Spirit Page 13

  Mommy reached out for the Peggy-girl. At the same moment, a white screech owl fluttered overhead, and Elizabeth looked up. A frozen pool, a summer night: it was all too strange for words. The owl circled towards the oaks behind the house, and even though it distracted her for only a moment, Elizabeth missed what happened next. The ice cracked, from one side of the pool to the other, with a terrible grating sound, like a huge sheet of plate glass breaking. Mommy dropped directly into the water – and presumably the Peggy-girl did, too, because Elizabeth couldn’t see her.

  Mommy screamed and gargled and splashed and went under. Without hesitation, Elizabeth jumped into the pool, half running, half sliding on a tilting piece of ice, and then plunging in her bathrobe and slippers right into the water. She was chilled and shocked, but she managed to kick off her slippers and swim through the slush to the middle of the pool, circling around and treading water.

  For one heart-sinking moment, she thought that her mommy had gone under for good. She circled around and around, desperately thrashing her arms, with large lumps of ice bumping into her. She was too cold even to shout out, but at last she managed to take in a huge breath of air, and dive beneath the surface. She looked around, but all she could see were wobbling silver air-bubbles, and the dark shadowy shapes cast by the pieces of ice that were floating on the surface. She kicked her legs, and groped around with her hands, but she couldn’t feel anything at all – neither her mommy nor the Peggy-girl.

  She swam back up to the surface, and broke through the thick, porridge-like slush. She knew that she wouldn’t be able to stay in the water for very much longer. Already she couldn’t feel her fingers, and her toes were starting to hurt. She was just about to strike out for the edge of the pool, however, when the slush exploded right in front of her and her mommy came bursting out of the water, wild-eyed, screeching for breath.

  Elizabeth shouted at her, ‘Mommy! Don’t panic!’ But her mommy was hysterical. She thrashed her arms around and pedalled her legs, churning up a froth of ice and freezing-cold water. She went under again, but this time Elizabeth managed to catch hold of her nightgown, and pull her back up again.

  Her mommy surfaced, and tried to cling onto her – tried to climb onto her, scratching her face and pulling her hair in her panic. Elizabeth went under again, and swallowed a stomach-ful of freezing water. But she managed to struggle around until she was underneath her mommy, and then kick herself up to the surface and grasp her around her neck, from behind. She had swallowed too much water to be able to speak, but she started swimming towards the shallow end of the pool, dragging her mommy after her with a strength that was fifty per cent adrenaline, forty per cent determination, and ten per cent downright stubbornness. She wasn’t going to die. She wanted to write and ride horses. She didn’t want her mommy to die, either. At last, Elizabeth felt her heel scraping on the concrete bottom.

  ‘We’re all right, we’re all right,’ she managed to choke out. ‘We can stand up now.’ Then slowly zig-zagging like two drunks, the two of them waded the last six or seven feet to the steps and climbed out.

  Her mommy knelt on the edge of the pool and coughed up water, her head bowed, her wet hair straggling down. Elizabeth, her teeth chattering, limped all the way around it, peering into the slush to see if she could see the Peggy-girl. She lifted up the long-handled net which her father used for straining bugs and leaves out of the pool, and she pushed it into the water again and again, and churned it around, trying to feel the Peggy-girl’s body. There was no sign of her, and Elizabeth was growing too numb and shaky to go on searching. She dropped the net and walked over to her mommy. Her mommy raised her head and looked up at her. Her face was completely empty of colour, as if she were a black-and-white photograph of herself.

  ‘Where’s Peggy?’ she asked, in a hoarse, haunted voice.

  Elizabeth shook her head. ‘I can’t find her. I’ll have to call an ambulance.’

  Her mommy turned and stared at the surface of the pool. ‘It was her, wasn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so. We’d better get inside.’

  ‘All right. Don’t wait for me. You go run for the ambulance.’

  ‘Mommy – ’ Elizabeth hesitated. Her pink bathrobe was dripping, and she felt as if she would never ever be warm and dry, ever again.

  Her mommy said, ‘It’s all right, Lizzie. I love you. I won’t do anything silly.’

