VACANCY & ARIEL

Shalin settles into cruising speed and Cliff, sobered by what she’s told him, says, “Even if that’s true…”

“It’s true.”

“…she could have seen a doctor.”

“She did,” says Shalin. “If you hadn’t gotten her fired, perhaps she could have seen the doctor who attended you.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t get her fired! She vanished off the set. I didn’t know what had happened to her.”

Shalin makes a dismissive noise. “As it was, Aunt Isabel went to a bomoh. A shaman. I can’t blame you for that. She was a country girl and still put her trust in such men. But when he failed her, she wrote you letters, begging for help, for money to engage a western doctor. You never replied.”

“I never got any letters.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“She didn’t have my address. How could she have written me?”

“She mailed them in care of your agent.”

“That’s like dropping them into a black hole. Mark…my agent. He’s not the most together guy. He probably filed them somewhere and forgot to send them along.”

They flash past a ramshackle fishing camp at the edge of the marsh, wooden cabins and a pier with a couple of small boats moored at its nether end. Their speed is creeping up and Cliff tells her to back it down.

“It’s an astonishing coincidence that we bought the Celeste and you started working for Uncle Jerry,” she says. “It almost seems some karmic agency is playing a part in all this.”

Cliff doesn’t know what troubles him more, the idea that the coincidence is not a coincidence, a thought suggested by her sly tone, or the implication that an intimate relationship exists between Jerry Muntz and the Palaniappans. Now that he thinks about it, he’s seen Jerry, more than once, stop at the motel for a few minutes before heading home. He has no reason to assign the relationship a sinister character, yet Jerry wouldn’t befriend people like the Palaniappans unless he had a compelling reason.

“All of what?” he asks.

“Aunt Isabel was a woman of power,” says Shalin. “By nature, she was trusting and impractical, not at all suited for life in Manila or Jakarta. She ended up in Jakarta, you know. In a section known as East Cipinang, a slum on the edge of a dump. We survived by scavenging. I’d take the things we found and sell them in the streets to tourists. We had enough to eat most days. Tourists bought from me not because they wanted the things we found, but because I was very pretty little girl.” Her lips thin, as if she’s biting back anger. “Isabel could only work a few hours a day, and sometimes not that. Her insides were rotting. She received medicine from a clinic, but the disease had progressed too far for the doctors to do anything other than ease her pain. She’d lost her beauty. In the last years before she died, she looked like an old, shriveled hag.”

“I’m sorry,” Cliff says. “I wish I had known.”

“Yes, you would have flown to her side, I’m sure. She often spoke of your generosity.”

“Look, I didn’t know. I can’t be held responsible for something I didn’t know was happening.”

“Is that what it is to you? A matter of whether or not you can be held responsible? Are you afraid I’m going to sue you?”

“No, that’s not…”

“Rest assured, I’m not going to sue you.”

Her voice is so thick with menace, Cliff is momentarily alarmed. They’re within the city limits now, driving in rush hour traffic past fruit stands and motels and souvenir shops, not far from the lot—he can’t wait to get out of the car.

“Isabel, as I told you, was a woman of power,” says Shalin. “In another time, another place, she would have been respected and revered. But ill, buried in the slums, power of the sort she possessed could do her no good.”

“What the hell are you getting at?” he asks.

She flashes a sunny smile and goes on with her narrative. “Isabel loved you until the end. I know she hated you a little, too, but she maintained that you weren’t evil, just profligate and vain. And slight. She said there wasn’t much to you. You were terribly immature, but she had hopes you’d grow out of that, even though you were in your thirties when she knew you. She was basically a decent soul and power was something she used judiciously, only in cases where she could produce a good effect. It was among the last things she transferred to me.” She sighs forlornly. “Taking control of me was the one selfish act she committed in her life. You can’t blame her. The streets had left me damaged beyond repair and she was terrified of death. Of course these transfers are a bit like reincarnation, so it’s not exactly Isabel who’s alive. I mean, she is alive, but she’s a different person now. There are things that are left behind during a transfer, and things added that belonged to the soul who once inhabited this body.”

“You’re out of your tree.” He says this without much conviction. “All you’re doing is screwing with me.”

“Right on both counts.”

She slows and eases into the turning lane across from the lot, waiting for a break in the traffic.