I was thinking out loud, my brain just too frantic to contain my thoughts in silence. “How does all of this connect to the patients? They all have a connection to the tunnel project, to accidents associated with construction. . . . Wait,” I said, snatching my cell phone from the table.
Phoebe glared at me—she disapproves of cell phone use in her store—but she humored me as I called Lily Goss.
When my client answered I identified myself and asked, “Did Julianne’s job put her in contact with dirt from the tunnel project?”
“What? Dirt from the tunnel . . . ? I think so. The firm was designing a hotel that’s planned for one of the reopened lots under the current viaduct. She was on the team and they went down to the site to do some planning work. Julie went to photograph the area as a reference for the models. That was earlier on the day she was bitten by the mosquito—or maybe she was actually bitten then. . . . The site is down near the water and the tunnel site, so I guess it could have happened that way. Why?”
“I just had a feeling there was a stronger connection to the other patients. They all had contact with dirt from the tunnel project.”
“Is it a pathogen, then? Some disease . . . ?” Goss asked, excited for a possible solution that was so very ordinary.
“I don’t think so—the doctors would have found a virus or something like that. But this gives me more information to attack the problem with. How is Julianne doing?”
“Badly. She doesn’t seem to rest at all. If she’s not painting the same things over and over, she’s shouting or crying. It’s so awful. I—I had to get out of the house for a while. I’m just on my way back from church. I had to pray for her and I talked to Father Nybeck, but . . . he still can’t offer any more help. She just doesn’t get better and I’m . . . losing hope. When is this going to end? Can you send these horrible spirits away from her? Have you figured out how?”
“Not yet, but I think I’m close.” I hoped I was, though I really didn’t know what the animus of the possessions was. I felt like the answer wasn’t far away, but it was still only a dim and shapeless idea. I had to put the pieces together soon or Julianne and the others might never wake up, their living souls fading away while they were pushed aside. “I will have it very soon, though.”
I could hear her breathing raggedly, as if she were close to tears. Finally she managed to speak again. “I’ll be waiting to hear from you.” She disconnected abruptly and I was sure she’d lost her battle not to cry. I felt terrible for lying, but I couldn’t let her give up—I would find the solution in time because I simply had no choice.
Phoebe reached for the phone as I finished, and I handed it over, feeling grim, but at least I now knew the link. I just had to connect it to a driving force. I scowled a moment in thought.
Phoebe poked the phone until she found the photos and frowned expectantly at me when I looked up again.
I tried to explain as my mind tumbled it around. “All three had accidents, all three came into physical contact with dirt from the tunnel on the day they were injured and went into a coma. They’re all haunted by these ghosts . . . these strangely obsessive ghosts who try to say something we don’t seem to be getting. The patients —or rather, the ghosts speaking through the patients—write strange things about tribute and hunger and food. . . . Everyone connected to the patients and the ghosts is thin, too thin, and too hungry—even me. The ghosts come from the market and they are connected to Hazzard, who believed in extreme fasting. They keep showing me the market like it used to be—before the city grew up all around it—when the shore was right below the hills and bluffs, not buried under the seawall and waterfront. . . . I keep finding the phrase ‘beach to bluffs and back.’ That’s the tunnel route—from the edge of the original strand in the south end of downtown up into the bluff where the market is. And something about the Wheel . . . but there wasn’t any Ferris wheel when Hazzard was around. And I don’t see what the Great Wheel can have to do with three bedridden patients who can’t even wake up. Cannie Trimble said something about a wheel—she must have meant the Great Wheel—and I didn’t get it. I still don’t. I just don’t understand how the Wheel is connected to the ghosts! And now to Hazzard . . .” I slapped my palm against my head as if I could jar the puzzle pieces together and make out the whole picture, but it wasn’t coming.
Phoebe put the phone down and grabbed my wrist on the fourth smack, arresting my hand. “Stop that! It’s not going to solve the problem for you. You got to think, not beat yourself up. You take these books and you go home to that man of yours and you think it out with him. He’s a smart one. He’ll help you figure it.”
I met her earnest gaze, biting my lip. “Phoebe, you believe me, don’t you?”
She scoffed. “Girl, what kind of lackwit you think I am? Of course I believe you. I can see it right here,” she added, tapping my phone as it lay on the table. “I could think you were crazy, but I know whatever crazy you are, it’s the good kind, not the psycho, lying kind. Now you go home before you knock your brains loose beating on your head like that.”
“I—” I started, but she cut me off, rising to her feet with the books bundled in her arms.
“No. No excuses, no thank-yous, no rattling on. You got work to do and you are going to go do it. Now,” she added, nudging my nearest foot with her own, “go on. What’ve I got to do, throw you out? Go on. You’re going to do it anyhow, might as well get on with it.” She prodded me to the door like a mother hen and loaded the books into a bag, which she shoved into my arms. “Now, out you go, Harper. And you come back for dinner next month. Poppy’s got to fatten you up for that man of yours.”
She winked at me and nearly pushed me out the door.
SEVENTEEN
It wasn’t raining, but it was thinking about it again. I hurried to the Land Rover with my bag full of books, not wanting them to get wet before I could look them over. Not to mention that Phoebe would skin me if they were damaged. I was troubled by the image of the Great Wheel, too. What we’d deciphered indicated some connection between it and the ghosts and the phenomena that the patients were experiencing, but it didn’t lie on the tunnel route per se, and damned if I could understand what the link was. It was on the waterfront and the accidents were all associated with the tunnel. The waterfront would be deeply affected by the construction and the tunnel, but . . . so what? How did that concern ghosts? What was Linda Hazzard doing in the mix—something about hunger, but what? Purlis was probably linked to all this, too, but that was another connection I hadn’t been able to discover yet. I just wasn’t seeing something and in the meantime I was chasing my thoughts in frustrating circles.
It was still early enough to ask a few more questions and going home would only remind me of Quinton’s absence. I headed back to the market to take another look at the bluff I’d drawn, above where Princess Angeline had lived and near where Linda Hazzard had killed her patients and had their bodies cremated without ceremony or tears.
It was sufficiently close to dinnertime that the streets were busy, but the parking lots were in flux, with the morning shoppers leaving and the evening revelers not yet arriving. I managed to find a parking place for the truck on one of the steep streets next to the market. The back-in angle parking was tricky and I almost thought the Land Rover would tip onto its side and roll down the hill to fall off the edge and onto the waterfront below, but it didn’t. I hurried down the sidewalk toward Steinbrueck Park.
I crossed the road to the park and sat down near the homeless memorial, imagining that this must have been almost directly above Angeline’s shack. I wondered what it was like to live at the edge of the city then, when ships lay at anchor to be unloaded by smaller boats and the goods hauled up the steep hills in carts.
“Bad clams,” said a voice beside me.
I turned my head sharply. “What?” The woman next to me wore a white garment that wrapped her in light. She wasn’t so much a ghost as a presence with a vague shape and a face hard to see in the luminance that shone from her.
“The city made the water dirty. Bad water made the clams bad. Not all the time, but enough.”
“Are you . . . Kikisebloo?” I asked.
She nodded. “You shouldn’t be here. The land is riddled like the timbers of old ships and the vileness comes
