Ghosts of Bergen County (10 page)

But the woods beyond the ball field were empty. She sat on the fallen tree, where the girl with the pigtails had stood. It was a warm day, though cool in the woods. Occasional cheers rose from the baseball game. But mostly the leaves rustled and the insects whirred. She loved the security offered by the cloak of the trees. She was invisible, a piece of the landscape. If anyone wandered down the path they wouldn't notice her, sitting on the tree, if she kept very still. It wasn't the place from her dream. Maybe there was no such place. Mary Beth sat for some time wondering what sort of place this was. She decided she would stay until it revealed itself.

When she was a girl, Mary Beth's house had backed to woods. She was a middle child, a cautious girl, but she valued time alone and she could find it in abundance in the woods behind her house. The ground sloped away from the kitchen to the edge of the woods and kept sloping, and she could go into the woods in summer, when the leaves were green and thick, thirty or forty feet, no more, close enough to be within shouting distance if her mom or her sisters called for her, but far enough to lose sight of the house completely and pretend she was alone in the middle of an ancient forest. The slope ended. Pools of water and animals—insects, birds, and frogs—gathered. Mary Beth loved the dragonflies best. They were proxies for fairies, and fairies were her friends. They lived in the earth and came out only at night. But these fairies made an exception for their one human friend, and Mary Beth was grateful. She watched them flit about in the dappled sunlight. They entertained her. When the frogs sang, the water shimmered with bubbles blown from beneath the surface.

Now her phone rang, and she was no longer invisible. She was a woman sitting on a fallen tree in the woods near the school field. “Gil,” she said.

“Hi, where are you?”

“Where are you, Mr. Stay-Out-All-Night?”

“On my way home.”

She waited for him to tell her more, but he didn't. “I'm just out,” she said.

“Where?”

“Walking.”

She braced herself for the question, in one of its two principal forms:
Are you okay?
or
Is everything all right?
She never felt she had his permission to not be okay. She was fragile, she knew, like a young tree growing from the floor of the forest. But she could get better. If she sat on this tree long enough, perhaps she would.

But he didn't ask the question. Instead, he said, “That's great. I have a lot to tell you. I met up with these folks from high school. It was kind of crazy.”

She waited for him to tell her how crazy.

“When will you be home?” he asked.

“I don't know. A couple hours?”

“That's a long walk.”

“I guess.”

“I'm glad you're getting out. I'll see you then.”

“Bye.”

He could be sweet. And he definitely was patient. She turned off her phone. The woods were silent. She waited on the log for something or someone. She wasn't sure which.

Ferko drove them to Edgefield, to her dad's house, a ranch with white siding and black shutters. Jen, still wearing the dress from the mall, let them in with a key on her ring. “Hello,” she called when the door gave way.

“Hello.” Dr. Yoder emerged in a pair of green shorts, a white shirt buttoned to the collar and black socks pulled to his shins. His head was bald, smooth, and freckled. His beard was white. He wore glasses that made his eyes look small and set way back in his head. He stood there for a moment, it seemed, sizing Ferko up—friend or foe.

Jen kissed his temple. “Dad, this is Ferko.”

“Gil,” Ferko said and extended his hand, which the doctor made no effort to take.

“Ferko,” he said, “the man who thinks I'm a rabbi. If it were only true.” Dr. Yoder stuck out his hand in Ferko's general direction. He was blind, Ferko realized. He wondered why Jen hadn't warned him.

He stepped forward and shook the doctor's hand. “Come in,” Dr. Yoder said.

“I'll be down in a few minutes,” Jen said, and hung her bag on the newel post and bounded up the stairs.

“Have a seat.” Dr. Yoder gestured with his open hand toward the living room. “Can I get you anything? A glass of water?”

Ferko was thirsty, but he didn't wish to trouble his host. He imagined the old man feeling his way along the walls toward the kitchen, up into the cabinets for a glass, ice from the freezer, and water from the fridge.

“It's hot,” Dr. Yoder said. “I'm getting one myself.” He doddered off toward the kitchen.

“Sure.” Ferko followed him.

