by Megan Crewe
“You want to come down to the parking lot?” I said. “I’m supposed to meet the grieving son at his car.”
The glow came back to his eyes. “Sure. You got a plan?”
I thought it over as we drifted toward the stairwell. “Nah. Just could use the moral support.”
“I bet I can do better than that.”
We stepped out into the sunlight. The clouds had burned away, leaving the sky flawlessly blank. The parking lot stood to the right, four rows of rain-slicked cars surrounded by glinting puddles. I hopped over the guardrail between the lawn and the lot.
“It’s the blue Oldsmobile,” Tim had said. “You can’t miss it.” He was right. The Oldsmobile’s boxy back end stuck out a foot farther than any other car’s, and it had more dents than the cafeteria pop machine. It wasn’t the usual car blue: deep, glossy, and royal. Nope, we’re talking a pasty, pastel powder blue.
Tim was leaning against the trunk, which was so low he could have sat on it and kept his feet flat on the ground. He stood up as I walked over, and the car creaked. Norris floated along beside me, running his fingers longingly down the hood of a sleek convertible. He glanced at me, winked, and then dove into the Oldsmobile headfirst. He glided over to the trunk and hung there, his face immersed, like he was snorkeling in it.
The sun was on my side, so Tim had to squint to look at me. His hands seemed to be giving him a hard time. They jerked from his waist to an itch on his neck, refusing to stay still.
“Nice wheels,” I said.
“It used to be my great-uncle’s.”
“Man, Cass, you wouldn’t believe all the junk this dude’s got,” Norris shouted, lifting his head. “Let’s see”—he plunged back in. “Lots of white candles. Incense. Matches. A big white sheet—looks like silk. Tape recorder. Nice mirror, all brassy. A couple photos. And a box of . . . tarot cards?”
My lips quirked. “Something funny?” Tim asked, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets.
I raised my eyebrows. “You brought enough stuff. Were you planning on holding a séance?”
Tim reddened. “What do you mean?”
“Candles, cards, personal effects. . . . Do you see me carrying around any of that? Trust me, if you needed it, I’d have told you.”
“Okay, okay,” Tim said, flushing darker. “I didn’t know. I thought I should get some things, in case. How did you—”
When I shrugged, he glanced back at the car, his eyebrows drawing together. Norris, sprawled on the trunk top, gave him a wave.
“You gotta mess with this guy a little, Cass,” Norris said. “He’s just asking for it. And I want to hear all about it tomorrow.”
I gave him a brief nod. He wafted across the parking lot and through the bricks of the school’s outer wall.
Tim ran his fingers through his hair. “So, uh, what do we do?” he said. “I mean, how are you going to find her? Or is it someone else, that you know?”
“It’s just me,” I said. “And I just look. Where’d she spend most of her time when she was alive—like, her free time?”
Tim answered quickly. “Home. I mean, she had friends and work—just part-time, but she liked being home more than anything.”
He sounded sure. Good. There was some hope he wouldn’t haul me off to half a dozen places if I didn’t find her in the first spot, then.
“All right,” I said. “That’s where we’ll go. Will it be clear there? No one home?”
“I think . . .” His eyes glazed for a second. “Yeah, that’ll be okay. Let’s go.”
Playing gentleman, he opened the passenger-side door for me. I squeezed in. The inside of the car looked ten times smaller than the outside, all cramped gray leather. It smelled like Pine-Sol. Tim bent himself into the driver’s seat, his legs grazing the bottom of the steering wheel. He backed out of the space fast and wide, and the bumper dinged the guardrail. That explained the dents.
As the car lurched out of the lot, Tim switched the radio on to some syrupy new-country station. He tapped the wheel in time with the music, but his fingers kept losing the beat. Just past the school, we hit a red light, and he glanced over at me.
“If she’s there,” he said, “at the house . . . will I be able to see her?”
I hesitated. We were getting closer and closer to the question of what exactly I could do. Well, he was going to find out soon enough, wasn’t he?
“Probably not,” I said. “How many people did you see in the parking lot?”
