Ghost Flower (22 page)

I chuckled, and I realized that for the first time, my laugh was genuine. I could see what had drawn Aurora to him. “No wait, please. I’d love to go. I mean, since you’re a legend.”

“You won’t be sorry,” he assured me. “I’ll get the car and bring it around the back. Unless you want to make an appearance for the four major news networks and two gossip shows camped on the lawn.”

I shook my head.

“Give me ten minutes. And if it’s okay with you, keep it under your hat. I don’t want the others to get jealous.”

“You mean you don’t want Coralee to know you’re leaving early.”

“You always did put such a sinister spin on my actions,” he said with mock exasperation.

I grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair where I’d left it when I came in, stole a second of Bain’s attention from Scar’s cleavage to wave goodbye, and slid out the back door of the house.

It was warm out there and quiet. I stood on a flagstone patio that was separated from the road by a low mound where the scrub brush had been left to grow, so that the patio seemed to melt into the landscape. There was a sleek-lined table with four chairs and three oversized pots of glossy-leafed lemon plants. A half moon hung low in the sky, and a warm, dry wind slipped by me, making a noise like rattling paper. I took a deep breath and smelled wood smoke.

I remembered Uncle Thom talking about wildfires, but it made me think of a different fire. A different city, the smoke of chimneys lit for the first time in the fall, and I heard Nina’s voice asking, “How do you know which way they’re going?”

The leaves on the tree we’re sitting beneath are startlingly bright yellow. Occasionally one of them will drift down in front of us, or on the front lawn of the house we’re looking at. Its chimney is puffing out wood smoke, and Nina is sitting next to me in the new purple parka I’d found for her, the sleeves rolled up because it was too big.

We liked this house especially because they never closed the blinds and they had a big TV and they tended to watch things with a lot of kissing. Tonight, though, it was an action movie, with people going back and forth across the screen, sometimes running, sometimes on horseback. The game was to make up a story to fit whatever we were watching, so tonight’s story was about some people who were running away from the bad guys who wanted to turn them into dainty handbags.

But Nina had been moody all day, and when she got like that, she was full of objections. “They could be going home. How do you know
they’re running away from something and not to it? They both look the same on the outside. It’s all running.”

“The theme music,” I’d told her, feeling pretty clever. “That’s how you can tell.”

She’d looked at me somberly for longer than I expected and finally said, “You are going to need a better answer than that.”

The memory brought back the timbre of her voice and the tickle of her hair on my chin as I put her to bed that night and the feeling of belonging to someone, mattering to someone, having someone whose first smile in the morning was for you. Someone who slipped their hand into yours when they were scared and trusted you to make them feel better. Someone who knew you, the important things about you, and loved you anyway.

Maybe it was the effort of having to play Aurora all day, or maybe it was the memory, but without warning I began to cry.

“Is it possible to feel homesick if you have no home?” I could hear Nina asking.

Yes,
I wanted to tell her. It was. I missed her so much. I ground my fingers into my palms to get myself to stop crying, but I couldn’t.

I would rather have been me, with her and nothing else, than Aurora and all the money in the world. Standing under the stars, with a house full of people behind me and a crowd on the lawn clamoring for even a glimpse of me, I felt more alone than I ever had in my life. More alone than when my mother left me. More alone than when I’d first ended up on my own. And more scared.

What had I done by agreeing to this? What could I have been thinking?

“Here,” a hand roughly shoved a pack of Kleenex at me, and I recognized the shadowy form of N. Martinez in front of me.

I took it, slid a tissue out, and mopped my eyes and nose. “Thank you.”

I turned to face where he was, but it was so dark I couldn’t see him, only his outline. He seemed so compact, contained, that I had pegged him as being wiry, but now in the moonlight I was struck by how broad his shoulders were, how powerful and well-muscled his arms.

He said, “Have you ever considered reevaluating your life choices?”

Just like that. Boom. Not one for small talk, N. Martinez. I took a step forward, so we were standing side by side, but not looking at one another. “Just because you don’t like me doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with my life.”

He shifted slightly as though my proximity made him uneasy. “I was more thinking about you. About how I’ve had to watch you cry in secret twice in two days.”

