Past Perfect

by Danielle Steel

  “You said there wouldn’t be any earthquakes.” Sybil glared at him accusingly.

  “It was just a small one, Syb,” he said insistently. “Welcome to San Francisco, kids,” he said to his children, trying to make light of it. “It’s fine.” Nothing had fallen or gotten damaged. It had just scared the hell out of them. They had never experienced an earthquake before.

  “Do you think we should go downstairs and make sure nothing fell and broke?” Sybil asked, worried. They had candelabra with crystal drops, a lot of lamps, and a number of small delicate objects that could have fallen in the rooms downstairs. And dishes in the kitchen that could have slipped off the shelves if the cupboards had opened.

  “You can if you want to,” Blake answered. “I’m sure it’s fine.” None of the others were anxious to go anywhere, in case it wasn’t over, or the aftershocks would be too strong. “Why don’t we watch something on TV?” Blake suggested to the children and switched on the remote. All three piled into their parents’ bed, where they saw on CNN that it had been a 5.1 earthquake on the Richter scale in San Francisco, with the epicenter 150 miles away, where it had registered 6.4. It wasn’t huge, but it had been a noticeable quake.

  “I’m going downstairs to check,” Sybil said in a soft voice, and Blake nodded, and indicated that he’d stay with the kids.

  Sybil turned the lights on in the second-floor hall, and headed down the stairs to the main floor. She wanted to check the living room and the kitchen to see if anything had fallen and broken, and she had just passed the dining room when a woman in a grand gown walked past her. She looked like a dowager, and she looked right at Sybil and spoke to her clearly as she leaned on her cane.

  “I thought the chandelier was going to fall right on my head. We have to ask Phillips to check it tomorrow.” And then she narrowed her eyes at Sybil, as a man in a kilt approached her. “And what are you doing downstairs practically naked?” She looked sternly disapproving at Sybil and headed toward the stairs with the man in the kilt, who was reassuring her that it had only been a small quake. As Sybil stared at them, a little boy ran past her, with a terribly pale young woman holding his hand, as a man and a woman left the dining room less hastily and smiled at Sybil, and a tall, handsome young man in white tie and tails asked her if she was all right. There was a young woman with him in an evening dress, and Sybil felt as though she had lost her mind as she tried to answer them and couldn’t speak. And as she turned to look at them on the grand staircase, where they’d been headed, she saw them disappear, and suddenly she was alone in the main hall. She looked at the family portraits she and Blake had hung, and she knew exactly who they were. And while she tried to absorb it, a stern-looking man also in white tie and tails stared at her from the dining room doorway and closed the door. She had no idea who he was, and she didn’t know the names of the others, but they were clearly the Butterfields who had lived there a century before. She was shaking as she ran to the kitchen, saw nothing broken, decided not to check the living room, and raced upstairs. As she entered her bedroom, she was breathless and deathly pale.

  “Are you all right?” Blake asked her, and she shook her head to indicate that she wasn’t, and then remembered the children in their bed, whom she had momentarily forgotten about completely in the terror and confusion of what she’d just seen. “I’m fine,” she managed to croak out, as Caroline stared at her more closely.

  “You’re pale, Mom. Do you feel sick?”

  “The earthquake just took me by surprise—I’m fine,” she insisted, lying down next to her daughter on her pillow and waiting for them to leave. They had all calmed down an hour later, when their father switched off the TV.

  “The excitement is over, back to your rooms,” he said firmly, and went to tuck Charlie in, while Sybil lay on their bed, trying to understand what she’d seen. She knew who, but couldn’t figure out how or why.

  “What happened to you?” Blake asked her when he came back from putting their youngest son to bed. “You looked like you’d seen a ghost.”

