Ghost Flower Read online

  The triggers for a memory can be obscure, mossy little embankments with unexpected wormholes that lead you into unknown regions of your psyche, but there didn’t seem to be much mystery to why my thoughts would turn to my mother on Mother’s Day. I’ve wondered, though, if there might not have been some tiny groove I stumbled into without knowing, some part of me that longed for family, that also got touched off without me realizing it. If that’s what ultimately made me do it.

  CHAPTER 3

  The rest of the day was a blur until closing time. That’s when Roman struck. “The cash drawer is ten dollars short,” he announced, eyeing me. “I think you know what that means.”

  He took a step toward me. I took a step back.

  “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Then who did?” Another step toward me. The coffee grinder was pressing against my back now.

  “I don’t know.” I reached behind me to steady myself, and my fingers closed around the handle of one of the ceramic Easter mugs we were putting on sale.

  “Well, what do you propose to do about it?” One step closer and his body would be pressed against mine. His breathing was already heavy, and his eyes were locked on my breasts. They’re not big, but his expression said they would be adequate. “I think we’ll have to do a whole body search.”

  I lashed my arm forward, sending the heavy mug bashing into his cheek where it met his eye socket. The mug shattered, and he reeled backward, gasping.

  “You stupid bitch,” he said, gripping his eye. “You stupid bitch, you could have blinded me.”

  I wanted to correct him. I knew what I was doing, and it wasn’t anything that dangerous. But he was recovering, and it was time for me to go.

  “You stupid bitch,” he repeated, apparently liking the sound of it, lurching toward me. He was between me and the exit. “I’m going to make you pay for that. I’m—”

  His meaty hand reached for me, and I ducked, throwing him off balance. As he stumbled, I shot toward the end of the counter. I felt his fingers close on the back pocket of my jeans, but I kept going. My heart was pounding in my ears so loud I only barely heard the rip of fabric, but the release sent me sprawling forward.

  “I’m going to call the police. You stupid—”

  On my hands and knees I crawled for the opening of the counter. He tried to pin my foot, but I kicked up and was rewarded with a groan. “You stupid bitch, I’m going to have you arrested. You’re going to—”

  I didn’t hear the rest. I was on my feet and at the door, fumbling with his keys in the lock. God, why wouldn’t my fingers work? Work dammit wor—

  And then I was outside, in the warm night air, the mountains’ dark silhouettes against the blue and gold of the late dusk sky. I ran—I don’t know for how long or how far. Finally I had to stop, leaning against a rust-red boulder, panting, crying. I looked down at my hands, and they were pocked with shards of pink and lavender and green and white ceramic from crawling over the mug I’d broken. A small yellow daisy from the rim was dangling from my left palm at a weird angle. I looked around and had no idea where I was.

  I had no idea about anything. The only clear thought I possessed was that I could not go back to my room in case Roman really did call the cops. There wasn’t much there, nothing anyone could use to find me, but it also meant I had nothing except an ID in the name of Eve Brightman and the clothes on my back. I certainly couldn’t plan to pick up my last paycheck.

  The wind changed, bringing the smell of desert sage, which meant it was raining somewhere nearby. I looked up and saw the eerie grey shapes of storm clouds massing around the mountains on the horizon. I looked down and realized I was still wearing my apron. Reaching in, I felt a crumpled-up bill and the piece of paper Bain had given me.

  “We have a proposition,” he’d said. “$100,000 cash,” the note read. There was a crack and a rumble of thunder. The storm was getting closer.

  He didn’t ask questions when I called, just told me to sit tight, he’d be there as soon as he could. I used three of the ten dollars I’d stolen and stashed in my apron to buy an ice tea and sat on the side of the road waiting, watching the storm clouds crawl closer. My mind should have been going a mile a minute, but instead it was just… blank. My eyes focused on the silvery-white cocoon of a moth or butterfly beneath the boulder next to the one I was sitting on. Apparently I wasn’t the only one making a new start at this particular intersection.

