Past Midnight

by Mara Purnhagen

  “You’re helping me more than you know,” I told her. “Thanks for letting me stay here.”

  “Any time,” she responded. I think Avery assumed that I was having problems with my parents, that maybe they were going to be separating or something. I knew that Avery’s parents had divorced when she was three, and that her dad lived across the country.

  “I see him around holidays and a week during the summer,” she’d told me. “It’s not a big deal. It’s always been like this, so I can’t really miss what I never had.”

  I remembered being in the sixth grade and realizing that out of everyone in my class, I was the only one whose parents were still married. At the time, I thought divorce was the natural progression of things. I kept waiting for my parents to announce they were splitting up. For a while, it made me feel left out a little, like all the other kids had gone through some important rite of passage that I hadn’t. It was a long time before I figured out that I was lucky.

  I spent the next three nights sleeping on Avery’s floor. She offered me her bed, but I felt bad enough for taking over half her room, so I insisted that the sleeping bag was comfortable and that I actually enjoyed it.

  During my second night I perused Avery’s bookshelf while she downloaded songs onto her MP3 player. She mainly owned classic paperbacks required for summer reading, but one book caught my eye and I pulled it from the shelf. Greetings from Beyond the Grave read the gold-embossed title. I knew the author because my dad was one of his loudest critics. He said August Zelden was a phony, someone who preyed on grieving people by giving them false hope that their loved ones were trying to send them messages after death.

  “It was a gift.”

  I looked up. Avery was smiling at me. “Someone gave it to me. I don’t know why I kept it.”

  “I’ve seen Zelden on TV,” I said, turning the book over in my hands. The back cover showed a picture of the author, a middle-aged man with a serene smile. “He’s very convincing.”

  “Do you believe in it?”

  “In this? No.”

  Avery came over and sat down on the floor next to me. “Not even a little bit?”

  I shrugged. “I always wondered why, if someone could talk to spirits, they never asked the really obvious questions. Like, what it’s like over there, or what exactly happens after you die? Instead, you just hear that they want to wish people well and remind them to get a checkup.”

  “What about ghosts? Do you believe in those?”

  “Ghosts are different. You can see them or hear them or track them in some way. And yes, I believe they exist.”

  Avery nodded. “So do I. But I’ve never seen one.”

  I had, but I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I asked why she believed in something she’d never seen. She thought for a moment before answering.

  “I guess it’s because so many other people swear they’ve seen one. I mean, there’ve been ghost stories for thousands of years, right? They have to be based on something.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “They must be based on something.”

  I had often thought that my parents too easily dismissed some of their findings. They wanted tangible evidence to examine, and I understood that, but their theories about energy didn’t leave a lot of room for the things that couldn’t be caught on their high-tech devices, such as the creepy feelings that could fill an empty room, the sense that something was watching you. I had years of experience wandering around abandoned asylums and vacant prisons and deserted houses. Those experiences had taught me the difference between a place that was spooky yet harmless and one that held something more. I could tell within ten seconds of walking into a place if we were going to get readings on the equipment, and I wasn’t as sensitive as Annalise, who knew the instant we pulled in front of a location if there was energy present.

  Now there was energy present in my new room, in my new house. The thought made it difficult for me to fall asleep at night. I would close my eyes and listen to the sounds around me, the slow rhythm of Avery’s breathing, Dante’s weird, light snoring and the steady ticking of the clock on the dresser. Sometimes I could hear distant traffic or bullfrogs singing outside. I tried to make my mind blank by picturing a vast space of pure, endless black, but my thoughts kept tumbling back to what I had seen on the monitor, the ghostly figures floating next to me.

  My parents had always found it amusing that people took hauntings personally, as if they had been chosen to experience something. They believed that some people were simply more sensitive to energy than others, and it was all a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how you looked at it. They would interview people who were freaked out because they thought a ghost was after them for some reason. “Nothing is after you,” Mom and Dad would say. “It really has nothing to do with you.”

  I repeated those lines to myself as I tried to fall asleep. Nothing is after you. It really has nothing to do with you. But I don’t think even my parents believed that. Whatever this was, it had everything to do with me.

  eight

  Life doesn’t stop just because you’re being stalked by ghosts. It doesn’t even slow down. And if I thought for a second my parents would ease up and maybe let me drive their car or hang out later than usual, I was sadly mistaken.

  After spending three nights at Avery’s, my parents decided that it was time I came home. They claimed to “have a handle on things.” I thought they were just worried that Avery and her mom might think the problems at home were worse than they actually were and they would be labeled bad parents. I agreed to return, but I didn’t want to sleep in my bedroom. Instead, I slept on the couch in our dining room. I felt more comfortable downstairs, but I couldn’t escape the sense that I was being observed. I would pull a blanket over my head and convince myself that paranormal energy couldn’t see through flannel, but it was taking me longer and longer each night to fall asleep. My only consolation was that I hadn’t had a dream about the dark-haired girl for a while. Those dreams hadn’t been bad, exactly, just strange, and I’d had enough strange in the past week to last me a lifetime.

