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20

Lissy

All the way back around the fence to the Bellamy house, Don was filled with dread. Sylvie was fading already, Gladys had said. Now that she didn't have that aching hole of guilt and shame in her heart, the house didn't have so much power over her. What if she was already gone? At this moment it was an unbearable thought. I just found her, he thought. I didn't ask to be in this swamp, and neither did she, but we found each other, and it's not right that I should already be losing her.

The door wasn't waiting open for him. She wasn't in the alcove in the ballroom. He called her name, striding through the main floor. Called again, again, more loudly, as he ran up the stairs, searched the second floor. Then up to the attic, and she wasn't there either, and now he felt it like another death. How could it happen so quickly?

The basement? She never went down there on purpose.

But then, that was before she learned the truth about who killed whom. Don skimmed down the stairs like a schoolboy, then ran the length of the ballroom to get to the basement stairs. "Sylvie!" he called. "Sylvie!"

She still didn't answer, but now it didn't matter, because there she was, pressed against the foundation wall, almost behind the coal furnace. Near the tunnel entrance.

"Sylvie, what are you doing?"

She smiled wanly. "I don't know," she said.

"What brought you down here?"

"I just... wanted to see myself again."

Was it ghoulish to want to see a corpse, if it was your own? "So did you?"

"No," she said. "Part of me wants to go there. Down the tunnel. But the house doesn't want me there. I don't know what's the right thing to do."

"All I know about the tunnel is that it's not part of the house," said Don. "Gladys says it's older than the house."

"You know what it feels like?" she said. "If I go down there again, I'll be free!"

"Depends on what you mean by freedom." He explained to her what Gladys had said about how the house might be losing its hold on Sylvie. "If you want to be free, then go," he said. "I can't ask you to stay."

"Yes you can," she said.

"Then stay," he said. "Please stay."

She launched herself from the wall, ran to him, threw her arms around him.

He held her, but as he stroked her hair, it kept passing right through his fingers. Slowly, but passing through. He couldn't help the tears of grief that began to flow. "You're going," he said.

She pulled away from him, her eyes frightened. He showed her what was happening with her hair. In reply she clung to him all the more tightly.

He lifted her—lighter now, or was it his fear of losing her that made her seem like nothing in his arms?—and carried her upstairs, back to the alcove. "I'll tell you something," he whispered to her. "If I lose you, Sylvie, then you can count on this. I'll find Lissy wherever she's hiding. I'll find her and..."

"And what?" she said. "Look, your hair goes through my fingers, too." She shuddered. "Which one of us is disappearing?"

"You don't know how many times I've wished that I could."

"Me too," she said. "And now that I don't want to, the wish comes true." She kissed him lightly. "But you didn't answer my question."

"What did you ask?"

"What you'll do when you find Lissy?"

Kill her, thought Don. But then he knew that it wasn't true. He wouldn't have the heart for it. "There's no statute of limitations on murder," he said. "I'll turn her in."

"Waste of time," said Sylvie. "Don't even bother looking for her, Don. They won't do anything to her because there won't be enough evidence, nothing to point to her except you, and you got all your information from the victim's ghost. And they'll say to you, Well, Mr. Lark, where's that ghost now? And you'll say, Sorry, Your Honor, but she faded away."

"So Lissy gets away with it."

"She already got away with it. There's nothing you can do about that."

"That's all I seem capable of, when it really matters: nothing."

Sylvie leaned back. "I think I won't sleep tonight," she said. "I don't want to go to sleep and wake up invisible. So I'll stay awake. I'll watch you all night. I'll hold your hand. And then when your hand sinks through mine and leaves my hand empty, I'll know I'm gone."

Again Don's tears flowed. It made him angry, to have to face grief again. He clenched his fists. "Damn, what happened to me? I used to be stronger than this."

"Fat lot of good it did you. I'm glad you're crying for me, Don. I've been dead for a decade, and you're the first one to shed any tears of grief for me."

"This is just the start, kid."

"You want to hear something pathetic?" she said. "I've had more kisses from you than from every other boy or man in my life combined."

He kissed her again.

"What's that for? You've already got the record."

"Running up the score," he said.

She kissed him back.

"Mm," she said.

He broke off the kiss. "What?"

"Just thinking," she said. "About Lissy. Maybe we're giving her credit for being too resourceful. You know, coming up with a false name. That's not easy to do. I mean, sure, you can get fake ID, but don't you have to know somebody? How do you go buy a fake driver's license?"

