Nothing but Ghosts

by Beth Kephart

  “Katie D’Amore,” she says, shading her eyes with her hand. “Aren’t we bright and early?” She makes a little music with the dangle of her keys, and for one shining moment she’s framed by the sun.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “No need,” she says. She continues up the steps, the bright wings of her skirt flapping behind her, and I stand to follow, wait for her to open the door. Now we’re the only two in the entire library—us and a civilization’s worth of books. A full bin of returned books sits under the slot at the door. She gives it a quick once-over, hits the lights, makes her way to the circulation desk.

  “So what brings you to our fine institution at this early hour?” she wants to know. She walks ahead of me and I let her, embarrassed to be looked at from behind. I’m dressed for work, after all. Crud clothes.

  “A date,” I tell her.

  “A date?” she asks. “Or a year?”

  I blush. “The second.”

  She’s moved around to her side of the desk and tossed her keys into her bag. Now she replaces her shades with her reading glasses and rebuckles the strap of one shoe. “Fashion,” she says, “is killing.” She stands up straight and tests the shoe. Her whole skirt dances away from her, returns. She belongs, I’m thinking, on Fifth Avenue. Anywhere but here, and most definitely not alone.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I tell her, and though I don’t mean much by the comment, she stops and gives me a long, steady look, head to toe. Me—grubbed-out me—in my work boots and khakis, my worn-out T-shirt, my Danny BU cap, which hides my hair.

  “You could know, Katie, if you wanted to. You could wear anything well.”

  I look at myself, rub at a spot on my shirt, push a stray strand of hair from my face. “You’re an unusual librarian,” I finally tell her.

  “Yes,” she says, smiling. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “I mean, you’re all dressed up, and your audience is books.” I bow toward the shelves, shift in my work boots. One creaks. I turn back around to find her studying me, two S lines lying on their sides across her brow.

  “I wasn’t planning on being a librarian,” she says at last. “Life doesn’t always go in the preplanned direction.”

  “You weren’t?” I plant my elbows on the desk that runs between us and fit my chin into my hands. She’s a mystery, too, this Ms. McDermott. “What happened?” I say. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Someone broke my heart,” she says, simply, no details. “Books saved me, so I became a librarian.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Well, no, Katie. Healing takes time. New directions do. It takes a long time, too, to return to yourself.”

  “But do you love being a librarian?”

  “I do.”

  I nod, wishing I could ask her so much more about herself—about who broke her heart, who changed her life, if she’s all through with healing, if anybody ever is, if she’ll ever fall in love again. But there are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and people’s secrets are theirs alone until their secrets are set free.

  “You mentioned a year?” she says now.

  “Nineteen fifty-four.”

  “Of course,” she says.

  “But I have a day now, too, Ms. McDermott. A month. September 10, 1954.”

  “You are one heck of a spy,” she says, coming toward me, high in her shoes. Her skirt makes the sound of sheets drying in the wind.

  “You think you can help?”

  “There are places to start,” she says. “Let’s go find out what we can.” She heads for the microfilm room and I follow, and when we arrive, she snaps on a light, reaches high for a blue box marked MAIN LINE NOW, and slides it toward her, popping open the lid as she does. From the box she pulls a wide brown strip of film and begins to thread the film through the reader. When she presses a button, something snaps, and now pages and pages of Main Line Now are flashing by.

  “These are ghastly things,” she says, meaning the reader, which zips and moans as the film speeds through.

  “Kind of scary,” I agree.

  “They do the trick, though, when nothing else does.” As she speaks, the film edges up to 1954, and now that she’s taken the century this far, she slows the reader’s speed. We’re through May, through June, through July and August. Ms. McDermott switches to the dial control to advance the film to September 9, 1954. A whole day goes by, and then another, and here we are: September 11.

  “The day before,” she says, “is revealed by the day after. At least in Main Line Now.” Pulling her hair from her face, she twists it all the way to one side and fits her glasses on her nose. “Well, will you look at this,” she says, but I’m already all over it.

