Not Flesh Nor Feathers

There was more to it than that—there was a problem down by the river again, at practically the same place where the armory used to be—but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to speculate just yet. They were three distant stepping stones, Caroline’s ghost, the armory, and the North Shore apartments. But I couldn’t shake the idea that they were connected. It was simultaneously too unlikely and too obvious.

I was seized with the urge to call Nick, but I wasn’t sure what I’d tell him if I reached him, so I sat there with Lu and we watched the rain for a few more minutes. My mind kept wandering back to something else Caroline had said, and it too made me wonder.

They are coming for me. They are coming for all of us.

Who? But the answer was obvious. It was written all over Christ’s face when he sat in my car and tried to tell me about the things stalking the riverfront.

The more I thought about it, the more I concluded that it was no answer at all; it only raised more questions. Who were they—and what did they want?

And why did Caroline think it was all about her?

10

Dead on Market Street

I ended up calling Nick anyway, because who else was I going to tell? Christ didn’t know the whole skinny on Caroline’s haunting and I didn’t feel like catching him up. So, really it was a matter of mere convenience.

He said he wanted to meet up and compare notes again, if that was all right, so we planned to meet at the Starbucks downstairs at the Read House. It was centrally located, and Nick had scheduled an interview with the head of the cleaning staff later that afternoon anyway. After all, what would Caroline do? Come downstairs and kick my ass over a latte? I doubted it. I would have been astonished to find her out of her room, much less downstairs in the café.

Nick blew it, though. He called after I’d been waiting on him for fifteen minutes and had to postpone; there was an apartment fire somewhere in southside and he’d been the closest man with a camera. We agreed to reschedule and I threw away my empty coffee cup.

I let myself out of the café and stood under the overhang at the Starbucks. It was raining again. With the water came a chill I didn’t like, but there was nothing to be done about it except tighten my sweater and stamp my feet. It wasn’t worth complaining about.

Then I saw her out of the corner of my right eye, standing at the intersection of Broad and MLK.

She looked familiar, but she wasn’t a friend, so it took me a second to figure out who she was. I might not have looked at her twice except that the sight of her set my senses tingling. She was looking in my direction, at me, I thought, but she might have only been waiting for the light to change.

Her hair finally clued me in. It was soaked, drowned-rat style, and so were her clothes. It was raining, but it wasn’t raining that hard. She must have been standing there a long time to get so wet . . . unless she wasn’t standing there at all.

“Ann Alice?” I said, and even though the girl across the street couldn’t have heard me, she nodded.

I knew her from around town in the same way I knew a lot of people, by sight alone. If I’d ever exchanged two words with her, I couldn’t have told you what they were. But there she was, wet and staring.

And hers was the last name Christ had added to his litany of the missing.

And there she was, dead on Market Street.

Once she knew she had my attention, she turned away and dropped her skateboard from its position at her knees. She stepped onto it and kicked, scooting across the street against the light. There weren’t any cars. There wasn’t anyone else to see her anyway.

The Death Nugget was parked a block away, and with it I’d left the umbrella I’d made a point of putting in the back seat. The rain wasn’t so bad, though, and Ann Alice wanted me to follow her.

“All right,” I told her. “I’m coming. Wait.”

She didn’t wait.

I ducked out from under the awning and went after her because I didn’t know what else to do. “Ann Alice?”

The back of her apple-red dyed head was retreating fast, and I stumbled trying to keep up. I hopped up onto the next curb and was on the sidewalk then, closer to her without being near at all.

I watched her duck and weave between the few people she met, and no one reacted at all—but no one ever did, even when she was alive. You keep your head down when the kids skate through, trying to get a rise out of you or bum money. It wasn’t strange at all that no one looked up. It wasn’t strange at all that no one moved to get out of her way.

Except this time they really couldn’t see her.

So I followed, but it’s hard to follow on foot when your quarry has wheels. “Slow down,” I told her, tripping over my own feet and the uneven walkway.

Down along Market she went, scooting in the general direction of the Choo-Choo, and I figured that was where we were going, maybe. But I lost her before we got there, at a corner where an old bank building squatted empty. She zipped around its side and vanished.

I ran up to the building and pressed myself against it. A small overhang let me hide from the worst of the water, so I stayed there and panted. “Ann Alice?” I called, but nothing and no one answered. “Ann Alice?”