“Well, two: me and you. Oh.” He blinked at the windshield, then looked back at me. “So . . . that’s how you knew what I had? There was someone there?”
“You just said you didn’t see anyone,” I said, raising my knees so I could slide down in the seat. The ancient leather was soft and actually pretty comfortable.
“But, I mean, someone . . . dead. I don’t know what you call them. A ghost, I guess?”
“If that’s what you want to call them.”
Tim grimaced. “I don’t know. I think we’ve established that I don’t have a clue about any of this.”
“You act like you do,” I pointed out. “I can buy that people at Frazer say all that spooky stuff about me. Not sure how you got from witches and psychics to talking to the dead, though. Or did you figure it’d be some kind of magic spell?”
The car behind us honked. The light had turned green. Tim looked away and hit the gas.
“There was something else,” he said, staring at the road ahead. “When everyone started talking about you, after the thing with Paul yesterday, I remembered. This time, like a year ago, I skipped class and came out front, and you were sitting under that tree, the little one by the sidewalk, talking really quietly. You’d look over beside you like there was someone sitting there, but I couldn’t see anyone.”
My skin chilled. Had I really been that careless? Thank God it hadn’t been a teacher who’d seen me, or I could have ended up back in therapy, or worse.
“It’s not like I was sure,” Tim kept going. “It just seemed worth a shot. I mean, obviously you can do something most people can’t. It’s not like there’s anyone else I know where there’s even a possibility. And even a little chance—”
“So why is it so important that you talk to her?” I asked. “She hide a winning lottery ticket before she died or something?”
“Is it so weird that I’d miss her?” Tim asked. His voice came out choked.
“No. But most people don’t go to this much trouble trying to do something that’s generally considered impossible.” I tried to imagine Mom or Dad calling up TV psychics or getting books like Tim’s out of the library. “Usually they just . . . accept.”
“I guess I didn’t realize until after she died that I was going to miss her so much.” He paused. “Things started to change, people changed, after she got sick. Everyone looks at me differently, talks to me differently. It’s like I never really knew them. If it had happened before, I’d have gone to her—she always knew how to deal with everything. She was always there. But obviously now . . . just knowing she’s still here, if she is, I know it would make things better.”
“Can’t you just talk to your dad?” I asked. “It’d be a heck of a lot easier.”
Tim was silent as he eased the car around the corner. “I can’t,” he said. “And it wouldn’t.”
He pulled up in front of a two-story house. “Well, here we are.”
I peered up at the place through the window. Somehow, I’d expected a playboy mansion, with a huge deck and a hot tub for romancing the ladies, but it was a regular house, dull beige and navy-trimmed, with a couple of crooked shingles and a few scabs of paint flaking off the porch front. Just goes to show you can’t believe teen television programming. Who knew—maybe Tim wasn’t quite the brooding lady-killer, either.
I got out of the car before Tim could try to open the door for me. After he’d locked up, he stepped onto the sidewalk and looked at me like he was waiting for something.
“Oh,”
I said, catching the cue. “Nope, nobody out here.”
“Okay.”
I followed him up the steps to the front door. There was a little sign hanging on the porch wall, painted with autumn leaves and the word Welcome in flowery script. From the way Tim’s eyes crinkled up when he saw it, his mom must have made it. My dad got the same look when he passed our mantel and saw the clay pony Paige had squished into shape in third grade. I guessed it didn’t matter which of a zillion things you were grieving for, it’d cross your face the same way.
“Well, this is it,” Tim said, pushing the door open. The front hall was dim. On the left, stairs rambled up to the second floor under a maroon runner. Through the narrow doorway on the right, a suede couch in matching maroon slumped in the shadows under a heavily curtained window. The only light, stark and artificial, came from the kitchen, straight ahead.
“He left the lights on,” Tim muttered to himself. I heard him swallow. He gave me a smile, hard around the edges. “You want a drink?”
“No thanks.”
