Drt (16 page)

“Well, I guess he’s her dealer or something. Jerry always said it was kind of a birds of a feather thing. She wanted to be around him at all times because he always has meth.”
 

“Is there anything else you can think of?”
 

She shook her head. “I wish I knew more. We all really hope that something happens to Leigh Ann. We always felt terrible because Jerry was mixed up with that junkie but didn’t know what to do about it. He kept refusing to listen to us when we told him to call the cops and turn her ass in. I think he was concerned that because he was still living in the same house with a meth addict that he wouldn’t be able to see the kids.”

“You mean he was living with Leigh Ann even though she was seeing Dravin?”
 

“It was terrible. We all felt really bad. That’s why any of us would be more than happy to tell you anything you want to know. We’d all help anyone that’s trying to do right by Jerry. He was a good guy that didn’t deserve the shit she put him through.”

“Thank you very much, Kelly. This makes everything a lot clearer.”

“No, thank you, I am really glad I could help.”

I nodded at her and started back to my car. I keyed the ignition and steered in the direction of Sylvia Barrio’s house. I had all the connections and she could help me put together the last of it.
 

I drove in silence up I-95. In the quiet, I thought to myself that I might actually live through this. It felt good that I was getting this chance to set everything right. Everything.

21

I parked the car and stepped out into the heat. Sylvia lived in a series of apartment buildings grouped like Serengeti stones tossed under a handful of trees. The tree branches spread out wide and created comfortable shade under their leathery green leaves. I closed the door and listened to the sounds of birds and bus acceleration, broken up by the occasional yelps and squeals of children in summer’s full throes.
 

I looked at the address in my phone and then at the snaky concrete path that wound through the brown grass. A vapor trail of nervousness swirled in my gut. There was something exciting about going into the place that Sylvia lived.
 

The buildings were worn red brick with shocks of black and windows. There were no balconies or patios. Unfortunate souls on the bottom floor lived underground while others were trapped 20 feet in the air. Every window was open, marking the lack of air conditioning, and in many, long vertical blinds danced suggesting fans. I walked to a solid red door and squinted at rows of buttons. I tried to find “Barrio” among the names, finally discovering it near the bottom. A buzzing sound emerged when I thumbed the white piece of plastic next to her name. Dogs barked wildly in the stacked homes behind the wall. I waited for a few moments before Sylvia’s disembodied voice crackled through a speaker.
 

“Hello?”

“Sylvia, it’s Greg.”

The door buzzed loudly. I reached for the handle but the buzzing had stopped before I could grab it.
 

I pushed the button again. This process repeated a few times before I was in the hallway of the apartment building. The carpet was dirty gray and there was a bicycle leaning on its side. An overhead light strobed above before quitting altogether. There was still enough sun beaming through to light the small passage.
 

The door opened to Sylvia’s apartment. She stood and smiled weakly as I came walking to the door.
 

“Hey,” she stood in the door frame waiting to usher me inside but her eyes got wide as I approached. “Greg! What happened to your face?”

“I will tell you in a minute. Lots of things to tell you,” I said as I walked in.
 

I pulled my hat off and tossed it aside. I was very happy to see her. There were so many things to tell her but before any of that I would have to get comfortable in her apartment.
 

It was a small, one bedroom affair. There were windows whose bottoms ran parallel to the ground, bushes obstructing most of the view to the outside. The lack of light in the area of the bushes cast a shadow into the apartment. It was furnished with a comfy looking couch and chair.

I noticed stacks of scented candles in the corner space and black-out curtains that had been pulled aside from all the windows, replacing the original blinds. The house was relaxing.

“I need those,” I said, nodding at the curtains.
 

She was walking to the kitchen. “I get migraines.”

“The light hurts when you have migraines?”

“Everything hurts when you have migraines. Water?”

“Yes, please.”

“So what have you found out?”

“I went to the family house yesterday.”
 

“You mentioned that, how did you know where it was?”

“Well, they live right across the street from me.”

“Oh!” she said from the kitchen. “That’s a coincidence.”

“Tell me about it. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw that.”
 

“So what did you find out there?”
 

“Well, his wife has already moved on. She was apparently moving on before Jerry had his accident.”

Sylvia emerged from the kitchen, carrying two glasses of water. “Really?”

“I know, poor guy. It must have been really hard.”
 

“So what made you go over there?”

“Well, after I got home. I saw the ghost…uh…Jerry. He was really serious. I think it’s because I started thinking that you were right about the ghost not existing.”

“…”

“Well, he met me there, and he gave me this,” I said, pointing to the bandaged spot on my chin. “I think it was so that I would believe he’s real.”
 

“Greg, are you mutilating yourself now? This isn’t good, honey. That won’t help you to accept that the ghost is in your head.”

“All right, now listen, please. I promise you that I didn’t mutilate myself. The ghost is real and I know it but it doesn’t much matter right now, okay?”

“But it does matter.”

“So I went across the street when the cut was fresh and the guy, the one the wife is living with now, takes care of me. The guy bandages me up, right? He pastes my face together with butterfly strips and-.”

“Greg, I know I said to try to do what the ghost says but I am starting to worry about this obsession.”

“Just bear with me and listen. So, I meet these people and they are out of their minds. Well, I mean, the mother is out of her mind. She smokes around the kids and was saying all these nasty things about Jerry and-”

A phone rang, but it wasn’t the sound of Sylvia’s cell phone. The sound was coming from a wall phone plugged into a wire in the kitchen. It rang like a sound from the past, when the mechanisms of phone lines were attached to bells, not speakers. Sylvia rose from the couch and walked toward the large piece of ringing plastic.
 

