Louder Than Words (16 page)

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

Ben’s mother opened the front door before I was even halfway up the walk. How did she know I was coming? How did she know who I was? During the weeks Ben and I had been dating, I hadn’t met his mother. And although he had said he was the only clairvoyant in the family, he did say that his mom was magical, whatever the hell that meant. The closer I got to my old front door, the more I realized just how bad this idea was. Seven Seashell Lane was no longer my home, and Ben was no longer my boyfriend.

“I’M SASHA BLACK. I’M SORRY TO BARGE IN ON YOU LIKE THIS. I SHOULD GO.”

Just as I had suddenly had the urge to return to the place where my family had died, I had woken up that morning with a desperate need to go home again. For whatever reason, my addled brain was telling me to return to the nest. But what little confidence I’d felt when I set off on my latest quest dissolved as the dreadful monotone that stood in for my voice echoed in the chill late afternoon shadows; such a contrast to Mrs. Fisher’s lilting, almost musical voice. Turning around, I was practically in the street when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“What are you doing, Sasha? Don’t go. You’re supposed to come here. I want you here. Ben wants you here, even though he doesn’t know it yet.”

She knew the magic words. At the sound of Ben’s name, I turned around and looked into eyes the exact same color and shape as Ben’s. We had not spoken to each other at school, and he never came to the library anymore. Glimpses across the cafeteria, down a hallway—that was all I had seen of him in the last month. Seeing someone up close who was so close to him made me miss him even more. Maybe he was here. No one was peering out from behind the curtains, but perhaps my exile was almost over.

“BEN WANTS ME HERE?” I wanted to hear her say it out loud again.

“He wants you to get better. He’s having a difficult time right now. Your breakup was hard on him.”

She made it sound like
I
had broken up with
him
. Now I knew Ben was a freak. What teenage guy had heart-to-hearts with his mom about his love life? Had he filled her in on the specific circumstances that had led to that breakup? As weird as this family was turning out to be, I couldn’t imagine that kind of openness. But the possibility that my blow job blooper was fodder for dinner table conversation in the Fisher household made me want to run fast and far.

“IS HE HERE NOW?”

Please be home
. I crossed my toes inside my shoes. At the very least, he could tell me exactly how much his mother knew about us.

Ignoring my question, Mrs. Fisher asked, “Did Ben tell you anything about me?”

“JUST THAT YOU AND YOUR HUSBAND ARE UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS, AND THAT YOUR HUSBAND IS WORKING ON A BOOK.”

“Nothing else?”

I shook my head. Maybe Ben had lied to me. Maybe Mrs. Fisher was a card-carrying telepath and was testing me.

“I’m surprised. I wonder why. I guess he wants you to do this all on your own.” She was almost talking to herself at this point. Definitely not a mind reader. Ben had been telling the truth. Thank goodness.

“WHAT DIDN’T HE TELL ME? ARE YOU LIKE BEN? DO YOU READ MINDS?” I had to ask, just to be sure. “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ON MY OWN?”

“No, I can’t hear your thoughts. Only Ben has that particular gift. But we’re an unusual family, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our paths have crossed.”

In her long skirt and dangly gold earrings, she resembled a gypsy fortune teller more than a college professor. “REALLY?”

Was this woman merely eccentric, or was I on the verge of something momentous? Maybe Mrs. Fisher could help me find the mysterious murdering poet, help me figure out what to do when I did. A crystal ball seemed as good a solution as anything Jules and I had come up with so far.

“I do. When we were moving back to the States, we weren’t sure where we should live, but when we walked into this house—your house—it spoke to us, and I knew we had to start the next leg of our journey here.”

“YOUR JOURNEY?” Did that mean they weren’t staying in Shoreland?

“I feel the spirit of your family in this house. Do you think you might be ready to do a little spiritual spelunking, Sasha?” Crazy
and
alliterative.

“I DON’T KNOW.”

“Sit for a few minutes. It’s okay. You’re a little afraid of me. I see it in your eyes. Please don’t be. I’m not as strange as you think I am.” Maybe Mrs. Fisher really was a mind reader. She sat down on the step and patted the place next to her.

I sat down next to Ben’s mother on the front steps of my old house, just like I used to do with my own mother when I came home from school. Biting my tongue, wanting to cry at this unexpected peek into my past, I looked up at Mrs. Fisher, half expecting my mother to be staring back at me, but it was just the hippie cat lady, and I breathed a little easier. Maybe just being in my old house would be enough to get the memory ball rolling. Buoyed by this nutsy woman’s off-the-wall enthusiasm, I almost believed I was ready to face it.

“I’m so sorry about the loss of your family. There is no greater tragedy. But your survival speaks to your strong spirit,” she said, smiling sadly.