I chucked my boots on the plastic shoe rack as Tim went on ahead. If we made the whole house as dark as the living room, finding a dead person should be a breeze. She’d stand out like a night-light. I skimmed over the stairs and banister, the side table with its vase of dried flowers, the shadowy shapes of furniture in the living room, and breathed deeply. The hall smelled like dusty leather. Unless Tim’s mom had secretly been a dominatrix, I had the feeling that smell didn’t come from her.
I walked into the harsh yellow glow of the kitchen. From the looks of things, no one had cooked there in ages. A row of gleaming pots dangled from a rack over the spotless stove. The counters and cupboards shone. A faint sweetness hung in the air, like a memory of cookies baked years ago.
The silence was starting to raise goose bumps on my arms. “She liked to cook?” I said, turning toward Tim.
“Nothing too complicated,” Tim said. “She loved pies, though. She made an amazing lemon meringue.”
He was taking a bottle of gin out of the freezer. It looked like water when he poured it into his glass, but it smelled sour. He topped it off with club soda and took a long sip.
So that was what he’d meant by a drink. It seemed a little early to start on the booze, but I wasn’t about to lecture him.
“Nothing here?” he asked.
“Not on this floor.”
“Where next—upstairs or down?”
“I’ll check her bedroom first,” I said, though really, anywhere other than that kitchen would have been fine. The fake brightness felt more haunted than the dark.
“Up,” Tim said, and raised his glass to the stairs. He flicked a switch as we went down the hall. The kitchen light blinked out. “Dad wants to keep the lights off all the time to save on electricity,” he said, like it was a bad joke.
The stairs creaked just a little less than the Oldsmobile, which wasn’t saying much. Upstairs the curtains were drawn back and sunlight warmed the rooms. Tim touched the door at the end of the hall. “This is her bedroom.”
I poked my head in after him. The room looked lived-in: the ivory bedcovers rumpled, a shirt hanging from one of the dresser’s brass knobs. A man’s shirt. Of course. Tim’s dad still slept in here.
“Mrs. Reed?” I said, stepping over the threshold. Tim sat on the bed, gingerly, and set his glass on the end table. Nothing else moved.
If Tim’s mom were around, I’d have expected her to zip right over the second she heard her name. Actually, I’d have expected her to meet us at the door. Dead people aren’t in the habit of hiding. It’s the opposite, really—they follow the living all over the place. I mean, think about it:
1. Usually no one can see them anyway.
2. They’re bored out of their minds, and breathers are the only things remotely entertaining.
3. If someone can see them, they’re so excited to finally have someone to talk to that you’re lucky if you can get them to shut up, ever.
With my head turned so Tim couldn’t see, I let out a silent breath of relief. Looked like she was going to be a no-show.
I still had to act like I was looking, though, or Tim wouldn’t be convinced. And I hadn’t even tried any digging yet. I was here, I was doing what Tim had asked—he could return the favor.
“The way you talked about Paul yesterday, I guess he must mess around a lot,” I said, nudging open the closet. No moms in there. Just a whole lot of her clothes: whites and yellows and reds, the colors she’d filled the house with.
“I don’t know. It’s not like he tells me about it.” Tim swiveled as I lifted the bed skirt. “So do you see any, like, signs? That she’s around?”
“Not so far.” All I saw under the bed was a heap of dust and a bunch of shoe boxes. I sneezed as I stood up. “But, I mean, you’ve heard stuff. About Paul.”
Tim shrugged. “He’s made a few comments when Danielle’s not there, but it’s hard to tell how serious he is. I guess Mom’s not in here?”
“Nope.”
“Let’s try my room.”
“Why not?”
Tim’s bedroom hardly had space for his bed, which didn’t leave many places for someone to hide. I picked up the framed photo from the computer desk that was squeezed between the foot of the bed and the wall. The little boy in it must have been Tim, aged six or so. Same light hair, same charming smile, a little rounder in the face. He was sitting on a woman’s lap, and they were both resting on a blanket beneath a chestnut tree, paper plates and Styrofoam cups scattered around them. The woman, I guessed, was his mom. She had little Tim’s head nestled in the arc of her neck and chin, and her honey-blond hair brushed his cheek. They were squinting, their faces bright with sun, and grinning at whoever was behind the camera. Tim’s dad, probably. A happy family picnic.
