Ghost Flower Read online

  “Clever. Bridgette’s idea?”

  I saw him start to frown then stop. “You just made a joke.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “And another one. No more meat for you.”

  I don’t know what I expected, but when I found Aurora’s class picture, it wasn’t like looking in the mirror or meeting an old friend. It was generic, long dark hair parted on the side, headband, cardigan. She was smiling but not really, her expression as blank and hollow as a tribal mask.

  Bain took the yearbook from me, flipped a few pages to a spread of candid photos titled “Community Activities” and pushed it back in my direction. His finger tapped a picture of two girls with bikes, side by side under a banner that said, “Be a Hero Bikeathon.”

  One of them was dressed as Catwoman in an all-black bodysuit with cat ears, a cat collar, and a looped tail dangling off the back of her bike seat. The other was dressed as Wonder Woman in blue boy shorts with a white trim, a red T-shirt that had two yellow sequin W’s glued on, and a yellow headband. She’d wrapped the hand grips of her bike in yellow tape to go with the Wonder Woman theme, and there was a red crystal star glued between handlebars.

  “Aurora,” Bain said, his finger resting on the one dressed like Catwoman. It was almost a shock to see her here. She looked so different from the sedate class photo. Here her hair was wild under the cat ears. She wore thick black eyeliner and was smiling in a confident, almost mocking way that was echoed in her posture, as though the costume fit not just her body but also her personality like a glove.

  With all that confidence, the challenging smile, I would have expected her to be looking at the camera, but instead she was gazing at the girl next to her. That girl was lovely, with a golden mass of hair that framed her face like a corona, porcelain skin, and huge blue eyes. She seemed mild, and, unlike Aurora, her costume didn’t seem to suit her at all. She looked like a doll someone had dressed up in another doll’s outfit, but her smile was friendly and candid. I could imagine having lunch with her, talking for hours, lying on a picnic blanket and staring up at clouds and cracking stupid jokes. “That’s Liza,” Bain said, and I couldn’t quite tell from his tone what he thought of her. “The one who committed suicide.”

  I stared at the photo for a long time, but the more I looked, the more it seemed to disassemble before my eyes. Liza came into sharper focus—sweet, funny, nice, pretty, kind—while Aurora became more of a blur. For the first time I began to see Aurora’s resemblance to me. But it wasn’t in her face; it was her eyes. I recognized the expression there from my own—the expression of someone who is keeping a secret.

  Who are you? I asked myself. What happened to you?

  I didn’t realize, then, that I had been staring at half the answer since I arrived.

  CHAPTER 10

  There is noise coming from somewhere, like a television, a man’s voice saying, “Come on.” I’m standing in an unfamiliar room.

  My heart begins to pound, and I hear a ring-a-linging in my ears. Then I realize it’s the phone in the room. You have to answer it, I think. It’s life and death.

  “It’s time,” the voice on the TV says, getting louder, like it’s trying to distract me from the ring-a-linging. I back toward the night table (“Let’s go!” says the voice), toward the phone, groping behind me to answer it. I keep thinking I’m nearly there, but it keeps receding. Glancing down, I see a notepad with the name TOM YAW written across the top. Is that who is on the phone?

  “Gotta go,” the voice on the television says, and I realize something about it is familiar. My pulse begins to race, and an alarm goes off in my head. I grasp desperately for the phone, and my fingertips graze it. The receiver flies off and falls to the floor, and as I reach and catch it in my hand, my mind flashes Watch out! and I turn and see—

  Bain was standing by the side of the bed when I opened my eyes.

  “Did you know you talk in your sleep?” he said.

  I was breathing fast, and my heart was pounding. “What are you doing here?” I got up on one elbow and glanced at the clock next to the bed. It read eight A.M. “It’s the crack of dawn,” I complained as though for years I hadn’t been used to getting up hours earlier. Then I noticed his white shorts and white shirt. “Why are you dressed like a hospital orderly?”

