Emily's Ghost (10 page)

He shrugged. "Ye seem all
right to me. A little prickly, maybe."

What am I doing? I'm
asking my hallucination if I'm hallucinating!
"Look, O'Malley, if you're real--really a ghost -- then prove
it. Make something levitate. Tell me something about myself no one
else knows."

"Can't do either one, as
it happens." He rubbed his chin as if he were due for a shave, then
said, "Ah. I've got it." He glanced around the room, then settled
on the stripped-pine dresser that was her grandmother's. He stared
at it intently, and the room began to fill with the blinding,
hurting light of the night before.

"Not that, not that!" she
cried, shielding her eyes.

"Ye want the bloody proof
or not?" he answered, annoyed; but the light subsided.

When Emily opened her eyes
again she saw, burned into the top drawer of the honey-colored
pine, the name "Fergus O'Malley" in a childish, scrawling
signature.

"I never went but to fifth
grade," O'Malley explained self-consciously.

Stunned, Emily approached
her grandmother's bureau and put a finger to the deeply scorched
drawer. It was hot to the touch. Her nostrils filled with the smell
of charred wood. From behind her she heard O'Malley's voice,
irritated and impatient once more, say, "Now. Can we get to
work?"

"Well, well: designer
furniture," Emily quipped; but all the while she was
thinking
, That drawer front could just as
well have been my thigh
. The thought sent
her spinning.

"That bureau was my
grandmother's." Her voice came out high and shrill and full of
crazy indignation. "Erase it, please."

O'Malley's surprised
chuckle gave her courage.

"I mean it! We have to
have some rules."

The ghost continued to be
amused. "Such as?"

"Such as, you may not harm
me, or anything of mine -- or any one of mine."

"Or else?"

"This investigation
will
not
go
forward."

She watched the muscles in
his clenched jaw grind her impulsive threat into dust. At last he
spoke. "So ye think ye cannot be replaced?"

She seized the chance to
protect herself from his wrath once and for all. "That's right.
Even assuming it was possible for you to get someone else to take
over the job, who would do it? Not a lawyer--no one's going to
do
pro bono
work
for a ghost, not when he can be pulling down two hundred dollars an
hour."

"An hour? When I didn't
earn that much in a year?"

"Yeah, well, different
dollars. A doctor won't do it, either. They save bodies, not souls.
Librarian? Too meek. A man of the cloth? Maybe, but most of 'em
would balk at wearing the necklace. No, I'm the one you
need."

"You didn't think so last
night," the ghost said sullenly.

"I was tired last night.
What about it, O'Malley? Deal? No harm to me or mine? Whether I
succeed or not, as long as I do my best?"

"I can't undo the dresser
drawer," he said scrupulously. "You should have told me it had
value for you. In my day, pine was a poor man's wood."

Suddenly relieved, Emily
said, "Never mind. I'll sand it out. Look, I need to bathe. I'm
going to go in there, to the ... bathroom," she said, pointing.
"And you'll stay ... here, won't you?" she added, making a swirling
motion with her hands as if she were speaking in a foreign
tongue.

O'Malley shrugged and
Emily opened the charred drawer and discreetly took out some clean
underthings. She walked over to the closet and began groping
mindlessly, conscious that the ghost was positioned over her right
shoulder. Annoyed, she turned on him. "I'm sorry. I need more
breathing room than this."

"I do not take up much
space," the ghost said with mild irony.

"You know what I mean. I
need privacy. I'm used to living alone."

"I lived with eleven
sisters and brothers in a flat half the size of this."

"That was then. This is
now. We live alone more nowadays."
And we
like it less,
she thought; but it was
nothing he needed to know.

The ghost frowned.
"Where
do
ye want
me, then?"

Emily resisted the obvious
retort and snapped, "Out of sight."

"So be it."

He vanished.

"Oh, for --" Hands on
hips, she said to thin air, "Do you have to take it so
literally?"

There was no answer. "Have
it your way," she murmured, and hauled herself off to the shower to
rinse away twenty-four hours of psychic shock-waves. She closed and
locked the bathroom door, then let out a short and bitter
laugh.
As if it really matters.

But somehow it did matter.
The closed door let her get as far as peeling off her jeans and
shirt. After that, things skidded to a halt. Emily sat on the edge
of the tub in her underwear, feeling reluctant, feeling
stupid.
Am I in fact insane?
The thought hovered in the air around her like
thick fog. It was as if she could not see the horizon; she had no
idea any more which way was up.

"If you're in the
bathroom, please tell me," she whispered humbly. There was no reply
and so Emily decided, very arbitrarily, that she was alone. She
took a deep breath, stripped, and stepped quickly into the shower,
yanking the curtain closed with something approaching
hysteria.

Another thought occurred
to her. "Are you in the
tub
?" she demanded in a
hiss.

Again there was no answer.
She turned on the water, hot, torrential, cleansing. Maybe she
could wash his spirit down the drain. She stood under the spray for
a long time, waiting to be clean.
I feel
exploited,
she thought.
I feel violated
.
It doesn't matter whether he's right here or not.
He might be. I have no way of knowing. Can he read my thoughts?
Does he know how much I detest this? I'm a prisoner in my own home.
He's like having a television monitor in every room.

She soaped up her neck;
her fingers caught in the chain of the necklace.
And all because of this miserable, godforsaken
....
She clutched the necklace with soapy
hands, trying to unfasten the complicated clasp. No luck. It
infuriated her. She threw open the shower curtain, stepped in front
of the mirror and wiped away the steam with her hands, straining to
see the mechanism reflected there. Impossible. She pulled at the
chain with both hands until her neck burned and ached. She swore,
she moaned, she whimpered with frustration. But she remained
bejeweled.

