Emily's Ghost (32 page)

"I promise. So, are you
buying Maria's story about the tower's being too expensive to
renovate?"

"Not for a minute," Mrs.
Gibbs admitted. She went to the door and peered out into the main
room, then came back and sat down. Leaning even closer to Emily,
she said, "I suppose I'm a shameless gossip, but about six months
ago Maria was out and Frank was in when I went by. He'd just
finished tearing down the old stairwell to the tower, and I
complained that I'd never seen the inside of it. That's when he
told me he hardly ever went in there himself. But there was another
door -- Maria had insisted he put it in before he took out the
original stairs -- and Frank let me peek in on the top
floor.

"He let me," she
continued, "but he was very nervous about it. I stuck my head in
and saw an enormous four-poster bed, unmade,
with clean sheets and blankets on it.
Well, you know me. I said, 'For goodness' sake! Are you
renting this out?' and Frank seemed mortified. It was only later
that I put two and two together: He had no idea that Maria was
sleeping in the tower."

"That's crazy. Of course,
he'd know!" Emily blurted.

"Oh, he knew she didn't
always sleep in their bed. He told me once that Maria was a
restless sleeper and sometimes took an available guest room not to
disturb him. But I'm positive he didn't know she was spending her
nights in the four-poster."

"Hmm."

"That's what I say.
Hmm."
She pressed her
fork into the last few yellow crumbs on her plate to gather them
up.

"Well, obviously she's not
having an affair," Emily said bluntly. "Their clientele changes
daily."

"That's a
scandalous
thought!"
Mrs. Gibbs said sharply, shocked by Emily's modern candor. "Not
what I meant at all. If I was trying to hint at anything, it was
that maybe Maria isn't happy with the" -- she cleared her throat --
"physical side of marriage."

"Well, she's picked a heck
of a place to hide out from it. It's almost as if she sees herself
as the princess locked in the tower by the cruel king, waiting for
her knight in armor to come and rescue her."

Mrs. Gibbs thought about
it. She nodded to herself and murmured, "Poor Frank."

"The question is," Emily
said softly, "who's the knight?"

****

Though Emily stayed
dutifully poised over the keyboard of her office computer for the
entire afternoon, her mind had broken free from her fingertips and
was poking around the top floor of the manor's tower. A vivid,
relentless picture of Maria --
Marie
-- fleeing from Frank's bed
and crawling into the big four-poster kept blotting out the dull,
plodding text on the screen before her.

Why would a poised and
well-educated woman steal away periodically to a room filled with
cobwebs and mice? Was Frank, with his Sears, Roebuck furniture,
really so unbearably mundane? And if Maria was so fascinated by the
historic, romantic manor, why did she act as if she knew nothing
about it and cared less? A smoke screen? But why? More and more
Emily was convinced that Maria held the key to all the secrets of
Talbot Manor, past and present.

"Yo! Bowditch!" It was her
editor, Phil Sparke, knocking sharply on the side of her desk. "You
with us today?" He was the kind of man who treated his female staff
exactly the same as he did the men who worked for him, which wasn't
very well at all.

"Just barely, chief," she
answered truthfully.
Kyle Edwards! That
was the name! The name on the packet of envelopes postmarked from
France!

"I really
would
like an answer to
my question," Phil said with biting courtesy.

"What was the question?"
she asked absently.

"The
interview!
The
goddammed interview!"
he
roared.

"Oh. Right. Done. I edited
it this morning. Stan has it for review."

"How'd it go?" he
demanded, chomping down hard on his unlit cigar butt.

"Very well. I was very
impressed."
The envelopes all were
postmarked in 1972.

"Did you nail him on the
paranormal shit?"

1972. Were they written in
a feminine hand? Definitely.
"Uh, not
exactly, actually."

"'Not exactly,
actually'?
Yes or no
,
Bowditch. Did you bring up
the
Newsweek
quote?"

"Newsweek?"
Was Kyle Edwards her knight in shining armor? But
how could he be? In 1972 Maria was barely a teenager.

"What am I, talking to a
tape recorder? If you blew the interview, Bowditch, your ass is in
a sling. I want a copy on my desk before you leave."

Emily hadn't had her ass
put in a sling all that often in life; it was a new and unsettling
feeling. She printed a copy of the interview for the managing
editor but held on to it while she waited for Stan to return with
his opinion. When he did show up, around six, she could see
instantly that he was unenthusiastic.

"No good, huh?" she said
glumly.

He shrugged. "It's fine,
as far as it goes. But here's your competition." He threw a copy
of
USA Today
across her desk.

It made the front
page:
MASS. SENATOR DESPERATELY SEEKING
NICOLE.

Pop-eyed with disbelief,
Emily read through the piece. "Senator Lee Alden, who is said to
have considered resigning his seat after the death of his wife,
Nicole, attended a séance in Westford last month in an attempt to
establish contact with her. Lois Lividus, a Hungarian psychic who
manages a channeler known only as Kimberly, invited the senator to
the sitting. Several scholars and at least one member of the area
press were also present. It is not known whether Senator Alden made
contact 'across the veil.'

"Oh, God. I'm dead." She
held her head down with both hands, as if it were going to fall off
her shoulders. "What do I do now? My glowing interview just became
a joke. I look like Lee Alden's speech writer."

