Nocturnal Part 29

"Too bad. That stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.d doesn't smoke either. I buy them, he throws them out." He sighed. "Where were we? I was born in 1895, right here in San Francisco. Barbary Coast, you know it? I built the castle in 1925. I made a lot of money in those years."

"And now?"

"Now?" His obsidian eyes glinted as he leaned toward me. "Dr. Dillon, I'm dead. There is no now."

I couldn't suppress a sudden shudder. Patients with DID usually didn't present dead people as alters.

"When did you, um, pa.s.s away?"

"New Year's Day, 1932."

"Where have you been since then?"

He patted his chest again, and when he found nothing, chewed on a thumbnail with the relish of someone who hadn't had these small comforts in a long time. "Here and there."

"What do you want now?" This was not a question a psychiatrist would ask a patient. It was a question my sister asked when she was ridding a house of a pesky poltergeist. But Edgar Templeton seemed to appreciate it. The arrogant grin he gave me looked nothing like Derek's warm, humble smile.

"I'm rich, Dr. Dillon. I have a beautiful home and many interests to occupy my time. But I am, alas, missing one thing."

"What's that?" I cringed, thinking of the way he'd leered at me.

"A body, of course," he hissed. "I am incorporeal, in case you failed to notice. Although I am not without resources."

The heavy book slid out from under my hand, flew through the air, and smashed against the opposite wall. I gasped, clutching at the floor.

"I intend to have Derek's fine young body as my own, so I can live again, and enjoy the pleasures of the flesh." His lizard eyes dragged insinuatingly down the length of my body. Gooseflesh erupted all over my freezing skin.

"What will happen to Derek?" My normal calm, authoritative tone had disappeared, replaced by a plaintive little girl voice that I hated but couldn't control.

"His soul will wander, rootless and dest.i.tute, for all eternity. Perhaps it will haunt you for the rest of your life. Have you ever wanted your own personal ghost?" His cackle made my flesh crawl.

Edgar stood up. His movements were disjointed and awkward, like a marionette being directed by several different hands. "I'm going home," he said.

"You're what?"

His lower lip turned down in mock pity. "You keep hoping I'll give up, don't you? But I'm stronger than he is, Maggie. He can't win."

"With my help he can."

When he laughed this time he sounded genuinely amused. "Oh, dear me, you have great confidence in yourself, little lady. Why would that be?"

He moved closer, lurching as if his knees didn't work. One of his shoulders was pulled up around his ear. I backed up until I hit the TV.

He stopped a foot away from me. The white mist floated in tendrils around his head, swayed by an invisible breeze. There was an unearthly power coming from this ent.i.ty, so strong it was visible in the room. It radiated out of him in waves, like looking at a tarmac road on a hot summer day.

"You couldn't save your mother, could you?"

His words. .h.i.t me like a punch in the solar plexus. "I was only eight," I whispered. "I couldn't have done anything."

When he touched me it felt as if he'd pressed a Popsicle against my cheek. "Yes, that's what you tell yourself. But you don't really believe it, do you?"

My head moved side to side without any help from my conscious mind.

"And you can't help Derek. But stay out of my way, girly, and you might just survive this."

He tapped his forehead as if he was tipping an invisible hat, and then he left. Closing my eyes, I listened to him careen down the hall like a drunk, his body bouncing off the walls as he stumbled down the staircase. Only when the door was closed and everything was silent did I allow myself to cry.

Dr. Kay steepled his fingers and stared at me impa.s.sively. From my position on the leather couch in his handsomely appointed office I could read all of his diplomas. They'd been carefully positioned behind his head for optimum visibility.

"You saw a mist coming out of his mouth, you say?"

I nodded, resisting the urge to break our shared gaze. His steel-blue eyes were hard to look at, even though his demeanor was resolutely professional.

"How much sleep are you getting, Maggie?"

"I'm a resident, Dr. Kay. Which is to say, not enough. But sleep deprivation is not a new thing for me. This is."

"Are you religious?" He tapped his Waterford pen on the legal pad in his lap.

