Emily's Ghost

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

She tried to forget the announcement she'd just heard, dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter, and went away more frustrated than not. She realized now that the day of her interview had been a turning point in their relationship. She'd watched Lee walk a fence between faith and skepticism, and then she'd watched him trip and fall on the wrong damn side. How painfully ironic that he was being skewered for being a believer.

  In the last half hour it had also become obvious that forgetting him was bound to be an uphill battle. The trick was to avoid being reminded of him. In some ways, that wouldn't be hard. It wasn't as though she had a photo album of their time together, or love letters from him, or a song they'd shared, or even some dried corsage to mope over. On the other hand, the senator did have a distressing habit of popping up in newspapers, in magazines, and now on television.

  And with a primary coming up, he was bound to be popping up more and more. Just that morning she'd read that he'd hired a campaign manager (not Cara Miles -- praise the Lord -- but some heavy hitter who'd run the last New York senatorial campaign). That person was being paid ten thousand dollars a month to keep Lee Alden's face in front of Emily at all times.

  But. If he did lose the primary race -- and for the first time Emily was beginning to believe that could happen -- he'd probably leave politics to become senior partner in some high-powered law firm. He'd drop out of the public eye. And out of sight, after all, was out of mind.

  Gee, Em, why stop there? she asked herself caustically. Why not hope that he gets kidnapped by an adoring constituent and locked away in her basement? Wouldn't that be helpful?

  Emily squared her shoulders. Getting over the man was going to be a long, hard battle. If it weren't for Fergus O'Malley, she wasn't certain she'd be up to it.

  ****

  On Sunday morning Emily and Fergus were sifting for clues in the rubble of debris that she'd dragged home after a week of research. Fergus, thinking he was doing Emily a kindness, zapped on Bay State Week in Review. Lee Alden's chiseled face was being featured in close-up.

  She protested, then went over to the television to turn it off. But she didn't, or couldn't, and ended up standing next to the tube with her hand on the remote -- ready, willing, but not quite able to switch Lee Alden out of her life. She was painfully aware that he'd made no attempt to see her since the interview. Granted, Congress was still in session, but she knew full well that the senator had been spending weekends in Massachusetts on damage control.

  "The bloke's under siege," Fergus said thoughtfully as he studied the senator's image flickering on the screen. "Ye think he'll pull through in one piece?"

  "It doesn't look good," Emily admitted. "Stan Cooper's roughing him up pretty badly in my paper. And Stan's not the only one."

  "Aye. They travel in a pack, them press people -- present company excepted, o' course. Times haven't changed much that way. It's funny, though. The man don't even believe."

  "Ah, but he's admitted he'd like to believe, and that's enough for most of them."

  The program ended; Emily turned it off with a funny little sound, as if she were straining to move a heavy piece of furniture.

  "I'd vote for him," Fergus admitted. "It does puzzle me why some folks want him brought down. He's quick, honest, smart --"

  "Three good reasons, my friend," Emily said tersely. "Can we talk about something else now?"

  "I understand," Fergus said.

  He did understand. Lately the two of them seemed to operate on exactly the same wavelength; Emily could hardly remember their last sharp exchange. Despite the fact that they were divided by sex, status, education, even the centuries themselves, they were completely in tune. When Emily bothered to wonder why, she always came to the same conclusion: Each of them had decided to trust the other because neither of them had anything to lose. That just wasn't true between Lee Alden and her.

  Perhaps more important, Fergus and Emily shared the same obsession: solving Hessiah Talbot's murder. Ironically it was the shrewd Mrs. Gibbs who'd pointed Emily to her most interesting find recently. On Wednesday the librarian had called Emily at home. "Are you aware," she had asked, "that the Newarth Sentinel has complete archives of all the newspapers it's published --"

  "Sure, that's standard practice," Emily, puzzled by the call, had told her.

  "--and that the Sentinel also keeps copies of pieces that were written up but never published?"

  "I didn't know that! As far back as 1887?"

  "Well, maybe the records aren't complete, but it's worth a look."

  "I'll go there tomorrow," Emily had answered.

