What the Dead Can Do, page 29
“What are the police still doing here?” Emily asked. She could hear them still talking with her father downstairs. “They should be out looking for Ethan. We all should.”
Lucinda’s eyes were seeking permission from Emily to sit on the bed.
Maybe Emily had given her the OK, but she hadn’t felt her face move.
The old woman looked at the dog, and her prior disgust with him and his failure to prevent the assault and abduction returned. Her mouth curled at one side of her lips, then went higher, as if she was trying to fashion something more like a smile, but you can’t grin away that kind of loathing.
“It’s not Pepper’s fault, Lucinda.”
The old woman sighed. With her new proximity, every wrinkle she already owned was deeper. Her sort-of-grandmother’s face was typically warm and soft looking given its age. It’d always been a peaceful place to gaze, but she looked like she was wearing the witch masks pop-up Halloween shops sold for under twenty dollars now. Her edges were hard, and the color left on her face was only variations of gray and blue.
“Of course not,” Lucinda said. “No one is blaming Pepper.”
Her tone was always so phony. The only adult who still talked to Emily like she was three instead of almost thirteen.
“But it’s not your fault either,” Lucinda added. “It’s no one’s fault, and I was wrong to come into the house screaming otherwise. That wasn’t very helpful of ol’ Grandma, was it?”
“You’re wrong, though. It was my fault,” Emily said.
“I know you feel that way. But my grandson’s well-being wasn’t ever your responsibility.”
Emily didn’t like the way the woman had said the words “my grandson.” Maybe Lucinda had spit it out nasty inadvertently. A Freudian slip made by her subconscious to help stop her from lashing out at Emily, her father, or even the dog.
An hour ago, Emily thought her brother’s grandmother would have killed the whole family if that was what it took to bring Ethan home. She thought about asking Lucinda if she knew anybody who might want to kidnap Ethan, but she never got the chance.
Then Lucinda said, “Your father and I think it’d be best if you stayed with me for a while.” She stood and looked around the room as if she was already trying to decide what she’d allow Emily to pack for however much time “a while” meant.
“Do you usually come to my place with a suitcase? Do you have more than one? I can’t remember. I’m sure we’ll come back here tomorrow, but let’s grab what we can now and—”
Lucinda’s search for items to pack or suitcases to pack them in went cold.
Ethan’s toys were on his side of the room. Twenty-two stuffed animals, other than the elephant which was probably still in the family car, were posed in a group just as Emily had left them for Ethan when she’d made his bed. When the old woman saw the stuffies, it was like she’d thrown a rod. There was no more go in her, and that didn’t seem fair to Emily. She was angry, too! This was no time to panic, freeze, or run away. She had no plan of her own to get Ethan back, but what the old woman was suggesting felt like everyone was giving up completely. Now, with Lucinda sad and possibly rebroken, Emily had been robbed of the opportunity to campaign for any other option besides leaving with her sort-of-grandmother to hide out and hope for the best. She felt like fighting but knew that doing anything other than the right thing wouldn’t help the situation. The right thing to do was ask Lucinda if she was alright.
As it turned out, Emily’s phone buzzed, and she didn’t need to say anything to bring Lucinda back from the brink. She put a hand over it, trying to muffle the sound, but the old woman turned around as the phone vibrated a second time and stepped toward Emily like she’d every right to grab it without asking.
“The police should have your phone, sweetie.”
“I doubt Ethan’s kidnapper is reaching out to me—”
“Give me the phone,” Lucinda demanded. She looked even older, if that was possible.
Emily shifted her butt to sit on the phone. She understood why Lucinda wanted it. The possibilities the adults had discussed after she’d gone upstairs had been loud enough to hear.
