A Shade in the Mirror Read online

  “Supposedly true?”

  “I just work here,” he sighed.

  “Well, which one would you buy?”

  “I guess that would depend on what kind of ‘shit’ had been happening at my apartment,” he said with a hint of a smile.

  I explained.

  The eyebrow lifted again. “You don’t look crazy,” he said.

  “Thanks. You don’t get much business here, do you?”

  “Oh, we do okay. Usually people just want to wander around and gawk. Sometimes they buy stuff. Not too many actually ask for help.”

  “So, which one should I buy?”

  “Let me ask you a kind of a weird question. Was there any salt on the counter?”

  “What?”

  “You ever see someone take a salt shaker and pour some salt on the table, and then stand the shaker up at an angle on the pile of salt? Then they blow the salt away until there are only a few grains left, holding the salt shaker up at a seemingly impossible angle, all by itself.” He held his hand diagonally, demonstrating.

  I pushed the tips of his fingers until they were roughly at the same angle I’d seen the glass at. “Could it work with the glass like that?” I asked.

  “You said there was water in it?”

  “Almost full.”

  He frowned. “Probably not.”

  He pushed the debunking book back among the other books, and pulled Apparitions, Ghosts, and Other Haunts from the shelf. “I guess I’d try this one then,” he said.

  “Are you humoring me?”

  He considered this a moment. “Maybe a little. But you don’t seem crazy. A lot of the people who come in here do. You also don’t seem to be desperate to believe in ghosts, and you’re not interested in getting me to believe you. I hate it when they do that.”

  “Yeah, no. I just want to know the truth. That’s all.”

  He walked with me back to the counter to ring me up. “I’m Derek, by the way,” he said.

  “Madison,” I replied, offering him my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” he said, giving it a quick but firm shake.

  On my way out the door, he wished me luck. I turned back and wished him the same.

  “With what?” he asked.

  “Avoiding the crazies.” The door swung shut on the sound of his laughter.

  “What the fuck, Kara?”

  Julie was screaming. It had been three days since the water had poured itself out and one since the mirror had been moved.

  “I didn’t touch it!” Kara shouted back.

  Cringing, I slowly opened my door a few inches to see what was going on.

  “This stuff was vintage!” Julie yelled from the doorway of her room. Her face was contorted and in one hand she gripped a handful of colorful ribbons. “Tad’s going to kill me. Do you have any idea how much this stuff cost?”

  Julie’s boyfriend was a fashion photographer’s assistant with an old-fashioned lingerie fetish. I’m not just talking lacy bras and such, but girdles, garters, stockings, corsets, the whole nine. When she slept alone, she tended to wear pajama sets with cute little holiday or animal themes. When he was sleeping over, Julie would only come out of her room if she was wearing a robe that reached her ankles. We generally didn’t ask, but occasionally she’d show off things he’d bought for her. One set had a $200 price tag on the bra, and that was the sale price.

  “I didn’t do it,” Kara said.

  “I didn’t do it,” Julie spat back. “Were you jealous?”

  “Jules, I did not touch your lingerie,” Kara said. “I swear.”

  “Well, did she do it? Why’d you invite a crazy girl to live with us anyway?”

  “Shhh!” Kara exclaimed.

  I slowly closed my door, listening to the dull roar of their lowered voices talking about me.

  Things were pretty awkward for the next few days. I tried to be home as little as possible while trying to figure out a way to tell Julie and Kara that we might have a ghost. As if Julie needed another reason to think that I was crazy.

  Then I woke to the sound of screams again, shrill and hysterical in the early morning. I flung my door open and ran down the hall, where Kara stood in a nightgown and bathrobe, pounding on Julie’s door, shouting, “Jules, unlock the door!”

  “Just stay away from me!” Julie shrieked. “I’m calling the cops!”

  “What happened? Julie?” I said to the door.

  “I don’t know,” Kara said. “I was making tea and I heard her scream.”

  The door was locked, and inside the room we could hear Julie talking on her cell phone, presumably to a 911 operator. The words were indistinct, but she seemed to be calming down. Thirty seconds or a minute passed. “Are you guys still there?” she asked. Her voice sounded small and scared, but closer, like she was just on the other side of the door.

  Then her doorknob clicked. She came out of her bedroom with her cell phone gripped tightly against her left ear. She closed the door behind her. Her hair was a mussed mess, her eyes were red, and she wore pink pajamas with little cows all over them.

  Her outfit was way merrier than she was.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “That’s one of my roommates,” she said into the phone.

  Kara asked her what happened, and Julie gestured back to her room.

  “Can I go in?” Kara asked.

  Julie asked the 911 operator if it was okay. She shook her head. “They say there could be evidence in there.” The person on the other end was asking her something. “Do we have a doorstop, or anything like one?” she asked. “Or a chair? To wedge under the knob?”

  Kara and I looked at each other with wide eyes. Kara went to the kitchen while I searched my room. I returned with a three-ring binder and Kara came back with one of the kitchen chairs, and we used both of them to secure the door. The whole time, Julie gave yes and no answers to questions that we couldn’t hear.

