Forever Odd

uneasy.
        Now focusing on Datura, the young waitress came closer still, to within a few feet of us.
        Squinting, trying to see the spirit, but staring to one side of it, Datura asked, “Why does she linger?”
        “I don’t know. The dead don’t talk to me. When I command them to be visible to you, maybe you’ll be able to get them to speak.”
        I scanned the casino shadows, searching for the lurking form of the tall, broad man with buzz-cut hair. Still no sign of him, and he was my only hope.
        Speaking of the cocktail waitress, Datura said, “Ask if her name was…Maryann Morris.”
        Surprised, the waitress moved closer and put a hand on Datura’s arm, a contact that went unnoticed, for only I can feel the touch of the dead.
        “It must be Maryann,” I said. “She reacted to the name.”
        “Where is she?”
        “Directly in front of you, within arm’s reach.”
        In the manner of a domesticated creature reverting to a wilder state, Datura’s delicate nostrils flared, her eyes shone with feral excitement, and her lips pulled back from her white-white teeth as if in anticipation of blood sport.
        “I know why Maryann can’t move on,” Datura said. “There was a story about her in the news accounts. She had two sisters. Both of them worked here.”
        “She’s nodding,” I told Datura, and at once wished that I had not facilitated this encounter.
        “I’ll bet Maryann doesn’t know what happened to her sisters, whether they lived or died. She doesn’t want to move on until she knows what happened to them.”
        The apprehensive expression on the spirit’s face, which was not entirely without a fragile hope, revealed that Datura had intuited the reason Maryann lingered. Reluctant to encourage her, I didn’t confirm the accuracy of her insight.
        She needed no encouragement from me. “One sister was a waitress working the ballroom that night.”
        The Lady Luck Ballroom. The collapsed ceiling. The crushing, skewering weight of the massive chandelier.
        “The other sister worked as a hostess in the main restaurant,” Datura said. “Maryann had used her contacts to get jobs for them.”
        If that was true, the cocktail waitress might feel responsible for her sisters having been in the Panamint when the quake struck. Hearing that they had survived, she would most likely feel free to shake off the chains that bound her to this world, these ruins.
        Even if her sisters had died, the sad truth was likely to release her from her self-imposed purgatory. Although her sense of guilt might increase, that would be trumped by her hope of a reunion with her loved ones in the next world.
        Seeing not the usual cold calculation in Datura’s eyes, nor the childlike wonder that had briefly brightened them as we had descended the stairs from the twelfth floor, seeing instead a bitterness and a meanness that emphasized the new feral quality in her face, I felt no less nauseated than when, with blood-smeared hand, she had pressed the wineglass to my lips.
        “The lingering dead are vulnerable,” I warned her. “We owe them the truth, only the truth, but we have to be careful to comfort them and encourage them onward by what we say and how we say it.”
        Listening to myself, I realized the futility of urging Datura to act with compassion.
        Directly addressing the spirit whom she could not see, Datura said, “Your sister Bonnie is alive.”
        Hope brightened the late Maryann Morris’s face, and I could see that she readied herself for joy.
        Datura continued: “Her spine was snapped when a ton-and-a-half ballroom chandelier fell on her. Crushed the shit out of her. Her eyes were punctured, ruined-”
        “What’re you doing? Don’t do this,” I pleaded.
        “Now Bonnie’s paralyzed from the neck down, and blind. She lives on the government dole in a cheap nursing home where she’ll probably die from neglected bedsores.”
        I wanted to shut her up even if I had to hit her, and maybe half the reason I wanted to shut her up was because it would give me an excuse to hit her.
        As though attuned to my desire, Andre and Robert stared at me, tense with the expectation of action.
        Although the chance to knock her flat would have been worth the beating the thugs would have administered to me, I reminded myself that I had come here for Danny. The cocktail