Tim hovered at my side. “So, do you think—”
I shook my head. “Not looking so good,” I said. “But there’s still downstairs.”
I pushed my hair back from my face, wondering if I could pull something out of Tim without being too obvious. Maybe if I started with something casual and general, like “What do you guys talk about all lunch hour, anyway?” and ran with whatever he gave me.
I was working out the wording and turning toward the doorway when I saw her.
It was just a face, emerging out of the wall, pale and framed by golden hair. Her gray-blue eyes met mine. The delicate eyebrows drew together, the lips parted, and then she jerked back into the wall so quickly it left me dazed and blinking. My breath stuck in my throat.
“What, what is it?” Tim asked. He leaned past me to see where I was looking.
“I don’t know.” It had been too fast. I couldn’t be sure if it was the woman in the photo. I went to the door, glanced up and down the hall. Whoever it had been, she’d made a dash for it as soon as she’d realized I could see her. Weird.
But she’d left something behind. As I breathed, I caught the scent, light and sweet like powdered sugar. The sweetness in the kitchen—it’d been her. I bent over the railing, and it grew stronger.
“Well, let’s go,” Tim said. He bounded down the first few steps, then hesitated and looked up at me. “I mean, it’s okay, right? Or should we wait? Do you think she’s nervous?”
“I don’t even know if it’s your mom,” I said, feeling uneasy. What was with the game of hide-and-seek? I’d come as a huge favor to her son—if it was her—and she took off on me?
“Go ahead,” I told Tim. I hurried down behind him, catching up at the bottom of the stairs. The hall was as still and empty as before. I stared into the dark rooms, frowning. The sugary smell was fading. In a few minutes, it would be just a subtle undertone, so faint I’d almost missed it coming in because I hadn’t known to look for it.
I marched into the living room. Dust whirled. The sofa, the TV cabinet, the dark-stained hardwood gave no hint of her. I brushed past the chairs around the dining room table, and there—a wisp of blond hair and white dress, vanishing
into the kitchen; the taste of powdered sugar on my tongue. I tore around the table and through the doorway. The figure slipped through a closed door just beyond the edge of the counter.
“That way,” I said with a jab of my finger. “Can we go?”
“Sure. It’s just the basement.”
I grabbed the knob and pulled it open as Tim came up behind me. He touched my arm.
“What’s going on?” he said. “It’s like we’re chasing her. Is she running away?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, even though that was exactly what we were doing. Why didn’t she want me to see her? Was there some page in the ghost etiquette book I’d missed, some way I’d broken the rules, offended her? I hurried down the steps. Above me, Tim flicked on the basement light. My socked feet cold on the concrete floor, I circled the laundry room, stopping once to peek inside the washing machine. Tim strode past me, heading for a door in the paneled wall.
“Maybe the rec room?”
The door opened for him.
“I thought I heard someone upstairs.” A man leaned out, glancing at Tim and then me. He rubbed his broad nose and the bristly mustache beneath. “Well. You brought a new friend.”
Tim had gone stiff, his hands clenched behind his back. “Dad,” he said in a tight voice. “You’re home early.”
“So are you.”
“Early dismissal,” Tim replied, so smoothly I’d have believed him if I hadn’t known he was lying. “Anyway, we were just leaving.”
Tim’s dad gave him a long look. His eyes were round and droopy, like a basset hound’s. Then he nodded. “Nice to meet you,” he said to me, and vanished back into the rec room.
Tim spun around and stomped up the stairs, but I hung back. She’d gone in there, with his dad, I was sure. She’d known we wouldn’t follow.
Why wouldn’t she want to talk to me? It didn’t make sense. Unless I really had done something wrong, without meaning to.
I swallowed thickly and headed upstairs.
“Of all the rotten luck,” Tim was grumbling when I reached the kitchen. His face softened, just a bit, when he saw me. “Sorry. If I’d known he’d be home, I wouldn’t have wasted your time.”
