“Are you going to kill me?”
She stared at me, waiting for an answer.
After a minute, she started shaking.
I opened the door and stepped out into the storm.
“Let’s go,” I said.
6
As it turned out, the bodyguard’s coat was overrated.
I stood on the bridge, soaked to the skin. Janice was just as wet-she’d climbed out of the Explorer looking like a model for an L.L. Bean catalog, and now she looked like she belonged in a homeless shelter. Still, she seemed younger somehow-her makeup washed away, her blonde hair plastered to her skull, her delicate hands holding an oversized flashlight that made her seem childish.
Thunder boomed above-an angry bear’s growl.
“This is crazy,” Janice said.
“Maybe,” I said.
She aimed the flashlight at my face, eyeing me like I was a hungry grizzly. I was hungry-hungry for things she could tell me. I had a lot of questions, but now that we were here I wasn’t sure how to go about asking them.
I decided to tell Janice as little as possible. “There’s someone who spends a lot of time here,” I began. “I want you to tell me about her.”
“This is a bridge. God knows how many people have crossed it. You can’t expect me to pick up an impression of just one of them. That’s not why you brought me here, is it?”
I told her that it was.
I explained that doing what I asked was her only chance to stay alive.
And then I told her about the little girl.
Some of my words were lost in thunder, but Janice heard enough. “You’re telling me that the little girl you’re looking for is dead?”
“She’s a ghost.”
“Oh, God.”
“Like I told you before: I see ghosts.”
“I sensed your power when I touched your knife. It was nothing more than a glimpse really, but I saw enough to convince me that you were telling the truth. I would have never believed it before that. I thought you were trying to scare me with all that talk about seeing Natasha Orlovsky’s ghost. You just don’t seem like the type.”
“I’m not. When it comes to the supernatural, I’m a pretty hard sell. There’s not much I believe in, really. But I do believe what I see.”
“I wish I could see the things you’ve seen.”
She sounded as dreamy as a schoolgirl with a crush, and I had to laugh. “Don’t be so sure about that.”
“But you’ve seen behind the veil.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Tell me…” She hesitated. “Tell me what you’ve seen.”
I smiled at her. There we were, standing wet and cold on a bridge in the middle of nowhere, but Janice Ravenwood didn’t mind. Not as long as she had a chance of unlocking an eternal mystery or two. She stared at me, waiting for answers with the eager eyes of an acolyte.
Janice’s flashlight beam burned my retinas.
I reached out and took the flashlight from her hands.
My face was lost in the dark.
I turned the light on Janice.
I saw her clearly, as clearly as I saw the dead.
But that didn’t mean I knew her secrets.
“Please tell me,” she persisted. “Good or bad…I really want to know what it’s like on the other side.”
Her eyes gleamed expectantly. A woman who’d lived for years off of pretty lies, waiting to hear the truth.
“Later,” I lied. “Later, I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
I described the little girl. Her blue eyes, her blonde hair, her little Addams Family dress. I pointed to the spot where she sat, legs dangling over the side as she watched the creek for the splash of a steelhead’s tail fin.
Driven by the storm, the creek rushed faster now. Dark and brown as the rain bled over the earth and the river drank mud from the shore.
The rising wind howled through the forest and gave voice to the tempest that rose from the sea. Though not so loud as the thunder. The ground shook as sharp cracks slashed the steady scream of the storm.
“We’re wasting time,” I said, and Janice nodded.
She sat on the wet wood in exactly the same spot as the little girl. Inhaling deeply, she closed her eyes. A minute passed. Janice started to shiver. The rain pounded down. Droplets stained her cheeks, glistening in the flashlight’s stark illumination.
“She likes it here,” Janice said finally. “She likes watching the fish. Steelheads. They swim against the current. They fight it. They have to fight it, because they have to get upstream, they have to-”
“They have to spawn.”
“Yes. The little girl knows that, because her father told her about the steelheads in a letter. He promised that her mother would bring her to this very spot, where she could see for herself. And her mother did just that, and told her to wait for her father, and left her here all alone.
“The girl is frightened. She doesn’t want to disappoint her father. She doesn’t know him, except for his letters. She keeps them in a special place, bound with a black ribbon, and she looks at them when she feels lonely. Sometimes she reads them over and over, and sometimes she just stares at the pretty red envelopes, at the return address written in her father’s strong hand.
“She knows that address will be her new home. She hopes she’ll like her father’s house as much as she likes it here on the bridge. She doesn’t mind being alone here. She’s used to being alone. She’s a quiet girl. She doesn’t have any friends at home. Her mother won’t allow it.
“She waits for her father. She hopes he will be her friend. She stares down at the water and watches as a steelhead slices a dark ripple on the surface, almost close enough to touch. If she were only a little closer, if she reached out at just the right time…”
“I don’t care about the fish,” I said. “Tell me about the little girl. Tell me who she is.”
“It’s not that easy. I follow her thoughts like a chain-one link at a time. First her parents and the creek. Then the fish…”
“Forget the goddamn fish.”
Janice leaned forward at a dangerous angle, as if she were trying to see her reflection in the brown water. It was impossible to see anything there. With a pair of living eyes, at least. But if you were staring through the eyes of the dead “She sees her shadow on the water,” Janice said. “She seems so small. She doesn’t like being small. Everyone says she’s pretty, but she knows they only say that to be polite. She’s too thin, and her skin is pale as white corn, and she doesn’t like her blonde hair. She wants to be someone else. Someone different. She wants dark hair like a girl in a storybook. And she wants pretty skin, skin like no one else on earth.
“Skin like the scales of a fish, skin that shines and gleams like a brave knight’s armor. She wants that more than anything. She’s not going to look away from her shadow until she sees a steelhead swim through her rippling body. She wants to see that living mercury splash through her face and-”
“ Forget the fish, dammit!” I grabbed Janice’s coat, afraid she was about to tumble into the creek. “I want to know about the girl!”
Janice cried out, and the sound was like a crack of thunder, as if something had snapped inside her.
I shook her. “Tell me her name!”
“It can’t be.” Janice shook her head. “It’s impossible.”
Dropping the flashlight, I pulled Janice to her feet and slapped her hard. I gave her one more chance to answer, and my tone of voice told her that I wouldn’t give her another.
“Everyone calls her CeeCee,” Janice said. “Everyone but her father. In his letters, he always calls her Circe.”
My fingers dug into Janice’s trim shoulders. “You’re hurting me,” she said, but I barely heard her.
A dozen conflicting impressions raced through my mind. The little blonde girl and raven-haired Circe…two faces becoming one, features joining around a pair of deep blue eyes.
But one couldn’t be the other. It was impossible. Their eyes might be the same, but they were so different. Not just the color of their hair-that could be changed on a whim. But the girl was dead, and the woman was alive, and there was no way to justify that they were one and the same.