Possession

NINE

As I walked up the steps, I heard violin music. Emerging into the open space between the buildings once again, I saw two musicians standing on the note in front of the market mural—a young man and a young woman, both with short hair and dark clothes, their violin cases open on the ground in front of them. One case held a hopeful dollar bill, the other a few CDs in plastic cases with a hand-lettered sign that read CD’S $12 EACH—SUPPORT CORNISH STUDENTS TRIP TO EUROPE. Their music soared upward in the resonant space, each bow sending a tendril of song and colorful energy twining around its companion’s thread, flowing into the road behind them and up into the market as if alive, seeking a path to the sky. People lined the rail of the staircase landing above, listening for a few moments while they waited for friends to emerge from the washrooms or what have you. A few passersby dropped coins into the case, making muffled clanks that reminded me of the harness chains of phantom horses.

I stopped to listen, letting the music flow over me with the remembered thrill of elation I’d once had for dancing. I had loved it once—even when it was a misery imposed on me by necessity and my mother—and this feeling was why. And for the first time in a long while I didn’t mind the memory. I guess I was finally growing out of my resentment and anger—I’m stubborn that way. I felt an odd pressure in my feet and legs and realized I was stretching up, hampered by my boots, as if my legs wanted to dance, even when the rest of me resisted. I took a breath and calmed myself down, settling back onto my heels, not because I refused to dance but because now wasn’t the time. And it’s dangerous to roll up en pointe in hiking boots—I hadn’t had to undergo the surgeries Olivia Sterling had been through during my student days or professional career, and I didn’t want to head that way now, either. My odd relationship with the Grey seemed to have granted me preternatural health and longer life than the average human—or so I’d been told by the only other Greywalker I’d ever met—but even that wouldn’t fix foolishness or damaged tendons. When the violinists paused, I stepped forward, picking up one of the CDs.

The girl smiled at me, taking her instrument off her shoulder. The boy followed suit in a moment, his eyes hazy as if the music held him in a daze while a kaleidoscopic mist of colors swarmed around him, touching the girl, then coiling back to him. The girl’s aura was pure gold that burned like a steady flame.

“Hi,” she said. “Would you like to buy a CD? We’re raising money to spend the fall quarter in Europe.”

“You’re at Cornish College?” I asked—it was a pretty safe bet they were students and not from Cornwall, but I asked anyhow.

“For now.”

“How long have you been busking down here? Is this a regular gig for you two?”

She shrugged. “Not so much. We’re both pretty busy during the school year. We only get down here in the summer and occasional weekends. Sean doesn’t like to play alone.”

“I see.” Judging by their energy, Sean was the more brilliant of them, but not as strong-willed or focused as his partner, so I understood his reluctance to do this gig by himself. I looked at the disc cover and pointed at the names of the performers. “You’re Selena?”

She smiled and nodded again, her aura flickering a touch of orange annoyance before she tamped it down. “That’s me.”

I dug a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket and offered it to her. She took it with another professional smile and tucked it into her own pocket as I refused change and put the CD into my bag. I wasn’t as interested in the music as in their goodwill and that was little enough to pay.

“You don’t know another busker named Jordan Delamar, do you?”

Selena shook her head. “No, I can’t say I do. Sorry.”

I shrugged it off. “Not a problem. Thanks for the CD—you play beautifully.”

Now she beamed. “Thank you!”

I stepped back, letting them go back to work as she obviously wished to do. I noticed she had to nudge the dreamy-eyed Sean to attention as I started to leave. I carried on, hoping to find some other buskers before the market closed, since I’d already missed office hours. The music followed me up the stairs.

Back on the street level, I waded into the swirling ghost fog of the market’s main street and made my way with care across the road to the Sanitary Market Building, sure that I’d seen musicians and other performers in several locations along that block of Pike Place and Post Alley. It was hard to pick out specific strands of music or patter above the general hubbub of cars and trucks, shoppers, ghosts, and vendors that flowed all over the street and sidewalks like a river flooding its banks while the fish tried to swim any direction they could. I felt distinctly like a salmon trying to get upstream.

