The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold Read online

  Loud, thumping bass came from the first apartment I passed. Inside the second, I heard a man and a woman shouting. Ray's apartment was on the second floor, so I headed for the metal staircase in the middle. A crow, perched on the second floor railing, leered at me. Two teenage boys in denim jackets were lounging in the middle of the staircase, smoking cigarettes and laughing while they tried to catch snowflakes on their tongues. A doddering little woman wearing a purple shawl, a bag of groceries cradled in her arms, was just starting a laborious journey up the stairs. When she neared the teenagers, they waved their hands in front of her face and yelled at her.

  "Hey, lady! Hey, ugly, I'm talking to you! Booga, booga!"

  "Booga, booga!" the second kid chanted. "Where you going with that stuff? Hey, stupid cow, I'm talking to you! You run out of tampons again?"

  She never acknowledged them. It was comforting, in a way, to know that dumbass teenagers were dumbass teenagers whether alive or dead, another constant in the universe. They jumped back and forth in front of her, waving their hands, shouting booga, booga, and continuing their never-ending stream of insults.

  Eventually, they allowed her to go on her way, turning their attention to me when I started up the stairs. I kept my head low. They started making fun of my shoes—my shoes, of all things—which may not have been Clarks or Keds or whatever the cool kids were wearing these days, but were perfectly acceptable tennis shoes that I'd bought at Target. I may have been a bit nicer if they hadn't picked on my shoes. I liked my shoes. They were comfortable and functional, the two things I prized in shoes above all. And they still had that out-of-the-box whiteness I liked so much.

  "Hey, dumbass!" one of them shouted. "Hey, where you going? That your wife we just passed? Booga, booga!"

  "Booga, booga!" the other one joined in, leaning in and yelling at the side of my face. "Booga, booga!"

  Timing my response for maximum impact, I waited until I was right between them, then leaned over and shouted: "Booga, booga!"

  Oh, the look on their faces. I probably should not have taken such joy in the way their eyes bugged out and their mouths gaped wide, but if my curse did not give me at least some modicum of pleasure now and then, I didn't know how I would even get through the day.

  The one at the top of the stairs shrieked and sprang up the stairs, vanishing into one of the apartments. The second one was a freezer, as a good percentage of people are when facing danger, and except for the cigarette that fell from his lips and drifted to the parking lot below, he could have been an ice sculpture. His sandy hair was thin, long, and greasy, the bangs low enough that they almost covered his eyes and mostly hid the acne dotting his forehead. He had obscenely large black medallion earrings, the kind that stretch the lobes like gum. I wondered what the forty-year-old version of him would think of the teenager who'd made the choice to do that to his ears, but then, teenagers like him often didn't make it to forty at all.

  Taking advantage of his paralysis, I leaned in close and gripped the railing on either side of him. The freezing metal made my fingers ache.

  "You know who I am?" I asked.

  There was the barest tip of the head.

  "Answer me so I know there's an actual brain in there," I said.

  "Y-y-yes," he said.

  "Not so great when the person you make fun of can actually do something back, huh?"

  "I'm—I'm sorry—"

  "I don't care. I'm going to ask you some questions, and you're going to answer them, got it? I'm investigating the girl who disappeared two days ago, lives right up there. Olivia Ray. You know about it?"

  He swallowed hard. The shock must have finally worn off a bit, because he tried to duck under my arm. I put a hand right in the middle of his chest, sinking it in, feeling the familiar electric tingle. He yelped and stood ramrod straight again. I knew he felt the same thing, though it was much worse for him. As a rule, most ghosts hated to be touched by the living, and they especially hated being touched by me.

  "I'm not done with you yet," I said.

  "Okay, okay!" he said. "I didn't see nothin', man, I swear."

  "But you know about it?"

  "Yeah, yeah. I just saw the cops around asking about it. I didn't see it myself."

  "I think you're lying."

  "No, man, no!"

  "What did you see?"

