Newford Stories (12 page)

“And bee stings?”

“If you’re allergic—and humans can be
allergic to pretty much anything—then, yes. It can kill them. Why
do you ask?”

I shrugged. “I met a boy who died of a bee
sting.”

“A dead boy,” Lucius said slowly, as though
waiting for a punch line.

“I meant to say a ghost.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“He’s not very happy.”

Lucius nodded. “Ghosts rarely are.” He
paused a moment, then added, “You didn’t offer to help him, did
you?”

He didn’t wait for my reply. I suppose he
could already see it in my face.

“Oh, Maida,” he said. “Humans can be hard
enough to satisfy, but ghosts are almost impossible.”

“I thought they just needed closure,” I
said.

“Closure for the living and the dead can be
two very different things. Does he want revenge on the bee? Because
unless it was a cousin, it would be long dead.”

“No, he just wants to be remembered.”

Lucius gave a slow shake of his head. “You
could be bound to this promise forever.”

“I know,” I said.

But it was too late now.

* * *

After leaving the Rookery, I flew up into a
tree—not one of the old oaks on the property, but one farther down
the street where I could get a little privacy as I tried to figure
out what to do next. Like most corbae, I think better on a roost or
in the air. I knew just trying to talk to Donald’s mother wouldn’t
be enough. At some point, I’d have to, but first I thought I’d try
to find out more about what exactly had happened to her
children.

That made me cheer up a little because I
realized it would be like having a case and looking into the
background of it, the way a detective would. I’d be like a private
eye in one of those old movies the Aunts liked to watch late at
night when everybody else was asleep except for Zia and me. And
probably Lucius.

I decided to start with the deaths and work
my way back from them.

There was no point in trying to find the
bee. As Lucius had said, unless it was a cousin, it would be long
dead by now, and it didn’t make sense that it would be a cousin. I
could look into it, I supposed, but first I’d try to find the
driver of the car that had struck Madeline. A bee wouldn’t even be
alive after thirty years, anyway. But a human might.

* * *

Most people know there are two worlds: the
one Raven made and the otherworld, where dreams and spirits live.
But there’s another world that separates the two: the between. Thin
as a veil in some places, wide as the widest sea in others. When
you know the way, it’s easy to slip from one to another, and that’s
what I do when I find myself standing in front of the locked door
of Michael Clark’s house. It’s how Zia and I always get into
places.

Slip into the between, take a step, then
slip right back into Raven’s world. It’s as though you passed right
through the door, except what you really did was take another,
slightly more roundabout route.

I didn’t like it in Clark’s house when I got
there that evening. There was an air of…unpleasantness about the
place. I don’t mean that it smelled bad, though there was a faint
smell of mustiness and old body odour in the air. It was more that
this was a place where not a lot of happiness had ever lived.
Because places hold on to strong emotions just the way people do.
The man who doesn’t forgive? The house he lives in doesn’t either.
The house full of happy, laughing children? You can feel its smile
envelop you when you step through the door.

Clark’s name had been in that last clipping
in the old lady’s scrapbook. When I looked it up in the telephone
book, I found three listings for Michael Clark. The first two
belonged to people much too young to be the man I was looking for,
but this house…I knew as soon as I slipped inside that I was in the
right place.

The front hall was messy with a few months’
worth of flyers and old newspapers piled up against the walls, the
kitchen garbage overflowing with take-out food containers and pizza
boxes, the sink full of dirty mugs and other dishes. But there
weren’t any empty liquor bottles or beer cases full of empties.

I found Clark sitting on the sofa in his
living room, watching the TV with the sound off. As with the rest
of the place, this room was also a mess. Coming into it was like
stepping onto a beach where the tide had left behind a busy debris
of more food containers, newspapers, magazines, dirty clothes. A
solitary, long-dead plant stood withered and dry in its pot on the
windowsill.