The prevailing theory was Ethan’s kidnapper was someone who knew him. A family member or a friend. The other premise Emily had overheard, though it seemed a distant second, was that her brother had been kidnapped for ransom. The officer who spoke most had also wondered aloud if all the interviews, TV appearances, and the like had made her family a bundle and, therefore, a target. It hadn’t helped when Dad told them Nicole had once wanted to get rich off the spectacle, but then again, that was Dad, wasn’t it? Sharing too much was his tell. He was anxious, it happened, even to him. To his credit, he had worked quickly to assure the police the family had made very little from all the PR, but the detective told him that hardly mattered. The kidnapper only needed to think they were rich.
“Fork it over,” Lucinda said, grabbing Emily by the wrist.
The firmness of the old woman’s grip was impressive, and Emily shifted her weight to one buttock, hoping it’d be enough to stop Lucinda from grabbing the phone. Her sort-of-grandma was stronger than she looked, though, and before Emily could settle on a more strategic posture, Lucinda grabbed her by the neck and threw her to the floor.
“You fucking bitch,” Emily heard herself shout. “Give it back, or I swear you’ll regret it.”
“My God! The attachment your generation has to your devices is sickening.” Lucinda spat. “It’s an addiction. Worse than your mother’s, if you ask me. Now just settle down.”
The fake sweetness the old woman deployed when first entering Emily’s room was long gone. As Lucinda stood over her, clutching the phone in one hand like it was a carnival prize, the kind few dupes ever win, Emily considered delivering a swift kick to Lucinda’s ankle—it might be enough to take her down. But Emily’s thud to the floor had someone, likely her dad, coming up the stairs. A kick like that could wait. The best bet now was to play the role of the victim.
Her dad would come up, take her phone, and give it to the police. Then, the adults would all huddle around her device and his for days, hoping for a ransom call that Emily didn’t believe would ever come.
Lucinda held Emily’s phone in front of her face. The old woman’s brows were uneven, one high and one low. Even so, she was squinting into the screen, studying the caller’s name. “Who’s Nicole?”
“My mom,” Emily capitulated. “Duh.”
“Your mom. Of course. Of course you don’t call your mom ‘Mom.’ Why would you?”
“Why?” she asked. “What does it matter?”
“It says you missed her call. There’s a message, too. Give me your password.”
“No.”
“God dammit, child! Give me your password!”
Matthew appeared in the doorway. “What the hell is going on in here?”
As the old woman turned to no doubt lie about what had transpired, Emily sprung from the floor and snatched her phone back. With Matthew there, Lucinda seemed to lose a bit of her nerve and dropped herself defeatedly onto Ethan’s bed. “Nicole just rang, and the little brat won’t give me the phone.”
“Is that true?” Matthew asked her before looking back toward the staircase.
If either detective was on their way up to see what the fuss was about, they would’ve had to have been capable of floating. There wasn’t a sound, but no one said anything else or even moved until they all heard the female detective cough downstairs.
Matthew took two steps into the room. “Is that true? Did your mother call you?” he asked, much quieter this time.
Emily wondered if he and Lucinda had been able to pick up any part of her mom’s voicemail that she was already playing to her ear. Mom had asked for Dad, so she held the phone face-up in front of her chest, put it on speaker so they could all hear it, and then moved the slider to the left to start her mother’s message again from the beginning.
“Emily … it’s your mother. Sort of, anyway—maybe that’s obvious right now. I can’t really say, and I don’t have time to try to act like I have any idea how to sound like her.”
It was Mom’s voice, but it was true: the rhythm of her words was different, and the vocabulary she used wasn’t common for Nicole. There was no rational reason for the message itself to cause a chill, but Emily’s skin went prickly and ice cold. Her mother’s tone was dull and broken, and hearing it should have frightened everyone, but Lucinda rolled her eyes like only old women who’ve seen it all can, then offered her two cents.
“Has your wife gone completely bat sh—”
Matthew held out his hand to shush Lucinda, then pulled the door shut. “Start it over,” he said as he sat next to Emily.