  “I did,” she whispered so Charlie couldn’t hear her, still pale. “Eight of them…nine including a man I didn’t recognize in the dining room. They were all leaving the dining room, talking about the earthquake, and headed up the stairs…and the old dowager accused me of standing there naked in my nightgown…and when they reached the top of the stairs, they all disappeared. All of them! They were the people in the portraits, even the little boy.” Her voice was shaking as she described them to him.

  Blake grinned at her as she lay there looking terrified. “What did you drink while you were downstairs?” Sybil sat bolt upright in bed and glared at him in frightened fury.

  “Don’t give me that! You lied about the earthquake, you said there wouldn’t be one, and now we just had one on our second day. And a whole family of ghosts just walked past me in our new house. No wonder the bank practically gave it away. They must have been scaring the hell out of people for the last forty years!”

  “Sybil, please. You’re upset about the earthquake. It jarred your mind. Besides, the bank would’ve had to tell us if anyone had seen ghosts here. It’s the law.” Legally, in California, the bank had to disclose it if a house was thought to have ghosts, but maybe they didn’t know.

  “I am going to jar your head if you don’t listen to me. I just saw the whole Butterfield clan leave the dining room and walk up the stairs and disappear. Two of them talked to me. The young man in uniform in the portrait downstairs. He was in white tie and tails. He asked if I was all right. And the old dowager scolded me, and I saw the old man in the kilt, he was talking to her. And they all saw me, I could tell. I saw them, plain as day.” She was badly shaken and Blake was skeptical.

  “Do you want a drink now?” he offered, trying not to make fun of her, but he thought the shock of the earthquake, and the fear, had played tricks with her mind. She was obviously more afraid of earthquakes than he’d realized.

  “I do not want a drink. I want to know what the hell is going on here. If our children start to see them around the house, they’ll be out of here in five minutes, and this house is toast. Especially Charlie.”

  “I don’t know anything about psychic phenomena, but if you didn’t imagine it, maybe earthquakes shake ghosts out into the open. I’m sure they’ll disappear again if that’s the case. They weren’t in the front hall to greet us when we got here, after all.” He couldn’t take her seriously. It sounded absurd to Blake. He was a practical person, but Sybil was too.

  “No, but they could have been. Maybe they’re all here in the house, just waiting to scare us away.” She looked panicked.

  “Were they scary?” he asked her sensibly, trying to keep a straight face.

  “No, just the old lady, and the man in the dining room afterward. The others were perfectly nice.”

  “Why don’t we just give them a chance to vanish again?” he said soothingly, making her feel like an escaped mental patient.

  “What if they don’t? Blake, I am not going to live with a family of ghosts. They scared the hell out of me.”

  “Why? They’re all dead.”

  “Are you crazy? What if they try to chase us away? Isn’t that what ghosts supposedly do if you’ve taken possession of a house they haunt?”

  “Why don’t we just calm down and see what happens. We can’t move out just because we had a small earthquake and you think you saw a ghost.” Blake didn’t want to feed the insanity. It was unlike Sybil to be hysterical, but clearly she was.

  “You don’t believe me.” She glared at him, even angrier at his condescending tone.

  “I believe that you think you saw them, but I don’t know what you really saw. Maybe you just saw the portraits downstairs. Maybe they were moving from the quake.” He was looking for a reasonable answer to what she’d seen, or thought she did. But he did not for a minute believe she’d seen a family of ghosts.

  “The portraits were not moving—the people were. And it was the same peop
le as in the portraits, all of them. And they talked to me, Blake!” She was insistent and knew what she’d seen and heard. “And walked up the stairs!”

  “Sybil, try to relax and be sensible. I’ll bet we never see them again. And there probably won’t be another earthquake for years.” She refused to answer him and lay down on the bed. He clearly didn’t believe her, and she didn’t know what to do next. There was no one she could tell. But she knew now that there were ghosts in the house. And whatever Blake said, the Butterfields were still there. “Did they try to frighten you away?” he asked her cynically.