"She bought drugs," said Don. "So she knew some underground people."

"No, Lanny bought the drugs. Just pot, mostly. I don't think she knew anybody like that."

"She really did coast on other people, didn't she," said Don. "He buys the drugs, you do her homework."

"That's the thing," said Sylvie. "When she needed some A papers right away, she didn't write them, she didn't do anything on her own, she just copied mine. Whatever looked easiest. Going underground and changing identities, that's hard. I just don't see her doing it."

"So you're saying she'll be living under her own name?"

"Don't you think?"

"No," said Don. "She knew she had to conceal her crime. That's why she killed Lanny, it's the only possible reason. She didn't know that neither body was going to be discovered. So she couldn't keep her own name."

The idea dawned on both of them at once. "She used mine," said Sylvie, as Don said, "How much did you two look alike?" They laughed for a moment, more at the excitement of the discovery than the coincidence of their talking at once.

"You said you two could swap clothes," said Don.

"Same color hair, nearly," said Sylvie. "Same basic shape in the face. Not that we looked like sisters, but if you didn't know either of us..."

"I mean, could she use your ID?"

"She could maybe get a haircut, different glasses, and tell the person at the motor vehicle department that of course she doesn't look the same, it's been years."

"No," said Don. "She just reports your license missing. Says her name is Sylvie Delaney and her purse was stolen."

"She'd need a birth certificate or something, wouldn't she?"

"Where did you keep your birth certificate?"

"In my room." Sylvie nodded. "You're right, she'd never have to show a picture."

"And your fingerprints were never taken."

"Right," said Sylvie. "I wasn't arrested much."

"This feels right, Sylvie, This is it. She took your name, your identity—"

"My savings. She could do my signature. She did that as a joke, but she could do it as well as I could. She used to tell me that I should do a harder signature, any fourth grader could fake mine."

"That's her whole getaway," said Don.

"Getaway," echoed Sylvie. "Don, she took my job."

It took him a moment to realize what she meant. "Providence?"

"They interviewed me over the phone. We never met. She read all my papers. She's a champion shmoozer. She could fake being me well enough to get along until she really learned the job. All the time getting an income."

"That makes my skin crawl," said Don. "To think of her out there in the world, using your name. People asking for Sylvie Delaney and she's the one they mean."

Sylvie shuddered. "Well, after killing me, I guess that's only adding insult to injury."

"I'm going to call," he said.

"Call who?"

"Directory assistance," he said. "Providence, Rhode Island."

"And then what?"

"And then I'll invite her here," he said.

"What makes you think she'd come?"

"Come on, Sylvie, give me credit." He put on his Marlon-Brando-as-Don-Corleone voice. "I'll make her an invitation she can't refuse."

"I don't want you hurting her, Don," said Sylvie. "You'd only get in trouble yourself. It won't help me for you to be in jail."

"No, I won't hurt her," said Don. "All I want is for her to face what she did. To face you. While you're still here."

"Oh," she said. "Oh, Don, I'm not sure I want to—"

"Why not?" he answered. "What can she do to you? What are you afraid of? Let her face her own shame and guilt."

Those words resonated with what he had told her from his interview with Gladys. "You're hoping the house will hold her," said Sylvie.

"Maybe," said Don. "It probably won't, though. She's guilty and what she did was shameful and she knows it, she can't hide from that. But pain and loss? She's got everything. I'm betting she feels no pain."

"She lost her family," said Sylvie. "Remember?"

"Then the house will snag her. That's justice, Sylvie. To have her trapped here."

"But how will you finish your renovations then?" she said.

He looked away from her. "I don't know if I will."

"You can't afford to walk away from this place."

He shrugged. "I have some money in the bank. I can break the house up a little bit, weaken it so the Weird Sisters aren't so drawn to it."

"But then she won't be drawn to it anymore."

"Sylvie, why don't you want me to bring her here?"

"I don't know," she said. "Because... because this is our place. If I'm going to fade, the only memory I want to take with me is this one. You and me. In this place."

Don got up from the alcove, paced toward the far wall, then stopped. "OK," he said.

"OK what?"

"OK, I won't call her. I'll let her get away with it. We'll have these last days or hours, whatever we've got, we'll spend this time together, and then I'll just... I'll just forget it all." He turned around and kicked the wall. It was tough and strong. It hurt his foot through the shoe. He slapped the wall with the flat of his palm and leaned there, crying again, dammit.

After a while he felt her hand on his back. Lightly, too lightly.

