by Kate Aeon
“No?”
Phoebe’s mouth went dry. She didn’t want to say anything, but she didn’t see how she could avoid it, either. “Michael called me today.”
The color drained out of Alan’s face. “He’s out of the coma?”
“The nursing home says no. That he’s very close to dying, in fact.”
“Then...”
Phoebe looked into his eyes and tried to look like someone sane. Because as bad as this confession was, everything else she had to say was worse. “I can’t explain it. I know Michael’s voice. I would bet anything that it was him on the phone.” She took a deep breath and added, “But that’s not why I’m here.”
“I was wondering about that.” He smiled a little. “Though I am grateful for the company.”
“You may not be. Do you believe in ghosts?”
She could see him framing the word “no” — could see the flat automatic denial already on his face and then something... something... It was like watching a man get hit in the face by a bucket of ice water. He froze and his eyes went wide, and for just an instant she could see fear and denial and the strangest little flash of what might have been hope. And then it was all gone. He was under control again. He’s really good at that, she thought. And he said, “I try to maintain a healthy skepticism about the paranormal.”
Phoebe nodded. “I taught science — could have taught at the high school level, but I enjoyed working with younger kids.” Her voice didn’t break there. She could almost have been proud of herself, had the circumstances been different. “I understand about skepticism. It’s a lot more useful than, say, dogmatic denial.”
“Why do you ask?”
Phoebe let herself look at Alan — really look at him. His was a pleasant face worn not so much by age as by pain. She could see the pain in his eyes. No one would ever mistake Alan for a movie star; no woman would ever stop in her tracks to stare at him as he walked by. But Phoebe had a sense of underlying solidity to him. Of something genuine. Something good. And she could hear the little voice in the back of her head.
Go see my daddy.
She already had some idea of what had happened to him. He had been someone’s daddy, though in his home she could see no signs of anyone else in his life at all. If she’d brought her cards with her, she might have had a clearer picture of what she was stepping into — but she hadn’t been ready to show that part of herself to anyone, and especially not to the neighbor who had politely invited her into his house at three in the morning.
“Because I saw a ghost today.”
He hadn’t changed position, but she noticed that his knuckles had gone white. “This happen to you a lot?”
“Second time in my life,” Phoebe said.
“When was the first time?”
“Also today.”
He took a deep breath. “I see. Spooky white sheet sort of thing?” he asked, and he was trying to be casual about it, but Phoebe could hear in Alan’s voice that the casualness was an act. All of a sudden he wasn’t so good at keeping his emotions in the box.
And this was where it got hard. Because Phoebe hadn’t seen something vague. She’d seen someone. Someone very specific. Someone who had mattered a whole hell of a lot to somebody — probably to this man, unless Phoebe had misunderstood.
She said, “My visitor was a little blonde girl, blue jeans and a pink blouse with a big red heart on the front. Short, curly hair. Sweet smile. Sort of... pixie-ish.”
Alan shuddered and swallowed. Closed his eyes and turned his head to one side, and then abruptly stood up. Turned his back to her.
Beneath his shirt she could see muscles in his back knotting and flexing.
“You teach science,” he said.
“Not anymore.”
“Doesn’t matter. You must still remember some of it.” His voice had gone hoarse, scratchy. “You have any explanation for what you saw?”
“No.”
“Where... where was this little girl?”
“In my living room.”
“Not... outside a window?”
“No.” Phoebe was trying to figure out where his questions were coming from. They weren’t the sort of questions she would have asked had she been on the receiving end of this conversation. “She told me to come see you.”
He turned to stare at her. To glare at her. “She talked to you.”
“She told me, ‘Go see my daddy.’ She showed me... you.”
Alan’s body went rigid, and the bones stood out under the skin of his face. Phoebe realized again that he was a big guy. Not as big as Michael — but a hell of a lot bigger than her.
“My daughter. Talked. To you.”
“I told you what she said. It wasn’t much. Just to come see you.”
She saw something heartbreaking in his eyes. He’d loved his little girl. Phoebe didn’t know how or when the child had died, but she could see in every line of Alan’s body that it might as well have been five minutes ago. That he hadn’t found any peace. Hadn’t come to terms. He was still raw and bleeding inside.
“And your husband who is in a coma called you today, too.” Another statement, not a question.
Phoebe nodded.
“Right.” Alan stood there, staring down at her, wearing an unreadable expression. “What do you do for a living now?” he asked.
Phoebe’s heart sank.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m curious. You have some... interesting things going on next door. Ghosts and mysterious phone calls. You aren’t teaching anymore. These places cost money. Unless you own yours outright — and I’m guessing that you don’t — you have bills to pay. So... what do you do? How do you make a living?”
Phoebe had never sought out the paranormal. It wasn’t an area of special interest for her, it wasn’t something she loved. It was, most times, an embarrassment. Her mother had taught her to read cards when she was little, so Phoebe had thought it was normal — that everyone did it. She’d proven to be good at it. But the world had quickly disabused her of the notion that anyone else thought reading cards was normal. She’d learned not to mention it at all in most circles and, when she did, to never suggest that it might be more than an amusing parlor game. Because if she did, she was suddenly a threat. Or a crazy person.
