Emily's Ghost (3 page)

"You have a fabulous aura,
Senator," Emily blurted, much to her own astonishment.

The senator grinned. "Is
that a professional evaluation? Jim says you have psychic ability.
Please. Have a seat."

He dropped into one of the
wing chairs; Emily sat in the other.

"I'd like to find out
whether I have it or not," she murmured, but her voice suddenly
lacked conviction. It was one thing to take on a con-man that she
felt instinctively superior to; it was another thing altogether to
take on a demigod. Her confidence was slipping fast.

"You're not in
Washington," she added with something like reproach.

"No. There was a family
emergency last night -- thank God, a false alarm. I'm only passing
through the office this morning on my way back to the Senate. My
time
is
a little
short ...," he said, glancing first at his watch and then at her,
expectantly.

"Yes. I understand
completely. Well, I won't keep you, Senator," she said, lifting
from her chair like a dove in flight. Suddenly she wanted
out.

If he was surprised by her
change of heart, he didn't show it, needless to say; politicians
were a cool and collected lot.

"Miss Bowditch, this power
you claim to have --"

He stood up, towering over
her, and slid his hands into the pockets of his Brooks Brothers
suit. "We're talking about the power of the press, are we
not?"

"Press?" she repeated in a
very small voice, fastening her gaze on his wing-tipped
shoes.

"Press. As in
Boston Journal
."

She winced. "You
know?"

"That you're an
investigative reporter for the
Journal
? Yes. We know."

She raised her dark eyes
to meet his look. "How did you recognize my name? I haven't been
with the paper long enough to rate a by-line."

"My secretary looked you
up in the Media Directory. You were behaving a little ... oddly.
She guessed you might be from the press." His expression was bland
but his eyes were dancing.

That got her dander up.
That, and the thought of the three of them having a good laugh over
her. "
I
was
behaving a little oddly? Has it occurred to you, Senator, that
people who believe that other people can levitate, bend spoons, and
talk to aliens through the fillings in their teeth -- that those
people are the ones who are a wee bit odd?" She didn't bother
hiding the contempt in her voice.

The senator was rocking a
little on his feet; she might have been a pesky lobbyist bending
his ear. His expression was still bland, but the light in his eyes
seemed to have gone out.

"That, I take it, is the
gist of the exposé you'd like to write about me?"

"Do you deny that you
wrote the NSF a letter urging that they spend more on interstellar
communication and psychic research?" She whipped out her steno pad,
ready to take down his "No comment."

Instead he said quietly,
"Do you really believe that a silver filling and the Arecibo
Radiotelescope are on a par with one another?"

"Yes or no, Senator. Did
you send the letter?" she demanded crisply, Bic pen
poised.

"Oh, for --" He shook his
head, exasperated, and said, "This Palmist getup and so-called
search for a master to teach you -- is this all with your paper's
sanction?"

Her eyes were slightly
lowered. "Yes."

"I don't believe
it."

"Well they didn't tell
me
not
to do
it."

"Ah." He glanced at his
watch again and made an impatient sound. "Look, I've got a plane to
catch. If you wanted to know how I feel about psi, why didn't you
just ask me?" He waved his hand up and down over her clothes. "Why
put yourself through all this embarrassment?"

"I am not embarrassed,"
she said, embarrassed. "But I do know one thing: among all the
cabinet members, congressmen, senators and ambassadors who
fervently believe in psychic phenomena, only a handful have come
out of the closet. And you're not one of them," she said, not quite
truthfully.

"I've never tried to hide
my beliefs; they're a matter of public record."

"Public record! Every once
in a while you throw a bone to some obscure little magazine
like
Etheric
, and
that's supposed to update the voters. Why not come clean in
the
Journal
,
Senator? That's what real people read around here."

What am I doing?
she thought wildly.
I'm
standing here trading punches with a United States Senator!
In her seven years as a reporter Emily had gone
after landlords and lawyers, developers and diet centers -- but
never had she taken on someone with so much power, so much
prestige.