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Do you believe in the immortal soul?"

I shrugged. This was a conversation I would have enjoyed having with my Catholic mother, if she hadn't died before we got the chance. "I'm not sure. Do you?"

He gave me a tight smile. "We're talking about you right now."

"Yes, I know."

Dr. Kay glanced to my right, where I knew there was a clock on the side table. My time was running out.

"It's countertransference, Mags."

Was this what he'd been thinking all along, slapping me with that Freudian label while pretending to listen to my talk of morphing faces and unexplained cold spots?

"But I-"

"You have feelings for the man, don't you?"

I pressed my lips together tightly while my mind floundered for the right answer, if not the true one.

Dr. Kay waved a dismissive hand. "Don't worry, you're not going to get in trouble. You did the right thing, sending him to me when you knew that your feelings were making you less than impartial. He's a nice-looking fellow, I'll give you that."

My cheeks grew hot. This conversation was getting more and more uncomfortable. "But if he's not my patient anymore, how could it be countertransference? Isn't that only for therapists who fall for their patients?"

"Countertransference can refer to a therapist developing erotic feelings for a patient, but also when a therapist takes on the psychosis of a patient. In your case, both of these."

I grabbed a tissue. Under the cover of wiping my nose I cleared away a few tears. "So what do I do about it?"

"You need to stay away from Mr. Fielding. I'll take good care of him, I promise you. Concentrate on your work. Can you do that?"

I blinked hard. "Yes, I can do that."

Dr. Kay put his pad down on the side table and leaned forward. The calm, neutral expression was gone, replaced by steely determination. "Good. Because if you don't, I might have reason to question your professional judgment. Then I might have to think twice about recommending you to the selection committee, and that could affect your career in a very negative way. We don't want that to happen, do we?" His sharp blue eyes pinned me down like a dead insect on a specimen board.

I swallowed hard and shook my head.

He patted his knees and glanced at the clock again. "Good, I'm glad we understand each other. And I'm afraid our time is up."

I sat at the table, staring at a framed photograph on my kitchen wall. The Cliff House was a historic hotel and restaurant on Ocean Beach that had burned down twice. My photo was of the second Cliff House, taken on the day of the fire, in 1907. In my left hand was a gla.s.s of the Zinfandel that Derek had left behind. If I breathed deeply I could still smell his spicy tomato sauce. Its aura was buried somewhere in the walls, and I certainly hadn't cooked anything else since then to bury it. I spun my BlackBerry like a dreidel. In the twenty-four hours since my appointment with Dr. Kay, Derek had called twice and texted twice.

I'd been sitting at the table, looking from the phone to the photograph, for over an hour, paralyzed with indecision. I wanted to call Derek so badly I felt it through my whole body, like the flu. To defy Dr. Kay would be to kiss my career goodbye, but the only thing I was really worried about now was Derek. He had gone back to see Dr. Kay, so I couldn't claim any therapeutic benefits for my presence in his life. Perhaps dealing with me would only distract him, interfere with his healing process, as Dr. Kay believed.

Or perhaps I was the only one who could really help Derek.

I hadn't been able to get Edgar Templeton out of my mind. The image of his face was so clear, I could have picked him out of a police line-up. If this had been New Orleans rather than San Francisco I could have easily found people, including my sister, who would have believed Derek's story of ghostly possession without question. But here in San Francisco, among my colleagues at Pacific University Hospital, I would risk being labeled mentally ill myself if I so much as mentioned the possibility that Derek's perceptions might be real.

I'd been poised on the edge of this particular knife since I was a child, precariously balanced between the worlds of fact and faith. The former was the realm of science, where I lived now, and the latter was the province of my mother and sister. The world of my childhood was a dark place full of misty intangibles, where death was a transfer station on the journey to another plane, and souls who got lost on the way could be found in every old house, chapel, or barn. They might even be driving ghost cars on a bridge.

