“I still want North.”
As soon as she said it, she slumped, as if the tension of denial had been keeping her upright. God, that felt good, she thought. The truth really does set you free. Then she looked across the table at Will as the silence stretched out and thought, Oh, hell.
“I’m sorry,” she began, and then somebody rapped on the window and Andie jerked around.
Flo was outside, waving.
“Wonderful,” Andie said, and got up.
“Wait a minute,” Will said, looking furious.
“No,” Andie said. “I am so sorry I did this to you, I am so sorry I’m doing this now, but . . . no.”
She turned and walked away, out of the restaurant and around to Frankfort Street where Flo was waiting.
“I saw your car,” she said. “You look awful. What’s going on?”
“I just broke it off with Will.”
“Good.” Flo patted her arm.
The sympathy was almost too much. “I think I might still be in love with North.”
“I know, honey.” Flo put her arm around her. “Come on back to the house and I’ll make some cocoa.”
That sounded so good that Andie almost said yes, just to be able to go back home with her mother, put her head down on the old wood kitchen table, and cry like a baby from all the released tension while Flo made soothing noises and put marshmallows in her hot chocolate.
“I can’t,” she said. “I have to get back to the kids.”
“Then I’ll walk you to the car,” Flo said, and made soothing noises for a block and a half.
“Thank you for not saying ‘I told you so,’ ” Andie told her when they reached her car.
“Like I would.” Flo stretched up and kissed her cheek. “If you need me, you call.”
“Right,” Andie said. “I will. I really will. Thank you, Mom.”
She kissed her mother good-bye and then made good time heading south, turning off onto the ever-more-deserted roads and then finally onto the narrow lane to the house, taking that insane drop to the driveway that Bruce still had not gotten around to fixing—“I’ll probably be out in a couple of days or so,” he said whenever she called—all the while thinking about North. Not Will, the nice guy she’d just dumped who would have been a good, steady, loving husband who’d never neglect her, but the rat bastard who’d deserted her for his career, just left her upstairs in their attic apartment to rot . . .
I have to stop thinking about this, she told herself, and drove out of the trees and started around the curve to the house and then hit the brakes, her heart pounding.
The girl from her dreams was dancing on the lawn, translucent and glowing faintly blue in the dark night, her skirt flowing around her.
Alice’s blue princess who danced.
Andie drove on slowly, trying to see better, but as she rounded the curve, the headlights hit the dancing girl for a second and she wasn’t there anymore, and when Andie drove on, the lawn was empty, even after the headlights had passed.
“I’m not asleep,” Andie said out loud, her heart pounding, “and that was a ghost.”
More than that, it was a ghost Alice knew. Just like Alice knew the woman across the pond and the man on the tower. If she was hallucinating, she was hallucinating with Alice.
“This can’t be happening,” Andie said, trying to jar herself back to reality with the sound of her own voice. It was late, she was tired, she was upset, she was . . .
That was a ghost.
She drove on around the house automatically, thinking furiously. Tomorrow she was calling the experts. And talking to Alice. And . . .
“Oh, Christ,” Andie said, and parked the car, looking for ghosts everywhere before she bolted for the house.
Six
Andie spent a sleepless night expecting to see the blue girl at any moment and fighting the urge to call North—There are ghosts!—and when the sun came up, she wasn’t sure if she was grateful she’d spent the night without a visit from the girl or not. She was awake so the girl must have been a dream, but she hadn’t been asleep at the wheel so had that been a hallucination?
We have to get out of here, Andie thought, and went down to the kitchen to begin talking Carter and Alice into a move to Columbus, but they didn’t come down for breakfast, and when she looked in their rooms, they weren’t there, either. She finally tracked them down in the library.
“Hey,” she said. “Breakfast.”
Alice stared at Andie, an odd look on her face, something between anger and relief.
“We thought you left,” Carter said.
“I did, I went to the university library in Columbus.” Andie came into the room and sat down on a chair closer to them. “I was home by midnight last night.”
