She was startled, then she gave a nervous laugh and dug a card out of her tote bag. It was a tiny slip of heavy, plasticized paper with her name and phone number on one side and a close-up black-and-white photo of a ragged toe shoe on the other. I DANCE, THEREFORE I AM was printed in white script over the shoe. She handed it to me. “There. That’s the number.”
I looked the card over with a curious frown.
“I had them made when I thought I was going to be doing a lot of auditions and stuff,” Olivia explained, blushing with a touch of embarrassment. “Kind of silly, huh?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve just never seen such a small card before—we didn’t do these in my day.”
She shrugged and looked uncomfortable. “Umm . . . well, anyway . . . It’s going to be really loud out on the pier, so you maybe better text me as early as you can, to be sure I get the message in time.”
“The pier? Are you going out to the waterfront?”
“Yeah, to the park with a couple of the girls and one of the instructors from the ballet studio. Mom wouldn’t let me go without ‘a responsible adult’ to watch us. But it’s really just Delphia’s mom and she’s cool.”
Now this was a quandary: I didn’t want to frighten her or her friends, but I also didn’t want to ignore the danger if things didn’t go as I thought they would—I didn’t know what time Hazzard and Limos would move their ghosts toward the Wheel. I bit my lip for a second and Olivia noticed my hesitation.
“Yeah? Something wrong?”
“No. But there could be a problem with the Great Wheel tonight. Were your friends planning on riding it?”
“I don’t know. Delphia’s scared of heights, but that doesn’t mean the rest wouldn’t want to go up. If the line’s not, like, horrendous. Do you know something . . . ? Is it bad?” She looked scared now.
I wanted to tell her the truth and I wanted to lie, too. I wanted her to be safe—which she might not be with or without me. “I don’t know,” I said.
She studied my face for a moment or two, then she nodded. “If they really, really want to go, I don’t think I can stop them, but I’ll get them to go early, not later, if that makes a difference.”
“It could,” I said, thinking an attack on the Wheel would be more likely later, when the crowds were thickest.
“Then that’s what we’ll do. And I’ll come whenever you tell me to—unless I need a ride. Then it might take a while.”
“I can pick you up if you’re OK with that.”
She shrugged. “Hey, I’m already going out ghostbusting, so I guess I’m pretty good with all kinds of crazy stuff. Don’t tell my mom, though. She will freak.”
I laughed a little. “Believe me, I won’t tell her.”
She glanced around me and grinned. “There’s Delphia! I’m gone! See you later!”
And she darted off before anything could change, embracing the momentary freedom, running from home as much as toward her friend. I had to swallow hard to keep on breathing normally as I watched her go. I hoped with every fiber of my being that I wasn’t lying, that it would all be OK.
I trudged back to my truck and headed for the care home where Delamar was. I hoped talking to Levi wouldn’t leave me in knots like this. I hadn’t thought that Lily would be the easy one. Even convincing Stymak to try again had to be less uncomfortable than telling half lies to Olivia Sterling.
I drove back into central Seattle and parked a few blocks from the hospital so I could walk for a while outdoors in the patchwork sunshine. The weather was typical for Seattle—neither hot nor cold, with clouds that rolled over the sun and then cleared away again after dropping a smattering of rain. It was such a common phenomenon here that the weathermen had a name for it: sun breaks. I was wearing a light jacket and didn’t mind the sun’s game of hide-and-seek; my confidence was suddenly staggering and even with time seeming to fly away from me, I felt the need to be in the normal world with all its mess and inconvenience for just a while longer before I plunged back into the darkness of the situation and faced the seance and everything that went with it. A misty drizzle came down for a minute or so, then dissipated in sudden steam as a hole broke in the cloud cover and the sun stuck a beam of light through to warm the sidewalk.
I sat on a cement bench beside a little triangle of lawn and closed my eyes for a moment, feeling the sun warm me. It was three o’clock on Independence Day but I didn’t feel particularly celebratory or patriotic. I especially felt no connection to James Purlis’s idea of patriotism, which had moved him to do horrible things not for his country’s sake but for the government and some twisted idea about worldly power. Surely that wasn’t what “love of country” was supposed to be?
If some act is wrong it is simply wrong, no matter who tells you to do it or for what grand motive. It seemed to me that a true patriot and decent human being rejects doing wrong and puts the ideals on which the country is founded ahead of the directives of government bureaucrats. If the government is off the rails, you don’t keep on riding the train to destruction—you certainly don’t push it there on your own; you start hauling the other way as hard as you can. That was what Quinton was doing, quietly and without any help or recognition, trying to pull things back toward that delicate state of balance. It was a strange and huge undertaking, but whether I approved of his Don Quixote way of going at it or not, I had to let him do it. Where would I be if Purlis’s ideas won? Branded a monster—a nonhuman with no rights—and put in a cage to be experimented on? That flew in the face of what I’d always taken for granted here—all that high-flown Founding Fathers business about people being inherently free and self-determined, endowed with rights just because they
As loony as it sounded, it meant I had to do a Don Quixote act myself and dismantle this conspiracy of ghosts. I turned my mind to that, trying not to dwell on my own bizarre and complicated family problems instead of the more immediate situation. I only hoped Hazzard and Limos would hold off tonight until Carlos was available. I thought it was likely that they would, since the ghosts would be exhausted from their exertions the previous night and, although Limos and Hazzard were also drawing strength through the rest of the patients’ families, their energy would be low for a while after their last effort. If they were going to have the strength to do something drastic to the Great Wheel, it would probably be after dark, but I didn’t know how long after sunset they would come.
And I still needed to talk to Levi Westman.
I got up and walked on, banishing the sense that I was taking on more than I could manage. I probably was, but I didn’t feel there was an alternative to trying. And I didn’t have time to formulate a better plan. I’d just have to make the one I had work.
I walked into the building and had no trouble getting up to Jordan Delamar’s room. It was a holiday, so I wasn’t surprised to find Westman sitting next to Delamar’s bed once again. He had the television on, but wasn’t paying any attention to it. Instead, he was bending over to study Delamar’s arm.
“Hello,” I said from the doorway.
Westman jerked upright and turned around, eyes wide. He relaxed when he saw me. “Oh. It’s you.”
“Yeah, just me. How’s Jordy today?”
He shook his head, looking worried. “I’m not sure. He’s restless and the . . . rash is pretty bad today.” He motioned me in and pointed at the welts on Delamar’s arm. “What is that?” he whispered.
I looked at the angry red lines that ran from the edge of the pajama sleeve Westman had pushed up to the shoulder all the way into Delamar’s palm where a Ferris wheel had been scribed. Along the arm what looked like clouds boiled and rushed toward the wheel. The coils of the clouds looked disturbingly like anguished faces. Westman lifted the other sleeve to reveal another picture—this one stylized waves with tumbling tops that looked uncomfortably like teeth also facing toward the palm. There was the number ten in this palm. If he had cradled his hands together, the clouds and water would have been converging on the tiny wheel at ten. I didn’t need to be very clever to figure that one out.
My expression clearly revealed my dismay. Westman stared at me as if on the verge of tears. “What is it?”
Here was another of those times I debated whether I should lie, but as I needed his help, I thought it would be better not to. “I . . . it’s a sort of warning.”
“About what? Is something going to happen to Jordy?”
“Something is going to happen to a lot of people, including Jordy,” I said. From what Carlos had said about