  “We’ll get this figured out,” Dad reassured me. “We’re working on it.”

  As the days passed and we settled into September, I found myself looking forward to school each day. I had a nice routine established: Avery picked me up at seven-thirty, and we met the other girls in the parking lot before walking to our lockers. At lunch, I sat with a large, loud group, and I stayed after school for an hour while Avery went to cheerleading practice. Usually I finished my homework in the library, but sometimes Mr. Morley asked me to edit footage for the school news. This meant that I spent the hour watching Bliss Reynolds on a screen interviewing people in a perky-yet-serious voice that I found irritating after about five minutes.

  “She’s truly annoying,” I mumbled once as I viewed the day’s footage with Noah. On the screen, Bliss was standing in front of a small tree and giving a particularly impassioned speech about the school needing to form more of an environmental conscience.

  “She’s not so bad,” Noah said. “She’s just really focused. Believe me, she’s a lot better than the girl we had last year.”

  “So Bliss wasn’t the only girl in class last year?”

  Noah shook his head. “No, but she wanted to be.” He looked at me. “Personally, I’m glad there’s another girl around here. Don’t tell Bliss that, though.”

  He winked, a silly gesture that reminded me how green his eyes were and also how nice Noah could be. We had been working together for weeks and I always turned to him with questions about the school or how things were done. Despite talking to him and working with him almost daily, I still didn’t know much about him. He was a junior. He was friendly toward everyone, including the freshman boys, who were always coming to him with their incessant questions. He sometimes munched on cinnamon mints, and he usually wore baggy plaid shorts.

  Other than those supe
rficial details, I hadn’t figured out much about my editing partner. He had a serious interest in video equipment, so he often asked me lots of technical questions, which I was happy to answer. Mr. Morley said we made a good team.

  I switched the topic back to the work in front of us. “We need to cut a few minutes from the show. Maybe we can save this footage for another time?”

  He nodded. “Sure, but you have to tell Bliss. She’s still pissed that we trimmed her segment on the new soda machine.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Right. What did she say? ‘It may not mean much to you, but it matters to hundreds of other students.’ She takes herself too seriously.”

  “We should all take the news seriously,” Noah said in a deadpan voice. It was a nearly perfect impersonation of Bliss, and I laughed out loud.

  “Really, though, what’s her story?” I leaned back in my chair. “She hates me, she bullies the freshmen and she’s always dressed like she’s about to go on a job interview. I don’t get it.”

  Noah closed the computer program before answering. “She’s trying to prove something, I think.” He swiveled in his chair to face me. I was always struck by how green his eyes were. I had to stop myself from staring into them.

  “She told me once that she’s going to be the first person in her family to go to college,” Noah continued. “So maybe that’s got something to do with her drive. The girl who was the anchor last year gave her a hard time, too, so maybe she’s doing the same thing.”

  “Carrying on a cruel tradition?” I asked. “How noble.”

  Noah shrugged. “Or maybe she’s just a mean and bitter person, I don’t know. But I’d like to think there’s more to her than that.”

  “So you’re one of those annoying people who believe there’s some good in everyone?” I teased.

  He smiled. “I’m more like one of those hopeless people who thinks there’s something great in everyone.”

  I swear his eyes sparkled a little when he said it. Not that I was paying attention or anything.

  My comfortable routine was interrupted one Wednesday afternoon when the cheerleaders left early for an away game and I was left to take the bus home. I was the last one on and I felt self-conscious as I trudged down the narrow middle aisle, my sandal sticking slightly to something smeared across the floor. I took an empty seat near the back and examined the sole of my shoe, hoping that whatever was now covering my left sole was a food substance and not, as I suspected, some kind of bodily fluid.

  “Gross,” I muttered, rubbing my shoe against the floor.

  “You’re just making it worse,” a voice behind me said.

  I turned, startled. It was Jared, and he was eying my foot-wear with a kind of half grimace.

  “Excuse me?” I was already irritated that I was taking the bus. I wasn’t in the mood for criticism.

  “You’re making it worse,” Jared repeated. “It’s just going to get dirtier if you rub it on the floor.”

  “I’m trying to scrape something off,” I said.

  “Lost cause.”

  “Thanks for the insight. I’ll be sure to consult you the next time I step on something sticky.”

  Jared chuckled. “Bad day?”

  “Something like that.” I gave up on the shoe and settled back into my seat, trying not to breathe in too deeply the stench of freshman sweat and plastic seats. The bus was very slowly pulling out of the crowded parking lot.

  “You’re friends with Avery Macintosh.”

  “Yes.” I didn’t turn around. If Jared wanted to keep talking, that was fine, but I didn’t intend to keep up a conversation with him.

  “But you’re not a cheerleader.”

  “So?” It felt weird to have Jared talking to the back of my head. “That’s interesting.”

  I gave up and turned around. Jared was sitting back, his arms folded across his chest.

  “How is that interesting?”

  He shrugged. “Just is.”