  “Tennis,” he said, tossing the red-and-white-handled racquet I’d seen in the photo on the piano in the air and catching it. “Bridgette thinks it’s important that you at least know the basics of tennis even if you say you won’t play. The caretakers at the big house go to church Sunday mornings, so we have a few hours when they’re not around. Come on.”

  I pulled the covers up to my chin. “I don’t know what to wear.”

  “I put some of Bridgette’s tennis stuff on the couch,” he said. “Come on, we don’t have a lot of time.”

  I was still slightly rattled as I jimmied myself into Bridgette’s clothes, picked up the tennis racket, and stumbled downstairs. I hadn’t heard Bridgette arrive, but she was sitting at the counter with one leg tucked up under her, sipping her fake-sweetened coffee, touching a piece of toast as though she might eat it, and reading the paper. She gave me a quick look, said, “Bain is already down on the court,” and went back to her breakfast.

  No coffee for me, I gathered.

  Between the lack of caffeine and the fact that Bridgette’s shoes were two sizes too big, I wasn’t my most graceful as I went down the tower stairs to the front door, but as soon as I stepped out into the morning air I felt energized. The guest house was beautiful, but to avoid being seen, I’d been inside for the entire past week. I felt free, like I’d been liberated from some kind of prison. The kind with the eight-hundred-count Egyptian cotton sheets.

  The tennis courts were between the main house and the guest house. You could see them from the French windows so I knew where I was going, but on the ground they were shielded behind a series of tall hedges. Even before I caught sight of them, I could hear the satisfying thwop thwop thwop of tennis balls being hit by a racket as a ball machine spewed balls at Bain. When I reached the fence, I stopped to watch him play. He moved with the kind of confidence and ease that come from natural skill, not practice. Which didn’t surprise me—it was hard to imagine Bain practicing anything. He was the kind of person who did what he wanted but didn’t work very hard at it.

  He saw me standing there, hit a remote control, and the ball machine went quiet. “Just warming up.”

  “I think you meant showing off.”

  “Trust me, you’ll know when I’m showing off. Let’s see what you can do.”

  The next ninety minutes were an endless study in what I couldn’t do. Which included: hold the racket properly, hit the ball forehand, hit the ball backhand, hit the ball over the net, serve, volley, and keep score.

  At one point I saw Bain glance in the direction of the guest house hopefully, but apparently whatever he was looking for was absent. So he returned his attention, dejectedly, to me.

  It was excruciating, him lobbing balls to me, me somehow managing to always be in exactly the wrong place and missing them. Once when I wasn’t paying attention, I accidentally hit a ball, and Bain’s face lit up. After that I tried harder, which guaranteed it wouldn’t happen again. The times I did manage to connect the balls were either too long or too short, except for the one I smashed into Bain’s shoulder so hard he yelped. Concentrating as intensely as I could, I got the ball across the net only three times, and either that was the magic number or Bain was running out of patience because after the last time he said, “I think that’s enough,” and shepherded me back toward the guest house.

  When we got back, Bridgette was there, sitting at the counter nibbling toast and sipping coffee. “Good game?” she asked, looking up and giving me a big smile.

  That was odd. “I’m a natural,” I told her. “Ask Bain’s shoulder.”

  I continued upstairs to my room and paused in the doorway. I’d been in a rush that morning so I hadn�
��t made the bed and I’d just flung the T-shirt I slept in on the couch. Everything was how I’d left it, slightly untidy.

  But not quite as untidy. The T-shirt looked like it had been folded out of habit, then unfolded and left in a slightly different spot. The hairs had been cleaned out of my brush before it was set back down parallel to the side of the dresser. It was as though someone had searched the room and tried to put everything back but just couldn’t tolerate the disorder. Someone who wasn’t good with messes.

  I smiled to myself as I noticed the corner on the top sheet of the mattress had been squared off. Running my hand along the side of the mattress pad, I felt the bulge of my wallet and pulled it out. My Eve Brightman ID was gone. As my mind raced through the best way to handle that, I checked my other hiding place. That one, at least, was untouched.

