Dream Lake

  Alex shook his head. “I’m going up to the attic, doing a little more clearing out.”

  “Oh, that reminds me … Holly loves that old typewriter you found. I gave it a couple of shots of WD-40 and re-inked the ribbon with a stamp pad. She’s been having a blast with it.”

  “Great,” Alex said indifferently.

  “Yeah, but here’s the interesting thing. Holly noticed the liner of the tweed case was loose, and there was a little corner of something sticking out. So she pulls it out, and it’s a weird piece of cloth with a flag and some Chinese characters on it. And there’s a letter, too.”

  The ghost lifted his head.

  “Where is it?” Alex asked. “Can I take a look?”

  Sam nodded toward the sofa. “It’s in the side table drawer.”

  While Sam put away the tools and vacuumed the remaining dust, Alex went to the table. The ghost was at his side instantly. “Personal space,” Alex warned under his breath, but the ghost didn’t budge.

  A feeling of apprehension crawled down the back of Alex’s neck as he opened the drawer and picked up a piece of thin silky fabric, yellowed with age, about eight by ten inches. It was stained in places, the corners dark. A Chinese Nationalist flag dominated the top. Six columns of Chinese characters had been printed under the flag.

  “What is it?” Alex wondered aloud, his voice drowned out by the vacuum.

  Even so, the ghost heard him, and his reply was soft but audible. “It’s a blood chit.” The term was unfamiliar to Alex. Before he could ask what it meant, the ghost added quietly, “It’s mine.”

  The ghost was remembering something, emotions emanating like smoke, and Alex couldn’t help but catch the edge of them.

  The world was smoke and fire and panic. He was falling faster than gravity, ricocheting through blue and cirrus-white, the metal skin of his aircraft twisting like a licorice whip as the forces of heaven and hell wrenched at it. His knees pulled up and his elbows cinched into a fetal position, the last thing every fighter pilot did before dying. It wasn’t training, it was the body’s primal recognition that it was about to go through more pain and damage than it could endure.

  His heart beat out the syllables of a woman’s name, over and over.

  Alex shook his head to clear it, and looked at the ghost.

  “What do you make of it?” he heard Sam ask.

  The ghost stared at the silk in Alex’s hand. “They gave them to American flyers to carry on missions over China,” he said. “In case the plane went down. The writing says, ‘This foreigner has come to help in the war effort. Soldiers and civilians should rescue, protect, and provide him with medical care.’ We kept them in our jackets—some people sewed ’em in.”

  In a monotone, Alex heard himself explaining the blood chit to Sam.

  “Interesting,” Sam said. “I wonder whose it was. I’d like to find out who owned that typewriter, but there’s no name in the case.”

  Alex began to reach for the letter. He hesitated as if he were about to put his hand into an open flame. He didn’t want to read what was on that piece of paper. He had a feeling it had never been meant to be seen.

  “Do it,” the ghost whispered, his face grim.

  The paper was stationery-sized and brittle. It wasn’t signed. It was addressed to no one.

  I hate you for all the years I’ll have to live without you. How can a heart hurt this much and still go on beating? How can I feel this bad without dying from it?

  I’ve bruised my knees with praying to have you back. None of my prayers have been answered. I tried to send them up to heaven but they’re trapped here on earth, like bobwhites beneath the snow. I try to sleep and it’s like I’m suffocating.

  Where have you gone?

  Once you said that if I wasn’t with you, it wouldn’t be heaven.

  I can’t let go of you. Come back and haunt me. Come back.

  Alex couldn’t bring himself to look at the ghost. It was bad enough to stand at the outer edge of what the ghost felt, trapped in the nimbus of a grief that felt worse than anything he’d ever experienced. It was like being injected with a slow-acting poison.

  “I think a woman wrote it,” he heard Sam say. “It sounds like a woman, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Alex replied with difficulty.

  “But why was it typed? You’d expect something like that to be handwritten. I wonder how the guy died.”

