A Shade in the Mirror

by Tracey Lander-Garrett

  “Precious memories, huh?” Billy observed. “I guess that’s probably all there is in this place. Didn’t the doc say that the owner disappeared?”

  “Something like that,” I said. I wasn’t sure. I skipped a few photos and studied another. It also featured a man and woman posed together, smiling. That was weird. I scanned the next one. Another photo of a man and woman posed. Were they all the same photo? I went back to the top. No, the clothing was different from image to image. And the backgrounds varied. But most of them were snapshots, some square, some rectangular. All were black and white and had white borders around the edges.

  “What’s up?” Billy asked.

  I propped the box on stack of crates and showed him what I’d noticed. Billy unscrewed the red filter from his flashlight to get a better view. We paged through the stack together. In every picture, a couple stood, smiling. “Wait, are they the same people every time?” Billy asked.

  I took a closer look. “Maybe?—no,” I quickly amended. From photo to photo, the girls varied from tall to short and chubby to skinny. Some had glasses, some had short hair, some long. In every photo, though, it was the same man. Sometimes in a suit, other times a short-sleeved shirt, sometimes wearing a hat, but always the same jaw-length dark hair that framed his face, the same crooked smile. “The guy is. It’s always the same guy. The girls are different.”

  “Serial killer much?”

  “Yikes,” I said. Then, looking closely at one image, I realized the girl was wearing one of those long skirts they call “poodle” skirts from the 1950s. I went back to the first photo and showed it to Billy. “When do you think this was taken?” I asked.

  “I dunno. Maybe the 1940s or so? I’m not great with history.”

  “And what about this one?” I asked, showing him the one with the poodle skirt.

  “That one’s definitely the ‘50s. The skirt’s a dead giveaway.”

  “Why did this guy keep so many pictures of himself posed with so many girls?”

  “Maybe it was his trophy collection. Doc said the guy was some kind of singer back then, right? Maybe he was just getting a lot of tail and wanted to record it.”

  “Tail? Really?” I said, turning the flashlight on Billy.

  “What word do you want me to use?” he asked. “Nookie?”

  “I think this is important,” I said. “I’m going to bring it upstairs.” I put the photos back in the box and closed it.

  “Yeah, I think our thirty minutes are about up anyway,” Billy said. “Can you fit this bottle of wine in your backpack?”

  “Billy!” I stage-whisper-shouted at him. “Put it back!”

  “But Mom!” he whined. “I promise not to drink and drive!”

  “No way. Besides, I left my backpack upstairs.” It was one thing to snoop around in the basement, but stealing a bottle of wine just seemed wrong.

  “Fine,” he said, and pouted. The bottle made a solid clink as Billy placed it back on the rack, and we made our way back upstairs. Light poured in the doorway to the kitchen from the other side of the house.

  The foyer seemed bigger now that it was fully lit, and Zoe was walking back in the front door, carrying a large toolbox. She went through the archway opposite the living room. Dr. Hernandez sat in a folding chair, making notes on a clipboard. Her glasses had slid down her nose and she seemed deep in thought, utterly uninterested in the machines and monitors that surrounded her.

  “Dr. Hernandez?” I asked. She regarded us inquisitively. “We found this box of photos. I don’t know if you’d be interested in looking at them?”

  She frowned minutely, and without even looking at the box, gestured to a card table set up with a monitor on it. “Just set it down there and we’ll take a look later.”

  I was disappointed, but I put the box down as I’d been told. I could hear Derek’s voice in the next room, the one where Zoe had gone with the toolbox. “Where’s everyone else?” I asked.

  “They’re in the dining room,” she said, gesturing toward the left room, “except for Eric—Prof. Gannon—and Katie. They’ve gone up to the caretaker’s cottage and should be back soon.” She resumed her note-taking. I turned around to ask Billy if he wanted to check out the dining room only to realize that I could hear his voice coming from it.

  “Bottles and bottles of wine,” he was saying as I entered the room.