"Hey, now!" came the call
from the other side of the door. "Do ye plan to be hosin' down all
blessed day?"

"None of your business!"
she snapped. She leaned back into the door, tears of frustration
welling. Then it hit her that the ghost seemed to be honoring the
closed door between them. It was a small gesture. But it was
something.

She emerged dressed and
with a towel wrapped around her hair. The ghost was sitting on the
small, deeply cushioned loveseat. Emily sat down at her desk,
smiled primly, and took out a yellow pad. "Okay, let's get started.
Tell me all you know about the woman you ... who ... the
victim."

"She was twenty-six and
her name was Hessiah Talbot," the ghost said in a burst. "She was
tall and thin, with pale skin and hair -- she had the look of a
cornstalk in October, if ye know what I mean. Faded, like, and
scraggly."

"You did know her, then?"
Emily asked sharply.

He looked surprised, and
then he looked away. "No."

She watched the by now
familiar flush creep over his clear-cut profile. He was lying.
"Look here, O'Malley, you have to tell me the truth, or we can't
get anywhere. Did you know Hessiah Talbot?"

"Our paths crossed once,"
he said with extreme reluctance.

Emily waited, and after a
pause he went on. "One day ... she finds me a little in my cups, on
a side street. She's free to step over me, o' course, like everyone
else. But no; she has to call her driver over to haul me off to the
mission to get cleaned up and fed. Like a stray dog," he added
bitterly.

"And you resented the
kindness?"

"Kindness, hell. I
offended her sense of order," he said. "I was a piece of trash that
tumbled into her view."

She was impressed by his
fierce if misplaced pride. She wondered how deeply it
ran.

"Hessiah Talbot was a
bitch, plain and simple."

Emily placed her pen down
deliberately. "It sounds very much like you despised her. Why
should I believe that you didn't kill her?"

He returned her cool
stare. "Because I haven't killed
you
."

She compressed her lips.
"Hokay; that's logical," she answered faintly. "Well, let's
continue, then."

Her knees had begun to
shake again. It occurred to her that she would never, ever feel
safe around him. If she had to believe in his existence at all,
she'd have preferred to think of him as a friendly ghost. Naturally
that was absurd; he was an entity from another plane, driven by
another set of rules from hers.

Unless, of course,
she
were
hallucinating. The thought that she was simply schizophrenic,
projecting demons from her own psyche, was looking more and more
attractive to her. After all, nowadays there was hope for the
mentally ill; Fergus O'Malley might be nothing a good dose of
medication couldn't cure.

But until she could visit
a shrink she decided to sit quietly and take down every word spoken
by this ghost who called himself O'Malley. Just in case. As the
afternoon wore on, her yellow pad filled up. Dates, names, places,
the ghost knew them all. With precise detail he laid out the 1887
mill town of Newarth, Massachusetts, street by street: from the
Talbot mansion at the top of the hill to the Irish shanties hard by
the river that powered the mill. He trotted out a goodly number of
its citizens, from the ambitious, hobnobbing mayor who played cards
with the victim's brother at the mansion every Thursday night, to
the gypsy peddler who sharpened the Talbots' knives. And he
recounted a great many details of the trial itself, including the
color of the lining of the cape the mayor's wife, seated in the
front row, wore on the day he was sentenced to be
hanged.

All through the day Emily
had been sustaining herself from cracker boxes and fueling up at
her Mr. Coffee machine, but by eight o'clock she needed something
more substantial. "I can't keep going," she pleaded, pushing away
the yellow pad. "Let's send out for Chinese."

The ghost stopped
mid-pace. "What? Will they sit and take yer notes for
ye?"

Her smile was weary.
"Chinese
food
,
not people. But on second thought, I'm hungrier than that. I'll
order a pizza."

"Peet-sa?"

"It's a kind of
dough-and-tomato thing, with cheese and toppings. You'll like --"
She stopped herself. "Well, anyway, give me a minute," she said,
heading off for her antique Princess phone.

The ghost tagged absently
along, still deep in thought. But when Emily picked up the phone
and began to dial, he snapped out of his revery. The room began to
become painfully bright again with his damnable light; it was a
reflex reaction with him, like a porcupine erecting its quills.
"Stop!" she cried. "I'm only getting food!"

The light subsided; the
ghost mumbled an apology, then watched suspiciously while she
ordered a large pepperoni, half mushrooms, half onion, extra
cheese. "I have to eat, you know," she told him in injured tones
after she hung up. "I have to sleep. I have to bathe.
I have a job.
I can't
stop living so that you can --" She was at a loss. Die?
Live?

"That's true. Ye'll have
to leave your employ," he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "It
goes without sayin'."

"What?! Absolutely not.
Who knows how long this may take?"

"Who knows how long
I've
got
?"

"And I have to see a ...
physician, soon," she said suddenly, veering away from the
confrontation. "I think I may have something ... wrong with me. I'm
going to try to get an appointment tomorrow."

She was stunned by the
transformation in his face. His eyebrows tilted, his lips
compressed in sympathy. "'Tisn't serious?"

"It's ... internal," she
hedged, vaguely stroking her right temple. "But I do need to see a
doctor." She smiled uneasily, aware that she was very possibly
asking herself for permission to find out if she was
crazy.

"Agh, I'm sure ye'r fine;
ye look the picture of bloomin' health to me." His voice was filled
with gruff conviction.

"Thanks for the
reassurance," she answered stiffly. As if he really
cared.