  Elizabeth left her and ran back towards the house. She turned as she climbed back up the steps, and there was her mommy, still kneeling under the moon, the loneliest figure she could ever imagine.

  Sheriff Grierson stood beside the empty pool with his big red arms folded and his big red face glistening with sweat. It was just after lunch the following day, and the heat was even more insufferable than on the day before. The flag hung limply from the Buchanans’ flagpole, and the whole day looked as if it had been given five coats of clear varnish.

  Elizabeth and her father stood close by. He had taken the first train back from New York, and looked tired and disoriented. Elizabeth was wearing her pink blouse and her white canvas pedal-pushers. She had braided her hair and tied it with a pink ribbon.

  Sheriff Grierson said, ‘I think we’re going to have to put this one down to some kind of hallucination, Mr Buchanan.’

  ‘It was real, though,’ Elizabeth insisted. ‘I saw it myself.’

  ‘Lizzie,’ said Sheriff Grierson, with great patience. ‘This swimming-pool of yours holds something upward of twenty-five thousand gallons of water. Not just that, its chlorinated water, which has a lower freezing-point than regular water. How could anybody have lowered the temperature of that volume of water sufficient to make it freeze over, on a hot June night with a temperature of 69 degrees?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I just know what I saw. It was all over ice, from one side to the other, and my mommy walked on it, right to the middle.’

  ‘To meet this girl who looks like your sister Peggy?’

  Elizabeth nodded.

  Sheriff Grierson sniffed and looked around. ‘I don’t know what to say to you, Lizzie. I surely don’t. I know you’re a good girl and a truthful girl, and you’ve never caused no trouble. I also know there’s been some funny stuff going on lately, like the way the Reverend Bracewaite met his Maker. I’m inclined to think that you believe you saw what you believed you saw, honestly and sincerely; but that it’s much more a question of believing rather than actually was.’

  ‘You think I’m making it up,’ said Elizabeth. Her arms and her legs were aching and she felt really angry with Sheriff Grierson for being so obtuse. Of course it was impossible for anybody to freeze a swimming-pool in the middle of summer, let alone enough for people to walk on. But it had happened, and it was Sheriff Grierson’s job to find out why, and how – not accuse her of storytelling, and her mommy of being mad.

  ‘I’m not saying you made it up deliberate,’ said Sheriff Grierson, defensively. ‘I’m just saying it came out of your imagination, and you honestly believed it to be when logic might have told you that it wasn’t.’ He turned to Elizabeth’s father and said, ‘Could I talk to you alone, for just a while?’

  ‘Elizabeth,’ said her father. ‘Do you think that you could go see if Mrs Patrick has finished packing mommy’s bag?’

  ‘I saw it,’ Elizabeth insisted. ‘I really did.’

  ‘Please, sweetheart,’ her father begged her. ‘I won’t be long.’

  Elizabeth went inside and her father and Sheriff Grierson strolled together around the pool.

  ‘I had hoped that Margaret was over it,’ said her father.

  Sheriff Grierson laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. ‘Obviously she took it harder than you first believed.’

  ‘There wasn’t any sign of this girl who was supposed to be Peggy?’

  Sheriff Grierson shook his head. ‘No footprints, nothing.’

  ‘And what about the pool?’

  ‘Deputy Regan said it was unseasonably c
old, all right, but he didn’t notice no ice.’

  ‘It could have melted by then.’

  ‘Mr Buchanan, I don’t believe that there was any ice to begin with.’

  ‘The Reverend Bracewaite died of frostbite. Maybe we’re dealing the same kind of phenomenon. Freak weather patterns, sudden localized cold snaps, thought of that? I published a book last year about strange weather conditions in the Litchfield area. In the summer of 1896 it snowed on a quarter-acre field just outside of New Preston and nowhere else.’

  ‘Mr Buchanan, think about it,’ said Sheriff Grierson. ‘It’s just not possible. And apart from that, there’s this story your wife and Lizzie have been telling us about some mysterious girl who’s supposed to be your late daughter Peggy but doesn’t actually look like her.’