  Forty-five minutes later a silver Porsche Carrera did a U-turn and stopped like an impeccably trained panther coming to heel in front of me. Bain rolled down the window and gave me a smile. “Ready for the ride of your life?” he asked.

  A voice in the back of my head whispered that this was too smooth, too easy. My hand hesitated on the door handle for a moment. If I did this, whatever it was, there would be no going back. No escape.

  You can keep running, the voice said. There’s no reason to stop now. Turn and run away again.

  I opened the door and dropped into the seat. “I’m ready.”

  At the time I thought I was.

  He made another U-turn and headed west, toward the clouds.

  CHAPTER 4

  I watched the raindrops slide down the window, finding pathways through the dust. It’s fascinating to watch how they do that—one of them leads the way, and then the others follow in that path, perhaps veering slightly and making it wider, but generally sticking to the same direction unless acted on by something powerful like the wind picking up or a sudden turn. Watch them sometime; their reluctance to chart their own course is remarkable. And if raindrops exhibit that—raindrops that have nothing at stake in their brief lives—how unsurprising is it that people do it too, following paths carved by others, even if it leads nowhere good.

  Surface tension was what did it, held them in place, I knew. They stayed that way because of the cohesion of molecules, their attraction to the surface, the superficial.

  Bain said, “Do you need to go to Van Cortland Street to pick anything up?”

  “You know where I live? Did you follow me?”

  “It’s called due diligence. I wanted to make sure you were suitable.”

  The word suitable sent a creepy chill prickling between my shoulder blades. “And what did you learn?”

  “That you’ve been living there for a month, during which time no one has come to visit you, you told the landlady you’re an orphan, you have no cell phone, and you’ve never gotten a phone call there.”

  I stared at him for four breaths until the creepy feeling receded. I said, “No, I don’t need to get anything.”

  He changed lanes, getting on the ramp to the highway, the clicking noise of his blinker the only sound in the car. Once he’d merged into traffic, we drove in silence, heading north. After about a mile he glanced over at me. “How long have you been on your own?”

  I paused, deciding which story to pluck from my quiver and shoot in his direction. I said, “My mother drove me to a Greyhound bus station when I was ten, said to wait there while she went to get Twizzlers, and didn’t come back.” It wasn’t the whole story, but it was true.

  I could tell I chose well by the way his lips compressed and his fingers curved over the mahogany inlay on the steering wheel. The atmosphere in the car shifted slightly, the way it does when someone burps and is embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I managed.”

  “I had no right—”

  “No, you didn’t.” There would be no more questions about my childhood, I was sure.

  The windshield wipers traced smooth overlapping semicircles out of the raindrops on the glass, like a flamenco dancer opening and closing her fans. Lightning flashed in shining silver veins across the sky, and thunder rumbled far away.

  I picked out a question with care. You have to be careful with strangers; questions can reveal as much as answers. “People always say it never rains in the desert.”

  “You’re not from here,” he said, almost to himself
, like he was filing it away. “You’ve never seen a thunderstorm in the desert then?” He glanced to see that I was paying attention. “They can be pretty amazing. Wild and out of control until suddenly, abruptly, they just stop. Ro—Aurora—loved thunderstorms. She’d run outside in them and just stand there for as long as they went on, getting soaking wet.”

  “Who?”

  “My cousin. The one you look like. I sometimes wondered if it was because she was kind of like a storm. Sounds stupid, probably.” The last part seemed more directed at himself than to me.

  “You say ‘was.’ What happened to her?”

  His lips compressed. “That’s what you, Bridgette, and I are going to talk about.” He frowned. “Why haven’t you asked where we’re going?”

  I kept my eyes out the front window, but I was watching Bain in my peripheral vision. “It wouldn’t matter. I don’t waste my time with superfluous questions.”

  “Superfluous. Fancy word. Where did you pick that up?”

  “I have a library card.”

