Chapter 30
Vail
In some ways, Charlotte had changed, but in others, she hadn’t changed at all.
When I’d last seen her in Colorado, she’d had the same cool manner, the businesslike poise.
The difference now was in her eyes and the barely perceptible sag of her shoulders.
Even after Colorado, her shoulders hadn’t looked like that.
Something had happened that had made her sad.
Maybe more than one thing. Well, she could join the club.
“Your sisters are nice,” she said politely as she carried her briefcase into the living room, following my lead.
“No, they’re not.” My sisters were many things, but no one used the word nice.
One of them annoyed the shit out of me and the other one bossed me around.
Then, for kicks, they’d switch places. I could hear their voices in the kitchen—low, hissed whispers overlapping each other.
They were talking about us, no question.
Charlotte didn’t argue the point. She was staring at the wall, with the words WAKE UP scrawled in crayon. Her gaze went to the crayon still on the floor, to the shards of glass swept in the corner. “Your manifestation did this?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “I already took pictures. You can take your own if you like.”
That was the usual procedure with any investigation, whether hers or mine.
Get out the camera, the tape recorder. Get out the electromagnetic meter, the infrared lens.
Take pictures, record the interviews from the witnesses, record your own notes as quickly as possible.
Dates, times, names, as if you’re a cop. Document, document, document.
The goal of every investigation was proof.
No one believed in this thing you spent your life on.
Everyone made fun of it, or they thought you were a con artist or a fool.
In defense, you became a cross between a detective at a crime scene and a scientist. You became Sherlock Holmes.
You became the fingerprint analyst and the blood analyst and the detective figuring out which window the killer had entered through.
You employed cold logic and technology, because you wanted to know, and you wanted other people to know.
You wanted to be right. You wanted it to be real and for everyone else to think so, too.
You didn’t want to be thought of as the nutjob anymore, the one who is either an idiot or a charlatan or both.
You wanted other people to see what you did, see the world the way you did, just once. Just once.
Charlotte didn’t take out her camera, or her recorder, or anything else. She stared at the words on the wall and said, “Tell me what happened.”
My throat tried to close. I flexed my hands at my sides, opening and closing my fists. “You don’t want to start an investigation? That’s why I called you.”
“I’ll investigate however I see fit. What I want is to hear you tell it.”
My cheeks stung hot. No one had ever asked me this.
I had done hundreds of interviews, but no one had ever interviewed me.
I had talked to Dodie last night, but this was different.
Charlotte was in the business of talking to people who had seen things that terrified them.
I had never truly understood before how it feels to have someone listen to you without judging.
People called VUFOS and Charlotte because they were crazy or because they were lying, sure.
But they also called because they wanted someone to listen for once. To see them.
I talked.
I told her the events of that night, beginning with Dodie screaming and ending with me smashing the vase over whatever had grabbed me.
It was only a sliver of the whole story, but where was the beginning, really?
Not with Dodie screaming. Where, then? I had never known where the story began, and now I didn’t know if it had a beginning at all.
So I told her that one part, that one night. It was something.
Charlotte listened without interrupting. She put her briefcase back down without opening it. She stepped forward and inspected the letters closely, then crouched down to look at the crayon.
When I finished, I dropped into silence. Charlotte still studied the crayon, and it looked like she was thinking. She should have asked a thousand questions, but instead, her thoughts seemed far away.
I studied her profile, the shape of her chin, the nape of her neck where her hair was tied back.
She had told the truth when she said that we knew each other through our lines of work.
When someone experienced something strange—like, for example, what happened in this living room the other night—they didn’t always know how to define it.
Sometimes, more than one person had the experience, and they differed as to what it was.
Charlotte might get called if it seemed to be ghosts.
VUFOS might be called if it seemed to be aliens.
If I was nearby and available, VUFOS would send me.
Charlotte and I had worked the same case only a few times. Once, we both concluded that the person was an obvious liar. Once, I had been reasonably sure the problem was some kind of ghost, so after I called Charlotte in, I had bowed out.
In Colorado, a man claimed that something was tormenting him.
Tormenting was the word he used. According to his account, the thing—he had not seen it except from the corner of his eye—followed him to work and back, rang his doorbell, tapped his windows.
It stomped on his roof and dug up the garden.
He claimed that this entity had dogged him for years, though in recent months, it had gotten worse.
His doctors could find nothing wrong with him, except that he might be crazy.
He’d talked about this problem to a retired college professor who lived down the street. The professor had known someone who knew Charlotte, who agreed to come assess the situation. Then Charlotte had called VUFOS, who called me.
Charlotte and I had spent seven days in the man’s house, going over every inch of it, including his garden. We kept vigil at night, waiting for the sounds to come on the roof or at the windows. We shadowed him to work and back. In all that time, we saw and heard nothing unusual.
The man insisted that the thing knew we were there, so it was being quiet to make a fool of him. This was entirely possible, so Charlotte and I stayed as long as we could, hoping to help him. Then we both had other commitments, so we left.
Twenty-four hours after we left, the man took his gun from the safe in his basement and killed himself with it. He didn’t leave a note. Since he lived alone, he wasn’t found for several days.
Charlotte was right. Colorado wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t hers, either.
The man could have been deluded, psychotic.
He could have had some other mental problem I wasn’t qualified to diagnose.
He could also have been tormented by something that waited until we left to start up again, and he only had one way to escape it.
There are always several possible explanations, and that was one of them.
“What happened to you since Colorado?” I asked Charlotte.
“Did something happen?” she asked, not looking up.
“I can tell.”
She hesitated, but only briefly. “My dad died.” She stood up, brushing her skirt into place.
Charlotte had learned about parapsychology from her English grandparents on her father’s side, who had pursued famous ghost-hunting cases in the twenties before they retired to obscure country life.
Her father had fought in World War Two, then moved to America with his wife and daughter.
On one of those long, sleepless nights on vigil in Colorado, Charlotte told me that as a teenager she had lived with her grandparents back in England, before both grandparents died in the early seventies.
I had inferred that she had some kind of problem with her parents.
But her sadness now at her father’s death was different.
I’m sorry was the accepted line I should say. Also That’s too bad, He’s in a better place, Time heals all wounds, and depending on the kind of death, either At least he didn’t suffer or At least he isn’t suffering anymore.
“Did you hate him?” I asked her.
“Only sometimes,” she said.
“I hated mine all the time.”
She gestured to the writing. “This wasn’t aliens,” she said. “You know that. You have a ghost in your family home. What am I missing?”
It was hard to breathe, but the words came out anyway. “Ben was my little brother. He died twenty years ago, when he was six. He was playing hide-and-seek. We never found him. My sisters and I are here because our little brother is haunting this place.”
Were her eyes always this kind, this sad? I thought maybe they were. It was why I looked into them as rarely as I could. But our gazes caught now, and I let myself sink for just a second, let her dark lashes and inky pupils take me in.
“Oh, Vail,” she said, the two words soft and heartbroken.
There were too many thoughts in my skull, pressing over each other, trying to explode, one after another.
There were always too many thoughts, so many that I never got any silence, so many that I could never speak quickly enough to catch one, so I didn’t try.
I wanted to tell her everything in that moment, but I didn’t know where to start.
“I need help,” I said, my voice a rasp. The first time I had ever said those words.
Charlotte stepped forward and put a hand on my cheek. Her touch was cool and soft, her fingers slender. She smelled like clean clothes and something faintly flowery.
She leaned up and gently kissed my lips, then pulled away. My thoughts went quiet.
“Show me the rest,” she said.
I nodded. “The attic.”
“The attic,” she agreed. “Lead the way.”