Past Perfect

by Danielle Steel

  “It’s our space now,” Sybil said firmly, and Michael smiled.

  “They may not think so. It’s not unusual for people from the spirit life to become quite attached to the homes they lived in during their lifetime. They may have happy memories there. It’s possible that they never left the house and have remained there for all this time. But it’s very unusual for an entire family to stay together in a home. It’s more common for one or two spirits to linger, but not a large group like the one you describe. They must be very comfortable there. Did they feel menacing to you? Did you have the sense that they were trying to frighten you?” Sybil thought about it and shook her head.

  “The old lady was pretty daunting, but it was more the way she looked at me and the way she was dressed. I think she had an accent too.”

  “What kind of an accent?”

  “British…Scottish maybe, and there was a man with her wearing a kilt. He didn’t talk to me. There’s a book about the family and their history in the house, but I haven’t had time to read it yet.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  She nodded in agreement. “One of their daughters wrote it—the one who bought the house back and stayed until her death many years later. Her daughter had no interest in the house and sold it when her mother died.”

  “There could be several reasons why they let you see them the other night. Two, most typically. Either they are trying to reach you and make contact with you, for some unknown reason. Perhaps even because they like you, or had some earlier relationship with you. Or they don’t want you on their turf and are determined to scare you, but it doesn’t sound like that to me. When spirits from another dimension want to frighten people, they’re not shy about it and can really wreak havoc. They don’t sound hostile or ominous to me.”

  “They weren’t,” she agreed. “It’s just the idea of them that is unsettling. I’m not even sure that I believe in ghosts. Or I never did before this. But they were extremely real, and stood right next to me. They appeared to be perfectly normal living people, like you and me, and then they disappeared. They just faded away like mist at the top of the stairs.”

  “They normally do that extremely well.” He smiled at her. “You see them one minute, appearing quite alive, and then you don’t.”

  “The couple who built the house looked entirely alive and smiled at me, and so did the young man. I think he must be their son. There is a portrait of him in uniform.”

  “He might have died during the war, so they had him painted in uniform to honor him,” Michael explained. “I have a feeling that they were just comfortable with you, and recognized you as a benign person, so they let you see them. As I said, what’s unusual here is that the entire family still appears to be together, in their home. You don’t hear about that very often. An individual, or a couple occasionally, but not the whole family, including several generations, intact as they were when they occupied the home. They must be a very strong presence to be there over a hundred years later. They may have always remained there, or perhaps they returned more recently, or they may come and go. Their daughter living there for many years would have made remaining there easier for them, and if the house has been unoccupied for many years, that opens the doors for them too. Spirits don’t usually like a busy home, or one where there is too much activity.”

  “I don’t want them frightening my children,” Sybil said sternly.

  “Of course. Would you mind if I came to visit you? One can often sense what kind of spirit activity is there, and how powerful a force it is. And if they have been there for all this time, they won’t go away easily. You and your family may have to learn to coexist with them.”

  “I’m not willing to do that,” Sybil said stubbornly. “I have a six-year-old son who would be traumatized if he ever sees them.”

  “You might be surprised. Children are often very receptive to spirits. Their minds are more open than ours.”

  “He’s afraid of ghosts,” Sybil insisted. And so was she, now that she had come face to face with them. It was Blake who didn’t believe in them, and thought they were a figment of her imagination. “And a few pieces of furniture have been moved, after I placed them where I wanted them.”

  “The phenomenon of moved furniture is fairly typical, particularly if you’re using what was theirs.” He was unimpressed by it. “They may want it all back in its original location, if you’ve placed it differently. Somehow you may have disturbed them, which brought them back en masse, or they are comfortable in your home.”

  “I don’t want them to get comfortable. I want them to go away. And if you think it would help to visit the house, by all means come and see it.”

  “Would tomorrow work for you?” She nodded. She wanted to find out as much as she could. She was preparing a show for the Brooklyn Museum, but was under no time pressure yet. And she wanted to know more about the Butterfields and make sure they didn’t reappear. They may have been comfortable there, but they were not welcome in her home. She wondered if she should take their portraits down. She asked Michael about it, but he said it wouldn’t change anything, if they were determined to stay in the home, particularly now that they had appeared. She told him it was important to her to get rid of the ghosts in her house, before they drove her and her family away.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow then,” Michael said pleasantly, as he stood up and ushered her out.

  Sybil thought about what he’d said all the way back to the city. In some ways it wasn’t reassuring, although she was happy to know that she was sane. But the fact that whole families who had remained in a home in spirit for a hundred years almost never wanted to leave was not encouraging. At least she was happy he didn’t think they were trying to terrorize them or drive them away. But she had no intention of coexisting with them. She had already decided not to tell Blake what she had learned that day. She wanted to hear what Michael would say when he visited the house, and what kind of vibrations he picked up, hostile or friendly, and if he could tell her anything more.