“I was going to call Matthew—your dad, I mean—but then, Amanda already has Ethan, doesn’t she? So, I imagined that by now, your dad had gotten the police involved. And that makes sense. I’d have done the same. If I call him, I think they’ll hear this. Leaving a message on your phone seems like a bad idea, too, but there’s no time to ring you again and hope that you pick up. So … find your father, Emily, and play this for him, please. Both of you … you’re going to have to trust me on this: telling the police or anyone else what I’m about to say right now will be of no help. Ethan’s still alive, I’m sure of it, but if you drag the police into this, or even my mom—Lucinda, I mean—I don’t know what Amanda will do with him.”
Hearing what she’d already heard, now a third time, didn’t diminish its hypnotic hold. As they listened to the rest of Nicole’s message—or something using her voice to leave a message, anyway—Emily hoped her father would do everything her mother was asking, save the part about leaving her home while he followed the instructions. If either he or Lucinda thought for a second that she wasn’t going to leave with them to help Tag, too, it was going to get ugly, fast.
31
TAG
Tag hid in the shadows the suburban-urban mix of Stamford afforded.
This is what the living always claimed to want: buzzing bistros and Manhattan-like cocktail bars just a short drive from safer, white-picket-fence neighborhoods. That perfect mix of city convenience balanced with rural inconvenience.
“Stamford’s a safe place,” he remembered hearing.
It was an odd time to recall that they had once talked about making a move to the Connecticut town to escape the yuppie influx in Brooklyn. Not as safe as advertised, he guessed.
It didn’t matter how he’d traveled there from Manhattan, but the short-term memories he’d made while using Nicole’s brain came and went as he walked her body into Aidan’s neighborhood. One minute he was thinking the block was ritzy, and wishing he and Amanda had had the chance to move there. The next minute, the scramble to get Nicole’s body to Stamford would grab his full attention. If the memories were legit, the trip up had been shockingly lucky.
He remembered being awful at moving her body through the hospital’s halls. Even with the “help” Nicole had promised, there’d been stumbling and a zombie-like quality to the escape they’d made, first into an elevator and then through the lobby on the ground floor. How in the hell did we pull that off? He could only imagine he had the routine dysfunction of America’s medical-industrial complex to thank. Outside the building, the reflection of Nicole’s body in a plate glass window had caught his eye; a punishing amble is how he’d describe it, one he thought would definitely hurt the next day, at least for Nicole.
Had he been running from a hospital in any place that wasn’t New York City, it was a good bet a barefoot fare, dressed in a blue medical gown, arms and face dotted with bandages, standing on a corner of a block with a hospital, and doing so after midnight, would’ve been a hard pass. The city that never sleeps had seen it all, though, and the Uber driver he’d summoned using Nicole’s phone was accommodating, maybe even too eager to help an awkward stranger he’d never met.
Zombie walk or not, the driver unlocked the doors, no questions asked. When the man didn’t drive Nicole’s body back to the ER immediately, Tag relaxed, which caused him to lose control of her altogether. Maybe it seemed like she’d passed out? It was also possible Nicole had regained control of her faculties and made passable chit-chat and excuses for her appearance.
“Dark days left me running a lot, too,” the driver had said.
Oh, that’s right, the driver had told Nicole about his own experience with substance abuse. Tag remembered that now. He “got it,” the man behind the wheel may have said. For all Tag knew, he and Nicole had bonded with the driver over addiction war stories, and that was the only reason he was in Stamford now waiting for Matthew to show. Shockingly lucky, indeed.
At some point during the ride there, Emily texted Nicole’s phone back. It’d been a notification on Nicole’s locked phone screen when he resumed final control, right before their driver pulled the car alongside a curb to drop them two blocks from Aidan’s address. Nicole had either missed the message or she’d left its notification for Tag to find.
A few houses from Aidan’s, Tag stopped to reread the message again. Emily’s text back was the response he’d asked his best friend to leave. If he took the single sunglasses-smile emoji on the screen at face value, it meant Emily had not only listened but that she’d followed his instructions and played his message for her father. Its delivery was timestamped. Based on the time the phone showed now, it was safe to assume Matthew wouldn’t arrive for at least another twenty minutes. And that was only if he was on his way at all.
