Not Flesh Nor Feathers

A hoof.

“Huh.” The hoof wasn’t life-sized or anything, but it meant a much bigger drawing or painting was still hidden. I glanced around the room for something larger and more solid than my hand, and I saw a rusty shovel lying beside the stairwell door.

I picked it up, got a good grip, then swung it.

After the first impact or two, I had to hold my breath against the airborne grime and close my eyes against the dust. But it gave me more of the horse, and part of a rider. I swung the shovel higher. More wall dissolved. More plaster came down.

After a few minutes of effort, I’d revealed a magnificently amateur painting of a white-hooded man on a galloping steed.

“Huh.” I said, and then I said it again because I couldn’t think of anything new to add.

The mural was somewhat smaller than the window next to it, and composed in a style that could best be described as earnest but unpolished. It displayed thick lines, flat color work, and a shabby grip on the basics of proportion. It was obviously meant to be inspiring, or possibly intimidating, but it was damn-near comical.

I stood back and made another scan of the room, paying closer attention to the walls. Here and there more similar pieces—probably by the same artist—peeked through the plaster. I gave one of the more perplexing spots a slap with the shovel and turned up a burning cross that looked almost jolly.

I also found two more partial horses and riders, but I couldn’t see the point in exposing them. Whatever was lurking beneath the plaster was no lost Picasso, after all. I’d gotten the message, or at least the general idea of it.

The bank building was old, probably from the middle of the nineteenth century. An upstairs room in a professional establishment—a secret Klan meeting place? Sure. It wasn’t surprising. Hell, it was only marginally interesting.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked Ann Alice, but she didn’t feel like being helpful anymore.

My phone rang, cluttering up the quiet with a jingling tune. It was Nick.

“All done here. You still want coffee?”

“Sure,” I said, eyes still firmly planted on the first horseman. “But let’s go somewhere else. I’ll meet you at Greyfriar’s in about twenty minutes.”

When I met him twenty minutes later, Nick was his usual charmingly direct self, and greeted me with a grimace.

“What the hell happened to you? You look like you’ve been—”

“Climbing around in a dirty old attic?”

“Yeah, but worse. What’s the deal?” He used his foot to kick a chair out for me, but I shook my head at him.

“Give me a minute to go clean up a tad.” I left him for the bathroom, where I learned that his reaction had once again been understated. I was covered in streaked drywall dust and century-old plaster, which had transformed to a pale, muddy state in every crevice of my clothing.

I washed up, tied my hair back into a fat bun, and joined him again.

“Better,” he appraised.

I sat down. “You’re not going to believe what I just found.”

“In Grandma’s attic?”

“In the attic of the old Clark’s furniture building, over on Market Street.”

He lifted an eyebrow, then lifted his mug. “What were you doing there?”

“Long story. Not important. The important part is what I found up there. Under the plaster in the second-story storage space, somebody painted a bunch of old Klan murals.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. They were plastered over ages ago, but the plaster’s falling down and you can see them if you poke at it.”

“That accounts for the peculiar new ‘product’ you’ve got going on in your hair.”

“Oh, shut up. But yes, yes it does.”

“And what does this mean?” he asked.

“I don’t know if it means anything at all,” I fibbed. It must have meant something to Ann Alice, or else why would she have gone to the trouble of showing it to me? Why not lead me to her body—wouldn’t that make more sense?

“I know the building you’re talking about. It used to be a bank, didn’t it?”

“Eons ago, yeah. It was a furniture store most recently, though. Now someone’s bought it out and they’re gutting it, by the looks of things. Maybe they’ll put up condos or something. How hard do you think it would be to find out about the place?”

“What, like if it was used by the Klan?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I mean. There must be records of that kind of thing.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. The Klan, I mean—let’s be honest. Even these days they aren’t the most organized bastards around. Have you seen their white power flyers? Have they no spellcheck—or is that an oppressive tool of the Jews and the blacks too?”

“I found one of those flyers on my car the other day, so I’m thinking they need to research their target demographic a little better. I wonder what they’d do if I showed up for a meeting?”

