Being Dead (10 page)

"Dogs can sense things people can't," Dwight said. "Like those whistles that are too high-pitched for humans to hear."

"You're saying Kevin has come back from the dead to blow a dog whistle at Spartacus?" Dwight could be such a moron.

"Stop acting so damn superior," Dwight told me.

I thought about what he was saying. "My dad is acting weird. He jumps up and he yells and he moves fast.
That's
what's spooking the dog."

"Your father was upstairs when die dog got spooked," Dwight pointed out. "Spartacus was in the living room; he saw something that made him want to get away.
Then
your father came down and saw what Spartacus saw: Kevin." He was looking very pleased with himself.

I straightened up. "There's no such thing as ghosts."

Dwight held his arms out in a hey-don't-blame-me gesture.

"And even," I said, "
even
if there were, Kevin would not do the things my dad thinks he's doing. He wouldn't threaten him. He wouldn't be trying to hurt him. Kevin..." I sighed. "Kevin was never like that."

Dwight sat down on the stoop. "No," he agreed. "But something is going on. Sure, your father is sad that Kevin died. But is that enough to make him see things that aren't there? Let me help you investigate this."

"I'm not—" I started, but just then my mother and Uncle Jack and Aunt Lise came out. Mom looked angry; I think she was embarrassed, and that made her angry. Uncle Jack looked shaken. Aunt Lise rested her cheek against mine. She probably wouldn't have done that if she'd been aware that until a minute ago my cheek had been against die dog, but it was a nice gesture. "Everything is going to be fine," she assured me. "Jack has gotten your father to agree to see a doctor tomorrow."

Tomorrow he might change his mind,
I thought.

She finished: "He thinks a quiet night at home would be best for this evening. We'll go out to dinner tomorrow, okay? All of us."

I nodded. What else could I do?
Demand
that they take me out?

Dwight asked, "Can I spend the night?"

"No." Aunt Lise didn't even glance at my mother to see if it was okay with her.

"But—"

"Move," Uncle Jack commanded.

Dwight moved. But so did my mother. She accompanied my aunt and uncle out of the porch and down the three steps of the stoop. They stood by the car, talking, their voices quiet, their faces earnest. Dwight took the opportunity to press his face once more against the screen door. "Remember," he whispered, "take your cue from the dog."

Yeah, right. Compared to Dwight, the dog almost
did
seem smart.

Could
Spartacus see something that none of the rest of us could, except Dad?

And if there was something to see, what else could it be but Kevin?

Was I stubbornly refusing to believe Dwight could be right, just because he was Dwight?

"So what do you think is going on?" I asked. "Not all dead people come back as ghosts, or Gramma Cassie would still be hanging around family picnics, force-feeding us those rock-solid diabetic cookies of hers. So why has Kevin come back?"

"Unsettled business," Dwight said. "That's why ghosts get tied to Earth. Wrongs to be righted, that sort of thing." He had a question of his own: "Why does your father think Kevin is here?"

"To ... I don't know..." It sounded so stupid. "To get him."

"Why?"

Exasperated, I said, "I thought we already agreed Kevin wouldn't be that way."

"But why would your father
think
he would? Did your father used to beat him, or anything like that, that he thinks Kevin could want revenge for?"

"No," I said.

The thing I remembered was that picture of Kevin and Millicent Oschmann on prom night—how they'd had to wait for Dad, who had run off to the store for flash cubes for the camera, then everybody smiling and waving, everybody thinking \ve had forever.

Dwight sat on the stoop; I sat on the other side of the door in the porch—both of us resting our chins on our hands, thinking.

"They used to get along," I said, "until..." And there it was: the solution Dwight was looking for. "Dad's feeling guilty," I said, "for supporting the war, for encouraging Kevin"—that wasn't it by half—"for bullying him into serving instead of running off to Canada." It was
different,
I remembered him saying,
but I wouldn't listen.
I finished: "He thinks he's responsible for Kevin being dead."

"But," Dwight said, "what's really happening is that Kevin keeps coming back—not because he
wants
to, but because your father himself keeps
calling
him back by his own feelings of guilt" Dwight saw the skeptical look on my face. "It's a possibility," he said.