Operating Nicole’s cell had taken a lot of effort, but paled in comparison to the effort it took to create coherent sentences about a plan he formed on the fly with a mouth that wasn’t his. Matthew might have listened to what the message outlined and shared it with the police solely out of his confusion. If that was the case, the authorities were on their way, and that inconvenience would not have taken another twenty minutes.
Only Matthew would understand what Tag meant when he’d finished the message.
“If you are willing to help, send me the emoji sign-off you used with Tag.”
Optimistically, that single sunglasses-smile emoji on the screen indicated Matthew was on his way, alone. No police. It meant his friend was willing to put disbelief on the back burner and take a chance on something unbelievable if it meant saving his—no, their son.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuccccck!”
Aidan’s shout startled him. Tag had barely registered that he’d made it into the man’s yard. He flopped Nicole’s body under a bush and looked toward the house to see if the cuss had been made because he or she had been spotted. It looked bigger than when he’d visited the inside.
His observations there had been brief, but only because Tag suspected Amanda had known he was there observing her as she honed her possession of Aidan. The exterior and landscaping were all very John Q. Public. What Tag had cataloged inside wasn’t completely abnormal, either. It had fine couches, expensive chairs, beds in most of the rooms, and the types of knick-knacks that typically signal an occupant has too much time on their hands. But it also housed the stench of death. Tag had smelled it, but wondered if it was only because one of Aidan’s victims had remarked as much the day before her corpse became a part of the odor.
The one lamp on in the living room went dark, but the fixture in the next room lit up right after. There was no way to tell if it was Aidan or Amanda moving from one room to the next. The man’s cuss could have meant he’d stubbed a toe under his own power as much as it might have indicated frustration with being unable to stub a toe even if he pleased.
He had no visual on Ethan. Leaving Nicole’s body to perform an observation inside crossed his mind, but possessing her again, even with cooperation, might have proven impossible.
Human bodies weren’t gloves, at least not for Tag. Amanda had given the art of possession her full attention. She was better at it. Par for the course, alive or dead, never not better than him at anything they both tried.
Leaving and coming back, even if done efficiently, was risky. Ethan was still alive, he felt it, then again, hunches of any kind were only how the living rebranded wishful thinking.
The scheming to escape from the hospital, to get Matthew to Aidan’s, to retrieve Ethan from Amanda—to say nothing of how hard it was to move another body, even one as spiritually damaged as Nicole’s—had kept Tag occupied. No space for emotion, no time for anything except decisions, but as he walked Nicole’s body to a window to peer into Aidan’s home, he was afraid.
Tag was terrified for his son. Not an ethereal mimicry of a fear he once knew, the real deal: panic and worry, trepidation, and no certainty he’d be able to overpower Amanda if he was even able to keep his possession of Nicole going. He’d lost control of his son’s welfare a second time.
On day one of his residency, Tag committed to the literature. After all, it was the easiest way forward. In particular, the council’s suggestion that feelings of any kind were echoes of emotions residents had experienced while living was particularly comforting. If he worked at it, he wasn’t supposed to feel anything. All decisions in the afterlife could be made in a vacuum.
In theory, that attribute would keep residents from straying into tasks like the one Tag was engaged in now. What could be better than feeling nothing at all? A second existence free from anxiety, sorrow, anger, and grief might also be worth never feeling love, admiration, joy, or pride. But it’d all been bullshit. Not echoes or mimics, but real. Gabriel had told Tag as much.
Residents claiming to have mastered feeling nothing were lying to themselves or lying to the recently deceased to gain good standing with the council. What’s worse, no resident had any actual idea what the council’s good graces might ever provide, lead to, or help them achieve. There was no official mention of any punishment for affecting the living in The Text, but there didn’t need to be. Every resident understood how the rumors of that punishment made them feel.