  Elizabeth’s father looked back towards the house. ‘Well . . .’ he admitted. ‘I know that it’s hard to believe. But I’ve studied all kinds of local phenomena – ghosts, and mysterious attacks, and things falling out of the sky – and while some of them are bound to be bunkum, some of them are bound to be true, too.’

  Sheriff Grierson gave him a comforting pat. ‘Come on, Mr Buchanan. There’s no harm done. But your wife’s still suffering the effects of grief, and Lizzie’s always been a little bit of a dreamer, hasn’t she?’

  ‘I guess,’ said Elizabeth’s father. Then he said, ‘Anyway, Margaret’s going back to the clinic this evening. They’re going to give her some tests, see what they can do to help her.’

  ‘How about Lizzie?’

  ‘I think she’ll be all right, once her mother’s gone. She’ll have to be.’

  They began to walk back up the lawn. ‘Split your family up some, all of this, hasn’t it?’ asked Sheriff Grierson.

  Elizabeth’s father said, ‘After Peggy went . . . I felt that the family slipped out of my grasp. I didn’t know where we were going any longer, or what I was supposed to do. Sometimes I blame myself for everything. For Peggy drowning, because I didn’t drain the pool. For Laura, because I wasn’t a strong enough father-figure. For Margaret, for driving her half out of her mind. Now I feel as if I’ve let Lizzie down, too, because I can’t believe her.’

  ‘You’re wrong to blame yourself, Mr Buchanan,’ said Sheriff Grierson. ‘I’ve seen this kind of thing happen to families before. It’s the natural effect of a tragedy, that’s all. Things will work out for you, don’t you worry about that. You just have to square up to your problems, look ‘em dead in the eye, and then try to lick ‘em in a fair fight.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s been worse than losing a child. It’s almost as if – when Peggy died – she left, but something else moved in with us.’

  ‘Don’t get your drift,’ said the Sheriff.

  ‘It’s hard to explain. But I feel as if we lost a daughter and gained a curse. There’s something living with us that brings us bad luck.’

  Sheriff Grierson said nothing. It was plain that he still didn’t understand what Elizabeth’s father was talking about. He didn’t care for superstition, and he didn’t like anything inexplicable. He believed in God but he didn’t believe in curses, or bad luck, or imaginary girls who could walk on the surface of swimming-pools. He was still irritated enough by what had happened to Dick Bracewaite, he was personally angry at Dick Bracewaite himself, for having been so inconsiderate as to be killed in a way which defied explanation.

  Doctor Ferris was waiting in the hallway for them, looking more like an out-of-work violinist than ever.

  ‘How is she?’ Elizabeth’s father asked him.

  ‘She’s fine,’ said Doctor Ferris. ‘Tired, anxious, but no physical problems, except that she’s underweight. I gave her something to help her sleep.’

  ‘You really believe that the clinic’s the answer?’

  Doctor Ferris snapped his bag shut. ‘It’s obvious she can’t stay here. This house and all of its surroundings obviously have the effect of bringing on these morbid hallucinations. She needs professional care, well away from here, otherwise she’s going to grow steadily worse. I don’t like to second-guess the specialists, but it wouldn’t surprise me if electric shock treatment weren’t considered desirable.’

  ‘Electric shock?’ asked Elizabeth’s father, anxiously.

  ‘As I say, I don’t like to second-guess the specialists. But electro-convulsive therapy has been shown to be quite successful in the treatment of severe depressives. Or, failing that, leucotomy.’

  Elizabeth’s father looked lost and dejected. Sheriff Grierson said, ‘If there’s anything else you need, Mr Buchanan, you know where to reach me. Doesn’t just have to be police business, neither.’

  Elizabeth’s father gave him a wan smile. ‘Thanks, sheriff. We’ll manage.’

  Sheriff Grierson tipped his hat, revealing a sweat-stained underarm. Then he walked back to his car, with Doctor Ferris following behind. As they drove away, neither of them saw the white face watching them from the upstairs window, just above the porch. Nor did Elizabeth’s father, as he stood watching them go. When he eventually turned around and walked back into the house, the face was gone.