I was a product of both of these worlds, but I had found them irreconcilable. So I had packed the world of my childhood away, like my emotions, in a box that I always intended to open but never did. Until now. Ever since not-Derek lurched out of my house like a zombie from a George Romero film, I had been thinking of the two men as separate ent.i.ties. Countertransference or not, some part of me already believed Edgar and Derek's story.

I swirled the wine until it coated the inside of the gla.s.s and then I took a deep inhalation, as Derek had taught me. If only there was a way to prove that Edgar Templeton was real, to use the methods of science to bolster my case, rather than refute it. My eyes drifted back to the phone, then to the photograph of the Cliff House. Smoke and flames were coming out of the roof, encircling the belvedere and winging into the sky. A Victorian era family, in suits and long dresses, posed on the beach in the foreground. They smiled for the camera, commemorating the historic day. As I looked at their long-dead faces an idea occurred to me. I grabbed my phone and my purse and ran out of the house.

I walked right past the San Francisco Historical Society on my first pa.s.s down the block. The squat, two-story red-brick building, tucked between two skysc.r.a.pers, was the architectural equivalent of a pair of old shoes in the back of your closet being slowly buried by subsequent purchases of more expensive and higher-heeled versions. The lobby was showing an exhibit about camping in the nineteenth century. I pa.s.sed it with barely a glance, looking only for the signs that directed me to the photography archives.

A middle-age woman, with wispy blond hair and a blanket-sized red scarf coiled around her neck, was clicking away on a computer behind the archives counter. She smiled cheerily when I reached her, as if this were a regular day and I was a regular customer looking for some relic of history that existed now only in her dusty archives. How could she imagine that what I was looking for was as alive as either of us, maybe more so?

"I'm looking for a photograph," I said.

The woman nodded. "Any particular subject?"

"A man named Edgar Templeton. He built a house in Pacifica that looks like a castle."

"Eddie's Folly," she said, reaching for a set of shelves on her right.

"You've heard of it?" I didn't know whether to be glad or horrified.

The librarian handed me a printed form and a pen. "Yes, I've got some pictures. If you could just fill this out and show me some ID, I'll pull them for you."

While I was waiting I wandered the room, checking out the framed photos on the walls. In a single circ.u.mlocution I discovered that Haight Street had once had an amus.e.m.e.nt park with a rickety waterslide called The Chutes that occasionally ejected people onto the sidewalk at high speed, and that a bar called Abe Warner's Cobweb Palace once housed monkeys, parrots, and bears. And people thought San Francisco was weird now.

The librarian brought out a cloth-covered accordion folder, placed it on one of the tables and handed me a pair of white cotton gloves. My legs suddenly felt weak, so I sat down and took a few deep breaths as I donned the gloves. The faded folder bore a typewritten sticker: TEMPLETON, EDGAR, 18951932. My hand trembled as I reached for the clasp.

The first file held a scratched black-and-white photo of Templeton's house when it was new. A crowd of men in broad-shouldered, pin-striped suits and women in flapper dresses milled around the courtyard, which at that point in time was beautifully landscaped and dotted with iron tables and chairs. Some people were standing on the roof, hanging over the parapets, smoking and drinking.

The next file slot yielded a yellowed article clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, dated January 2, 1932. dated January 2, 1932.

Notorious Bootlegger Edgar Templeton Murdered in Little Italy Suspected bootlegger and gang leader Edgar Templeton was shot and killed while dining at Vesuvio restaurant on Columbus Avenue last night. Also killed were his wife, Claudia, two a.s.sociates, Melvin Purvis and Angelo Ciccone, and a bystander, Juanita James. Three other people were wounded.The cold-blooded killings have stunned the populace of San Francisco. Witnesses stated that as Templeton and his party were dining at the front of the restaurant, a black Ford without license plates pulled up on Columbus Avenue. Several gunmen opened fire through the plate gla.s.s windows, sending patrons scurrying for cover amid a hail of bullets and shattered gla.s.s. At least three gunmen were involved, according to eyewitnesses. Police have recovered at least 160 sh.e.l.l casings inside the restaurant.Police chief Francis Gibb speculated that the killings may have been in retaliation for another spectacular shooting that occurred in Half Moon Bay, at a beachside location known as a rendezvous point for liquor smugglers from Canada. Two weeks ago, on December 15, two unidentified Canadian men and an American, Joseph Margolis, were shot and killed while unloading a s.h.i.+pment of whisky that subsequently went missing. There are no suspects in this murder, but rumors have flown that it was perpetrated by Edgar Templeton, whose reputation as a bloodthirsty gangster includes at least three murders allegedly perpetrated by his own hand.The establishment in Half Moon Bay, reputedly a speakeasy, was said to be in compet.i.tion with one in Pacifica owned by Mr. Templeton. Templeton maintained that the large and impressive building, modeled after a European castle, was solely his private residence.

