Above the East China Sea: A Novel (23 page)

“How the
hell
you got a key?”

“When you clear base, just take a second and check out the name on your inspection sheet.”

“Your dad runs Inspection?” Wynn asks with appropriate deference.

Like his superpower has been revealed, Kirby nods in modest acknowledgment. We have all felt the lash of Inspection, the corps of anal-retentives who swarm over your quarters when you move out, making certain that your family isn’t trying to pull a fast one on them with old tricks like not cleaning the dusty air vents or spackling over your nail holes with toothpaste. Everything has to meet the housing inspector’s standards or your transfer will get held up.

“Why is it called Murder House?” I ask.

“You don’t know?”

“Usually the reason someone asks ‘why,’ isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, Luz. Maybe you’re working undercover for your mom. Undercovers ask a lot of random questions.”

“That’s it, Kirby. You got me. I’m wired up the yin-yang. Here.” I stretch out the neck of my T-shirt toward him. “Speak into this.”

“Way I heard it,” DQ starts in, “some captain choked out his wife when he caught his best friend nailing her. Who was also, like, the navigator in the crew he was on.”

“That sucks a bag of dicks,” Wynn sympathizes.

“Not the story I heard,” Kirby argues. “I heard that the wife wasted the captain because she caught
him.
With the navigator!”

“Dude!”

“You’re both wrong,” Jacey says, her voice a low rumble that slices through the monkey chatter. “It was a fourteen-year-old girl. Back in the early sixties. Her stepfather was …” We all wait for her to continue. Something in her tone, her intensity, makes me stop breathing. “… interfering with her.”

DQ’s brow crinkles, the old-fashioned word has confused him.

“She threatened to tell, and he choked her to death.”

Wynn and DQ start asking all kinds of stupid CSI questions about whether they had the “forensic capabilities” back then to conduct a proper investigation. Through the whole boneheaded discussion Kirby, for a change, doesn’t say a single word; he just watches Jacey. When Wynn and DQ start going off about JonBenét Ramsey, Kirby steps over next to Jacey and says, “Jerkwads, shut the fuck up. Jesus.”

They are silent for a moment; then Wynn asks, “So why is this place supposed to be haunted?”

Kirby answers, “Whole bunch of weird shit. Water faucets and
lights turning off and on by themselves. Bloodstains on the curtains and floors that wouldn’t wash out. Candles blowing themselves out in closed-up rooms. Children crying in rooms no one was in. Just weird, freaky shit. The next family they moved in told base housing they couldn’t live there. Obviously, BH don’t give a shit. Refused to move them. Whole family bugged so bad that they made their dad take the first transfer available. They ended up PCSing to Armpit.”

“Harsh.”

Armpit is slang for Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Not a dream assignment.

“After them, it got
really
interesting. The next family saw an Okinawan woman dressed like an old-timey princess washing her hair in the laundry room sink. And a samurai warrior dude with the winged helmet and everything, riding a horse through the living room.”

“What does
that
have to do with the girl?” DQ asks.

“Everything. Her getting murdered was such a major release of negative spirit energy that it opened up a sort of wormhole there for all the forces of evil to enter and—”

“God, Kernshaw,” Wynn interrupts, “would you please stop talking out of your ass. Jake already told us the whole story. The house was built on an Okinawan family tomb. After the war, they came in and bulldozed this site where ten generations were resting.”

“Oh, wow, like in
Polter Guys,
where the house was built on an ancient Indian burial ground.”

“That was a hella scary movie.”

“Yeah, that part when Jack Nickels hacks through the door with an ax and goes, ‘Here’s Jack!’ ”

“No, dumb ass, that was that other one. The one that had the lady from
Popeye
in it.”

The chatter rises to such howler-monkey levels that I have to say, “Okay, you morons are going to have to shut up now. Your stupidity is physically hurting me. Kirby, you going in?”

“Me? Why me?”

“Uh, because you’re the one with the key.”

“Second wave. I’ll go in with the second wave.”

“What if the first wave never comes out?” DQ asks.

“Wynn?” Kirby holds the key up, jiggles it at Wynn. “YOLO, bro.”

Wynn shakes his head. “Hey, I’m with Jake on the whole desecration deal.”

