Chapter Nine If You Go Away #2
“I’m good! I’m real good! My wife and I found each other again after a long time apart. We got married, and we just adopted our first baby this year—a little girl. She’s our little peanut, oh, let me tell you! Here, I’ve got pictures.”
I blink through Manny’s life, looking at pictures of a beautiful wife, although I can clearly see she’s not human, not with her dead white skin, and their very human daughter, a pink-cheeked little bubble with lots of dark hair. Amazing, Manny. Happy for you.”
“Thanks, Johnny. Say, I’m so sorry about what happened to you. And about Nancy. I heard you wondered about her, huh?”
“I found out she didn’t show up that night. Maybe she called me, and I didn’t know. I wasn’t doing so well,” I say, voice stiff.
“Well, I knew from your friend here that you wanted to find out, so I asked around, and I remembered that Nancy Benson used to room at the old Dullahan house on First Avenue—you know, it’s an office building now, but it still looks like a grand old place, and anyway—do you know who ended up buying up that place? ”
“Who?” How the hell would I know?
“The bank! Silverman First Fiduciary. And being as the Silvermans are werewolves—”
Amber lets out a little yelp. “I bought my house from a werewolf?” she yips, eyes wide.
“Oh, a good one. With an excellent degree in financial management, I’m sure,” Manny placates, “and I asked if they could help out one member of the paranormal community, so I asked if they could help me track down anyone who might have lived there around the same time or been close with her.”
“I don’t think she had a lot of friends. I remember we were both on our own. She was the quiet type.”
“Well, it turns out she was close to the landlady, one of the Dullahan family daughters, and the Dullahan family is still very active in Pine Ridge. I asked if Patrick Dullahan could recall his mother mentioning anything about it. He’s a customer, you know, about sixty now, and still in agriculture—the large commercial end, but he said he’d try. And guess what?”
“What?” I really hope all of this is going somewhere after all that.
“He sent me a long text. Here.”
Manny holds out his phone.
Patrick: Hey, Manny, thanks for taking a look at the car for me.
I’ll get it in for those new ball joints mid-month.
Mary says she’d be happy to babysit anytime, so you let Rhea know.
Oh, looked up Nancy Benson in Mom’s old journals.
She was a great one for keeping notes about the tenants.
Nothing nosy, just efficient. Found her journals from 1954, and she had an entry for September 16th.
I took a picture for you. I hope this helps.
I know from Amber that you have to tap the phone, but screens and ghosts don’t mix in my experience. Amber lets me use a little stylus pen when she’s teaching me about technology, but now she’s already next to me, tapping the image, eyes desperately curious.
On faded blue lined paper, scrawly script in a notebook states:
Pretty little Miss Benson was pacing and boiling the kettle dry in the kitchen this afternoon when I went to meet the meter man. Talked to her about kitchen privileges and fire safety. She’s a waitress, and she’s normally very conscientious. Seemed distracted.
When I spoke to her, she mentioned that she was planning to go over to her sweetheart’s for supper, and I reminded her that no gentleman callers could be in her room, nor in the house after eight.
I reminded her of the curfew for residents when not at work.
I run a respectable house. She burst into tears and said she had led that nice boy on and couldn't marry him.
She was in love with his best friend, that good-looking Harry Rogers at the hospital who dances with all the girls and never gave her so much as a tumble.
Poor little thing cried herself sick after that.
She was quite hysterical, and as she had no family, I had to sit with her.
Seems she’d thought she would get over Harry in time, but she wasn’t.
Johnny (that young mechanic at Manny’s) is a good and decent man.
I told her to call the young man and talk it over, but she went to bed with a headache and was still asleep when I left.
Meter man arrived. $8.50. I must talk to Miss Murtree about running her radio and that new television.
Mr. Crawford’s laundry bill is overdue.
Miss Murtree says Mr. Crawford’s practicing his banjo before seven in the morning. Wrote him a stern note and pinned it to the linens.
“She... she wanted Harry. She did want Harry.” Why do I feel better and worse at the same time?
Amber’s hand is warm and steady on my back. “And Harry wanted her.”
Manny pipes up. “You know, John, I don’t know why things work out the way they do.
Rhea and I were apart for over a century.
I’ve been thinking hard for the last few days, back to that month, that year.