  As she walked into the front hall, she looked at the portraits more closely than she had before. They were exactly like the people she had seen in the hallway the night of the earthquake. And she could have sworn that the grand dowager was gazing right at her in the portrait with a disapproving stare, as she held her fan and a lorgnette. Sybil could still hear her voice that night. She noticed a black pug dog in the painting then too, sitting on the floor next to the woman. The old man in the kilt appeared to observe her with interest as she walked past, trying not to let them unnerve her. This was her house now, she thought with determination, and no longer theirs. And as she walked upstairs to check on her children after their first day of school, Sybil didn’t see the little boy sitting under a table, wearing knee breeches and a cap, holding a bag of marbles, as he smiled, watching her.

  Chapter 4

  Michael Stanton from the Berkeley Psychic Institute came to visit Sybil the next morning at ten A.M. The house was quiet. Alicia and José were cleaning their bedrooms, the children were at school, and Blake was at work.

  Sybil told him as soon as he walked in that she had only had time to read a few chapters of Bettina’s book the night before, but it was fascinating, and everything appeared to be there. All she knew about them so far was that Bertrand and Gwyneth Butterfield had built the house in 1902, which she knew anyway. Their oldest son was named Josiah, and he’d been eight years old when they moved in. His sister Bettina was two years younger than he. Their son Magnus was three when they arrived, and he had been killed three years later, in a tragic accident, run over by a runaway carriage at the age of six. A daughter, Lucy, had been born in 1909, four years after Magnus’s death, and she had always suffered from frail health—she had a weak chest, as her older sister put it. Sybil also knew now, from the book, that the daunting dowager in the elegant gown was Gwyneth’s mother, Augusta Campbell, née MacPherson, who lived with them, and she was indeed Scottish. Gwyneth Campbell Butterfield had be
en born in Scotland as well. The older gentleman in the kilt with the mane of white hair was Augusta’s much older brother, Angus MacPherson. And Bettina had shared that he played the bagpipes atrociously, at every opportunity, and for some reason had come to live with his sister, his niece, and her husband and children in America, and was like an eccentric grandfather to them more than a great-uncle.

  Sybil had gotten no further than that, but she shared the information with Michael Stanton, as he walked slowly from one portrait to the next, observing them closely. And for the first time, Sybil noticed that there was a set of bagpipes leaning against Angus MacPherson’s chair in his portrait. Bettina had added that her grandmother had had a black pug named Violet, which Sybil had noticed in the dowager’s portrait before. The tiara she wore in the painting was the same one Sybil had seen her wear the night of the earthquake. It was slightly concealed by her elaborate Victorian hairdo, and she was wearing several long strands of very large pearls.

  Sybil didn’t say anything to Michael Stanton while he looked at the portraits, other than to explain who each of them was, which she knew now from Bettina’s book. She told him she had a box of photographs of them too. And then she walked him around the main floor. He stood for a long time in the dining room with his eyes closed, and when he opened them, he followed her up the grand staircase to the bedrooms on the second floor. They toured the entire house before she took him into the sitting room off her bedroom and they sat down. He looked tired, as though he had poured all his strength and energy into what he was trying to discern.

  “What do you think?” Sybil finally asked him, and he nodded thoughtfully as he looked at her.

  “The spirits are incredibly strong here,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house quite like this. It’s almost as though they’re still alive here, or think they are. I can hear Angus playing the bagpipes, and the old lady talking, the children laughing, and their parents are totally benevolent spirits. The little boy who had the carriage accident is very strong here too. His spirit must have returned here to be with his family, which isn’t surprising since he was so young. He’s full of mischief, and I get the sense that he wants to meet your little boy. And that the others want to meet you. I think the man you saw watching you from the dining room is not ominous. He’s some kind of manservant, who must have spent his entire career working for them here, so his spirit never left. He’s a less significant member of the group.”

  “Are they going to stay here?” Sybil asked him uncomfortably.

  “I don’t think there’s any question of it,” he told her honestly. “The question is, are you? They’re not going anywhere. They live here, and always have. I’m not sure what part of the house they have settled in. I don’t feel them strongly in the bedrooms or the upper floors. They seem to be mostly downstairs, on the main floor. Their aura is strongest in the dining room, and I think you might see them again there. They might be willing to simply leave the upper floors to you, and share the reception rooms with you. Bertrand Butterfield seems to be a very determined benevolent presence, and his wife is an extremely gentle, kind spirit, unlike her indomitable mother, who is harmless but a force to be reckoned with. And her brother, Angus, must already have been quite old when he got here. I get a sense from him that he’s slightly confused.”

  His observations were fascinating, but it was not what Sybil wanted to hear, and how was she going to explain to Blake and her children that they would be sharing their home with the Butterfields for as long as they lived there? For a minute she hoped it was just hocus-pocus, but something very powerful told her it wasn’t, and that Michael Stanton’s reading of the situation, and the personalities they were dealing with, was accurate, even in the spirit world.

