Bijou Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue: April 1985

  Only a woman gets that mad

  Old Flame

  “How I arrived there, it was hard to tell”

  A Library of Secrets

  Premature Burial

  Bijou Xtra

  The Hidden Diary

  Summation of a Summoning

  Wind and a Wake

  The Pink Poodle

  Atomic Illusionist

  Harpies

  My Hour in Heaven

  A Delphine

  FOD

  A Ghost in Flames

  Unfinished Business, a Warning

  A Recipe

  My own private Hell

  Ghosts United

  A Conversation with the Past

  A Trick of Time

  Hell’s Laboratory

  Purgatorio

  Cross Words

  Piedmont Portal

  Shortcut to Hell

  Hollis’s Bijou

  Soul-sucker

  Freddie’s Formula

  The Last Bijou

  Book View Café

  Copyright © 2012 by Jill Zeller

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-1-61138-345-4

  Cover art by http://depositphotos.com

  20131201PGN

  April 1985

  Justin’s mother killed him, so townspeople believed, convinced by the papers and the testimony of beautiful, tearful Mae Worthington. Mae, from a respected family, reliable babysitter, model student, precocious poet, could never, ever have harmed a child in her care.

  Determining the four-month-old died from suffocation, the county coroner submitted his report. The mother denied it, accused the babysitter of neglect, even outright murder. The town turned against the baby’s mother. The idea of accusing Mae Worthington of the murder of a child! She was only 13! Justin’s mother had a drug history. No one liked her or her husband. They kept to themselves, didn’t mingle with the neighbors. Drove the wrong color car.

  The woman and her husband moved away. Later, they heard, she died in a car accident. The townspeople nodded to each other, muttered sagely: Ah, she was guilty after all. She turned her car into oncoming traffic. She killed herself.

  Mae Worthington grew older, won scholarships, traveled with the debating team, became homecoming queen. The only sign of how the trauma of Justin’s death affected her was her poetry. Grim, baffling, disconsolate. People who knew such things said she was the next Plath or Sexton. Her father paid for expensive psychotherapy; the therapists said: write more poetry.

  Until the baby’s death the popular Mae was always seen in the company of Dominique Cantini, an odd girl with few friends. People praised Mae’s willingness to befriend the underdog. What self-possession, what integrity! But after Justin’s death, the friendship soured. Mae courted new friends, other friends, Sawyer, Hollis and Annie Novak.

  Mae was a girl who could do nothing but succeed, a girl everyone loved to see and talk about. She swept through high school on invincible wings, blessed, touched, they said.

  Just before graduation, on a spring day when sun warmed the tawny folds of the California valley hills, when the blue sky tasted of summer heat, Mae Worthington drove her car—a graduation present from her father—onto the Santa Fe Pacific railroad tracks and waited for a train. When it came, nothing was left but crushed steel, blood, and bits of bone.

  Chapter One

  Only a woman gets that mad

  My sister’s wheelchair lay on the bottom of her swimming pool, its wheels enlarged to cartoon-size by the light and water. Leaving the cool sanctuary of her grape arbor to look at it, where the beating sun found me and forked a headache between my eyes, I said, “How did that get there?”

  Ivy’s voice, coarsened by decades of smoking, floated to me from the shade. “The ghost did it, Annie.”

  I turned and stared at her through my sunglasses. “Ivy Novak, so that part at least is true. You are being haunted.”

  The sunken wheelchair was not the most impressive manifestation I had seen since I arrived that morning at Ivy’s house, but it helped to focus this minor evidence of the ghost’s fury. Stiff and bleary from having driven 800 miles straight from cool Seattle to scorching Quantum City, a place so lacking personality it masked perfectly what really went on here, I could not at first understand what I was seeing as I turned the corner onto Juniper Street and cruised down the block toward my former home.

  I pressed a finger to the place between my eyes where the fork resided. “Do you think the ghost had something to do with the accident as well?”

  Ivy Novak Woolf Easton Olds, in truth my half-sister, held onto the patio table and rubbed her towel through her hair. She was five years older than my thirty-four, a fact I disliked recalling—and although we shared the same father we had vastly different mothers. Frederick Victor Novak not only traded in the old model for the new, he bought a different make every time.

