Possession

SIXTEEN

Old Possum’s seems never to change. Phoebe occasionally rearranges the shelves and reorganizes the stock, but the air of everything having been, forever, as it is right now and always shall be is as permanent as the musical wooden floors and the cat hair on the doormat. The sign over the coatrack still read HE WHO STEALS MY COAT GETS TRASHED, and there were still fake dinosaur skulls on the walls, as there had been since I first arrived. One of Phoebe’s employees—eternally referred to as “the minions”—stood behind the cash desk, folding hardcover books into plastic covers, while Beenie, the dumbest of the shop cats, supervised. If Beenie stayed true to form, he would end up half-wrapped in plastic before the books were done and wandering through the shop in a daze, unable to fathom how to get it off. The shop wasn’t busy at this early-afternoon hour, so I just waved to the minion as I passed and headed toward the back, drawn by the scent of coffee.

Phoebe was waiting for me in the coffee alcove where I’d first talked to Lily Goss, cups of coffee—hers iced, mine hot—sitting on the painted table between the comfortable chairs. Simba, the giant cat, was curled on top of an ancient unabridged dictionary and overflowing the sides. They both looked up at me as I walked over to the unoccupied chair. Simba stared hard and I wondered if he could smell the ferret’s recent presence in my bag.

I fixed the cat’s defiant stare with one of my own. “This is not a large snack,” I said. “So don’t get any ideas, because next time I’ll bring Chaos with me and the tube rat will kick your furry butt.”

Simba put on a haughty expression and turned his head away as if he couldn’t be bothered with peasants or ferrets. Phoebe snorted. I just sat down.

“Hi, Phoebe,” I said as I reached for the coffee cup. “Thank you for the coffee. And the books.”

“You haven’t even seen them yet. How are you so sure you need to thank me for them?”

“You have never given me a useless book. A few weird ones, but never useless.”

“What was so weird?”

“That Christopher Priest book was pretty strange.”

“Oh, you haven’t seen weird if you think Priest is it.”

“Please don’t attempt to prove that to me. At least not today.”

“I just try to broaden your horizons, girl. You always reading those mystery novels. Don’t you get tired of that? It’s like reading about work.”

“No it’s not. Real detective work is never that interesting or exciting.”

She snorted again. “So you say, Miss I-Talk-to-Ghosts.”

I glanced down, a little put off and still a bit worried about her reaction to what I was going to tell her. “Usually I’d say that’s not how it works—they come to me—but in this case I have been talking to ghosts. A couple of them, at least.”

I glanced at Phoebe sideways to see how she was taking it. She was staring at me and nibbling on her lip. “Do you truly?” she whispered. “The things that happened, they seemed like . . . just bad people doing bad things.”

“Do you remember when Mark died?”

“I’ll never forget that.”

“That experiment was all about creating a ghost. Which they did.”

“It was a fake ghost.”

This had become so ordinary to me over time that explaining it was hard. Getting my understanding of the what and why of the Grey, ghosts, and monsters into the air on a stream of words was like trying to sculpt smoke. “The ghost existed, even if it wasn’t the revenant of a human who’d really lived. What we call ghosts aren’t always the lingering spirits of people. Some of them are more like a memory that won’t fade or a habit that’s so much a part of a place that it keeps on repeating even when the people who performed it are gone. And some are things we make out of our own minds.”

“You mean they’re our imagination.”

“Not quite that. More like the animation of things we believe.”

“If that’s the truth, then why don’t we see angels and devils all the time?”

I looked her in the eye. “Do you really believe in imps from hell who cause all our misfortunes, who torment and tease us constantly? Or do you only want to? To have something to blame. Do you believe an angel stands watch over you night and day, to guide you through life, even when things go to hell in a handbasket?”

Phoebe bit her lip again. “I did when I was a child. I believed in all the spirits, devils, and angels Poppy told me about. I told you about the duppy, remember?”

“I do. But now . . . ?”