She’d learned to shut up about the cards. About the world she could sometimes sense just on the other side of conventional reality. She had learned never to suggest that she got information from anywhere except television, radio, or something she’d read. Except with people she knew very well, she covered her few slips with the stock line “I must have read it somewhere,” along with a smile and a shrug.
Which wasn’t going to work here, because he’d asked her a direct question.
Phoebe stood up. Grabbed her cane. “My job isn’t a part of this.”
“Humor me.”
“I’m all out of humor. It’s been a very bad day for me,” Phoebe said evenly, “because I received a call I can’t explain from someone I hoped I’d never hear from again. And I saw a ghost. Twice. And while I can understand that you don’t want to believe me — or maybe just that you don’t believe me — I only came over here to give you a message. It wasn’t easy for me to come, and frankly, I’m not sure why I’m here. The little girl — your daughter — told me to come see you, but she didn’t tell me why. So. I’m here. I’ve told you what she told me. But now I think I’m done.”
Phoebe discovered that she didn’t want to know what Alan would think of her when he discovered her current line of work. She didn’t want to know any more than she already knew from the look on his face — that he thought she was a scammer. A charlatan.
As she limped to the door, he was still demanding answers, sounding angrier and angrier. “Who sent you here? Really? Who told you about my daughter? What sort of game are you playing? Answer me, dammit. You come here and say something like this, tell me you saw my daughter—”
His voice broke, and Phoebe’s heart broke wi
th it. But she wasn’t going to tell him any more about herself. Wasn’t going to let herself be the target for all of his pain.
She’d spent too much time as a target already.
“You owe me the truth!” he was shouting as she stepped out of his door.
“I gave you the truth,” she said as she slammed the door behind her.
She wanted to cry. Why couldn’t she have still been a nice, normal science teacher when this happened? Then she could have admitted to her job without instantly destroying whatever credibility she might have had.
I read tarot for a psychic hotline. Yeah. That would really add to the poor man’s peace of mind.
Alan stood behind the heavy vertical blinds over the front window and watched Phoebe leave. She’d claimed that Chick had come to her, that Chick had appeared to her on the anniversary of Chick’s death and told Phoebe to come see him.
Alan wanted to think that someone had put his neighbor up to it. That this visit had been some disgusting, heartless trick, or maybe the opening move of some bizarre money-grubbing scheme, something foul. Because that would make sense.
But after Phoebe closed her door and moved out of Alan’s sight, he shut his eyes and saw Chick standing in the rain, staring up at him, trying to tell him something that he couldn’t hear, and he felt the tears burning paths down his cheeks again.
Chapter Seven
Phoebe curled up on the couch, wrapped in an afghan, cold and shaking in spite of the heat.
Bad. That could have been so bad. She’d gone into a stranger’s house in the middle of the night on the advice of something even she couldn’t quite believe. The doctor could have gone psycho on her, and people would have been picking pieces of her out of neighborhood dumpsters the next day.
She pressed her cheek against the rough weave of the couch and closed her eyes. He could have done anything. He’d been angry, he’d been demanding, but it could have been a lot worse. He could have reacted the way Michael had reacted when he caught her reading cards at a party Halloween night and realized that she hadn’t thrown her cards away. Three months after they got married.
That Halloween incident had been such a stupid thing. Dr. Luckreed found out from his wife — who taught sixth-grade social studies at the school where Phoebe was in her first year of teaching — that Phoebe read tarot, something she had kept from the attention of the principal and the school board. Up to that time, she’d just read occasionally for her friends — she’d never charged for a reading and had never gone public with her odd talent. But Sherry had been having problems, and Phoebe had offered to read for her, and the reading had helped. Phoebe thought nothing more about it until a month later, when the Luckreeds wanted a tarot reader as entertainment for a Halloween party and Sherry had asked Phoebe if she would come and throw cards. Phoebe had been delighted.
They set her up in a little heated gazebo outside the main house, with the pathway lit by pumpkins and with ghosts, bats, and spiderwebs fluttering from the bare-branched maples that arched overhead.
Phoebe’s evening had started slowly — she’d thrown cards for one woman and had been really on. Then she’d sat for a while, sipping a cup of hot chocolate from the big electric pot Sherry had supplied. She’d had time to finish almost a full cup before she heard a laughing couple come up the walk. She’d quickly nailed both the fact that they’d been trying to get pregnant for ages and that the woman had finally succeeded — something she hadn’t yet dared tell her husband, fearing that it wouldn’t last. The cards said it would.
Phoebe had had time for a few sips of hot chocolate after those two — but then she’d looked up to find a line of people stretching all the way back to the big old Victorian house. Word had gotten out, and she didn’t have time for another sip of chocolate all night.
She’d had a ball, and she’d been hot with the cards, too, steadily digging out hidden issues, helping people get a different perspective on problems that had been stymieing them, and simply letting the querents know how things were going in their lives. The whole tone of the evening had been pure, unadulterated fun.
