“Don’t you look at me like that, not you, Phyllis! You’ve got ghosts like a country dog has fleas, and you don’t even know it! Goddamn it, goddamn it, Pea, why did you have to take it all so seriously? Couldn’t you have knocked off a few baddies and called it a day? Couldn’t you have run off with Dev that first time and stayed here in this cracker country? Oh no, but you got to be the best, don’t you? Be the very best angel for the devil himself, and now where has that got you? Sick to death with a baby, your man in the war, and your devil’s old ghost settling in for the winter! And now I’m supposed to fix it? I gotta clean up this goddamned mess you made? I love you, Pea, I swear I do, I never had a friend like you, but—”
Grief cut her off like a closed fist. Phyllis just stared at her, mouth open, eyes wet.
Tamara stood up, walked straight through the kitchen to the side door and out into the cold punch of winter.
To sit back and watch her die. To know she could have done something, but to choose, instead, nothing. To live the rest of her life with that most damning of proof that she had always been better at pretending goodness than being good.
She kicked a stone. It wasn’t Tammy who’d spent fifteen years cutting a bloody swath through New York’s lowlife. She hadn’t submitted her will to a man with no more moral sense than those silver teeth Marty stuck in his mouth every year.
Sure, said Tammy’s own thoughts in Pea’s damned voice, but you danced for him.
The cards weren’t any more forthcoming—two of hearts, five of clubs, seven of diamonds, primes, those solitary figures, accusing her: choose her or choose yourself, Oracle, but we both know who you really are. And then the other ghosts started crawling their way through Tamara’s peripheral vision, along with old silver himself.
Her uncle Chester, who had died of a heart attack last summer, in his mistress’s bed.
Great-Aunt Winnie, eyes eloquent with disappointment and reserved pride.
A light-skinned woman who reminded Tammy of Pea, and must be her great-grandmother herself, whose cards and kerchief she had kept in trust all these years.
She blamed Victor’s curse, though she couldn’t understand why Pea got to sleep the night through while Tamara paced the kitchen until twilight. She’d resorted to using Mrs. Grundy’s laudanum more nights than she liked to admit. Was it that Tammy was the oracle to Pea’s unhappy fate? Or was it the choice, that angel joker, that had the haints up in her business like a church lady at Sunday repast? She told herself she needed distraction, and so she rang Walter.
“Just checking in on my favorite place in the world,” she told him, aiming for and hitting that perfect note of airy cheerfulness, though it cost her more than it used to.
“Still standing, Tammy,” Walter said, dryly. “Miss us already?”
“It’s not exactly the Flamingo up in here, Walt.”
“I thought you hated the Flamingo. On principal.”
“Well, it’s certainly no Pelican! Who’s on tonight, anyway?”
“Some dancer,” Walter said, a little distracted. “I don’t remember the details. Someone on your list.”
“French or Russian?”
“Chicagoan?”
“Oh! Don’t tell me Katherine Dunham found time at last? Last I heard she’d gone to Hollywood and forgotten all about us.”
“It would seem she remembered. Tammy—I appreciate your interest in the joint, but you’re up there, we’re down here—”
“If you’re too busy, Walter, you can just say so.”
“Is everything all right with you and Pea?”
“Why wouldn’t everything be?”
“Just a feeling.”
“You got the hands now too?”
Walter laughed. “Grateful to say I’ve never had a dream come down. But I do know my business. You’ll let me know if you need me? I promised Dev I would keep her safe. I don’t make a lot of promises, Tammy.”
Keep her safe? And how, Tamara thought, was Walter going to keep Phyllis safe from her own bloody past? “There’s nothing wrong, Walter.”
“But you’ve been seeing dead people.”
Tamara opened her mouth and felt everything she had meant to say drain away. She had never felt so distant from the Pelican, from Victor’s New York, from the glittering play she’d performed for herself, night after night.
“How do you know that?” she asked flatly.
“Pea told me you think that Victor is haunting her. And right before she passed out that night at the Pelican you screamed something. About a body in a tree. So, tell me Tammy, what did you see?”
“I saw Pete Williams,” she said softly. Walter didn’t respond, so she found herself filling that soft space he left her with her own, real voice. “He was this boy I knew growing up. We might have kissed even, I don’t remember. I kissed a lot of boys. Mama didn’t like it, said that I was growing up like my dad. Anyway, Pete and I didn’t run with the same crowd. My mama taught literature at St. Paul’s and I lived mostly with my grandma, who had her master’s—the first in the family—anyway, we were that kind of family, some liked to call us uppity, but we were well educated, respectable, despite my dad. And Pete’s family lived in a one-room shack down by the creek and none of them stayed in school past eighth grade. Pete might have gotten through some high school, but he dropped out to work. Something dirty. Road work or construction, I don’t remember. He dated one of my girlfriends for a while, but we all said she could find someone better, so she left him. She married a dentist from Richmond … beat her ass every Sunday night, like it was part of the liturgy.
“Pete was a nice kid. Poor, not educated worth a damn, but kind. I think that’s worth a lot more than we realized back then. But they say that he fell for some white girl—not rich, either.
