SERENITY
One minute I am standing in a room at a private laboratory with three other people, and the next, I’m alone in that same room, on my hands and knees looking for a tooth that has fallen.
“Can I help you?”
I jam the tooth into my pocket and turn to find a bearded man in a white coat. I approach him hesitantly, tap him hard on the shoulder. “You’re really here.”
He recoils, rubbing his collarbone, looking at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I am. “Yes, but why are you? Who let you in?”
I am not about to tell him my suspicion: that the “person” who had let me in was an earthbound spirit, a ghost. “I’m looking for an employee named Tallulah,” I say.
His features soften. “Were you a personal friend?”
Were. I shake my head. “An acquaintance.”
“Tallulah passed away about three months ago. I guess it was a heart condition that wasn’t diagnosed? She was in the middle of training for her first half marathon.” He puts his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. “I’m really sorry to have to break the news to you.”
I stumble out of the lab, passing the secretary at the front desk and a security guard and a girl sitting on the concrete wall outside making a phone call. I can’t tell who is alive and who isn’t, so I look down at the ground, refusing to make eye contact.
In my car I turn the air-conditioning on full blast and close my eyes. Virgil had been sitting right here. Jenna had been in the backseat. I had talked to them, touched them, heard them clear as a bell.
Clear as a bell. I take my cell phone out and start scrolling until I get to the list of recent calls. Jenna’s number should be there, from when she rang me in Tennessee, scared and alone. But then again, spirits manipulate energy all the time. The doorbell rings when no one is there; a printer goes on the fritz; lights flicker when there’s no storm.
I hit Redial, and get a recording. The number is out of service.
This just can’t be what I think it is. It can’t, I realize, because plenty of people saw me in public with Virgil and Jenna.
I turn the ignition and scream out of the parking lot, driving back to the diner where the rude waitress had serviced our table this morning. When I walk into the building, a bell jangles overhead; on the jukebox, Chrissie Hynde is singing about brass in her pocket. I crane my neck over the high red leather booths, looking for the woman who had taken our order this morning.
“Hey,” I say, interrupting her as she is serving a table full of kids in soccer uniforms. “Do you remember me?”
“I never forget a three-cent tip,” she mutters.
“How many people were at my table?”
I follow her to the cash register. “Is this a trick question? You were by yourself. Even though you ordered enough to feed half the kids in Africa.”
I open up my mouth to point out that Jenna and Virgil ordered their own meals, but that’s not true. They had told me what they wanted to eat, and had each gone to the restroom.
“I was with a man in his thirties—his hair was buzzed short, and he was wearing a flannel shirt even in this heat … and a teenage girl, who had a messy red braid …”
“Look, lady,” the waitress says, reaching beneath the till to hand me a business card. “There are places you can go for help. But this isn’t one of them.”
I glance down: GRAFTON COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES.
? ? ?
At the Boone Town Office, I sit down with a Red Bull and a stack of records from 2004: births, deaths, marriages.
I read Nevvie Ruehl’s death certificate so many times I think I might have memorized it.
IMMEDIATE CAUSE OF DEATH: (A) Blunt force trauma
(B) DUE TO: Trampling by elephant
Manner of death: Accidental
PLACE OF INJURY: New England Elephant Sanctuary, Boone, NH
DESCRIBE HOW INJURY OCCURRED: Unknown
Virgil’s death certificate is the one I find next. He died in early December.
IMMEDIATE CAUSE OF DEATH: (A) Penetrating trauma to the chest
(B) DUE TO: Motor vehicle accident
Manner of death: Suicidal
Jenna Metcalf does not have a death certificate, of course, because her body was never found.
Until that tooth.
There was no mistake in the medical examiner’s report. Nevvie Ruehl was indeed the person who died at the sanctuary that night, and Alice Metcalf was the unconscious woman Virgil had brought to the hospital, who subsequently disappeared.
Following this logic, I finally know for sure why Alice Metcalf would not have communicated with me—or even Jenna, for that matter. Alice Metcalf, most likely, is still alive.