“Do you still have it?”

“The flyer? No.” I frowned at him, and he hastily explained himself.

“Might be an interesting sort of investigative piece, that’s all. It’s been a while since anybody’s bothered with the Klan in the news. And hey, I’m a white guy. I could probably get past the bouncer to take a peek at a meeting.”

“Ew.”

“For research purposes!” he protested.

“For whatever purposes—ew. But if you wanted to take a camera into the old Clark’s building, it might make an interesting quickie piece. Tell the boss you got an anonymous tip and found the place open.”

“Is it open?”

“Technically. You can get inside if you’re willing to get dirty. If you can make a few phone calls, you might not even need to. Some sweet talk might get you past the front door in a more legal fashion.”

If there was one thing I’d learned from hanging around Nick, it was that journalism credentials opened doors and got people talking—so if he wanted to check into the paintings, I’d be happy to let him. He’d almost certainly find out more about them than I could.

In my experience, if a ghost isn’t trying to lead you to a body, she’s trying to lead you to a killer. I didn’t know what an old Klan meetinghouse had to do with Ann Alice’s demise, but it must have been important one way or another. Ann Alice was Caucasian and non-confrontational, so far as skater kids go. I had a hard time believing any neo-Nazis had gotten her.

“I’ll make a note of it,” Nick said, and I knew he’d remember. If nothing else, he’d get bored and short of ideas some afternoon and go poking around. “But that’s not what you wanted to talk about. You wanted to talk about Caroline, right?”

“Right.”

“Good. So did I. I found her grave. She’s buried in that big spread over at the foot of Lookout. You want to go check it out?”

“Why?” I asked. What was the point of seeing where her body was? It was the rest of her that was making trouble.

“Why not?”

“It’s raining, for one thing. And who cares, for another?”

“Do you think she cares? You’ve talked before about ghosts who don’t know they’re dead. If she knew where her body was, might this solve the problem?”

I shook my head and stood up, having suddenly realized that I had no coffee. “Whatever’s wrong with her isn’t going to be fixed with a little show and tell.” I fished a couple dollars out of my jeans pocket and took them to the counter, where I exchanged them for a to-go cup.

When I returned, I’d had some time to think. But I still didn’t believe her grave was going to do us any good. “Here’s what I think would work better,” I began. “We know she was institutionalized somewhere, right? Do we know where?”

“I’ve got it written down someplace.”

“Good. So wherever she was, they’d have records, wouldn’t they? Treatment records, maybe. Maybe we’d get dumb and lucky enough to stumble across a journal or something, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. There’s always the chance we might scare up a few doctor’s notes.”

“Good point. Patient/client privilege doesn’t hold up when patient and client have both been dead for years. It’s worth looking into.”

A flash of Technicolor hair at the window caught my attention. I looked out and saw Christ there, chewing on the filter end of a cigarette. “Excuse me for a minute,” I said to Nick.

“Again?”

“Again. Just for a minute.”

I pushed open the heavy glass door and Christ flinched, as if he couldn’t decide whether or not to run. “Christ, I want to talk to you.”

He was glaring over my shoulder at Nick. Nick didn’t know what was going on, but he knew malice when he saw it. He made a tense, defensive shrug that asked through the glass, “What the fuck’s your problem?”

I turned my back on him and took Christ by the shoulder, gently pushing him away from the storefront and back to a spot where we were less easily observed. “I saw Ann Alice today,” I told him, and to his infinite credit he knew exactly what I meant.

“I told you!” he almost shouted, but I held him down with one hand and made a shushing gesture with the other.

“I know you told me, and hey—now I believe you.”

“What’d she say? Where is she? What happened?” The questions came flapping out of his mouth one after the other, but I had to sit him down and quiet him with the truth.

“I don’t know—she didn’t say anything. She just led me to something, and I don’t know what it means. She wasn’t very helpful.”

“Maybe you just didn’t understand!”

“Oh, there’s no ‘maybe’ about it. She took me to that old bank building on Market Street, the one on the corner that used to be a furniture store.” 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">