  "Nothing!"

  "Anybody you know see anything?"

  "No! Just…"

  "What? Tell me!"

  "Well, Skintop, he said he saw these dudes in black ski masks toss the kid in the back of the van. He said the dudes were, like … chanting."

  "What?"

  "You know, like monks or something. Chanting in another language. And he said that's not all. He said they were, like, blinking in and out and stuff. Like it was hard to see them."

  "Where's Skintop?"

  "I don't know, man."

  "I want you to—"

  But the kid finally summoned enough courage to make a break for it, ducking under my arm and sprinting down the stairs. I swiped at his back, and he let out another yelp, but this time he didn't stop. I watched him go, wishing I'd gotten a little more information out of him and wondering what the whole chanting business was about.

  I turned to head back up the stairs and there, at the top, was a little boy in a bright blue snowsuit with gray duct tape patching up the elbows. His face was the only thing exposed to the snow, and he blinked his big round eyes at me. He couldn't have been more than five.

  "Who you talking to, mister?" he asked.

  "Frosty the Snowman," I said.

  "But I don't see him," the boy said.

  "That's because … he's invisible."

  "He's not made of snow?"

  "He's made of invisible snow."

  "How do you know if it's invisible?"

  "Because … I can see invisible things."

  The boy contemplated this for a while, then nodded. He started down the stairs, passing me.

  "Okay," he said. "That makes sense. I'm going to go see if I can make a real snowman. That's more fun."

  * * *

  A tour of John Ray's apartment did not yield as much useful information as I'd hoped. He greeted me at the door, thanked me profusely for coming, and showed me around his place in a semiconscious daze, repeating himself, often trailing off mid-sentence. Laura wasn't there yet. He had the heat cranked up so high that I immediately had to shed my trench coat, and even then I felt sweat forming on my brow within two minutes. The old baseboard heaters, clicking and clanking, gave off a faint rusty odor. When I mentioned how warm it was, he stopped and looked at me as if I'd just mentioned something quite painful.

  "Oh," he said. "Yeah. That's because of Olivia. She gets these … cold spells. She likes it warm."

  "Does anything trigger these cold spells?"

  "I don't know. She just gets them. Why?"

  "Just asking."

  I wished Laura was there so I might get a better answer. The apartment had the look of someone who had just moved in yesterday, with cardboard boxes and green plastic totes everywhere. I wanted to ask when the furniture was going to arrive, because they had one rickety futon in the living area, a folding card table in the kitchen nook, and not much else. A few family pictures did hang on the walls, but they only served to show how bare the place really was. There was one bedroom and it was no different in there: two sleeping bags, suitcases that acted as dressers, and a scattering of other personal effects. There was a hand-held drawing board next to the closest sleeping bag. A laptop on one of the totes showed an Oregonian article about Olivia's abduction, the one I'd just read an hour earlier. A couple dozen paperback books were stacked along the wall next to the other sleeping bag, the one under the window.

  "You didn't bring much with you from Wisconsin, huh?"

  "No. Couldn't fit most of it in the car."

  "Not even a TV, huh? How do you watch Wheel of Fortune?"

  "What? Oh, the TV. Yeah, sometimes we'll watch
stuff on my laptop."

  "Okay. That was kind of a joke. I don't watch of Wheel of Fortune." In fact, I didn't watch much television at all. It was too distracting with all the ghosts wandering around in the picture. Even entertainment hadn't been spared from my curse, alas. "That Olivia's sleeping bag, the one next to the books?"

  He nodded. I dropped to my knees next to it, scanning the titles. Most of the paperbacks were of the thick doorstopper variety, epic fantasies I seldom had the patience to read. "Pretty advanced stuff here for a nine-year-old," I said.

  "She's always been a good reader," John said. "She spent most of her day reading. I'd take her to the Rockwood library a couple times a week." I heard the hoarseness in his voice, the tightening of his throat. "She likes the ones about other worlds. Dragons, elves, that sort of thing. She said she liked pretending she was somewhere else."