The last death certificate I look up belongs to Chad Allen, the teacher whose unattractive baby Jenna told me she’d been babysitting. “Did you know him?” the clerk says, looking over my shoulder.
“Not really,” I murmur.
“It was a real shame. Carbon monoxide poisoning. The whole family died. I was in his calculus class the year it happened.” She glances at the pile of papers on the table. “Do you need copies of these?”
I shake my head. I just needed to see them with my own eyes.
I thank her and walk back to my car again. I start driving aimlessly, because really, I have no idea where I go from here.
I think about the airline passenger en route to Tennessee, who buried his nose in his magazine when I started to have a conversation with Virgil. Which, to him, would have sounded like a crazy lady ranting.
I consider the time we all visited Thomas at Hartwick House—how the patients could easily see Jenna and Virgil, but the nurses and orderlies had spoken only to me.
I remember the very first day I met Jenna, when my client Mrs. Langham bolted. What was it she’d overheard me saying to Jenna? That if she didn’t leave immediately, I was going to call the cops. But of course, Mrs. Langham couldn’t see Jenna, plain as day, in my foyer. She would have thought my words had been directed at her.
I realize I have pulled into a familiar neighborhood. Virgil’s office building is across the street.
I park and get out of the Bug. It’s so hot today that the asphalt is swimming beneath my feet. It’s so hot that the dandelions in the cracks of the sidewalk have collapsed.
The air in the building smells different. Mustier, older. The pane of glass in the door is cracked, but I never noticed before. I walk up to the second floor, to Virgil’s office. It is locked, dark. Posted on the door is a sign: FOR RENT. CALL HYACINTH PROPERTIES, 603-555-2390.
My head buzzes. It’s like the beginning of a migraine, but I think it is actually the sound of everything I know, everything I believed, being challenged.
I’d always thought there was a great divide between a spirit and a ghost—the former had made it smoothly to the next plane of existence; the latter had something anchoring it to this world. The ghosts I had met before were stubborn. Sometimes they did not realize they were dead. They’d hear the noises of people living in “their” houses, and assume they were the ones being haunted. They had agendas and disappointments and anger. They were trapped, and so I took it upon myself to help them get free.
But that was when I had the ability to recognize them for what they were.
I’d always thought there was a great divide between a spirit and a ghost—I just didn’t realize how small the gap was between the dead and the living.
From my purse, I take the ledger that Jenna had signed when she first came to my apartment. There’s her name, the adolescent cursive round as a string of bubbles. There is the address, 145 Greenleaf.
The residential neighborhood is exactly as it was three days ago, when Virgil and I had come to talk to Jenna, only to find that she didn’t live at this address. Now I realize that it’s entirely possible she did. It’s just that the current owners wouldn’t know that.
The same mother I spoke with before answers the doorbell. Her little boy still clings like a barnacle to her leg. “You again?” she says. “I already told you, I don’t know that girl.”
“I know. I’m sorry to bother you again. But I’ve had some … bad news recently about her. And I’m trying to make sense of some things.” I rub my temples with my hands. “Can you just tell me when you bought your house?”
Behind me is the soundtrack of summer: children screaming as they squeal down a Slip’n Slide next door, a dog howling behind a fence, the drone of a ride-on lawn mower. In the distance is the calliope song of the ice cream truck. This street, it’s teeming with life.
The woman looks like she’s about to shut the door in my face, but something in my voice must stop her and make her reconsider. “Two thousand,” she says. “My husband and I weren’t married yet. The woman who lived here had D-I-E-D.” She glances down at her son. “We don’t like to talk about that sort of thing in front of him, if you know what I mean. He has an overactive imagination, and sometimes it keeps him up at night.”
People are always afraid of things they don’t understand, so they dress them up in ways that are understandable. An overactive imagination. A fear of the dark. Maybe even mental illness.
I crouch down so that I am face-to-face with her son. “Who do you see?” I ask.
“A grandma,” he whispers. “And a girl.”
“They’re not going to hurt you,” I tell him. “And they’re real, no matter what anyone says. They just want to share your house, like when other kids at school want to share your toys.”