  Laura was woken up by somebody whispering, very close to her ear. She opened her eyes with a start, and found herself staring at the empty pillow next to her. She blinked. She could have sworn that she had heard somebody whispering. She didn’t know what they had been whispering, but it had been one of those distinctive, saliva-sizzling whispers, conniving and secretive.

  She sat up in bed. This was her first morning in Los Angeles, and the breeze was flooding warmly into her bedroom, so that the net curtains billowed and flapped. Her room was whitewashed, small and plain, with a carved oak Spanish-style bed and a carved oak bureau, on top of which stood a large blue bowl of freshly-picked oranges. On one wall a blue-and-white rug was hanging; on the others there were straw fans and paintings of orange groves. There was a pungent smell of eucalyptus in the air, combined with the smell of freshly-watered terracotta pots.

  She climbed out of bed and stepped out onto her narrow balcony. Aunt Beverley’s house was perched on the brink of a cliff overlooking Santa Monica Bay. She had bought it ‘for peanuts’ from the actor George Albert. Although it was quite rundown, and needed redecoration, it was cool and airy with tiled floors and whitewashed cloisters, and a small enclosed courtyard with a blue mosaic fountain and a showy purple bougainvillea on its eastern wall.

  Laura looked down at the beach. The ocean was masked behind a thin photographic mist, through which an occasional wavelet sparkled, but it was still early yet, only ten after seven, and by nine o’clock the mist would have burned off. Laura was missing Lizzie really badly, and her father and mommy, too; but she thought this was Paradise, and although she had cried into her pillow before she went to sleep last night, she already had the feeling that she belonged here. She liked going around with Aunt Beverley, too. Aunt Beverley took whatever she wanted and went wherever she wanted to go, and spoke her mind. She might look like a man, and swear like a man; but she was stronger and funnier and ruder than any man that Laura had ever met, and whenever she was with her, Laura felt adventurous but safe. Aunt Beverley seemed to know absolutely everybody in Hollywood, and she was disparaging about all of them. She called Charlie Chaplin ‘the Sniffer’ because he sniffed around every pretty girl at every party he went to. Elia Kazan – ‘Gadge’ to his closest friends – she referred to as ‘Madge’ because she thought he was so self-indulgent and effete.

  Aunt Beverley was a fierce woman and no mistake, and you could see it in the eyes of the people she talked to.

  Laura was still standing on the balcony in her too-big red-and-white striped pyjamas when she heard that whispering again. It seemed so close that she turned around, startled, but there was nobody there. It could have been the ocean, shushing. It could have been the breeze. Yet she was sure that she had heard somebody close to her ear, trying to tell her something. Whisper-whisper-whisper, the way schoolgirls do.

  Her room was empty, a
part from Mr Bunzum, tilted lopsidedly on the pillow. Poor old Mr Bunzum had made it to Hollywood at last, and still couldn’t drive his excellent red Packard, poor old whisker-face, mainly because he was nothing but a stuffed rabbit, and didn’t really own an excellent red Packard anyway. Laura lifted up the net curtains and stepped back into her bedroom and strained her ears. She could hear a woman singing ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’ in Spanish. She opened her bedroom door and looked down into the courtyard, and saw a plump black-haired woman down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the blue mosaic. The woman looked up and smiled and called, ‘Buenos dias!’ Laura quickly closed her door in embarrassment.

  It was then that she turned and saw the faintest outline of a girl, standing on the balcony. The girl was aged about ten or eleven, the same age as Laura, with tousled curls. She was wearing the simplest of white dresses. Her face was turned away, and for some reason Laura thought that she was crying. She was scarcely visible, no more than a half-transparent disturbance in the morning air, although Laura could see her more distinctly when the breeze dropped and the net curtains fell across the window.

  Laura stood still, her hands tingling with fright. The breeze blew up the curtains, and for a moment the girl’s outline disappeared; but then they fell again, and the girl faintly materialized. She turned towards Laura. Her eyes were little more than smudges, and her cheeks were white, but Laura could see that she was deathly serious. What was more, Laura knew her – she knew her so well that her heart almost stopped on the spot.

  The girl was Peggy. She didn’t actually look like Peggy. She was much older than Peggy had been when she drowned. But Laura was absolutely certain that it was her.