  “Stop acting like a criminal,” I said, then stopped in my tracks. The room was dominated by a long black table with low-back black chairs. The light-colored wooden floor had been inlaid with concentric rectangles of black wood, starting at the edges of the room and getting smaller until the last one surrounded the table and chairs. Two red crystal chandeliers hung suspended over the table’s center. Long black drapes hung in the tall windows facing the front of the house, and an archway led down a hallway somewhere.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Derek said.

  “Actually, if anyone here is acting like a criminal, it’s me,” Zoe said. She was standing next to a set of French doors and unpacking several screwdrivers from a tool kit. Next to her was one of those Japanese screens, the kind that act as room dividers. It was black and decorated with three peacocks in different poses, each one on a different panel.

  “What are you guys doing?” I asked.

  “I’m preparing to do a little amateur burglary,” she said, gesturing at the door.

  “Wait, doesn’t that just lead outside?” I asked.

  “It looks like it,” Derek said, “but it doesn’t.”

  “He’s the one who noticed it,” Zoe said. “If you go outside, you can tell there’s another room right here. This screen was actually attached to the wall in front of the doors. Unless you pulled it down to see behind it, you’d never even know it was here. You should have seen Prof. Gannon’s face when—Derek, right? When Derek told him.”

  “Nice going,” I said to Derek. “When did the lights come on?”

  “About five minutes ago,” Derek said. “He was about to leave for the caretaker’s cottage to call the management company when I found this. He said he’d ask the caretaker for the keys.”

  “Then if there are keys, then you won’t need to pick the lock, right?” I said to Zoe.

  “Oh, I can’t pick a lock,” she said. “But here’s a lifehack for you: if a door is locked, and you don’t have a key, if the hinges are on your side, you’re in business.”

  “Handy,” I said.

  “You’re so cool,” Billy said. He was clearly in awe of Zoe.

  Zoe smiled shyly in return. “Not really,” she said.

  “But you see ghosts,” I said.

  Derek took on a wary look while Billy’s face lit up.

  “I don’t like to talk about it,” Zoe said.

  “Why not?” Billy asked incredulously. “If I had a superpower, I’d never shut up about it.”

  “Because people think you’re crazy when you say you see ghosts,” Zoe said.

  “But you’re not crazy, right?” Billy said.

  “Sometimes I wonder.”

  “What do you mean?” Derek asked.

  “It’s one thing to be four years old and have what your mother thinks is an imaginary friend. It’s another thing entirely to be woken up in the middle of the night by the spirit of a woman who has just died in a car crash who wants you to tell her husband that she doesn’t blame him for her death.”

  “Whoa,” Billy said. Everyone was quiet a moment.

  “Sorry for bringing the mood down,” Zoe said with a sigh. “What about you, Madison?”

  “What about me?”

  “Yeah, what about you?” Billy echoed.

  “What?”

  “Can you see them?” Zoe asked.

  I bit my lip. “I don’t think so. Not as far as I know, anyway,” I said. “But . . .”

  “But?” Zoe asked.

  “But I’m pretty sure my apartment is haunted.”

  “What, seriously? And y
ou didn’t even tell me?” Billy snapped.

  “It’s not the kind of thing you go around telling people!” I said.

  “Did you know?” Billy asked Derek.

  “Yeah,” Derek said.

  Billy raised his eyebrows and glared at me.

  “That was how we met,” Derek continued. “I work at Thirteen Books. She came in for research.”

  “I knew you looked familiar,” Zoe said.

  “Been there?” Derek asked.

  “A couple of times,” she said. She turned to me. “So what’s the deal with your ghost?”

  “I’m really not sure. There’s kind of a lot.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this,” Billy said.

  “Billy, come on—I didn’t even know you were into ghostly stuff until yesterday.”

  “You couldn’t have guessed?” he asked, gesturing at his all-black wardrobe.

  “Wait, are all of you Fives on the belief scale?” Derek asked.

