Emily's Ghost (34 page)

He took a deep drag of his
cigarette, held in the smoke reflectively, then sent it off like a
missile. "Yeah, those were the days."

Emily was busy scratching
down the memories of the shaggy leftover from Woodstock. A pet
chicken in the tower; at least now she had a good idea where the
small bones had come from. "So you had a kind of arts and crafts
commune, would you say?"

He flicked an ash into an
empty saucer. "Well, no one took the trouble to apply for a retail
tax number or anything, if that's what you mean," he said dryly.
"Like I said, we did a little of this, a little of that. Whatever
it took to get by."

The Bob Dylan album
launched into the plaintive "Tomorrow Is a Long Time," and Kyle
became thoughtful. He had the look of a man who'd been hurt by a
woman a long time ago. Still, after a moment he shook himself free
of the memory with a lame smile --Emily suspected he was the kind
who got emotionally sideswiped often -- and returned to the
conversation.

With his elbows propped on
the black tabletop, one hand folded loosely over the other, a plume
of smoke snaking from the cigarette he held, he looked attractively
sinister. "Now. What is it you
really
want to know?" he asked with
a flash of sudden, shrewd intelligence.

"Since you ask," she said
with a level look, "what was your connection with Maria Salva?
You'd have known her by the name Marie. She lived in France and
sent you quite a few letters at one time." It was pretty brazen
bluffing, considering Emily hadn't had the wits to look at the
return addresses on the other sides of the envelopes when she was
in the tower.

For a long while -- too
long -- Kyle looked puzzled, struggling with the information.
Finally he put it together. "Marie ... right! The kid who got
thrown in a convent! How do you know about her?"

"I'll tell you after you
tell me," Emily answered lightly.

"Isn't much to tell. It's
probably been fifteen years or more since I've thought about her. I
remember how it started. Varuna came into my room one day with a
letter addressed to the caretaker of Talbot Manor. No one wanted to
bother with it, and I had nothing to do, so I thought what the
hell. The letter was one of those teenage ramblings, you know how
kids are -- all earnestness and naïve sincerity."

He motioned the waitress
for a refill on his coffee. "Apparently the kid had journals or
something of ancestors who were supposed to have lived in Talbot
Manor; maybe they were Talbots, maybe not, I don't remember. So she
was on this
Roots
kick, you know? Where you want to trace your lineage? Only
she seemed
really
into it; she yearned to walk the halls, feel the pain, that
kind of thing. She seemed a little around the, uh, bend, you know
what I mean? A little
too
intense, even for a teenage girl. I should know;
I've got one of my own now. Somewhere."

Emily nodded
sympathetically, noting that Kyle was taking some kind of emotional
hit even as he spoke.

But just as quickly he
recovered. "So I sent off some nice little answer about, yeah, how
the place reeks of history, figuring that would be that. No such
luck. Every two weeks I got another letter and more questions. She
wanted room-by-room descriptions. She wanted to know every piece of
furniture. She wanted
photographs
,
for Pete's sake. Yeah, I remember now. As a kind of joke we
all got in front of a tripod one night—we were zonked -- and sent
off a group photo. I seem to remember it was a pretty funky
shot."

He shook his head,
chuckling at the memory. "Next thing I know, I get a letter from
her parents threatening me with the Mann Act if I go near their
daughter. She's in Paris, I'm in Newarth, but never mind. They said
she was being shipped off to a convent, just to make sure.
Grissette. That was her name. Marie Grissette." Pleased that at
least part of his memory was still intact, Kyle leaned back in his
chair.

"And you never heard from
her again?"

"Not a word. If there were
any more letters, I never got them; I moved on."

"What did the parents seem
like? Could you tell?"

"Well educated.
Articulate. Uptight. Marie was their only kid, I think. I suppose
it was the photo that freaked them out. A bunch of long-haired
hippies in tie-dyed rags lying on top of one another. It was a
joke, but I could see where a parent might not think it was all
that funny. Poor Marie. I wonder where she ended up." He gave Emily
another shrewd look. "I take it you know?"

"Coincidentally, Marie's
living in Talbot Manor," Emily answered with a bland face. She took
another sip of thick French brew. "She's married to the present
owner."

"Whoa," Kyle said softly.
"That's pretty heavy." He took out his Camels and tapped the packet
across the edge of the table. "Still, it doesn't surprise me. Her
letters were loaded with talk of kismet and karma. Strange kid.
I'll have to go around there one of these days and say
hi."

He stuck a cigarette in
his mouth and began patting his pockets for matches. "Or not," he
said between compressed lips. "Newarth's always depressed me. I'm
not sure why."

But Emily knew. "Because
there's a curse on the town, that's why."

They parted amicably a few
minutes later. The afternoon was warm and pleasant, and since Emily
had just about had her fill of living like a cave dweller, she
strolled the half dozen blocks over to the Longfellow House to take
advantage of the outdoor concert series there.

She found a quiet spot on
the side grounds of the historic yellow house -- where George and
Martha Washington had spent their seventeenth anniversary -- and
settled in for an hour or so of classical guitar and violin. The
crowd of a hundred was friendly and evenly split among the old, the
middle-aged, and the young. Several couples came with infants
packed neatly in carriers. Nearby a pretty woman with flame-red
hair rocked her baby to the soothing sounds of a baroque sonata
while her husband sipped bottled lemonade. A black Labrador with a
red kerchief tied around its neck worked the edges of the crowd,
panhandling for sandwich scraps, then lay down obediently next to
its master, a John Lennon look-alike with steel-rimmed
glasses.

These are very nice
people,
she thought, pleased that she'd
come.
The music is wonderful. The sun is
shining. And it's free.

