“She’s always worried about something,” Raymond said.
Unaeze smiled. “That is a wife’s duty, to worry about her husband’s health. Especially since her husband hates to visit his doctor!”
“Work’s been busy lately, Doc.” He smiled sheepishly.
The doctor waved off Raymond’s excuse. “Let’s start at the beginning, eh?”
While Raymond sat on the examination table, Unaeze went through the routine for a general physical, finding everything satisfactory. He touched the bruise on Raymond’s temple.
“Are you experiencing any headaches or dizziness?” the doctor asked.
“Should I be?” He rubbed his grainy eyes.
“It would not be unheard of, after the head trauma you suffered.”
“Been having headaches,” he said. He indicated the bruise. “Feel ’em right here.”
Unaeze made a note. “They began after your accident?”
“Yeah.”
“How long does the pain endure?”
“Not long. Ten, fifteen minutes, maybe. But it’s intense, like the worst migraine.”
The doctor made another note. “Your wife says that you’ve been having nightmares as well.”
“Christ, did she tell you everything?”
Unaeze touched his shoulder. “Sorry, I don’t mean to offend you. But I must inquire, for your sake. Did these nightmares also begin after the accident?”
“Look, I’ve just got a little insomnia, that’s all, probably get these headaches ’cause I can’t get any damn sleep. Can I get some sleeping pills or not?”
Unaeze muttered something in his native tongue. He scribbled on a slip of paper and handed it to Raymond.
“This is a prescription for Ambien. It should aid your sleep, Raymond. I’ve given you a two-week supply.”
“Thanks, Doc. That’s all I needed.” He slid off the table and tucked the prescription in his pocket.
“There are possible side effects,” Unaeze said. “Your dreams could become more vivid than usual.”
Raymond laughed bitterly. “Don’t think that could happen to me, Doc.”
“Other potential side effects are difficulty breathing, nausea, temporary amnesia, and in rare cases, hallucinations.”
“Sounds like fun.”
Unaeze frowned. He wrote another note and gave it to him.
“This is a referral to a neurologist,” he said. “His name is Dr. Price, excellent doctor. I think you should see him. Your headaches concern me.”
“They checked out my head after the accident. Said everything was fine. Just had the concussion.”
“I’m aware of the health reports, Raymond,” Unaeze said. “But I strongly believe that you should seek a second opinion from a specialist, have some tests—”
“There’s nothing wrong with me that some good sleep won’t cure.”
Unaeze threw his hands in the air. “Why must you be so difficult? I’m only trying to help you.”
“Can I go now, Doc?” Raymond jingled his keys. “I need to get back to my office.”
Shaking his head, Dr. Unaeze ushered him out of the examination room.
Neurologist. Please. Going to Unaeze had been bad enough. There was no way in hell he was going to see someone else for more tests, so they could poke and prod him as if he were a lab rat and send his wife into a fit of anxiety. There was nothing seriously wrong with him. Sleep—pure, dreamless sleep—would solve his problems.
He had the prescription filled at a nearby Eckerd, and returned to his ReMax office on busy Panola Road in Lithonia. It was a quarter to eleven, early enough for him to still enjoy a productive day.
The sight of his office comforted him. It was a large, bright area, with several enclosed rooms. Sand carpeting, cream walls. Potted plants. Award plaques and photos he’d taken with community luminaries hanging on the walls.
His staff of four—three real estate agents and an administrative assistant—talked business on telephones and pounded on computer keyboards. The pleasing sounds of money being made.
Tawana, his assistant, greeted him cheerfully.
“Good morning, Uncle Ray. How did the doctor’s appointment go?”
On his way to the coffee machine on a table in the corner, he spun.
“Who told you I’d gone to the doctor?” he asked.
Tawana grinned. “Aunt June, of course. She said to make sure that you went. If you came to work instead of going to your appointment, I had strict orders to call her.”
This was what he got for employing family members. Tawana was his niece, his brother-in-law’s daughter. Twenty-one and a junior at Spelman majoring in marketing, she was a good employee, but he could do without her intrusions into his personal life. She and his wife were always in league over some matter or another.
“I went,” he said. “The doctor said I have two weeks to live.”
“What?” Her mouth fell open.
“Inoperable brain tumor. I might drop dead at any minute.”
Her face was so stricken that he quickly told her he was only kidding.
“That wasn’t funny,” she said.
“Sorry, it wasn’t,” he said. “About the only thing I’d drop dead of today is lack of sleep. Please hold my calls until after lunch. I want to catch up on some things.”
In the privacy of his spacious office in the back, armed with a cup of steaming coffee, he booted up his computer.
Cruel humor wasn’t his style. But fatigue made him irritable, and he was more tired than he’d ever been in his life.
He accessed the calendar program, his tool for organizing his days. A reminder window appearing on the screen, telling him what he needed to do today. “Call Andrew re: golf” sat at the top of the list.
The reminder had appeared yesterday, too. But he hadn’t called his son yet.
Guilt pressed on him, like a physical weight.
He couldn’t afford to relapse into the kind of father he used to be. Andrew deserved better.
