Ghost Flower (8 page)

Go!
the voice in her head orders, knocking her out of her thoughts.
You have to get out of here!

This time it works. Stumbling to her feet, she makes for the door. She pauses on the threshold, caught by the dim sense that she’s forgetting something—should she have a coat?—but it’s fleeting, overpowered by the urge to get away and her thirst, almost unbearable now. She’d kill for a Diet Coke.

Wrenching open the door, she stumbles into the warm night air.

FRIDAY

I
fell asleep on the bus and dreamed of laughing girls and orange butterflies landing near my cheek and only woke up when the driver’s voice announced our arrival in Tucson.

From the station I spent the last of my money on a taxi up into Ventana Canyon. It was the road that led to the Silverton compound, but that wasn’t where I was going. Not yet anyway.

If everything went as I’d planned, though, it was where I would end up.

The size of the houses increased as the road rose, and so did my nervousness. My fingers tapped against the black vinyl seat next to me, and I pressed my forehead, suddenly warm, to the glass of the window hoping for cool relief. There was none.

As the taxi pulled up in front of the address I’d given the driver, I was seized with a jolt of apprehension so strong it nearly left me dizzy.
Why are you doing this?
a voice in my head asked. There was nothing wrong with Bain and Bridgette’s approach; it would have worked.
So why are you rushing things, why this way, why tonight…?

I knew the answer, even if I hadn’t been ready to admit it to
myself until that moment. When I’d come up with the idea, I’d told myself I wasn’t going along with Bain and Bridgette’s plan because I wanted to appear in Tucson with a bang, not just stroll up at tea time. Tea time is languorous, that in-between moment in the day when all the shadows are slanted obliquely and reality can slip easily from one thing to another. People do things they regret mildly at tea time.

Night, though—if you do something you regret then, it won’t be mild. At tea time “what if?” is a kid’s game, something to keep conversation going; at night it’s a beckoning whisper from behind a barely open door of your psyche. Night is the darkness of a theater before the curtain goes up, full of strangers’ coughs and bodies shifting and unknowns that can be wonderful or terrifying or both. It is elusive, intriguing, and, fundamentally, lonely. It fit Aurora, this new Aurora, perfectly. She had to come home at night.

But sitting in the back of the idling taxi, staring at the mansion in front of me, I realized I’d also done it precisely because I was scared. Because if I’d shown up at tea with the Family, I could still have backed out somehow. Appearing this way, though—there would be no running away. I would be committed.

I’d copied the address out of the Sonora Heights Academy alumni directory, but for a moment I thought I might have gotten it wrong: The house was massive and apparently fancy, but the entire front yard was ripped up, a construction zone. And there were no lights in the windows.

The cab driver appeared to share my apprehension. “You sure this is what you want?” he asked, eyeing me speculatively in the rearview mirror.

He meant the address, but his question echoed in my mind. “You sure this is what you want?” I could still turn around, still go back
to Phoneix, call Bain or Bridgette and have them come get me, arrive the way they’d planned—

I spotted a billowing purple silk pagoda on the far side of the construction zone, apparently spanning a path. That must be the entrance. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.” I paid him, took a deep breath, whispered, “Here we go, Aurora,” and walked beneath the pagoda, along the tea-candle-lit path, into Coralee Gold’s graduation party.

It was like walking onto a stage set. The swimming pool was filled with floating candles, the entire area around it covered with oriental rugs. Brightly colored silk cushions were grouped around low octagonal tables with hookahs on them, and iron candelabra twisted in exotic shapes taller than me hoisted thick white candles all around the yard. Shirtless serving men with well-oiled chests and puffy harem pants stood behind tables of drinks and food with their arms crossed, statue-still. There was a faint breeze that rustled through the leaves and made the candles flicker slightly, stirring a wind chime somewhere in the distance. Other than that there was no movement, no sound. It was like the moment before the director yells action.

