Emily's Ghost (30 page)

She tapped the photo.
"That's why," she said, and turned away to gather up her
things.

But Lee took her by her
shoulders and turned her to face him. "Why the concern for my
political wellbeing, Emily? Why this protective surge?" When she
said nothing he added, "I could use some answers,
kiddo."

He was too near. She'd
been careful to keep her distance, to keep the talk on a rational
level. But now he'd crossed into the danger zone, the zone of the
heart. Alarm bells were going off everywhere.
Intruder alert! Left shoulder! Right shoulder!

Her hands went up to his.
Lifting them gently away, she said in a nearly steady voice,
"You're the right man for the job. I don't want to see you
blow
it."

"Since when? What about
the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence? What about the
séances? I'm a flake, remember?"

"Nah," she answered,
confused by his about-face. "I got that part all wrong." Why was he
pushing her on this?

"You're patronizing me,
Emily," he said in a suddenly dangerous tone. "I won't have it.
Those weren't questions; those were cotton balls. I admit I was
grateful just now for the reprieve. But I have to be able to face
you after you walk out of here."

He went over to her tape
recorder and pressed a button. "Ask the hard one. Ask the obvious
one.
Do I believe in ghosts?"

Her head was beginning to
spin. What was he after? First he was grateful; now he wasn't. She
needed time to think things through, and he wasn't letting her. He
was pushing her, prodding her. Why? Why?

She spun on her heel like
a cornered thing and faced him. "What are you doing? Why are you
forcing this issue? Suppose I do ask you if you believe in ghosts?
If you say yes, I'll have to nail you to the wall when I write this
up. If you say no, we're back to the I'm-a-nut scenario. Why can't
you just leave it alone?" she cried, beyond herself with
frustration.

"I will if you will,
goddammit!"

They weren't talking about
the interview anymore, and she knew it. "I can't! He wouldn't let
me if I wanted to!"

In three steps Lee had her
in his grip; she'd never seen him so angry before. His breathing
was fast, his voice hot and hard. "What would it take to knock you
loose from this obsession of yours? What--?"

He stopped. Let go.
Stared. She turned her head and saw what he saw: The lamp on his
desk had begun to brighten and then to blind. Lee squinted and
looked away, and so did she, filled with dread for the excruciating
pain that was about to follow.

But the pain never came.
The light dimmed and then went out. Lee blinked once, twice, and
rubbed his eyes, no doubt trying to get the bright spots out from
behind his eyelids.

"Give yourself a minute,"
Emily said. "It goes away." She tried to keep the note of obnoxious
triumph from her voice, but it was impossible.

Lee walked over to the
lamp and peered over its linen shade. "Bulb's burned out. Must've
been a short."

"What!
You're
the nut here! What does it
take--?"

"Come and look," he said,
cutting her off from the road she was headed down. "The bulb's dark
on top."

She began stomping toward
the lamp but halted dead in her tracks three feet away.

Fergus was standing six
inches from the senator.

It was absolutely shocking
to her to see the two of them lined up side by side. Fergus was
younger, shorter, more sparely built than Lee, but he
was
there, in full view.
For a moment she thought quite seriously that she was going to die.
Her chest constricted; there was a roaring in her head; her mouth
went absolutely dry. She tried to say something but
couldn't.

Fergus peered over the
lampshade with Lee, then looked up at her with a beatific grin.
"'GE,'" he cried, pointing to the bulb. "'We bring good things to
life!'"

Emily stared wide-eyed at
the ghost, then at Lee, who was at first baffled, then alarmed by
her behavior.
"What?
Tell me!" he demanded.

He pivoted ninety degrees,
putting him face-to-face with Fergus. The scowl on Lee's face was
fierce.

Fergus wilted a little
before it, but he held his ground. After a second or two his
expression relaxed, then became almost insolent.

But Lee was staring into
thin air. "Emily, if there's something here,
describe it to me!"
he
implored.

Emily tried desperately to
oblige. "He ... you..."

And then she
fainted.

****

That's twice,
Emily thought as she came to. She was lying on a
small sofa, and her jaw was throbbing. She sat up, rubbing the sore
spot. Lee was at his desk, pouring water from a thermal decanter
into a glass. He brought it over and sat down beside
her.

"Hurts?"

She nodded. "Who took a
poke at me, you or him?"

"Go ahead, make jokes. You
caught the claw foot of the wing chair when you fainted. Let's have
a look." He took her jaw gently between his thumb and index finger
and tilted it to one side. "Yep, you'll live. Have you eaten
anything today?"

She ignored the question
but did drain the glass of half its water. "I take it you didn't
see a thing?"

He took the glass she
handed to him. "I didn't
see
anything, no."

"But?"

Lee rubbed his eyes, then
dragged his fingers down his face, stretching the facial muscles as
exhausted people do. She wondered if he'd slept at all. He
certainly hadn't shaved.

"But.
I felt something not unlike the moment of Nicole's death,
when I was in the hospital." He was frowning, deep in thought,
struggling for the words. "I remember telling you I felt a kind of
euphoric joy at the time. That wasn't quite accurate. There was an
element of fear in it -- fearful joy, if there is such a
thing."

He stared at the glass in
his hand as if he were wondering how it got there. "But why the
fear, I don't know. Was it because I was afraid the moment would
end, or was it because I was afraid that I wasn't ready for what
was happening to me?

"One thing I do know," he
said, placing the glass carefully on a low table as if it were a
precious goblet, "is ever since that moment in the hospital I've
carried around a nagging feeling of guilt -- as if I failed Nicole
somehow. As if I'd had the chance to cross over some Rubicon and be
with her forever but had chosen to hang back. As if I should have
loved her more.

