Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  I shake my head. I just needed to see them with my own eyes.

  I thank her and walk back to my car again. I start driving aimlessly, because really, I have no idea where I go from here.

  I think about the airline passenger en route to Tennessee, who buried his nose in his magazine when I started to have a conversation with Virgil. Which, to him, would have sounded like a crazy lady ranting.

  I consider the time we all visited Thomas at Hartwick House—how the patients could easily see Jenna and Virgil, but the nurses and orderlies had spoken only to me.

  I remember the very first day I met Jenna, when my client Mrs. Langham bolted. What was it she’d overheard me saying to Jenna? That if she didn’t leave immediately, I was going to call the cops. But of course, Mrs. Langham couldn’t see Jenna, plain as day, in my foyer. She would have thought my words had been directed at her.

  I realize I have pulled into a familiar neighborhood. Virgil’s office building is across the street.

  I park and get out of the Bug. It’s so hot today that the asphalt is swimming beneath my feet. It’s so hot that the dandelions in the cracks of the sidewalk have collapsed.

  The air in the building smells different. Mustier, older. The pane of glass in the door is cracked, but I never noticed before. I walk up to the second floor, to Virgil’s office. It is locked, dark. Posted on the door is a sign: FOR RENT. CALL HYACINTH PROPERTIES, 603-555-2390.

  My head buzzes. It’s like the beginning of a migraine, but I think it is actually the sound of everything I know, everything I believed, being challenged.

  I’d always thought there was a great divide between a spirit and a ghost—the former had made it smoothly to the next plane of existence; the latter had something anchoring it to this world. The ghosts I had met before were stubborn. Sometimes they did not realize they were dead. They’d hear the noises of people living in “their” houses, and assume they were the ones being haunted. They had agendas and disappointments and anger. They were trapped, and so I took it upon myself to help them get free.

  But that was when I had the ability to recognize them for what they were.

  I’d always thought there was a great divide between a spirit and a ghost—I just didn’t realize how small the gap was between the dead and the living.

  From my purse, I take the ledger that Jenna had signed when she first came to my apartment. There’s her name, the adolescent cursive round as a string of bubbles. There is the address, 145 Greenleaf.

  The residential neighborhood is exactly as it was three days ago, when Virgil and I had come to talk to Jenna, only to find that she didn’t live at this address. Now I realize that it’s entirely possible she did. It’s just that the current owners wouldn’t know that.

  The same mother I spoke with before answers the doorbell. Her little boy still clings like a barnacle to her leg. “You again?” she says. “I already told you, I don’t know that girl.”

  “I know. I’m sorry to bother you again. But I’ve had some … bad news recently about her. And I’m trying to make sense of some things.” I rub my temples with my hands. “Can you just tell me when you bought your house?”

  Behind me is the soundtrack of summer: children screaming as they squeal down a Slip’n Slide next door, a dog howling behind a fence, the drone of a ride-on lawn mower. In the distance is the calliope song of the ice cream truck. This street, it’s teeming with life.

  The woman looks like she’s about to shut the door in my face, but something in my voice must stop her and make her reconsider. “Two thousand,” she says. “My husband and I weren’t married yet. The woman who lived here had D-I-E-D.” She glances down at her son. “We don’t like to talk about that sort of thing in front of him, if you know what I mean. He has an overactive imagination, and sometimes it keeps him up at night.”

  People are always afraid of things they don’t understand, so they dress them up in ways that are understandable. An overactive imagination. A fear of the dark. Maybe even mental illness.

  I crouch down so that I am face-to-face with her son. “Who do you see?” I ask.

  “A grandma,” he whispers. “And a girl.”

  “They’re not going to hurt you,” I tell him. “And they’re real, no matter what anyone says. They just want to share your house, like when other kids at school want to share your toys.”

  His mother yanks him away. “I’m calling 911,” she huffs.

  “If your son had been born with blue hair, even though there had never been blue hair in your family tree, and even though you didn’t understand how any baby could have blue hair because you’d never come across it in your life … would you still love him?”

  She starts to close the door, but I put my hand on it, pressing back to keep it open. “Would you?”

  “Of course,” she says tightly.

  “This isn’t any different,” I tell her.

  Back in my car, I pull the ledger out of my purse and flip to the last page. Very slowly, like stitches being pulled, Jenna’s entry disappears.

  As soon as I tell the desk sergeant that I’ve found human remains, I am ushered into a back room. I give the detective—a kid named Mills, who looks like he has to shave only twice a week, tops—as much information as I can. “If you look in your files, you’ll find a case from 2004 that involved a death there, back when it was an elephant sanctuary. I think this might be a second fatality.”

  He looks at me curiously. “And you know this … why?”

  If I tell him I am a psychic, I’m going to wind up in a room next to Thomas at the mental institution. Either that or he’ll slap handcuffs on me, sure I am a crackpot ready to confess to committing a homicide.

  But Jenna and Virgil had seemed completely real to me. I had believed everything they said, when they spoke to me.

  Goodness, child, isn’t that what a psychic is supposed to do?

  The voice in my head is faint but familiar. That southern drawl, the way the sentence rises and falls like music. I would know Lucinda anywhere.

  An hour later, I am escorted to the nature preserve by two officers. Escorted is a fancy word for stuffed in the back of a cop car because no one trusts you. I hike through the tall grass, off the beaten path, the way Jenna used to do. The policemen carry shovels and sifter screens. We pass the pond where we found Alice’s necklace, and after doubling back on a loop, I find the spot where the purple mushrooms have erupted beneath the oak tree.

  “Here,” I say. “This is where I found the tooth.”

  The cops have brought along a forensic expert. I don’t know what he does—soil analysis, maybe, or bones, or both—but he plucks the head off one of the mushrooms. “Laccaria amethystina,” he pronounces. “It’s an ammonia fungus. It grows on soil that has a high concentration of nitrogen.”

  Goddamn Virgil, I think. He was right. “It only grows here,” I tell the expert. “Nowhere else in the preserve.”

  “That’s consistent with a shallow grave.”

  “An elephant calf was also buried here,” I say.

  Detective Mills raises his brows. “You’re just a font of information, aren’t you?” The forensic expert directs two of the other officers, the ones who drove me here, to start digging systematically.

  They begin on the other side of the tree, across from where Jenna and Virgil and I were yesterday, heaps of dirt shaking through the sifters to catch whatever decomposed fragments they might be lucky enough to unearth. I sit in the shade of the tree, watching the pile of soil rise higher. The policemen roll up their sleeves; one has to jump into the hole to toss the dirt out.

  Detective Mills sits down beside me. “So,” he says. “Tell me again what you were doing here when you found the tooth?”

  “Having a picnic,” I lie.

  “By yourself?”

  No. “Yes.”

  “And the elephant calf? You know about that because …?”

  “I’m an old friend of the family,” I say. “It’s why I also kno