“Jen comes here to nap. I don't think she gets any sleep in the city.” Dr. Yoder took two glasses from the cabinet and filled them, nearly to the brim and without spilling a drop, from the dispenser on the door of the freezer. “Where do you live now, Ferko, in Sodom or Gomorrah?”

“Glen Wood Ridge.”

“Edgefield's rich cousin,” Dr. Yoder said. He brushed past Ferko on his way to the living room. “Nice town.”

Dr. Yoder sat in a wing chair, and Ferko sat on the sofa facing the fireplace. He set his glass on the coffee table. Ice clinked against the sides.

“She tells me you saved her life yesterday.”

“Hardly.”

“She wasn't wearing a helmet, was she?”

Ferko hoped it was a rhetorical question.

“What, she's going to mess up her hair?” Dr. Yoder asked the center of the room. He sipped his water, then set it beside him on the end table. “I tell her, you ride that bike all over the city, in and out of traffic, all those frustrated drivers beating lights to get across town. It's a wonder it didn't happen sooner.”

He paused, and Ferko nodded in agreement—pointlessly, he realized.

“She takes some chances, that one.” Dr. Yoder's tone softened. “She always has. But she's a sweetie. And smart—book smart and street-smart, even if she's not common-sense smart.”

Ferko thought that summed Jen up pretty well, and it also explained why she hadn't gotten stopped that morning. What did it say about Ferko, though, stopped for merely swimming in her wake?

They sat in silence. They sipped their water. Then Ferko stood to read the spines of the paperback books on the mantel above the fireplace. There were four books, each a thin volume in a different dark color—navy, maroon, forest green, and black—wedged between two bricks that served as bookends. Each spine bore the name
YODER
and some variation of the same title.

“The
Ghosts of
books,” Dr. Yoder said. “Is that what you've found up there, Ferko? First editions, all of them, though not worth the paper they're printed on. Still, I'm proud of them.”

“You wrote them?” Ferko pulled one down.
Ghosts of Brooklyn
. Inside was a map of Brooklyn with circled numbers. Each of these, he learned upon turning the page to the table of contents, corresponded to a chapter in the book.

“They occupied me when I was younger. A lot of research and a lot of writing. I love ghost stories.”

“Where did you grow up?” Ferko asked, his finger marking the first chapter, titled “The Orange Street Ghost.”

“Washington Heights. Is that the volume you have there?”

“
Brooklyn
.”

“A contractual obligation. Start with
Washington Heights
, the top of Manhattan.”

Ferko replaced
Brooklyn
on the mantel and chose
Ghosts of Washington Heights
, the book with the black cover.

“In the first half of the twentieth century,” Dr. Yoder said, “Washington Heights was remote and insular, the perfect place for ghosts to thrive. I explain it in the introduction to that book, my first one. Ghosts are like animals that live in the forests. Encroachment from new development destroys their habitat. Ghosts of Edgefield or ghosts of Bergen? I imagine there are, but their presence is too diffuse to be felt. There's too much here that's new.”

Ferko had his own apparition, even though his house was only three years old. “You know a lot about ghosts,” he said.

“I'm not a scholar. But I'm not a kook, either. Unfortunately, the latter outnumber the former by a wide margin.”

“Have you ever seen one?”

“Seeing is not the right question. I'm blind now, but long before I became blind I knew what it was like to feel a presence without seeing it.” He stood and turned toward the stairs. “Peruse
Washington Heights
. The house in the first chapter is on the street where I grew up. It's a bookstore now. They still sell the book.” He trundled forward. “Let me see what's become of our Jen. She's supposed to take me to the pharmacy.” He mounted the stairs.

Ferko turned to the first chapter—“The Preacher's House (185th Street).” The narrative described a house built in 1925 by a Methodist preacher, a Reverend Hurlingham. Now the house had a ghost—the spirit of a boy in its basement, a shallow space, five feet deep, once accessible only by a ladder that hung from a trapdoor in a closet. Legend had it that the preacher sent his children to the basement when they were unruly or when he was in a sour mood. The basement had no lights, no windows. You closed the trapdoor leading to the closet, and the basement contained the sort of blackness that had a tangible quality.