  “The day of the storm,” I say.

  “The storm,” she echoes.

  “Storm like a bowling ball,” I say, the old refrain.

  “So what does it mean,” Ms. McDermott asks, “for the case of Miss Martine?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know yet.”

  “Everything takes time,” she tells me.

  I nod. “I guess.”

  “Come and find me when you’re done, okay?” She turns toward the circulation desk—all grace and style. I bet she was a dancer. Once.

  The storm, as it turns out, is front-page news—as bad as Reny said it was, and maybe even worse. On the microfilm the photos are blurs; the captions are dramatic. There’s a barge knocked loose on a river and smashed up with a dam. There’s a field of cows up to their knees in floodwater. There are sheds flattened by the limbs of trees, a barn that caught on fire, and beside the big story are the little stories of a child being rescued by a dog, an old lady rafted on a piece of plank wood—gone a whole mile on top of the swollen-in-the-streets river.

  I read for news of the Everlasts, find none, look for images of the estate, but whatever happened didn’t happen there, or happened where nobody could see it or where nobody spoke of it, or where it was less important, absolutely, than the third-page story of a bound-for-Richmond train that jumped the tracks and landed in a pile that looked, from overhead, like a twisted J. FIVE DEAD, the headline reads, and with my breath held, I scan the article for the names of the deceased, find them, finally—Hauptman, Wachtner, Stentson, Long, Clancy—no Everlast there, no Miss Martine, but still I’m speeding through the pages of Main Line Now, so that the room grows hot with the hurried whirl of the machine, then quiets, then heats. Nothing. However and why ever Miss Martine disappeared was never answered by that paper. She is not among the dead, but also not among the living.

  I let the microfilm rewind and snap it free from the reader. Turn off the lights in this little room and go to find Ms. McDermott. I see her in the stacks across the way, helping a man find some volume. She sees me, I wave, place the film on the circulation desk. I head out the door into the heat of the day.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Funny thing. My being late doesn’t matter. By the time I get to the estate, the place has stilled: Old Olson has wrapped the site in caution tape and told the others to go home, and now as I hurry down the hill, Reny and Ida are hurrying up, Ida saying, “Don’t even bother,” and Reny saying, “Don’t make like it’s bad news if it’s not. Free day off, Girl, is what Ida means. Full wages for vacation.”

  I hear them, but I don’t feel the need to stop—wave them off, keep going down, even when I hear Ida calling after me, accusing me. “All you young ones think you know so much. I say don’t bother.” I am close enough now to get a better look at the site, all fenced off with yellow like the scene of some crime, and to see Old Olson himself, standing with his arms crossed in a knot, talking to Danny. Owen is strapping on his backpack, which looks all-but-lunch empty to me, no more turtle shells. By the time I get to my side of the stepping-stone bridge, Owen is crossing in my direction.

  “Hear the news, Girl?” he calls.

  “Day off?” I say.

  He puts one foot down on the first stream stone, shifts his
backpack, takes another step forward. “Cool or what?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, halfway over now. “You’d have to ask Old Olson. All he said is that Miss Martine changed her mind. No more gazebo. Tomorrow we go back to weeding.”

  “No more gazebo?” I repeat. “That’s weird.”

  The straps of Owen’s backpack are pulling across his lacrossy shoulders. “Sweet is what I’d call it,” he says. “Except my mother has to come back and get us.”

  “You guys need a third car.”

  “You’re telling me! One problemo with that scenario, Girl: My dad’s the world’s cheapest rich guy.” He laughs. Starts digging in his pocket for his phone. “You heading up?” he asks.

  “In a minute,” I tell him. “Going to find out from Danny what Old Olson has to say.” Across the stream Old Olson still has his big arms crossed, and I can’t read Danny’s face beneath his cap.

  “Catch you tomorrow, then.”

  “Yeah. Tomorrow.”

  “Don’t work too hard.” He laughs.

  “Wouldn’t ever.”