  On Thursday Emily had called the Sentinel and got permission to go through its library. On Friday she'd spent the day carefully sifting through crumbling copy that had never made the leap to the printed page. The archives seemed almost maniacally in order; some old New England newspapers were like that.

  She'd managed to pan out one gold nugget: a column, written by what passed for a society columnist back then, that covered what had to be the last ball in Hessiah Talbot's life. It seemed to Emily that the account of the ball must have become suddenly awkward after the murder of its most prominent guest and had been pulled at the last minute.

  It was written in the typically breathless, gushing voice of the society writer and described the guests, their clothes, the decorative theme (silver and gold), and the designated charity (local soup kitchen). It was a fascinating piece, filled with small and telling details. When Emily returned to her condo that night, she called Mrs. Gibbs and thanked her profusely.

  Now for the tenth time she was reading the column back to Fergus.

  "Okay, let's see what we've got," she said, between spoons of oat bran cereal. "We've got Mrs. William Wellington the Fourth. She sounds like an enormous woman, or she'd never have been able to wear a gown with 'a thousand golden roses sewn into its folds.' Would her husband Will, the 'prominent physician,' still find her attractive? Dr. Wellington must have hobnobbed with the Talbot family. Could he ever have treated Hessiah Talbot? Known something about her? Could she have known something about him?"

  "Can't answer ye," said Fergus steadfastly, sitting opposite her at the kitchen table. "Never saw a physician in me life, either professionally or socially."

  She killed the last of her orange juice. "All right. Next. Jeremiah Blood. Obviously a nouveau riche. Proprietor of a string of liveries and smithies in the area. A bachelor, but clearly would be looking for a wife. Think, Fergus. Could he have loved Hessiah from afar? Shod her favorite horse before he worked his way up the ladder and became a parvenu?"

  "Will ye drop that foreign talk, woman?" he groused. "I have trouble enough with modern English."

  "Okay, okay; I'm just being snotty about this ball. It's so easy for me to picture it. Small town, not enough bluebloods for a quorum, they're forced to let in the upstarts, all in the name of charity. I can imagine the sniping and the put-downs all evening long. C'mon, Fergus." She gave him a dangerously tender smile. "Don't be mad at me."

  He returned her look with a slant-eyed, half-mocking one of his own, and they were friends again. Emily ran down the rest of the list, which included the local priest whose soup kitchen was benefiting from the charity ball.

  "It bothers me that Father O'Neil keeps popping up in this investigation," she admitted. "You've said that he played whist regularly at the manor, that he was close friends with Hessiah's mother before she died, that—"

  "What's yer point?" Fergus interrupted, more shocked than angry. "Ye think a man of the cloth, a Catholic priest, actually strangled this innocent young woman?"

  "It sounds unbelievable, I grant you. I'm just trying to be thorough. Anyway, since when is Hessiah Talbot an 'innocent young woman'? You once called her a bitch, remember?"

  "That's because I was remembering the way she ordered me hauled off to Father O'Brien's mission. I didn't really mean it," he said, a little sullenly.

  "But was she really all that innocent? Listen to this again: 'Miss Hessiah Talb
ot, whose late arrival only heightened the effect of her entrance, was quickly acclaimed by all to be the belle of the event. Miss Talbot was a vision of pure loveliness in a Paris gown of silver taffeta trimmed in exquisite French braid. Her ensemble was crowned by an extraordinary jewel that had the entire company, especially les débutantes charmantes, remarking on its striking size and color. Very soon it became apparent to all and sundry that her dance card was quite full, and it was even whispered that Lieutenant Dale Culver had earlier torn away an inscribed sheet and commanded those dances for himself, on the quite justifiable ground that he was beginning a tour of duty the following day. The gay and dashing lieutenant shall be sorely missed by many of the company and is wished godspeed.'

  "Well?"

  "Ye're reading more between them lines than ever was intended."

  "Not at all," she said, taking a shovelful of by now soggy cereal. "I think it was the Silver and Gold Ball that was the ball alluded to during the trial, the ball Hessiah Talbot attended on the night of her death. It explains why the society column was never printed."