The article was accompanied by two gruesome photographs that would never have run in a twenty-first-century newspaper. One was a shot of Templeton and the other dead people lying on the floor of the restaurant amid shattered plates and overturned furniture. The men had on suits and ties, while the woman, who was pet.i.te and dark-haired, wore a floral print dress that was bunched up around her shapely thighs, revealing the garters that held up her stockings. The other photo was of Edgar Templeton, lying on the floor with an overturned chair next to him. He held a fork in his right hand. His wide-open eyes stared upward and his mouth seemed to be smiling. There was a neat hole the size of a quarter in his forehead and a pool of sticky-looking black blood under his head.

The file also held an eight-by-ten print of Templeton's mug shot: side-by-side front and side views, with a five-digit prison number in the lower left corner. He was again wearing a suit and tie, the white s.h.i.+rt dark with grime around the collar. It was an excellent likeness of him, so clear that I could distinguish individual smallpox scars on his cheeks and chin. The living Edgar Templeton was handsome, in an Al Capone sort of way. His expression-even in a mug shot-was insolent and vaguely amused, as if his incarceration were a practical joke he was playing on the prison guards. His eyes were dark, but not the depthless black I remembered. In the photo they had some translucence that indicated they might have been brown or hazel. But the splayed-out nose, sharp cheekbones, and heavy eyebrows low on the ridged forehead-they all belonged to the man I had seen in my apartment, the man who had turned an expression of love into a repellant s.e.xual violation.

I put out one gloved finger and touched the face, but I didn't need tactile evidence to know it was real. The blood drained out of my head, leaving me dizzy and nauseated, gripping the table to stay upright. The evidence was here, as plain as the nose on Edgar's face, that we were dealing with a ghost. But what to do now? No drugs, no shock treatments, no amount of talk therapy or hypnosis or biofeedback was going to make Edgar go away. I knew what I needed, and it wasn't going to be found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Chapter 5.

"Lady Eva's House of Gris Gris. New Orleans Cemetery Tours every Tuesday night." The girl's tone was bored and perfunctory. She ended the recitation with a sharp snap of her chewing gum.

"May I speak to Lady Eva?" I asked. Even after ten years I still choked on my sister's "professional" name.

"Who's callin'?" the girl asked.

Her New Orleans drawl was as familiar to me as my own name. I had talked the same way when I came to California, but after the twentieth person described my accent as "cute," I decided I had to get rid of it. I traded my car for lessons from a graduate student in speech therapy. I had been relatively successful, but the accent slipped back whenever I was exhausted or drunk or overwhelmed.

"This is Eva's sister, Maggie."

"I didn't know Eva had a sister."

"I'm not surprised."

While the girl went to look for her boss I was treated to the rolling piano notes of "Basin Street Blues," played by Dr. John. The bearded pianist was part of the New Orleans musical canon, heard in every establishment in the French Quarter, including Eva's store on Rue St. Anne. After a pause long enough to finish Dr. John and move on to the Neville Brothers, the receiver rattled.

"Maggie Dillon, as I live and breathe!" Eva said cheerily.

I winced at her choice of words. Our mother had used that phrase whenever she ran into an acquaintance. It was usually accompanied by a hug and an invitation to tea. Eva sounded so much like Mama that it twisted my heart like a wet dishrag.