“I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I never saw them. And why didn’t I? You say I just need to believe—”

“That’s not quite what I said. It’s not just the things you accept and it’s not just you. And even when the idea has form, it may not be revealed, or it may not come to us in a way we can see or understand. Some things that we believe are, when we face them, too horrible or too awesome or too large to take in. And so we just don’t see them. Most of us adults filter them out so we can keep on going ahead with our lives without losing our minds. Can you imagine the impact—the disorienting mental shock—of actually seeing God or an angel in our world full of science and machines and humans who believe bone-deep in self-determination? We may claim something is fate or destiny, but we almost never truly believe it—not Americans. If we did, how could we run around feeling so . . . guilty all the time? If we didn’t believe that we caused the worst things that happen to us and our world—that it’s all our fault—we couldn’t also believe that we could fix it. We’re so arrogant, so filled with hubris that if there were any gods still paying any attention to us, they’d have to wipe us out like so many fleas for our presumption. We have to believe that we are ultimately in control of the earth, of our destinies, of our lives, and that makes it very hard for any god to speak to us. It’s a little easier for ghosts—we only have to remember them or something of them.”

Phoebe sat still, watching me and thinking, the energy around her flaring and shifting. This idea I’d just planted in her mind made her mad and sad and thrilled and it made her curious and frightened all at once, to judge by the colors that burned and sparked around her. I wondered which emotion was going to win.

Simba screeched and whipped himself into a puff-furred arch, batting at something on the floor. Phoebe and I both jerked out of our fugue to stare at him.

One of the other cats was crouched on the carpet in front of the dictionary with a guilty paw in the air. Simba swiped at it, issuing a guttural, gurgling moan. Then he spun around and crouched to leap away, but the attempt was ruined by the sudden pounce of his adversary.

Simba shook the other cat off and turned back around to slap the miscreant on the head. Then he gave a snarky-sounding yawp and bounded away to the top of the fake fireplace, nudging a small gargoyle so it rocked for a moment on its chipped base. The other cat hopped onto the vacated dictionary and huddled into a self-satisfied loaf, with its tail wrapped around its feet and a tiny cat smile on its furry face.

Phoebe sighed. “Troublemaker.” Then she looked at me, quirking her head to the side and studying me as if I’d suddenly changed in front of her eyes.

“What’s that on your cheek?” she asked.

I was puzzled and frowned over her question. “My cheek . . . ?”

She pointed at the same bit of my face that the woman at the Chinese deli had. “You got a scratch or something. You been in a scrap?”

“No,” I said, shoving my hair back. “It’s something a ghost wrote on me today. Can you read it? I can’t.”

She was taken aback and gasped a little before she leaned in and stared at the curling letters on my skin. “It’s so fancy. . . . It looks like a tattoo, but I know you better than that.”

“You don’t think I’d get a tattoo?”

“I know you wouldn’t—you don’t like to be noticed. Don’t get a lot more noticeable than tattoos on the face.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I could pierce my nose. . . .”

She gave me a mocking slap on the arm. “Oh, girl! You would look like a skinny rhino!”

“Why? My nose isn’t big.”

“No, but on you a pierced nose would stand out like a big ol’ horn. You got that kind of face that says ‘You don’t really see me’ to everyone.”

“Bland.”

“White. You are so white, girl.”

I looked down at my hands, the marks of the dermographia fading to pale pink scratches. “White. Like bread. Like a mid-America, middle-class, WASP. Which I am.”

“That’s not what I meant at all.”

“But that’s what I mean. That’s what I want people to see. Most of the time. Someone nearly invisible—someone unremarkable.”

“Then it’s a good thing most of them never get to know you, because you are remarkable. I remark on you all the time!”

I tried on my Phoebe imitation—which is to say a terrible phony Jamaican accent. “Dat Harper, she nothing but trouble, dat girl!”

I got another smack on the arm for it, which I deserved, but it came with a smile and a laugh. “Stop that! We all be trouble—ain’t nobody in my family boring.”

There was that word again: “family.” It seemed like I couldn’t move without running into the idea or some member of someone’s family. At least I liked Phoebe’s—couldn’t say as much for my own or Quinton’s, though I’d met only one member of his. I wished I could see the web Carlos had shown me last night, but even without the visual, I was reasonably certain that a line of affection bound me to Phoebe and her clan of laughing, loving lunatics.

