Swimmer Read online

  ‘Mr Rook?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Jim Rook here. Who wants him?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know whether you’ll remember me. Jennie Oppenheimer. Well, Jennie Bauer when I was single. I was in your class in ’91.’

  ‘Jennie Bauer … Jennie Bauer … Hey, yes! Of course I remember you! Sure! I remember all of my students, even the students I’d rather forget. Let me see now … King Lear … when Cordelia weeps over the dying king, and says, “Had you not been their father, these white flakes Did challenge pity of them” – what did you say? “Does that mean he had dandruff?” Yes, Jennie. I remember you. I remember you clearly. Long blond hair. Very cute. Short span of attention, I’m afraid to say.’

  ‘My son’s dead.’

  Jim didn’t know what to say. He very rarely heard from his students after they had left Special Class II at West Grove Community College. They always swore that they would write, and keep in touch, but he always knew they wouldn’t. Those who had been saved by his remedial English class from a life of car-washing and dog-walking and other McJobs were always too busy to remember the scruffy teacher who had shown them the difference between Hamlet and ham-and-eggs, and who had brought them to the edge of tears with his recitation of poetry by John Frederick Nims: ‘Inference of night wind, a rumor of rain.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ said Jim, thinking, Why is she telling me? I haven’t heard from her since the leaving party after her final exams. ‘What happened? Was it an accident?’

  ‘He drowned. It happened yesterday morning. Mike and his sister were playing in the pool and I left them alone for only a moment, but he drowned.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. That’s a tragedy. How old was he?’

  ‘Nine, and he was such a good swimmer.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Jennie. My heart goes out to you. Was Mike your only boy?’

  ‘His father’s devastated. We can’t have any more children and he’s blaming me.’

  ‘It’s the shock, that’s all,’ Jim reassured her. ‘He’ll get over it. An accident is an accident.’

  ‘But this is the point, Mr Rook. This is why I’m calling you.’

  ‘Hey, listen. I think you can call me Jim now. We’re not in Special Class II any more.’

  ‘I know … But you do still have that ability, don’t you?’

  ‘Ability?’

  ‘You can still see – well, you can still see ghosts and things like that?’

  Jim didn’t say anything, but he thought, Uh-oh, what’s coming now? So many people who found out that he could see spirits and other supernatural presences wanted him to help them with all kinds of other-worldly problems. Either they wanted him to summon up their late Uncle Charlie to find out what he’d done with all of his rare Civil War coins, or else they wanted to discover if a chilly presence in their kitchen was the cause of all of their rotten luck. They never seemed to accept that supernatural manifestations walk among us all the time, with their own tragic problems and their own complicated agendas, and spirits are hardly ever interested either in contacting the still-living or helping them, and especially not in harming them. They were benign, most of them – benign and slightly stunned, like the victims of a bus crash.

  But Jennie didn’t say what he expected her to say. ‘Listen, Mr Rook, I came out of the house and I was sure that somebody had just pushed their way through the bushes. Then – when I was trying to save Mike – I saw wet footprints on the bricks around the side of the pool. They weren’t a child’s footprints – they weren’t Mikey’s or Tracey’s – but there was nobody else there. Tracey tells me that she didn’t see anybody, and by the time the police arrived the footprints had all dried up. The detective told me I was in shock. Well, I was in shock. Of course I was in shock. But I know what I saw.’

  ‘So … uh … what do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want you to find out who murdered Mike, Mr Rook. I want to find out who pushed him under the water, and why.’ She was crying now, and she was so grief-stricken and exhausted that her voice acquired a deep throaty undertone, as if she were starting to sing an aria in a tragic opera.

  ‘Jennie, I’d love to be able to help you. But this sounds like police business to me.’

  ‘I told you. The police don’t believe me. They’re going to say it was an accident, or parental neglect, or whatever.’

  Jim sat down on the arm of his couch. Outside the window, the sun was gradually sinking over Venice and the evening sky was the color of boysenberry jelly. ‘Jennie, I’m packing up to leave. I’ve been offered a job with the Department of Education in Washington, D.C.’

