The Ghosts of Now (7 page)

The pressure of Dad’s hand on my shoulder startles me, and I jump. “We’d better go,” he murmurs.

“Where?”

“Why, home, of course.”

“We haven’t been here very long. There are things I want to tell Jeremy.”

“He can’t hear you, Angie.”

“We don’t know that.”

He sighs. “Please be reasonable.”

I lean toward my brother. “Good night, Jeremy. I’ll be back tomorrow.” There are tiny, blue veins on his eyelids. His lashes lie quietly on his cheeks. I wish I could reach behind that curtain. “Good night.”

It’s not late when we reach our house, but Mom has gone to sleep facedown on the sofa in the den, her cheek squashed against her nose so that her breathing comes out in a whispery snuffle.

Dad looks down on her for a few moments, his mouth drooping like an unhappy little boy’s.

He needs someone. “You want to talk about Jeremy, Dad?” I ask him.

But he shakes his head. “I’d better get a light blanket for your mother,” he answers. “I don’t want her to catch cold.”

I wait until he returns and tucks an old, blue, woven shawl around her. “I couldn’t find the blankets.” His voice seems to belong to someone else.

“Dad, it might help us both to talk about Jeremy. Maybe about what we can do for him.”

“Everything that can be done is being done, Angie.”
He straightens both inside and outside. “Dr. Branning knows what to do.” He moves toward the rosewood desk in the corner. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some paperwork to do.”

“Do you have to do it now?”

“Yes, now.” His look is almost conciliatory. “Besides, we don’t want to wake your mother, do we?”

I wander off to my room, see that it’s only eight thirty, and wonder what to do with myself. I pick up my French book, but toss it on my desk with a groan. Not now. There is no way to forget the accident, the detective, and Debbie Hughes.

Suddenly I find myself picking up my handbag and car keys. I’ve got to talk to Debbie. It won’t take long. I should be home again before Dad goes to bed and looks for me to say good night. The Grandy Hughes address is in the phone book, and by this time I’m familiar with the streets.

There’s a car in the Hughes driveway and some lights on in the downstairs rooms. A far upper-left window also gleams in the darkness. It dawns on me that Debbie probably isn’t here. She’s bound to have a date on Saturday night. But I’ve come this far. I’ll give it a try.

The doorbell’s chimes are followed by the click of a woman’s heels. The door opens, and a short woman with blond hair in a high, teased, out-of-style hairdo smiles at me. “Yes, dear?”

“My name is Angie.” I deliberately leave off my last name. “I’d like to see Debbie, if she’s home.”

“My, yes, she’s home, all right,” the woman says. “But you can’t see her. She has some little virus or something, and you know how catching those things can be.”

“I won’t worry about that,” I tell her. “It’s very important to me to see Debbie.”

Her eyelids stretch wide and blink. “But she may not feel up to seeing anyone, dear. She’s broken a date to stay in bed, so she probably won’t want to talk to you.”

“Please. Could you ask her?”

“Well—” She looks over her shoulder, then shrugs. “All right. You said your name is Angie?”

I nod.

“Wait just a minute, Angie.” The door closes gently in my face.

A breeze has come up again. It must be a regular thing around here. At least it’s a layer of cool to break up the pounding heat. But the breeze carries a grit of dust in it, which crawls down my neck, sifting into my clothes.

It’s at least five minutes before the woman returns. I assume she’s Debbie’s mother. I also assume she and Debbie have had some kind of conversation about me, because she has gulped down her smile and she opens the door just a crack. Her eyes are narrowed and wary.

“Debbie doesn’t feel well enough to see anyone, just as I told you.”

“Please, Mrs. Hughes. I must see her.”

“No, no. Not now.”

The door begins to shut, but I move a little closer and say, “Listen to me, Mrs. Hughes. If I can’t talk to Debbie now, I’ll come back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, if necessary. Or I’ll talk about what’s on my mind in school. Yes. That’s what I’ll do.”

“What a rude young woman you are,” she says, but her voice wavers. “If Grandy were just here, he could—”

I don’t find out what Grandy Hughes could do, because a voice behind Mrs. Hughes says, “It’s all right, Mama. Let her come in.”

“Oh, dear,” her mother says, but she opens the door, and I quickly step inside.