I felt the warmth of a blush on my cheeks. “It’s a very nice family to be allowed into.”

“Oh, girl, you don’t get permission to be family; you just are. Oh! That reminds me,” she said, bending down to pick up a pile of books from the floor beside her chair. “Talking of family, I found this book with a photo of Princess Angeline—Chief Sealth’s daughter.” This time, I noticed, she used his tribal name, not the Americanized version.

Phoebe settled the pile of books on her lap and sorted through it until she found a slim brown paperback. She opened it with care, not bending it at the spine or the covers, and held it out to me. “There she is! Some local photographer—Edward Curtis—paid her a dollar to let him take that picture and he wrote a book about the Indians and got rich selling the photo to newspapers and magazines. She was an old lady then.”

I took the book and studied the photo of a very old native woman that was dated 1907. Her strong, square face was folded and creased with wrinkles and had sagged at the brow and jaw, pulling the corners of her wide mouth down and nearly closing her dark eyes. She seemed to be dreaming something sad. Tired, but undaunted, she had sat erect and still while the photographer had done his slow work. Thick gray hair peeped from beneath the bandanna she’d tied over it and the arched top of a well-worn cane pressed to her chest just above the bottom of the picture. “Kikisebloo” was the name the caption gave her.

“I haven’t seen her,” I said and wished I had. I wondered what she would have said about Seattle now.

“She used to live by where the market Hill Climb is now,” Phoebe said. She turned aside to dig out another book and I flipped idly through the one in my hand until a face seemed to jump off the page to glare at me. A handsome, if hard, face with a crown of dark hair and a slightly hooked nose. It was the woman I’d seen in the market office and again in Kells, where her face had melted away to show a skull that wasn’t hers. I bent the book open to get a better look at the photo and try to read the caption.

“Hey, be kind to the books!” Phoebe said, stopping in midsearch.

“This woman . . . I saw her ghost at Pike Place Market. She seems . . . very unpleasant.”

Phoebe raised her eyebrows at me and blinked. “Not surprising. That’s Linda Hazzard. That doctor that I told you starved all those people to death. See, it says there she had an office in the hotel at the market.” She pointed to a bit of text on the page. “Says back then it was called the Overlook. Now it’s the LaSalle, right in the main arcade corner. It’s all low-income housing these days and offices for the Market Foundation and that.”

“Yes,” I said, nodding absently and trying to fit the terrifying spirit of Linda Burfield Hazzard into the puzzle of this case. She’d starved people—calling it therapeutic fasting, but the difference was semantic. How many people? The book said it was unknown, but guessed at forty or more. But I’d seen more than forty ghosts, hadn’t I . . . ?

Phoebe interrupted my thoughts, holding up the book she’d been looking for. It was a large-format hardcover full of photos and she flipped it to a particular page and pushed it toward me. “See, this was Princess Angeline’s shack.”

Reluctantly, I closed the first book and put it on the coffee table, smoothing it down to undo any damage I might have caused. I accepted the new book and looked dutifully at the photo. I felt electrified and I sat up very straight.

Phoebe gave me a curious stare. “What?”

“I’ve seen this before.”

“The photo? A lot of people use it in books about Pike Place Market and old Seattle.”

“No. The place.” The picture showed a small white shack near the bottom of a long bluff covered in pines. A steep slope of trees ran from the stony beach below toward another rickety-looking building that sprawled along the top of the bluff. “I drew this place this afternoon—not the buildings, just the area.” It was the same scene my hand had sketched on the tablecloth. It was also the same place I’d seen in so many of Julianne Goss’s paintings. The long bluff of mist-shrouded fir and cedar over the curving, stone-strewn shore.

Phoebe frowned. “Why would you be drawing that if you didn’t know what it was?”

“It’s a strange, disturbing little story.”

“Then you’d better tell me.”