  After a few minutes, four policemen arrived. Julie thanked whoever was on the phone with her and hung up. One of the cops, a tall older guy, told all three of us to go wait outside in the hall with another cop, a younger guy with really short hair. We went. Kara tried asking Julie questions, but Julie just shook her head robotically.

  A few minutes later, the cop who’d sent us out called us back in.

  “Young ladies,” he said, “I don’t want you to walk into that room, but I want you to look in at that bed and tell me what you see.” Kara and I edged closer, and the cop pulled open the door. What I saw horrified me.

  Among the rich rose and orange hues of Julie’s walls and the colorful watercolor artwork she’d hung on them, one thing stood out. The black handle of a huge chef’s knife stood straight up, the stainless-steel blade stabbed deep into the pillow that still held the indentation of Julie’s head.

  “Oh my God,” we said in unison.

  Chapter Two

  The police were in our apartment for hours. More uniforms and two detectives, one male, one female, showed up. Photos were taken. They dusted for fingerprints. They bagged the knife.

  We were each interviewed separately.

  After the female detective questioned Julie and Kara, it was my turn. She sat at our kitchen table, an angry-looking blonde woman with a penetrating stare. She’d given her name as Detective Ramsay.

  Before I’d even finished sitting down, she said, “So when did you start using again?”

  “Huh? Using what?”

  “Well, I see here that you met Ms. Reynolds at a rehab facility. You want to tell me about that?”

  “It wasn’t a rehab facility. It was a home for people suffering from mental illness.”

  “Yes, and for addicts in recovery. You didn’t answer my question.”

  I crossed my arms. “I’m not using anything.”

  “So what were you on before you checked in there?”

  “On? I wasn’t on anything. I have a condition. A dissociative fugue, the d
octors called it.”

  “Right. And you say you lost your ID?”

  “No, I don’t have any. I didn’t have any when they found me.”

  “Convenient.”

  Oh, Rice Krispies. She thinks I did this.

  “So where did you run away from?”

  Great. This again. A lot of cops don’t believe me about what happened to me. Detective Ramsay clearly didn’t.

  "Look, I didn’t do this."

  "Never said you did. Just trying to clarify your background. Did you run away from a group home? Lots of kids do. Foster family? You’d think there’d be a record."

  "I don’t know!"

  "Uh huh.”

  The other detective entered the kitchen behind her. “C’mon Fran, give the girl a break. I already verified her story.”

  He was short—maybe five-foot-six—and good looking, probably in his mid-thirties, with dark hair and a square chin that had been freshly shaved. He was the kind of guy who you might mistake for a model if he’d been taller.

  “Why don’t you come out to the living room, Miss Roberts. Your roommates are in there.”

  The female detective scowled at me and the feet of the kitchen chair squealed beneath me as I got up.

  Kara and Julie sat close together on the couch and I plunked into the chair. The female detective leaned against the kitchen doorway while the male detective took the lead.

  “I’m Detective Wilson,” the male detective said. “I’ve canvassed your neighbors and landlord and your apartment has been searched. It seems you had some kind of intruder last night or early this morning.”

  Like that was news.

  “Although we’re not ruling out the possibility of a jealous ex-girlfriend or boyfriend, we think it’s someone who has keys to the apartment, maybe someone who used to live here,” he said. “We think this because there are no signs of forced entry. It’s possible the intruder entered from the fire escape outside your roommate’s room, but we think it’s more likely they entered through the apartment and locked her door again before they left.”

  Kara nodded. It was a logical explanation. Of course, she hadn’t seen a glass of water pour itself all over our kitchen floor and then dash itself to pieces.

  “You believe that it wasn’t one of us?” I asked.

  Detective Wilson inhaled and exhaled loudly through his nose. “We’re fairly certain, Miss Roberts. There were no fingerprints on the knife nor any foreign ones on the inside doorknob. A number of items have been taken as evidence for forensics.

  “Your roommate Miss Moon has not accused you, nor is she pressing charges against either of you. As I understand it, she has already packed a bag . . .” he left off doubtfully and Julie nodded. He continued, “I suggest you get all of your locks changed, make sure the windows are locked, and we’ll see what we can dig up on the few leads we have. In the meantime, you and Miss Reynolds might want to find somewhere else to stay for a few days too.”

  Kara thanked him for his time and he gave each of us his card in case we thought of something that would help with the case. Julie was heading out to go stay at Tad’s. Kara had called in late to work, so once the police cleared out, she got dressed and went in. Mr. Delgado said the locksmiths would be over first thing in the morning, and he would take care of letting them in if we weren’t home.

  Kara wouldn’t be; she was planning on staying with her boyfriend in Harlem. I’d be all alone in the apartment. I didn’t have much choice. I’d only been at my job for about two months, and while I was friendly with Mac, the owner, I didn’t exactly want to ask him if I could sleep on his couch for a few days while his three-year-old twin sons and newborn daughter screamed at all hours.

  One of my co-workers, Billy, claimed that he slept on park benches most nights, sobering up after the bartenders at the Slaughtered Lamb bought him one too many shots. He was no help. Likewise, my best work friend Celeste lived in the dorms at NYU and was always complaining about how small her room was and how her roommate smelled like corn chips. There were others, but the store had a high turnover rate and Billy, Celeste, and Mac were the only ones I could even think about asking.