  ‘You’re leaving? What about Special Class II?’

  ‘Well, we all have to move on. This is going to give me the chance to help students all over the country, not just LA.’

  ‘When are you going? Do you think we could meet?’

  Jim looked toward Tibbles Two, but all she could do was yawn and dig her claws into the cushions. Either she was provoking him into making a decision, or else she was trying to tell him that he was wasting his time. She was only a cat, for sure, but he had seen what she could do before. Her nose was more finely tuned for fortune-telling cards than any of the so-called ‘psychic sensitives’ that he had ever met.

  The day before he had been offered his new job in Washington, she had scratched out of his Grimaud pack the eight of diamonds, signifying ‘delay’, and the ace of diamonds, which represented ‘a wicked woman’. Then – haughtily – she had stalked back to the couch, curled herself up and sat there watching him to see what his reaction would be.

  Jim said, ‘I’m packing now, as a matter of fact. I’m supposed to be flying out Wednesday morning.’

  ‘Mr Rook – I’m sorry, Jim – I know this is an imposition. But I know that Mike didn’t drown by accident, and I don’t have any other way of proving it.’

  Jim raked his fingers through his tousled hair. In the mirror on the other side of his apartment, another Jim Rook, with his face back to front, did the same thing. The Jim Rook in the mirror was thinking, When you take on a student, when you teach her how to write and how to talk, and how to make her own impression on the world around her, when does your responsibility end? All of that poetry you taught her, all of those plays, all of those hours struggling with Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson and Kenneth Patchen: ‘Have you wondered why all the windows in heaven were broken?’

  The trouble was, he knew what the truth was; and the truth was that a teacher’s responsibility never ends, any more than a parent’s or a priest’s.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Do you know the Café del Rey, on Admiralty Way? I can meet you there at – what, maybe eight o’clock?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jennie told him, and he could tell that she was crying. ‘I’m so frightened – I’m so scared – and I couldn’t think of anybody else to turn to.’

  After she had hung up, Jim sat on the edge of the couch with his head bowed. He had promised himself that he would never again answer an appeal for help from anybody who was troubled by supernatural events – or seemingly supernatural events, anyhow. He had nearly died from pneumonia at the age of nine, the same age as Mike, and ever since then he had seen faces and people and things that he didn’t want to think of, ever again. Shadows, ghosts. Demons running through the streets, and screaming at him out of closets. Dead people, standing outside supermarkets. Sad and bewildered faces, reflected in windows, when there was nobody there.

  He couldn’t take any more of it. People didn’t seem to understand that he found his psychic ability even more frightening than they did. He had no choice about what he saw. If he went to visit a friend, and his friend’s dead grandfather was sitting in the corner of the room, and only Jim could see him, what could he do about it? What was he supposed to say?

  As he sat there, Tibbles Two dropped off the couch on to the floor. She padded across to the coffee table, where Jim had stacked all his various decks of mystical cards. She stood up on her hi
nd legs and tipped the Grimaud deck on to the floor, so that the cards were scattered out of their box.

  ‘Thanks, TT,’ said Jim. ‘It’s nice to know that there’s somebody even messier than me.’

  He knelt down to pick up the cards, but while he was shuffling them back into order, TT picked one out of the deck between her teeth and walked off into the kitchen with it.

  ‘The hell—’ said Jim, and followed her.

  TT was standing over her water bowl. With great care she dropped the Grimaud card into the water, and watched it as it sank.

  ‘Great move,’ said Jim. He knelt down and picked the card out of the water, and shook it. It was the death card, the card of the empty-eyed skeleton, the nine of clubs, wrapped in a dark gray sheet with a scythe over his shoulder and an hourglass in his hand.

  ‘What’s this?’ Jim asked her, holding up the dripping card. ‘All of a sudden you’re playing boats?’

  TT stared at him as if she couldn’t believe how stupid he was.

