The old man had drowned, and they hadn’t been there. And then Loretta deLarava had tried to eat the old man’s ghost, and—as Pete Sullivan had realized only after having driven far up the featureless Interstate 5 toward San Francisco, and as Sukie must have realized at some point during her own flight—they had fled without taking away the wallet and the keys.
Sullivan held the cold beer glass tightly to keep his hands from shaking, and his face was cold and sweaty. In that instant he completely understood, and completely envied, Sukie’s suicide.
She’d had to do it. How could you hide forever in a bottle?—unless you became transparent yourself. Dissolved (—like Speedy Alka-Seltzer—) so that you were a waveform propagated all the way out beyond any scraps of physical material, even compass needles, that might move in response to the fact of you and thus betray your presence.
(He couldn’t think about the three cans of Hires Root Beer that had also fallen out of the shoebox, one of which had rolled right up to his foot and sprayed a tiny forlorn jet of ancient brown pop across his shoe, but) he knew in the tightening back of his throat that he and his sister had betrayed their father on that day, that chilly winter of 1986 day, by running mindlessly away and leaving the tokens of their father’s ghost in deLarava’s hands.
But I’m still alive, he thought, and I’m back in L.A. I’ve got to save him from her. And I can’t possibly face him.
“—the ghosts of dead family members,” said a placid male voice from one of the television speakers, “but police investigators speculate that the apparently supernatural effects were caused by some electrical or gas-powered apparatus that may have exploded and caught fire, causing the blaze that gutted the psychiatric clinic and killed three of Dr. Elizalde’s patients. Several others still to this day remain hospitalized for psychological trauma sustained during that Halloween tragedy.”
Sullivan looked up at the nearest screen, but saw only football players running across a green field. He pushed his chair back and turned around, and on one of the farther sets saw a blond man in a suit standing behind a news-show podium. As Sullivan watched, the studio set was replaced with a still photo of a slim, dark-haired woman standing with raised eyebrows and an open mouth in a doorway. Her eyes were shut.
That looks like a bar-time snapshot, Sullivan thought as a chill prickled the back of his neck. Whoever this woman is, she seems to have anticipated the flash.
“And today,” the newsman’s voice went on, “nearly two years after that scam-gone-wrong, Dr. Elizalde is reportedly back in Los Angeles. Police say that this morning she went to the Amado Street house of Margarita Gonzalvez, the widow of one of the patients who died in the so-called séance—and drew a handgun and fired four shots! Mrs. Gonzalvez was able to snap this photograph of Elizalde shortly before the discredited psychiatrist allegedly began shooting. Police are investigating reports that Elizalde may subsequently have bought a disguise and stolen a car.”
The scene changed back to the newscaster in the studio, who had now been joined by another blond man in a suit. ‘“Physician, heal thyself,”’ said the newcomer solemnly. “A tragic story of misplaced faith, Tom.”
“Certainly is, Ed,” agreed the grave newscaster. “Though medical authorities now believe that many of the folk remedies dispensed at these curanderias and hierverias can actually be beneficial. It’s the charlatans who prey on credulity, and exaggerate the reasonable claims, who give the whole field a bad name.”
The newsmen were apparently segueing into a topical Halloween-related story about the upcoming Day of the Dead celebrations in the local Hispanic communities, and shortly they switched to film clips of stylized papier-mâché skulls waving on poles, and dancing people wearing black and white face makeup and wreaths of marigolds. Sullivan turned back to his table, frowning at the spooklike figure of the napkin-draped drink. The dead woman’s drink, the suicide’s drink. He wasn’t going to touch it.
Apparently this psychiatrist’s catastrophic “so-called séance” had been big news two years ago. Sullivan never read newspapers, so he hadn’t heard about it.
She held a séance at her psychiatric clinic, he thought; on Halloween, a dangerous night even for a séance that might not have been meant to get real supernatural effects. And something sure enough happened—the surviving patients apparently saw “dead family members,” and then there were fires and explosions or something, and three of her patients died. (Of course the police would assume that the disaster was caused by some kind of goofy “apparatus” blowing up.)
If she is on bar-time, as that photo implies, it’s certainly no wonder—she’s now got ghosts guilt-linked to her, like all of us ghost-sensitives.
Sullivan had gathered from the news story that Dr. Elizalde had fled Los Angeles after the fire and the deaths. Why had she come back now, at another Halloween? Not to shoot at that widow, it seemed to him—if there was shooting, it was probably aimed at Elizalde. Elizalde probably came back here in some idiot attempt to…set things right.
Apologize to all of them, living and dead.
But…
It sounds to me as though she really can raise ghosts, he thought. Whether she’s happy with it or not, it sounds as though she’s a genuine, if accidentally ordained, medium.
She could probably raise the ghost of my father, and I could—insulated from him, at a medium distance, speaking through a screen like a shameful penitent in a confessional—warn him.
His heart was beating faster. Elizalde, he thought. Remember the name.
She’ll be hiding now, but I’ll bet she won’t leave L.A. until after Halloween, until after her Quixotic amends are impossible again. She’ll be hiding, but I’ll bet I can find her.
He smiled bleakly into his empty beer glass.
After all, she’s one of us.
OUTSIDE, IN the westbound left lane of Wilshire Boulevard, a 1960 Cadillac Fleetwood slowed to a stop at the Westwood intersection.
Behind the wheel, Neal Obstadt could see that all the other drivers had their headlights on, so he reached out carefully and switched on his own. He liked to be the last.
A cellular telephone was wedged under his jaw, and in his right hand he held a Druid Circle oatmeal cookie from Trader Joe’s. “You don’t need to be fretting about overcosts, Loretta,” he said absently into the phone. “Your location accountant’s an anal-retentive, and the production reports always balance. You’ve got the insurance and permissions. Worry about something else, if you’ve got to worry.”
Obstadt had had various business dealings with deLarava for years, and he knew that this anxiety was what she called “checking the gates”—a cameraman’s term for a last-minute, finicky checking of the lens for dust or hair. Still, he could hear her sniffling—and she’d been crying on the phone this morning, too—and it occurred to him that this agitation was out of proportion for the modest ghosts-on-the-Queen-Mary shoot she had scheduled for Saturday.
“You having a bad hair day, Loretta?” he asked. “Your big manhunt suffer a setback?” The light turned green, and he accelerated west, toward the elevated arch of the 405.
“What did you have to do with that?” shrilled her voice out of the phone. “He isn’t really leaving the state, is he?”
Obstadt blinked, and smiled as he took a bite of the cookie. “Who, Topper?” he said around the mouthful. “Spooky, I mean—your Nicky Bradshaw. He left the state? I had nothing to do with it, I swear. I never even liked the show.”