Reverend Hurlingham and his wife, Libby, had eight children—six boys and two girls—before Libby died of an unexplained illness at the age of thirty-seven. A few years later, so the story went, the youngest boy, Sebastian, who was five and particularly prone to fits, bit his father's arm. It was the sort of infraction that, in many households of the time (and, indeed, in many households today, Dr. Yoder noted), would have resulted in whacks with a stick or a belt or an open hand. But the preacher had a better punishment in the basement of the house on 185th Street.

It was late, past bedtime, which further fueled the preacher's impatience and rage, and so he caught Sebastian by the collar and dragged him toward the closet, picked the boy up, and dropped him, crying, down the hole. The preacher shut the hinged hatch, which stifled Sebastian's screams, and placed a heavy trunk over it, and the other children, Sebastian's brothers and sisters—each older from two years to twelve—watched from a safe distance, peering around corners, because they had each spent time shut in the black basement and did not wish to incur their father's wrath.

“Ferko.”

He looked up from the book to find Jen's head in the stairwell. She tromped down the steps in sweats and a T-shirt. She must have kept clothes at her dad's for her frequent visits (and naps) on the weekends.

“I can't believe he gave you required reading.”

“He found the books himself.” Dr. Yoder was at the top of the stairs now, taking them one after another. “Ferko is naturally curious about ghosts.”

He wasn't sure if Dr. Yoder was being sarcastic, though it was true enough. Perhaps it showed. “Can I borrow this book?” Ferko asked.

“You can have it.” Dr. Yoder's legs were visible now, more and more of him with each step. “I have a box of them in the basement.”

“We're going to the pharmacy,” Jen said.

“I've got to go,” Ferko said.

“We'll meet you out front, Dad.”

She walked him to his car. “I fell asleep.”

“I wondered.” Her face looked misshapen, her eyes puffy.

“Isn't my dad sweet?” she said, perking up.

Ferko waved the book, an affirmative answer.

She leaned against his car. “We had fun, right?”

They had, but he wasn't saying.

“We should do it again,” she said.

“Will I ever be the same?”

“Don't be dramatic.”

Dr. Yoder stood on the steps, locking the front door.

“Thanks for the book,” Ferko called.

“Nice to see you, Ferko. Stop by anytime.”

“Isn't that cute?” Jen asked him. “Nice to
see
you?”

“I heard that,” Dr. Yoder said.

First, Mary Beth grew hungry. Then she grew tired. Then a shaft of sunlight found its way through the leaves on the trees and fell directly on her arm. She moved out of its way. And all this time, while one baseball game ended and another began, no one came up or down the path or through the woods at all that she could discern. No strangers and no one she knew. No dragonflies flitted by. Or fairies, either. She stood and stretched her legs. She even hopped off the tree, careful not to get her pants caught by the prickles. Then she climbed up again and sat, and the girl was standing in front of her.

Mary Beth nearly fell to the ground.

“Why are you here?” the girl said. Her hair was still in pigtails, the same fuzzy braids as the day before.

Mary Beth recovered. “I'm waiting for you.”

“It's my house, not yours.” The girl looked at the fallen tree.

“Of course,” Mary Beth said. She shifted backward on the tree to give the girl room to hop on. When the girl didn't, Mary Beth stood to get off.

“You're invited to stay.” The girl put her hand on the tree to claim her space. “For tea.”

“Okay.” Mary Beth sat again. The tree shaft here was narrower, and Mary Beth straddled it like the back of a horse. The girl sat cross-legged and faced her.

She made an elaborate show of preparing the tea—filling the kettle with water and putting it on the flame—and while they waited for the water to boil Mary Beth thought of things she might say (she had a lot of questions), though she didn't wish to ask them in a way that would upset the girl and destroy the camaraderie they were now developing. Mary Beth had just come up with a question she thought innocent enough and nonthreatening—what plans did the girl have for the summer?—when the girl began to whistle, a single, unsteady note, like a boiling teakettle.

“Oh,” Mary Beth said.