Debbie’s wearing a pink shortie nightgown, and her feet are bare. Her hair is tousled, and she looks like someone who needs to be in bed. For the first time I have some doubts about what I’ve started.

The Hughes home is beautiful, with a wide, circular staircase sweeping up from the entry hall, but there’s a fussy, busy accumulation of too many pictures and too many accent pieces. There are even too many people here right now. I want to talk to Debbie, not to her mother.

“I’m sorry if you’re sick,” I tell her. “If you’d like to get back in bed, I’ll be glad to talk to you in your room. What I want to ask you won’t take long.”

“Okay,” she says, looking at her mother instead of at me. “Mama, you don’t need to come with us. We don’t
have much to say to each other. Angie will be leaving in a few minutes.”

As I follow Debbie up the stairs, her mother scuttles into another room. “You’d do it, too, wouldn’t you?” Debbie’s words are flat and angry, taking me off guard.

“Do what?”

“Hassle me at school. I heard what you said to Mama.”

“I don’t want to hassle you. What makes you think I’d try to do a think like that?”

At the top of the staircase Debbie doesn’t pause. She just heads down the hall and into a room to the left. It’s the one I had seen from the street.

Debbie flops on her bed, leaning against the padded, pastel-flowered headboard. “Tom Fergus called Daddy about your trip to the police station. He told him what you said.”

I stand by the door, watching her. “And he told us your excuse—your explanation,” I say.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Trying to find out the truth.”

“What Daddy told him is the truth.”

“You really want me to believe that after your car was stolen your father would rush like that to get the body work done on it?”

“I need my car to get back and forth to school.”

“One of your friends could have picked you up.”

“I don’t want to be dependent on my friends.”

I take two steps closer to Debbie, and she flattens
against the headboard. “Don’t lie to me. I believe that you were in that car, that you hit my brother.”

“No,” she says. “I’m going to tell you where I was, and you aren’t going to like it. Not a little bit. But the way you’re acting, you deserve it.”

She sits upright, and her eyes glitter as she smiles. “Last night,” she says, “I was out with your friend Del Scully.”

I hope she can’t see how she’s shaken me. “I don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“Because Del’s not in your social group. He’s—”

She interrupts with a slow laugh that rolls huskily from deep in her throat. “Sometimes that doesn’t matter. He’s
very
good-looking. Don’t you agree?”

I hate myself for blushing. I try to act as calmly as possible, because I realize that I’ve let her get me off the track. “Someone phoned me,” I say. “Was it you?”

She drops the pose. “What are you talking about?”

“About a phone call I got from a coward who whispered ‘Your brother is dead’ and hung up.”

I watch her carefully, but I can’t tell if what I said surprised her or she’s just reacting to hearing me say the words. There’s a quick intake of breath and her eyes widen. “Why do you think I’d make a phone call like that?”

“Because I think it was your car that hit my brother.”

“My car was stolen.”

“Prove it.”

“I don’t have to prove anything to you.” She’s leaning forward, and her shoulders are trembling.

I step a little closer to her. I’m shaking, too, but it’s because I’m so angry. “Maybe you were driving your car, maybe not. If you weren’t, then I think you know who was, and that makes you equally guilty. My brother is still unconscious. He’s badly hurt. And I’m not going to let the hit-and-run driver get away. If that creep is also the whisperer, then there’s even more to answer for.”

“Get out of here!” Her voice is so tight the words seem to scratch her throat.

“Okay—for now. But I won’t give up.”

“Leave me alone!”

I don’t answer. I just give her one long stare before I turn and walk out of her bedroom. Her mother is standing at the bottom of the stairs like a watchdog who’s ready to go for the throat. I wonder how much of our conversation she’s overheard. There’s nothing to say to her, so I just pass her and walk across the entrance hall to the front door. She’s right behind me, and I hear the dead bolt click as the door shuts almost against my back.

She has turned off the porch light, so I stand without moving for a few moments, waiting to get my bearings.

My car isn’t the only one on the street, but I’m not aware of that until I’m inside my car and pulling away from the curb. Then I realize that another car started up when mine did. Could it be a coincidence?

I’m not sure, so I circle the block. So does the other car. I pick up speed. The best place for me to be is on
one of the main streets, not a residential street. It’s hard to breathe and my hands are clammy. I keep glancing from the street to my rearview mirror and back again.