So is intelligent life on Mars.

But I liked Dwight's interpretation a lot better than my father's. Or mine.

"Dwight," I started.

But I never finished.

There was a sound from the house.

And just as Mom, Dad, and I had known Kevin was dead as soon as we'd seen those army guys, so, too, we all immediately recognized the significance of that sound: It was a gun. I knew that without even having known my father had a gun—a Luger, I was told later, a German officer's gun, a memento that lots of World War II veterans brought home with them. But in that single moment after the shot, I saw Aunt Lise flinch, Uncle Jack whirl back toward the house, Mom sway and catch hold of the car door. Dwight's eyes looked ready to bug out of his head. Spartacus began to whimper. As for me, I was just empty. Perhaps I had finally figured it out; perhaps not. Perhaps there would have been something I could have done with the knowledge I thought I had. Perhaps not. In that moment, I knew I would never know.

What happened to my father inside the house while the rest of us were all outside discussing him? Did he intentionally shoot himself from grief or guilt? Did he
accidentally
shoot himself while trying to protect himself from Kevin?
Was
Kevin's ghost there—and if so, did he return specifically to try to stop Dad from killing himself? Or am I wrong about Kevin? Did he set out to drive our father to his death? Can a ghost be angry enough, and substantial enough, to aim a gun and pull a trigger? Were we blockheads to base so much of our theory on the behavior of a brain-damaged dog?

"Stay here," Uncle Jack commanded us—me and Dwight, though neither of us had twitched—as he yanked the porch door open and ran into the house. Aunt Lise was holding my mother. Dwight and I were staring at each other. Spartacus took the opportunity to run through the open door into the front yard, where he stood and bayed at the sky.

When the Canettis peeked out their window to see what die problem was, I finally took Spartacus by the collar and told him, "That's enough."

And he stopped.

When Jessica screamed, Mark and Adam came running so fast, they nearly bowled me over.

"Did you see it?" she yelled. "Did you see that thing?"

We all peered around the room and shook our heads.

"It was terrible!" she said. "I've never seen anything like it."

Adam took a deep breath before speaking. While Jessica and I had been inside, he and Mark had been struggling to get the refrigerator up the front stairs, and his patience had obviously been left behind. "If it was a bug," he warned, "or a mouse—"

"Bug!" she shouted. Her chest heaved under the tight T-shirt, which boldly proclaimed,
ARCHAEOLOGISTS DIG IT—SUNY COLLEGE AT OSWEGO
. She had been working hard, also. The previous occupants, gone two years now, had left their furniture behind, and she had been cleaning the large, dusty rooms and trying to arrange the new and the old furniture so everything fit That must be a girl thing, wanting everything to be perfectly right from the very beginning. Her exertions and her recent scare made her voice strained. "Mouse? What kind of jerk do you think I am? It was a person. A horrible, disgusting, slimy, half-human
person.
"

"'Disgusting'?" I said. "
'Slimy'?
"

Mark also seemed incredulous. '"Half human'?"

Adam started for the window.

"No, right here in the house," Jessica said. "He was standing there all
dripping
and ... and ... foul, and
leering
at me. And then he just kind of dissolved into thin air."

Leering
was just like her; she was the type who'd always suspect a guy's ulterior motives—even a slimy, disgusting, half-human guy.

Mark seemed to have the same idea. "
'Leering,'
Jessica?"

"Where, exactly, was this thing?" Adam asked, trying to take charge.

"There, right there." She pointed to where I stood, and I had to move quickly to get out of Adam's way.

He crouched down, examined the dust patterns. He had already finished sophomore year in archaeology and obviously felt his training qualified him as some sort of forensic expert.

"Any slime there?" I asked. "Any drips?"

"Well, see anything?" Mark interrupted. "Any cloven hoof tracks or whatever?"

"Cute, Mark, real cute," Jessica snapped.

Adam stood up. "Well, of course, there's all the tracks we've made moving our stuff in here, but I don't see anything that looks out of order. Tell you what: Why don't you sit down and rest for a while, Jessica?"