“Hold on,” she answered the phone. “Hello?” she turned around and met my eyes while she listened. “Next week?” she then turned to a calendar on the wall and ran her index finger down it. “Thursday at 3:00. Okay. Okay. Bye,” she hung up the phone.
 

“Appointments,” she said as she walked back to the couch and sat down. “Now what were you saying?”
 

“Anyway, I met the little girl.”

“He had a little girl?”
 

“Yeah, a nine year old girl named Hayleigh. She’s beautiful. As I am getting bandaged, she came in the room for a second but then ran off. Then before I leave she comes up and hugs me. I didn’t know what to do. I thought it was really weird at first but when I got home and I found this in my pocket.” I handed Sylvia the piece of notebook paper.

“What’s this?”

“Just open it. Look at it!”

Sylvia looked down into her hand and thumbed the small piece of folded blue lining open. She spread it out and for a second her eyes were empty, reading, searching, then they were wide open.

“What does this mean?”

“I wasn’t sure at first but then I went back to the company Jerry worked for earlier today and found out more about Leigh Ann. She’s a meth addict and the people Jerry worked with think the guy she’s with now is her dealer. It’s obvious Hayleigh wants to get away from these people.”

“What should we do? Should we call the police? We should call the police. No, we can’t call the police. This isn’t enough evidence. We need to tell somebody. Don’t we have to? Who do we tell? We shouldn’t tell anybody.”

“I don’t know if it’s enough evidence to call the police or not but we should try shouldn’t we? Who knows what the hell those two are doing in that house that those kids are being exposed to.”

“But what if we just make it worse? What if we call the police and they don’t find anything? Wouldn’t they just get better at hiding it?”

“You’re right. That Dravin guy seems like he would be good at hiding those problems but we still need to do something, don’t you think?”
 

“…”

“What do you think I should do?”

“…”

“Sylvia?”

Her eyes were still very wide. She looked like something had just clicked in her mind, something terrible.
 

The door buzzed. The sound of dogs again. She made no movement, just staring at me in a haze. She looked like she was in profound shock.
 

The door buzzed again and she walked toward the intercom. She pushed the button. “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s your appointment.”
 

She keyed the intercom down again. “I’m sorry, I can’t today.” She stepped away from the intercom. The speaker buzzed a third time, the person on the other side clearly angry with the response.

Sylvia was out of the apartment in a flash and the door clapped closed behind her. I sat on the couch in silence. In the distance, Sylvia’s voice argued in Spanish.
 

I looked around the room, my eyes resting on the huddles of candles and incense in the corner. I looked at the blackout curtains again. There was also a stereo on the wall with the speakers nailed in place and painted over. The speaker part stood straight out of the wall like a plastic appendage.

I squinted through the shadows in the apartment and saw black ironing board legs with a cushioned white top. It was surrounded by towels and robes and other soft pieces of fabric. It wasn’t an ironing board, like I thought at first. It was a massage table.
 

That was the moment I put it all together. Words started flowing into my mind. Words like therapist…licensed therapist…the extra phone that was on the wall in the kitchen. I thought about the appointments that were showing up in the middle of the day, about how strange it was that a person who had her own practice in psychotherapy would be in this predicament. I thought about Be Well, how she had told the group she was a therapist.

Then Kelly back at InTransition flashed into my mind, what she said about massages. I thought about the look that Sylvia had on her face when I had been telling her all about what I had learned at the Morris house. What had I mentioned to make Sylvia space out so bad? I was talking about the family. I was talking about Leigh Ann and…
 

Oh my God. I pictured the box in my car, jostling lazily next to me as I drove, loaded with evidence.

Sylvia returned to the apartment, still looking a bit shook up. I stood up when she came back in, my mind racing like it hadn’t done in many years. I turned to her. “I have to check something.”
 

“Are you leaving?” she asked as I walked toward the door.

“No, just….just hold the door,” I said as I pushed past her and outside to the car.
 

I walked to my car and opened the passenger door. I fished the box of evidence out and found the print outs from Craigslist. I looked through the entry on the top and found the phone number.
 

I dialed the 10 digits as I was walking back to the apartment. My heart slammed against my ribcage. Sylvia stood holding the door open, looking solemn and defeated. She winced when she heard the sound.
 

The sound of an old phone ringing.
 

22

Sylvia Barrio sat on the couch in her cluttered apartment. She made thumb circles on her kneecaps and stared straight ahead. I had walked into the apartment while the phone was still ringing and sat down next to her without speaking. We sat together for a while and absorbed the events of the past five minutes. I wasn’t shocked. Something about all that had happened in the past week made me impervious to shock. Sylvia was not though and it was clear she needed some time to process this development.

I figured I could spare the time. I didn’t know if the ghost was going to kill me tomorrow, the day after that, or ever. The situation was ruled by an unknown technicality, the ghost could strike at midnight or he could be counting from the moment from he said seven days. Maybe the ghost had concocted the whole seven days things to simply drive me forward. If that was the ghost’s intention, then we were well on the way.
 

In reviewing the last forty-eight hours, I was pretty sure that Dravin Baxter was the problem that had to be dealt with but Leigh Ann’s involvement was less clear. I was suspicious of her ever since I sat in the kitchen. The revelation that she was a meth addict certainly added spice to the stew, but that didn’t mean that she was guilty of hurting her own children.
 

I still had questions to answer and now more than ever I hoped the woman sitting next to me on the purple couch in this tiny apartment in Prince George’s County could help me with that. Though for the moment I had to be patient.
 

Sylvia reached a shaking hand down to the water on the coffee table. She took a couple of measured swallows and returned her hands to her lap. She sucked in some air. “I believe you about the ghost now.”
 

“It doesn’t really matter-”

“It matters to me.”