Chapter 2 #2
She locks the door and gestures for Bridgette to lead the way, following the little ghost girl back down the staff hallway, come hell or high water.
“I think it’s silly you have to take the service elevator,” Bridgette proclaims as they come around the corner to the elevator alcove.
Frannie made it two weeks working for Henry and lugging her giant backpack into the main elevator before the front doorman pulled her aside: “You’ll have to take the staff elevators and use the staff entrance from now on, Miss Goldstein. We’ve been getting complaints.”
The staff are much nicer than most of the tenants she’s bumped into, so she pretends it doesn’t rankle. Mostly.
Frannie watches Bridgette push the button, like any other little girl.
“At least it’s easier to chat with you here than in the tenant elevator,” Frannie says, following Bridgette into the narrow service elevator with its dark wood walls and gray carpet floor.
Bridgette pushes the button for the basement. “I don’t show up on the cameras if I don’t want to. And I can decide who can see me and who can’t.”
The doors close and Frannie stares at her reflection in the unpolished metal door. It’s just her, with her frizzy red curls, overwide green eyes, and round face, in her black jeans and simple henley long-sleeve T-shirt. It’s like Bridgette’s not even there.
“See?” Bridgette says, appearing briefly beside Frannie in the dull reflective surface before disappearing again.
“How does that work?” Frannie asks.
Reflection or no, Bridgette seems very real there beside her, just a little sheer, swiveling her hips so her skirt moves back and forth.
“No clue. Now come on!” Bridgette says in time with the ding.
She takes Frannie’s hand. Frannie stumbles after her, a shiver coursing through her body. Bridgette’s hand isn’t entirely solid. Frannie can feel her fingers gripping her palm, but they’re slight, like an air-filled silk glove. That static electricity feeling flutters up and down her spine.
“Where are we going?” Frannie asks, focusing on walking upright instead of being touched by a ghost, so it doesn’t look like she’s being dragged around by an unseeable force.
Bridgette pulls her into the white, cavernous basement.
At the opposite side of the room, there’s a ramp for large deliveries Henry mentioned was once used to bring in ice and goods for the tenants back in the 1800s.
Now it’s just for furniture deliveries, and hearses.
The edges of the room hold bicycles, tenant strollers, and various maintenance carts.
The whole room leaves Frannie feeling generally unsettled.
Thankfully, the breakroom is dark and the security room door is closed. She hopes no one’s watching the basement cameras.
“Come on,” Bridgette whines, tugging Frannie toward the side of the room where there are a few service doors.
“What’s the hurry?” Frannie asks, glancing back at the security room before following Bridgette through one of the opposite doors. The light is significantly dimmer in the corridor off the basement. Frannie wonders how much trouble she’ll get in for being down here.
“Would you stop? I made you invisible too,” Bridgette says.
Frannie stumbles. “What?”
She looks down and finds that her hand has disappeared. Her arm is gone. All of her is invisible.
She yelps. This is so weird.
And then her body pops back into … view.
“How are you doing this?” Frannie asks, heart pounding in her throat. She feels a little faint.
Bridgette just giggles and pushes through another service door into an even older hallway. The concrete floor is dusty, the beige paint peeling on the narrow walls.
“Michael will know.”
“Michael?”
“MICHAEL!” Bridgette yells, turning into a wide, open room.
There are pallets piled in the back corner. The walls are cinderblock, the floor concrete. In the middle of the room, there’s an old sawhorse with a plywood top, like maybe a contractor once set up shop here.
“What?”
A boy, maybe ten or eleven, stands behind the sawhorse, hands splayed out on a set of large yellowing diagrams. He has the same gauzy halo as Bridgette, but looks like he’s maybe from the 1920s or ’30s instead of the 1800s, wearing a pair of what Frannie thinks are knickerbockers and an overlarge argyle sweater. His blond hair almost looks white.
Another ghost.
“This is Frannie, she wanted to meet you,” Bridgette says, beaming at him.
Michael looks at Frannie, nonplussed, pale blue eyes almost gray in the light from the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.
“Hi,” Frannie manages, her heart still hammering. “Nice to meet you.” What else is she supposed to say?
Michael stares at her for a moment and then looks back down at his diagrams.
“Frannie’s the one who works in the sad closet on the ninth floor,” Bridgette says.
“It’s not sad,” Frannie says.
“You have to wear a jacket inside when it’s winter,” Bridgette says, looking up at her.
“Seriously, how long have you been spying one me?” Frannie asks. She hasn’t worn her parka in the office for at least six months.