  I peeled off my clothes and got into the shower. My ID was probably safer with Bridgette than it would be with me once I got to Silverton House. But without it, it would be nearly impossible for me to leave. I couldn’t think of any other reason Bridgette would have taken it.

  As I was to learn, my imagination was pretty stunted.

  One week down. Seven to go, I told myself as I stood under the warm spray of the shower.

  If you live that long, a voice inside my head whispered.

  After that, Bridgette got friendlier, and the days got more monotonous.

  There were only four books in the guest house: To Kill a Mockingbird, Northern Arizona Critters and Creepers, The Junior League of Scottsdale Favorite Recipes Cookbook, and the yellow pages. I did spend some time reading over the messages people left in Bridgette’s yearbook, but unsurprisingly those were as arid as Bridgette herself.

  There were magazines, all with titles like Arizona Today or Arizona Home or Home, Arizona. I read every one, spotting people who appeared in my notecards at dismal-looking parties, and learned a lot about things like desert gardening and the New New Arizona Cuisine (Get out that grill!).

  At the beginning of the second week, Bridgette and I had been at work all day, and we were getting on each other’s nerves. I felt like the more I came to understand Aurora, the more she seemed to distrust me. We had dinner in silence, and I went to bed right after.

  The clock said 11:09 when a line of silver light raked over the windows and I heard a car pull into the driveway. I assumed it was Bain, but when the door to the guest house didn’t open, I went to the window to check who had arrived. I saw an old silver VW bug and caught the sound of footsteps on gravel as someone moved quickly through the shadows toward the main house.

  Giving myself the excuse that I was making sure the person wasn’t a prowler, I tiptoed down the stairs, out the door, and followed the same path he’d followed. As I rounded a corner, I saw light coming from the ground floor of the main house. Maybe the live-in couple who looked after the place were entertaining, I thought, but then I saw Bridgette.

  The room I was looking into through the curtains was a library, with floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with the kind of unopened books I had spent hours dusting in other similar houses. Even though it was a warm night, there was a fire burning in a fireplace, as though to set the mood. Bridgette was standing in front of it talking to someone I couldn’t see. She was smiling and looked—not like herself. Mischievous and happy. She was also naked. I quickly ducked down and out of sight.

  Based on the card for Bridgette’s boyfriend, Stuart Carlton [25, financial consultant, collects rare baseball cards, $5,000,000 (plus trust fund at 30)], he didn’t strike me as the VW Bug type. Of course his car could have been in the shop, and he could have borrowed his housekeeper’s. Or it could have been someone else. Whoever he was, I hoped he’d show her a really good time because with her out of the house I saw my first chance since getting there to get online. I hadn’t been allowed near a computer, but with Bridgette busy I could use hers.

  Backing away from the window, I sprinted back to the guest house. I found Bridgette’s computer in the bottom of a drawer in her room and woke it up. It was password protected, but I’d seen her type it enough times to know where the keys were, and it only took me two tries to get it—CHL0E. Her password was her favorite designer. Ugh.

  I got the browser open and searched “Aurora Silverton.” There were news links in the context of the Silverton family’s involvement in various charities for missing children, including the Aurora Silverton Foundation, one record of her winning a junior-level tennis tournament in seventh grade, and a link to a piece by the gossip columnist of Tucson Today about the preparations for Coralee Gold’s graduation party, which would include “a special memorial moment for absent classmates Elizabeth Lawson and Aurora Silverton.”

  “They were a part of our class, and they should be a part of our celebration,” Coralee Gold told the columnist during a hush-hush planning session for what promises to be the party of the season. “I can’t tell you exactly what we have in mind, but I can say no one has ever done anything like it at a graduation party.” Coralee is the daughter of nationally famous Domestic Diva Gina “Good as Gold” Gold and her adorable husband Bernie.

  Among the comments from people who loved Gina Gold and thought Bernie really was adorable, one jumped out at me that sent an icy chill down my neck.

  AzAngry: “It makes me sick every time I see the Silverton name. How many more problems will they be allowed to bury the way they buried Elizabeth Lawson?”