Across the street, a homeless guy with a shopping cart looked up at me and shouted back, “Ann Alice!” in a hoarse voice. He went on his slow, rattling way, still shouting it every few seconds, still calling it out in an idiot’s echo.

I waited until his progress took him out of earshot, and I was mostly alone. A car or two pulled up to the stoplight and idled, but no one was watching me between their squeaking, slapping windshield wipers. It was safe enough to follow.

Around the corner I slipped back into the rain and let it hit me, since there was no avoiding it.

The building was being remodeled, or maybe only stripped for salvage before it was torn down. You never know, there on south-side. Maybe someone had bought it to turn it into condo space, or maybe it was going to be leveled for another stupid stadium. Anyway, it was empty and boarded up with sheets of plywood and “no trespassing” signs flashing orange and black warnings.

But Ann Alice knew what she was doing. One board had been kicked in or pulled down, and there was a gap large enough to fit through. I saw no further sign of her, so I assumed I’d found what she wanted me to find.

I crouched and squeezed, pulling my shoulders through with a little bit of nervousness. The edges of the boards picked at my sweater and pulled my hair. I scraped my back on the wall’s edge and winced, but kept going inside, into the dark and dusty closeness of a shut-up place.

“All right, you’ve got me here. What is it?”

I stood up straight and took in the sights. All the windows had been covered from the bottom up, though some of them were left exposed near the ceiling and there was light enough dribbling in from the gray afternoon. The air was thick and tasted like sawdust mixed with chalk. A few crates and pieces of debris littered the floors and corners.

On the floor, my boot grazed a flyer for a big moving sale.

That was right, I remembered. It used to be a furniture store after it was a bank. I had no idea where it’d relocated to. Didn’t matter, though.

Ann Alice was lying low. I squinted into the corners and examined every watery beam of light, but there was no hint of her. Then, upstairs, I thought I heard something like a footstep, or a soft scuffling. It was an impatient little sound.

Immediately in front of where I’d entered was a big empty expanse that must have been a showroom. Back deeper into the corner there was more to see and explore. There were partitions and divisions, remnants of the place’s first incarnation as a bank, maybe. Since there weren’t any stairs to be seen in the showroom, I headed back, watching for nails and trying to remember when I’d had my last tetanus shot.

A narrow door that looked like it might have covered a closet proved instead to hide a skinny set of stairs. I saw a suggestion of more light where they ended; but between me and the top, there was only blackness.

I pressed a hand against the wall, feeling for a rail but not finding one.

I started to climb anyway. I tested each wooden stair before I put all my weight on it. Every one of them creaked a complaint, but held.

“What have we got up here?” I asked under my breath, not expecting an answer and not receiving one.

The door at the top was hanging open and half off its hinges. I nudged it aside with my foot and stepped into a finished attic with a high triangular ceiling. My nose wrinkled. I detected death, but it was something small. The gnawed papers and pulped clothing suggested rats.

“Ann Alice, you’re not up here, are you?”

A human would stink worse than this, I thought. She wanted to show me something else.

Hey.

I jumped. It was an idle greeting, the kind I passed back and forth with people every day. When I turned around, she wasn’t there—but I was left with the thought that she had been.

“Jesus, kid. What are you doing?” She kept her silence, but I tried to track the syllable to a location. Maybe I’d heard it from the other side of the room, or maybe it came from the big window that overlooked Market Street.

I went with my second guess. I climbed clear of the staircase and went creaking across the floor. Every step kicked up more dust.

Look.

It came out in a whisper, but it was close. Over my shoulder. It was a whisper that pointed.

“At what?” I asked, on the verge of exasperation. “If you’ve got something to share, I’m listening—but I’m not in the mood to play tag.”

Even as I spoke, my eyes were drawn to a cracked patch of crumbling plaster, there on the wall by the window. But I thought I saw something else under the plaster. Color. A line or two that didn’t fit.

I hunkered down and examined the patch, which was smaller than a fist. There was something underneath it. I took the edge of my thumbnail and gave it a needling pick. A flat bit flicked away and exposed more color—brown, black, and white.

“Okay,” I breathed. “What have we got here?”

The plaster was old and brittle. It didn’t take much to pry it free. I whacked the wall with the back of my hand and more chunks fell. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">