And then she’d looked up to find Michael next in line, his patrician features twisted with fury, his green eyes glowing. Michael, who had been working late on a case and who’d said he wouldn’t be able to make the party and couldn’t really stand the Luckreeds anyway and suggested that she really should just decline the invitation. She looked into his eyes as he stood in the gazebo archway, and she saw murder. Her hands had stilled on the cards, and he’d said in a voice too low to cause a scene but poisonous nonetheless, “Forgot to tell me a few things, didn’t you, Phoebe? How dare you make a spectacle of yourself like this? I told you never to do this — this witch crap of yours — again. Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know how this reflects on me?”
“I’m having fun at a party. The people here are also having fun. I don’t see how it reflects on you at all.”
“You will,” he said. He’d insisted that she leave right then. Claiming a family emergency, he’d dragged her past disappointed guests waiting in a line that had only gotten longer. He had hunted up Dr. Luckreed and made excuses, and then had hauled Phoebe home, telling the Luckreeds he would have someone pick up Phoebe’s car the next day.
He’d hurt her in ways she would never have been able to imagine, and he hadn’t even laid a finger on her. He never raised his voice, never lost control — but he started in with her trailer-park childhood and the way her lower-class manners, speech, and actions were constantly making her look like a fool and humiliating him by association. He’d mocked her career as something fit only for the talentless and unambitious, utterly ridiculed her use of the tarot deck, and called her both gullible and scheming. And then he’d accused her of being like the girl who’d left him — of being cheap and tawdry and a charlatan, of letting him down, of making him so angry that he’d said those terrible things to her when he never wanted to hurt her. When he loved her so much. And when he’d been a fool, because he’d fallen again for the same sort of woman who had hurt him before.
They’d only been married three months. She’d been young. She’d been stupid. She’d believed that she was partly at fault — that at the very least she’d humiliated him and perhaps caused him potential problems with his work. And she had let the pity that brought them together and that kept them together overshadow the stirrings of self-preservation that told her to walk away. She’d held honor in high regard back then — had believed that when she gave her word she had to keep it no matter what. No matter whether the person to whom she’d given her word was upholding his end of the bargain or not.
Young and dumb.
Over the next few months, to appease his various hurts and humiliations, she’d resigned her teaching position, had almost vanished from the lives of people who knew her, and had cut off almost all communication with her friends. Michael’s associates started being the only people that she saw.
And then, when she’d voluntarily cut herself off from everyone who might help her, the real horrors had started. And she was too ashamed at having been played the way he’d played her, and too afraid of what he would do to her, to run for help.
Young and dumb.
Eight years and the dumb had worn off, as had any illusions she might have had about honor, either his or hers. She’d run. And five years after that, she wasn’t all that young anymore, and the smarts had apparently stuck. She could see trouble and stay out of its way.
She took a deep breath, uncurled herself from the couch, and cautiously stood up. She had daylight, and errands to run.
The leg felt better. Some days were like that, and she was sure that with enough exercise and care, she would eventually be able to get rid of most of the pain and regain most of her mobility. She yearned to be able to run again; she’d loved running.
She decided to go without the cane — just tough it out. She grabbed her backpack, swung open the door, and there stood her next-door neighbor, just comi
ng out his own door.
“Four years I managed to live here without running into you,” he said, “and now you’re everywhere.” Then he noticed she wasn’t using the cane. “Miracle worker, too, I see. Very nice.” He looked disgusted. He stared at her the way people used to when she was a kid. They’d find out she was from whichever trailer park her family was living in at the time, and they’d act like she had something contagious that would rub off.
“Like I have nothing better to do with my life than hoax some shallow, money-obsessed snob like you,” she said. “Your kid came to me at that ridiculous hour of the morning because she wanted to tell you something. No skin off my nose if that doesn’t matter to you,” Phoebe snapped and headed down the sidewalk, taking her time and going easy on her knee.
And then he was right beside her, glaring down at her. “I want to know what your game is. You think you can — what — blackmail me? Get me to pay you to tell me some story you made up about her? You figure I have a lot of money because I’m a doctor?” He looked like he’d be willing to strangle her if she just gave him that little extra nudge. “What’s your angle?”
“You’re the conspiracy theorist. You tell me.” Phoebe reached her car, grateful that her parking space was close to her front door. “But not now. I have things I need to take care of.” She gave him a cold, haughty smile — the one she’d perfected as a kid living in a one-bedroom single-wide trailer in an endless succession of dreary trailer parks, sharing a foldout couch in the wall-less den with her sister and wearing homemade clothes and hand-me-downs from relatives who were better off.
She got into her car wanting to hate Alan, slammed the door, and drove off.
But she couldn’t hate him. If she put herself in his place and tried to imagine someone coming to her in the middle of the night, claiming that he’d had a visit from her dead child, she would have been skeptical, and probably hostile. She would have been looking for the angle, too, had some lunatic claimed what she had claimed.
Phoebe could tell herself that Alan was like Michael — but her gut said he wasn’t. That the two men were about as far apart on the spectrum as two members of the same species could be.