  "So she wasn't in school?"

  "No. I asked, but she didn't want to go yet. I told her she'd have to start in January, though. I didn't want her to get too … too far behind."

  He was on the verge of a complete breakdown. I wondered where Laura was. I was starting to get worried. It was possible the walk was just taking her a while, but she knew I was coming and she was just as motivated to find her daughter as her husband was. She also shouldn't have been as affected by the weather as a living person, though it was always hard to say with ghosts. It was usually about what they let affect them. Most of them simply couldn't transcend a lifetime of limitations their physical bodies had imposed on them.

  I thought about what had Laura said, about her being with John when Laura was taken, and didn't see how it was possible if they were all in one room. "Was Olivia in here with you when it happened?"

  "No, she was in the living room. A lot of times she'd go out and sleep on the futon. She says I snore."

  "Ah. She didn't keep a journal, did she?"

  "No. As much as she liked to read, she didn't like to write much."

  "No stuffed animals either?"

  "Before—before the accident, she had some things. She didn't want to bring them. She said they made her sad."

  "Sad?"

  "Yeah. Because they weren't real. She said she liked real animals too much to pretend with fakes anymore. She handed them out to kids in the neighborhood before I could get her to change her mind."

  I felt around her sleeping bag and found nothing. I flipped through some of her paperbacks, hoping to find notes or something else stuffed between the pages, and found nothing there either. No toys. No jewelry. No real keepsakes. When I asked if she played with any of the kids in the neighborhood, John told me no, she pretty much kept to herself even though he encouraged her to get outside and play with others. Except for the paperbacks, there were almost no signs of her personality, or even that she had lived there. She might as well have been a ghost.

  Perhaps, in a way, she was. I knew the feeling. I knew what it was like to feel so apart from everyone, to feel so different, to be so different. I also knew what it was like when all the things that you used to be attached to lost some of their appeal; it wasn't so much the things changing as it was you changing. It was like losing the taste for a particular kind of food. One day you just didn't like it anymore. You couldn't explain it.

  The difference, for people like Olivia and I, was that we had lost the taste of almost all food.

  I knew I was projecting myself on her, seeing my own problems in the blank slate of her life, and it was a pitfall I would have to avoid if I was going to do my job. I looked out the window. The blinds were down but cracked open. I parted two of them in the middle and leaned in close, feeling the cold seeping through the glass. The snow was still falling, though the flakes were smaller, tiny white dots shimmering under the hard triangles of light from the nearby streetlamp. There wasn't much of a view: the narrow strip of grass, now covered in snow, behind the complex, a tall chain link fence that surrounded the property, and the half-dozen little houses on the other side.

  The houses were mostly tract homes constructed in the late seventies, when this part of town wasn't even incorporated into Portland and was full of cherry and apple orchards, houses built in a hurry and not to last, but the one directly across from me seemed out of place among the others. It was two floors, with a high peaked roof and dormered windows, the kind of house common in the thirties and forties that nobody built quite the same way anymore, with lots of nooks and crannies but little overall square footage. Most of the houses had a lit window or two, and smoke curling from their chimneys, but this one was dark.

  I was about to turn away when two crows alighted on the peak of the roof, directly above the second-story window. Then two more crows joined them, four in all. They shook the snow off their wings and stared at me. I suddenly realized this was the third time in the last hour I'd gotten the feeling some crows were watching me. It might have been a coincidence, but based on what I already knew about Olivia's connection with animals, it might mean something.

  "The house over there," I said to John. "Anybody live there?"

  "The one right behind us? I think that one's for sale."

  "You sure?"

  "Yeah, saw the sign the other day. Somebody told me it was built by the person who used to have all the land in this neighborhood. Why?"

  "No reason," I said.

  And then, just like that, there was a reason. A big one. A girl's face appeared in the upstairs window.