  ‘What, then?’ he demanded.

  She came up to him and flicked the card out of his hand with her paw. Then she picked it up in her mouth and dropped it back in the water bowl.

  ‘Death in the water,’ said Jim. ‘That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it? Death by drowning. And more than one death.’

  He fished the card out of the water bowl and shook it. ‘Listen … I’m going to see Jennie and try to find out what happened. But I can’t do anything more than that. I’m still leaving for Washington Wednesday, and when I’m gone, I’m gone for good. And nobody else in the world is ever going to discover that I can see their recently deceased nephew playing ball on their lawn.’

  Two

  Jennie looked smaller and much more pale than he remembered her – as if the laughing, suntanned, provocative girl that he had taught in Special Class II all those years ago had died, and this was her ghost. She was sitting in the corner of the café with a glass of mineral water, staring out of the window, and it was only when Jim walked right up to her table that she lifted her eyes, and focused them, and gave him the faintest suggestion of a smile.

  ‘Well, well. Jennie Bauer.’

  ‘Jennie Oppenheimer these days.’

  Jim sat down, and ordered a Coors. ‘What happened to your son … that was terrible. I had some friends in San Fernando who lost their daughter in their pool. Tragic.’

  ‘You mean that she was deliberately drowned, like Mikey?’

  Jim sat back in his chair and looked at her in just the same narrow-eyed way that he looked at all of his students when they flew off on some over-imaginative tangent. ‘You saw the bushes move, and you saw some wet footprints beside the pool?’

  ‘Somebody was there, Mr Rook. Somebody or something. I could feel it. It was cold. It was very evil. And I swear to God I’m not making this up.’

  Jim’s Coors arrived, in a ridiculously tall, frosted glass. Personally, he preferred it straight out of the can. All the same, he scooped up a handful of pretzels, chewed them until they were mush, and then sluiced them down with a cheek-bulging mouthful of cold beer.

  ‘Let me tell you this, Jennie. In my experience, spirits are not half as interested in our world, the physical world, as we are in theirs. They’ve lived their lives, okay? They’re gone. They’re too busy worrying about ridiculous little undone details, like Why didn’t I tell my father I loved him when I had the chance? They don’t threaten us – not very often, anyhow. And they very seldom try to hurt us. Most of the time, they can’t. They don’t have the … whatdyacallit? … substance.’

  ‘But somebody drowned Mike, I swear to God.’

  Jim laid a hand on her arm. ‘I don’t know what to say. You saw the bushes move. You saw some wet footprints beside the pool. You had the weird feeling that somebody had walked through your yard. But none of that amounts to any kind of real evidence, does it? I mean, let’s be serious about this.’

  Jennie stared at him. He remembered her eyes: they were such an extraordinary blue, like the windows of heaven before they broke.

  ‘My son drowned. You don’t think I’m serious?’

  ‘I don’t know … You’re making me feel guilty. I always used to give you guys in my class the general idea that there’s a mystical explanation for everything that happens. But maybe there isn’t. Maybe life is just life, and accidents are accidents.’

  ‘You don’t believe that, do you?’

  Jim shrugged, and looked away. Across the crowded, brightly lit café, a pretty young girl with short blond hair was throwing her head back in laughter, and he had a sudden pang for the life that he had never lived, accidents or no accidents.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you, Jennie. When they do harm us, spirits almost always do it for a very good reason … in my experience, anyhow. Usually they harm us out of revenge. I can’t think what a nine-year-old boy could have done for a spirit to want to drown him.’

  ‘So that’s it?’

  ‘That’s it, I’m afraid. What you saw, what you felt … maybe it was some kind of spiritual manifestation. But there’s no evidence that it had anything to do with Mikey’s death. And think about it: if there was a spirit there, it could have been trying to rescue him, not drown him. Every child has a spirit watching out for him: what some people like to think of as a guardian angel. Maybe Mikey’s couldn’t do anything to save him.’

  Tears were sliding freely down Jennie’s cheeks. ‘Is there any way to tell?’

