Outside, through the western windows, clouds gathered. July was the time for thunderstorms in Colorado, her mother had told her. “It might storm while I’m in New York,” she’d said. “But don’t be afraid. It’s just God rearranging the clouds.”
Lucy watched the sky darken while her father read aloud about the white witch. She could see their reflection floating in the glass. The window was a magic world; it held both the inside of the house where she and her father sat and the outside where the trees had begun to lash. Far away, a train whistle blew. Her father loved the trains. That’s where he worked now that he wasn’t a soldier anymore, writing a book about the railroads. But the sound of the whistle always opened up something in Lucy that was far away and sad.
A silver thread of lightning shot down from the sky. Lucy shivered.
Her dad paused in his reading. “The train?”
“No,” she said, wanting to be brave. “And not the lightning, neither.”
She sat on the shiver, squeezed it until it went away. Then she lifted her head and pointed toward the window. “Could we go there?”
Her father followed her gaze. “Outside? Sure, after dinner. We can go for a walk once the storm has passed.”
She shook her head. “No. Look. See us in the window?”
Her dad sat up, shifting her on his lap, and squinted toward the glass. “I do, Lucy.”
“And you see the trees, too?”
“I do,” he answered gravely. He always took her ideas seriously. But she could feel his smile.
“It’s a magic place,” she said. “An in-between place. Like the wardrobe.”
“What would we do there in the window, Lucy Goose?”
At the use of her nickname, she looked into his face. Her father hadn’t called her Lucy Goose since she started kindergarten. Now she was a big third grader.
“We’d find things,” she said. “Special things. Like Lucy did in Narnia.”
“I’d like that, Lucy Goose.”
She looked back down, hugged Bobo. “Does Mommy have to go?”
“Only for a few days.” He tilted her chin up. “What’s bothering you?”
But Lucy shook her head. She was always seeing things. That’s what her teachers said. “I’m not afraid.”
A shadow cut the light from the kitchen.
“The spaghetti is ready, you two,” her mother said. “Come and eat.” She went to the bottom of the stairs and called up for the boys to come to dinner.
Her dad eased her off his lap, set her on her feet. “Shall we dine together, milady?”
She took the arm he offered. “Of course, milord.”
Dinner was the usual rambunctious affair. Noisy in the bright kitchen as rain slapped the windows, her brothers talking over each other in their eagerness to tell their parents everything that had happened that day in their summer science camp. They were big kids, twins who would be starting middle school next year.
Brian was halfway through a story about making balloon rockets with straws and string when his flailing hand caught the pitcher and sent it flying.
Juice went everywhere. Her mother stood to grab rags while her dad and Brian knelt and began gathering the broken shards. Her parents didn’t get mad about stuff like this. They just took care of it. Lucy had been to friends’ houses, seen how different it was.
In the midst of all this, the doorbell rang.
“One of you kids get that,” her mother said.
But now the boys were arguing over who had knocked over the pitcher. Lucy stood and walked out of the kitchen toward the hall. As she rounded the corner, the light from the kitchen fell away and the front door emerged from the darkness. Through the window next to the door, evening light fell soft. The storm was gone, and a single star shone in the sky.
Far away, another train blew its whistle. Lucy paused in the hall, one hand pressed flat against the cool texture of the wall, one foot lifted as if afraid to touch down.
The doorbell rang again.
“Lucy!” called her mom. “It’s Carla. She needs to borrow the mixer. Can you let her in?”
The hallway grew longer. Darker. The door loomed, its brass handle gleaming in the dying light.
Lucy glanced back into the library where her book and Bobo lay in the chair.
Whoever had rung the bell began to knock.
“It’s like the wardrobe,” Lucy whispered. “Don’t be afraid. It’s Aslan waiting.”
Or the white witch, said a voice from somewhere.
Lucy’s hand found the door handle.
Don’t open it, said the same voice.
“Lucy!” called her mom.
Her thumb squeezed down on the latch and she pulled open the door.
DAY ONE
CHAPTER 1
Every chance you get, remember: hang on to the living.
Don’t take up with the dead.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
Death did not become her.
Standing near the tracks in the cool of predawn, I ran my flashlight along the dark spaces between the wheels of the coal car and carried out as much of an assessment as I could, given the condition of the body. The jumper—railroad slang for a suicide—was an adult white female, probably in her late thirties. She had a lovely face, arresting despite her age and the blood spatter and bruising.
There wasn’t anything beautiful about the rest of her.
I flicked off the flashlight, dropped it through the ring in my duty belt, and shoved my hands in the pockets of my railway police uniform, letting the velvety gray predawn air wrap around me. Sitting beside me and pressed against me, my K9 partner, Clyde, looked up into my face. His faint shivering traveled up my leg.
The death fear.
It was a gift from the war, like the ghosts.
I untucked my hands and squatted so Clyde and I were eye to eye. I tilted his muzzle up gently with my fingers.
“We’re still good,” I told him.
He studied my face, and after a moment his shivering stopped. I released him, and we pressed our heads together.
Somewhere on the other side of the train, a meadowlark spilled its morning song into the darkness. Something small rustled through the grasses. A couple hundred yards away, just visible between the cars, the water of the South Platte River lapped at its banks. So early in the morning, the city seemed far away, more promise than substance, the headlights on the highway like stars burning in another galaxy. For Clyde and me, this was the time when the membrane between the possible and the impossible was at a gossamer thinness.
Dawn was the time for ghosts. For we can least bear our guilt in the long, low hours of near dark, when the sun is a rumor that might never blossom.
I’d been haunted since my return from the war. My therapist talked about referential delusions and post-traumatic stress and a refusal to let go of the past. But I put my faith in a fellow Marine who told me that our ghosts are our guilt. A lot of soldiers and Marines are haunted. Eventually, my friend promised, we move on.
Now, I warily brought my gaze back to the tracks where a slick, shadowy mess of shattered bones and destroyed flesh were all that remained of a once-beautiful woman. Nothing stirred but a stray strand of her dark hair.
“No ghosts, Clyde. See?”
Clyde huffed.