Amanda Lee must’ve heard at least part of what he said, because she scooted forward on the swing, stopping its mournful creaking. Revitalized.
So I told her about the dream red sky and the swimming pool, about me in the white bathing suit, walking into the study to find Gavin reading a book. Then about the desert, the spider, the two girls in the air machines, and the final image of blindfolded Elizabeth.
Amanda Lee didn’t say anything for a while, just leaned back in her porch swing and let it sway back and forth as she touched the cross around her neck. The swing’s chains moaned again as Louis and Scott gathered near me, done with scrutinizing the porch.
But Twyla actually walked up the first step for a better look at Amanda Lee, who turned her face to her, feeling her coolness. Unflustered, she didn’t say anything about the ghost eyeballing her.
“I only wish I were a better detective,” Amanda Lee said softly, looking at me again. “Then I would understand what all these images mean when we put them together.”
“Then let’s take them one by one,” I said.
She was game. “All right. A swimming pool could signify the need for a mental recess—that Gavin is taking a moment to try and understand his feelings.”
“That’s a good thing,” I said. “The haunting is making him sort himself out. Maybe he’ll be easier to access from this point on.”
Or maybe not. But pessimism would get me nowhere.
Louis asked, “How about that pool man who appeared in the dream?”
Amanda Lee addressed the location of his voice. “That’s a new element. One I don’t have a ready answer for.”
He rested on a step, and Scott followed his example, engaged in the conversation, too. Twyla was meandering closer to Amanda Lee, and I had the feeling that she was actually checking out the chunky turquoise cross necklace on my part-time ally. What a fashion victim.
“Could the pool man be a keeper of Gavin’s emotions?” Louis asked. “Could it be that he somehow maintains order for Gavin’s feelings in his mind?”
When I gave Louis a check-you-out look, he seemed humble. Then he offered something like an apology for being so smart.
“I like learning,” he said casually. “I couldn’t get enough education in life, so I spend a lot of time in libraries looking over shoulders at books and, these days, computers. Lord knows I have the time to fill.”
When this was all over, I was dying to have a talk with Louis about why he was so mild when he could do just about any damned thing he wanted to as a ghost. He’d existed awhile, through Civil Rights and everything. But it could be that earth-shattering stuff like that didn’t get to beings like us.
“Maybe,” I said, going on, “in Gavin’s psyche, the pool man plays the part you mentioned, Louis. But why do I get the feeling there’s something more to him in general?”
Amanda Lee said, “It’s because of the way the pool man was lingering under Wendy’s window that morning you visited her.”
Twyla took a detour from her Amanda Lee surveillance and wrinkled her nose. “Grody. From what Jen told us before, it sounds like pool boy is a barf bag.”
“Anyway,” I said, moving on to Amanda Lee again. “How about the desert imagery? What do you make of that?”
“Isolation, loss, misfortune.”
Louis chimed in once more. “That’s where this Gavin fellow has been wandering all this time in his head. A figurative desert. But what about the spider that showed up?”
“Spiders,” Amanda Lee said, clearly hearing Louis now, “are powerful forces that can protect. Would it make sense that the spider is attempting to discourage the dreamer from continuing any more destructive behavior?”
“Like mur-ders,” Twyla singsonged, but I didn’t think Amanda Lee heard her. Or maybe she’d already learned to ignore shit like this very fast.
“However,” Louis said to Amanda Lee, “a spider creates webs…”
Scott volunteered his view. “And webs trap things. Or people.”
Did I have a crack team or what?
“A spider,” Amanda Lee said, “might symbolize trapped memories for the dreamer. If we take into account the fact that Liz appeared later in the dream, I’d venture to guess that he’s caged with the recollection of her, and it’s a constant punishment for what he did.”
I’d told the others about my doubts regarding Gavin’s guilt and Amanda Lee’s belief in it, so I looked first to Louis for a reaction. He didn’t have one. Neither did Scott. It seemed all of them were deep in thinking mode—even Twyla, who’d just sat on the porch with her petticoats spread around her, her chin in her hand.
Louis finally said, “That bird, though… it killed the spider.”
My turn. “Based on the original dream, we figured the bird was a protector.”
“Or a shadow of guilt,” added Amanda Lee.
Louis leaned an elbow on the top step. “It seems to me that the bird killed the spider to protect that little girl, who was brought down by the spider’s web.”
“Amanda Lee thought she was an expression of Gavin’s repressed feminine side,” I said.
“His anima?”
Amanda Lee seemed like she hadn’t heard him correctly, but then she asked me a question that confirmed she had. “Louis said that, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Has he studied Jungian psychology and dream analysis?”
Louis’s smile told all. With the amount of time he hung out in libraries, he probably knew everything by now.
“I’d say so,” I said to Amanda Lee as Twyla turned to Scott and made a finger-shoved-down-the-throat gesture. He only laughed, like he was used to Louis’s turbo brain.
As for Amanda Lee, she seemed like she’d love to take on another ghost pet, and my hackles rose, not because I felt like I was being replaced but… well, would Amanda Lee make plans for him, just like she’d done for me?
She asked me, “Does Louis know everything about the first dream?”
“We’ve talked about it before.” At McGlinn’s party.
He said, “Not that I’m adding much to the conversation right now. Honestly, I’d like to spend some time thinking all this through, Miss Amanda Lee, before I volunteer more theories.”
“I would love to hear them, Louis. And please, it’s Amanda Lee.”
“Won’t do any good to ask him to call you that,” I said, smiling at Louis, who only shrugged.
Twyla was still gagging, but Scott was ignoring her now.
Who wasn’t? “I have a theory, and you’re not going to like it, Amanda Lee. It’s about that part of the dream when Elizabeth appeared in that bloody blindfold shaking her head.”
“Ooo!” Twyla raised her hand, wanting desperately to be constructive. “I know this one. Elizabeth’s, like, the statue of justice.”
I could tell Amanda Lee still couldn’t hear her as much as she could Louis, and I repeated what Twyla had said, then added my two cents.
“That’s a good thought, but I think Gavin’s dream was trying to tell me something through Elizabeth. She’s saying that we’re not seeing everything we should be seeing, and she was shaking her head because we’re on the wrong track with all our theories.”
Of course, Amanda Lee didn’t agree. “But what about all the blood you’ve seen in his subconscious? All the guilt and darkness and fire… ?”
Louis came to a slow stand. “Not to belabor the point, but I could be applying myself to this with a little elbow grease.”
“There’s a computer in the casita where you could look up dream analysis and come up with more ideas,” I said. “Amanda Lee could fill you in on anything you might be missing.”
He glanced at her. “May I?”
“Be my guest.”
As he whooshed over to the small house, I kind of felt like he’d indeed taken my place. But Amanda Lee was watching me with a look that said she wasn’t going to use Louis like she’d used me.