And she was alone. Her
thoughts drifted inevitably to Fergus, who could be there just like
that if he wanted to be. Under her breath she whispered his name,
though she'd never yet succeeded in making him show.

Fergus -- for once, for
one wonderful once -- appeared alongside her, his legs pulled up in
front of him, leaning back on his hands.

"I love this," he said
happily. "When I was a boy, I worked in a stable near a concert
hall. Me dad knew the rear doorman, who used to let me sneak in
backstage. The music's eighteenth-century, right? Ye're a wonderful
woman, Emily Bowditch." He turned to her with a look that took her
breath away. "I will not forget this." For the first time, ever, he
reached his hand out to her, as if he wanted to stroke her hair.
"If only I --

"Anyway," he said, turning
back to the performance, his jaw set resolutely. "Ye're a wonderful
woman, Emily Bowditch."

Emily listened to the rest
of the performance in a state of exaltation, because the music was
expressing exactly what she was feeling. The low strains of the
guitar moved some unknown part of her soul, and the violin answered
in an anguished, tremulous voice that exactly matched her
thoughts.

But Emily wasn't a
composer; she couldn't analyze her feelings for Fergus in musical
terms. All she had were words, and words weren't enough. How did
she feel about him? What
could
she feel about him? Every once in a while she'd
turn to look at him, and he'd return her look. They were sharing
something very deep, very real, for the first time.

The final rondo wound to a
lively close, and everyone applauded. The concert was over. Emily
turned, and Fergus was gone. People began to gather up their
blankets and babies and backpacks. The Labrador made one last pass
through the crowd and came back with a pork chop bone; for some
reason it chose to drop down next to Emily to gnaw on its spoils.
It was a friendly Lab and submitted with grace to Emily's pats on
its head.

"Hey, boy," she murmured,
scratching its ears. "You made out pretty well this afternoon." She
thought about Kyle Edwards and Marie Grissette, and then she
thought about Fergus. She was aware of a rush of pleasure passing
all through her.

"And so did I."

The next time Emily saw
Lee Alden she was sitting in, of all places, a bar, and he was on
television.

The bar was near the
Newarth Library, and the $3.99 supper special seemed too good to be
true. As it turned out, the Reuben was a rip-off (soggy bread,
rubbery corned beef) and the draft brew tasted more like a near
beer. Still, if Emily hadn't ducked into the place, she'd never
have known that Lee Alden was the featured guest on
Bay State Live,
a local
interview and call-in show.

Emily's table wasn't
really close enough to hear the TV, perched high above the far end
of the bar.
Fine with me,
she decided initially. She had no interest in
tracking the perils of Lee's career. She had plenty of other perils
to track.

And wasn't it just like
him to turn up on a five o 'clock show --
when
women were in their kitchens,
making supper with their counter TVs on? Oh, he knew where and when
to reach his voters, all right. And how
annoying
that he was so
photogenic.

She sneaked a second look,
then a third. By the time the waitress came by with her after-meal
coffee, Emily had thrown up her hands emotionally. She pointed to
the television and said, "Would you mind turning it up a
bit?"

"Sure, honey," the
waitress answered, shifting her gum over to her right molars.
"Ain't he a doll? Hey, Jack. Kick it up a little, will
ya?"

The bartender didn't think
much of the idea. "How about you bring your coffee over here
instead?" he said to Emily.

So she took her cup and
settled in at the empty bar with the waitress and Jack while the
only other customers, three men and a woman, hovered around a video
game near the other end.

"You been followin' this
guy?" Jack asked Emily. "He's some hot ticket. Never saw anyone so
dead set on getting voted outta office. It's like he's got some
kinda suicide wish."

"Baloney," the waitress
said. "He ain't afraid to say what he feels, that's all. Which is
more than I can say about the rest of them jerks in Washington.
What
do
you
think, honey? What's wrong with
a guy believing in ghosts?"

"Well-l-l, I'm not exactly
sure he does believe in them," Emily answered carefully. She
glanced cautiously at the light fixtures.
Stay out of this, Fergus,
she
prayed.

"The heck he don't!" the
waitress shot back. "The
Enquirer
says he's living with the ghost of his wife on
some uninhabited island off the coast of Massachusetts."

"What?"

"I got out my atlas; I
figure it has to be one of the Elizabeth Islands," she said,
tearing off Emily's check from a pad and slapping it on the bar.
"Where else could it be?"

"Brenda's a stickler for
detail," the bartender offered dryly. "Bren, I told you once, I
told you a thousand times. Don't ever, never believe what you read
in the papers. Right, miss?"

Emily cleared her throat.
"Absolutely." She moved over to the next barstool, closer to the
television. "Let's hear what the senator has to say for himself,"
she suggested, desperate to know what was going on.

They'd missed the whole
beginning. At the moment the program's host was summing up the
senator's record in Congress, toting up the legislation he'd
proposed that had or had not passed. Put that way, it did sound
dry.

"Bor-rring," said Brenda.
"Switch to
Cheers."

"And that brings us,
Senator, to a subject that's been much in the news of late: your
interest in the paranormal."

"Wait!" cried Brenda and
Emily together.

Jack put the remote back
on the bar. "That's it; he's dead meat now," he said, looking
forward to the kill.

In his blazer, striped
tie, and gray flannels Lee looked typically at ease, as though
being asked about ghosts were an everyday thing for a
senator.

Emily had never watched
the program before, probably because she'd never been out of work
so early on a weeknight before. She had no idea of the host's
political bias, but he seemed to her a fair man.

"You've admitted attending
a séance recently in an attempt to establish contact with your
wife, who died two years ago," the host elaborated.