  More sadness, coming in aching waves from the ghost. Alex had to clench his fist to keep from striking out at him, even though it would have been like flailing at mist. Anything to make it stop.

  “Cut it out,” Alex muttered, his throat tight.

  “I can’t,” the ghost said.

  “Cut what out?” Sam asked.

  “Sorry,” Alex said. “I’ve gotten into a habit of talking to myself. I meant to ask, can I take this with me?”

  “Sure, I’ve got no—” Sam broke off and looked at him closely. “Holy crap. Are you misting up?”

  With horror, Alex became aware that his eyes were watering. He was about to start bawling. “Dust,” he managed to say. Turning away, he added in a muffled voice, “I’m going upstairs. Work on the attic.”

  “I’ll come up and help you.”

  “No, I’m on it. You sweep up down here. I need some private time.”

  “You get a lot of private time already,” Sam said. “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have some company.”

  That almost provoked a laugh from Alex. “I haven’t been alone for months,” he wanted to tell his brother. “I’m being haunted.”

  He could feel the weight of Sam’s gaze.

  “Al … you okay?” his brother asked.

  “I’m just great,” Alex said viciously, heading out of the room.

  The ghost’s mood hadn’t eased by the time they reached the attic. Alex reflected grimly that there was something worse than being followed everywhere by a spook, and that was being followed by a spook who had gone full emo on him.

  “It may have escaped your notice,” Alex said in a murderous tone, “that I suck at dealing with my own baggage. I’m damned if I can deal with yours.”

  “At least you know what your baggage is,” the ghost said, glaring at him.

  “Yeah, which is why I spend half my time drinking to forget it.”

  “Only half?” came the sarcastic rejoinder.

  Alex brandished the handful of printed silk in one hand. “You really think this was yours?”

  “Take it easy with that. Yes, it’s mine.”

  Alex held up the letter in his other hand. “And you think this was about you.”

  The ghost responded with a single nod. His eyes were midnight-dark, his features grim. “I think Emma wrote it.”

  “Emma.” Alex blinked in astonishment, his fury fading. “Zoë’s grandmother? You think you and she …” Slowly he made his way to the staircase and lowered to the top step. “That’s a hell of a leap to take,” he said, “with nothing to back it up.”

  “She was a writer for the Herald—”

  “I know. And she lived here, and maybe there’s some minuscule chance that typewriter might have been hers. But there’s no proof of anything.”

  “I don’t need proof. I’m remembering things. I remember her. And I know that piece of cloth in your hand was mine.”

  Alex unfolded the blood chit and looked at it again. “There’s no name on this. So you can’t be sure it’s yours.”

  “Is there a serial number?”

  Alex scrutinized the cloth and nodded. “On the left side.”

  “Is it W17101?”

  As Alex read the serial number … W17101 … his eyes widened.

  The ghost gave him a superior look.

  “You can remember that but you can’t remember your own name?” Alex asked.

  The ghost glanced over the heaps of boxes and objects in the attic, the packed-away memories shrouded by dust and years. “I remember that I was once a man who loved someone.” He
began to pace, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his bomber jacket. “I need to find out what happened. If Emma and I got married. If—”

  “If you what? You died.”

  “Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I came back.”

  “From a plane crash?” Alex asked sarcastically. “From what I could tell, it was a hell of a lot more than a bumpy landing.”

  The ghost seemed determined to invent some kind of happy ending for his story. “When you love someone that much, you wouldn’t let anything stop you from going back to her. You would survive no matter what.”

  “Maybe it was all on her side. Maybe to you it was just a fling.”

  “I still love her,” the ghost said with quiet ferocity. “I still feel it. Locked up in here.” The ghost put a fist on his own chest. “And it fucking hurts.”

  Alex believed that. Because it hurt just to be near it.

  He watched the ghost resume pacing.

  If the ghost’s image accurately reflected what he had been in life, he’d had the build for a pilot, lean and supple, with enough developed muscle mass to counteract blackouts from the punishing maneuvers of a dogfight. “Kind of tall to be a pilot back in your time,” Alex said.

