“Can I help you?”
I jam the tooth into my pocket and turn to find a bearded man in a white coat. I approach him hesitantly, tap him hard on the shoulder. “You’re really here.”
He recoils, rubbing his collarbone, looking at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I am. “Yes, but why are you? Who let you in?”
I am not about to tell him my suspicion: that the “person” who had let me in was an earthbound spirit, a ghost. “I’m looking for an employee named Tallulah,” I say.
His features soften. “Were you a personal friend?”
Were. I shake my head. “An acquaintance.”
“Tallulah passed away about three months ago. I guess it was a heart condition that wasn’t diagnosed? She was in the middle of training for her first half marathon.” He puts his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. “I’m really sorry to have to break the news to you.”
I stumble out of the lab, passing the secretary at the front desk and a security guard and a girl sitting on the concrete wall outside making a phone call. I can’t tell who is alive and who isn’t, so I look down at the ground, refusing to make eye contact.
In my car I turn the air-conditioning on full blast and close my eyes. Virgil had been sitting right here. Jenna had been in the backseat. I had talked to them, touched them, heard them clear as a bell.
Clear as a bell. I take my cell phone out and start scrolling until I get to the list of recent calls. Jenna’s number should be there, from when she rang me in Tennessee, scared and alone. But then again, spirits manipulate energy all the time. The doorbell rings when no one is there; a printer goes on the fritz; lights flicker when there’s no storm.
I hit Redial, and get a recording. The number is out of service.
This just can’t be what I think it is. It can’t, I realize, because plenty of people saw me in public with Virgil and Jenna.
I turn the ignition and scream out of the parking lot, driving back to the diner where the rude waitress had serviced our table this morning. When I walk into the building, a bell jangles overhead; on the jukebox, Chrissie Hynde is singing about brass in her pocket. I crane my neck over the high red leather booths, looking for the woman who had taken our order this morning.
“Hey,” I say, interrupting her as she is serving a table full of kids in soccer uniforms. “Do you remember me?”
“I never forget a three-cent tip,” she mutters.
“How many people were at my table?”
I follow her to the cash register. “Is this a trick question? You were by yourself. Even though you ordered enough to feed half the kids in Africa.”
I open up my mouth to point out that Jenna and Virgil ordered their own meals, but that’s not true. They had told me what they wanted to eat, and had each gone to the restroom.
“I was with a man in his thirties—his hair was buzzed short, and he was wearing a flannel shirt even in this heat … and a teenage girl, who had a messy red braid …”
“Look, lady,” the waitress says, reaching beneath the till to hand me a business card. “There are places you can go for help. But this isn’t one of them.”
I glance down: GRAFTON COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES.
• • •
At the Boone Town Office, I sit down with a Red Bull and a stack of records from 2004: births, deaths, marriages.
I read Nevvie Ruehl’s death certificate so many times I think I might have memorized it.
IMMEDIATE CAUSE OF DEATH: (A) Blunt force trauma
(B) DUE TO: Trampling by elephant
Manner of death: Accidental
PLACE OF INJURY: New England Elephant Sanctuary, Boone, NH
DESCRIBE HOW INJURY OCCURRED: Unknown
Virgil’s death certificate is the one I find next. He died in early December.
IMMEDIATE CAUSE OF DEATH: (A) Penetrating trauma to the chest
(B) DUE TO: Motor vehicle accident
Manner of death: Suicidal
Jenna Metcalf does not have a death certificate, of course, because her body was never found.
Until that tooth.
There was no mistake in the medical examiner’s report. Nevvie Ruehl was indeed the person who died at the sanctuary that night, and Alice Metcalf was the unconscious woman Virgil had brought to the hospital, who subsequently disappeared.
Following this logic, I finally know for sure why Alice Metcalf would not have communicated with me—or even Jenna, for that matter. Alice Metcalf, most likely, is still alive.
The last death certificate I look up belongs to Chad Allen, the teacher whose unattractive baby Jenna told me she’d been babysitting. “Did you know him?” the clerk says, looking over my shoulder.
“Not really,” I murmur.
“It was a real shame. Carbon monoxide poisoning. The whole family died. I was in his calculus class the year it happened.” She glances at the pile of papers on the table. “Do you need copies of these?”