His mother yanks him away. “I’m calling 911,” she huffs.
“If your son had been born with blue hair, even though there had never been blue hair in your family tree, and even though you didn’t understand how any baby could have blue hair because you’d never come across it in your life … would you still love him?”
She starts to close the door, but I put my hand on it, pressing back to keep it open. “Would you?”
“Of course,” she says tightly.
“This isn’t any different,” I tell her.
Back in my car, I pull the ledger out of my purse and flip to the last page. Very slowly, like stitches being pulled, Jenna’s entry disappears.
As soon as I tell the desk sergeant that I’ve found human remains, I am ushered into a back room. I give the detective—a kid named Mills, who looks like he has to shave only twice a week, tops—as much information as I can. “If you look in your files, you’ll find a case from 2004 that involved a death there, back when it was an elephant sanctuary. I think this might be a second fatality.”
He looks at me curiously. “And you know this … why?”
If I tell him I am a psychic, I’m going to wind up in a room next to Thomas at the mental institution. Either that or he’ll slap handcuffs on me, sure I am a crackpot ready to confess to committing a homicide.
But Jenna and Virgil had seemed completely real to me. I had believed everything they said, when they spoke to me.
Goodness, child, isn’t that what a psychic is supposed to do?
The voice in my head is faint but familiar. That southern drawl, the way the sentence rises and falls like music. I would know Lucinda anywhere.
An hour later, I am escorted to the nature preserve by two officers. Escorted is a fancy word for stuffed in the back of a cop car because no one trusts you. I hike through the tall grass, off the beaten path, the way Jenna used to do. The policemen carry shovels and sifter screens. We pass the pond where we found Alice’s necklace, and after doubling back on a loop, I find the spot where the purple mushrooms have erupted beneath the oak tree.
“Here,” I say. “This is where I found the tooth.”
The cops have brought along a forensic expert. I don’t know what he does—soil analysis, maybe, or bones, or both—but he plucks the head off one of the mushrooms. “Laccaria amethystina,” he pronounces. “It’s an ammonia fungus. It grows on soil that has a high concentration of nitrogen.”
Goddamn Virgil, I think. He was right. “It only grows here,” I tell the expert. “Nowhere else in the preserve.”
“That’s consistent with a shallow grave.”
“An elephant calf was also buried here,” I say.
Detective Mills raises his brows. “You’re just a font of information, aren’t you?” The forensic expert directs two of the other officers, the ones who drove me here, to start digging systematically.
They begin on the other side of the tree, across from where Jenna and Virgil and I were yesterday, heaps of dirt shaking through the sifters to catch whatever decomposed fragments they might be lucky enough to unearth. I sit in the shade of the tree, watching the pile of soil rise higher. The policemen roll up their sleeves; one has to jump into the hole to toss the dirt out.
Detective Mills sits down beside me. “So,” he says. “Tell me again what you were doing here when you found the tooth?”
“Having a picnic,” I lie.
“By yourself?”
No. “Yes.”
“And the elephant calf? You know about that because …?”
“I’m an old friend of the family,” I say. “It’s why I also know that the Metcalfs’ child was never found. I think that girl deserves a burial, don’t you?”
“Detective?” One of the policemen waves Mills toward the pit that he’s been digging. There is a gash of white in the dark soil. “It’s too heavy to move,” he says.
“Then dig around it.”
I stand at the edge of the pit as the policemen swipe the dirt away from the bone by hand, like children making a sand castle when the water keeps rushing in to destroy their work. Finally, a shape emerges. The eye sockets. The holes where the tusks would have grown. The honeycomb skull, chipped off at the top. The symmetry, like a Rorschach blot. What do you see?
“I told you so,” I say.
After that, no one doubts my word. The dig systematically moves in quadrants, counterclockwise. In Quadrant 2, they find only a piece of rusted cutlery. In Quadrant 3, I am listening to the rhythmic pull and swish of soil being lifted and tossed when suddenly the noise stops.