“Mrs. Crumb said you weren’t coming back,” Carter said.
“And you didn’t tuck me in,” Alice said, wounded. “Nobody tucked me in.”
“Well, that’s the last time Mrs. Crumb babysits,” Andie said, feeling the now-familiar urge to kick the old lady. “Of course I was coming back. I told you I was coming back when I left. Want some breakfast?”
Alice looked outraged. “And you didn’t leave me your skirt with the sequins and you promised.”
“I came back,” Andie said. “That was only if I left for good. What is it with you guys?”
Alice stood up and went for the door, but Carter hung back. “What were you looking up in the library?”
“Ghosts,” Andie said, watching for his reaction.
Carter nodded and headed for the kitchen, too.
“See, I thought you’d be more surprised,” Andie called after him, and went to fix them pancakes, which Alice smothered in butter and syrup and slurped down. Andie brought up moving to Columbus as artfully as possible, but Alice said, “No,” and went on eating and Carter ignored her, so she regrouped. When the kids were done and back in the library working, she called the two numbers in her notes. For Boston Ulrich in Cincinnati, the author of the not-much-use ghostbuster book, she got an answering machine and left a message. For Dennis Graff in Cleveland, the there’s-no-such-thing-as-ghosts guy, the phone just rang until she finally gave up. “Damn it,” she said to nobody, and checked that Carter and Alice were doing their morning work. “I should get a cookie for this,” Alice said. “Let’s see how it all works out,” Andie told her, and went upstairs to find Mrs. Crumb. The whole idea of ghosts seemed ludicrous in the daylight, but it was going to be night again and when it hit, she was going to be prepared.
Andie found the housekeeper in the upstairs hall, dumping Carter’s wastebasket into a trash bag. “I need to talk to you,” she said, and startled the old lady so that she dropped the basket, spilling papers to the floor.
Andie bent to pick them up. “Why did you tell the kids I wasn’t coming back?” she said, and then stopped to look at the drawings Carter had thrown out.
Mixed in with the copies of comic book characters were amazing rough portraits, capturing Alice laughing, something Andie had never seen, and Mrs. Crumb looking surly, and . . .
Andie straightened.
And the blue girl who’d visited her every night and danced on the lawn.
“Who is this?” she said, holding up the page for Mrs. Crumb to see, the blue girl with her wildly curling hair and big eyes and that generous laughing mouth . . .
“That’s nobody,” Mrs. Crumb said, and picked up the garbage bag and walked away, leaving the mess on the floor behind her.
“Right,” Andie said, and went downstairs to the library to find Carter, but the only one there was Alice, reading a butterfly book in the window seat. Andie held up the drawing. “Alice, who is this?”
“That’s Aunt May,” Alice said. “Carter is very good at drawing.”
“Yes, he is,” Andie said automatically, and looked at the drawing again, a little breathless. “This is the aunt who took care of you?”
“Yes,” Alice said. “She died.”
“Right.” Andie sat
down next to the window seat.
The woman she’d been talking to in her dreams was a ghost, that’s all there was to it. Ghost. She’d never seen her before, never seen a picture of her before and yet . . .
“Are you okay?” Alice said. “You look weird.”
“I’m fine. Thank you for asking.”
“Can I have that?” Alice said. “The picture of Aunt May. Can I have it?”
“Of course,” Andie said, and handed it over. “Alice, I’m sorry your aunt died.”
Alice nodded, not looking at her.
“Do you talk to her?”
“She’s dead, Andie,” Alice said, sounding very adult.
“Because she talks to me at night.”
Alice blinked at her. “Maybe you’re dreaming.”
“And I saw her on the lawn last night as I drove home.”
“You were very, very tired.” Alice looked back at her butterfly book. “I’d like to read now, please.”