DQ swats Wynn. “You’re a pussy. Big tough cowboy. You’re a scared little pussy boy.”

Wynn swats back, which starts a whole slapping, fake punching war. While they’re occupied determining who the bigger pussy is, I pull Jacey aside and whisper, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. Of course.”

“Did Kirby put anything in the Cuervo?”

She doesn’t hesitate before shaking her head. “No, if he’d actually had anything he would have pulled it out when I said I was leaving. I mean, he’s seriously into me.”

She’s right. Kirby wouldn’t have been cooking an egg with a flashlight if he’d had exotic designer drugs to impress Jacey with. “So there wasn’t anything in the Cuervo?”

“No. But don’t stress. About the way you were? You know, after the cave and all?”

I look away, praying that Jace gets the message that I don’t want to talk about this anymore. She doesn’t.

“Don’t feel bad, okay? This one time? Back at my friend’s when we were stationed at Lackland? We were like eleven or something. Her brother gave her a joint and we both got so high, we were laughing our asses off. Had the monster munchies. Everything. Then her brother tells us it was oregano and grass clippings. But, I swear, I was super, super high. So, you know, it happens. You think you’re doing some shit and your mind plays tricks on you. It’s no biggie.”

Even though Jacey can’t see me, I nod, not knowing what to say as I consider the possibility that it all really happened. The instant that I allow the image of the girl in the cave into my thoughts, the fireflies either reappear or I just notice them again. Either way, it’s like someone has turned the intensity all the way up. The dots of light brighten to diamond pinpoints.

I grab the key out of Kirby’s hand. “I’ll go.”

“Luz,” Jacey says, “are you sure?”

I shrug. “YOLO, right?”

Jacey turns so that only I can hear her. “I don’t think you should be the one to go. Not after—”

“That’s why I have to go.” I take the flashlight from Kirby.

“Wow, you see that?” DQ asks, holding his palms up. “It started raining right when she said she was going in.”

“Rain?” Wynn asks, holding his palms up to the drizzle. “This is like extra high humidity. Mist at the most.”

“Whatever.”

I take the key and walk alone across the parking lot to the place where the dead communicate with the living, and the question I’ve tried so hard to tamp down, the one only Codie can answer, bullies its way into my head. I shove it down and glance back. The group is now mostly hidden in the woods around the lot, right on the edge of the area illuminated by the security light. The mist makes them look fuzzy and washed-out, like a fading photo of people I used to know a long time ago from another assignment, another base.

I turn back to the house and am nearly to the door when Jacey scampers up beside me. “I’m going in with you.”

“Jace, really, you don’t have to.”

“I know, but you’d do it for me.”

As I try to open the back door, first Kirby, who squeezes in next to Jace, then DQ and Wynn arguing about who’s the pussy now, join us. A patrol car passes. Its spotlight rakes the yard, and everyone presses into the shadows as the car passes.

“Hurry up, Luz,” DQ hisses as I fumble in the dark. “He’s turning around. He’s turning around! He’ll see us when he comes back this way.”

“Oh, fuck,” Wynn whispers. “My dad is gonna have my ass.”

“
Your
dad,” Kirby says. “Mine’ll lose his job.”

We all shove in the door the instant I get it open. A second later, stripes of high-intensity illumination from the patrol car’s headlights slash across the empty back porch and slice in under the blinds.

Everyone freezes. The closed-up house is pitch dark and hot as an oven. It smells like an empty base house, like dust and Pine-Sol, but it feels different from any other empty base house I’ve ever set foot in. It feels inhabited.

“Kirby,” DQ hisses, “turn the fucking flashlight on.”

“No! We have to be sure they’re gone.”

Codie?

I wish I was alone. In the darkness, while the others make nervous
jokes, I try to conjure my big sister by bringing to mind the way she looked on the day of her graduation from Basic. She was a recruitment poster in her pale blue blouse with brand-new chevrons on either shoulder. Her hair was braided tight against her head and tucked under her dark blue cap. A LEGO block of colored medals and awards was pinned ruler-straight across her chest, right above her heart. She was so proud. I wish I had been proud too, instead of angry and bewildered and jealous of my mom and the air force for taking her away from me. I wish I’d known that my anger was a luxury that I squandered too much of the time we had left on.

