Tapping the Dream Tree (9 page)

“But the woman never does?”

Mary shook her head.

“An unusual ghost,” Christy said.

“Mmm.”

“And what do you think is keeping her here?”

“Well, not vengeance,” Mary said with a small laugh.

“Why not?”

“Well, if she was that sort of a person, she'd never have let herself be shut out of her life the way she was, would she? I think she's just, like you said, sad. In mourning for everything she lost. She can't go on because she never got to find out who she could be. Or maybe she just wants some recognition.”

“But not from the guests.”

“No. I think it'd have to be from the woman who killed her.” She cocked her head to look at him. “Have you ever heard of a ghost like that?”

Christy shook his head. “But that doesn't mean she's not real.”

“To me.”

“And whoever else has seen her.” Christy paused a moment, then asked, “I assume you have seen her?”

“I think everyone who's in this hotel for any length of time gets to see her. But most of them don't know she's a ghost.”

“Now I'm really intrigued.”

Mary smiled. “Use it in your next book. ‘Course, I guess you need an ending to be able to do that.”

“No, I just tell the stories the way I find them, anecdotal, fragmentary or complete.” He regarded her for a moment. “You only know what I write from that TV show.”

“I don't get into bookstores a lot. Pretty much all I read is what people leave behind in their rooms. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. I think there are far more people in the world who haven't read me than there are those who have. Or who even know who I am.” He smiled. “And frankly, most of the time I'm happy to leave it that way.”

“When aren't you?”

“Oh, when I'm looking at some rare first edition that I can't buy because I only have this month's rent in my bank account.”

“I hear being rich isn't all it's cracked up to be.”

“Did you ever hear a rich person say that?” Christy asked.

“Only when they're trying to pass as one of the proletariat.”

“Now who sounds like a writer?”

Before she could respond, another of the hotel's guests approached the desk, asking if there were any messages for him.

“Thanks for the conversation, Mary,” Christy said as she turned away to look.

“You, too,” she told him over her shoulder. “Sleep well.”

The next morning, when Christy went to the front desk to check out, he had a copy of one of his books in hand. He doubted Mary would still be on shift this morning, but thought he could at least leave a copy for her with whoever was on duty.

The morning clerk could have been Mary's mother—she even had the same name on her nametag, but there the resemblance ended. She was middle-aged, forty-something—which made her roughly his own age, he thought ruefully. Funny how you forget that you grow older along with everyone else. Medium height, not quite overweight, attractive in a weary sort of a way, short brownish-blonde hair that had started to outgrow its last cut, dressed in a skirt and blazer that appeared a little outdated.

Her taste in music, judging from the faint wisp of sound drifting out of the office behind her, ran more to the classics. Something by Paganini was playing. Solo violin. The smell of her coffee made him wish he'd ordered some from room service, instead of waiting till he got to the radio station where he was doing his first interview this morning.

“Does everyone working here have the same name?” Christy asked.

The woman regarded him with confusion.

“Your nametag,” he said. “It has the same name as was on the one the clerk was wearing last night.”

Now he wished he'd never brought it up. Maybe they only had the one nametag and shared it around.

“Jeremy was wearing my nametag?” she asked. She said it in the same tone she might have used if this Jeremy had been manning the desk while wearing one of her dresses.

“No,” Christy said. “It was a young woman. Blonde hair, sort of punky looking—but in a nice way,” he quickly added when the woman's frown deepened.

“We don't have anybody like that working here,” she said. “The clerk on duty last night would have been Jeremy.”

“And he'd have been at the desk here the whole time?”

“Unless it was particularly quiet. Then he might have been studying in the office in back.”

Christy could see a portion of the office from where he stood. He returned his attention to the woman who was regarding him with some measure of suspicion now.

“Studying,” he said.

“He's a student from the university,” she explained.

Christy nodded. He knew now where this was going.

“Does your father own this hotel?” he asked. “Indulge me,” he added as her look of suspicion deepened. “Please.”

“My father passed away a few years ago. I'm the present owner.”

“I'm sorry,” Christy said. “Not that you're the owner, of course, but…”

“I understand,” the woman said. “Can you tell me what this is all about?”

Christy shook his head. “Not really. It seems I had the most vivid dream last night.”

The woman regarded him expectantly.

“I should just check out,” he said.