I look up and see one of the policemen holding the small fan of a broken rib cage.
“Jenna,” I murmur, but all I hear in response is the wind.
For days, I try to find her on the other side. I imagine her upset and confused, and worst of all, alone. I beg Desmond and Lucinda to reach out to Jenna, too. Desmond tells me that Jenna will find me when she is ready. That she has a lot to process. Lucinda reminds me that the reason my spirit guides had been silent for seven years was because part of my journey was to believe in myself again.
If that’s true, I ask her, then how come now I can’t talk to the one damn spirit I want to?
Be patient, Desmond says. You have to find what’s lost.
I have forgotten how Desmond is always full of New Age crypto-quotes like that. But instead of being annoyed by it, I just thank him for the advice, and wait.
I call Mrs. Langham and offer her a free reading to compensate for my rudeness. She’s reluctant, but she is the kind of woman who walks through Costco just to eat the samples in lieu of paying for lunch out, so I know she will not turn me down. When she comes, for the first time I actually manage to talk to her husband, Bert, instead of faking it. And it turns out he’s just as much of a jerk in the afterlife as he was when he was living. What does she want from me now? he gripes. Always bitching. For Christ’s sake, I thought she’d leave me alone when I finally died.
“Your husband,” I tell her, “is a selfish, unappreciative ass who would prefer that you stop hounding him.” I repeat, verbatim, what he said.
Mrs. Langham is quiet for a moment. And then she replies, “That sounds exactly like Bert.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“But I loved him,” she says.
“He doesn’t deserve it,” I tell her.
When she comes back a few days later, to get advice on finances and important decisions—she brings a friend. That friend calls her sister. Before I know it, I have clients again, more than I can squeeze into my calendar.
But I make time for a lunch break every afternoon, and I spend it at Virgil’s grave. It wasn’t all that hard to find, since there is only a single cemetery in Boone. I bring him things I think he’d like: egg rolls, Sports Illustrated, even Jack Daniel’s. I pour the last over the grave. It will probably kill the weeds, at least.
I talk to him. I tell him about how the newspapers all credited me for helping the police locate Jenna’s remains. How the story of the sanctuary’s demise was splayed across the front pages like Boone’s own version of Peyton Place. I tell him that I was a person of interest until Detective Mills proved that I was in Hollywood, taping one of my shows, the night that Nevvie Ruehl died.
“Do you talk to her?” I ask him, one afternoon when the sky is swollen with rain clouds. “Have you found her yet? I’m worried about her.”
Virgil hasn’t responded to me, either. When I ask Desmond and Lucinda about it, they say that if Virgil’s crossed over, he may not yet understand how to visit the third dimension again. It takes a great deal of energy and focus. There’s a learning curve.
“I miss you,” I say to Virgil, and I mean it. I’ve had colleagues who pretend they like me but are really just jealous; I’ve had acquaintances who wanted to hang out with me because I was invited to Hollywood shindigs; but I have never really had many true friends. Certainly not one who was such a skeptic yet still accepted me unconditionally.
Most of the time I’m in the cemetery alone, except for the caretaker, who walks around with a weed whacker and a pair of Beats headphones. Today, though, there’s something going on near the fence line. I see a small gathering of people. A funeral, maybe.
I realize that I know one of the men at the grave site. Detective Mills.
He recognizes me immediately. It’s one of the perks of having pink hair. “Ms. Jones,” he says. “Good to see you again.”
I smile at him. “You, too.” Glancing around, I realize there are not as many people here as I first thought. A woman in black, two more cops, and the caregiver, who is patting down the freshly turned earth on a tiny wooden casket.
“It’s nice of you to come today,” he says. “I’m sure Dr. Metcalf appreciates the support.”
At the sound of her name, the woman turns around. Her pale, pinched face is framed by a lion’s mane of red hair. It is like seeing Jenna again, in the flesh—a bit older, with a few more emotional scars.
She holds out her hand, this woman I tried so desperately to locate, who has literally landed in my path. “I’m Serenity Jones,” I say. “I’m the one who found your daughter.”