"All right," the senator
said after a moment.

"Pardon me?"

"I said, 'all right,' Miss
Bowditch. You have your wish. See Mrs. Cusack and she'll set up a
time. I'm afraid it can't be right away."

"Pardon me?"

He flashed her a sudden,
good-natured grin -- and a heck of a vote-getter it was -- and
said, "There's an old Chinese curse: 'May your most fervent wish
come true'." Then he glanced at his Rolex again and said, "My car's
waiting; I have to run. You have a good day, Miss
Bowditch."

He left Emily in a state
bordering on shock.

So. The way to land an
exclusive interview with an important man on a controversial
subject was to wear a dumb hat. A slow, wicked, utterly jubilant
smile transformed her face.

"
I
knew that."

****

When Emily popped out of
the senator's office, it was still only mid-morning; the day, which
Emily had asked to take as a vacation day, was still very much her
own. She was in a jump-for-joy mood and wanted to share it with
someone, so she called her friend Cara.

Cara Miles was the Pisces
to her Virgo, a woman she'd met one summer in New Hampshire where
Cara had retreated to do some painting -- "and/or," she'd said,
"get in touch with my inner self." In every way they were cheerful
opposites. Emily was a small-town girl from a big blue-collar
family; Cara was a Boston-bred Only Child whose forebears
apparently owned the Mayflower. Emily had worked nights and
weekends to put herself through community college; Cara was a
Vassar girl. Emily had scrimped and saved for years and only just
managed to close on a one-bedroom condo in an iffy neighborhood of
Boston; Cara owned -- free and clear -- a four-level townhouse in
the Back Bay. Emily paid her taxes; Cara paid her accountant. Emily
favored shirts and jeans. Cara draped herself in hand-printed silk.
Emily trekked. Cara flowed.

But they both loved New
Hampshire, and to shop. Emily had taken Cara around to every
antique shop in the Manchester area, and to a few attics that
weren't in the Yellow Pages. Cara had reciprocated when Emily moved
to Boston. To Emily the secret to their friendship was obvious:
they'd never yet both desired the same antique. They came close
once -- an oak pharmaceutical cabinet for seventy-four dollars --
but after a few minutes Emily gave up wanting it. She had no place
to put it. And anyway, she didn't believe in bric-a-brac; what
would she have kept in it?

When Cara arrived at the
small Spanish café tucked in one of the step-downs on Newbury
Street, Emily was waiting for her. She was still dressed like a
frilly peasant gypsy, and Cara nearly passed her by.

"Emily!" she said, doing a
double take. "I love you in that. It's a whole new
look."

"-- but the same old me;
don't get your hopes up," Emily said, laughing.

"Well, you ought to give
in to that side of yourself more often; you'd meet more men. So.
What's the occasion?"

"I was on a job
assignment, and it turned out well. I'm celebrating," she said,
holding up a glass of sangria. "Can you join me?"

"Ooh, that could be
dangerous -- antiquing under the influence." Cara slid into the
chair opposite the tiny table and tossed back a mane of softly
curled brown hair. "I don't dare buy anything more -- I've been
sending things off to Sotheby's for auction as it is. I'm trying to
clear space for a studio." She motioned for a waiter.

"Cara! You've gone back to
painting."

"Mmmm, not painting.
Painting didn't really express ... wasn't really the -- couldn't --
well, I've taken up sculpture. It's so much more, I don't know,
essential as an art form."

While she was ordering,
Emily thought,
Oh, yes. I can see why I
wanted to be with her right now. She's another one of those types
who forever struggle with the mystical essences of
things.

Not for the first time,
Emily wondered why she herself did not. Life seemed to Emily a
pretty straightforward affair. In general her mother was right: You
were born, you worked, and then you died. If you were lucky you
fell in love with a great guy and had a couple of kids. So far she
hadn't been so lucky.

