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She’d survived worse.
In the small galley kitchen, which was white and serene and probably her favorite part of her condo, Charlotte took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with tap water. Her leather backpack was open on the counter. It didn’t register at first as she drank. But then she lowered the glass from her lips and set it on the countertop with a click, an uneasy feeling coming over her.
She reached into the backpack and brought out her work pouch wallet. She zipped it open, holding her breath.
It was empty.
She immediately emptied her backpack and sifted through everything, frantically at first, then more deliberately, making absolutely sure.
Benny, who obviously held his alcohol better than she did, had taken her money.
She ran back to the front doors and opened them. The police officers were still on Lizbeth Lime’s patio.
The female officer turned to Charlotte. Charlotte smiled. When it came to the police, she never wanted to call too much attentionto herself. She stepped back inside and closed the doors, willing her heart to stop racing.
Whenever she moved, all the money from the sale of her previous home went into buying a new place, for that one security she allowed herself. With everything else, she lived hand to mouth. She needed the money that had been in her backpack. This was the first time in her life she’d ever been able to support herself wholly with her henna, something teenaged Charlotte had always dreamed of. She’d been working longer hours and saving for weeks since finding out about the rent increase, so she would have something to live on until she found a new space to work in. She’d had a cushion. Now that cushion was significantly less soft.
“Bastard, bastard,bastard!” she whispered, every muscle tense with the effort not to cry. She wasthrough.She’d cried too much these past few months, ugly, shuddering cries that left her gasping for breath, because of her breakup with Asher—the only bad thing that had come out of moving to Mallow Island. Her mother had cried like that, and it had always struck Charlotte as selfish and overly dramatic. There had been much more devastating things happening during her childhood, yet all her mother could do was cry for herself.
A lifetime of trying not to be like her mother, and look what she had turned into.
Just another desperate, cash-poor artist with a broken heart.
Frasier, sitting in his office, could hear the birds outside start to calm. The police must have finally left. He waggled his head a little. Old Otis, the eldest of the dellawisps, was stillperched in his hair. Otis swayed, but didn’t move. He must have fallen asleep.
The desk in front of Frasier was littered with sketchbooks and colored pencils. Drawing was a medium he’d taken up later in life and all he drew was birds, over and over, usually in the heat of the day when it was too hot to be in the garden. The wall in front of him was covered in sketches of the dellawisps, so many of them the papers overlapped, forming a decoupage of turquoise birds.
He stared at them for a while; then he took off his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes. What a morning.
He was at an age now where the people he’d once known outnumbered the people he presently knew. After passing away, sometimes his friends would visit him before leaving this earthly world. It had been happening all his life, and what had been a terrifying experience for him as a boy no longer surprised him. It was usually just a brief encounter—a sparkle out of the corner of his eye, a gust of wind in an airless room, a particular scent.
But there were some, out of fear or confusion or unfinished business, who stayed with him longer.
And of course Lizbeth would be one of them.
She was here in his office with him and he sensed her impatience, like she was wondering where something was.
“I don’t know where he is,” he said to her, hoping she was thinking about her son, though more than likely she was still wondering where that blasted story of hers was. “I’ll find him, but I doubt he will come home. Not even now.”
But Lizbeth wasn’t listening. In death, as in life, she was singularly the worst listener he’d ever met.
Before her son Oliver had left for college a few years ago, Oliverhad asked Frasier to check on Lizbeth regularly. Despite Oliver’s complicated relationship with his mother, despite the fact that he couldn’t get away fast enough, he’d still been worried about what would become of her once he was gone.
Lizbeth had moved into the Dellawisp when Oliver was just three years old, so Frasier had watched him grow up and had helped raise him as best he was able. Lizbeth wasn’t one anybody would ever call maternal. Still, Frasier had hoped he and Lizbeth would share how much they missed the boy during his check-ins. But it had soon become clear that Lizbeth had no interest in talking, or listening, to Frasier about anything. Once Frasier had finally caught on to this, he’d begun amusing himself by telling Lizbeth great daily fictions about once being shipwrecked with the Queen of England, or the time he joined a band of burglars all dressed as Santa who pulled off the largest heist in history on Christmas Eve at the Mall of America. Once he’d even told her that he was madly in love with her and asked her to run away with him to a nudist colony on Corsica.
She’d never heard a word. She’d been too busy sorting and cataloging and murmuring to herself, “I know I saw it somewhere.”
She’d spent most of her time trying to find things. Over the past few years, it was the story she wanted Roscoe Avanger to write about her, somewhere in her maze of boxes. Once a week Frasier would clean Lizbeth’s kitchen and her bathroom, but the rest was hopeless, which was a shame. Though small, these unit interiors were exquisite. Frasier would take out anything spoiled, rotten, or mildewed so there wasn’t a smell or an infestation the other residents could complain about. They already had plenty of things to complain about with Lizbeth. She used to write down everythingshe saw them doing, sure it was a crime of some sort. She would hand him sheets upon sheets of notes about them, which he always threw away.
He’d known something was wrong the moment he’d entered her place this morning. It had been unnaturally still, no shuffling of papers, no kinetic Lizbeth energy permeating the space, bouncing around with nowhere to escape. He’d found her under an overturned bookcase containing hundreds and hundreds of copies of Roscoe Avanger’s famousSweet Mallow.He’d finally managed to push the heavy oak piece off of her, cursing his age because he could have lifted it with a single finger when he was younger, but cursingthat damn bookeven more. But it had been too late. She’d been dead for hours. He’d lowered himself onto a stack of books beside her and taken his phone out to call for help. The quiet had been unnerving while he’d waited, so he’d told her a story about stumbling across a diamond mine in his grandfather’s backyard when he was a boy.
Frasier finally put his glasses back on and pushed his wheeled desk chair across his small office to the filing cabinet, past the clipboards he had tacked to the wall with work orders, birdseed deliveries, and a lost-and-found list of the things the dellawisps had stolen. They were funny little thieves. Most people thought they were a nuisance, but he enjoyed them. It had taken him all his life to understand this, but even unlikable things have worth. It was how, after all, he’d learned to live with himself.
He took out the file with Lizbeth’s sister Lucy’s name on it, then pushed himself back to his desk, Otis still swaying on his head. He went through the papers until he found Lucy’s phone number. She hadn’t answered her door when he’d knocked earlier, but that wasn’t unusual. She never answered her door.
“I didn’t really find a diamond mine,” he told Lizbeth as he dialed. “But that thing about the Queen of England? Absolutely true.” He felt Lizbeth shift around restlessly. “What, you don’t believe me? She still sends me birthday cards.”
GHOST STORY