I told her a little bit about the case and the patients I’d seen. Then I told her about the incident in the Chinese deli, about my fainting but not being quite unaware, about the drawing and the dermographia. I didn’t talk about the sense of being displaced from my own body—that was a little too much for me at the moment and I suspected too much for her as well. She stared at me in silence and I thought maybe this was the limit at last. That this time I would not be believed, forgiven, or invited back to dinner.

Finally she asked, “You got that writing all over you?”

“Not all over . . .”

“Well, then, where?” She tugged on my shirtsleeve. “Show me.”

I found myself squirming and feeling uncomfortable, batting at her hands rather than just pushing her away. “I’m not taking off my shirt in your shop. Stop it. I have pictures.”

Phoebe sat back and goggled at me. “You got what?”

“I took photos with my phone. They aren’t very good shots, but the marks are fading quickly this time, so it’s a good thing I took the pictures when I did.”

“What do you mean, they’re fading quickly this time?”

“It happened before but it was just a short message—on my arms. This time it’s all over my upper body and I can’t read it—it’s on my back, too.” I pulled the phone out of my bag and poked around until I got to the photo gallery. I handed it to her. “There. Take a look and if you can tell me anything it says, I’ll be thrilled. I can’t make much out of it.”

I’m not the most modest person in the world—after years spent in dance troupes, backstage in cramped conditions with dozens of other dancers, I’d shed any shyness about people seeing my naked body—but handing over those pictures to Phoebe felt strangely intimate and I found myself holding my breath, waiting for what she would say. She flicked through them, going back and forth, enlarging some, skipping past others with a snort of dismissal. . . .

She looked up and said, “You are a terrible photographer.”

I laughed in relief. “You try and take a decent picture of your own back.”

“I can’t hardly read any of this. And what’s this . . . like a picture here?” she said, pointing at a photo that showed part of my back below my left shoulder blade. The looping text had run up into an arc, like part of a large circle that had been cut off by the angle and the curve of my body under my arm. The circle appeared to be segmented like a pie by more lines of text.

I took the phone and enlarged the section of the photo to peer at the words. “‘ . . . Great Wheel where tribute comes to make a meal for . . .’ I can’t make out the rest. Then the lines say ‘Limos comes within . . . the mistress of death . . . hunger calls to hunger.’ Terrible grammar, but I can’t say it makes much sense. . . .”

“It does look a little like the Great Wheel, though,” Phoebe said.

“What does?”

She put out a finger and traced the shape the trail of words had taken. “This. It’s a Ferris wheel, with the spokes here, and the loops in the words make the—what do you call ’ems—the gondolas for people to ride in here.”

As she touched the image, I could almost imagine her touch on my skin and I shuddered. I put the phone down on the table between us.

“Harper? You all right? You look like a goose walked on your grave.”

“No, but . . . I’m starting to get a picture in my mind of this whole case and I don’t like it at all. I see these ghosts . . . and among them is Linda Hazzard, but she’s not quite like the rest—there’s something more going on with her and she seems to be more autonomous than the others. This writing talks about hunger calling to hunger. It says something about the Great Wheel and even makes the shape of it on my skin. . . . It’s all of a piece, but . . . too much of it’s still missing. Mistress of death . . . that’s got to be Hazzard, right?”

“I suppose. . . .”

I was thinking out loud, my brain just too frantic to contain my thoughts in silence. “How does all of this connect to the patients? They all have a connection to the tunnel project, to accidents associated with construction. . . . Wait,” I said, snatching my cell phone from the table.

Phoebe glared at me—she disapproves of cell phone use in her store—but she humored me as I called Lily Goss.

When my client answered I identified myself and asked, “Did Julianne’s job put her in contact with dirt from the tunnel project?”

“What? Dirt from the tunnel . . . ? I think so. The firm was designing a hotel that’s planned for one of the reopened lots under the current viaduct. She was on the team and they went down to the site to do some planning work. Julie went to photograph the area as a reference for the models. That was earlier on the day she was bitten by the mosquito—or maybe she was actually bitten then. . . . The site is down near the water and the tunnel site, so I guess it could have happened that way. Why?”

“I just had a feeling there was a stronger connection to the other patients. They all had contact with dirt from the tunnel project.”