He studied her, surreptitiously, while she completed the necessary paperwork. He could see the traces of the girl she'd been, now that he knew to look. Could almost smell the rose hips of the younger Mary's perfume.

“This is for you,” he said, handing her the book when their business was done.

The suspicion returned, deepening once more when she opened it to the title page and read the inscription.

For Mary,

May you finally be recognized for who you are.

Christy Riddell

“I don't understand,” she said lifting her gaze from the book to meet his. “How could you know my name before you came down to check out? And what does this mean?”

She was pointing at the inscription.

Christy could only shrug.

“It's a long, sad story,” he said. “But we met once, a long time ago. I doubt you remember—you must meet so many people in this business.”

She nodded.

“The inscription refers to who you were then—when we met. You told me a ghost story.”

She looked down at the book again, read the title.
Ordinary Ghosts, Hidden Hauntings.

“Like these?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No, it was a rather extraordinary ghost story, pulled out of a rather sad situation that happens more often than any of us likes to admit.”

“I don't understand.”

“I know. But nothing I can say will change anything, or make it any clearer. I'm sorry if I've troubled you in any way.”

He nodded and turned away, walking across the lobby. He paused at the exit.

“Good-bye, Mary,” he said. “I hope you enjoy the book.”

“Well, I'll certainly give it a try,” the woman behind the desk told him.

Christy hadn't been talking to her, but he gave her a smile. He didn't get a response from the other Mary, but he hadn't been expecting one. Nodding again, he left the hotel and hailed a cab. There were only two interviews this morning, then a signing at a bookstore. Plenty of time to think about choices made and what could come of them. Too much time, really.

But then that was what life is all about, isn't it? The choices we make and how the people we are can be left behind when we make those choices because they're no longer a part of our story. For many, not even the words remain to remind us of them. There are only all those ghosts of who we were, wandering around for anyone to see. Except ourselves.

Because we rarely see our own ghosts, do we?

As he settled in the back seat of his cab he found himself wondering about his own ghosts, how many there were, haunting the places he'd once been, those products of choices he'd made that he would never meet, telling stories he would never hear.

I went down to the Beanery
that night, you know, that cafe down in the old factory district by the canal that's more like a warehouse than a coffee bar. Big enough for a rave, but the wildest the music gets is Chet Baker or Morcheeba. Very hip place, at least this week. Nonsmoking, of course, but everything is these days. Open concept with lots of woodwork: pine floors, rustic rafters and support beams. No real general lighting, only pockets, low-hanging overhead lights illuminating tables with groups of people in earnest conversation, drinking low-fat lattés and decaf espressos, go figure. Kind of like a singles bar without the action, but I like it for that. For the anoyminity it allows me. So I'm surprised when I catch a name I haven't heard in years.

“Hey, Spyboy.”

It takes me back to New Orleans, Mardi Gras. Spyboys are part of the Big Chiefs' entourages during the annual parade, the Mardi Gras “Indians” who scout ahead for the other tribes on the march and just generally make a lot of mischief. I did my bit in the parades back in those days, but the name stuck because of another job I held before I retired: digging up dirt for the Couteau family. I'm good at secrets—keeping my own, uncovering those that belong to others. I guess I'd still be there, but I took exception to the use of my expertise. I don't mind tracking down deadbeats and the like, but it turned out that people died because of information I dug up. When I found out how the Couteaus were using me, I couldn't live with it, but you don't say good-bye to people like this.

See, I grew up wanting to be one of the good guys. Call me naive. When I realized that wasn't happening, when I understood exactly what I'd fallen into, I had no choice but to disappear. That entailed getting out of town and staying out. Maintaining a low profile once I was gone and, most important, keeping my mouth shut.

So when I hear that name, one part of me wants to keep walking, but curiosity's always been a serious weakness. I turn to see what part of my past has finally caught up to me.

I don't recognize him right away. The lighting's bad where he's sitting, alone at a table, nursing a chai tea latté. Nondescript—your basic average joe, medium height, brown hair, brown eyes, no distinguishing features. The kind of man your gaze just slides over because there's nothing there to hold it. He's wearing a dark jacket and turtleneck.

“I heard you were dead,” he says.

It's the voice I remember. That rasp, like it's working its way through a hundred years of abusing cigarettes and whiskey. Sammy Hale. Used to run numbers for the Couteaus until he got caught dipping his hand where it shouldn't. Not once, but twice. I check out his right hand where the fingers are cut off at the knuckles. It's Sammy all right.