I knew the party had started more than an hour earlier, but at first I didn’t see any guests. Then my eyes moved to the terrace beyond the pool where a massive pink-and-white striped canopy had been erected over a dance floor. The floor was ringed with people, all of them staring solemnly toward the center. I couldn’t tell what they were looking at, so I moved closer and stood on my tiptoes at the edge of the crowd to get a better view.

The crowd formed a U-shape, open at the far end, where a woman was sitting on a chair. “Chair” is the wrong word; it was more like a throne with ornately carved gold sides and plush red velvet cushions.
It was large and seemed larger because the woman inside it was tiny, almost birdlike. She could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty years old. She had long, unnaturally black hair and was wearing a lapis blue silk robe edged in gold. Her eyes were closed, her head was tipped back, and her lips were moving.

That’s when I figured it out. Coralee Gold had hired a spiritual medium for her party. I had to stifle a laugh. This was either the best thing that could happen to me or the very worst.

Straining my ears, I made out the words, “Which one of you is there? I see two of you but I can only hear one. Which one are you?”

There was a moment of the kind of silence that comes only from one hundred people all holding their breath, the kind of silence that clings to you, turning a group into a single yearning organism. I had good reasons for not believing in ghosts or mediums, but as the silence stretched, I felt myself getting caught up in it. Wanting to believe, anxious about what was going to happen.

The tension wound itself tighter among us until it was nearly suffocating. At that moment, the woman with the dark hair opened her mouth and in a thin, reedy voice completely different from the one she’d been using said, “I am Aurora.”

A shudder convulsed the crowd. Everyone craned closer to listen. But the next words were indistinct, jibberish.

Speaking in her own voice, the medium said, “Can you repeat that? We couldn’t quite hear you Aurora.”

Silence.

“I had her, but I feel her slipping away,” the medium said with a small shake of her head, eyes still closed as though she were talking to herself as much as to us. Taking a deep breath, she raised her fingers to her temples and intoned, “Aurora or Elizabeth, if either of you is still there, can you ring the bell?”

More sticky, lengthening silence. And then, faintly, the bell began to ring.

Everyone around me straightened abruptly, as though they were all feeling the same chill I felt, and a whisper went through the crowd. I said to the person next to me, “That’s cool.”

He turned and looked at me. And gasped.

It was fascinating the way it happened—just the slightest murmur, the sound of bodies shifting as they moved to elbow their neighbor or point, like ripples begun by a leaf hitting the surface of a pond, until someone said aloud, “Oh my God, that’s Aurora Silverton.”

Then the medium woman’s eyes flipped open, and she stared at me, shrieked, and began to writhe. The crowd parted to make way for her, and she jerked across the floor toward me, as though she were a marionette whose arms and legs were being controlled by an invisible giant. She stopped in front of me, swaying. Her eyes rolled, and her long, blood-red nails curled in my direction. “You—you dare to mock the work of our sister Madam Cruz,” she said in a low, booming baritone completely different than the voice she had been using before.

“I didn’t mock, I was just—”

“Silence!” Her head tilted to the side, and her face moved up and down next to me, as though she were an animal of prey sniffing meat. “You are a cursed thing only half-alive. Be careful that evil does not claim the half that still lives. You come from a world of lies and shadows, and they cling to you like ivy.
You reek of the fetid stench of death.
”

“I’m really sorry, I—”

A strange growling noise came from deep in her throat. “Your punishment awaits you already. The spirits will have their revenge. Go! Leave! If you have any sense, you will fly from here forever.” And then she passed out.

It got a bit hectic then. iPhones began popping out everywhere, and I was swarmed by people. From what Bain had said, I got the impression that Aurora and Liza were a bit aloof from the other students in their class, and that probably explains why most people drew closer to me but didn’t address me, watching me instead through the cameras on their phones. There were a handful of girls, who came forward to hug me, but they seemed more wary than glad to see me.

As though Aurora was nice enough, but not really nice. Or as though they wanted a picture with me to post on their Facebook pages.

I wasn’t disappointed. I’d only really had a chance to study Aurora’s friends in a yearbook from three years earlier, so I wasn’t going to be able to recognize most people, not easily anyway. Which meant this part was the most dangerous part of my arrival—and I would need to cut short.