A cross street that can be counted on to have the Fairlie version of traffic is just half a block ahead when a cherry suddenly flashes on top of the car that’s following me, and it quickly slides up beside me.

I move to the edge of the curb, and the police car pulls just in front of me, blocking my way forward. A tall, lanky officer climbs out of the car and walks back toward mine, so I roll down the window. In the glare of red flashes and bounced-off light from my headlights against his car, I recognize him as the same policeman who questioned me in the hospital.

“Hi,” I say, and I lean back against the seat feeling weak with relief. “Thank goodness it’s you. When I saw I was being followed it scared me.”

He looks uncomfortable. “Got your driver’s license handy? I need to see it,” he says. “Your proof-of-insurance card too.”

“Sure.” I fumble in my handbag for my wallet, pull out my license and the card and hand them to him. “What’s the matter?”

“Routine,” he says. He studies the license.

“Why were you following me? What’s going on?”

He hands back my license and insurance card and leans his arms on the frame of my open door window, arching his neck and bending awkwardly like a long-necked crane so that his face is down on a level with mine. “Look,” he says. “A few years ago my brother-in-law
was in a bad smash-up. Drunk driver caused it. The drunk walked away from it, but my brother-in-law died and left my sister a widow with two little kids to support. I hated that drunk so bad I could have killed him. Almost did.”

He pauses, and I say, “I’m sorry. But I don’t understand what’s happening now. Here and right now.”

“I’m trying to say I know how you feel about what all went down with your brother. But what you’re doin’, runnin’ around hassling people, won’t help any.”

“I wasn’t hassling anybody.”

“Miz Hughes felt different. She put in a call. You’re probably a good kid who’s a lot upset. It’s just that you make a pest of yourself and you’re gonna get watched.”

I understand what he’s trying to tell me. My body feels numb from the shock, and I wiggle my fingers as though they’ve gone to sleep. “Nothing is going to get done,” I’m mumbling to myself, but he picks up the words.

“Hit ’n’ runs are hard to prove.”

I put my hands on the steering wheel, gripping it tightly. “I get the picture. Can I go home now?”

“Sure,” he says. He straightens, hunching his shoulders up and down and stretching to get out the kinks. “I’ll just follow along to make sure you get home all right.”

He moves back to his car with long, slow strides and climbs in, flipping off the red cherry. He moves forward to give me space, waiting for me to take off.

I’ve got to think. There’s so much to think about. I
try to pretend he’s not there, and as I pull up on the driveway I ignore him.

Dad has heard the back door open and close. He comes into the kitchen, a pencil in his hand, his shirtsleeves rolled up. His reading glasses have slid crookedly on his nose, and he takes them off, blinking at me like a surprised owl. “I thought you were in bed, Angie.”

“I just went out for a few minutes.”

“You should have told me.”

“You were busy. I didn’t want to bother you.”

Fear suddenly shivers across his face and is gone before I can be sure that I’ve seen it. He reaches to hug me, holding me against his shoulder and saying, “Angie, we
must
know where you are—especially after dark. We don’t want anything else—” He can’t finish the sentence.

I suddenly feel protective toward my father and hug him back, awkwardly patting his shoulder. “Okay, Dad. I didn’t think. I’m sorry.”

He straightens, holding me off and giving me a little shake and a smile. “Fine,” he says, and he’s back to the father I know. “It’s time we headed for bed. Your mother has been asleep for hours.”

I think of Del, and in the confusion of my feelings I blurt out, “Did anyone call me?”

“No,” Dad says. “Of course not, or I would have known you weren’t here.”

To cover up I reach for a glass and get a drink of water.

“Were you expecting a call?” Dad asks.

“No,” I answer, gulping down the lukewarm water and wiping my mouth on the back of my arm.

Who cares about you, Del?
I’m astounded at the jealousy I feel, the hurt because I was beginning to trust him. I try to be rational. There’s been nothing between Del and me. Nothing to give me a reason for aching like this. I slap at my hair with a hairbrush and viciously scrub my teeth. I squirm between the sheets, tugging at my twisting pajamas, and lie there in the dark.
Del
, I think,
why didn’t you tell me you were out with Debbie?