  “No,” she admitted. “But just seeing them nearly gave me a heart attack.” She was so enraged at Blake for everything that had happened, and for not believing her, that she didn’t speak to him again that night. She was up early the next morning, cooking breakfast, when she saw him again.

  “How do you feel today?” he asked her quietly after the children finished breakfast and went back upstairs. They had talked about the earthquake all through breakfast, and how scary it had been. But that had been nothing compared to what Sybil had seen after that, when she went downstairs.

  “Are you asking me if I’m sane again?” she said coldly.

  “Of course not. You were frightened out of your wits last night, after that shake. I don’t blame you for being upset.” He sounded condescending, and she was just as angry at him as she’d been the night before.

  “I know you don’t believe me, but I saw all of them, the whole family, and some other man.”

  “Who knows, maybe that’s the way those things work. Maybe they appear every hundred years on some anniversary, or only during earthquakes. They’re certainly not hanging around on a daily basis. We never saw them here before.”

  “We’ve only lived here for two days. Maybe they don’t want us here, and they think we’re disturbing them. This was their home.”

  “And now it’s ours. We can’t let a family of ghosts frighten us away,” he said, still refusing to enter a state of panic with her.

  “Oh, no? I’ve heard horror stories about things like that. They could push one of us down the stairs, or scare us into falling. The old lady is pretty damn scary, and there was some weird old guy with her, the one in the kilt. And who unstuck the window in our bedroom that had been painted shut the night before? You and I didn’t, and there’s no one else. In the morning, it was unstuck and the window was open. And who moved the tables in the front hall? Someone switched them and Alicia and José said they didn’t.” And Blake had said he hadn’t either when she asked him, so she assumed the moving men had. “Maybe they’re here watching us right now.” The idea gave her a shiver. “I’m not going to have my children living in a house full of poltergeists, if that’s what they are.”

  “Maybe they’re benign spirits who wish us well,” he said, thinking that his wife was going nuts. “Let’s just try to keep a grip on reality, shall we? If you see them again, we can call in an exorcist or something, I’m sure there’s some way to get rid of them. They’re dead, after all.”

  “Precisely. And if they’re still hanging around here a hundred years later, you can be damn sure they’re not planning to leave anytime soon.”

  “Maybe they’re friendly,” he said, but he could see that he wasn’t going to convince her. The experience of the night before had been too vivid for her.

  “I don’t care if they are friendly. This is our house, and I’m not going to live here with them. This is a little too Twilight Zone for me.”

  “Try not to think about it today. Enjoy the kids, before they start school.” They were going to drive by Charlie’s school in Marin County, and take a look at Sausalito on the other side of the bridge. Charlie wanted a tour of Alcatraz, but she had found out you had to book it months in advance. Instead, they were going to see the sea lions at Pier 39. “Have a good day,” Blake said cautiously, blew her a kiss, and left for the office, where everyone would be talking about the earthquake and where they’d been when it happened.

  The children commented on it again on the drive to Marin, and Sybil was relieved that none of them had seen any of the Butterfields on the second floor. There was no mention of them.

  When they got there, Charlie liked the look of his school. They drove through Sausalito, then went back to the city and visited the sea lions, who were barking, and occasionally snapping at each other, and lying in the sun. They had lunch at Pier 39, and then the children all wanted to go home. They still had things they wanted to unpack, and Andy had promised to play a videogame with his little brother. Caroline wanted to call her friends in New York. Once they were busy in their rooms, Sybil took a quiet walk through the house to see if she noticed anything unusual, but all seemed normal. Nothing was out of place and there was no sign of the Butterfields. But despite her husband’s cynicism, she refused to believe she had imagined it.