Which brought her back to
her original view: you were born, you worked, and then you died. It
was very important to be kind and fair -- it was almost an
obsession with Emily. But for the life of her, she could not
understand why some people had to have a mystical experience every
time they ate a cheese sandwich.

"So tell me about your
assignment," Cara said as she plucked the cherry out of her
sangria. "What poor crook have you set your sights on this
time?"

"He's not exactly a
crook," Emily answered with a wry smile. "He's just hopelessly
misguided -- and you wouldn't even think he was that."

"Something to do with the
astral plane?"

Cara had tossed the
question off casually as she eyed the plate of crispy shrimp
rissoles that was being placed between them. But she'd hit a bull's
eye, and Emily was extremely impressed. Stan Cooper was right: Cara
probably
was
the
telepathic one.

"Not even close," Emily
lied, a little shaken. "And anyway, I can't talk about it until
after the interview in a couple of weeks."

"Fine with me." Cara bit
into the hot fried appetizer and went into a swoon of pleasure.
"These are out of this world," she cried, and then: "Okay, let's
talk about men. You first. Find any?"

Emily's mouth was full.
She shook her head.

"I did. A doozy." Cara
rolled her eyes and tossed off the rest of her sangria. "I met him
at one of daddy's bank things. From across the room I thought he
was the most handsome man I'd ever seen. From a foot away he was
even better. Snappy dresser; sexy drawl; bluer eyes than mine.
There was only one little hitch ...."

"He was
married?"

"He was investigating
daddy's bank." Cara dropped her head into her hands, then looked up
with a hopeless, tragic smile and motioned for a refill on her
wine.

By the time they left two
hours later, Emily and Cara were both convinced that for a tragic
situation, Cara's dilemma was pretty darn funny. Feeling mellow and
amused, they wandered aimlessly and contentedly through the lineup
of exquisite shops on Newbury Street. They paused to stroke a fine
Italian handbag here, an Inuit soapstone carving there. They stared
in the window of a florist for a full ten minutes, choosing the
flowers for their wedding bouquets, just in case. Cara tried on an
Australian outback coat and a pair of lizard boots, bought them,
and arranged to have them delivered. The bill came to $3,l37.40.
She wrote a check.

Emily didn't mind. She
figured that in Boston she could get along pretty well without
either an outback coat or lizard boots. In general she felt pretty
immune to impulse buying. She tried on a handmade sweater from
Ireland, for example, but convinced herself that it was too
scratchy. She picked up a stoneware mug from Scotland and walked
around with it for a while, but then she put it back on its shelf.
It wasn't hard: in every shop, thoughts of her mortgage hovered
sadistically overhead.

Until she ambled up to the
window of a shop called, with charming understatement, "Something
Old." The shop specialized in estate jewelry, and the window
display was enchanting. Scattered on a bed of deep maroon velvet
were a dozen pieces of antique jewelry, mostly of diamonds and
pearls. Their owners were there too, in sepia photographs whose
edges were curled with age--grand ladies in
fin de siècle
ball gowns, their
throats ringed in thick chokers of pearls, their tiny waists
encircled with diamonds. There were tools of their trade as well: a
mother-of-pearl hairbrush and a silver comb, and an intricate,
hand-painted fan of ebony. In every fold of velvet a random
treasure lay partly hidden: a ruby hat-pin; a set of pearl
tear-drop earrings; a tortoiseshell button-hook.

Emily was charmed by all
of it, from the tiara to the button-hook. But it was a necklace of
pale pink stone that cast a spell over her and held her fast. It
was not a magnificent piece, or even an elegant piece. It was -- an
odd piece. The big rectangular stone, set in delicate gold filigree
but hung on an extremely heavy chain, was like nothing else in the
window. Emily couldn't imagine a woman of either taste or wealth
having adorned herself with it, and yet it was undeniably old.
Something about it -- the way the track lighting bounced off its
facets, or the gypsy look of it -- made her want to know
more.