Chapter Nine
The next morning, the first of March, when she woke up fifteen minutes ahead of her alarm clock and got out of bed because she couldn’t sleep any more, she decided today was the day.
Not before Mrs. B’s breakfast, which she fetched with only a murmured “Morning” to Ren. Not before her own breakfast, which consisted of drinking a cup of mint tea and licking a spoon dipped in yogurt. Not before her shower, which almost made her feel calm and collected. But then it was time.
She combed back her damp hair, applied a little lipstick and mascara for confidence, put on her favorite green wool cardigan for comfort, and picked up two items: the journal and the photo of Sean Reynolds. She descended the back staircase and approached the breakfast bar. In the mid-morning lull, Ren unrolled plastic wrap over a huge bowl of fruit salad. Behind him, the cook pulled out the pans she would need for lunch.
Ren glanced at Lina. “Hello.”
“Hi.” Lina sat down, placed the journal and photo on the bar, and folded her hands over them. “Could you come over here when you have a second, please?”
A wary expression touched his face. “Sure. Let me just put this in the fridge.” He slipped his arms around the bowl and carried it to the steeldoored refrigerator in the pantry. Lina watched his feet as he went and returned, noting the details: a film of flour near the soles of his shoes, a scuff of dust on the ankle of his trousers. So real.
He came up to the bar, opposite her, and leaned his elbows on it. “Yes?”
She uncovered the journal and set it up to display its spine. “You could have made this code harder to break.”
His face changed. Flickers of surprise, anger, and confusion raced across it.
“Yes,” he said after a few seconds, “but then it would have been harder to write in. It works if you’re trying to discourage casual readers. Not cryptographers.” On the last word he snatched it away and looked at the spine, then at her. He clearly awaited an explanation. But then, she could say the same.
“Cryptanalyst, actually,” she said. “You’re the cryptographer—the creator of the code.”
“Where did you get this?”
She looked at her hands, spread on the counter over the photo. “From your room. You left the door open once. I apologize. I had no right.”
“And you say you translated it?”
“Yes. I cracked your ‘ghost’ code.” She looked at his eyes when she said the word, and thought she saw fear glimmer in them.
“This is from years ago. Why would you care?” He sounded distressed now. He flipped through the pages, glancing at the encoded words.
“I want to know who you are and how long you’ve been here, and why.”
“Oh?” He closed the book and smacked it against the edge of the counter. “And did this tell you anything?”
“I think so.” Time for Exhibit B. Lina uncovered the photo and turned it around.
He went still as he gazed at it. Then he asked softly, “Where did that come from?”
“A box, in the basement.”
He blinked a few times. “Thought those were all buried deep.”
“Is this you?”
He picked up the photo to study it, dark lashes moving as he took in the details. “This, I’d say…is Sean Reynolds.”
“Then that’s a yes?”
He let the journal and the photo sink to the countertop. When he looked up at her, the hostility in his eyes was gone, and the wry weariness in its place shot a thrill through her. He was older than twenty-two, no question. Far older. How had she missed it until now?
“Marla isn’t going to come save me this time, is she,” Ren remarked.
“It’s you. Right? Just say it. This is you.”
He glanced back to make sure the cook wasn’t paying attention, then answered Lina with a nod.
Never had such a small gesture sent the world spinning for her like it did now.
“How?” she asked.
He studied her for a few seconds in silence, then came around the counter, took her hand, and dragged her away. He led her through the back door into the garden, to a faded picnic table with an umbrella.
It was a cool, dry day. The neighbor’s plum tree pushed a flowering pink branch over the fence. Birds chirped in the bushes. Daffodils sprouted in the planting beds. Lina was not immune to spring’s charms as Ren dusted off the bench with his apron and gestured for her to sit, but she felt out of place. Surely, for what he was about to tell her, a candlelit musty library in a ruined castle would be more appropriate, on a night with a thunderstorm raging outside.
Nevertheless, here under the hazy high clouds on the first of March, with the breeze ruffling his hair, and sprigs of ivy swaying beside their table, Ren seated himself across from her and examined the photo again. “It’s strange,” he said. “Every day I think about how I would explain it to someone. I’m always wishing I could. But now that somebody actually wants to know, I’m not sure what to say. There’s no way to phrase it that doesn’t sound ludicrous.”