"Don't take that tone with me."

"'Tone'? What
tone?
" Adam was a bit too defensive. "That was concern you detected in my voice."

"Bull. That was a Jessica's-been-seeing-things-that-aren't-there-Must-be-that-time-of-month tone."

"Come on, Jess."

I was biting my cheeks over this exchange, and one look at Mark showed he was enjoying himself, also. Not that I knew him that well, but I thought we had a lot in common. If it weren't for those other two! They were only interested in this fine old house because the real-estate broker was willing to rent it out cheap to college students until a buyer turned up. There was no way the four of us could share the house in peace.

"You think I'm just imagining things," Jessica was accusing. "That I believed Donna Horvath's stories and got carried away with my own daydreams."

"Of course not," Adam said so quickly that we all knew that was exactly what he was thinking.

"Big deal," Jessica said. "So a murder was committed in this house. That doesn't bother me."

"Here," I said, "in this room."

"Right here," Mark echoed.

"As the poor guy dozed in this very rocking chair," I finished, "his dear brother beat him to death for the sake of a woman who didn't really love either of them."

As if on cue, all of us turned from the antique rocker and looked at the fireplace, but of course the police had kept the poker as evidence.

"And we know that the murderer confessed but then hung himself in his jail cell before telling what he'd done with the body," Jessica continued. "As for the rest of it, that's just garbage: how the dead guy came back and
haunted
his brother, brandishing the murder weapon—the fireplace poker—until the brother turned himself in. How the ghost followed him to jail and drove him to suicide. I never gave the story a second thought."

"Until now," I said.

"Until now," she echoed. She rubbed her arms. "Jeez, this place is depressing. I think we made a mistake renting it."

"It's better than the dorms," Adam started.

"I think we need some air," I said. I could see what was coming, but I couldn't help myself. With perfect timing I threw the window up just as an owl hooted.

Jessica, as could be counted on, overreacted and screamed.

"There, there," I whispered just loud enough for her to hear, then patted her on the back. The more I patted, the more she screamed.

Finally I pulled a hanky out of Adam's pocket and fanned her with it. Jessica started hyperventilating.

"That does it," Adam said. "Let's get out of here."

It had taken them about three hours to unload their stuff, but they got it all back in the truck in less than thirty minutes.

"Good-bye," I called as they piled themselves in.

I wanted someone to stay—really I did. Otherwise, I'd never rest properly. But I found it hard to resist playing my little jokes.

I watched the truck pull out of the driveway, then went back into the house and sat down in the old oak rocker—always my favorite, despite what had happened to me there. Perhaps later I would go visit my special place in the lower garden.

It was no good trying to outrun the rain. Harrison realized that after those few frantic seconds when the first big drops pelted the leaves in the uppermost branches, hard enough to be audible. Already soaked, he wasn't running, for the roads in the old section of the cemetery could be treacherously slippery. He was caught, naturally, just about halfway between the cemetery office, where the rest rooms were, and the area where his troop was helping Allan earn his Eagle Badge by cleaning up litter and debris from around the graves.

He almost missed seeing the woman kneeling by a grave not far from the road. It was only the near-simultaneous flash of lightning and crack of thunder that caused him to jerk his head up, into the eye-stinging rain. For a moment he thought he was seeing mist, a product of the combination of hot spring day and cold rain.

As soon as he saw it was a woman in a white dress, Harrison stopped looking, reluctant to intrude on someone's privacy, even if that person was unaware of him.

But then he glanced back.

The woman just knelt there as though oblivious to Harrison, to the pouring rain, to the danger of a thunderstorm with all these centuries-old trees around. She rocked back and forth, her pale hands covering her face. Her white dress and her long dark hair were plastered to her body, giving her the look of a black-and-white photograph. Even from the road Harrison could see her shoulders shaking.

Strange, he thought, that anybody should be so overcome by grief here in the old part of the cemetery. Most of these graves dated back to the 1800s, which was why this section looked so like a park: The Victorians had had a weird perspective on things. These days sightseers came here to take pictures of the grand angels or to make rubbings of the stones with their elaborate carvings and their flowery testimonials.