"Don," she said. "I can face her."

"No," he said.

"I want to," she said. "What she did to me, that's done with. But what she's done to you—that really pisses me off."

He laughed in spite of himself, turned around, held her. "You mean it?"

"It's less than a twelve-hour drive to Providence if you go straight through," she said. "I had that all figured out. Feels like only yesterday."

"Let me guess. The bitch took your car."

Sylvie danced away from him. "We're such stupid children," she said. She pirouetted lazily. "We've built up this whole castle in the air, and she's probably married to some executive with Coca-Cola and living in Atlanta under his name."

"Still, it's worth a shot. It makes sense," said Don. "I'm going next door to see if they'll let me use their phone."

"Hurry back," she said.

"Stay out of the basement, please."

"Of course," she said. "I'm too busy dancing my life away to bother with basements." She was still turning around and around as he closed the door behind him.

Next door, Miz Evelyn let him into the house. "So have you decided what you're going to do?" she asked.

"Sylvie's fading. When she's gone, I won't leave the house strong like this."

"But all your money's tied up in it."

"I've lost a lot more money than this," said Don. "Lose enough of it, and you start thinking of it as nothing."

"Money's never nothing," said Miz Evelyn. "All those years we took in laundry and sewing, living on nothing, growing a garden, saving, saving. All so we could keep living here and never go out of the yard. Money is very much something."

"Not compared to saving people I care about."

"Well, all I can say is, if you weaken that house I'll be the first to kiss you."

"Too late," he said.

"There's already a line?" Miz Evelyn laughed. "Should have known, a strapping young man like you."

"Miz Evelyn, you ladies do have a phone, don't you?"

"Oh, you need to borrow one? It's right here in the parlor, right over here on the writing desk."

It was an ancient black dial phone. "You don't know how many years it's been since I've used one of these," he said.

"Oh, I don't know how we could ever get along without it. That's how we get our groceries delivered! And lightbulbs and things like that!"

"I didn't mean the phone, I meant that phone." She didn't understand. "They have phones with buttons now."

She looked baffled. Then comprehension dawned. "Oh, you mean pushbuttons. For a minute I thought, what in the world would you need to button up a telephone for!" She laughed. "Oh, my laws, I don't get out much." She looked wistful.

Don picked up the phone and dialed 411. He got the area code for Providence and then dialed directory assistance at that number. It was amazing how irritating it could be. The pressure on the sides of his finger. The endless waiting for the dial to return to position.

"For Providence," he said.

Miz Judea walked into the room.

"I need a listing for Sylvia Delaney. Or Sylvie. I'm not sure how the last name is spelled. Delaney."

He realized he had nothing to write with. He flung out a hand toward the Weird sisters, who were eavesdropping unabashedly. "Pen pen pen, please," he said.

Miz Evelyn fetched a pencil for him from a cubbyhole in the writing desk, and took an open envelope from the mail table.

The operator came back on. "Could that be S. Delaney, D-E-L-A-N-E-Y, on Academy Street?"

"Could well be, it's worth a shot."

"Hold for the number, please." After a moment, the computer voice started intoning the number. Don wrote it down and dialed it immediately.

"Am I missing something?" Miz Evelyn asked. "Ain't Sylvie Delaney the name of the haint?"

Don nodded, listening to the phone ringing.

Miz Evelyn went on talking, ostensibly to Miz Judea. "Why's he calling a dead girl in Providence when she's haunting the house next door?"

"Hush and listen, Miz Evvie," said Miz Judea.

Someone picked up the phone. A woman's voice. "Hello?"

"Hello, is this Sylvie Delaney?" He did his best to keep his voice sounding breezy, cheerful.

"Yes," she said. "Who's this?" Bored. Must have a lot of unidentified men calling her.

"Forgive me, but I just want to make sure I've found the right person. Did you get your graduate degree at UNC-Greensboro?"

"Who is this?"

Don waited a moment. "When I'm sure you're the right person," he said.

"Yes, I did my graduate work there. Now who are you?"

"We've never met, Miss Delaney," said Don. "But I feel as though I know you. You see, I've been renovating the old Bellamy house."

"I don't know of any such place," she said.

"You roomed here back in the mid-eighties."

"You must be thinking of somebody else. Good-bye."

"Hang up if you want, Miss Delaney, but I've seen what's in the tunnel under the house."

She said nothing.

"You don't seem to be hanging up," said Don.

"Maybe we do need to have a conversation," she said.