That had been part of my plan from the beginning. Except it’s not as easy as you’d think to start a fight at a fancy graduation party. Actually getting someone to stop tweeting and take a swing at me was a challenge. I had to goad three guys, including one whose iPhone I threw in the pool when he wouldn’t stop filming me, before anything happened. Even then it was only because they summoned one of Coralee’s mother’s bodyguards, and after bruising my knuckles on his chin, I kicked him in the nuts.

The police arrived almost immediately—someone must have called them as soon as I started the fight.

The officer who brought me in was surprisingly young. He wasn’t good-looking, not in the traditional sense anyway, but he had the kind of face you wanted to keep looking at. His mouth was too big, his nose looked like it had been sculpted in a bar fight, and he was scowling. His face was made for it.

He was the kind of guy you’d never see at a country club, but who would have no trouble getting past the velvet rope at a night club. The name tag pinned perfectly straight on his blue patrolman’s uniform said “N. Martinez.”

He approached me cautiously, but I could have told him he didn’t have to worry. I only fight when it’s unavoidable, and I’d already called all the attention to myself that I needed.

He cuffed me, then steered me into the backseat of a waiting cruiser. Neither of us spoke during the twenty-two-minute drive to the police station, and the scowl didn’t change. When we got there, he scraped a chair out from next to a desk and pushed me into it. “Where’s Ainslie?” he said to the only other person in the place, a white man with graying hair in a tweed coat and a tie, a detective. “This one’s for her.”

“What is it?” the detective asked, wincing a little as he looked at me. Clearly somewhere between the fight and getting thrown into the pool, my looks had lost a bit of their luster.

“She was that domestic disturbance at the Gold residence,” N. Martinez said. I could tell he didn’t like the detective and that he was not the kind of person who was good at hiding that. “Crashed Coralee Gold’s graduation party. Looks a lot like Aurora Silverton, doesn’t she? That case was Ainslie’s.”

I felt, rather than saw, the other man’s eyes get huge as I sucked on the cut on my lip that I’d gotten from the Golds’ security guard’s right hook.

The detective came around to take a look at me. He had an urban road system of veins on his nose, and there were teddy bears on his tie. I gave him a smile, apparently a bloody one because he pulled back. He turned to N. Martinez and said, “You had better get her tidied up. This gets out, we’re going to have flashbulbs lurking outside.”

“That’s not standard procedure,” N. Martinez objected. The scowl hadn’t wavered, but it might have deepened. “The evidence—”

“Get her cleaned up before Ainslie sees her if you want your job.”

N. Martinez grabbed my arm with no pretense of trying to be gentle and led me out into the hall. He stopped to pick up a first aid kit, then dragged me to the men’s room. “I’m a girl,” I pointed out to him. You’d think someone with an interest in standard procedures would care about that.

“But I’m not, and I’m coming in with you.” I knew from experience that police get very testy and overprotective when they hear you’ve kneed someone in the balls. He followed me in, put the first aid kit on one of the white porcelain sinks, and unlocked the handcuffs. “Wash yourself.”

You reek of the fetid stench of death. Madam Cruz’s voice echoed in my ears as I watched him watch me.

There were two sinks beneath a mirror. Behind me were two dingy green painted stalls, and alongside them was a urinal. There was a sign on the door with a time stamp that indicated the cleaning crew had been through that morning, but I didn’t believe it. The place could have used a full five hours of scrubbing.

“Could you turn your back?” I said. “I’d like some privacy.”

He ignored me and took up a position leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, still scowling. There was something familiar about him, I thought, but then realized it was probably just the expression in his eyes, the cold cop stare. I’d seen it before.

I wondered what the N stood for. “Nosey,” maybe.

My left hand looked bad, the knuckles covered with blood—mine, I noticed, as I rinsed it off—and starting to swell. It would be useless for at least a few days, depending on how long I kept it
wrapped in a bandage. And that was the idea: No one could expect me to play the piano or tennis with a bandaged hand.

Everything was going just how I’d intended. It was all—

Cursed thing, only half-alive.