  “I think that Bettina, their second child and oldest daughter, is the only one in the family who attained a great age,” Michael said, and Sybil knew from the bank that she had died at eighty-four. “Except for Augusta and Angus, of course,” he added, “but their spirits were already old when they arrived in the house. I think Bertrand died somewhere around sixty, during the Great Depression, when they lost their money, and Gwyneth not long after, although she was a few years younger than he. I don’t get the feeling that she died here. She must have passed away after the home was sold. And Bettina’s daughter, whom you mentioned sold the house after her mother’s death, doesn’t seem to be here at all, except as a baby. I don’t think she ever lived here as a child or an adult, and she seems to have no emotional tie to the house. She comes to me as foreign, French probably, and her adult life must have been there. She doesn’t feel American, nor linked to the house to me.”

  “Bettina said in the chapter I read last night that she moved to France shortly after Lili was born. Lili was the child of Bettina’s first husband, who died in the Great War. Bettina moved to France with Lili after the war, married a Frenchman, and remained in Paris until she was widowed for the second time. She returned to San Francisco then to reclaim her parents’ home and bought it back from its owners at the time, and lived the final thirty years of her life in the house. But her daughter, Lili, remained in France.” Michael’s psychic sense about them was amazingly accurate. “You know who all the players are now, Mrs. Gregory,” he continued. “What are you going to do?”

  “Do you think I will see them again?” Sybil asked, looking worried.

  “I think you will. Their spirits are too present not to. They think this is still their home. They may not even understand what you’re doing here.”

  “I’m not sure I do either,” she said ruefully. “I feel like we’ve moved into someone else’s home. It will never feel like ours, if they’re attached to it this strongly.”

  “They’re spirits, and no longer live people. You should be able to find a way to coexist. It depends on how present they wish to be, and how powerfully they make themselves felt. Spirits can either be very determined or very discreet, depending on how they react to you, and how firm you and your husband want to be about it.”

  “I don’t want to have to fight for our turf.”

  “Maybe you won’t have to. They’re not aggressive people, most of them seem very gentle, and the children are very sweet.”

  “Do you think Bertrand and Gwyneth want to drive us away?” she asked him.

  “I don’t get that sense at all. Their energy seems very welcoming and warm. Augusta may give you a hard time”—he smiled as he said it—“but that’s just who she is as a spirit, and who she was then as well. And Angus is entirely harmless, he’s just an eccentric old man. I think he never married and had no children of his own.”

  “I’ll have to talk to my husband and find out what he thinks, if he even believes me,” Sybil said thoughtfully, and she wasn’t at all sure he would.

  “He may have to see them himself to take it seriously,” Michael suggested.

  “If they show themselves to him.”

  “I think they will. And Magnus is aching to play with your youngest son.” That worried Sybil too.

  “I hope he doesn’t frighten him. Charlie is terrified of ghosts, as I said before.”

  “Magnus won’t appear as a ghost to him. They’re just two little boys.”

  “A hundred years apart,” Sybil said, still trying to sort it all out in her head. It was a lot to digest. But at least Michael had validated what she knew she’d seen, and told her a great deal more. Along with Bettina’s family history, she had all the information she needed now, but she still wanted to finish the book to learn more about them. She and Blake had bought much more than a house, they had acquired a century of history, and the family that had lived there too.

  “I hope you’ll tell me how it all works out,” he said kindly.

  “I will,” she said solemnly, grateful for his visit and the light he had shed on the situation they were in, which only she believed so far.

  “They’re a very endearing group of people, if you ever get to know them,” Michael said. “My visit m
ay have stirred them up a bit. Psychic contact from me today may bring them forward again. They can feel me, even if they don’t know who I am. It may draw them to you. They can sense you too, and your interest in them. You have a very open spirit,” he told Sybil, and wished her luck before he left. He told her that she was very fortunate to have drawn the Butterfields toward her own light, which he said was very attractive to spirits, who sensed other pure spirits around them. She wasn’t sure that was a good thing, and she didn’t know if she was ready to meet them again. She wanted to talk to Blake first.

  She was quiet when the children came home from school that afternoon. She was lying on her bed, reading Bettina’s book, and went to ask them how school had gone. Andy and Caroline seemed to like their new high school, and Charlie was happy at his school and said the teacher was nice, though not as nice as his teacher in New York, but he didn’t know her as well yet. He went to play outside in the garden after that, and Sybil went back to her book to learn more about the Butterfields and their history.

  Blake came home from the office looking tired, and said he’d had difficult meetings that afternoon with their bank, and he was happy to see Sybil at the end of his day. It had been lonely for him before they arrived in San Francisco, and he loved having his family around him again.

  “What did you do today?” he asked with interest as she got dinner ready and gave him a vague, distracted answer.

  “Nothing much.” She was making roast beef, which was a favorite of his. He went upstairs to change from his suit into jeans, and they all came into the kitchen when she sent Charlie to get them for dinner. She wanted Blake to carve the beef, and she’d set the kitchen table with pretty place mats and flowers. But before she could ask Blake to slice the meat for them, they heard noises in the dining room that sounded like a party, voices talking and laughing, and they looked at each other, wondering who was there. All the Gregorys were in the kitchen, and there was no one else in the house.