Charles De Lint - The Ivory and the Horn

"Oh, God, I hope not," she said.

Wendy stood up. "Brenda doesn't do drugs and she hasn't got AIDS," she said, "Come on, Jilly. We've got to go."

"But you heard what Greg said about the way she looks," Jilly said as she rose to join her.

Wendy nodded. "It sounds like she's finally found a diet that works," she said grimly. "Except it works too well."

She left Greg's office and walked briskly down the hall towards the stairwell. Jilly only had enough time to quickly thank Greg before she hurried off to catch up to her.

"I don't even know where to begin looking for her," she said as she followed Wendy down the stairs.

"Maybe we should start with this Jim guy she's been seeing"

Jilly nodded, then looked at her watch. It was past five.

"He'll be off work by now," she said. "The admin staff usually leaves at five."

"We can still call the school," Wendy said. "Somebody there will give you his number."

***

"I haven't seen her in over two weeks," Jim told Jilly when she got him on the line. "And she hasn't called for a couple of days now."

"That's just great."

"What's wrong? Is Brenda in some kind of trouble?"

Jilly put her hand over the mouthpiece and turned to Wendy who was standing outside the phone booth. "He wants to know what's going on. What do I tell him?"

"The truth," Wendy said. "We don't know where she is and we're worried because of what we've been hearing."

"Right. And if there's nothing the matter she's really going to appreciate our blabbing all her problems to a potential boyfriend."

"Hello?" Jim's voice was tiny in the receiver. "Jilly? Are you still there?"

"What do I tell him?" Jilly asked, hand still over the mouthpiece.

"Give it to me," Wendy said.

Jilly exchanged places with her but leaned in close so that she could listen as Wendy made up some story about needing to pick up a dress at Brenda's apartment and they were sorry to have bothered him.

"Right. Tell him the truth," Jilly said when Wendy had hung up. "I could've told him that kind of truth."

"What was I supposed to say? Once you reminded me of how Brenda would react if we did lay it all on him, I didn't have any other choice."

"You did fine," Jilly assured her.

They crossed the sidewalk and sat down on a bench. The tail end of rush hour crept by on McKennitt, making both of them happy that they didn't own a car.

"Could you imagine putting yourself through that everyday?" Jilly said, indicating the crawling traffic with a lazy wave of her hand. "I'd go mad."

"But a car is still nice to have when you want to get out of the city," Wendy said. "Remember when Brenda drove us out to Isabelle's farm this spring?"

"Mmm. I could've stayed there for a month..." Jilly's voice trailed off and she sat up on the bench. "We never checked if Brenda's car was in the garage."

***

The car was gone.

"Of course that doesn't prove anything," Jilly said.

She and Wendy walked slowly back up the driveway. When they reached the front of Brenda's building, they sat down on the bottom steps of the porch, trying to think of what to do next.

"Just because she's gone for a drive somewhere on a Saturday afternoon," Jilly tried, "doesn't mean anything sinister's going on."

"I suppose. But remember what Greg told us about how she looked?"

"She looked fine when I saw her," Jilly said. "Thinner, and a little jittery from having quit smoking, but not sickly."

"But that was a few weeks ago," Wendy said "Now people are talking about her looking emaciated, like she's a junkie or something."

Jilly nodded. "I'm not as close to her as you are. I know she's always going on about her weight and diets, but does she actually have an eating disorder?"

The Brenda Jilly knew had never weighed under a hundred and twenty-five.

"She was in therapy in high school," Wendy said. "Which is when she first started suffering from anorexia. The one time she talked to me about it, she told me that the therapist thought her problems stemmed from her trying to get her father back: If she looked like a little girl instead of a woman, then he'll love her gain.

"But her father didn't abandon his family, did he?" Jilly asked. "I thought he died when she was eight or nine."

"He did, which is a kind of abandonment, don't you think? Anyway, she doesn't buy into the idea at all, doesn't think she has a problem anymore."

"A classic symptom of denial."

Wendy nodded. "All of which makes me even more worried. The way Greg was talking, she's down to skin and bones."

"I wouldn't have thought it was possible to lose so much weight so fast," Jilly said.

"What if you just stopped eating?" Wendy said. "Your basic starvation diet."

Jilly considered that for a moment. "I suppose. You'd have to drink a lot of liquids, though, or the dehydration'd get to you."

"It's still going to leave you weak."

Jilly nodded. "And spacey."

"I wonder if we should report her as missing?" Wendy wondered aloud.

"I've been that route before," Jilly said. "There's not much the police can do until she's been gone for at least forty-eight hours."

"We don't know how long she's been gone."

"Let's give it until tomorrow," Jilly said. "If she's just gone somewhere for the weekend, she'll be back in the afternoon or early evening."

"And if she's not?"

"Then we'll see my pal Lou. He'll cut through the red tape for us."

"That's right, he's a cop, isn't he?"

Jilly nodded.

"I might still try calling the hospitals," Wendy said. She gave Jilly a pained look. "God, I sound like a parent, don't I?"

"You're just really worried."

Wendy sighed. "What gets me is that Brenda's always so... so organized. If she was going somewhere, she'd be talking about it for weeks in advance. She'd ask me to drop by to look after her plants. She'd— oh, I don't know. I thought we were close, but she's been avoiding me these past few weeks— nothing I can really point to, it's only when I look back on it I can see there was something more going on. Whenever I called, she was just on her way out, or working overtime, or doing something. I thought it was bad timing on my part, but now I'm not so sure."

She gave Jilly a worried look. "The idea that she's gone on some weird diet really scares me."

Jilly put her arm around Wendy's shoulders and gave her a hug.

"Things'll work out," she said, wishing she felt as confident as she sounded.

Wendy's anxiety had become contagious.

19

I wait until it's past ten and then realize Ellie's going to pull a no-show. Waiting for her, I find myself wondering about my reaction to all of this. From the voices rising up out of the well and their lost faces manifesting in my dreams to the ghost of the motel's old proprietor... I seem to accept it all so easily. Why doesn't it freak me as much as it should?

I don't have an answer— at least I don't have one that makes me feel comfortable. Because either the ghosts are all real and I'm far more resilient than I'd ever have imagined myself to be, or I'm losing it.

I'm tired, but I'm not quite ready to go to bed. Maybe weak would be a better way to put it. I've had a busy day. Since there's no maid service— along with everything else this place hasn't got— the first thing I did after I got up was go exploring for water. There was the well, of course, but it was deep and I'd no way to bring water up its shaft. I wasn't so sure I'd even want to if I could. Bad enough I called up ghosts, just by thinking of them. I didn't want to know what would show up if I took some water from that well.

Turns out I didn't have to worry. Not a half dozen yards into the forest, on this side of an old set of railway tracks, I found a stream. The water's clear and cold, even at this time of year. Using a battered tin pail that I discovered inside what must have been a tool shed, I carried water back to my unit and scrubbed the floors and walls. It sounds pretty straightforward, but it took a long time, because I had to rest a lot.