  “I’m a Four,” I said.

  “Five,” Zoe said.

  “Three,” Billy said. “I kind of want to believe, but I don’t really. If that makes any sense.”

  “You’re a One?” Zoe asked Derek.

  He snorted. “When the professor asked what my belief was on a scale of one to five, I asked, ‘Isn’t there a Zero?’ ”

  “Wow, I’m kind of surprised,” Zoe said.

  “Why’s that?” Derek asked.

  “With you working at Thirteen Books, I mean,” she said.

  Derek explained about his uncle owning the bookstore as well as the building, and a conversation followed about the rates of rent in New York City. Zoe lived by herself in Queens. Billy had grown up in the Bronx, and still lived there now, with three roommates. “The apartment sucks, but the rent is cheap,” he said.

  As this discussion wound down, Prof. Gannon returned with faithful Katie at his heels. I couldn’t help noticing how hard she was trying to impress him with her good student routine. I wondered if she was a two on the belief scale. It would mean he had one observer for every measurement on the scale. I wondered if that was on purpose.

  “Well, I’m glad to see everything all lit up now. The master fuse just needed to be reset,” the professor said. “No luck with any extra keys, though Mr. Kong—that is, the fellow I spoke with on the 24-hour help line for the management company—gave us express permission to enter any room on the grounds as a part of our investigation.”

  “What does a real estate management company need a 24-hour help line for?” Derek asked.

  “Yeah, seriously. I wish I could get 24-hour help from . . . did you say ‘Kong’?” said Billy. “I tried calling my slumlord when my ceiling started leaking right over my bed. No answer. Didn’t return my calls for three days.”

  No wonder Billy slept on park benches. I felt a little bad for him and a lot grateful toward Mr. Delgado for being there when we needed him.

  Prof. Gannon said, “However, that is entirely beside the point, as we have permission, and a locked room to enter. I am impressed with your observational skills, Derek. None of the other groups we’ve had in the house ever noticed it.”

  “Hanging a room divider on the wall just seemed odd to me—like someone was trying to hide something,” Derek said.

  “How many other groups have you had in here?” asked Billy.

  “Three,” the professor said. Katie carefully scrawled the number down in her notebook.

  “Did each group have five observers that each had different measurements on your belief scale?” I asked.

  The professor raised his eyebrows. Katie glanced back and forth between the two of us, waiting for him to answer.

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that at present,” Prof. Gannon said.

  “Did any of the other groups have any supernatural encounters?” Billy asked.

  “I’m afraid I can’t—”

  Billy cut him off. “Right, bias and all that. I almost forgot,” he said.

  “So about these doors . . .” the professor said.

  “Not a problem,” Zoe said, picking up a slim screwdriver. She held the business end beneath the top hinge of the right door and tapped it once with the hammer. A skinny metal bolt popped out of the top of it. Then she did the same with the other two hinges.

  “Now we just pull out the pins, lift, and voila!” she said. She put down the tools, grasped the doorknob and one of the hinges, and gave the door a lift.

  “Well done,” the professor said as the door slid out of the hinges. Then, when it almost toppled over onto Zoe, he and Billy both sprang forward and helped her set it down. A dark gray curtain hanging from the other side of the door let out a puff of dust in Katie’s direction, making her cough.

  The room beyond was dark. Red shag carpet appeared in the slice of light from the dining room chandeliers, but other than that, it was hard to tell what was in there.

  I clicked on my flashlight and stepped through the doorway, shining the red light into the darkness. Motes of dust spun through the air as the beam revealed shelves filled with books on the opposite wall.

  “Library,” said Zoe.

  I could make out a desk and some kind of low couch as the main furniture of the room, along with a desk lamp and a floor lamp in one corner. “I see some light fixtures,” I said.

  “I’d better get some more clamp lights,” the professor said.

  “I can get them, Professor,” Katie said, a bit too eagerly.

  “No need,” he said and stepped out of the room.

