Mom gave her forehead another slap. I was starting to worry she might give herself a brain tumor, or something. “Oh my God, La Petite Maison dans le Bois! Why didn’t I think of it first?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“His study! Where he writes! If he’s anywhere, it would there! Come on!”
She grabbed my hand and ran me around the shallow end of the pool, but when we got to where the gravel path started, I set my feet and stopped. Mom kept going, and if Liz hadn’t grabbed me by the shoulder, I probably would have face-planted.
“Mom? Mom!”
She turned around, looking impatient. Except that’s not the right word. She looked halfway to crazy. “Come on! I’m telling you if he’s anywhere here, it will be there!”
“You need to calm down, Tee,” Liz said. “We’ll check out his writing cabin, and then I think we should go.”
“Mom!”
My mother ignored me. She was starting to cry, which she hardly ever did. She didn’t do it even when she found out how much the IRS wanted, that day she just pounded her fists on her desk and called them a bunch of bloodsucking bastards, but she was crying now. “You go if you want, but we’re staying here until Jamie’s sure it’s a bust. This might be just a pleasure jaunt for you, humoring the crazy lady—”
“That’s unfair!”
“—but this is my life we’re talking about—”
“I know that—”
“—and Jamie’s life, and—”
“MOM!”
One of the worst things about being a kid, maybe the very worst, is how grownups ignore you when they get going on their shit. “MOM! LIZ! BOTH OF YOU! STOP!”
They stopped. They looked at me. There we stood, two women and a little boy in a New York Mets hoodie, beside a drained pool on an overcast November day.
I pointed to the gravel path leading to the little house in the woods where Mr. Thomas wrote his Roanoke books.
“He’s right there,” I said.
12
He came walking toward us, which didn’t surprise me. Most of them, not all but most, are attracted to living people for awhile, like bugs to a bug-light. That’s kind of a horrible way to put it, but it’s all I can think of. I would have known he was dead even if I didn’t know he was dead, because of what he was wearing. It was a chilly day, but he was dressed in a plain white tee, baggy shorts, and those strappy sandals Mom calls Jesus shoes. Plus there was something else, something weird: a yellow sash with a blue ribbon pinned to it.
Liz was saying something to my mother about how there was no one there and I was just pretending, but I paid no attention. I pulled free of Mom’s hand and walked toward Mr. Thomas. He stopped.
“Hello, Mr. Thomas,” I said. “I’m Jamie Conklin. Tia’s son. I’ve never met you.”
“Oh, come on,” Liz said from behind me.
“Be quiet,” Mom said, but some of Liz’s skepticism must have gotten through, because she asked me if I was sure Mr. Thomas was really there.
I ignored this, too. I was curious about the sash he was wearing. Had been wearing when he died.
“I was at my desk,” he said. “I always wear my sash when I’m writing. It’s my good luck charm.”
“What’s the blue ribbon for?”
“The Regional Spelling Bee I won when I was in the sixth grade. Spelled down kids from twenty other schools. I lost in the state competition, but I got this blue ribbon for the Regional. My mother made the sash and pinned the ribbon on it.”
In my opinion I thought that was sort of a weird thing to still be wearing, since sixth grade must have been a zillion years ago for Mr. Thomas, but he said it without any embarrassment or self-consciousness. Some dead people can feel love—remember me telling you about Mrs. Burkett kissing Mr. Burkett’s cheek?—and they can feel hate (something I found out in due time), but most of the other emotions seem to leave when they die. Even the love never seemed all that strong to me. I don’t like to tell you this, but hate stays stronger and lasts longer. I think when people see ghosts (as opposed to dead people), it’s because they are hateful. People think ghosts are scary because they are.
I turned back to Mom and Liz. “Mom, did you know Mr. Thomas wears a sash when he writes?”
Her eyes widened. “That was in the Salon interview he did five or six years ago. He’s wearing it now?”
“Yeah. It’s got a blue ribbon on it. From—”
“The spelling bee he won! In the interview, he laughed and called it ‘my silly affectation.’ ”
“Maybe so,” Mr. Thomas said, “but most writers have silly affectations and superstitions. We’re like baseball players that way, Jimmy. And who can argue with nine straight New York Times bestsellers?”
“I’m Jamie,” I said.
Liz said, “You told Champ there about the interview, Tee. Must have. Or he read it himself. He’s a hell of a good reader. He knew, that’s all, and he—”
“Be quiet,” my mother said fiercely. Liz raised her hands, like surrendering.
Mom stepped up beside me, looking at what to her was just a gravel path with nobody on it. Mr. Thomas was standing right in front of her with his hands in the pockets of his shorts. They were loose, and I hoped he wouldn’t push down on his pockets too hard, because it looked to me like he wasn’t wearing any undies.
“Tell him what I told you to tell him!”
What Mom wanted me to tell him was that he had to help us or the thin financial ice we’d been walking on for a year or more was going to break and we’d drown in a sea of debt. Also that the agency had begun to bleed clients because some of her writers knew we were in trouble and might be forced to close. Rats deserting a sinking ship was what she called them one night when Liz wasn’t there and Mom was into her fourth glass of wine.
I didn’t bother with all that blah-de-blah, though. Dead people have to answer your questions—at least until they disappear—and they have to tell the truth. So I just cut to the chase.
“Mom wants to know what The Secret of Roanoke is about. She wants to know the whole story. Do you know the whole story, Mr. Thomas?”
“Of course.” He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, and now I could see a little line of hair running down the middle of his stomach from below his navel. I didn’t want to see that, but I did. “I always have everything before I write anything.”
“And keep it all in your head?”
“I have to. Otherwise someone might steal it. Put it on the Internet. Spoil the surprises.”
If he’d been alive, that might have come out sounding paranoid. Dead, he was just stating a fact, or what he believed was a fact. And hey, I thought he had a point. Computer trolls were always spilling stuff on the Net, everything from boring shit like political secrets to the really important things, like what was going to happen in the season finale of Fringe.
Liz walked away from me and Mom, sat on one of the benches beside the pool, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette. She had apparently decided to let the lunatics run the asylum. That was okay with me. Liz had her good points, but that morning she was basically in the way.
“Mom wants you to tell me everything,” I said to Mr. Thomas. “I’ll tell her, and she’ll write the last Roanoke book. She’ll say you sent her almost all of it before you died, along with notes about how to finish the last couple of chapters.”