  He bends forward a little as the hill rises beneath him. Ida and Reny are out of sight, gone.

  It takes a while before Danny and Old Olson are done, and Old Olson never unties his arms. “Hey,” Danny says when he sees me.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “Day off.”

  “I heard.”

  “I’m thinking it’s suspicious.” He pulls me close and whispers something into my cap, but I can’t hear, so I turn toward him, ask him with my eyes. He says he’ll tell me later, and now we are walking inside the shade beside the stream—up and around the hill, gaining distance from Old Olson, Danny not talking, me just waiting. He stays close, so close, and is about to say something—I feel it—when Peter drives by in his own little cart, his hard white hat pulled down on his head like he is going on safari. When he’s gone, I turn to Danny—tell me—but it’s too late: Yvonne steps out from behind a tree, waving hello to us both. By the time we get to the entrance gates, Mrs. Santopolo has pulled up in her champagne-colored SUV, looking late for something else. Danny takes off running.

  “Gotta go,” he says.

  I call after him. “Danny?”

  “Meet me here,” he says. “Tonight. Just after dark.”

  “Here? You’re serious?” I am half whispering, half calling out loud enough for anyone who might be listening to hear.

  “Do I look like I’m messing around?” And he doesn’t, really, he looks like he means what he says, and also like he is glad to have walked the shade line with me.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Riding your bike at night is not the same as riding it during the day. It’s a different slice of speed, where you’re up off the ground and you’re cracking the shadows and the deer in the trees are frozen deer until you’ve passed and gone. The air is not so hot tonight. My hair is flying backward. I can’t see every bump and turn, but I know this road by heart, and besides, the stars are bright and the moon is filling back in, and here I am now, banking in on Miss Martine’s, braking on my silver zipper in the dark, leaving Dad in his studio with the painting that, he announced at dinner, is absolutely, no doubt about it, the John Butler Everlast rendition of through-and-through regret. Dad said that he wanted to spend more time studying it through his million pairs of glasses, and I said that was cool and that I’d come in later on, but first I wanted to take a ride around the block; wouldn’t be gone long, I told him. “Be careful,” he said. He didn’t ask a single question, didn’t even press me about my research, and maybe that’s because he’s still distracted but also because I’m not a daughter who has ever given him much trouble. Mom used to say that being responsible has its own rewards, and the more I live, the more I figure that she was right about that.

  I’m the first one here. At least I don’t see Danny, see only the one light in the one window at Miss Martine’s, which I watch for a very long time. Nothing moves.

  Nothing passes behind it or before it, the room doesn’t change color like rooms do when there’s TV, and I don’t hear music, either, only the singing of the frogs down by the stream, and the crickets, and I think those are cicadas, and when I really think about it, I hear things messing around in the trees—squirrels, probably, or birds. The lights are on at Old Olson’s house, but only a few lights, upstairs, and if Danny and I keep to the path near the stream, we should keep our cover. I lay my bike down in the grass beside the nearest stone post. I watch the road, looking for Danny. There are footsteps now, something in the shadows moves. My heart bangs high and hard right near my throat, and it’s dark, and I’m waiting, and finally I’m thinking maybe Danny isn’t coming, but now there’s the sound of something, and it’s Danny.

  “You walked?” I ask, a hoarse whisper.

  “Had to. Both my parents are out to wherever, and besides, I didn’t want to have to explain.” He wears long-distance sneakers, and the bill of his cap sticks out from his back jeans pocket.

  “So,” I say, and I wonder if he can hear my heart. When he smiles, it’s like there’s another moon in the sky, so bright that I worry about Old Olson, in whatever room he’s sitting in, looking outside to see, and that Miss Martine, wherever she is, will notice, too. We’re trespassing, and it’s wrong, but I wouldn’t trade this for anything.

  “What’s the plan?” I whisper to Danny.