His fingers came up to
Emily's jaw, skimming the bruise so lightly that she hardly knew
it. "I've never told this to anyone."

Emily wanted to comfort
him; he looked so vulnerable. "I don't think you could have loved
Nicole more than you did," she said. "I think you feel guilty the
way we all feel guilty when we survive the death of someone close.
The worst part is, we feel joy that we
are
still alive. And then we feel
guilty because we feel that way. We can't help any of it, Lee.
We're only human."

"That's how it was with
your mother?" he ventured.

"Yes ... that's how it
was."

He twined his fingers
through hers. They sat without speaking for a while, and she felt
closer to him than she'd ever felt before. But after a bit she
became uneasy; what if he felt he'd said too much? She glanced
nervously at the door. Millie would realize the interview should've
been over by now.

She stood up. "Well!" she
said awkwardly, straightening the folds of her cotton skirt. "Your
family thinks of me as the guest who wouldn't stay, and now your
staff will think of me as the reporter who wouldn't go. I should
leave you to your work."

He looked startled by her
abrupt move, but he scrambled politely to his feet. The smile on
his face was ironic and tender. "My family figures you ran away for
a perfectly good reason. But you're right about my staff; they're
very schedule-oriented."

"Time to go, in that
case." There it was again, that tick-tick-ticking clock. Whenever
she was with him, she felt that she was on borrowed time. She
scooped up her shoulder bag and began her march out.

"Whoa, hold on!" His arm
shot out across her chest like a railroad gate. He was close enough
for her to see the golden stubble on his cheeks. "My staff and I
don't always agree," he explained, letting his fingertips trail
across the top of her breasts before he let his arm fall. "What I'd
like to know now is where do we go from here."

She was feeling the heat
from his glancing caress, and as usual when he touched her, her
body went surging ahead of her brain. He seemed to be waiting for
an answer. But what was the question?

Where do we go from
here?
"I guess you run for Senate and I
continue on my way. At least for now."

"Like two ships passing in
the night? I don't think so, Emily. Not after this."

"Especially
after this, Lee. Face it, you're not positive
what happened here. Is there really any point to your getting
further involved? The less you know about Fergus, the better. Your
press conferences will go a lot more smoothly."

"Look, I'll grant you, I'm
still not altogether convinced what it is you're seeing. But it
looks more and more like I've fallen for someone with rotten luck
and not just a simple crackpot."

"Gee, you know how to make
a girl feel good," she said ironically. But she
was
pleased -- her heart was
pounding -- just because he said he'd fallen.

"You and your necklaces,"
he said with a helpless shake of his head. "Me and my séances. What
a team."

He made a fist around the
crystal of her necklace and drew her gently closer by its chain.
Through a haze of longing she saw his mouth, full and skeptical,
open slightly for the kiss. A shiver passed through her; she closed
her eyes.

And then she remembered.
"No!" she cried, pulling her head back. "He might short out every
piece of office equipment you have!"

"You can't be serious,"
Lee said, laughing, holding her close by the chain.

She locked her dark eyes
onto his blue gaze. "Put it this way: Can you afford to lose
whatever Millie's feeding into her computer right now?"

He thought about it, then
released the crystal from his grip. He centered the jewel neatly on
her breast. "I don't think I like this Mr. O'Malley of yours," he
said, dusting off the crystal with his fingertips.

"What does he care?
He's
not the one running
for office," she said impishly.

"Will you tell him for me
that I mean him no harm?"

"I think he pretty well
knows that." Her voice became more serious. "This conversation
seems pretty dumb unless you believe me, Lee. Do you?"

He winced and rubbed the
back of his neck as if he'd got a crick there. "It's a pretty
stupendous thing, Em, if it's true. Part of me wants to assemble a
congressional committee to investigate. Part of me wants to steal
that necklace and see for myself."

"Do you?" she repeated
doggedly.

"I want to. No one wants
to believe you more."

"Do you?"

He leaned his forearms on
the back of the wing chair as if he were at the rail of a ship,
staring at the horizon. "I wish I had more proof."

Her heart plummeted.
Shaking with disappointment and frustration, she walked over to him
and put her hand alongside his cheek, turned his face to her, and
kissed him long and hard, a mocking, tonguing, daring
kiss.

She pulled away abruptly.
"Check with Millie in that case," she said, and left.

****

Emily came to a screeching
halt at the curb outside the senator's office building. She could
not gather the wit to remember if she'd brought her car or taken
the train. In the meantime, rain had begun to fall. She began to
storm blindly down Cambridge Street, oblivious to the sky, heading
for either the parking garage or the underground rapid transit, she
wasn't sure which.

"This is the last straw.
This really is," she said in a fury under her breath. "That man
will
never
believe me.

"Not if ye try using power
ye don't possess."

"Oh.
You,"
she said, throwing her hands
up in the air. "Just what I need. Go away, Fergus. I'm not in the
mood!"

"What kind of fool stunt
was that back there?" he demanded. He was alongside, struggling to
keep up with her. "Did ye really believe I'd destroy a piece of the
nation's business just to prove a point for ye?"

"The point I was trying to
prove, you jerk, was that you exist!"

He flushed angrily. "What
the hell do I care if yer boyfriend believes it or not? It would
just complicate matters. It would bring the press around in hordes.
Ye couldn't get a goddamned thing done. Not that ye do a hell of a
lot anyway. I never saw such a goddamned procrastinator. Why can't
ye just get on with the investigation? Why must everything be laid
at the feet of this idol like some kind of offering? What's he got
to do with my acquittal? When are ye goin' to stop this hemmin' and
hawin' and agonizing and
just do
it?"