  Ivy picked up her cigarettes, then seemed to remember who I was, her sister Annie Novak, no-nonsense ICU nurse, and fearing my lecture, perhaps, put them down. “She’s a very nasty ghost. Did you see the wall?”

  I had. Ivy walked toward the house, and I could see she was unsteady, holding onto the back of the chairs as she went, and pointed. In a place between two sets of sliding glass doors I could see the round hole the size of a dinner plate, punched through the stucco.

  I glanced through the breezeway into the street. The police were still there, one of them parked on the lawn. They had blocked off the street from the east end—luckily Zoe and I had entered from the west, but even then had to park three houses away. The aid car was taking the corpse away as we followed the sidewalk toward the house, but his mangled motorcycle still lay on Ivy’s brown lawn, the ash tree he struck scarred by a blazing gash of exposed heartwood.

  I hadn’t seen Hollis in years. I didn’t know why his death should depress me so, but when Ivy told me who had died on her lawn, I felt like I had been punched in the stomach

  I said to Ivy, trying to focus on the problem at hand, “Why would she push your wheelchair into the water?” Easier to ask a question about simple mischief, not about why the ghost caused the death of a friend.

  Ivy shrugged. She pulled the towel over her shoulders. “I don’t need it any more. Maybe she was trying to prove something.”

  And what are you trying to prove? I sank into an old s-style patio chair that swung back when you sat on it, recognized from our childhood. “How do you know this ghost is female, if she won’t come when you summon her?”

  Ivy turned to look at me. She wore a smirk I remembered from the first day she came to live with our family. One corner of her mouth up, the other down, finely plucked eyebrows one up, one down. It made me feel like I was the gawky and impressionable ten-year-old again, and she the imperious and contemptuous fifteen.

  She said, “Only a woman can be that furious about something.”

  I pressed my fingers to my temples. Zoe came to the doorway, balancing a heavy pot. “Mom, Pepper is thirsty.”

  The sight of my nine-year-old daughter gripping a cooking pot brimming with water, eased my headache. Her chocolate brown eyes glanced shyly at Ivy, then widened with delight at the sight of the swimming pool.

  “Bring her out here, darling, and say hello to Aunt Ivy.”

  “Did you bring Pepper? How interesting.” Ivy stayed near the hole in the wall. I remembered her fear of dogs.

  A bullmastiff weighing in at 130 pounds, Pepper looked hazardous but was all marshmallow. She bounded past Zoe, nearly toppling her over with her pot of water, and made straight for Ivy to say hello.

  I saw Ivy stiffen. She tepidly touched Pepper’s forehead, and Pepper responded with a wet lick before turning
and plunging her head into Zoe’s pot of water. Rubbing her hand on her towel, Ivy walked around the big dog with slow, careful steps and came to sit beside me.

  “She really likes you.” I put my arm around Zoe; feeling her slender body next to mine helped calm my growing unease, helped me push away having to think about Hollis. “So I can see you don’t need the wheelchair right now. And the truth is I’m relieved to see you doing so well. But why the email saying you had an exacerbation of your M.S.? Why not just say you had a ghost issue?” I was afraid I couldn’t keep the edge out of my voice.

  Ivy’s clear turquoise eyes were planted on Zoe. She reached out a bony-thin arm and touched Zoe’s forehead. “What beautiful skin. You look more like your dad than your mom.”

  “Hi, Aunt Ivy,” Zoe said, and I was proud as she leaned in and kissed Ivy’s cheek. But I knew Zoe didn’t like the comment about her father.

  Looking upward at a bunch of maroon grapes hanging above her head, Ivy ran a hand through hair dyed the same shade. “Frankly I don’t understand why you are upset. You admitted in your last email you needed to get away.”

  She was right about that. I had to get out of Seattle for a while and Ivy needing help for a flare of multiple sclerosis was my duty, so I had driven straight through to California. But I was upset not so much with her as with myself for not seeing through her prevarication. Thus was the pattern of our youth together. I was always the one caught because of Ivy’s lies.