  "Why didn't they call it a Silver and Gold Ball at my trial, then? All they said was she was wearing a linen nightdress after some ball she'd attended."

  "To them it wasn't important which ball. Besides, the trial coverage was bizarrely erratic by modern standards. The reporters were more concerned about the shocking effects of the murder on Hessiah's family and friends."

  "And crying out for my death," he added grimly.

  Emily bit her lip. "That, too."

  "Say it was the Silver and Gold Ball she went to before she was strangled. What makes you so convinced that the 'extraordinary jewel' she wore was the necklace? It could've been an emerald coronet. It could've been a diamond brooch. The description's altogether too vague."

  "You might be right, but I don't think so. When a guest is wearing the real thing -- say, a pearl choker -- this writer spells it out in fawning detail. But all the writer dares say about Hessiah's jewel is that it was 'extraordinary' and that everyone talked about its 'striking size and color.' It could've been a lump of anthracite. This writer is hedging, Fergus; he's being ironic."

  "Ye'd know more about such things than I. But why would the wealthiest woman in town wear a piece of junk like that to a fancy ball?"

  "Oh, for love, unquestionably. It was a present, I'm sure of that. If only we knew from whom."

  "And why would she be wearing it over a nightdress?"

  "Also for love. Don't you understand women at all?"

  "No. I don't," he said, flushing. "For one thing, ye don't know that she was wearing the necklace when she was strangled. Maybe someone picked it up from her dressing table and wrapped it around her neck. And here's another thing, this Lieutenant Culver. Nobody ever mentioned him at my trial. Shouldn't I be bothered by that?" he demanded.

  "Good question. It's too convenient that Lieutenant Culver was scheduled to leave Newarth the day after the Silver and Gold Ball. I doubt if the police ever bothered to track him down and question him. It sounds like half -- I assume, the female half -- of Newarth society was willing to vouch for the lieutenant in any case. As you said yourself, the police weren't very motivated to look any farther than you."

  "Will ye be the one who finally runs him to ground, then?"

  "I don't see how, Fergus; we don't know a thing about him except his name and rank. It's not as if we can subpoena the man," she said, uneasy about Fergus's spiraling confidence in her.

  Fergus jumped up from the table and began to pace the length of the apartment. "We can't just let him go! All yer speculating about the necklace and the ball may or may not be, but the one thing we do know is that this military bloke -- Gawd, they go for the uniform every time, don't they? -- tore up the lady's dance card and waltzed away the night with her."

  "That was the rumor. And even if it were true, we don't know whether she was taken with him."

  "She danced with the bastard, didn't she? If ye're correct and this is a crime de passion," he said, perfectly mimicking her use of the phrase, "then we'd damn well better hunt him down."

  He was so relentlessly logical, almost primitive in his responses. The two of them may have been simpatico lately, but their styles were completely at odds. Emily liked to approach a problem the way she would an onion, peeling away its complications layer by layer. Fergus grabbed the first sharp knife at hand and brought it down hard, chopping the thing in half.

  Chapter 21

  As far as Emily could tell, neither Lee Alden's campaign to get reelected nor her campaign to pinpoint Lieutenant Culver's historic whereabouts went forward in the next week. When she ran into the military, she ran into a brick wall. The archives of the Newarth Library and the Sentinel were one thing; the archives of the United States Navy were something else altogether. Around and around and around Emily went, alternately calling Boston, Annapolis, and Washington. It got to the point where she seriously considered installing a WATS line on her phone.

  Lee Alden's week wasn't going so well either. It started off with a debate against Boyd Strom. Boyd Strom was a rough-and-tumble self-made man, a street fighter with no compunctions about playing dirty. He never once bothered to address an issue. Instead, he needled Lee about his wealth, promised everyone everything, vowed never in his life to raise a single tax, and generally stuck to the low road. The debate was too carefully structured to squeeze in any digs about Lee's interest in the paranormal, but Boyd Strom was obviously biding his time; there would be another debate.