  When she got back to her room, she grabbed Bettina Butterfield’s book out of her travel bag and put it on her night table, and then she opened her computer and started surfing the Net, not sure what she was looking for. There were several sites that referred to ghosts, and even a chat room for people who had seen them, but she was looking for something more scientific. She finally discovered a website for the Psychic Institute in Berkeley, and jotted down their phone number. She closed her bedroom door and called them immediately, and when they answered, she asked to speak to someone for advice. The receptionist told her that all their counselors were busy, and asked if she’d like to make an appointment. On the spur of the moment, she made one for the next day, when all the kids would be in school. She wondered if they’d think she was crazy too, but she wanted to know if there was any basis for what she had experienced. Was it a common occurrence or totally unheard of, and what could she do about it before a family of dead people took over her home? She didn’t tell Blake that she’d called them and made an appointment. He would have been convinced she was crazy. She was relieved when that night there was no repetition of the activity of the night before. The house was peaceful, and Blake was comforted to find that Sybil was no longer on a crusade about ghosts in the house when he got home. She didn’t mention them at all.

  The next day, when Sybil got everyone off to school, and had waved Charlie off on the school bus, she got in the van and headed across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley. She found the institute easily with the help of the GPS, and when she got there, it looked like a normal office or a small medical building. There was a very ordinary receptionist, and when Sybil said she had an appointment with Michael Stanton, the girl at the desk asked her to wait. Two minutes later, he came to greet her, and took her to his office. He was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and hiking boots, and had a beard, but his hair was short. He was about Sybil’s age, and he looked like a schoolteacher of some kind, or a college professor. And in his office, she saw that he had a number of degrees, including a master’s in psychology from UC Berkeley. He explained to her that he had been studying psychic phenomena for twenty years, and had written several books on the subject, to reassure her that this was a serious vocation for him.

  “It’s surprisingly scientific, even though it’s not always easy to explain to people who haven’t experienced it,” he said pleasantly, and then he turned to her with a warm look and asked what he could do to help her.

  “I know this sounds ridiculous, or it would to most people, and my husband is acting like I’m psychotic. We just moved into a new house three days ago. It was built in 1902 by the Butterfield family. They moved out around 1930—I think they lost their money—and a member of the family bought it back many years later and lived there until 1980. It’s had a number of owners since then. My husband and I bought it a month ago. We just moved out from New York. There have been a couple of minor incidents, nothing terrifying, but the other night during the earthquake, I saw them. All of them. The people who built the house, their children, and three other people.” Sybil looked agitated as she explained it to him, remembering ho
w frightened she had been, both by the earthquake and the people in the hall afterward. “I saw them perfectly clearly. They walked out of the dining room, right past me, up the staircase and vanished. Two of them talked to me, and I heard them talk to one another, just as though they were right there with me.” Michael Stanton didn’t look surprised by what she said.

  “How do you know it was them?” he asked quietly.

  “We have their portraits up in the front hall. We bought the house from the bank, in a foreclosure, and there was quite a lot of furniture and some art in storage. We’re using it, and I liked the idea of hanging the paintings of them, like a portrait gallery in a European château or an ancestral home. It seemed respectful of them.”

  “Did anyone else see them the other night?” he inquired, and she shook her head.

  “I was alone downstairs and they disappeared before I went back up to the second floor. I went down to see if anything had broken or fallen during the earthquake.” He nodded and jotted down some notes on a pad on his desk. In some ways, he reminded her of a shrink, but he didn’t act as though she was crazy, as Blake had.

  “What were they wearing?” he asked, and Sybil thought about it.

  “They were dressed in clothes similar to the portraits, though not exactly, but they were wearing clothes of the time when the house was built. Evening gowns, white tie and tails, a kilt.” He nodded again. “Does this sound nuts to you?” she asked him, and he smiled at her.

  “Not at all. I hear it all the time. Something about the earthquake the other night may have replicated an incident in their lifetimes, and shaken them loose, literally. Given when the house was built, I assume they must have lived there during the 1906 earthquake. And your moving in may have jarred them too. If the house has been unoccupied for a long time, you may have startled them. Hanging their portraits may have made them feel welcome. And they may be curious about you. Ghosts are sometimes very curious about people in their space.”