Leaving Time(128)

“Here,” I say. “This is where I found the tooth.”

The cops have brought along a forensic expert. I don’t know what he does—soil analysis, maybe, or bones, or both—but he plucks the head off one of the mushrooms. “Laccaria amethystina,” he pronounces. “It’s an ammonia fungus. It grows on soil that has a high concentration of nitrogen.”

Goddamn Virgil, I think. He was right. “It only grows here,” I tell the expert. “Nowhere else in the preserve.”

“That’s consistent with a shallow grave.”

“An elephant calf was also buried here,” I say.

Detective Mills raises his brows. “You’re just a font of information, aren’t you?” The forensic expert directs two of the other officers, the ones who drove me here, to start digging systematically.

They begin on the other side of the tree, across from where Jenna and Virgil and I were yesterday, heaps of dirt shaking through the sifters to catch whatever decomposed fragments they might be lucky enough to unearth. I sit in the shade of the tree, watching the pile of soil rise higher. The policemen roll up their sleeves; one has to jump into the hole to toss the dirt out.

Detective Mills sits down beside me. “So,” he says. “Tell me again what you were doing here when you found the tooth?”

“Having a picnic,” I lie.

“By yourself?”

No. “Yes.”

“And the elephant calf? You know about that because …?”

“I’m an old friend of the family,” I say. “It’s why I also know that the Metcalfs’ child was never found. I think that girl deserves a burial, don’t you?”

“Detective?” One of the policemen waves Mills toward the pit that he’s been digging. There is a gash of white in the dark soil. “It’s too heavy to move,” he says.

“Then dig around it.”

I stand at the edge of the pit as the policemen swipe the dirt away from the bone by hand, like children making a sand castle when the water keeps rushing in to destroy their work. Finally, a shape emerges. The eye sockets. The holes where the tusks would have grown. The honeycomb skull, chipped off at the top. The symmetry, like a Rorschach blot. What do you see?

“I told you so,” I say.

After that, no one doubts my word. The dig systematically moves in quadrants, counterclockwise. In Quadrant 2, they find only a piece of rusted cutlery. In Quadrant 3, I am listening to the rhythmic pull and swish of soil being lifted and tossed when suddenly the noise stops.

I look up and see one of the policemen holding the small fan of a broken rib cage.

“Jenna,” I murmur, but all I hear in response is the wind.


For days, I try to find her on the other side. I imagine her upset and confused, and worst of all, alone. I beg Desmond and Lucinda to reach out to Jenna, too. Desmond tells me that Jenna will find me when she is ready. That she has a lot to process. Lucinda reminds me that the reason my spirit guides had been silent for seven years was because part of my journey was to believe in myself again.

If that’s true, I ask her, then how come now I can’t talk to the one damn spirit I want to?

Be patient, Desmond says. You have to find what’s lost.

I have forgotten how Desmond is always full of New Age crypto-quotes like that. But instead of being annoyed by it, I just thank him for the advice, and wait.

I call Mrs. Langham and offer her a free reading to compensate for my rudeness. She’s reluctant, but she is the kind of woman who walks through Costco just to eat the samples in lieu of paying for lunch out, so I know she will not turn me down. When she comes, for the first time I actually manage to talk to her husband, Bert, instead of faking it. And it turns out he’s just as much of a jerk in the afterlife as he was when he was living. What does she want from me now? he gripes. Always bitching. For Christ’s sake, I thought she’d leave me alone when I finally died.

“Your husband,” I tell her, “is a selfish, unappreciative ass who would prefer that you stop hounding him.” I repeat, verbatim, what he said.

Mrs. Langham is quiet for a moment. And then she replies, “That sounds exactly like Bert.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“But I loved him,” she says.

“He doesn’t deserve it,” I tell her.

When she comes back a few days later, to get advice on finances and important decisions—she brings a friend. That friend calls her sister. Before I know it, I have clients again, more than I can squeeze into my calendar.

But I make time for a lunch break every afternoon, and I spend it at Virgil’s grave. It wasn’t all that hard to find, since there is only a single cemetery in Boone. I bring him things I think he’d like: egg rolls, Sports Illustrated, even Jack Daniel’s. I pour the last over the grave. It will probably kill the weeds, at least.

I talk to him. I tell him about how the newspapers all credited me for helping the police locate Jenna’s remains. How the story of the sanctuary’s demise was splayed across the front pages like Boone’s own version of Peyton Place. I tell him that I was a person of interest until Detective Mills proved that I was in Hollywood, taping one of my shows, the night that Nevvie Ruehl died.

“Do you talk to her?” I ask him, one afternoon when the sky is swollen with rain clouds. “Have you found her yet? I’m worried about her.”