Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls (23 page)

Still, the outside of the place is positively deluxe compared with the inside, which, I quickly found out, is plain old gross.

I walked through the old-fashioned wooden doors. The lobby of the landmark building looked like the waiting room of an auto repair shop—all spazzy fluorescent lighting and gray wall-to-wall carpet. The only furniture was some cheap, undistinguished chairs and a fiberboard end table with three-year-old copies of
Modern Golf
magazine sitting on it.

There was no one behind the reception desk, so I pushed the button for the elevator.

When the elevator descended, I found that it was the ancient kind, where you actually have to pull the door open and there’s no comforting
ding
at each floor. Instead all I could hear was creaking and wheezing as it pulled me upward, suspended, I guessed, by a piece of twine or a broken cable repaired with a shoelace. One of the two lights inside the tiny lift was burned out, and my reflection in the greasy, graffiti’d mirror was cast in harsh shadows. I jangled the room key in the palm of my left hand, still clutching the spatula tightly in my right.

I was only going to the third floor, but it took forever, with the mechanism stopping and starting jerkily along the way. Every time it lurched, I expected to plunge to the ground. I pictured myself landing in the basement, a bloody, broken heap, while Hattie stood at the top of the shaft, holding a pair of wire cutters and cackling.

When the elevator finally stopped on the third floor, I pushed open the rusty door and stepped out into a spooky, darkened hallway. I picked a direction at random, scrutinizing the numbers on every room, trying to figure out if I was headed the right way. It should have been an easy task, but the place was like a maze, with a corner every five feet and mysterious dead ends everywhere. There was no sound. Only my shoes padding against the stained carpet and my heart pounding hard against my chest.

A weird noise echoed through the stillness. It was a distorted, high-pitched warble, like the voice of a withered, shrill old hag. She was repeating the same phrase over and over. “Very soon but not yet! Very soon but not yet!” After about the fifteenth time I realized that the sound was coming from a parrot. Probably another resident’s pet.

I wandered farther into the labyrinth of the hotel. Finally I came to Hattie’s room—number 349. Summoning my courage, I took a deep breath and banged on the door. If she answered, I decided, I’d just whack her with my spatula until she had no choice but to surrender.

Luckily I heard no response. I slid the key into the lock and slowly turned the knob, holding my breath as I eased into the room.

It was pitch black when I entered. I flipped the switch on the wall to find that the ceiling light was burned out. “Hello?” I called, crossing my fingers that there would be no answer.

“Very soon but not yet!” the parrot cried faintly in the distance. I slammed the door behind me, shutting out the sound of that creepy bird.

I groped my way around the room and finally felt a desk. Searching with my hands, I discovered a lamp and flicked it on.

When I saw what I was facing, my spatula clattered to the ground. I had to grab the desk chair for support.

The wall directly in front of me was plastered with photos. Photos of
my face.
Hattie had painstakingly constructed a disturbing collage devoted to me!

When I had calmed down enough to inspect the collection further, I recognized yearbook photos, magazine shots of me and my mom at her premieres, a postcard of a portrait my dad painted of me brushing my teeth, and even a clip from the
Halo Reader
of me as a toddler sitting on Santa’s lap. How had she found all this stuff? I hadn’t even known that most of these pictures existed.

But there was more. Three-by-five snapshots that Hattie must have taken in public. Me buying a pretzel on the street. Me coming out of my apartment with keys in hand. Me walking out of the subway, standing in line outside the movie theater with Daisy, eating at an outdoor café. Most of the pictures had been taken in the month before my purse had been stolen.

Hattie was spying on me all that time!

The longer I stood there examining Hattie’s psychotic photo shrine, the more my breath quickened. A thin sheen of perspiration formed above my lip and along my brow. I felt like I was going to be sick. In an attempt to calm myself, I sat down on the bed, facing the other way.

No!
I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming.

On the opposite wall, scrawled in a red substance that could only be blood, was the same phrase written over and over again in a messy, off-balance scrawl.

I INVESTIGATED THE scrawl and realized, with some degree of relief, that the “blood” was actually lipstick (Dior Fiery Red—somehow Hattie knew that it was one of my favorite shades).

But what could the phrase mean?

I stared at the wall, frozen in place. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply until the danger of a youthful heart attack seemed to subside. Then I remembered the night everything started—the night of the first Many Handsomes show.

“Lulu Dark can see through walls, you know,” Charlie had joked to fake Berlin. Obviously it had had some significance to her, but it was hard to think why.

I knew I had to get out of that room fast, but I wasn’t leaving until I found all the evidence I could. I just hoped I’d already seen the worst of it.

I walked over to the desk. On top I found a stack of letters, all addressed to Hattie Marshall, all unopened.

So I was right, I thought, with a fleeting sense of satisfaction. Hattie
was
our girl’s name. The return address was for someone named Susan Marshall, in Motoropolis.

Who was Susan? Hattie’s mother? I didn’t have time to pore over the letters just then, so I grabbed them and dropped them into my trusty purse. There would be plenty of opportunity to read them when I was safe and sound at home.