  “We’re following a hunch,” he says. He slips his arm around me, and we start walking side by side in the deepest part of the shadows, as close to the edge as we can get, as far away from the two houses as possible, until we are beside the stream, which bends. The trees overhead are dark and wild, and there are definitely squirrels out here, possibly raccoons, and the ferns look like they’re caught up in some prayer, eyes closed and heads bowed. I’m listening to the birds, to the stream. I’m keeping my eye on Old Olson’s house, where the same lights stay on in the same windows and no door has come flying open.

  “Danny,” I whisper, “where are we going?”

  “Tell me you haven’t already guessed,” he says, pulling me closer, making me think, like I’ve already been thinking, how totally depressing it is that he’s going to BU in two weeks. But here he is now, his arm the just-right weight across my shoulders, his hair so curly without the cap, I want to touch it. “You go the library today?” he asks.

  “I did.”

  “You find anything?”

  “Nothing much,” I say. “Nothing useful.” We’ve reached the part of the stream where the bridge cuts over, the one that’s been built for the golf cart. This is the widest part of the stream right here, where the watercress is thickest and the frogs are loudest, and as we step onto the wooden slats, one rattles. Danny freezes in place, lets the echo die down. We both take a look back at Old Olson’s, wait for a light to go on, a door to slam, but nothing like that happens. “We stand in the clear,” Danny says.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

  From the bridge I can see where the moon falls down between the big arms of a tree and floats itself on the water. It’s a pale mossy color and more like an oval than a circle as it lies there not moving, but slightly moving, depending on how you see it. “The moon is with us,” Danny says, and I say, “Now are you going to tell me?” Because we’re still on the bridge, and we haven’t gone forward. Danny takes his arm from my shoulders. I shiver a little, lean against him.

  “All right,” Danny says, sighing like it’s going to be this really long story. I wait. I like standing this close to Danny; I like waiting. “I got here early this morning, really early, okay? Before even Old Olson was around.”

  “How?”

  “How what?”

  “How’d you get here so early?”

  “My dad,” Danny says, “but that’s not the point. The thing is, I got to the site and I did some digging around.”

  “God, Danny.”

  “What?”

/>   “I mean, that’s taking a pretty big chance, don’t you think?”

  “I guess.”

  “Anyone could have seen you—Yvonne. Peter. Amy. Old Olson. Reny. Ida. Anybody. Miss Martine herself. Even Miss Martine.” Danny’s so tall that I have to lift my eyes toward his, but he’s turned away, toward the stream and its floating-to-nowhere moon.

  “Do you want to know what’s there or not?” he asks.

  “I want to know.”

  “Do you want to guess first?”

  “I can’t.”

  “A trunk.”

  “What?” I step to the side to get a better look at him, to see if he’s messing with me. A slat of bridge floor creaks again. I check back at Old Olson’s. Nothing. I look back at Danny, and wait. Again.

  “Like I said: a trunk. Like one of those big old things you see in black-and-white movies. The kind they’d pull off of old trains and steamboats and stuff.”

  “An actual trunk?” I say, trying to figure what it could mean. I settle back closer to Danny.

  “Big leather thing, from what I can tell. Sunk deep in, but definitely there. I could trace it with my fingers.”

  “So this dig was never about clearing a foundation for a gazebo,” I say.

  “Not that I can figure.”

  “It was about digging out a trunk. Using a little hired muscle to get back to some buried chunk of past.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  I picture the thing buried in the dirt like that, imagine Danny tracing it around with his fingers. What could be inside? Jewelry? Furs? Bars of gold? A dead person? What could Old Olson want with it, or Miss Martine?

  “So that’s my news,” Danny says, pulling me closer than I have ever been to him, ever been to any boy. I tilt my chin, and he’s looking straight down at me—a clear shot into my soul. I try to swallow, but now my heart’s high in my throat, beating hard and furious as the wings on that strange, crack-of-dawn finch. Danny smooths the bangs from my face. “Katie,” he says, and do you know how different that is from calling me Girl, from calling me any other thing? “How come you were never in any of my classes? How did I miss out on you?”