Andie sat back, frustrated. Pushing Alice to admit there were ghosts was wrong, even if Alice was talking to her dead aunt every night. That’s who had to be sitting in that damn rocking chair. Alice didn’t have an imaginary friend, she had a dead aunt.
“She was really young,” Andie said, remembering how she’d danced. May. How May had danced.
Alice nodded but didn’t look up.
I need to know more, Andie thought, but not from Alice, not if she didn’t want to talk. “Is there a family photo album?”
“In the cabinet by the fireplace.” Alice dropped her butterfly book and picked up Carter’s drawing. “You don’t need to see a picture. This is what she looked like.”
“She was very pretty.”
“She was bee-you-tee-ful,” Alice said, looking sadly at the drawing. “And she laughed and she danced. She said when you stop dancing, you’re dead.” Alice touched the drawing.
“She must have been fun to live with.”
“Sometimes.” Alice put the drawing inside her butterfly book and closed it. “I did my work. Can I go to the kitchen and get a cookie?”
“Yes,” Andie said, not interested in fighting a sugar battle while her head was exploding and Alice was coping with death.
It took her a while to find the photo album, stuck in the back of a cabinet with books piled in front of it. But when she pulled it out and turned to the last filled pages, there was her ghost girl, vibrantly alive, laughing at the camera as she hugged Alice and Carter close, both of them smiling, which made Andie’s heart hurt, that they’d lost those smiles. She flipped to the earlier pages, Carter as a young boy standing next to his dad, leaning on his leg, Alice in her father’s arms. Their father looked kind and more than that, he looked like he loved them, cuddling Alice close, his arm draped comfortably across Carter’s shoulders. They’d gotten a good start before he’d died. And then Aunt May had done her best, too, because they’d smiled again.
She flipped back to another earlier page and found Alice’s baby pictures. Several other pages before that there was a photo of the kids’ dad with a pregnant blond woman who looked much like Andie thought Alice would look someday, attractive in an offbeat way, interesting beauty as opposed to classic. Another one of the woman, still very pregnant, holding a four-year-old Carter close. And then earlier than that, wedding pictures with Aunt May as a very young bridesmaid, about Alice’s age. She must have been a late baby to be that much younger than her sister. In fact, given her brunette curls in comparison to her older sister’s straight blond hair, she might have been from a second marriage. And then still earlier, sister pictures, and more family Andie couldn’t recognize, and she closed the album and thought, Their aunt May is still here for a reason. It was getting easier to believe in ghosts the more she thought about it, but it was still . . .
Maybe this was the reason the kids wouldn’t leave the house. They didn’t want to leave their aunt alone, haunting a cold stone house with only Mrs. Crumb for company. Maybe if she found a way to get Aunt May to . . . to go toward the light or something, maybe she could get the kids out of there, get them to Columbus and a normal life.
“Experts,” she said, and tried calling Ulrich and Graff again and got nothing.
Lunch and lessons and supper took up the rest of the afternoon, along with a sharp chat with Mrs. Crumb who was still denying that May was May and was defensive about telling the kids that Andie wasn’t coming back—“How was I to know?”—so it was almost six before Andie tried calling for a third time, starting with Boston Ulrich again.
This time, a man answered the phone, and Andie said, “Professor Ulrich?” and when he said, “Yes,” she said, “I’m Andie Miller, no,” looking around for Mrs. Crumb, “Andie Archer, I left you a message earlier. I have a ghost problem.” He didn’t laugh or hang up, so she said, “I see a dancing blue woman. I think I know who she is, and I need to know how to . . . send her on. Or whatever.”
“You say you’re at a house in southern Ohio,” he said.
“Yes. Archer House.”
“I see.”
“Is that significant?” Andie said, praying they weren’t on a list of the most haunted places in the Buckeye State.
“Someone else was asking about that house. It has quite a reputation, right?”
“Someone else? Is there something I should know?”
“Tell me what’s happening.”
“This woman talks to me at night,” Andie said, and then remembered the woman at the pond and the man on the tower. “And there may be . . . others. I don’t drink and I don’t take drugs but I see . . . ghosts. I need help.”