  “I could fit in a P-40,” the ghost said distantly.

  “You flew a warhawk?” Alex asked, fascinated. In his boyhood, he had once built a model of the distinctive shark-toothed World War II plane. “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.” The ghost was lost in thought. “I remember being shot at,” he eventually said, “and pulling so much g-force that I’d feel the blood leaving my head and everything would get blurry. But I’d hold it until the guy on my tail either gave up or passed out.”

  Alex fished his phone from his pocket and opened the mobile browser.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “No one. I’m trying to find out if there’s some way to identify a pilot with the serial number on this thing.” After a minute or two of searching, Alex found a page of information. He frowned as he read.

  “What is it?” the ghost asked.

  “Out of luck. No master list. They were issued in bulk from different U. S. and Chinese sources. Some of them were reissued to new pilots after the first ones died. And since the serial numbers were considered classified information, the lists they did have were probably destroyed.”

  “Look up Emmaline Stewart,” the ghost said.

  “Not on this phone. The connection’s too slow.” Alex scowled at the tiny glowing LCD screen. “I need a laptop for this.”

  “Go to the Bellingham Herald site,” the ghost insisted. “They’d have to have something about her.”

  Alex went to the Web site and worked the phone for a minute. “The online archive only goes back to 2000.”

  “You stink at research. Ask Sam. He could find out everything about Emma in about five minutes.”

  “People in their eighties,” Alex said, “don’t usually leave an Internet trail. And there’s no way I’m asking Sam—he’d want to know why I’m interested, and I don’t want to explain.”

  “But—”

  “You’ll see Emma soon enough, when Zoë brings her to the island. And if I were you, I wouldn’t get too excited. She’s an old lady now.”

  The ghost snorted. “How old do you think I am, Alex?”

  Alex gave him an assessing glance. “Mid to late twenties.”

  “After what I’ve been through, age gets pretty damn relative. The body is just a fragile container for a soul.”

  “I’m not that enlightened,” Alex informed him. After attaching his phone to the portable speakers, he went to the box of garbage bags and pulled one out.

  “What are you doing?” the ghost asked.

  “Going through more of this junk.”

  “Sam’s computer is downstairs,” the ghost protested. “You could ask to borrow it.”

  “Later.”

  “Why not now?”

  Because Alex had to feel like he had some kind of control over his own damn life. The encounter with Zoë that morning, and reading the old typewritten letter, had unsettled him. He needed a break from free-floating emotion and drama and unanswered questions. The only thing he could think of was to do something practical.

  The ghost, reading the volatility of his mood, retreated and fell silent.

  As a series of Tony Bennett duets played in the background, Alex went through boxes of tax documents, old magazines, broken dishes, moth-eaten clothes, and toys. The floor was littered with dead insects and dirt. Behind one dilapidated box, Alex found an ancient mousetrap with a dried-up rodent carcass. Grimacing, he used a wad of plastic to pick it up and throw it away.

  Opening a box, Alex found a stack of leather-bound account books and ledgers. A plume of dust rose as he pulled out the first book, making him sneeze. Kneeling, he sat back against his heels, thighs slightly splayed for balance. He read a few of the brittle age-darkened entries, all of them neatly written in faded black ink.

  “What is it?” the ghost asked.

  “I think it’s an account book from a fish-canning factory.” Alex turned a few pages. “Here’s an inventory … Steam machines, flaying and frying grids, soldering tools, tin plate scissors … A whole hell of a lot of olive oil …”

  The ghost watched as Alex skimmed through the book. “Whoever owned the factory must have had plenty of dough.”

  “For a while,” Alex said. “But this area was overfished until the salmon disappeared for a while. Most of the fisheries and factories went out of business in the sixties.” He delved into the box and pulled out more ledgers. Opening another, he found a few handwritten business letters, one concerning a lithographing company that was supplying labels, and another about a state-run committee that was forcing the cannery to lower its prices. He paused to look more closely at one of them. “The factory was owned by Weston Stewart.”

