Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Finally he returned to the kitchen and began to search, opening drawers and cabinets. At the back of the counter he noticed a white plastic box with a cord, its small cursive label identifying it as a can opener. He paused, trying to imagine how it worked, or why it was necessary. Soon he found a piece of white paper, a heavy black marker, matches, and the stub of a wax candle. He took them outside and sat against the wall, under the overhang of the roof, lit the candle, and wrote in bold, flowing ideograms.

In a bucket a cricket sang, he wrote, cutting through my sorrow. I am awestruck. Thank you, father, for teaching me to how to listen. He folded the paper, wrote his father’s name on it, scribbled, in English, Seattle, on the upper corner, then lit it with the candle, dropping it into an empty clay pot. He watched the ashes drift into the mist, his postcard from America.

Much later he found his way to the stairs, and was about to step into his bedroom, when he saw that the door at the end of the hall, beyond Corbett’s room, lay slightly ajar. He approached with a pang of guilt and pushed the door open. There were unfamiliar scents. He turned on the light. An easel lay at the center, with an unfinished watercolor. A sketch of the intended picture lay on a table beside the easel. It was of a windblown stone building on a mountain, with a string of prayer flags flapping over it. Corbett had been painting.

Shan was sitting on the front steps, studying the flowers, watching the inhabitants of the street, when he heard Corbett come down and move toward the kitchen. He had been sitting there since before dawn, unable to sleep, watching, often not completely understanding what he saw. A white truck with a bloated cargo bay drove slowly out of the mist, men in coveralls emptying plastic barrels of trash into it. Several people sped by in very small shorts and caps, running in the rain. He did not understand where they ran to, or what they might do when they arrived. A truck passed by with a huge, mysterious message painted on it, POSITIVELY OVERNIGHT.

His mind kept drifting toward another dawn, thousands of miles away, where Surya and his new companions collected human waste, where hermits in Yerpa recited mantras in a chamber filled with butter lamps, where Ko probably slept in manacles, dreaming nightmares of men with skeleton hands. He became aware of Corbett speaking on the telephone, saying Bailey’s name frequently, emotion rising and falling in his voice like a tide. Shan entered the house quietly and was sitting in the big chair again when Corbett, still speaking on the phone, handed him a banana.

Five minutes later Corbett hung up the phone and stepped to the door, gesturing for Shan to follow. They climbed into the car and drove, over a bridge, down a sharply winding road through a forest of huge evergreen trees.

“Bailey says the insurance company is about to write a check to Dolan,” Corbett reported in a dull voice. “Don’t push him. He stayed up all night,” Corbett warned as they pulled into a gravel lane.

They arrived at an old house in the process of being rehabilitated, newly painted boards on one wall, what looked like black paper on another. Bailey stood in a separate building, a shed that had been converted into a small gargage, the bay door open. On a long table in the center of the garage were arranged a paperback book, ruined by water, some dirty clothing, several folded papers, a broken necklace, a small pair of shoes, and a bicycle, its frame and front wheel bent. At the end of the table were lenses, small bottles of chemicals, and several delicate brushes.

“Not a damned thing,” Bailey said without a greeting. “Lost count of the number of times I’ve examined each thing. Last night before dark I went down below the first bridge, hoping for some sign she had been there. Nothing. Tide’s done its work. It’s been weeks now.”

Shan stepped closer to the table. A piece of seaweed, dried and shriveled, clung to one of the shoes.

“Police report still says she came onto the bridge too fast,” Bailey stated, “hit a wet patch, slammed into the low wall, and the force took her and the bike over.”

Corbett picked up the necklace, silver with a small locket, opened to reveal a photo of an old woman. He held the necklace toward Shan. “But this was found in the seaweed on the opposite side of the bridge. Their report can’t explain that. Because it came off before she was thrown off the first bridge. Maybe there was a brief struggle. He tossed it off the back of the second bridge when he disposed of the bike.”

Shan surveyed the table, then the garage. “The police work is completed?” The evidence should have been in an official lab.

“Case closed,” Corbett said. “Accidental death. All done. This was all being sent back to her parents.”

“Yesterday we checked every storage rental operation in the region for anything rented to Dolan or McDowell or Lodi. Nothing. We called the antique dealers again. Not one of the Dolan items has surfaced in the Northwest. It’s a dead end, boss,” Bailey said. “And I’m beat,” he added, then handed Corbett a piece of paper with a drawing on it and stepped toward the house. Corbett waved at his back.

They drove again, for ten minutes, and got out in a cemetery, Corbett studying Bailey’s drawing as they walked down the rows of wet square stones and dripping conifers.

“Do they stay here?” Shan asked. Some of the graves looked very old.

Corbett gave him a weary, puzzled glance, and Shan realized he thought Shan was making a bad joke. But in the cities of China no one but the very wealthy or famous stayed in graves. If a family could afford a burial at all, the body was interred only for four or five years, to allow for mourning, then exhumed and cremated to make way for the newly dead.

It took nearly fifteen minutes to find the grave, a surprisingly large stone with extravagant carvings of birds and flowers along its edges, Abigail Morgan’s name carved in ornate letters. “Dolan insisted on paying for it,” Corbett muttered as he extracted something from his pocket and placed it on the stone.

Shan gazed at it, disbelieving at first, searching Corbett’s solemn face, then stepping closer. It was a tsa-tsa, one of the clay images of Tara the protectress, the kind the American had seen left on the altar below Lodi’s effigy.

As Corbett stood by the grave with a mix of sorrow and anger on his face, Shan surveyed the landscape and began to collect rocks. He had built a cairn several layers high at the foot of the grave before Corbett noticed and began to help. When they had laid the top stone, nearly two feet high, Shan turned to Corbett. “Do you have a clean handkerchief?” When the American nodded and extended the cloth, he took a pen from Corbett and inscribed the mani mantra on it ten times, then anchored it under the top stone. “Everytime it flaps in the wind,” he explained, “it recites the prayer.”

Corbett seemed about to respond when his cell phone rang. He hesitated, then with a reluctant expression withdrew it from his pocket.

“Corbett,” he snapped, and then, “yes sir.”

Corbett listened for a long time, his eyes smoldering. “I forgot all about her, sir,” he said at last. “You ordered that file closed, I recall.” He listened again. “Right,” he said. “A new case. Art theft in Boise. We’re on it.” He returned the phone to his pocket. “Whenever you’re ready, Inspector Shan,” he said with a dangerous grin.

There was no security guard at the front gate, only a video camera and a speaker in a small box inside a brick pillar. Shan sat at the wheel, having changed places with Corbett fifty yards down the road, and spoke quietly into the box as Corbett turned his face away from the camera. They waited a minute, then two, but the heavy iron gate suddenly creaked and began to slide sideways on a track in the pavement.