  I couldn’t stay mad at her about lying about her relapse, or about anything, for long. But I’d had no idea things were so serious. A chill crept up my back, and I would have welcomed a relief from the Quantum City heat, but it was the wrong kind of chill.

  Picking up her cigarettes, Ivy said, “I’m sorry to hear about Jonah.”

  Wincing, I glanced at Zoe, but she was looking over at the swimming pool. I could see her curiosity about the wheelchair clear on her face, and she carefully ignored what Ivy had just said.

  “Thanks,” I replied. “It was kind of tough for us.”

  Ivy tapped out a cigarette. I said nothing about that, but just looked at her. Not lighting it, she played with it, moving it through her fingers like a mobster with a quarter. “Surprised me it hit you so hard. I thought you hated him.”

  “Mom, can I go look at the pool?” Before I finished nodding, Zoe was halfway across the patio. I didn’t stop her. Jonah had insisted she have swimming lessons and she loved the water.

  I said, “I loved him, Ivy. You can be angry as hell at someone and still love them.”

  “But you were divorced two years ago. He was out of your life. I don’t see how—”

  I pressed my hand onto the table top. “Ivy, drop it, please. He was Zoe’s dad. She loved her dad, OK?”

  She gave me a look of pure innocence, oh, I forgot. But she hadn’t forgotten. She wanted me to know how pleased she was that I, the perfect sister who could do no wrong, had failed at marriage like herself. She had been married three times.

  The progeny of her first marriage appeared in the sliding glass doorway. At least I thought it was Bruce, my nephew. The young man who walked out onto the patio in a pair of baggy navy swim trunks with white stripes down the sides, had Bruce’s cragged, stylish face, dimple pressed into his chin, his mother’s startling blue topaz eyes, but the corpus below his handsome face had doubled in mass. The hulk who came to stand beside his mother had grown, as I compared it to a photo I had of him when he was fourteen, not only three inches in height, but gained at least seventy pounds.

  I got up and gave him a hug he did not return. He would be seventeen now. He had been a lifeguard at the public pool the last three summers. I wondered if he still did that. He had been a champion swimmer, once.

  Bruce said, “The police are leaving. Wow, wait til I tell the guys what happened!” Pulling a cell phone from his pocket, he gave it serious attention. “Oh. Hi, Aunt Annie.”

  As if to emphasize something, Ivy said, “Zoe’s such a skinny thing. Ever give her enough to eat? You both look like refugees from Dr. Atkins hell.”

  I glanced over at my daughter. She had Jonah’s razor-straight wheat-toast hair. In the sun, her hair gleamed and the beaded anklet she wore twinkled. My heart swelled with love just looking at her as she kicked off her thongs and sat beside the pool. All four of us, me, Zoe, Bruce and Ivy, epitomized eating disorders of some kind.

  I said, “Bruce, you look well.”

  Without taking his eyes off the cell, he shrugged and a smile hooked onto one side of his mouth. Did he really think I meant it? He looked terrible. At least he was tan.

  “Bruce has been on a diet. He’s lost fifteen pounds.” Ivy sipped her tea. She did not look pleased.

  “Good job.” I wondered, as Bruce moved heavily away from us and toward his cousin sitting beside the pool, what had gone wrong in his life to cause this eruption of fat?

  “He has a new girl friend,” Ivy said, too casually I thought. “He wants to take her to the homecoming dance in October. So he needs to lose some weight.”

  “But what happened? How did he get so—big?” I whispered, and Ivy scowled at me and waved her hand.

  “It’s not so bad, just a few pounds. He’ll lose it again. You know how teenagers are.”

  Nodding, I squinted at my sister, my throat so cold it felt like it was full of all the frozen cubes in Ivy’s iced tea. The question had to be asked. “So what happened out there? How did Hollis die?”

  Zoe’s voice echoed behind me. “Hey Mom, how did Aunt Ivy’s wheelchair get in the swimming pool?”

