Spirit (22 page)

“We need to think this over,” I proclaimed.

Timmy clapped his hands. “Goody, Uncle Jason’s gonna think!”

Wise-guy.

Sam came over and gave me a consoling pat on the back. His fingers lingered over my bare skin, giving me another chill. This chill was the good kind. “Don’t you worry, Jason, I’ll show that wall a thing or two, yessir. Don’t you fret about that at all. Give me the fucking hammer.”

I shriveled Sam with an icy stare while Timmy scraped one index finger over the other in an accusatory fashion. “Omm, bad word,” Timmy said.

Then my nephew showed more sense than all the adults in the room when he handed Sam my spider gloves. “Use these,” he said. “There’s no bugs in them, I looked.”

So Sam slid the gloves on and manhandled the sledgehammer over to the wall.

“Don’t collapse the house,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” Sam said, hoisting the hammer onto his shoulders. “This isn’t a retaining wall. Basically what it is is just an afterthought. It makes no sense for this wall to be here at all. One little hole in it isn’t going to hurt anything. I hope,” he finished up in a barely audible whisper.

He gripped the sledgehammer with a lot more aplomb than I had displayed, and without thinking too much about it (another one of my faults), he drew back and slung the hammer into the wall with a resounding crash. Through a thick cloud of dust, we heard a clatter of loose bricks as a hole materialized in the wall in front of us. The hole was two feet off the floor and after a few more bricks tumbled through the opening and the dust began to clear, it finally showed itself to be about the size of a doghouse.

I nervously scanned the basement ceiling through the haze of dust Sam had stirred up. The house showed no signs of tumbling down upon our heads, so I figured we were safe.

Timmy was whooping and clapping and leaping around in his excitement. Thumper had burrowed under the blanket, leaving only her trembling tail exposed. I guess her excitement level was considerably lower than Timmy’s. All three of us were coughing and blinking back tears due to the brick dust hanging in the air.

Sam still wasn’t satisfied with the destruction he had wreaked, so he drew back one more time with the sledgehammer and knocked loose the bricks standing between the new hole and the floor. Sam immediately stepped away to escape the second cloud of filth he had raised, and as soon as the dust from
that
hammer strike cleared and the bricks stopped tumbling,
voil
̀
a
, we had a doorway, of sorts.

I reached out and took Timmy’s hand. I led him forward until I could take Sam’s arm with my other hand. Together, the three of us slowly approached the ragged opening, not sure what we would find.

We leaned forward through the freshly opened wound in the wall and peered into the dim interior. It was lit only by my missing basement windows, long painted-over and placed high along the opposite wall. The windows were thick with spiderwebs. I got the creeps just looking at them. The stench and heat wafting out of the shadowy recess reeked of mildew and stale air. And dirt. Raw dirt.

Looking down, I realized the space was unpaved. The floor was naked earth, clumped and uneven, slanted up in a rise toward the front of the house…. Broken slabs of concrete that must have once comprised the floor were stacked in a jumble in the opposite corner as if they had been jackhammered out of the ground and laboriously tossed there out of the way. For what reason, I couldn’t imagine.

Sam and I gazed at each other. He tried to wipe the dirt from his face but left a bigger smear of filth than was there before.

“I think we’d better do some digging.” he said.

I looked down at Timmy, who had tilted his head back to peer up at us. Then I turned to once again consider the expanse of dirt in front of us—and the unexplained walled-up space in my basement.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s dig.” After a moment of hesitation, I added, “What are we looking for?”

Sam refused to answer, which told me more than I wanted to know.

At that moment, my cell phone chirped somewhere upstairs, and all three of us leaped straight up into the air. A split second later, the house gave a shudder around us as if it had slipped a few inches into the ground. I could feel the jarring movement underfoot. Windows rattled upstairs. Thumper whimpered from beneath her dusty blanket in the corner.

When wooden beams suddenly creaked and groaned in the ceiling and dust sifted down onto our heads, we all jumped again.

“Oh, dear,” I said. “Did we do that with the hammer?”