  A billboard for the Highway Motel—“Next exit. Best in class!”—seemed to catch Bain’s eye as we went by it, and I felt his gaze rest on me for a moment, appraisingly. I pretended not to notice, watching the scenery pass, Mary Ann’s Diner, Citco Gas, the Rub-a-Dub Carwash.

  Bain shifted his weight in his seat. “Are you always this calm when you get into cars with strange men?”

  We sped by the exit for the motel. I said, “I’m fairly certain there’s nothing you and your sister want me to do that I haven’t done before.”

  A parenthesis formed at the corner of his mouth as it rose in a small, pleased smile. “Oh, I think you might be surprised.”

  Out of nowhere, my mind flashed back to earlier in the day, him calling me a dead ringer, and the first glimmer of fear began to clutch at my intestines. But I was determined not to show it.

  We got off the main highway at the ramp just before the “Phoenix next five exits” sign and switched to small roads, the kinds that go straight from pavement to gravel without a shoulder. The kinds favored by organized serial killers for burying their victims because they’re accessible but not obvious and don’t retain tire marks.

  The rain had slowed to a misty drizzle. The silver-blue of the Porsche’s headlights polished the wet asphalt into an ebony ribbon.

  Traffic was light on the other side, so we bet on how many cars would pass us between each mile marker, a dollar a marker. I won the first and second miles (three cars each); he won the third (six). The fourth was still a draw when he swerved without slowing into the gravel-covered parking lot of a medium-sized general store, spraying a cascade of grey pebbles with the back tires. He braked into a parking space in front of the door, said, “Wait here,” and was out of the car, letting in a wave of cool air before I could protest. Through the window I watched him shake hands with the man behind the counter, exchange a few words, take a toothpick, and come back out.

  He had the toothpick in the side of his mouth, rolling it around when he got back into the car. “Bridgette already stopped in for supplies, and she’s at the cabin waiting for us,” he said, his arm extended across the back of my seat as he made a reverse arc out of the parking spot.

  “You’re scared of her,” I said.

  The toothpick stopped moving. His head was twisted to look over his right shoulder, which meant it was facing me straight on, and he stopped in the middle of backing up to move his eyes to mine. “No, I’m not. Why would I be afraid of my baby sister?” he challenged.

  I couldn’t answer, but I knew I was right. You learn to sense things like that when you’ve lived like I had.

  We sat like that, his eyes on my face, toothpick clenched between his lips, for the space of three heartbeats. Long enough to become aware of not blinking. Long enough so that the challenge drained from his expression and was replaced with something else, something intense that could have been longing or hate or anything in between.

  His tone unreadable, he said, “Seeing you makes me miss my cousin.”

  “Were you two close?”

  “We were family.” He was suddenly avoiding my gaze. Turning his head from me, he punched the car into third gear. He kept his foot on the break, revved the engine until it whined like it was begging for mercy, and exploded onto the road doing sixty.

  We drove in silence for the next ten minutes, the headlights flashing from side to side as we sped up a curly road, first picking up cream-colored rocks, then grey boulders, and finally trees, taller and taller ones. We passed a silver mailbox, and Bain swung into a gap between the trees, slowed, and rolled the car to a stop in front of a triple-bayed garage. It was set into a wide stone two-story building with a square tower on one side that had vines growing up it. There was a warm yellow light spilling from the windows above the garage doors and the tower, but otherwise the entire area was dark.

  “We’re here,” he said, opening his door and starting to get out. “Welcome to the family cabin.”

  I climbed out too. “I’m pretty sure most people would call this a castle.”

  Bridgette’s voice came to us across the gravel drive saying, “As you’re finding out, we’re not most people.”

  She was standing inside a wide door at the base of the tower. She’d changed into grey leggings and a light blue baggy sweater, but she still had on the driving moccasins. Her arms were crossed over her chest. “For one thing, we’re more careful. Before you take another step, tell me your name. And don’t say Eve Brightman. Eve Brightman died eleven years ago; I checked. You’re not even on Facebook. Who are you really?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. Nothing about my life had ever really fit into birthday party invitation categories like Who, What, Where, When, Dress to Impress. But I couldn’t tell Bridgette that. Instead I put some challenge in my voice and said, “Why does it matter?”