Don covered the receiver and whispered to the old ladies, "Now she wants to talk." Into the phone he said, "Yes, I think we ought to meet."

"Are you here in town?" she asked.

"No, here in Greensboro."

"Well, you don't expect me to drop everything and go all the way down there, do you? I have a job, I have responsibilities—"

"That's not my problem, is it?" said Don. "I'm betting you can get here by tomorrow at noon. After that, I call the police to check the body. When they figure out that it matches Sylvia Delaney's dental records, they're bound to start wondering who's this woman who's been using Sylvie Delaney's name for all these years."

"You're crazy if you think I'm going to pay blackmail over something that you've clearly concocted out of your own imagination."

"I'm not taping this, so you can skip the innocent act," said Don. "Noon tomorrow, at the Bellamy house. Come to the front door, and come alone."

"This is the stupidest prank I've ever heard of."

"I'm looking forward to meeting you—Lissy."

"Who are you?" she demanded.

He set the receiver down on the cradle. Then he sat back in to one of the plush parlor chairs. "That may just be the stupidest thing I ever did."

"What did you do?" said Miz Evelyn.

"Is your brain gone, you silly hillbilly?" said Miz Judea. "He just invited the woman who killed the girl next door to come down here and kill him, too."

"Oh!" cried Miz Evelyn. "That was foolish of you, Mr. Lark!"

"I know," he said. "But it seemed like a good idea at the time."

"You mean you don't even have a plan?" said Miz Judea.

"All I know is that Lissy Yont is going to face Sylvie one last time before Sylvie fades away."

Miz Judea shook her head. "You best talk to Gladys again," she said. "You bit off more than you can chew this time."

Nothing had changed in Gladys's room, except that Gladys looked even wearier and more impatient. "I wish you'd tell that girl to stop all that dancing," she said. "It wears me out."

"Her dancing?"

"Around and around. Like spinning thread. Like knitting. It ties me up in knots."

"Well, don't worry," said Don. "She'll be gone soon."

Immediately Gladys was full of sympathy. "Oh, you poor thing. It never lets up for you, does it?"

Was she mocking him? "Miz Judea thinks I should talk to you."

"Only because you're as stupid as they come," said Gladys. "Of course, I say that with your best interests at heart. Most people are stupid. I don't hold it against them. I just wonder what we're supposed to do for you when you're dead?"

"Why, you can see the future now?"

"Miz Judea told me what you did. That woman's going crazy right now, figuring out how she's going to kill you and get away with it."

"Well, if it's any comfort, she's also probably planning how to burn down the house or blow it up to destroy all the evidence against her. So you'll win no matter what."

"Burning's the last thing we want. It'll take years for the shadow of that house to fade, if it burns. We need it torn down. In case you haven't been listening."

"Give me a break here," said Don. "You didn't come up with anything. And I'm going to get Sylvie some justice before she goes."

"Which Sylvie?"

"Which?" He was confused. "Sylvie. The Sylvie."

"The Sylvie who's dead and living next door? Or the Sylvie who's probably buying a gun right now and heading on down here to kill you?"

"That's Lissy Yont."

"It was Lissy," said Gladys. "Don't you know nothing about the power of names, Mr. Lark? When I saved these girls, I called them by their soul names—name of their spirit and their body. When that girl started going by Sylvie's name, she didn't know what she was getting in for. When people know you by a name, call you that name and you answer, it ties the name right to you. Now, her spirit is still Lissy Yont, but her body has been called Sylvie Delaney by everybody for the past ten years. She's been divided. Her soul is split, so her body's name is Sylvie Delaney by now."

"So the soul's name is the spirit and the body?" said Don.

"Divide the names and you divide the soul. Leaves room for other spirits to try and seize the body, possess it. That woman doesn't know how weak her hold on her own body is. That body don't feel like it be part of no soul, it feel like it just be possessed by this spirit named Lissy. It want to get with its right spirit." Gladys cackled with pleasure. "People who don't know what they're doing, they do the dumbest things! Like you, calling a killer down to visit you."

"And you think it's funny?" asked Don, irritated now.

"I won't laugh when you dead," said Gladys. Sounding a little irritated herself.

"Not this time," said Don.

"Why? You don't look bulletproof to me."

"Because long before she can get to me, she's going to meet Sylvie face to face, the real Sylvie, right there in that house, where Sylvie is strong. Where the house does her bidding."

"Sylvie strong there compared to dead people who got no house. A dead woman's never as strong as a live one."