I don’t think Harry would even have looked at Nancy except that you spent so much time with her.
You made him see that she was worth noticing, and when you died, he went to comfort her, and things shifted. ”
“He came over here that night. His face was different. Closed over. Told me Nancy deserved someone who loved her all out. I thought... I thought that was him. And when I started to feel sick, to feel worse that night, I thought...” I trail off.
Manny’s eyes narrow. “Oh. Johnny, no.”
I go on the defensive. “I’d never seen him act like that before. He’s a medic. Worked at the hospital. He could have grabbed something and slipped it to me.”
“He could have, sure. Anything is possible. Isn’t it also possible that your friend hoped you’d listen to him and realize you didn’t really love Nancy so that he could have a shot?
And when you passed, he jumped on the chance to get her for himself, because he knew there was no point in waiting, no point in being sad and alone?
After all, you were a healthy young man, and you’d died in the prime of your life. ”
“But that’s just it! He’d died in the prime of his life!
” Amber shouts, making us both jump. “Why aren’t people suspicious and investigating?
This has to be murder. Johnny... Johnny’s been stuck here, all alone.
All this time,” her voice weakens and breaks.
“It wouldn’t be fair for this to have been natural.
Would it? He would have crossed over. It’s... It’s not fair!”
Manny is silent, trying to figure out how to respond to that outburst. Amber’s angrily scrubbing at her eyes with one sleeve of her baggy orange sweatshirt.
“You know,” I say, taking her hands. “It would be fair. And it would have been okay with me to be stuck here for all this time if I got to meet you because of it. Don’t cry, sweetheart. I don’t want you to shed tears over me and my dumb mistakes.”
“There was a standard sort of investigation, Johnny. Coroner and folks at the hospital morgue, I guess. I heard it was a burst appendix. You’d taken ipecac, and that’s a bad idea.
It can actually cause an inflamed appendix to rupture.
They advise against using it in almost all cases these days.
” Manny pats my back with his hammer-like hands and quickly pulls back when he almost punches straight through me. “Oops.”
“A case of appendicitis shouldn’t be fatal. Not fair!” Amber looks at me, eyes still full of tears despite what I said.
What I’m starting to believe.
Manny’s voice rolls on, a gentle tide. “If you did burst your appendix, you might have passed out. People can pass out from pain, after all. If you had called the hospital that night, they could have saved you, probably. IV antibiotics were available back then. Peritonitis could be contained if it was caught early. I don’t think it should have happened so fast, but there could have been other factors, like alcohol, dehydration, or some underlying infection, or maybe even some structural thing with your organs that you’d never have known about if things weren’t going wrong. ”
“You’re right. You’re right,” I say. “Thanks, Manny. That helps a lot. We’re still waiting for some records to come in.”
“All right. Sure sorry I upset you. In a way, aren’t you glad that it looks like it was an accident?”
Amber looks at me.
I look at her.
Seventy years wasted suspecting my best friend?
Seventy years of loneliness.
But also... Seventy years of training myself to be a master of the form I have left, so that I can touch things, control things, and even float things. Change forms and states of solidity.
Seventy years of waiting—so that Amber would walk into my life.
“I’m glad I know that now,” I murmur.
“I think I’ll duck out. Hey, Johnny, you...
You wouldn’t want to come back to work part time?
Handle the easy stuff like oil changes and changing tires?
Laz’s wife is helping at the front desk so Rhea can be home with the baby, but more and more people from the campus are using us as their local garage, so... ”
A job. A girl. This house. My house.
And knowing that, sure, I died young, and suddenly, but it wasn’t Harry? And Nancy, sweet girl, got the guy she was really in love with? Harry got the girl he wanted?
Damn it, good for them. “I need that spirit bottle, buddy. And I’m still helping Amber recover, so it might not be a lot of time.”
“That’s okay. We can be flexible with the hours.” Manny sticks out his hand. “Good to see you, Johnny. Is it okay if I tell some more folks you’re back? The ones in the know, you know?”
“It’s fine. Can’t wait to see everyone. Or meet ‘em for the first time.”
“Right. Glad to have you back.”
“Good to be back.”
And it is.
It’s not true. It’s just that Harry Rogers is way more clever than they think.
It can’t be a simple, silly, everyday, ordinary type of tragedy that forced this good, kind person to wait here. Trapped.