  “That’s not an answer. I want an answer.”

  I watched a moth flutter around the buttery light next to the well-kept, solid-looking door, and it made me think of the cocoon I’d seen earlier.

  I decided to go with the truth.

  CHAPTER 5

  “I’m on the run,” I said. “I’ve been hiding.”

  Bridgette’s eyes narrowed slightly, and I got the feeling that wasn’t what she was expecting. “From who?”

  “Someone who thinks I have something they want.”

  “Are the police looking for you?”

  “No.” I was pretty sure that was true but not positive.

  “So it’s just this—individual. Who is he?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  Bain was next to me then. “You didn’t tell me you were a criminal. You played me.”

  “I’m not a criminal. And you didn’t ask.”

  He said, “What’s your real name?”

  I considered it, truly, then said, “I don’t think I want to tell you that.”

  Dark indentations appeared beneath his cheekbones as he clenched his jaw. “Forget it. The whole thing is off.”

  Bridgette looked at him curiously. “It was your idea.”

  “Well, I changed my mind. It’s a bad bet. And as I’m sure you’re dying to remind me, not the first.” He shifted his eyes to me. “I’ll drive you back to Tucson. Unless you’d rather ride with Bridgette.”

  “Either way.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bridgette watching us, and I sensed she was amused. “Bain, may I speak to you for a moment?”

  He dragged his eyes from me and glowered at her. “What?”

  “Let’s go upstairs. You might as well stay for dinner. I made macaroni au gratin avec lardon,” Bridgette said, with a hint of challenge.

  Even though I had no idea what that was, I was suddenly ravenous. I’d skipped breakfast and lunch, and my dinner the night before had been a day-old scone. “That’s a favorite of mine,” I told her, like I ate it every day.

  Her eyes narrowed again, but she turned a
nd led the way up the staircase. They led up one floor into a wide open space with the windows I’d seen from below on one side, and a wall of French doors on another. There was a fancy-looking kitchen with an island surrounded by six tall stools with backs. An immense overstuffed couch and chairs were grouped around a huge sheepskin rug, facing a fireplace. The furniture was all white or cream and modern but comfortable looking. Three places were set at the kitchen island with plates and napkins and glasses and forks and spoons that looked like they could be real silver, and the smell of something delicious baking came from the oven. The kitchen area alone would take an hour and a half to clean properly.

  But what drew my eye was the piano. A baby grand made of a rare dark wood gleaming like a beacon off in a corner by the French doors. It was a beautiful instrument.

  Bridgette pushed Bain through one of the French doors onto the balcony that ran the length of the building, said to me, “Help yourself to whatever you want. We’ll just be a second,” and closed it behind her.

  I took a bottle of Perrier from the refrigerator and moved toward the piano, which would give me a good vantage point to watch Bridgette and Bain. Lines of photos in matching hammered silver frames marched down the length of it like officers in the Army of Memory.

  I picked up the largest one, a smiling group overlooking a tennis court. Unlike the others, it had a dark matte around the edges as though it had been cropped, and the center seemed shifted. A woman with striking silver hair sat in the front near the left edge, with an athletic-looking man in a yellow polo shirt and seersucker shorts leaning against the balcony edge behind her. There were enough physical similarities to make me think he might be Bain and Bridgette’s father. The man was smiling, but he wasn’t looking at the camera. He was looking intently to the left, off the side of the photo. On the other side of the old woman stood Bain and Bridgette, slightly younger, both dressed for tennis.

  Every detail, from the glint of the double strand of pearls the old woman was wearing with her tennis dress to Bridgette’s unscuffed tennis shoes to the watch tan line on Bain’s wrist above the red handle of the racket combined to make the picture look like an advertisement for How the Rich Live. They were all smiling and appeared to be a complete happy family with everything in the world they could want. But it had a careful, curated feeling that seemed sinister. What was the man looking at so intently just outside the frame?