  ‘Well … I’ve heard that some mediums can do something they call a “spirit-trace”. It’s a way of, like, sniffing out a spirit’s scent. That would tell you for sure if there was a spirit there, and it might give you some idea if the spirit meant to do Mike any harm. But apart from that, I don’t think that spirit-traces are very specific.’

  ‘Can you do one? I could pay you for your time.’

  ‘A spirit-trace?’ Jim shook his head. ‘Way beyond my expertise, I’m afraid. I just see things, by accident. You need a real full-blown mystic for that kind of thing.’

  ‘Do you know any full-blown mystics?’

  ‘I used to. But that was long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.’

  Jennie reached across the table and took hold of both of his hands. ‘Mr Rook – Jim – please help me. I have to know how Mike died.’

  ‘Well, there’s a psychic fair in De Longpre Park tomorrow. Maybe somebody there will be able to help you.’

  ‘Will you come with me?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jennie. I’m not sure that this is really the right way to go.’ Jim didn’t really like having anything to do with full-time professional mystics, who always made him feel as if he was a charlatan – in spite of the fact that his psychic talent was probably far more potent than theirs.

  Apart from that, he had been planning on taking his fellow teacher Karen Goudemark up the coast for the day, to Captain Flynn’s Famous Seafood Shack, followed by a romantic walk on the shore. He was intent on trying to persuade her to quit her job at West Grove and come with him to Washington. Karen was the most delectable woman he had ever met. Soft, warm, feminine, funny. She had cheekbones like Garbo, with honey poured over her head for hair.

  ‘Please, Jim. I’ll do anything.’

  Jim picked up his napkin and dabbed away the tears on her face. ‘Okay. How about twelve o’clock?’

  Jennie lifted his hands and kissed his knuckles. ‘You don’t know what this means to me. I’ve been feeling like I’m going crazy.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jim. ‘Happens to me all the time.’

  ‘A psychic fair?’ Karen repeated in disbelief.

  ‘We don’t have to stay for long. I just have to find somebody who can do this special kind of spirit thing.’

  ‘Jim … you know I don’t have any time for all of that hippie-mystical stuff.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But I promised. It’s Jennie Bauer. She used to be in my class, about seven years ago. Her kid drowned.’ He told her all about the moving b
ushes and the footprints, and Jennie’s feeling that ‘somebody was there … It was cold. It was very evil.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Two days ago. The poor girl’s still in shock.’

  ‘Two days ago? And you’re taking her to see a psychic? For God’s sake, Jim, she needs a fully qualified counselor.’

  ‘But she’s convinced that what she saw was real, and nobody else believes her. Not even her husband.’

  ‘And you think that somebody at a psychic fair can do that for her? Come on, Jim, you know yourself that all of this seance business is a scam. She’s going to end up even more broken-hearted than she is now. And probably poorer, too.’

  Jim shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She’s so totally sure that some evil presence came into her yard. What worries me is that if I don’t help her, she’ll go looking on her own for somebody else who will. And then – yes, I agree, there really will be a danger that she gets ripped off.’

  Karen shook her head slowly from side to side, so that her blond hair swung across her forehead. ‘You’re impossible, you know that, don’t you? You seem to think it’s your personal responsibility to cure the whole world of illiteracy, dyslexia, cultural alienation, lack of appreciation of Longfellow, acne and poor self-image – as well as every supernatural manifestation from Angels to Zombies.’

  ‘That’s not true. I never said I could cure acne.’

  Karen said, ‘All right, then. I’ll come along to this psychic shindig. But only on one condition: that we still make it up the coast in time for lunch at Captain Flynn’s.’

  ‘Deal. Done. Absolutely. And I love you for it.’

  He led her out of her house and opened the door of his saddle-bronze Eldorado convertible with a flourish. ‘You won’t regret this,’ he told her. ‘Some of these psychic fairs … well, you can pick up some terrific bargains. Knitwear, pottery. Magic crystals.’