“You’re Sean Reynolds, who died here in 1936.” Lina nodded and squinted up at the plum blossoms, feeling confused in a dreamlike sense, as if her head and body had disconnected. “Okay. It sounds ludicrous.”
“People expect certain things from their ghosts.” He traced the photo’s wavy edge with his thumbnail. “They expect you to be transparent or scarylooking or floating a foot above the ground. They don’t expect you to walk up, shake their hand, and say, ‘Hello, I’m a ghost, I’ve been in the house for the last seventy years and haven’t aged a day, but I have gotten pretty good at cooking. Would you like some pie?’”
Lina chuckled without any humor, staring at his rolled-up shirt sleeves and the brown hairs on his arms. Ghost. He had finally said it, but now it struck her as impossible.
“Obviously, I don’t usually tell people,” he said. “Either they freak out or they don’t believe it. Since you’re not freaking out, I guess you don’t believe it.”
She glanced at the house. “Things happen here I can’t explain. And, yes, I decided you had to be Sean after I read the journal and saw you vanish into thin air. But…” In the clinical manner she used with patients, she took his wrist and placed her fingertips on it. “You have a heartbeat. You appear to breathe.” She folded her hands on the table. “In my medical opinion, you’re not dead. So I guess you’re right. I don’t quite believe it.”
“I’m only ‘not dead’ when I’m here. I step off this property, and—” He snapped his fingers. “Cease to exist, at least as far as anyone else can see.”
“Why? Is there some reason you’re supposed to stay here? Unfinished business?”
His lips flattened and his eyes cut aside, squinting in the wind. “I don’t know. No one has ever bothered to tell me.”
She felt a pang, not wishing to have hurt him, thinking of the young man who died before getting to fight in World War II and end up with eight grandchildren. But her mind wouldn’t let him be that person, not if such a person was dead. A Fountain of Youth theory seemed more plausible to her at the moment than a ghost theory. “It can’t be,” she said. “You’re healthy, you’re strong, you can make cookies and dance a waltz and—and save women from spiders…”
His smile looked sad. He set aside the photo and got up from the table. “Then I guess I have to make you freak out. Come here.”
She rose and followed him.
“You’ll notice I usually wear the same clothes,” he said. “This shirt and pants, these shoes and socks.”
She glanced at his outfit, the usual white-and-black, plus a green apron today. “I just figured it was for your job.”
“Right. It was—is—my uniform, but that’s not all. These are the clothes I died in, and these are the clothes I always reappear in. If I bring anything else with me when I leave, it falls away at the border, and I come back in this same shirt, pants, shoes. So it’s easier just to wear them most of the time.”
She blinked, feeling the way she felt when someone tried to explain tax returns to her.
He unlatched the gate. “I’ll show you.” He lifted the sash of the apron and placed it in her hand, and closed his fingers around hers. He stepped backward across the threshold…and disappeared. His cloth-wrapped hand collapsed to nothing; the apron fell away loose in her grip. She gasped and gathered it up. She stared blankly at it, then at the space in front of her where he should have been. Of course she had seen this trick before, from high above, but up close and in the palm of her hand it packed a much stronger wallop. She lunged out into the alley and looked up and down. He was gone.
“Ren?” The tremor in her voice betrayed the terror she had stonewalled until now. “Ren!”
Suddenly he was there, crowding the space in the gateway with her. She shrieked.
He caught her arms. “It’s all right, I’m here. It’s all right.” She leaned against the gate and recovered her breath while he spoke. “Ah, there, see? I knew it was unnatural, you being so calm.”
His attempt at levity did not make her smile this time. She dropped the apron back into his hand. “Where were you?”
“Right in front of you. You just couldn’t see. It’s okay. I know it’s hard to get used to.” He re-tied the apron around his waist and took her elbow. “Let’s sit down.”
She let him lead her back to the table.
“Can I bring you some tea? Food? Anything?” he asked as she slumped onto the bench.
She shook her head. “I’m all right.”