“No,” Sam said. “Somebody’s mad, and it ain’t us.” His eyes were as big as tennis balls while he surveyed the ceiling as if he didn’t quite trust it not to come crashing down on top of us.

I nodded. “You’re right. It must be Sally on the phone.”

Upstairs in the kitchen, we heard my phone chirp again. Well, actually, it emitted
half
a chirp, then the chirping abruptly ceased when the basement floor shuddered beneath our feet and a huge
boom
echoed through the house. Sam and I cringed away from the sound.

“Uh-oh,” Timmy said, standing beside me clutching my trouser leg. Sam and I gazed down at him, and I’m pretty sure I blanched. I hate it when I blanch. Sam didn’t look too spunky either.

“The uh-ohs again,” I groaned. “What is it this time?”

Timmy sadly shook his head. “You ain’t gonna like it.”

“Why, what’s Daddy going to do?”

Timmy stuck his finger up his nose and started rooting around for gold. I guess paranormal activity was getting to be old hat to him. “I think he already did it.”

“Oh God. And stop picking your nose.”

With a final shudder, the house settled into stillness. I had the oddest sensation it was expectantly waiting—but waiting for what?

I scooped Timmy into my arms, Sam gathered up Thumper, and with heavy hearts, the four of us trooped up the basement stairs to see what we would find.

Whatever it turned out to be, I had a feeling Timmy was right. I wouldn’t like it at all.

W
E
STOOD
in the kitchen doorway like a mismatched collection of pastries, two large and one small, slathered in icings of brick dust and sweat. We stared into the kitchen, speechless.

But that didn’t last long.

“This ain’t good,” Sam finally said.

“No shit,” I agreed, while Timmy happily squirmed in my arms, trying to get down.

“Told ya you wouldn’t like it,” he tittered as I stood him on his feet in front of me.

The remnants of my cell phone were everywhere: littered across the kitchen counter, sprinkled in the sink, sparkling over the tile floor from one end of the room to the other like a scattering of shiny gemstones cast there by the gods. The phone wasn’t just smashed. It was almost vaporized. There didn’t seem to be a piece of plastic, metal, or circuitry left that was any bigger than a raisin. I couldn’t have done a finer job of killing it if I’d used the sledgehammer and three sticks of dynamite.

I was pretty sure my phone had chirped its last chirp.

I turned away from the destruction and looked down to study Timmy’s upturned face. “Guess it was Mommy who called, huh, and Daddy didn’t like it?”

Timmy tittered again, throwing my own words back in my face. “No shit.”

“Watch your mouth,” Sam and I said in absentminded unison, and Timmy had the good grace to pretend to look guilty. Sam set Thumper at Timmy’s feet. The dog gave herself a good shake, creating a little cloud of brick dust. Then she sneezed.

Sam caught my eye, and I was surprised to see him smiling too. “Two disintegrated phones in two weeks,” he said. “Your cell phone provider will be thrilled. He’ll probably send you a thank-you card.”

It was then that the wall phone jangled in the corner by the kitchen table, startling the bejesus out of all four of us. I had forgotten about the landline. As soon as my heart stopped yammering in my throat, I crunched my way across the kitchen floor, smashing the shattered pieces of my poor murdered cell phone even flatter.

I snatched the receiver off the wall and barked, “What!”

Sally’s voice was cold. No hello, no kiss my ass, just, “Put Timmy on. Now.”

I was in no mood to argue. I handed the phone to my nephew. He wasn’t used to wielding a humongous dinosaur receiver in his tiny four-year-old paw. He fumbled around for a minute before he got the right end of it up to his ear where he wanted it.

“Hello?” he said, all innocence and sweetness. Then his face lit up. “Hi, Mommy!”

Sam and I were eyeing the house around us, wondering what it was going to do in response to this newest intrusion by our ghost’s most hated enemy—my sister.

But the house seemed to be listening in on Timmy’s conversation as raptly as Sam and I were. It didn’t make a peep, and neither did we. We stood there staring down at the boy, hanging on to every word.