I give him a shrug.

“I could say the same thing about you,” I tell him.

“I got better,” he says. Smiles.

It's enough to hook me, pull the line taut, then reel me in. He knows my weakness. I take one of the empty chairs at his table.

“Sounds like a story,” I say.

“Maybe. You still in the information business?”

I shake my head, then touch a finger to my temple. “This is where it stays now. Can't sell anything anymore because that's like saying, ‘Here I am.' But you know me.”

He nods. “Yeah, you always had to know.”

“So how'd you survive?” I ask.

Again that smile. “I didn't.”

I hear a lot of stories, mostly from street people these days, and they'll tell you any damn thing. What intrigues me right now is that I remember Sammy from the old days. The one thing he never had was much imagination. Why do you think he got caught ripping off the Couteaus, not once, but twice?

I'm good at waiting. You learn more if you don't ask questions. But I can tell that's not how Sammy wants to play this out.

“So what happened?” I ask.

“I guess you could say I wandered out of the world.”

“You know I'm not following you here,” I say.

That smile of his plays out into a grin and then he tells me a story that even the skells hanging around outside the detox center would be embarrassed to own up to.

“Come with me,” he says when he's done.

“I can't,” I tell him and I walk away.

Or maybe I didn't walk away.

Maybe I hear him out and that old curiosity of mine has me follow him out of the Beanery into the night. We trade the sounds of quiet conversation and the Bill Evans Trio playing on the cafe's sound system for the noise of the streets, the rich smell of brewing coffee for car exhaust and the faint odor of rotting garbage. Tomorrow's pickup day downtown and all the bins are standing in a row along the curb.

Sammy keeps talking, adding details. I walk along beside him, nodding to show that I'm taking it all in.

Not that I believe him for a second.

Carnies have always been easy fall guys for mystery and trouble. People think of them with the same uneasy mix of intolerance and envy as they do Gypsies. What a life, but they'll rob you blind. Lock the doors when the tractor-trailers pull into town and the midway goes up. But what a life. Every day a different town, a whole new crowd of rubes to take advantage of. But keep your hand on your wallet and lock up your daughters.

And haunted carnivals are nothing new, either. Hell, they've got their own little category in folklore and literature, too, from Ray Bradbury to Dean Koontz. But this Ferris wheel he's talking up, it's a new one for me. It's a mechanism that doesn't make sense in the world we all inhabit, like opening a door in your house and finding it leads into a room you've never seen before. I'm haunted by the idea of his carnival ride, existing sideways to the world, a big Ferris wheel with this odd sign hanging over the entrance to the ride, “Crowded After Hours.” A creaking, ancient behemoth of midway entertainment that only exists when the fair's closed down, the booths are all dark, and the carnies have closed the doors of their trailers against the night. A midnight ride where each rider is some costumed figure from nightmare or story or dream, an uneasy crowd of gargoyles and clowns and stranger beings still, like a Mardi Gras parade on a slow-spinning wheel.

There's room for Spyboy there, he tells me.

“See, you're safe on the wheel,” Sammy says. “Safe from the world. Safe forever.”

Maybe, I'm thinking. But are you safe from the wheel itself? Because, never mind the implausibility of it, there's something not right about this idea of chaos married to order, all these mad troubled souls doing time in the confines of their seats, the big wheel turning slowly, creaking in the mist.

“Just have a look,” he says, seeing my doubt.

And I guess I will. I do. Curiosity pulling me along as we head up to the roof of the old Sovereign Building on Flood Street, just north of Kelly, in through a back door and up a stairwell until the rooftop gravel's crunching underfoot and we're standing at the edge of the roof, looking out. Sammy's eyes are shining, aglow.

“I don't see anything,” I tell him.

“You have to have faith,” he says. “You have to believe.”

I squint and think I see something, some monstrous shape looming out of the night, clouded with mists, a wheel turning, the seats rocking slowly back and forth and all these … these beings on them, staring off into unimaginable distances.

“How often do we get a chance like this?” Sammy asks me.

I turn to look at him, still snared by his sincerity.

“Think about it,” he says. “Every time we make a decision, we make another world. We do one thing, and we're in the world that decision called up, but at the same time, we didn't do it, so we're in that other world, too. It goes on forever, all these worlds.”

“You know, you're not making a whole lot of sense,” I say.