At the first corner, next to the Greek take-out place, a man dressed head to foot in bright blue was bending balloons into hats, animals, and flowers for the amusement of small children and their parents standing in line for a quick bite to eat. Next to him, a ghostly double made a balloon poodle and wafted the finished phantom animal into the air, where it dissolved into sparkles that rained down on the creations of the living man beside him. A little boy in a striped shirt scampered over from his parents, waving a dollar bill, and offered it to the man in blue. The man bent down to listen to the boy’s whispered request.

He laughed and straightened up to inflate some balloons and begin shaping them. The spirit beside him did the same. I watched from the crowd-eddy created by a spiral staircase behind them as the living balloon man shaped a monster’s head and added goggly eyes by scribbling black pupils on two small white balloons, which he then tied onto the green monster face. Done, he showed it to the boy and asked, “How’s that?”

“Great!” the boy yelled, jumping up and down in excitement and causing a few people to step off the sidewalk to continue onward in safety.

The balloon man laughed, once again mirrored by his incorporeal double, and put the monster onto the boy’s head as a hat. The boy growled and pranced back to his parents, saying, “I’m a t’ranasaurus! Grroww!”

The boy reminded me so much of the Danzigers’ son, Brian, that I laughed myself, and then felt a pang that my friends were still in Europe and I hadn’t seen them in a couple of years now. I hoped they were doing well, but I still missed them—even troublesome Brian, who would have been starting school this autumn if I remembered correctly. I sidled closer to the balloon man as he started on a long-stemmed balloon flower for a little girl.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi there, pretty lady! Be right with you.”

“I don’t need a balloon. I just wanted to ask you a question.”

“OK, then. Fire away.” He bent a long red balloon into loops and twisted it around a green balloon to make the blossom, without looking at me, concentrating on his creation and sending an occasional wink to the little girl in front of him. His ghost did the same, ignoring me completely.

“Do you know another busker named Jordan Delamar?”

“Not sure. What’s he do?”

“That’s what I don’t know. But I think he was injured a few months ago.”

He stooped and handed the balloon flower to the girl and received a few bills from her parents in exchange before he turned to me, absently twisting a balloon between his hands into crazy loops.

“Oh . . . yeah. Didn’t know his name. About . . . six or seven months ago, I think that was—around December. Part of an awning in the slabs came down and hit a guy. Knocked him flat. They had to take him to the hospital.”

“Do you know what happened to him after that? Is he back?”

“Umm . . . I don’t know. I haven’t heard any more about him. I’m not here much in the off-season—not a lot of call for balloon animals when the kids aren’t around. I do a lot of theater stuff and private parties then, instead. I get some good gigs around Christmas to keep kids entertained while their parents are shopping or waiting in line for photos with Santa. That sort of thing.” Another child tugged at his pants leg and he smiled down before he gave me a quick glance, saying, “Sorry—I have to get back to work here.”

“Oh, just one more question—what’s ‘the slabs’?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s the outdoor vendor area at the north end of the main arcade building, near Steinbrueck Park. Doesn’t get much use in the winter, except for the wreath vendors around Christmas.” He turned his attention to his young admirer.

“Thanks for the help,” I said, dropping a bill into his balloon-bedecked tip jar.

“Thank you!” he called after me as I shoved my way back into the diminishing stream of shoppers, heading northwest, toward the world’s first Starbucks store and the slabs.

But by the time I reached the row of horizontal cement tabletops attached to the wall where Western Avenue swept up to meet Pike Place and Virginia Street, it was nearly seven and the only people willing to talk to me were the vendors who hadn’t yet started packing up for the day.

A thin, long-haired man wearing sunglasses and sitting in a cloth lawn chair beside a selection of small paintings and T-shirts of cartoon cats committing dastardly deeds nodded when I asked about the accident in December. “Yeah, I remember that. There was a big awning over this area because of the rain—we all chipped in to put it up so we could do some holiday business. There was a work crew up here doing something about the tunnel. Some kind of study about vibrations or sound waves. They were drilling a hole. . . . I don’t remember exactly why. Anyhow, whatever they were up to, it was real messy and made the awning collapse at the far end. This guy was standing under it at the time, so he took a nosedive into their dirt pile and got clonked on the head pretty good by the falling awning.”

