Forest Ghost Read Free Page B

to go. I
told
him. He just wouldn’t listen.’

Corinne Calls
    B y the time Jack had parked his car and squeezed out of it, Sparky had taken his astrological globe up to his bedroom.
    ‘What is the matter with young Sparky?’ asked Saskia, as Jack came into the restaurant. ‘He just go straight upstairs and he don’t even say hallo.’
    ‘Looked to
me
like he’d been crying,’ put in Jean.
    Jack briefly told them what had happened. Jean pressed her hand against her forehead and then said, ‘Oh,
no
! My friend Ruby – her son Jimmy belongs to that same scout troop. I hope
he
wasn’t one of them!’
    ‘Why don’t you call her, just to make sure?’ Jack suggested. ‘Go ahead – do it now. You don’t want to spend the rest of the evening worrying about it.’
    Jean went to make her phone call while Jack went through to the kitchen. Mikhail’s two sous-chefs had arrived and were busy prepping for the evening. Piotr was furiously chopping up potatoes to make dumplings, while Duane was mixing a thick stuffing of mushrooms, walnuts and horseradish.
    Piotr was short and chunky, with buzzcut hair. He had recently come to live in Chicago from Lublin, in Poland, but Duane, a tall young African-American with a bald head and large gold earrings, had lived in Chicago all his life. For some reason, he had a talent for cooking authentic Polish food. Even Jack’s mother said that Duane’s
zrazy
were to die for.
    ‘What’s Sparky having tonight?’ asked Duane.
    ‘I don’t know. He’s kind of upset. I’ll tell you why later. Maybe some soup.’
    ‘The soup tonight is
zhurek
. Otherwise there’s
borsch
, or cherry soup.’
    ‘Thanks, Duane. Everything OK, Mikhail?’
    Mikhail had his back turned but he lifted his hand to show that everything was under control. Jack didn’t say anything about tomatoes.
    He went up the narrow back stairs to the three-bedroomed apartment over the restaurant. The apartment was large, with high ceilings, although it was mostly furnished with old-fashioned couches and armchairs which Agnieszka had inherited from her parents, and its heavy brown velvet curtains gave it an Eastern European gloom, like the restaurant below.
    He went to Sparky’s bedroom door and knocked. ‘Sparks? You OK? You want anything to eat?’
    There was no answer so he opened the door. Sparky was sitting at his desk with the astrological globe in front of him. Through the window, Jack could see the brown brick wall of the building next door. It had a large hoarding on it with a stylized picture of a ram’s head, and the words
Capricorn Hardware
. It had always struck Jack as one of life’s coincidences that Sparky should have an astrological sign staring into his bedroom window, especially since Sparky
was
a Capricorn.
    Jack sat down on the end of the bed and watched Sparky turning the globe around and around – occasionally stopping to jot down figures and symbols on a notepad.
    ‘So what are you doing now?’ he asked.
    ‘Looking back,’ said Sparky. ‘Trying to find out what happened.’
    ‘Looking
back
? I thought astrology looked into the future.’
    ‘Unh-hunh. The stars can show you the past as well. Just because nobody took any notice of their stars at the time, that doesn’t mean that the warnings weren’t there. I looked back at President Kennedy’s stars for November twenty-second, 1963, and if anybody had drawn him a star chart, he would never have driven through Dallas in an open-topped limo. The third degree of Gemini was rising, and the Moon had reached the square of Mercury.’
    ‘Sparky,’ said Jack, standing up and laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘Maybe you should give this a rest for now. Come down and help me in the restaurant.’
    Sparky didn’t turn around and look up at him, but Jack could tell that he was silently crying. ‘No, Dad,’ he said. ‘I have to do this. I want to.’
    Jack waited for a while, with his hand still on Sparky’s shoulder. Sparky was wearing a