He wanted to spend time with his son. But in the past few weeks, he’d been so damned tired.
Be honest with yourself, Ray. You’re avoiding Andrew because talking to him makes you think about the accident, about that terrible place. Your boy was the only one there, and even he doesn’t understand what had really been going on.
He remembered the conversation with Andrew, in his hospital room in the hours after the wreck.
“Do you know anything about an old mansion in Bulloch County, off Interstate 16?”
“No . . . Can you call that nurse now, son?”
It shamed him to recall how easy it had been to lie to his son. But years of breaking promises to Andrew had made lying to him easy, hadn’t it? What was one more lie in a tall pile of them?
He had lied to Andrew to protect him. That was his justification. To keep Andrew from looking into matters that were better left alone. What Andrew didn’t know, wouldn’t hurt him.
He only wished there were some way for him to avoid these matters, too. But the nightmares wouldn’t let him escape. They were a lucid reminder of something he thought he’d left behind thirty-odd years ago.
Pressing his lips together, he clicked the button to erase the calendar window.
He would call his son. Later.
Or so he promised himself.
Chapter 12
Andrew spent the entire morning in Mika’s suite. When she had given him the pager and started sending him lovey-dovey messages, he’d tried to give it back to her, said it wasn’t necessary for them to keep in touch that way. Refusing to argue with him, she strolled into the bedroom. He followed her inside—and walked out two hours later, sweaty and worn out.
He finally left the Ritz-Carlton with the pager clipped to the waist of his slacks. Like she’d told him to do.
It felt liberating to arrive home, a place where logic ruled—not his hormones. As much as he’d enjoyed Mika’s company, being with her made him feel, uncomfortably, like a puppet. Manipulated by string
s of lust.
He wished he hadn’t agreed to see her again that evening. Well, his rational mind wished he hadn’t agreed to the date. His body already missed her.
He dropped the pager on a table in the hallway. He’d switched it off soon after he left the hotel. He’d check it for messages later.
The house was quiet. Everything appeared to be in order.
He began a familiar routine: he retrieved the mail, fed the fish in the aquarium, checked voice mail messages on his home phone, and, since it was lunchtime, prepared a turkey-and-cheddar sandwich on wheat bread, with a side of low-fat chips and a glass of Diet Coke. He took his meal upstairs, planning to eat while reading E-mail.
When he stepped across the threshold of his office, he dropped his lunch.
The lid of the laptop had been raised. Black text glowed on the white background of the Microsoft Word program:
HELO ANDREW
Stepping over the spilled food, Andrew kept a distance of several feet from the computer. As though something might catapult from the screen and bite him.
He’d turned the computer off when he left last night. He hadn’t been using the word processing program, hadn’t typed “Helo Andrew” on the screen. It couldn’t possibly have been him.
Someone else had done this.
But who?
He gripped the back of the desk chair. The cold sweat on his palms dampened the leather.
Was he the brunt of an elaborate practical joke? Eric loved to play around, but he couldn’t imagine that he’d do something like this. No one else he knew would do such a thing, either.
He found himself thinking about the other weird stuff that had happened the past couple of days: the video game incident, the wineglasses in the china cabinet, the water running in the bathtub during the Memorial Day cookout.
Intuitively, he understood that all of these things were somehow related. They weren’t coincidence. Someone was behind all of this.
But who?
A current of cold air blew past him.
He glanced at the windows. They were shut.
The hair on the back of his neck rose.
He had the certain feeling that he was no longer alone.
He heard a noise, turned around.
The food on the floor was moving.
The plate turned over . . . slices of bread and turkey and cheese stacked themselves . . . the chips slid onto the side of the plate . . . the glass floated upright, half-full with ice cubes.
“I’m not seeing this.” He took a step backward. “I’m dreaming. This isn’t real.”
The plate, heaped with food again, rose in the air as if lifted by an invisible waiter. An unseen force drew the glass upward, too.
“This is only a dream.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them.
The food and the glass hovered across the room, toward him.
Cold air advanced closer, too.
He screamed.
He fled into the adjoining bathroom. Locked the door. Backed away from the door as if it might explode open on its own. He nearly tripped over the toilet, managed to regain his balance before he fell.
He was breathing so hard that his lungs hurt.
He turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on his face. He dried his skin with a towel. Sucked in deep breaths.
He saw himself in the mirror. His eyes were wide and terrified.
“I’m not crazy,” he said to his reflection. “What the hell did I see out there?”
Ghost, a voice in his mind answered. It’s been a ghost all along. You suspected it and didn’t want to admit it.
But he didn’t believe in ghosts.
Actually, put it this way: he had never seen one before. He was willing to admit that they might exist. Several people close to him, including his mother, claimed to have witnessed apparitions. He was a skeptic on such matters, but he wasn’t a bullheaded fool. He had enough imagination to believe that there was a world beyond our five senses.
But this ghost, if that’s what it was, was in his house. His house. Not some creepy Victorian mansion in New England. His recently constructed, ultra-modern home in a booming Atlanta suburb.
How could this be happening to him?
He looked at the bathroom door.
What would Mark Justice do in this situation?