  The ghost looked at him alertly, recognizing Emma’s maiden name.

  Alex continued to sift through the ledgers. The entries in the last few books were typed instead of handwritten. A few newspaper clippings and black-and-white photographs had been tucked into the pages.

  “What are those pictures?” the ghost asked, approaching.

  Alex sensed the ghost’s eagerness to hover over him, to get a good view. “Don’t crowd me. I’ll tell you if there’s anything you need to see. These are just exterior shots of buildings.” He picked up a newspaper article announcing the closing of the factory. “Place went out of business in August 1960,” he said. Sorting through more clippings, he saw one titled “Local Fish Industry on Brink of Collapse” and one describing local complaints about the stench of the waste products coming from the cannery. “Here’s an obituary for the factory owner,” Alex said. “Weston Stewart. He died less than a year after the cannery closed. Doesn’t say what cause. Survived by a widow, Jane, and three daughters: Susannah, Lorraine, and Emmaline.”

  “Emmaline,” the ghost repeated as if the word were a talisman.

  A tiny picture of a young woman headed the last newspaper clipping. Her shoulder-length blond hair had been arranged in sculpted waves, her lips rouged with lipstick. She was the kind of woman who was beautiful in spite of technically not being beautiful. Her eyes were clear and curious and melancholy, as if she stared into an unwritten future with nothing to hope for.

  “Come take a look at this,” Alex said.

  The ghost hurried to look over his shoulder. The moment he saw the photo, he made a quiet sound as if he’d been gut-punched.

  EMMALINE STEWART, JAMES HOFFMAN TO BE MARRIED SEPTEMBER 7, 1946

  After resigning her staff position at the Bellingham Herald, Miss Emmaline Stewart has returned home to San Juan Island to prepare for her coming marriage to Lieutenant James Augustus “Gus” Hoffman, who served as a transport pilot in the China-Burma-India theater. During the last two years of the war, Lieutenant Hoffman flew 52 missions across the aerial support route over the Himalayas. Vows will be spoken at 3:30 a
t an open service at First Presbyterian on Spring Street.

  As Alex read the article a second time, he felt emotion closing around him, so heavy and smothering that the more you tried to wade through it, climb out, the deeper and faster you sank.

  “Stop,” Alex managed to say.

  The ghost retreated, his face tearless and drawn. “I’m trying.” But he wasn’t, and they both knew it. This grief was his way of being close to Emma, the only connection available until he was with her again.

  “Just chill,” Alex said tersely. “I won’t be much use to you …”—he paused for a deep gasp of air—“if you give me a damned heart attack.”

  The ghost’s gaze followed the faded clipping that had dropped from Alex’s fingers. The yellowed paper spun, leaf-like, to the floor. “This is what it feels like to love someone you can’t have.”

  Crouched there amid piles of boxed-up memories and dust and shadows, Alex thought that if he were ever capable of feeling that way about anyone—which he doubted—he’d rather take a bullet to the head.

  “It’ll happen to you,” the ghost said, as if he could read Alex’s thoughts. “It’ll hit you like an ax someday. Some things in life, you can’t escape.”

  “Three things,” Alex said unsteadily. “Death, taxes, and Facebook. But falling in love, I can definitely escape.”

  The ghost let out a huff of amusement. To Alex’s relief, the agonizing yearning began to fade.

  “What if you could meet your soul mate?” the ghost asked. “You’d want to avoid that?”

  “Hell, yes. The idea that there’s one soul out there, waiting to merge with mine like some data-sharing program, depresses the hell out of me.”

  “It’s not like that. It’s not about losing yourself.”

  “Then what is it?” Alex was only half listening, still occupied with the viselike tightness of his chest.

  “It’s like your whole life you’ve been falling toward the earth, until the moment someone catches you. And you realize that somehow you’ve caught her at the same time. And together, instead of falling, you might be able to fly.” The ghost went to the discarded clipping and stared down at the photo, riveted. “She’s a beaut, isn’t she?”