“NOT SO STRONG. I STILL NEED FOUR TRIPLE-A BATTERIES TO SPEAK, AND I BARELY REMEMBER MY CHILDHOOD. I’M AFRAID OF EVERYTHING. AS YOUR SON HAS TOLD ME, I’M A MESS.”

“Ben doesn’t really believe that, and neither do I. Besides, you’re not so fearful as you once were.”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” I hadn’t told anyone other than Dr. O. about the poems and flowers, and she was bound by doctor-patient privilege. And Jules had sworn she wouldn’t spill it.

“You forget, dear girl, your thoughts speak louder than words.” For a few seconds, she rested her hand on my head.

“BEN? HE HASN’T SAID A SINGLE WORD TO ME IN OVER A MONTH.” Thirty-six days, actually, but I didn’t want his mother to think I was obsessed with her only child.

“He may not be speaking to you, but he’s keeping tabs on you. He hasn’t left you, even if it looks that way.” Was this quirky woman just being kind, or was that really true? I desperately wanted to believe her.

“HOW? HE TOLD ME HIS ABILITY ONLY WORKS AT CLOSE RANGE AND HE’S BEEN AVOIDING ME.”

“As far as you know.” One eyebrow went up, just like Ben’s.

“BUT I’VE ONLY SEEN HIM AT A DISTANCE AT SCHOOL AND NEVER ANYWHERE ELSE.”

“I don’t want to say that Ben has been stalking you, but he does make the occasional nocturnal visit. Your mind is apparently very active right before you fall asleep.”

“OH.”

I felt hot all over, and I knew my face was bright red. Most nights before I dozed off I spent fantasizing about Ben being in bed with me. I hoped he had exercised some discretion and conveyed only relevant information to his mother, which hopefully did not include my mental reenactments of various examples in Jules’s sex book. It was hard to tell from her face exactly what she knew. From now on, I would have to revise my bedtime routine.

“You’ve visited the scene of the accident—that took tremendous fortitude. And you know that someone caused the crash that killed your family. That’s tremendous progress, don’t you think?”

Another more pressing thought occurred to me. Now that I was making a concerted effort to heal my psyche, maybe Ben would come back to me. His mother would vouch for my sincerity and diligence on my mission to recapture the power of speech. How could he say no when I was doing exactly what he wanted?

“WHAT TIME IS IT? I HAVE TO BE SOMEWHERE AT 4:30.”

That wasn’t exactly true, but I needed to be alone, to sort out all this new information, and I needed to figure out how to tell Charlotte about the poems. And Ben wasn’t here.

“It’s time, then. Do you want a ride home?” Mrs. Fisher stood, brushing off her skirt.

“I DON’T MIND WALKING AND I COULD USE THE FRESH AIR. IT’S NOT FAR.”

“If you like. Ben won’t be home until much later, but I’ll tell him you were here. Although I suppose he probably already knows that.” Maybe she was a mind reader after all. “You’re not ready to see him anyway.”

My face fell. “BUT I’M TRYING. ISN’T THAT ENOUGH FOR HIM? DOESN’T HE CARE?”

“Yes, Sasha, he does, very much.” She spoke with such conviction, I had no choice but to accept what she said.

“THEN YOU’LL TALK TO HIM FOR ME?” It was unlikely that Ben’s own mother would agree to be my advocate, but it was worth a try.

Mrs. Fisher shook her head. “Please try to understand. Ben is taking the long view. You have your whole life to have a relationship with him, or some other young man. But that will only take place if you work out your relationship with yourself.”

Mother and son apparently subscribed to the same life philosophy, which meant, at least for now, I was on my own. Damn.

“Look.”

Jules dropped a newspaper page in my lap as I sat on my old couch in the library sunroom. I enjoyed my afternoons there less since Ben had given me the boot, but I had no better place to go, and there was always the hope that he would sit down next to me just as he had that first day. So here I sat, looking at a monograph of Italian Renaissance painting, staring at Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
, daydreaming about Ben.

“TEENAGE GIRL GIVES BIRTH TO TWINS IN BACK OF TAXICAB. FASCINATING. ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING?”

I handed back the piece of paper without looking up. She had interrupted my daydream right at the good part.

“No, you idiot, the article underneath that. The reading at Bookends tonight. ‘Derek Moore talks about his new book,
In Verses Veritas
, a story of one man’s journey toward personal truth through poetry.’”

“SO?”

Jules sighed melodramatically at my failure to jump on board her thought train. Sometimes she assumed I thought about things exactly the same way she did, and when I wasn’t able to finish her sentences, she was frustrated.

“Look at the picture on the cover. Don’t you see it?” She held the newspaper about an inch from my face.