He smiles. “Just think of a world where you're not looking over your shoulder every couple of minutes, wondering if the Couteaus have finally tracked you down and sent one of their boys to deal with you.”

“Eternity on a Ferris wheel doesn't really sound all that much better,” I say.

“You're thinking of the outside,” he tells me. “Concentrate on all the journeys you can take inside.”

I shake my head. “I don't get it, Sammy. I like the world. I like being in it.”

“You just don't know any different.” He gives me that smile again, the kind you see on the statues of saints in a church. “In some world you've already stepped over. You're already riding the wheel and you can't imagine how you'd ever have hesitated.”

“Why me?” I ask him. “Why'd you come to me?”

“We're linked,” he says. “By bad blood. The Couteaus want both of us dead.”

You're already dead, I'm thinking, but we've already covered that and it didn't get me any closer to understanding what he's talking about.

But I can see that ghostly wheel now, half here, so close we can almost reach out and grab one of the joints of its frame, half lost in a steaming mist.

“And besides,” he says. “We're already there.”

He points to a seat shared by a harlequin and something truly weird: a man with the head of a quarter moon, a blue moon, like something out of a kid's book. A man in the moon with Sammy's features. And I can make out my own features, too, under the harlequin's white makeup.

“What's with the moon head?” I ask him.

“You know,” he says. “Once in a … I always wanted to be lucky. Different. The guy who comes and you don't know what to expect, maybe good, maybe bad, but it'll shake up your world and make some new ones because whether you like it or not, there's a big change coming. I don't want to be what I am, some loser you can't remember as soon as I walk out the door.”

“I never wanted to be a harlequin,” I say.

He smiles, it's like a child's smile this time, so simple and all encompassing, the whole world smiling with you.

“Spyboy was a kind of clown,” he says.

“So what does that say about me?”

“That you like to see people happy. Same as me. Look at us.” He points at the pair again. “Don't we make you smile?”

I'm feeling a little disoriented, dizzy almost, which is strange, though not the strangest thing to happen to me tonight. Still, I've always been good with heights, so this flicker of vertigo disturbs me, more than the wheel and Sammy's story, go figure.

“Come on,” he says.

I don't know why I do it, but I jump with him, off the roof, grab hold of the wheel's frame, climb down toward where we're already sitting, Spyboy and the Blue Moon.

Only maybe I don't jump. Maybe I stand there and watch him fall, and then I go home. But I can't get it out of my head, what he told me, the way he just jumped, the height of the building, how I never heard him land on the pavement below. I wonder if someone can die twice, except there's no body this time, waiting for me when I step out of the door and into the alleyway. Maybe there wasn't when the Couteaus had him shot either.

The next day I go to work, walk in the back door of the restaurant, same as always. Raul looks up when I come in. He waits until I take off my jacket, put on an apron, start in to work on the small mountain of pots and dishes that've accumulated since I was last standing here at the sink.

“There was a guy looking for you after you left yesterday,” he says.

Sammy, I think. I want to forget all about what maybe happened last night, but the thoughts keep coming back like bad pennies.

“Did he say what he wanted?” I ask, curious as to what Sammy might have said, still looking for a clue, trying to figure him out, where he went when he jumped off that roof.

Raul shakes his head. “Didn't say much of anything. He was big guy, mean looking. Talked a little like François, only not so much. Same accent, you know?”

I go cold at that little piece of news.

I'll tell you the truth, I never thought the Couteaus would bother to track me down. Where was the percentage? I didn't rip them off like Sammy, I've kept my mouth shut all along, stayed low, working shit jobs, minded my own business. But I guess just walking away was insult enough for them.

“He say anything about coming back?” I ask.

Raul shrugged. “I didn't like the look of him,” he says, “so I told him you quit.”

“You didn't lie,” I tell him, already removing the apron.

“What's this guy got on you?” Raul asks.

“Nothing. He just works for some freaks who don't like to hear the word ‘no.' He comes back, you tell him you never saw me again.”

Raul shrugs. “I can do that, but—”

“I'm not saying this for me,” I tell him. “I'm saying it for you.”

I guess he sees something in my face, a piece of how serious this is, because he swallows hard and nods. Then I'm out the door, walking fast, pulse working overtime. There's a sick feeling in my gut and the skin between my shoulderblades is prickling like someone's got a rifle site aimed at my back.