  I figured it wouldn’t kill me to stay in the apartment for the night. It wasn’t like changing the locks was going to keep the ghost out anyway. The knife-wielding ghost.

  Suddenly Billy’s park bench didn’t seem so bad.

  After I showered, I threw on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve black t-shirt with my Converse sneakers and left for work.

  I started reading Apparitions, Ghosts, and Other Haunts on the subway and found very quickly that our ghost, if that was indeed what it was, was behaving like a classic poltergeist (or “noisy ghost” as translated from German). The moving of objects was basically what poltergeists—well, “lived for” wouldn’t be the right term, but you know what I mean.

  After coming out of the subway, I passed by Thirteen Books and decided to stop. Derek was there, perched on a stool behind the counter, his long legs at awkward angles.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey back,” he said. “How’s your water-wasting ghost?”

  “It’s graduated to shredding lingerie and stabbing pillows.”

  “Say what now?” he said, putting down the book he was reading.

  I told him the tale. He was incredulous, especially when I said I was still staying in the apartment.

  “You’ve got to have some friends or family you can stay with for a day or two.”

  “Um . . . no.”

  “No?” The frown on my face stopped him from asking additional questions. “Okay, it’s none of my business, but really, you should get the hell out of there.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

  “I don’t. But I do believe in psychos. You shouldn’t be in that apartment by yourself.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, mostly believing it.

  “I have a couch you can crash on.”

  “You don’t even know me!” I laughed. “And I don’t know you.”

  “So? You have a trustworthy face. And so do I. Plenty of people have told me.” I took a good look at his face. Not bad looking, with a hint of freckles across a long straight nose and a wide forehead. His eyes, which I’d thought were purely brown before, had hints of green in the afternoon light and were bordered by blonde lashes and brows that were just slightly darker than his short blond hair.

  “Do you have a roommate?” I asked.

  “Nope, just me. I live in the apartment upstairs,” he said, pointing to the ceiling.

  “Seriously? How’d you luck into that?”

  “My uncle. He owns this place, the whole building. Asked me if I wanted to be manager when I graduated college. I said sure. And here I am.”

  “And here you are, asking a strange girl to shack up with you.”

  “Hey, no one said anything about shacking. I just offered the couch for a night or two until things settle down at your place.”

  “Well, it’s nice of you, but I don’t have any of my stuff. I’d have to go back there anyway, and—”

  “I’ll go with you,” he interrupted. “Look—I really don’t think you ought to go back into that apartment alone until your landlord has the locks changed and someone goes through and makes sure there aren’t any homeless people living in crawlspaces or between the walls or anything.”

  “You really think it’s an intruder, huh?”

  “It’s a logical explanation.”

  “And the water?”

  “Well, whether it’s a stabby phantom or a freaky stalker, I just don’t think I could live with the guilt if something happened to you.”

  “Thanks, that’s comforting.”

  “Good. Then it’s settled.” I shook my head. I’d clearly lost. I didn’t exactly mind losing, though. It wasn’t like I relished the idea of spending the night in the apartment alone.

  “I close up at seven-thirty,” he said. “How about you, are you off work now? On a
late lunch break?”

  I explained that I was on my way in to work at Christopher Street Comics. Derek knew exactly where it was and said he’d be waiting for me outside when I finished my shift.

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Never surer,” he said with a grin.

  I had to admit it. He did have a trustworthy face.

  Christopher Street Comics was as usual as usual can be when you work among six-foot-tall shelves of comic books with superhero t-shirts arranged on the walls and ceiling. It was slow most days of the week. Serious comics junkies only came in on Wednesdays, which is when the new comics showed up, and the tourists usually came on Fridays and Saturdays. Since the shop was in Greenwich Village, we also got our share of drunks wandering in at night, but this night was dead. Billy, who had recently turned twenty-one, spent most of the night cracking jokes and complaining about the price of drinks in the city, while Mac hid out in the office doing orders or inventory checks or whatever the hell he did back there.

  I checked bags and ran the register for most of the night, and right around closing, as Mac was locking the front door, I saw Derek, tall and blond, leaning against the railing in front of the store. He wore jeans and a plaid button-up over a dark t-shirt with some writing on it. I was pretty sure it was what he’d been wearing earlier, but not positive.

  Had he changed his outfit for me?

  Was this a date?

  Derek waved at me.

  “We’re closed,” Mac said.

  “Uh . . . he’s actually waiting for me,” I said, and waved back.

  “Oh yeah?” Mac asked. “Got a hot date?” Mac, a trim forty-something with graying dark hair in a ponytail, usually wore jeans with perfectly ironed dress shirts and ties. He’d been married for however many years and was being hassled at home daily by his wife and kids. He was always asking us if we had any “hot dates” lined up for our weekends. We figured he was living vicariously.

  I took my cash drawer out of the register and handed it to him with the register tape I’d already taken out. “Yep, popcorn and a movie,” I said. Not that Derek had said anything about movies or popcorn, but it was simpler than trying to explain what was really going on. Mac headed back to the office to count out my drawer.