“Is it a pathogen, then? Some disease . . . ?” Goss asked, excited for a possible solution that was so very ordinary.

“I don’t think so—the doctors would have found a virus or something like that. But this gives me more information to attack the problem with. How is Julianne doing?”

“Badly. She doesn’t seem to rest at all. If she’s not painting the same things over and over, she’s shouting or crying. It’s so awful. I—I had to get out of the house for a while. I’m just on my way back from church. I had to pray for her and I talked to Father Nybeck, but . . . he still can’t offer any more help. She just doesn’t get better and I’m . . . losing hope. When is this going to end? Can you send these horrible spirits away from her? Have you figured out how?”

“Not yet, but I think I’m close.” I hoped I was, though I really didn’t know what the animus of the possessions was. I felt like the answer wasn’t far away, but it was still only a dim and shapeless idea. I had to put the pieces together soon or Julianne and the others might never wake up, their living souls fading away while they were pushed aside. “I will have it very soon, though.”

I could hear her breathing raggedly, as if she were close to tears. Finally she managed to speak again. “I’ll be waiting to hear from you.” She disconnected abruptly and I was sure she’d lost her battle not to cry. I felt terrible for lying, but I couldn’t let her give up—I would find the solution in time because I simply had no choice.

Phoebe reached for the phone as I finished, and I handed it over, feeling grim, but at least I now knew the link. I just had to connect it to a driving force. I scowled a moment in thought.

Phoebe poked the phone until she found the photos and frowned expectantly at me when I looked up again.

I tried to explain as my mind tumbled it around. “All three had accidents, all three came into physical contact with dirt from the tunnel on the day they were injured and went into a coma. They’re all haunted by these ghosts . . . these strangely obsessive ghosts who try to say something we don’t seem to be getting. The patients—or rather, the ghosts speaking through the patients—write strange things about tribute and hunger and food. . . . Everyone connected to the patients and the ghosts is thin, too thin, and too hungry—even me. The ghosts come from the market and they are connected to Hazzard, who believed in extreme fasting. They keep showing me the market like it used to be—before the city grew up all around it—when the shore was right below the hills and bluffs, not buried under the seawall and waterfront. . . . I keep finding the phrase ‘beach to bluffs and back.’ That’s the tunnel route—from the edge of the original strand in the south end of downtown up into the bluff where the market is. And something about the Wheel . . . but there wasn’t any Ferris wheel when Hazzard was around. And I don’t see what the Great Wheel can have to do with three bedridden patients who can’t even wake up. Cannie Trimble said something about a wheel—she must have meant the Great Wheel—and I didn’t get it. I still don’t. I just don’t understand how the Wheel is connected to the ghosts! And now to Hazzard . . .” I slapped my palm against my head as if I could jar the puzzle pieces together and make out the whole picture, but it wasn’t coming.

Phoebe put the phone down and grabbed my wrist on the fourth smack, arresting my hand. “Stop that! It’s not going to solve the problem for you. You got to think, not beat yourself up. You take these books and you go home to that man of yours and you think it out with him. He’s a smart one. He’ll help you figure it.”

I met her earnest gaze, biting my lip. “Phoebe, you believe me, don’t you?”

She scoffed. “Girl, what kind of lackwit you think I am? Of course I believe you. I can see it right here,” she added, tapping my phone as it lay on the table. “I could think you were crazy, but I know whatever crazy you are, it’s the good kind, not the psycho, lying kind. Now you go home before you knock your brains loose beating on your head like that.”

“I—” I started, but she cut me off, rising to her feet with the books bundled in her arms.

“No. No excuses, no thank-yous, no rattling on. You got work to do and you are going to go do it. Now,” she added, nudging my nearest foot with her own, “go on. What’ve I got to do, throw you out? Go on. You’re going to do it anyhow, might as well get on with it.” She prodded me to the door like a mother hen and loaded the books into a bag, which she shoved into my arms. “Now, out you go, Harper. And you come back for dinner next month. Poppy’s got to fatten you up for that man of yours.”

She winked at me and nearly pushed me out the door.