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No Such Thing As Ghosts
She seemed to be attending a lot of funerals lately.
Too many.
The evening was still as the very Earth seemed to hold its breath out of respect for the dead. The funeral had been over for the better part of an hour, but Gracey lingered behind, moving slowly down the graveyard’s rows, walking a labyrinth whose passages only she could see. It was a lonely ritual born of confusion, deep grief, and the question that had gnawed at the back of her mind since she’d heard the disquieting news: Where was Audra Fairgood?
The girl had been missing ever since the night Aleister had been discovered dead in his bedroom. According to local gossip Gracey had been unable to avoid, Audra and her mother had had an argument and Audra had left the house in a fury. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, apparently. Friends of the family indicated that Audra was prone to spending the night with friends when she and her mother fought, but she’d never been gone more than an evening.
Audra Fairgood had now been missing for a week.
Gracey’s flesh pimpled over as she thought of the missing girl and the mother who had lost her husband. She’d watched Shira Fairgood surreptitiously from the corner of her eye — she supposed they all had. She’d seen the way the woman sat, expressionless, red, unblinking eyes unseeing, vacant. She’d watched Nora Goldman hold her daughter’s hand, the solid rock around which everything else crumbled. There they sat in the middle of the storm, a missing daughter and a dead husband. People would talk. In a town this size, they always did.
Gracey shivered despite the heat. So much anguish. So much guilt. So many unanswered questions.
Shaking herself out of her morbid thoughts, Gracey looked up to see Marco Flores skipping toward her at a fast clip, hand raised in the air. He was still wearing the dress shirt and trousers he’d worn to the funeral, but he’d shed the heavy jacket and removed his sock and shoes. His clip-on tie dangled from a pocket. As he came closer, Gracey could see he was clutching a large bottle of bubbles in one hand. In the other he held a bright yellow bubble wand high in the air, giggling as the ephemeral spheres blew daintily into existence and floated slowly skyward.
“What are you doing out here, Marco?” Gracey asked with a smile. Something about the boy always lightened her mood. She was glad to see him. Her mood needed lightening.
“Blowing bubbles,” he said. “What are you doing out here, Gracey?”
It was a fair question. She’d been walking the cemetery grounds for long enough now that her legs, unused to exercise, had begun to tingle uncomfortably. But she’d come to no conclusions, and no answers had deigned to descend upon her. “Just thinking,” she admitted, arms wrapped tightly over her chest. “It’s quiet here. I needed to be alone.” She hadn’t realized the truth of this statement until she’d made it.
“Want me to leave you alone?”
Gracey admired the boy’s respect for her feelings and found his presence comforting. “No. I like having you around,” she said, smiling.
Marco nodded, an innocent wisdom flickering behind his bright, brown eyes. “I try to be alone sometimes. But sometimes it doesn’t always work.” He looked over his shoulder, frowned.
“Does your mom know you’re here?”
Marco shook his head. “No, but she doesn’t care. I’m allowed to come to the cemetery whenever I want.”
Gracey lifted her eyebrows in surprise. “Do you come here often?”
Marco donned a sheepish expression, looked briefly off to the side, avoiding Gracey’s eyes. “Well…not so much anymore,” he said. “But I do sometimes. When it’s not scary.”
The boy’s purity and candor brought a small smile to Gracey’s lips. “How’s your mom? She doing okay?”
Marco shrugged. “She’s sad a lot,” he admitted. “She’s scared something bad’s gonna happen. A lot of people have died. She’s at home right now making salsa and crying.”
Marco lifted the bubble wand to his lips and blew slowly, making a large, heavy bubble that wobbled in the air and began to fall instead of rise. Marco bent his knees and positioned himself beneath the bubble, poked out his tongue until the bubble landed on it, sat a moment, and popped. Marco grinned at Gracey, awaiting her approval.
“Yech,” she said, making a face. “You know bubbles are made out of soap,” she said. “You just ate soap.”
The boy shrugged, dipping the wand once again into the bubble fluid. “It doesn’t taste too bad. Didn’t you ever get your mouth washed out with soap when you were little?”
“Of course not. I never use foul language,” she answered with a prim smile.
But Marco wasn’t persuaded. “That’s a lie. I heard you say shit before,” he said.
“Marco!”
“What! I did!”
Gracey chuckled, shaking her head. “That may be true, Marco, but that doesn’t mean you should say it.”
“I’m allowed to say bad words,” Marco said.
Gracey doubted very much that this was true, but decided not to pursue the matter.
As she began walking again, Marco kept pace beside her, blowing his bubbles and shuffling his bare feet in the dirt. Occasionally he would stop and cock his head to the side as if listening and then would resume his childish ambling. A few times he muttered something under his breath, but when Gracey asked him to repeat what he’d said, he ignored her. Sometimes he would sing a few notes of a song Gracey didn’t know, and sometimes he would laugh. It was unnerving, perhaps, but he was a child, and she supposed children did those things. She wished she knew for certain, but she’d had so little occasion to be with children.