  Problems? Bury?

  Before I could search the site for more, I heard the sound of voices and the crunch of feet on gravel outside. Apparently Bridgette’s boyfriend was not the sleepover—or even the stay-very-long—type. I closed the browser, shut the laptop, tucked it under the sweaters, and had just made it back into my bed when the front door opened. My heart was pounding so loud that when I heard footsteps padding slowly down the hall and Bridgette peered into my room, I was afraid she’d be able to hear it even from under the covers.

  AzAngry was probably just a nutcase, or a disgruntled employee, I thought. Hadn’t Bain said that people liked to think the worst of the family? Liza had committed suicide. Surely no matter how powerful the Silvertons were, they couldn’t have orchestrated that.

  Right?

  A few evenings later, Bain, Bridgette, and I were together, sitting on the porch eating chips and salsa and discussing the plan for my return to Tucson. It was going to be the Friday a week after Aurora’s high school class would have graduated. It had to be on a Friday, Bridgette explained—

  “—because Grandmother always has tea at four o’clock on Fridays and all the grandchildren are required to attend,” I interrupted. “This isn’t a bee; you don’t have to spell it all out.”

  Bain laughed and said, “That was creepily like Aurora,” but Bridgette just stared at me and said, “Yes, it was.”

  I grinned at her. After an uncomfortable moment, she picked up where she’d left off. “You’ll take the train from Phoenix and then a taxi from the station in Tucson,” she said. “When you get there, you’ll ring the doorbell. Mrs. March will answer, and you’ll tell her to pay the taxi. It’s the kind of thing Aurora would have done, and it will shock everyone enough they won’t think of not letting you in.”

  Bain took the empty chip bowl and dumped the crumbs into his mouth. “And the fingerprints,” Bain said. “We need to get them to check them right away because once they’ve done it you’re clear. But we think if you suggest it, it could look suspicious, so I’m going to bring it up. As though I think I’m challenging you. Once Grandmother accepts you, everyone else in the Family will go along with it.”

  I noticed that both he and Bridgette always pronounced the Family the same way, as though it had capital letters and was somehow different from every other family in the world.

  “Is the Family some kind of cult?” I joked.

  But Bain didn’t laugh. “The Family is the most important thing. You do whatever you must to protect it.”

  “Yes,” Bridgette agreed, loo
king at him hard. “You do.” She turned back to me. “That only leaves the hug.”

  “The hug?”

  “Grandmother insists we hug her at tea, but Aurora hated it and wouldn’t do it. If you come in and don’t hug her, it could look like you don’t know the ritual. On the other hand, if you do, it would be out of character for Aurora.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “We’ll just have to play it by ear,” Bridgette said, twisting the triple bands on her pointer finger. Leaving things unplanned clearly made her nervous.

  “Maybe one of us could make an issue of it,” Bain suggested. He turned to me. “We figure if Bridgette and I doubt you the most vociferously, we’ll be able to control the opposition.”

  “Vociferously. Fancy word,” I said.

  He winked at me. “I’ve got a library card.”

  Despite not trusting them and not wanting to like them, a strange kind of closeness had grown up between us during the past three weeks. A closeness I couldn’t risk.

  I determined I would destroy it.

  The next day was Friday, exactly a week before I was supposed to go back. Bridgette drove me into Phoenix to have my hair cut, so that it parted on the same side that Aurora’s had, and colored to resemble her slightly lighter brown.

  She also gave me money to buy an outfit to wear back to Tucson, since the clothes I’d come in were a mess and I couldn’t show up in something from the Silvertons’ guest house.

  I went to the mall and bought a shapeless nubby gray jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves that looked like something someone’s grandma would wear, a midnight-blue sequin miniskirt that absolutely did not, a sleeveless pearl grey silk shirt, black peep-toe pumps with an ankle strap, over-the-elbow black gloves, two thick bangles, and a pair of Ray Ban knockoffs. The jacket just kissed the bottom hem of the miniskirt. It was definitely not the kind of outfit you’d wear to tea.