Talking to him was like catching a glimpse of yourself in a magnifying mirror, all imperfections and blemishes. “Sorry if it bothered you. No one said you had to stick around here.”

He ignored that and said instead, “If you were my sister, I’d be concerned.” The authentic feeling in his voice touched something deep inside me. Something unfamiliar and scared—and suddenly eager to get out.

No,
I told myself.
Stop.
My voice sounded haughty, harsh to my ears. “I’m not your sister, am I? I’m no one’s sister. I don’t have anyone to be concerned about me. And I don’t need anyone. I don’t want anyone.”

There was a pause. “Okay.”

“I’m fine,” I said coldly.

He brought his hand to his mouth and cleared his throat. “You bet.”

I turned to face his outline. “Stop acting like you know me or my life. You don’t know anything.”

There was a long silence. When he spoke, it was so quiet I had to lean in to hear it. “I know you aren’t used to people being nice to you. But you were, once. And despite whatever secrets you’re carrying around that tarnish your vision of who you are, there’s a part of you that knows you still deserve kindness.”

I felt like I’d been punched.

For a moment my mind reeled with absurdities. I saw myself at a state fair eating things on skewers with him, saw us walking together through an arch of trees whose leaves were changing colors, pictured picnics near a mountain stream, watching the sunset from a deck overlooking a pond, watching it rise over the red tile roof of a European town. I wanted to tell him things, tell him how I didn’t speak for a year when I first got into foster care, tell him about Miss Melanie and the Durlings and who Eve Brightman really is. Was. I felt a wave of longing roll out of me, but not the way it usually did, diffuse and sad. This was hopeful, as though it had been coaxed out by a whispered promise.

Don’t do this
, a voice in my head screamed.
Don’t even think it. You’re making it up. This man wants nothing to do with you. He’s a police officer; he’s trying to win your trust so he can learn things about you. Things you can’t afford for him to learn. If he finds out the truth about you, who knows what will happen? Even if it was different, you know what you are doing here, and no one, especially no cop, has a place in that. Aurora would never have had anything to do with him. And you can’t afford to have anything to do with him either.

I drove my finger nails into my palm, forced a hard laugh, and said in my most brittle voice, “I can’t imagine why you’d think I care about your cheap cop psychology.”

He went very still.

“Wait,” I said, wanting to take it back. I reached out and laid my
hand on his forearm, and as my fingers touched the solid muscle there, I felt something like an electric shock ricochet through me. “I didn’t—”

He moved his arm away. “Your ride,” he said, nodding toward the street where Grant sat in the driver’s seat of an idling white Ford Bronco. I hadn’t even heard it pull up. “You should go.”

I hesitated a moment longer than I should have before walking down the hill toward Grant’s car. Right before I got in, for some insane reason I turned to wave goodbye. N. Martinez was standing where I’d left him, his hand over his arm where I’d touched it, rubbing it as though to erase any trace of me.

Of Aurora,
I corrected myself. But that didn’t matter. I could never be anyone but Aurora Silverton to him.

I felt like a hand was closing over my heart.
Damn him. Damn N. Martinez.

“W
hat was that?” Grant asked as I slid into the passenger seat of his car. There was a slightly petulant curl to his lip.

“Nothing,” I shook my head. “Just a police officer giving me some advice. He suggested I rethink my life choices.”

“You’re not tied up with him or anything, are you?” he asked, cruising toward the police barricade.

I noticed the silver VW I’d seen in Phoenix parked behind Bain’s Porsche. I must have been wrong about it not being Stuart’s style. “Tied up?”

“Enamored of the law. The thing is, what we’re about to do? It’s a tiny bit illegal. Is that going to be a problem for you?”

“Have we met? I’m Aurora Silverton. The only problem with what you just said is the ‘tiny bit’ part.”

“I’m serious. You can’t tell anyone about it. If you squeal, the whole squad will get in trouble. It’s all for one and one for all. If you’re friends with cops, that’s okay, but you can’t be part of the ghost-busting team.”

I thought about the way N. Martinez had looked at my hand on
his arm, like it was somehow sullying him. “I am not friends with cops,” I told him definitively.