“Of course,” he said, and then talked on for a good half hour, mostly about his research and the success he’d had, without giving her anything of use at all, much like his book.
“Who was it that asked about the house?” Andie said, interrupting him when she couldn’t take it anymore.
“I can’t tell you that, of course. However, I could come to you the first of November,” he finished. “Only for the day. My fee is five thousand dollars—”
“I’ll get back to you on that,” Andie said, pretty sure that Boston Ulrich knew less about ghosts than she did. She hung up and tried the other expert, Professor Dennis Graff up in Cleveland, and still got no answer even though she let it ring for a long time.
That left her with only one expert to turn to.
“Flo, I need help,” she said when her mother answered the phone.
“Andie! What’s wrong?” Her voice dropped. “Is it North?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Andie said, realizing that she was crossing over into Flo territory with the conversation she was about to have.
“Of course not, dear. You have ghosts?”
“I could be losing my mind. Hallucinating. Brain tumor.”
“No, honey, lots of people see ghosts.”
“Yes, but they’re crazy.”
“Forty-eight percent of Americans believe in ghosts.”
Flo using statistics was almost as unsettling as the statistic itself. “Where do you get these numbers?” Andie said. “Who takes polls on this stuff?”
“CBS before Halloween. It was on the news. And really, Andie, if forty-eight percent believe, don’t you think that some of them must actually have seen one?”
“No.” Except I have. Maybe. “Let’s assume for the moment that there are ghosts. Tell me how to get one out of here.”
“Well, the surefire way is to dig up the body and burn it,” Flo said, as if she were saying, “Use soda water to get wine out of silk.”
“Okay,” Andie said, thinking, You had to call Flo, didn’t you? “And Plan B would be . . .”
“Well, there are all kinds of superstitions,” Flo said, dismissively. “You could hold a séance and ask them to leave, but I never think that works. Why would they go polite on you all of a sudden? But if you burn their bodies, there’s nothing holding them to this plane. Where is this ghost buried?”
“I don
’t know,” Andie said. “Also, this is an insane plan. Plus, illegal. I’ll bet anything it’s illegal.”
“Andie, if you have ghosts, you’re going to have to think outside the box. Call North. He can get you anything.”
“Right.” Andie rubbed her forehead again at the thought of telling North to burn a body. Not that he couldn’t get it done, he could get anything done, it would just be explaining it to him that would be difficult. “Let me get back to you on this.”
“Do you want me to come down there?” Flo said. “I’m very sensitive. I might be able to help. For instance, water and fire bar ghosts, they can’t cross running water and they abhor fire.”
“Really,” Andie said, thinking, My mother is a nutjob. Except she was sitting in the only house in southern Ohio that had its own moat. And a fireplace in every room.
“I should come down there,” Flo said. “I can help.”
Andie thought of her mother, wandering through the house, trying to find ghosts so she could ask them where they were buried. And what their signs were. “Just wait. I’ll get back to you. I promise. Thank you.”
Then she hung up and called her very last resort.
Southie knocked and came into North’s office a little before seven that night. “Your secretary’s not out there,” he said, looking back into the empty anteroom. “You know, she’s a cute little thing.”
“You can’t have her,” North said automatically as he scanned down his neatly printed notes. “She’s intelligent and efficient and I don’t want her quitting because you seduced and abandoned her.”
“Not my type,” Southie said. “Which is what I came to talk to you about. Kelly wants to go down to that house. Somebody else is calling the experts and asking questions, and she’s afraid she’s going to get scooped. I don’t see why she shouldn’t go.”
“Because it’s private property and she’s not invited.”
“Yes, but she would like to be invited. She would like me to invite her. I would like me to invite her. There’s no reason for me not to invite her.”
Outside the office, a phone rang.
“Yes there is,” North said, ignoring the blinking light on his phone. “You’re not invited.”