“Bridgette is frequently where she’s not supposed to be.”
Frannie looks back at Michael, then glances around the room. “Are you where you’re supposed to be?”
Michael looks up. “Are you?”
Touché, little 1920s ghost boy.
“I thought you’d want to meet her,” Bridgette says, her voice plaintive. “She works for Henry L. Olsen.”
“Mom’s going to be mad you’ve met her,” Michael says, staring pointedly down at his diagrams.
“You have a mom?” Frannie asks.
“Of course we have a mom,” Bridgette says. “We’re just kids. And Mom won’t be happy you’re back down here with those silly schematics,” she adds to Michael. “You’re not supposed to be looking at those any—”
“Dry up, Bridge,” Michael mutters.
Brigette glares at her … brother? Michael glares back. And Frannie stands there awkwardly, wondering what the hell her life has become.
“Fine. I won’t tell if you won’t,” Bridgette huffs.
“Deal. Now bring her back upstairs before someone misses her.”
“Not likely,” Bridgette says petulantly.
“Hey,” Frannie says. She’s not sure how she feels getting dissed by ghostly children.
“You won’t tell Mom?” Bridgette asks, looking up at Frannie once more.
Frannie blinks, surprised. “I’ve never met your mom,” she says, glancing between the children.
Michael nods and looks back down at his schematics. Frannie wonders what they’re for, and why he has to look at them down in this creepy basement offshoot.
“Come on,” Bridgette says, tugging on Frannie’s hand to lead her back out.
Frannie squeaks when her arm disappears again. She goes stumbling after Bridgette, looking over her shoulder at Michael, who’s bent over the schematics, tracing something with his finger.
“I thought he’d want to meet you, since you haven’t gone silly at the sight of us,” Bridgette grumbles as they make their way back down the service hallway and out into the basement, still empty, still white, but significantly less creepy by comparison.
“Well, maybe—”
“Oh! I forgot to tell him. Wait right here,” Bridgette says suddenly, dropping Frannie’s hand and darting straight through the door they just exited.
At that exact moment, one of the building custodians, Paul, steps into the basement, his head turned toward Frannie, where she’s probably just materialized out of thin air. Paul blinks and Frannie stands frozen for a moment, as surprised as he is, before her reflexes kick in.
She walks over to the FedEx drop box and scrounges in the top to pull out an envelope.
“We ran out,” she tells Paul with a little shrug.
“Right, right,” he mutters, blinking again before the confusion clears from his heart-shaped face. “Have a good day, Miss Goldstein.”
Frannie smiles and watches him turn to head toward the breakroom. He glances over his shoulder and Frannie tries to look normal. Wouldn’t want to make him go silly or anything …
Once he’s gone, she takes the three steps up to the service hallway at a leap, jamming her finger into the call button for the staff elevator.
That was too close. She’ll have to ask Bridgette to be more careful in the future. Or she could just not go on invisible ghost adventures with little ghost children, especially not if their mom wouldn’t approve.
“Michael will come visit sometime when he’s not busy with his project. He’s usually much more polite.”
Frannie jumps when Bridgette materializes inside the already moving elevator. “What’s he working on?” she asks, pretending at calm.
Bridgette shrugs and doesn’t meet her eyes. “He’s always fiddling with something, but he only looks at the building plans when Mom’s not around.”
“Why doesn’t your mom want him looking at them?” Frannie asks, confused.
“I try not to get involved in their dustups,” Bridgette says just before the bell dings and the doors open onto the ninth floor. “I gotta go have lunch. See ya, Frannie.”
And then she’s gone. Frannie stands there until the elevator starts to close again. Startled, she throws her arm out. The doors bump her forearm and she winces. There’s a ghost mom with weird ghost rules, and a meal schedule. Can ghosts eat?
She makes her way back to her office and sits down at her desk, staring blankly at her dark laptop screen, senses high. Bridgette or her ghost mom could be watching her right now. Frannie glances around the office, but no one’s there. That she can see, at least.
She should be scared. She should probably be terrified.
This isn’t a fairy tale. This is her life.
She should be concerned that she’s being haunted.
But all she really feels is … curious. All she wants to do is figure out why they’re here, and what they do, and why Bridgette chose her of all people to haunt after all this time.
But she still has to do her job, so she tries to shake off her existential ghost questions and focus. She’s just managed to print her final page of transcription when her phone chimes, and she nearly jumps out of her chair.
It’s just a text from Henry: Come down and talk schedule.
She’s got to get a handle on herself.