He gave me a suspicious glance in one direction, then in the other. “I believe it,” he said. He held out his hand. “Welcome to the team. Now buckle up because we’re going to take back the night, one ghost at a time.”

As we drove down to the flats, I said, “You mentioned something about your life story?”

“That was an idle threat.”

“No, I want to know.” I touched his arm. He looked down at my hand, differently than the way N. Martinez had, then back at me. He looked intrigued.

“We’ll see,” he said. He handed me a camera. “Take that and start spotting.”

The image on the camera’s screen showed up in different shades of green, like in a leaked sex tape or army video. “Spotting what?”

He glanced at me. “Ghosts, of course.”

“What do ghosts look like?”

“You’ll know one when you see it.”

“You’re just trying to distract me from your story.”

“Is it going to work?”

I shook my head.

He puffed out his cheeks with air and then exhaled. “There’s really not much since you left. Graduated, started at the U in cinematography part-time, moved in with my brother in a trailer on the Kim family ranch. And now of course I am part of the fledgling Coralee Gold media empire.”

“Your fortune’s made,” I said. I was watching the scenery we were passing flash by on the green screen of the camera, but I didn’t see anything even slightly spectral.

“Yeah. Fortune and my reputation. I can’t wait to be the king of the webisode.” He hugged the steering wheel with his left arm and leaned over, peering from the road to the screen on the back of the camera. “Ghosts can be tricky, especially on pavement and—there, look!” He swerved manically to the curb. “We got one!”

He was grinning from ear to ear and pointing at what appeared to me to be a completely blank cinderblock wall.

“Where?”

He nudged me with the camera, and when I looked at the wall through it, I could suddenly see something that looked like a gum drop with two round eyes and a scalloped bottom painted about a foot from the ground. “No way!”

“That’s a ghost,” Grant explained. “The designated Haunters paint the ghosts on in light sensitive paint, and then the Hunters—that’s us—have to find them and eradicate them.”

“Eradicate how?”

“Watch and learn.” He hopped out of the truck and went around behind it. When he reappeared on the sidewalk, he was holding a bucket, a roller, and a tube of paper. He dipped the roller into the bucket, smoothed the piece of paper over the wall, and turned to me. “Is it over the ghost?”

I laughed. The paper had a large yellow PAC-MAN printed on it. “About four inches to the left,” I told him. When it was right, he rolled over it, applying paste so it stuck to the wall.

“Now we take a picture and submit it to the game master and—ta da. One point for us. We got a late start, but I’m feeling lucky.”

We hunted ghosts all around the flats of Tucson. While we were pasting our fifth one, a sneaky partial on the side of a bus bench, I asked, “Who taught you to talk to ghosts the way you did at the séance?”

“That is all because of crazy Aunt Rosalie.” He chuckled to himself as he added more paste to the roller. “She was a gypsy, or anyway that’s what she said, and my dad confirmed it every time he was mad at my mom by calling her a gypsy bitch. So it must have been true, right?” I was kneeling to hold the poster on, and he was bent over so his face was upside down to my face. He glanced over and gave me a little smile that made my heart rate pick up slightly, and I was struck by how easy it was to be Aurora around Grant. He brought out the Aurora in me.

He stood up and went on. “Aunt Rosie used to take me on her rounds. She was kind of a spiritual doctor to a lot of people. I guess I learned from watching her. She said I had a good way with troubled spirits. The
tocco luces
she called it, the touch of light. I think she made it up just for me, to make me feel important, but I don’t care. I like the phrase.”

“You certainly had it tonight.”

“I don’t know what that was tonight. Weird.”

“Do you know who Jay was? The guy talking to Bain?”

“No idea. There wasn’t anyone named Jay at the party three years—” He stopped talking and got a confused look on his face.

“What is it? What do you remember?”

“Did Bain say ‘J.J.’ at one point?”

I searched my memory. “I think he might have. Why?”

“There was a guy named Jimmy. He was a handyman at the country club. Everyone called him J or J.J. But he wasn’t at the party.” He looked thoughtful for a moment then, like he was shaking something off, and smiled at me. “Probably unrelated. Anyway that’s what it is, the
tocco luces
. You saw it in action tonight. It’s also the title of my first movie.”