  Chapter 5

  Her skin was so dark that I almost missed her. It was the whites of her eyes that I saw first, floating out of the darkness of the room, and then her pupils, like polished obsidian catching a glint of yellow from the streetlamp. She had a round face and straight black hair tied up in high pigtails. She was maybe eight or nine years old, wrapped in a dark afghan, and she blinked at me once before leaning back into the darkness.

  Ghosts were such a ubiquitous part of my life that I seldom got spooked by seeing one, but this little girl raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

  The crows took flight, vanishing into the night and the swirling snow. If it hadn't been for them, I never would have asked about the house in the first place, or kept looking at it long enough to see it. Something was at work here. The Glock in my shoulder holster might not do any good against ghosts, but I was still glad I had it with me.

  "Who lived there before?" I asked John.

  "I don't know. It was empty when we moved in. I think it needs a lot of work or something. Why?"

  I watched the window for a while longer, waiting to see if the girl would make a return appearance, which she didn't, before turning and facing John.

  "Look," I said, "I know I ask some weird questions, but it would better if you just answer without grilling me on my methods. Speed is of the essence here, and it's better if I don't have to keep explaining myself to you."

  "Sorry," he said.

  "No, no, it's fine. Listen, I'm going to head out. I don't think there's anything more I can do here." He looked so crestfallen that I half wondered if he thought I was going to find Olivia hiding in the apartment. I patted his shoulder, which was a little like patting a cardboard cutout; he was so thin and unsubstantial that he actually stumbled to the side at my touch. "Hey, man, I'm going to stay after this. There's some people I can talk to, some leads to follow. I just need to get out and do the work."

  "Okay," he said.

  "We're going to find Olivia."

  "I hope so. Is there … Is there something I can—"

  "Best thing you can do is stay by the phone."

  "But I want to help. Maybe I should go out looking for her."

  "I know that's what your instinct tells you to do," I said, "but trust me, there really needs to be someone here in case Olivia comes home."

  He nodded. Putting on my trench coat, I almost told him to call me when Laura showed up, then caught myself. Outside the apartment, I lingered for only a moment, hoping to see some sign of her, but there was no one there except for
a half-dozen crows gathered along the gutter on the far side. Some watched me, some preened their feathers. The snow had almost ceased, more of a mist in the lamplight, but the temperature had dropped and the air now had a bite that nipped at my nose.

  I hurried out of the complex. My tennis shoes crunched in the snow in a way they hadn't before, so I watched my step. The girl in the house, having made eye contact with me, may have already fled, but if not I didn't want to give her the opportunity. Maybe she was an SIS, a Shut-In Spirit, what the Department of Souls called those ghosts so fixated on a location that they refused to ever leave. Those were the haunted house types, the ones seen almost exclusively in movies but in actuality were quite rare.

  A dark sedan crept past on the street, chains rapping against the road, what was left of the falling snow a powdery swirl in the headlamp beams. Turning the corner, I passed a brown UPS truck parked at the curb, no doubt doing last minute Christmas deliveries, and saw two UPS employees, both men, one carrying two boxes to a little ranch house with a big wraparound porch, the other empty-handed and dressed in a uniform that was at least thirty years out of date. Not hard to guess which one of those was a ghost. It was always surprising to me how many of the dead tried to go on working their jobs even after their ultimate retirement plan kicked into place.

  John was right about the house. There was a For Sale sign in the front yard. The flyer box was empty, but there was a laminated one taped to the front, and I turned it so I could read it in the porch light. Since John had said the house had been on the market a while, I expected a high listing price, and was surprised to find that wasn't the case. It was priced quite reasonably, even considering it wasn't in the best of shape. The white trim around the door had flaked all the way down to bare gray wood. Rhododendrons and junipers had strangled most of the yard. Yet even out here in the Numbers, as many of the young urbanites who dwelled in the city's center somewhat snobbishly referred to East Portland, there would usually be some Nike or Intel worker who'd gobble up an old home like this as a DIY project.