He sat across from her, looking concerned.
“All this time,” she said. “Seventy years…”
“Not quite seventy.”
“You’ve been here, being a houseboy?”
“That’s right.”
“You can’t leave? There’s not…an afterlife?”
“I suspect there is. But I’m locked out.”
She put her head in her hands, trying to think only about breathing. He waited quietly. Suddenly she laughed.
“What?” he asked.
“For the longest time I thought you were too young for me.”
He smiled, looking for all the world like a bashfully pleased college boy.
“So,” she added, still woozy with adrenaline. “Now I know the big secret.”
“I told you you didn’t want to know.”
“When’s the last time anyone else found out?”
“Well, I suspect Jackie knows.” He lifted his eyebrows and puffed his cheeks in an exhalation. “Boy, it was a shock to see her again. Guess the feeling was mutual.”
“Did she ever say anything about it?”
“Not exactly. But when she said, ‘I’m sorry for what happened,’ I’m pretty sure she meant the poisoning in 1936, not just the assault and battery recently.”
“No wonder she moved out. I wouldn’t be able to face you every day with that on my conscience.”
He shrugged. “I’ve never known for sure how much of a hand she had in it. From what I hear, she did give my dear girlfriend the idea.” He pronounced Julia’s nickname with the appropriate measure of sarcasm. “But neither of them knew better, so it’s hard to assign blame. I don’t think my parents should have pressed charges either, but…ancient history.”
“Who else knows? I guess Marla and Alan.”
He nodded. “They run interference when people start asking questions.”
“The old house arrest story.”
“Yep.”
“Then you’re not a criminal?”
Ren—should she think of him as Sean?—broke into a surprised smile. “No. Of course not. Disappointed?”
“Relieved. You never did seem the type. That’s why I had to know.” In a rush of remorse, she took up the journal and pressed her palms to the front and back covers. “I’m so sorry I took this. I didn’t know any other way. I tried to ask, but you weren’t talking, and neither was Marla…”
“It’s all right. Relax.” He slid the journal out from between her hands. “You’re a clever one, you know that? No one’s ever swiped one of my journals before. Let alone decoded it.”
“It still didn’t tell me much. You never wrote about…1936.” Saying “your death” seemed too personal. She spared a moment to recognize how bizarre a question of etiquette this was.
“That’s because this was 1994. Back in the forties I did plenty of writing about it. I think I’ve exhausted all the ways to express angst known to man.”
“I only saw journals back to the eighties, in your room.”
“I ran out of space. The earlier ones are in storage, in the basement.” He smiled. “Padlocked. You wouldn’t have gotten in so easily.”
“Must be a fascinating record. You, here all this time…” She turned the photo around toward herself. “It’s horrible. And wonderful.”
“I mostly consider it a curse, but it has its benefits.”
She nodded. “The telekinesis is rather amazing, though I admit it scares me. How much control do you have over it?”
He gazed at her in confusion before comprehension lit up his eyes. “Oh. Oh, that isn’t me. That’s… her .”
When Lina finally understood, the floor of her stomach dropped. “Julia.”
Ren shifted in his seat, and looked over his shoulder at the house. “It’s better not to say her name. She often seems to hear it, and acts up.”
Lina felt cold, and hoped it was due to fear rather than an imminent performance by the poltergeist. “Have you seen her? Does she appear, like you?”
“I haven’t seen her since she died. But I sense her. I feel it like the weather changing when she’s in a bad mood.”
“Can you stop her?”
“No. I can only warn people. And I usually don’t even do that, because they’d wonder how I know. Marla and Alan don’t want to be warned, not unless it’s looking like a really bad storm.”
Lina nodded. “I suppose I wouldn’t want to know either. I’d be jumping at shadows all day.”
“Yeah. Like me.”
“So the two of you are stuck here. Linked.”
“Seems that way.”
“And, your family…” She let the question trail off, guessing it trod on sensitive territory.
“They don’t know.” He bowed his head and scraped dust off the journal. “Parents died in the sixties. My little sister is turning eighty this year and lives in Coeur d’Alene in a facility like this one. She’s a widow with two kids and five grandkids. Once in a while I’ve gone out there to see them, but it’s not easy to go that far.”