Clark looked up when I came in and didn’t
even seem surprised to see me. That happens almost as often as it
doesn’t. Zia and I can walk into someone’s kitchen while they’re
having breakfast, and all they do is take down a couple of more
bowls from the cupboard and push the cereal box over to us. Or
they’ll simply move over a little to give us room on the sofa
they’re sitting on.

In Clark’s case, he might have thought that
I was another one of those personal demons he was obviously
wrestling with on a regular basis.

I didn’t bother with any small talk.

“It’s not like they made it out to be,” the
man said, when I asked him about the night his car had struck
Madeline. “I didn’t try to kill her. And I wasn’t drunk. I’d had a
few beers, but I wasn’t drunk. She just stepped out from behind a
van, right in front of my car. She didn’t even look. It was like
she wanted to die.”

“I’ve heard people do that,” I said. “It
seems so odd.”

“I suppose. But there are times I can
understand all too well. I lost everything because of that night.
My business. My family. And that girl lost her life.
I
took
her life.”

There was more of that. A lot more.

When I realized I wasn’t learning anything
here except how to get depressed, I left him, still talking, only
to himself. I looked up at the night sky, then took wing and headed
for the scene of the accident that Michael Clark kept so fresh in
his mind.

Between my ghost boy’s mother and Michael
Clark, I was beginning to see that the dead weren’t the only ones
haunted by the past.

* * *

The place where Madeline had died didn’t
look much different from any other part of the inner city. It had
been so long since the accident, how could there be any sign that
it had ever happened? But I thought, if her brother’s ghost was
still haunting the bedroom where he’d died, then perhaps she hadn’t
gone on yet either.

I walked along the sidewalk and down an
alleyway, calling. “Hello, hello! Hello, hello!”

I did it, over and over again, until a man
wrenched open one of the windows overlooking the alley. I looked up
into his angry features, though with the light of the window behind
him, he was more just a shadow face.

“It’s three o’clock in the morning!” he
yelled. “Are you going to shut up, or do I have to come down there
and shut you up?”

“You’ll have to come down,” I called back,
“because I can’t stop.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I need to find a dead girl. Have you seen
her?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

His head disappeared back into the apartment
and he slammed the window shut. I went back to calling for Madeline
until I heard footsteps behind me. I turned, warm with success, but
it was only the grumpy man from the window. He stood in the mouth
of the alley, peering down its length to where I stood.

He was older than I’d thought when I’d seen
him earlier—late fifties, early sixties—and though he carried more
weight than he probably should, he seemed fit. If nothing else, he
smelled good, which meant he at least ate well. I hate the smell of
people who only eat fast food. All that grease from the deep-frying
just seems to ooze out of their pores.

“What’s this about a dead girl?” he
asked.

I pointed to the street behind him. “She got
hit by a drunk driver just out there.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

“I just want to talk to her,” I told him.
“To see how she feels.”

“You just said she was dead. I don’t think
she’s feeling much of anything anymore.”

“Okay. How her
ghost
feels.”

He studied me for a long moment, then that
thing happened that’s always happening around Zia and me: He just
took me at my word.

“I don’t remember anybody dying around
here,” he said. “At least not recently.”

“It was thirty years ago.”

“Thirty years ago…”

I could see his mind turning inward, rolling
back the years. He gave me a slow nod.

“I do remember now,” he said. “I haven’t
thought about it in a long time.” He turned from me and looked out
at the street. “This was a good neighbourhood, and it still is, but
it was different back then. We didn’t know about things so much.
People drank and drove because they didn’t know any better. A
policeman might pull you over, but then if it looked like you could
drive, he’d give you a warning and tell you to be careful getting
home.”

He nodded and his gaze came back to me. “I
remember seeing the guy that killed that poor girl. He didn’t seem
that drunk, but he was sure shook up bad.”

“But you didn’t see the accident
itself?”

He shook his head. “We heard it—my Emily and
me. She’s gone now.”

“Where did she go?”