"They're not going to wrestle. Lissy's just going to face what she did to Sylvie."

"Meaning you think that ghost is going to scare her to death."

"She thinks she got away with it. I just want her to see that there's a life after death and someday she's going to answer for what she did."

"Don't it ever occur to you that only good people are afraid of paying for their sins?"

"No ma'am," said Don. "I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts, Miss Gladys, and they think everybody else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else."

"People be more simple than you think, Don Lark."

"You've spent the last sixty years sitting on a bed getting fat while you do spells to keep a big old house from swallowing up your people, and you're telling me that people are simple?"

"Nobody simpler than me," said Gladys.

"Well, so, maybe you're right. Maybe Lissy'll get here and see Sylvie and laugh in her face and then come shoot my brains out. If she does, then I won't care anymore, will I?"

"Now look who's talking brave."

"I got to do something for Sylvie before she goes, if she's going."

"She's going, and you already done something. You gave that girl love. What you think anybody want more than that? You think she give a rat's behind about seeing Lissy? That for you, Mr. Lark. She do that for you."

"OK, maybe," said Don. "Maybe that's for me. Maybe just once I want to look evil in the face and name what it is."

"Only it be using the wrong name. That body be Sylvie Delaney walk through that door. And don't you go expecting her to show up at noon. You think she crazy? You call her what, ten minutes ago? She on the road now. Not the airplane! She ain't putting her name on no plane ticket. She driving, but not slow, no. She flying down the pike. How long from Rhode Island? Ten hours I bet. Pay cash for gas. She get to town at midnight. Then she get scared. Midnight too busy. She wait for you to sleep. She park way up the block. She come by the house on foot. From back there. Maybe she come to the gully, maybe she come up that tunnel. Maybe she try to take that body out. Destroy the evidence, like they say in them cop shows. Obstructing justice."

"I didn't think of that."

"You didn't think of nothing. You acting from your heart now, not your head."

"Yeah."

"No, no, that be good, you keep doing that. Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil think of things good folks can't think of. Can't enter your head what evil do."

"You'd be surprised."

"But the good heart, now, it think of good things that evil can't imagine, cause it got no heart. How about that? That be philosophy. That be deep."

Either it was too deep for Don, or not deep enough, he couldn't be sure either way. But he was glad he talked to Gladys again. That back entrance to the tunnel, that had to go before tonight. That had to be sealed off.

"You know I wish I wasn't so fat," said Gladys.

"I hear that from a lot of folks," said Don.

"I wish I could fit through that door. Wish I could go down them stairs. Wish I could be there next door."

"Why? Can't you tell what's going on from right here?"

"Oh, sure I can. But see, I never heard of something like this before. I don't think it ever happened. Somebody been living under a dead persons name for years and years, come face to face with that dead person's spirit. Who know what going to happen."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, that Sylvie spirit, it going to meet a Sylvie body. And back again. They going to know they belong together. If the Sylvie spirit still had its own body, then so what? That happen before, lots. But the Sylvie spirit got no body. What then? And that Sylvie body, it hungry for a Sylvie spirit for a long time. Want to be a soul again, not just possessed."

"You're not saying that Lissy's body might capture Sylvie's spirit," said Don.

"I not be saying nothing, I just wondering. I just thinking it be a real good thing if you tell that dead girl not to touch that Lissy when she get here."

"She might get trapped in the same body with the woman who killed her?" The idea made him sick at heart. What had he got her into?

"Just tell her keep away. She a ghost, Mr. Lark. That Lissy girl, she can't touch her if she don't want to be touched."

"Thanks for the warning," said Don.

"These ladies give you lots of warnings, you didn't listen to a one of them."

"So maybe I'm learning to listen better," said Don.

"Maybe but not likely," said Gladys. "But if you ain't dead when this is all over, you come see me, tell me what all happened. I can't see it except with the eyes of magic, and I want to know what it look like."

Don held out his hand, then walked around the bed to where she could reach it. They shook on it, though her hand was so puffy with fat that he could barely get a grip on it. "We got us a deal," said Gladys.

"Better than that," said Don. "We got us a friendship."

"Well, that's good news. Cause I know you a man look after his friends."

"No one does that better than you."

"Now you go and don't get killed if you can help it." She waggled her sausage fingers at him.

He tipped his imaginary hat to her. Then to Miz Evelyn and Miz Judea. "I'll let myself out," he said.

They bade him good-bye as well, and he headed back over to the Bellamy house.