  “Should we go on in?” Billy asked in a low voice. “Dark library hidden away in a haunted house? Who knows how long since anyone’s been in there. This could be epic.”

  “I think we should wait,” Katie said doubtfully, casting her glance toward the doorway.

  “We should at least wait for the lights,” Derek said.

  I felt along the wall of the library for a switch and was pleasantly surprised to feel my fingers brush against a hard button. I pressed it, and the floor lamp in the corner lit up.

  “Let there be light,” I said with a smile, and stepped into the room.

  Chapter Twelve

  My first impression was just one word: wood. The room had dark-reddish brown wood (was it mahogany?) bookshelves on every wall all the way up to the ceiling, which had been painted a rich burgundy. A lacquered black desk, covered in scattered papers, dominated the left side of the room. The other side of the room featured a low red couch and a round arm chair upholstered with leopard print. The floor lamp stood behind the couch, its copper shade reminiscent of the wide end of a bugle.

  The room smelled like dried rose petals—like the potpourri Julie kept a dish of in her bedroom.

  “What’s that smell?” I asked.

  “What smell?” Billy asked.

  “Like dried roses,” I said.

  “It’s the books,” Derek said from the dining room. “Old books smell like that. It’s the paper rotting.”

  Zoe and Billy crowded in behind me. The red shag rug beneath our feet was thick, muffling the sound of their footsteps. I continued to take in the room, paying attention to the odd details. The shelves were filled with books and oddments: small statues, ornamental boxes, a bottle, a bell. Derek and Katie were still standing in the dining room.

  Billy whistled a low whistle and said, “Pretty swank.”

  The right wall next to the light switch had a few floor cabinets and an old-timey record player sitting on top. Was that a phonograph? A golden statue of an Egyptian woman with her arms held out, almost a foot high, stood next to it. Above that hung a framed oil painting of the sun hanging low over the ocean. I couldn’t tell if it was rising or setting. There was no way to tell without knowing which ocean it was.

  There were no windows, but there was a single latticed door centered in the far-right wall, surrounded by bookshelves, and partially obscured from view by the couch.

  Billy walked up to the desk, stepping
around some papers that had fallen to the floor. A thud sound came from behind the desk, like something falling over, and Billy froze. “Um, what was that?” he asked.

  My heart just about stopped in my chest. “You mean that wasn’t you?” I asked.

  “No.” He stood completely still.

  “Zoe, are there any—?”

  “Not that I see,” she said.

  All three of us stood very still, listening.

  There was another thump and then Billy let out a screech as a small dark shape, low to the floor, bolted past him toward the couch.

  Everyone began asking questions at once, with Derek ducking beneath the door frame to get into the room and Katie running toward the foyer, while Billy clutched his chest and Zoe and I began laughing.

  “What’s wrong?” Derek was asking.

  “Professor!” Katie was shouting.

  “Is that a—?” Zoe began.

  “A fucking cat? Are you shitting me?” Billy exclaimed.

  “Quiet!” I yelled, and then when everyone shut up, I bent down to look under the couch. Two yellow eyes stared back at me and hissed. Well, the eyes didn’t hiss, but that was all I could really see.

  “Psst,” I said. “Here, Kitty.” I rubbed my fingers together in the cat’s direction.

  A small black nose edged out of the darkness and sniffed my fingers. Derek bent down to see, startling the cat. It hissed again and the nose and eyes disappeared. There was a scrambling sound, and I peeked beneath the couch just in time to see black legs and a tail vanish through a missing pane in the latticed door.

  “It’s gone,” I said, turning to face the group.

  “Everyone all right?” asked Prof. Gannon, entering the room.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We just scared a cat.”

  “I’ll leave you three to it then. Zoe, come with me. I have an abnormal reading on one of the UV monitors that I think will interest you. Katie, you should come too if you want to include it in your report.” Prof. Gannon headed towards the foyer. Zoe and Katie followed him.