“IT’S BLURRY, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE SOME KIND OF FLOWER.”

“Not just any kind of flower—it’s a white tulip.” She jabbed her finger at the fuzzy newsprint photograph of the book cover.

“AGAIN, SO WHAT? I DON’T THINK OUR MYSTERY POET HAS THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS TO PURCHASE WHITE TULIPS.” With her typical enthusiasm, Jules had jumped from a single coincidence to full-on indictment. In my mind, she had soared over the Grand Canyon of conclusions. “IF A GUY WROTE A BOOK ABOUT FORGIVENESS, IT WOULD BE PERFECTLY LOGICAL TO PUT A WHITE TULIP ON THE COVER, SINCE IT’S NO SECRET THAT TULIPS REPRESENT FORGIVENESS. ANYBODY CAN LOOK ON
FLOWERSYMBOLS.COM
.”

“I know, but I have a feeling. Just come with me.”

She pulled at my arm, and the enormous book spread across my lap crashed to the floor. The librarian cleared her throat and shook her head.

“YOU’RE GOING TO GET ME KICKED OUT OF HERE, AND I DON’T HAVE ANYPLACE ELSE TO GO.” Jules had caught me in a low moment.

She patted my head. “Poor homeless girl. Did Charlotte kick you out of the mansion? You can come live with me, but first we’re going to this bookstore.”

I gathered my things. Jules was relentless, and once she’d made up her mind, it would be easier to rewrite history than convince her otherwise.

The bookstore was jammed when we arrived. Whoever this guy was, he had a following. Every chair was filled, so we stood at the back with a dozen other people, barely able to see the man with a beard and long hair sitting in a big leather chair. After a few minutes, a middle-aged woman dressed in tie-dye from head to toe picked up a microphone.

“Welcome, everyone. What a crowd. Apologies to those who have to stand, but it’ll be well worth it. Derek’s insights into the human spirit are without parallel.”

Jules elbowed me and whispered, “It looks like we fell into a Woodstock reunion.”

We had to be the youngest people in the room by at least thirty years.

Why are we here again?
I scribbled on my notepad.

“Poems, forgiveness, white tulips, murder,” she hissed. “Just listen. It takes patience to be a good detective.”

Remember, Sherlock, we’re not real detectives
.

“Good evening. My name is Derek Moore, and I have a terrible secret. Four years ago I committed a crime, and I never told anyone.”

Jules shoved me so hard I almost fell over. Now he had my attention. Could we have backed into it? I started to sweat. Was I looking at the person who had changed my life forever? In my mind, I had imagined someone classically evil, with slicked-back hair and a little black mustache curled up at the ends—not a Jesus lookalike in cowboy boots, torn jeans, and John Lennon sunglasses.

“What I did doesn’t matter now. I’ve made peace with my transgression, and rehashing what I’ve done wouldn’t accomplish anything. And that leads into what I want to talk to you about, what I’ve written about: forgiveness. Forgiving yourself for your own wrongs, and forgiving others for their shortcomings. Anger, whether at yourself or sent out into the world, only brings you down, only reduces the quality of your life. It’s a poison that will slowly and surely kill you. How do you dispel that anger? I’m here to tell you—poetry. I cannot emphasize enough the power of words to heal.”

My muscles cramped up, and my handwriting was barely legible.
You think this is the guy? What do we do now?

“I don’t know. Shhh.”

Jules was listening intently—what she was waiting for this guy to say, I didn’t know. Did she expect some kind of confession? To me, he was just spouting clichés, preying on the human need to feel better about ourselves, to get things off our chest and move on.

I wrote Jules another note and shoved it in her face.
His speech is pretty generic. Say you’re sorry, in stanzas, and move on
.

Now that the moment was at hand, I wasn’t sure I was ready to face the person who had killed my family. Jules grabbed the pencil out of my hand and gestured toward the speaker.

“Just listen,” she whispered. Either she was gathering evidence I couldn’t identify as such, or she was totally into the bullshit this crackpot was spewing.

Mr. Moore was staring off into space, almost preaching to the rapt crowd. I had to hand it to him; he was polished. He spoke totally off the cuff, no notes.

“Even something as serious as murder can be forgiven. There is no offense which our Lord does not forgive, and therefore there is no wrongdoing which we ourselves cannot forgive.”

Before I could grab Jules’s sleeve, she had taken off for the platform, climbing over the aging flower children if she couldn’t squeeze between them.

“Citizen’s arrest, citizen’s arrest!” I followed the trail she had blazed but before I could reach the front of the room, two security guards had grabbed her. “Arrest him, not me. He killed my friend’s family. He just said murder should be forgiven. He’s talking about running a car off the road and killing three people.”

Although there had to be a hundred people in the room, you could have heard a pin drop.