  When it was over, Emily switched on the vacuum cleaner and went back to her rugs. "There was no comparison between them," she said above the roar of the Hoover. "Lee blew him out of the water."

  "What, are ye nuts?" Fergus answered in a voice just as loud. "It's Strom who talks people's language.

  "Strom was pious and self-serving!"

  "So what? He tells 'em what they want to hear. Ye don't know a damn thing about politics!"

  Emily banged the big Hoover into the sofa. "You're not for Boyd Strom; you're just against Lee Alden!"

  "I'm not for either one of 'em, ye twit! I won't be voting!"

  Stung, Emily stopped and turned off the machine. "I'm sorry. I forgot again," she said, distressed. "It's so hard to believe you might not be around for the primary. Who'll watch the returns with me after all this?" she asked in a plaintive voice.

  "Probably me," he said grimly. "If ye can't find that damn lieutenant, I might be around till doomsday."

  "Would that be so bad?" she asked with a sad little smile. "Think of the times we'd have."

  "True. I could take a hell of an accurate exit poll for yer paper."

  They shared a quiet, conspiratorial laugh. Emily hid her dismay over the thought of losing him by making a production of wrapping the extension cord around the upright handle of the Hoover.

  So this is what it's come to, she thought. From trying like crazy to bump him out of my life to simple dread at the thought that I might succeed.

  She leaned both hands on the vacuum handle as if it were a high-tech walking stick. Her back was to Fergus; she simply could not direct the question to his face. "Fergus? Do you really have to go?" she whispered.

  There was no response from him, and in the meantime, tears had started to roll. She brushed them away quickly, feeling unbearably self-conscious. When she finally found the courage to turn around, Fergus was standing very close, looking very serious. His mouth was without a flicker of animation; his eyes had a depth that was profound.

  "What's happening between us is impossible, ye know that," he said in a voice weighed down by pain.

  "N-no, I don't know that," she argued, unable to look at him. "Just about everything that's happened so far is impossible. Why should this be any different?"

  "Well, for one thing there's nothing, absolutely nothing, that I can do for ... to ... with ... ye," he said with a self-conscious sound deep in his throat.

  "Naturally not," she said, coloring. "But
that's not all there is to a relationship."

  "Nowadays it seems to be," he said tersely.

  "No, no. It really isn't important to me. Not at all. There's a trend nowadays toward abstinence. Really. You've read those magazines. Sex is just too ... complicated."

  Yet even as she said it, she was aware that the most natural, logical, desirable thing in the world would be for him to take her in his arms.

  Fergus saw the frustration she was feeling. He must have, because he answered in a husky voice, "Why are we doing this to ourselves?"

  His image seemed to waver and soften around the edges into transparent light, and then he was gone. The effect on Emily was devastating; he'd never disappeared in quite that way before. She had no idea what it meant; the rules seemed to evolve and change as time went on.

  Oh, God, she thought wearily, falling onto the sofa in a trembling heap. It was all too much. Lee Alden had done his level best to bat her emotions right out of the park, and now Fergus, a great outfielder if ever there was one, had leaped high, high in the air with his glove and caught them.

  ****

  When the call came from the Oak Bluffs Home for the Aged, Emily was folding three weeks' worth of laundry and was in a subdued mood; heat waves and Laundromats did that to her. She let the answering machine kick in, partly because she hadn't been calling the newsroom as she had promised she would. But as soon as she heard the director's voice recording a message, she knew something was wrong. She rang back the number immediately; the director answered.

  Emily apologized for not having been quicker to pick up the phone, and the director said, "I'm afraid I have bad news. Hattie Dunbart passed away in her sleep last week. It was a very peaceful end and not unexpected. But we'll all miss her terribly."

  It was an awful shock, like the crack of ice on a pond giving way underfoot. For all her frailness, Hattie Dunbart seemed like the kind of woman who could will herself to live forever, and Emily said so.

  "She was determined. Incidentally, Hattie was very taken with you. She mentioned you several times after you left, and that's why I'm calling. She wanted you to keep the necklace. Her exact words were 'What the hell am I going to do with it? I have a neck like a chicken.'"