She pushed that thought out of her mind.
But pondering the ways of children brought Gracey’s attention full circle, and once again Audra Fairgood was at the forefront of her brain. Wherever Audra was, was she safe? Was she alone? Was she scared or suffering? Had she gone away of her own accord or had she been taken? This last thought Gracey could scarcely bear — Audra was no more than thirteen, a mere slip of a girl, and though Gracey didn’t know her well, her heart broke each and every time the watery memory of Audra’s face swam before Gracey’s mind’s eye.
She couldn’t imagine the horror Shira Fairgood was living with.
“Where’s your brother, Marco?” Gracey asked. They had fully circumambulated the cemetery, and were once again on its northernmost edge, the oldest part of the cemetery. It was also the most beautiful; most of the graves were still tended with real flowers left by family members and loved ones, not the gaudy, plastic flowers the cemetery attendants left on the newer graves. Holes in the the crumbling stone walls served as tiny shrines within which pieces of hard candy and colored candles whose glass containers bore the faces of saints were placed. When Tiny had first moved to Love & War she’d spent many hours amid the old graves with paper and wax, taking rubbings of the headstones. The rubbings were framed and hanging in the hallways in Gracey’s home.
“I don’t know,” Marco said, stopping to scratch his foot. “I guess he went home with Mother. He’s afraid of the graveyard.”
“Aren’t you afraid of the graveyard?”
It was a moment before Marco answered. “Yes and no,” he said. “I’m not scared of it during the day. But at night…” His voice trailed off, and Gracey thought she saw a small shiver. “But Alma says I got nothing to be afraid of. She says ghosts are not real.”
“Who’s Alma?”
Marco shrugged, indicating the question’s small importance. “Just my friend,” he said.
Gracey, who, given her unusual circumstances and intimate awareness of the occult, had reason to believe in ghosts, also believed in white lies, especially where children and their innocence were concerned. “Well, Alma’s right,” she said. “There are no such things as ghosts, and graveyards are nothing to be afraid of. Still, I do think it’s a place where you should be respectful. Do you understand that?”
Marco was watching Gracey with unblinking eyes. “Yes. Is bare feet not respectful?”
Gracey smiled. “I think bare feet are okay.”
“And bubbles?”
Gracey’s smiled widened and she put her hand on Marco’s head, mussing his hair. “I think bubbles are probably okay, too. After all, bubbles are very beautiful.”
Smiling, Marco retrieved the wand from the plastic container and blew another stream of bubbles. They floated slowly on the still air, catching unseen currents and drifting away toward a darkening sky.
Gracey watched the bubbles float away, noting the reflections they carried across the graveyard. Here they hovered over Buddy Heffman’s grave, there over the graves of Carmen and David Olaya. And now they lingered over the fresh grave of Aleister Fairgood.
Gracey’s heart froze in her chest.
Mentally, she conjured up all the people who had died recently. Rubio Bautista. Buddy Heffman. Carmen and David Olaya. Aleister Fairgood. They did all have something in common. Fear gripped her and pushed her forward, quickening her feet as she moved through the northern end of the cemetery, noting the family names on the headstones. They were all there: Heffman. Bautista. Olaya. Fairgood. The northern part of the cemetery had seen five new graves in a short amount of time.
The south end of the graveyard — the newer end — had seen none.
Gracey closed her eyes against the realization. The founding families. Only members of the founding families of Love & War had died.
Murdered, Gracey thought suddenly. These people were murdered.
Gracey’s throat went dry and her breathing became ragged. She didn’t want to believe it. Yes, Buddy Heffman’s death was questionable at best, and Aleister Fairgood had certainly been a victim of an attack. But Rubio Bautista’s death had been ruled a suicide, and Carmen and David Olaya had died in a car accident.
The logic was sound, the evidence incontrovertible. And yet Gracey knew with steely certainty that penetrated every fiber of her being that all five citizens of Love & War had been murdered.
The realization made her dizzy with fear.
Steadying herself, Gracey knelt in front of Marco, placed her hands on his arms, caught his gaze. “Marco,” she said, her voice faltering only just, “I want you to go home now. Go on home and hug your mom. I bet she misses you. You can come over tomorrow and have pie,” she amended, just in case the boy wondered if he’d done something wrong.
At the mention of pie, Marco’s eyes lit up and he nodded a hurried agreement before running off down the street toward his home. Gracey stood alone in the graveyard amongst the tombstones, a numbing cold boring into her bones even as beads of sweat dotted her brow.
It was only a moment before Gracey realized that Audra Fairgood was the last birth member of the Fairgood clan, one of the founding families of Love & War.
Her vision was blurred by tears as she ran for home.
June 13th, 2010
I made myself wait til lunch-time to read this, because it is such a special treat.
It was definitely worth all of the waiting. I hope life lets you update a little more often though. ;oP