  “The ghost did it. Last night.” Bruce had a fine, deep voice, even gentle. He had always liked Zoe. “None of us saw it, but heard the splash, huh Mom? Sounded like a body falling from the sky.”

  “Like someone out of an airplane, landing in the pool. Cool!” Zoe loved reading about disasters. I saw Bruce nodding at her, grinning. They seemed to be getting along just fine.

  Ivy picked up her cigarette. It was bent and leaking tobacco. She put it in her mouth but didn’t light it. “Honestly, Annie, I don’t know. I was standing in the driveway, looking for your car. I expected you earlier.”

  The day burned too brightly. Ivy’s face was too innocent. Everything was overexposed, the pool, the lawn, the wooden fence, the arbor, leaves silver-tinted as if they were coated with liquid sky. I knew something was terribly wrong, but I kept my thoughts to myself, wished I could have some of the vodka I had seen in Ivy’s freezer when she went looking for ice cubes.

  But I had sworn off alcohol, tobacco, too. Long ago. But now, the taste of it would be like swallowing gold.

  “Was he coming to see you?” My voice cracked.

  Shrugging, Ivy reached for her tea. Her hand trembled. Disease or dis-ease? “I heard him coming down the street on that big Harley. He drove all over town on that thing, trying to pick up girls, but Annie, he was bald and fat and looked like a baby stuffed in leather and blown up to adult size.” She glanced toward the pool where Bruce and Zoe dangled their feet in the water, laughing and talking. He was showing her something on the phone. I hoped it wasn’t a dirty picture. “I thought he was going to slow down. I heard the motor screaming and I thought I heard him shouting. There was this big car coming, an old thing, bright blue, all restored and shiny. He headed straight for it. The next second the bike was airborne, headed straight into the tree.” Ivy raised her shoulders as if she were cold. But she couldn’t be as cold as I felt just now, like I had sunk to the bottom of a frozen lake. “The driver of that vintage car never stopped, kept going. I told the police about that.”

  Closing her eyes, Ivy shook her head. “I never heard so much noise. I thought the bike was going to hit me, but it stopped on the grass. I tried to revive him, but I could see he was dead.” She made a motion with her hands, as if she were snapping a twig in half. “I tried. Bruce called 911. I hope there wasn’t any blood on the grass for Zoe to see.”

  Shaking my head, I too was relieved that Holl
is was covered up and taken away before we got here. I remembered his big bellowing laugh, his ability to drink more beer than anyone in our class, and how he secretly cried in movies. I lost track of everyone when I left town just before graduation. Except Ivy. There was no one else I wanted to see. I knew I should be sad about Hollis, but I was only afraid. I wanted to hug my daughter, take her in my arms, never, ever let her go into a world where she would see death and destruction. I had made a vow long ago, but I wondered if I could keep it. A black knowledge spread through my brain and my taut, lanky body, a perilous gift that I had tried to turn into a benefit for my patients, that would one day claim me, and my daughter too.

  I felt Ivy’s eyes on me. “Annie, I’m sorry I lied to you. But I had to get you down here. I didn’t think you would come if it was only ghost trouble.”

  “Why would you think that?” I said irritably, knowing she was right, but not liking it. “You’re family. We have to help each other. Although I still don’t get why you and Bruce can’t handle this yourselves.”

  A shade of worry fell down over Ivy’s face. It shocked me. I had never seen Ivy afraid of anything. Except our father.

  She said, “I had to get you down here because this ghost won’t come to me. I have tried to summon her, but she can resist me. That pissed me off, and also that she would have the balls to haunt a Novak, a Spirit Keeper.”

  We said in unison, the words I had not repeated for years, “Not only protect the living from the dead, but the dead from the living.”

  I felt small, deflated, as if I had shrunk to the size of one of Zoe’s Barbies. What could I possibly do about a ghost so enraged she would kill someone I knew and wait until just before I arrived in Quantum City to do it?

  Ivy scowled. “I only just now figured out who it probably is. I’m afraid if we don’t get her soon, the violence is going to get worse.”

  I knew, too, but I didn’t want to say it aloud, make her more tangible, palpable, by naming her. Instead, I said, “How long has this been going on?