Justice didn’t answer. Perhaps the supernatural fell outside his realm of expertise.
He dragged his hand down his face. Thinking.
Then, before he lost his nerve, he unlocked the door, yanked it open.
The sandwich, chips, and glass sat on the desk beside the laptop.
But a chill had settled over the room. The presence? In horror movies, coldness in the air often announced the nearness of a spirit.
His heart jackhammered.
He noticed that new text had appeared on the computer screen, underneath the first message.
DONT BE SCARD
He laughed, a bit maniacally, at the misspelling of the word and the absurdity of the message.
Don’t be scared. Shit.
He was getting the hell out of there.
Chapter 13
Rain tapped on the roof of Carmen’s Marietta town house. Somewhere in the far reaches of the night, thunder rumbled.
At the kitchen table, sipping from a bottle of water, Andrew told Carmen the story of why he believed his house was haunted. He needed her advice to help him decide what he should do next. He was an independent thinker and preferred to find solutions to his own problems. But he couldn’t solve this one on his own.
After rushing pell-mell out of his house, he had busied himself driving around, completing errands, browsing at the shopping mall—and trying to avoid thinking too much about what he’d seen in his office. He didn’t want to think about it until he could share the story with someone he trusted, because with his tendency to overanalyze things, he feared he would drive himself crazy. He wanted to tell Carmen the story first; he was anxious for her to arrive home from work so he could share his experience with her face-to-face and make sure she understood that he wasn’t imagining things.
Which was one reason why he hadn’t told Eric about it. Eric, like him, was relentlessly rational. No doubt, he’d attempt to persuade Andrew that he’d dreamed the entire episode while taking a nap. Andrew didn’t want that kind of feedback, not with his own thoughts so tangled over what had happened.
Carmen, on the other hand, was open-minded, intuitive, and clear thinking. The kind of friend he needed right now.
“Wow,” she said, when he finished his story. She pulled her hands back through her curly hair, and whistled. “Wow, Drew.”
“Do you believe me?” he asked.
“Of course I do. You’re not the kind of guy who would make up something like this. You’re, like, Mr. Logical. I totally believe you.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks, Carmen. I needed to hear that. This has been driving me nuts. I never expected something like this to happen to me.”
“Who would? When I saw a ghost, it surprised me, too.”
“You’ve seen a ghost before?”
She nodded. “I was seventeen. My granddaddy visited me, a few days after he passed. He’d moved in with us when he got up in age, and I became really close to him. When he died, it hit me hard. One night, not long after the funeral, I was in bed, not able to sleep . . . and I felt this weight sit on the side of the mattress, and a cool touch on my cheek. I knew it was my granddaddy. I was surprised, but I wasn’t scared. He was visiting to let me know that he was doing fine, and that I shouldn’t be sad any more, ’cause he was in a better place. And you know what? After that night, I started to feel better.”
“Glad to know that something like this has happened to you, too,” he said. “Makes me feel better about my own sanity. Unless we’re both crazy.”
“You’re the writer, so that means you’re probably the crazy one.” She smiled.
“Always got jokes.”
>
“Seriously, we’ve got to put our heads together and figure this out,” she said. “For that, I need brain food. I’m starved. Want me to order a pizza?”
“Pizza’s cool.”
“Pepperoni on one half, veggie on the other?”
“Sounds good.” It was the style of pizza they always shared. The pepperoni was for him, and the other half was for her.
While she called Pizza Hut and placed an order for delivery, he went to the bathroom. In there, he turned on the pager that Mika had given him.
He wondered why he was hiding in the bathroom with the pager, where Carmen would not see him. Wondered why he hadn’t mentioned Mika to Carmen at all. His behavior was that of a guy who was cheating on his woman, which was ridiculous. They weren’t romantically involved.
Still, he’d rather not tell Carmen about her.
Throughout the day, Mika had sent him eleven messages. BEEN THINKING ABOUT YOU; HEY, DARLING; CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU TONIGHT; and so on.
He had finally responded about an hour ago with, “HAVING VERY BAD DAY, CAN’T COME FOR DINNER TONIGHT. SORRY, WILL SET ANOTHER DATE.” He simply couldn’t deal with Mika, and the strangeness that had invaded his house, simultaneously. Until he found out what was going on at his home, he’d be unable to focus on anything else. Mika would have to wait until later.
But as he scanned the list of messages that Mika had sent, he saw that she hadn’t responded to his date cancellation. She hadn’t called his cell phone, either.
She probably was pissed at him. Pissed that he wasn’t coming to see her, pissed that he wasn’t within arms’ reach so that she could seduce him into changing his mind. Well, she would get over it.
Back in the kitchen, he took a seat at the table. Carmen poured herself a tall glass of iced tea.
His gaze wandered over her. She’d changed from the conservative navy-blue business suit she wore to her accounting job into casual wear: red shorts, a white tank top, and flip-flops. She’d washed off her makeup, too.
But it didn’t matter what she wore: she was fine. He found himself comparing her to Mika. Mika was perfection personified, like a woman straight out of an exotic fantasy. Carmen was beautiful in a girl-next-door way.
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