Derek Moore sat motionless in his chair, legs still casually crossed, seemingly unfazed, not even looking at Jules as he addressed her.

“Miss, I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about. Could someone please handle this interruption so that I may continue? Young lady, you are not only misguided, you are rude.”

I reached out to Jules, but the security guards, having patted her down to make sure she wasn’t packing heat, were already hauling her toward a side door. A minute later we were on the sidewalk. Jules stood, gasping for air, rubbing her bruised arms. I pulled out my voice box.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH YOU? ARE YOU TRYING TO GET US ARRESTED?”

Before she could answer, the earth mother who had introduced Derek Moore emerged from the side door. “Are you high?” Kind of a funny question from someone who looked like she’d probably spent the last five decades stoned. “I should call the police.” Didn’t she mean pigs?

Jules pulled herself together and stood nose to nose with Miss Yasgur’s Farm 1969. “That man in there killed my friend’s family. He ran them off the road in a snowstorm four years ago. I don’t know whether he was drunk or stoned or what, but he wrote some poems, and he left them at the tree with white tulips, and we figured out it was him.”

Jules had clearly gone off the reservation. I knew what had happened and
I
could barely follow what she was saying, she was talking so fast.

Expecting the woman to pull out a phone and call 911, I was shocked when she started to laugh. “That’s a fascinating story, but quite impossible.”

“But the picture of the tulip and the poems and all this crap about forgiving yourself for committing a crime. It has to be him,” Jules insisted.

She had a wild look in her eyes, and I put my hand on her arm, hoping she would come back down to earth and just stop talking before we got into more trouble. I still hadn’t told Charlotte about the poems, and I was beginning to think I didn’t want to.

“MA’AM, I’M REALLY SORRY ABOUT THIS. MY FRIEND IS A LITTLE UPSET.” Since when had I become the voice of reason? “WE’RE GOING TO LEAVE NOW. SORRY FOR EVERYTHING.”

“Oh, you poor thing.” My frantic typing and robotic voice seemed to take the hysteria down a notch. The Hawkie Talkie was incredibly powerful—everyone who heard it instantly started oozing sympathy. Maybe it wasn’t such a nasty little device. It was turning out to be quite useful. “She’s talking about your family, isn’t she?”

I nodded, trying to squeeze out a tear. If this woman had planned on calling the police, maybe she would take pity on the head case and her mute friend. We made quite a pair, and I couldn’t imagine anyone with an ounce of compassion who would want to make trouble for such a damaged duo.

Laying her hand lightly on my shoulder, she said, “I’m so sorry for your loss, but there is absolutely no way Derek Moore could have caused the accident.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” Jules had recovered her voice and was about to relaunch her trek down her twisted road to reason, but thankfully the woman cut her off.

“He couldn’t have run a car off the road, because he doesn’t drive. Derek Moore has been blind since 1972. The pigs—I mean, the police—sprayed him with some kind of tear gas at an anti-war rally, and he was allergic to the chemicals. He never recovered his eyesight.”

Jules’s jaw dropped. Finally, she had run out of things to say.

“WE’RE GOING TO GO. SORRY FOR THE TROUBLE WE CAUSED.”

I took Jules’s arm and dragged her to her car, digging the keys out of her pocket and letting us in. Just as we got inside the sky opened up, and we sat perfectly still, listening to the rain pound on the roof.

“YOU DIDN’T READ THIS WEIRDO’S BOOK, DID YOU?”

“Nope.”

“BLIND FOR THIRTY YEARS. HENCE THE SHADES INDOORS.” I wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of what had just happened, but Jules was embarrassed enough already.

“I’m so sorry. I just had this feeling. When I opened the newspaper, there it was. It was like fate.” Jules shook her head and then rested it against the steering wheel. “I’m really sorry.”

“IT’S OKAY. YOU WERE JUST TRYING TO HELP. BUT MAYBE NEXT TIME YOU COULD DO A LITTLE RESEARCH BEFORE WE MAKE A SCENE AND ALMOST GO TO JAIL.”

“Point taken.”

“IT’S ACTUALLY KIND OF FUNNY. YOU LOOKED VERY GRACEFUL, HURDLING OVER THE HIPPIES. GAZELLE-LIKE.”

“Thanks.” Jules let out a giggle.

It
was
kind of comical, especially since we didn’t end up behind bars. If she’d laid a hand on Derek Moore, I’d probably be calling Charlotte to bail her out on an assault charge.

“CITIZEN’S ARREST? WHERE DID YOU COME UP WITH THAT?”

“I think I saw it on an episode of
CSI: Miami
.” Jules looked at me and broke out laughing. That was one of the best things about Jules—she didn’t dwell.