Next I pulled open the top drawer of the desk to find a sheaf of papers. It was “Berlin’s” schoolwork, arranged in chronological order from the beginning of the semester. The stuff on top of the pile—the oldest stuff—was presentable and thoroughly completed. She’d gotten A’s and B’s on most of it. But as I flipped through the papers, toward the work from March and April, the handwriting began to break down, from a neat, almost anal-retentive script to a furiously scribbled, error-ridden chicken scratch. Every other word was crossed out with thick, jagged lines. The grades were C’s and D’s, mostly—with some F’s.

At the bottom of the pile was her Future Career Day paper. She’d never turned it in, and it didn’t have a name on it at all. It looked like it had been written by a five-year-old after a forty-eight-hour sugar binge. I read it carefully.

 

“Wow,” I said aloud when I was done reading. “That’s really pathetic.” The “paper” was especially strange because it was, well, stupid. And based on her other work, not to mention my interactions with her at school, Hattie, or whatever you want to call her, certainly didn’t seem stupid. In fact, she had to be pretty smart to pull off all the crazy tricks that she’d managed.

The other unusual thing about it was that it was the only thing I could find in which Hattie didn’t seem to be pretending to be another person.

Maybe it wasn’t stupidity but craziness that made the paper so childlike, I hypothesized. Yes, impersonating someone is crazy to begin with, but to do it for four months is probably enough to make a person completely lose it.

I put the paper in my purse with the rest of the evidence. Then on a hunch I dialed the front desk. “Hi,” I said when the clerk picked up, “this is . . .” I paused. What name had Hattie used when she checked in? I wondered.

After a beat I decided, based mostly on the mail, that this was the one place where she could be herself. Her secret hideout—her Bat Cave—where she went when being someone else was just too much.

“This is Hattie Marshall in room 349. Have there been any messages for me?”

“I’ll connect you to your voice mail,” the clerk said.

Yes!
My instincts were correct. I was on fire.

There was a click, and the robot voice mail lady was on the line. “You have. Seventy-five. Messages,” she said in her familiar monotone.

The words gave me a serious jolt. Seventy-five messages? Hattie must not have checked them since she’d arrived in Halo City.

I listened to nearly every voice mail. They were all from the same person. Susan Marshall. The one who sent Hattie all those letters.

Susan, it seemed, was Hattie’s older sister. Her first few voice mails were angry; something about stealing a hundred dollars. But as they went on, Susan was starting to panic.

“Hattie,” she said in the last message, “forget the hundred dollars you took. It’s okay—you can have more if you need it. I just want to know you’re okay and take you home to Motoropolis. Hattie, I’m coming to Halo City on Monday. I’ll be staying with Cousin Rhonda. Call me. Please.”

As she gave the number, I scratched it down in my notebook. Susan and I had a few things we needed to discuss.

 

Susan met me at Little Edie’s, which I was beginning to think of as my office as well as my hangout. Daisy was there too, ready to defend me if Susan was as nutty as her sister. Once I saw Susan, however, I knew my fears were unfounded.

Susan Marshall was about thirty, I guessed, but she looked like the kind of person who had lived through a lot. You could tell she had once been beautiful—in fact, she looked quite a bit like Hattie—but years of stress had taken their toll. Her face was careworn, aged with worry lines. Her hair was streaked with gray, and she was shaped sort of like a potato. Susan’s outfit consisted of black stirrup stretch pants, white Nike high-tops, and an electric blue tunic tied around the waist with a gold lasso belt. Some people might have described it as tacky, but even with her enormous, permed hair and dangly price tag earrings, I thought she looked kind of cool.

“It all sounds like Hattie.” Susan sighed after I related everything I’d learned. (Actually, not everything. I left out the part about the murder.)

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you all this,” I responded, meaning it. “But I figured, the way Hattie’s been acting lately, she needs help.”

Susan nodded. “Ever since she graduated from high school, she’s had such problems.”

Her last sentence stopped me cold.

“What do you mean,
graduated
from high school?” I asked.

“Hattie is twenty-two years old,” Susan told me. “But she was so popular in high school, and she’s always wanted to just go back to that. I’m not surprised that she found a way to actually make it happen. We grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, you know. Never had much money, although we made do. Mom kicked Hattie out of the house the day she graduated, and Hattie never really recovered. After that it was just one thing after another. Fighting, stealing money. And stealing clothes, of course. She was always wanting more clothes—and designer ones. She could never pay for them. Four hundred dollars for a T-shirt. To me, that’s just dumb.

“Not for Hattie, though. She was so obsessed with being someone different, with being someone that she thought was better. To her, that meant rich and famous. She read all those magazines, saw those pictures, and thought that the only thing that would make her happy was if she could be on the cover herself. Do you know she sent seven videocassettes to MTV? She wanted to be on that, whatchamacallit, that
Real World
so bad. Seven tapes!”

“That’s ludicrous,” I said. Daisy kicked me under the table. She knew I couldn’t wait till I was eighteen so I could try out for
The Real World
myself.

“When she disappeared, I was angry at first,” Susan went on. “I’d been letting her stay with me, and then she just up and leaves. No thank you or anything, and all of my cash in her back pocket. She sent me a postcard a few weeks later, telling me she was safe, and that’s the only way I even figured out she was staying in that weird hotel. I went there as soon as I got to the city, but she wasn’t around. She never answered any of my letters or phone calls. I was sure something awful had happened to her. Thank goodness she’s fine.”