Kirby switches his flashlight on and, of course, the beam falls on nothing. There are no bloodstained curtains or floors. No faucets and lights turning themselves on and off. No children crying. No samurai warriors or Okinawan princesses doing shampoo commercials. The house is as dead and done as the cheerless words the Hickam base chaplain spoke at Codie’s service.

I’m turning to leave when Kirby yelps, “Holy shit!”

“Is that what I think it is?” DQ asks the question on one long, shrieky exhalation.

Kirby has the beam focused into the pitch dark of the next room, where it reflects off of a pool of dark liquid so wet in a house that has been closed up for years that it gleams. “That’s blood, isn’t it? I’m getting out of here.”

It is blood. My heart stops.

“That must have been her bedroom,” Jacey says.

“So that has to be her blood,” DQ, completely freaked out, says. “Almost fifty years old and still fresh.”

“Or it could be …” I go into the room, pick up a white plastic cup with the Teen Center logo, “Being a teen has never been this much fun!” written on it, “… spilled soda from some other kids as dopey as us who also managed to break in.”

“Oh, snap!” Wynn cackles. “Diss on you, DQ.” He snatches away the plastic cup, grabs DQ in a neck lock, and shoves the cup into his face. “Drink the blood, infidel! Drink!”

DQ slaps the cup away. “Get that outta my face, snowflake.”

That’s it. There is no sign that a girl died here. No spirits reach out to me from beyond the grave to explain what’s happening and what
I’m supposed to do. No displaced samurai or dirty-haired princesses. No spirit of a starved girl trapped in a cave trying to make contact. No Codie.

So now that I’ve eliminated the possibility that either my sister was trying to reach me or I was tripping my ass off, that leaves only one explanation: I am even more seriously screwed up than I already knew I was. All I want now is to be alone. I can’t keep up a front for one more second.

“We’re out of here,” DQ says, making his voice deep and manly. “This place is about as haunted as a petting zoo.”

“Yeah, plus, it’s hot as balls in here.”

They stampede out, taking the noise and light and struggle with them. For a moment, the empty house is blissfully peaceful and oddly cool and I could stay here forever. In the next instant, the question I’ve been running from, the one that only Codie can answer, forms in my mind. The instant it does, every ounce of energy in my body washes out, leaving me too weak to move. An unimaginable thirst overtakes me, and my stomach cramps violently from hunger. I open my mouth to cry out from the pain, but no sound emerges. Needle pricks of pain stab my scalp, like I’m being eaten alive by biting insects. I try to claw at them but can’t raise my arms. My heart drums with fear and I try to run, but I am frozen. Literally. I shiver with cold.

With every bit of strength I can summon, I force my right foot a fraction of an inch forward. As soon as I lift it the tiniest bit, a shaft opens up and I am falling. I hurtle down so fast that my hair and arms are blown straight up over my head. Air punches up into my nose, my mouth, with a nauseating force.

I see where I will land: spiked rocks poking up above churning waves. I scream, and the sound is sucked away before it leaves my throat. But I don’t land. Instead, the rocks, the sea, the darkness disappear, and I’m in a place where the sky is a shade of indigo more exquisite than I could ever describe. The air smells like lilies and pineapples. I watch a child that I know is my child as he tumbles down a grassy hill.

“Luz?”

It’s Codie. I stop breathing. She’s here. We’re together again and I understand that we can be together forever. I know what I have to do. The debate is over. I have all the answers. Except one. Of course, she knows the question I won’t allow myself to ask, and though she scolds
me for even letting it form in my mind, she answers it. “Cabooskie, what does it matter how I died? Even if I did kill myself, that’s no reason you should.”

“It matters, Code. It’s all that
does
matter. Just tell me you didn’t. That you were happy. You were, weren’t you? Happy? Being a soldier?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“So why are they saying you were outside the wire?”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“But I have to know. You had an intact family. You had me. You always had me, Codie. Right? You were going to come home to me. Codie. Codie?”

“Codie?” The sound of my own voice startles me and I awake to excruciating pain. My back is broken on the rocks, a wave is rising up to claim me, my sister is gone, and I have made a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake. This isn’t what I want. This isn’t what Codie wants for me. As clearly as if she were standing next to me, she says one word,
“Yuta,”
and then I am alone again.