  The bus hit a pothole and everyone bounced a little in their seats. Jared shifted his legs, and I glanced down at them. He noticed.

  “Guess you heard all about the crash.” He said it softly, but I heard resignation in his voice and felt a twinge of pity. He looked so athletic, so strong. Maybe he’d hoped to earn an athletic scholarship at one point, a future at his top-choice college where he could play football or basketball. I didn’t know the extent of his injury, but his pronounced limp told me that any dreams of playing at the college level—at any level, really—had been shattered in the car crash.

  “Avery said you were in an accident last year.”

  Jared sat up straighter. “She said that? She said it was an accident?”

  His carefully detached attitude had vanished and he was staring at me intently. I tried to remember the conversation I’d had with Avery. Had she said it was an accident? She had described it that way.

  He was driving too fast and he hit a telephone pole.

  “I don’t know if she actually used the word accident,” I admitted. “But maybe she did. I think she did.”

  “You think she did or you know she did? Please, Charlotte. It’s important.”

  It was strange to hear Jared say my name, like he knew me. And he looked so desperate. It was important to him.

  “She said it was an accident.” I was sure of it. Avery certainly didn’t say it was intentional. He had been angry at the time, careless.

  He’s not the same. He’s dangerous.

  Looking at Jared, I wondered if that was really true. He just didn’t strike me as the dangerous type. A loner, maybe. If Avery hadn’t been so adamantly against him, I could see myself developing a little crush on him. But I knew from the way my new friends reacted to hearing his name that he was to be avoided. I felt weird even talking to him.

  He stared out the window, his eyes wide. “An accident,” he mumbled, and I had no idea what had just happened, but I knew I had changed something. And I knew I had to tell Avery.

  Jared got off the bus at the first stop without saying anything else to me. I watched from the window as he limped down a tree-lined street. After the bus pulled away, I began to panic. What had I done? Avery would be furious with me if she knew I had talked to him. She would be at the away game late and I didn’t know if I’d get a chance to talk to her until the morning.

  The bus turned into my neighborhood. I was the only one to get off, and I walked home thinking about things. “I really hate taking the bus,” I grumbled. I glanced at our empty driveway and pulled out my house key, knowing my parents were probably off on a local research trip. Before I could put the key into the lock, though, the door swung open.

  “Charlotte!”

  I jumped a little, then smiled. “Annalise?”

  My sister engulfed me in a hug. “It’s so good to see you!”

  She looked tan and cheerful as she pulled me into the house and we walked into the kitchen together. I paused to kick off my sticky shoes. “What are you doing here?”

  She perched on top of one of the bar stools at the kitchen counter while I grabbed something to drink. “I’m here to help you, of course.” She set her laptop on the counter and began typing. “I’ve been doing research,” she explained. “I’ve found some stuff about the Courtyard Café.”

  I poured myself a soda and sat next to her. “What’d you find?”

  “Okay. So, it was built in 1883 as a family residence. But the earthquake in 1886 destroyed the place.”

  I knew all about the famous earthquake from the carriage tours I’d taken through the city. Charleston had nearly been leveled.

  “Who lived there after the earthquake?”

  “No one, for a while. It took years to rebuild.”

  Annalise clicked on a link and brought up a faded photograph showing a group of tents set up outside. It looked like a camp.

  A very familiar camp.

  “I’ve seen this before,” I murmured.

  “I researched the earthquake,” Annalise
said. “After it happened, people lived in tents made from their tablecloths or curtains for a long time as they rebuilt. They formed little colonies in the nearby parks.”

  I had seen this exact image in one of my dreams. The dark-haired girl had slipped away from one of these tents in the middle of the night. I was about to tell Annalise all about the dreams when she clicked on a new page and brought up a grainy black-and-white photograph. It was the Courtyard Café, only it was just a house. Two people stood on the porch, but they were blurry.

  “Edward and Elizabeth Pickens,” Annalise said. “They had one daughter.”

  “Let me guess. Her name was Charlotte.”

  “Right. Only, she disappeared after the earthquake.”

  “You mean she was lost in the rubble?”

  “No. She was alive and accounted for. But the day after, she vanished. She was sixteen.”

  Annalise clicked on some more pages. “Charlotte Pickens disappeared from her family’s tent and was never seen again.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Annalise shook her head. “No one knows. Her parents searched for her, but I don’t think they ever found her.” She typed some more. “I’m trying to locate their graves, but I haven’t had any luck yet. They’re not listed in any of the cemetery databases. I’ll keep trying, though.”

  I sat there for a while, taking it all in. What had happened to Charlotte Pickens? And why was I seeing her in my dreams?

  We needed more information. Her parents needed more information. I was suddenly sure that the two ghostly images I’d seen on the screen, the ones that were now apparently residing in my bedroom, were Edward and Elizabeth Pickens. I was also sure that if we could find out what had happened to their daughter, they would leave me alone. I could feel it.

  “So how do we find a girl who’s been missing for over a hundred years?” I asked.