“Did you know him? The man who got clonked on the head?” I asked.

“Not particularly—I mean, like, I didn’t know his name or anything. Mostly we called him Banjo Guy.”

“Have you seen him around since then?”

He shook his head and started folding T-shirts now it was obvious he wasn’t going to make any more sales today. “Nope. Not that I can recall. I suppose I might not recognize him without the banjo. He wasn’t an unusual-looking guy. Black guy. Kind of average, kind of not too distinctive one way or another. Young—mid-twenties maybe. Sorry I’m not much help.”

“No, no—the information about the awning was a lot of help. Thanks.” He clearly had no more information to give me.

Jordan Delamar had been injured about the right time according to the insurance billing records I’d been able to snoop. But whether he was the Banjo Guy or “the boy who played” I wasn’t yet certain. The only thing I was pretty sure of was that he wasn’t an engineer or architect or computer modeler, so that wasn’t the link between the three patients. I’d have to come back in the morning and see if he owned a performer’s badge and if he did, verify that he was the person who’d been injured here. Then I’d have to find out where he was. I didn’t think I’d be lucky enough to catch any of the buskers on their way out of the market for the day. Most of the vendors and shopkeepers were already closed and the buskers had disappeared while I’d been talking to the man with the bad-kitty pictures.

I started to turn around and go up the steep block of Virginia Street to First to catch a bus back to my office—where I’d left the truck—but paused as I thought I saw a familiar face. Across the street on a small promontory of the old bluff that the market stands on was Victor Steinbrueck Park. Against the Tree of Life homeless memorial—backlit by the summer sky that was darkening with unusually black clouds—was a skinny, restless figure that rocked from foot to foot, flapping its arms as if cold. I knew him—a homeless man I’d met on a case in Pioneer Square a few years back and continued to see around—though I couldn’t recall when I’d seen him last. He was called “Twitcher” by almost everyone—he suffered from a rare neurological disorder that set him in constant motion. I frowned and walked toward the park, thinking I could ask him if he’d relocated up to Steinbrueck Park and if he’d been around when the awning accident had occurred.

Twitcher stood near the glass “pool” around the memorial that had been installed last October. He turned his head as if he saw me, and I paused for a moment, shocked at how emaciated he’d become. Twitcher was always nervously thin, since he was literally never still. Most people thought he was crazy, or stupid, or both. He wasn’t either, but he was afraid of doctors and he had difficulty making his needs known between his spastic motions. He’d given up and begun living on the streets when the state stopped paying for his treatment.

A car blared its horn at me from my blind side as I started across the street and I turned to shout at the driver for running the Stop sign. When I turned back, Twitcher was gone. Not a hint of him could I find, even when I ran up and down Western for a block in each direction looking for him. There was nowhere to hide—and why would he when he had seemed to be waiting for me? I’d have to ask his friends Sandy and Zip—fellow Pioneer Square homeless people—if they knew what Twitcher was up to. Tomorrow.

As I waited for the bus to take me back to Pioneer Square, rain began to fall. The clouds that had rolled in as I searched for information about Delamar—or “the boy who played”—let down a steady drizzle that thickened into a summer downpour by the time I had to exit the bus. It looked as if we’d have the usual gloomy, wet Fourth of July that we’d had more often than not since I’d moved to Seattle. It wasn’t my fault, though; the occurrence was common enough to rate a joke that summer didn’t start here until July fifth, just to make sure we all knew where we were. I wasn’t really dressed for the rain and my thin jacket was soaked through by the time I got to my office building, but the sudden storm had one bright side: James Purlis wasn’t too likely to be tailing me in this weather.

I really needed to talk to Quinton about his father’s interference. I didn’t like being the rope in this tug-of-war and if the situation didn’t improve soon, I’d have to make my position a bit more clear to Papa Purlis. I suspected he still thought I was mostly harmless—he struck me as overly confident or maybe he was just a misogynistic ass—but I had no problem with proving him wrong. In a way, I was looking forward to it. . . .