“The house pulls you back?”
“No. It’s just tedious. For one thing, it feels weird when I’m out there, like I’m dreaming or watching a movie of someone else. For another thing, I can only go as fast as a normal person—I can walk, or hop buses and trains, even though I can’t touch anything. It’s very strange and I don’t understand it. But essentially, I ride a bus or train for several hours without being able to bring anything to read, all to see some people who don’t know I’m there.”
“I see. At least here you can have conversations.”
He nodded, balancing the journal on its bending pages. “If Marla’s grandma hadn’t agreed to take me in, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Gone nuts like my old friend, I guess.”
“Does…your old friend…get jealous when you talk to other people? Is that it?”
“Probably. I figure she resents both sides. Them, for getting close to me. And me, for being able to feel alive when she can’t.”
“What does she want?”
He let out a long breath. “I’ve asked, in every way I know how. But she’s never answered. She’s never said a single thing. My guess is…she wants this to be over.”
Lina shivered. The finality of the statement shouldn’t have seemed ominous, considering the participants were already dead. But death, she guessed now, was only the first chapter in the world’s possible torments. “I suppose you’ve thought of exorcism.”
He swung the journal between his palms. “Didn’t work. For either of us.”
She huddled her cold feet together in their loafers, under the bench. Her stomach felt hollow and the chill of the March air had penetrated her sweater. “Well. I’m glad it didn’t, in your case, at least.”
Ren laid the journal flat, aligned it with the edge of the table, and sat up. “I consider it a success that you haven’t run off screaming. People have, in the past. And then generally I never see them again.”
“I believe it. But I’m not going anywhere.” She tilted her head from one side to the other. She was so tense it felt like cement had been poured into her neck muscles. “So…what now?”
“Now? I should get back to work. As for you, I only ask that you don’t tell anyone.”
“Is it all right if I talk to Marla?”
He nodded. “One of us will have to.” The corner of his mouth curled upward. “She’s going to be annoyed with me.”
“After all her efforts to shield you.”
“Yep.” Ren stood and offered her his hand. She took it, and although in every respect his limbs and clothing felt normal, she wondered if she could ever touch him now and not remember he was dead.
She followed him to the back door of the house, which he opened for her. She paused before entering. “If your name’s really Sean, what do I call you?”
“Oh.” His arm slid higher on the door, and his eyebrows flickered up, as if he was grateful to get an easy question for once. “Ren is fine. My buddies in high school used to call me that—short for Reynolds. Besides, wouldn’t people wonder if you started calling me Sean?”
She shrugged. “Just thought, if you had a preference…”
“Come on.” He gestured her inside. “We’re letting in all the cold air.”
He entered the kitchen, apologized to the cook for dallying, and started slicing French rolls for sandwiches. Lina toasted an English muffin, peeled slices of cold cuts and cheese from the tray of sandwich makings, and poured herself a cup of coffee. “I better get to work,” she said to Ren, balancing her plate and mug.
“Okay. Talk to you later.”
Ascending the stairs took a huge effort. Her legs felt weak. She was breathing like someone in a fever when she reached the third floor, and had to pause to sip her coffee before continuing along the corridor.
“There you are,” said Mrs. B when Lina came into her room a few minutes later for a checkup. “I’d been wondering what became of you.”
“Sorry. I was outside. Having a look at the flowers.”
“Oh, bring me some when you get a chance, won’t you? Something that smells nice. And we’ll hope that ghost doesn’t go scattering them around.” Mrs. B laughed.
To Lina the words felt like a swallow of poison. Her stomach clenched. The ghosts were real, the last hour wasn’t just a dream, and there were many, many things that felt terribly wrong about the situation and would never feel right.
She set down her clipboard and medical bag, afraid she would drop them. “Okay. I’ll bring in a…few hyacinths, or something.”
“Thank you, dear. Now let’s see if my vision has gotten any worse this week.”
Although Lina doubted her capability of staying here another minute without (as Ren predicted) running out the door screaming, she sat down, produced the eye chart, and began testing Mrs. B’s vision, because that was what she had come to this house to do.
* * *