked tousled, like he’d slept in them. “My God,” he said. He rubbed his hand over his chin, which was covered in light stubble. “I—when I heard last night, I drove right down from Tempe. It’s true. It’s—” His mouth worked for a moment, but no sound came out. He turned to look at Uncle Thom. “I congratulate your family on getting Aurora back, Thomas.”

“Thank you, Leo,” Thom said. He glanced at me uncertainly. “You remember Leo Lawson?” he prompted. “Liza’s father?”

“Mr. Lawson,” I said. I stood up, seized with an overwhelming urge to hug him, but at my slightest gesture he pulled back. A sharp chill wrapped itself around me, and my hands dropped to my sides. I said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” It sounded ridiculous.

His eyes roamed my face, the most intense scrutiny I’d gotten since I’d been in Tucson, like he was looking for something.

Something I couldn’t give him. In a cracked voice he said, “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” The pain on his face was awful. I wanted to turn, run away. This wasn’t what I had agreed to when I told Bain and Bridgette I’d impersonate Aurora. I had no idea what I’d be doing to these people.

“Reopening it. Reopening this whole mess.” His eyes moved from me to the photos on the table of Liza. I wished someone had covered them up.

I felt worthless, mean. “That wasn’t my intention, Mr. Lawson. I—the police just wanted to—”

His gaze returned to me, and now it was different. Composed, determined. Cold. I had the sense he’d made a decision. His hands
came up and rested on my shoulders. “My daughter committed suicide. I have to live with that. But I will not live with having it dredged back up. She died by herself. All alone, my sweet girl. You left her alone then. Why can’t you just leave her alone now?” Mr. Lawson’s feverish eyes sought and held mine. “Don’t do this. Leave her be. If anything else happens, it will be on your head. Your head.
Do you understand?
” His grip was furious, his tone almost menacing.

But his gaze was—scared. He was
afraid
of something.

“That’s a threat,” Uncle Thom declared. “I want it noted for the record that he laid his hands on my—”

“Fear in a handful of dust,” I said, the words coming out of my mouth before I’d even realized it, and I felt the relief you feel when you remember the lyrics to a song that’s been eluding you.

Then I looked in Mr. Lawson’s face. The color had drained from it, and he was a pale, sickly white. “What did you say?” His fingers dug into my shoulders as though if he let go he would fall, and his voice was jagged like it had to be dragged out of him. “What—why did you say that?”

“I said, ‘Fear in a handful of dust.’ I—I don’t know why. It’s a poem, I guess, that I’ve been trying to figure out. Do you know what it means?”

“It was Liza’s favorite poem.
The Wasteland
by T.S. Eliot. You knew that. You must have known she had that stanza written down and tacked on her wall.”

Liza’s favorite poem? Why would that have been what I was trying to remember? How?

The terror I’d felt the night before when I saw the door handle moving by itself flooded back over me. I stared at Mr. Lawson.

The agony of his expression was almost unendurable. His fingers gripped my shoulders. I didn’t know if I wanted to hug him or flee.
I stood there, shaking, my mind reeling. “I’m so sorry,” I said, falling back on my prepared script as my mind staggered around like a drunk unable to cope with reality. “I didn’t remember. I didn’t know.”

“He’s hurting my client,” Uncle Thom squawked somewhere in the distant background.

N. Martinez stepped forward, and Mr. Lawson’s hands dropped from my shoulders. “I’m going. It’s done.” He kept his agitated gaze on mine, repeated, “Please, just stop,” and stalked out.

There was silence for three beats. Uncle Thom stood up. “We’re done here.”

He and Detective Ainslie did some jockeying about would we or wouldn’t we be hearing from one another, and she handed me her card and told me to call if I remembered anything. I said the things I needed to say, but I wasn’t paying attention. My eyes were glued to the close-up picture of Liza in the middle of the conference table, to the way she was half-smiling up at me. As though she and I shared a secret.

It had to have been a coincidence, me thinking of that poem. It was the photos, the dust on the rocks in the desert. Just a coincidence and not worth thinking about anymore.

I felt myself being propelled toward the door, and when I came out of my haze I realized Dr. Jackson was speaking to me. “It was nice meeting you, Aurora,” she said. “Good luck.” She held out her hand.

We shook, a strangely formal gesture, but it momentarily made my lethargy evaporate because when I got to the door I remembered something. I half-turned, my hand on the lintel, and said, “It’s uncommon, isn’t it? For people to commit suicide by jumping?”