“I mean she’s dead. The cancer took her.
Lung cancer. See, that’s another of those things. Emily never
smoked, but she worked for thirty years in a diner. It was all that
secondhand smoke that killed her. But we didn’t know about
secondhand smoke back then.”

I didn’t know quite what to say, so I didn’t
say anything. I don’t think he even noticed.

“Now they’re putting hormones in our food,”
he said, “and putting God knows what kind of animal genes into our
corn and tomatoes and all. Who knows what that’ll mean for us, ten,
twenty years down the road?”

“Something bad?” I tried.

“Well, it won’t be good,” he said. “It never
is.” He looked down the alley behind me. “Are you going to keep
yelling for this ghost to come talk to you?”

“I guess not. I don’t think she’s here
anymore.”

“Good,” he said. “I may not work anymore,
but I still like to get my sleep.” He started to turn, then added,
“Good luck with whatever it is you’re trying to do.”

And then he did leave and walked back down
the street.

I watched him step into the doorway of his
apartment, listened to the door hiss shut behind him. A car went by
on the street. I went back into the alley and looked around, but I
didn’t call out because I knew now that nobody was going to hear
me. Nobody dead, anyway.

I felt useless as I started back to the
mouth of the alley. This had been a stupid idea and I still had to
help the dead boy, but I didn’t know how, or where to begin. I felt
like I didn’t know anything.

“What are you doing?” someone asked.

I looked up to see Zia sitting on the metal
fire escape above me.

“I’m investigating.”

“Whatever for?”

I shrugged. “It’s like I’m a detective.”

“More like you’re nosy.”

I couldn’t help but smile, because it was
true. But it wasn’t a big smile, and it didn’t last long.

“That, too,” I said.

“Can I help?”

I thought of how that could go, of how
quickly we’d dissolve into silliness and then forget what it was we
were supposed to be doing.

“I’ll be veryvery useful,” she said, as
though reading my mind. “You’ll be in charge and I’ll be your Girl
Thursday.”

“I think it’s Girl Friday.”

“I don’t think so. Today’s Thursday.
Tomorrow
I can be Girl Friday.”

I gave her another shrug. “It doesn’t
matter. It turns out I’m a terrible detective.”

She slid down the banister and plonked
herself on the bottom step.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

“It started out when I went looking for you
and your store, but then I got distracted…”

* * *

“And now I feel like I’m forgetting what
it’s like to be happy,” I said, finishing up. “It’s like that
stupid ghost boy stole all my happiness away, and now, ever since I
talked to him, all I meet are unhappy people with very good reasons
to be unhappy, and that makes me wonder, how could I ever have been
happy? And what is being happy, anyway?”

Zia gave a glum nod. “I think it might be
catching, because now I’m feeling the same way.”

“You see? That’s just what I mean. Why is it
so easy to spread sadness and so hard to spread happiness?”

“I guess,” Zia said, “because there’s so
much more sadness.”

“Or maybe,” I said, “it’s that there’s so
much of it that nobody can do anything about.”

“But we can do something about this, can’t
we?”

“What could we possibly do?

“Make the mother remember.”

I shook my head. “Humans are very good at
not remembering,” I said. “It might be impossible for her to
remember him now. She might not even remember him when she’s dead
herself and her whole life goes by in front of her eyes.”

“Supposedly.”

“Well, yes. If you’re going to get precise,
nobody knows if that’s what really happens. But if it did, she
probably wouldn’t remember.”

“And you can’t just kill her to find out,”
Zia said.

“Of course not.” I sighed. “So what am I
going to do? I promised Donald I’d help him, but there’s nothing I
can do.”

“I have an idea,” Zia said, a mischievous
gleam in her eye.

“This is serious—” I began, but she laid a
finger across my lips.

“I know. So we’re going to be serious. But
we’re also going to make her remember.”

“How?”

Zia grinned. “That’s easy.”

She stood up and slapped a hand against her
chest.