“We’re playing,” Timmy said into the mouthpiece, obviously in response to a question.

I could hear the sharp drone of Sally’s voice coming through the receiver from where I stood. She didn’t sound any happier speaking to Timmy than she had when speaking to me. She was so mad, and her voice cut the air with such vicious clarity, I could overhear every word she said to him.

“Who’s playing?”

“Me and my uncles.”

“You mean uncle. Singular. My idiot brother, Jason, is the only uncle you have. And he’s one too many.”

Timmy laughed. “That’s not true! Sam’s here too! He’s another uncle! I think they’re boyfriends!”

Sally appeared to be rendered speechless by that announcement. At least, for a moment. “Who else are you playing with? And what are you playing?”

Timmy gazed up at me when he answered. His big blue eyes, so filled with guileless innocence, nailed me to the spot where I was standing. And yet I think he knew what he was doing full well. There was a hint of in-your-face bravado in his voice when he said to Mommy, “We’re looking for Daddy. I think he’s mad at you.”

Sally’s voice jumped an octave on that one. I rather suspected it would. “What do you mean you’re looking for Daddy? Daddy’s gone, Timmy. Don’t you remember? We’ve talked about this before. He left us. Now we’ve got Jack, honey. Jack’s your daddy now.”

Timmy didn’t buy that one any more than I did. “Jack just acts like he likes me, but we never play. He just looks at me like he wishes I’d go someplace else.”

Ouch,
I thought.
From the mouth of babes.

Apparently, Sally wasn’t in the mood to argue the nurturing talents of her lover. “What do you mean your daddy’s mad at me? He’s nowhere around; how could you possibly know if he’s mad at me? And when did your daddy’s brother get there?
Sam
,” she snapped, as if she couldn’t believe she was even uttering the word. “When did
Sam
get there?”

Timmy wasn’t up to counting days. “Dunno. A while, I guess.” His face lit into a smile. “Daddy plays with me! The other day he put me in a tornado!”

“I seriously doubt it,” Sally snapped again. “Put your uncle on the phone. Not Sam. Jason. Put Jason on the phone. Now.”

Timmy held the phone out to me with both hands. “I think you’re in trouble,” he whispered as I plucked it from his grasp.

“It won’t be the first time,” I whispered back, giving him a hearty smile conjured from sheer imagination and a forced joviality dredged up from the bottom of my feet for the kid’s benefit alone.

Sam gave me a cluck of sympathy. He started dragging a broom around the kitchen floor sweeping up the remnants of my cell phone, but his eyes stayed on me every second. He didn’t look too jovial either.

Sally’s voice was like a knife stabbing into my ear. “What the hell are you playing at, and why haven’t you been answering your phone?”

I found a stubborn streak buried somewhere in my psyche and dragged it out where it could be of use. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking me, Sis.”

“Horseshit!” Sally spat. “Not answering my phone calls is bad enough, but why are you even mentioning Timmy’s father to him? He doesn’t need to feel any more abandoned than he probably already does.”

“I don’t think—”

“And what did Timmy mean when he said you were looking for Daddy? Is this some sort of weird hide and seek game, or are you actually rooting through the house trying to unearth Paul? You’re certifiable, you know that, Jason? As soon as I can get there, I’m going to yank that kid out of your clutches, and you’ll never see him again.”

I had been fighting with my sister since the day I was born. I could hold my own pretty well after all those years of practice. “Like you did with Sam’s family? Why did you cut them out of Timmy’s life, Sally? Why would you deprive Timmy of his only grandparents? Our folks are gone, but don’t you think Timmy might have enjoyed his other grandparents showing up once in a while to make him feel loved and dote over him and swamp him with presents? Huh? Why would you isolate the kid like that?”

When I started my rant, I was relieved to see Sam scoop Timmy into his arms and lug him out to the backyard. I could see them now through the kitchen window, standing under the orange tree and talking quietly. Sam was on his knees in front of the boy. Timmy looked sad. Damn. I hoped that wasn’t because of what I’d said in front of him.