Dr. Jackson nodded. “It is. Despite what you see on TV and in the movies, less than 10 percent of suicides happen that way.”

“Although Three Lovers has become a popular spot for it,” Detective
Ainslie said. “There was another suicide there after your friend’s. A man named James Jakes.”

“You already tried to pin that on the Family without success,” Uncle Thom said. “You couldn’t link anything to Bain then, and you won’t be able to link anything to Aurora now.” He put a hand on the small of my back and pushed me the rest of the way out the door.

As he and I stepped out of the police station, the dazzling sunshine and warmth hit me, and I stood there for a moment breathing them in. The wind had picked up slightly, tinged with the faint smell of smoke.

“Wildfire season,” Uncle Thom said. “They’re predicting a bad one this year.” He spoke casually, as though we hadn’t just endured something strange and uncanny. Because, I realized, he hadn‘t.

How had I known that poem?

I shivered, suddenly cold despite the heat.

There was a knot of people at the bottom of the stairs, some of them holding signs that said, “Send Silvertons to Jail Not Senate.” They spotted Uncle Thom and me and started booing. A woman in a blue baseball cap shouted, “Murderers!” as we went by, and several others joined in.

I looked at them and heard them, but it was as though they were behind glass. Like I was observing from a great distance, with someone else’s eyes, someone else’s body. I kept feeling the tickling of that other voice in my head and picturing the girl lying at the bottom of the rust red ravine. I wondered if that was what it felt like to be haunted.

Haunted.
I shivered again.
There is nothing to be afraid of
, I told myself.
You just thought of a poem because the images matched the photo. There is no such thing as being haunted. There is no such thing as ghosts
.

And for the next forty-three minutes, I believed it.

I
t took eleven minutes to drive from the police station to the mall where I was supposed to meet Bridgette. After Uncle Thom had told me that I’d done a great job and I’d mumbled something appropriate, we spent them in silence.

I tried to concentrate on the scenery to blot out the image of the girl lying at the bottom of the canyon. There was a geological quality to Tucson, moving from the flats upward, as though it had been developed in layers. I watched the buildings go by with exaggerated interest, first the old adobes, newly gentrified: a turquoise one with a green door, a red building with a red door and a massive cacti peering over a tall fence, and a yellow house with an electric blue door flanked by bright fuchsia bougainvillea on either side.

This didn’t look like Aurora’s world—but I could imagine living in the house with the blue door, doing homework at a carved desk and waiting for my mother to come in from painting in her studio. I’d make us
macaroni au gratin avec lardon
for dinner, and we’d eat off of plates with brightly colored horses or camels painted on them. And later we’d sip tea from wide mugs and watch television
together on an old oversized green couch covered with mismatched pillows.

Then we were past the houses and into the next layer, low-slung strip malls whose tenant lists could be the template for a game of suburban American Mad Libs, [dry cleaner], [nail place], [smoke shop], [pet spa], with the occasional Native American Gallery or Gem Depot to remind you that you were in Tucson. From there, closer to the mall, we moved into a realm of stucco-covered townhouses that somehow managed to look dirty despite being painted the color of the dirt.

Uncle Thom dropped me in front of Macy’s. It took me seven minutes to find Bridgette in the back corner of the designer section. I was sure she’d been saving up a barrage of fury for me, and there were a lot of things I wanted to ask her, like about the party she hadn’t mentioned to me, and the boy in the photo strip with his face scratched out. But when I found her, she was deep in conversation on her phone. She was, of course, perfectly put together, each reddish brown hair perfectly in place, her blue eyes subtly outlined with brown shadow, her high-waisted wide-leg jeans and cream eyelet top creaseless, her brown undoubtedly designer sandals unscuffed.

Without pausing in her conversation, she motioned me over, pointed toward a bottle blonde salesgirl whose name tag said “Maisie,” and turned her back.

“Your cousin started a dressing room for you,” Maisie told me. Her quietly chic off-white skirt and top looked like they aspired to grow up to be Bridgette’s wardrobe one day. Her tone was close to worship, but she seemed a little shell-shocked. “She’s very energetic.”

At least I wasn’t the only person Bridgette had that effect on. “Yeah.”

The dressing rooms were separated from the sales floor by a wide cream-colored arch. It led into a subdued hallway with dark burgundy flocked velvet walls and thick carpeting that looked like you’d have to
vacuum three times to really get it clean. A row of star-shaped lanterns that seemed to create more shadows than they eased hung from hooks along the wall. It felt like a boudoir, not a corner of a department store.