"Worse come to worst, it's
a living," Stan said dryly.

She ignored his sarcasm.
"Who could've leaked this?

Stan's lids were half
lowered, his thin, long lips curled in an ironic smile. "Maybe it
was that member of the area press.

She shook her head. "No
way." She stared at the paper in front of her, still incredulous.
"Phil will have my head on a platter for sidestepping this issue.
Or worse," she moaned, remembering his threat. "I'll lose my
job."

"I doubt it."

Suddenly it dawned on her:
"Lee Alden will lose
his
job!"

"That all depends on the
voters," Stan said grimly.
And he'll blame
me,
Emily realized, aghast. It was
unbelievable. Through no fault of her own she -- and Lee -- were
going to go down in flames. She sat at her desk, barely
acknowledging Stan's amused good night, trying to come up with a
way out of the impasse.

At seven o'clock she
walked into Phil Sparke's office with a copy of her interview and
the
USA Today.
"I'm going to make it easy on you, chief," she said, sighing.
"I'm requesting a leave of absence."

Phil yanked the cigar butt
from between his teeth. "What the hell you talkin'
about?"

"Stan was right; I'm in
over my head on the business with Lee Alden. Politics is a big
boy's game. My interview reads like something from a high school
paper," she said with brutal honesty.

She watched him give his
collar a hard yank, always a bad sign. "But that's not the reason
I'm asking for some time off. I have some truly pressing, truly
urgent personal business to take care of. It's affecting the
quality of my work. I simply can't do both anymore. It's a matter,
literally, of life and death."

Phil leaned back in his
chair and deliberately, slowly read the
USA Today
piece, then skimmed
through her interview. It was obvious that he was glancing at her
questions, not the senator's answers. Fina11y he looked up. "'Life
and death' won't cut it. Be specific, Bowditch. Why do you want the
time off?".

"I
can't
, Phil. You know that I would
never ask for a leave if there were another way. I've never cut out
from an assignment, much less from a job, in my life. Begging for
this is taking everything I've got," she added with a desperate
look at him.

He stuck the two-inch butt
in his mouth, then struck a match on the underside of his desk.
After two or three deep drags he got the end of the cigar to glow
again and, with a deft roll, had it anchored in its usual position
on the left side of his mouth. "How long we talkin'?"

She took a deep breath. "A
month, more or less. Effective at once."

"Like hell. You'll finish
out the week. And you'll check in once a week after that. And what
about the historical piece you were doing on that mill family in
Newarth?"

"Oh, I'll definitely
finish that in the next month," she promised without a trace of
irony. "And I have a couple of smaller things I can crank out. One
of them is that piece on dangerous summer toys."

He clamped his jaw and
ground at the end of his cigar, then pushed her interview and the
hated
USA Today
across his desk. "Shitcan this interview. And the paper,
too."

Red-faced, she gathered up
the papers. "I'm sorry about this, Phil."

"I can't guarantee things
will be the same when you come back," he said calmly. "You're good,
I won't deny that. But I can't guarantee."

"I accept that,
chief."

She fled feeling empty,
frightened, and broke.

****

The week passed
uneventfully. Fergus did one of his disappearing acts, leaving
Emily to wonder why. He might have heard her conversation with Phil
and was biding his time, or he might have gone into angry hiding
after their confrontation in the rain. The only excitement in the
week came from a brief statement read by Jim Whitewood, Senator
Alden's aide, to the press. The statement confirmed that in
accordance with Senator Alden's ongoing interest in the paranormal
he had, indeed, attended a channeling the month before. The senator
saw nothing to convince him that anything got channeled.

"Ha! Easy for you to say,"
Emily murmured, watching Whitewood on the Friday evening
news.

She was now officially on
leave and spent the evening clearing the decks for action: tossing
every unread magazine, book, and catalog in her condo. Emptying the
top drawer of her file cabinet. Clearing two shelves of her
bookcase. Moving her desk to face the wall instead of the view.
Formatting a computer disk to hold the mounting volume of
information on Hessiah Talbot's murder. Laying in a supply of junk
food and index cards.

I'm ready,
she decided at midnight.
I'm ready, and I feel good about it.
She really did believe she was the best person to track down
Hessiah's murderer.
Lee won't, and Fergus
can't. It's as simple as that,
she told
herself. She hoped that Fergus would accept her leave of absence as
a kind of token of good faith. The look in his eyes, the sound of
his voice during their last meeting were still very much with her.
He had stirred her soul, and she knew things would never be the
same between them again.

"Not that I have a clue
what they were in the first place," she mumbled, filling a tea
immerser with leaves of Darjeeling.

And then there was Lee
Alden, her slightly eccentric, madly handsome, but all too rational
... ex-lover, would he be? She supposed so. One time -- that was
all they'd had together. Tears welled in her eyes; she blotted them
with her wrists.
Next time fall in love
with someone who has a humbler career,
she
told herself, sliding the kettle off the burner.
Like an astronaut or a brain surgeon.

She poured boiling water
over the metal perforated egg and watched it brew. Suddenly she
seemed to have time for things like this: for watching the water
turn from clear to gold to deep brown. Since she was sixteen, she'd
never gone a whole month without working, without a paycheck. It
didn't seem possible that she'd be doing it now. What
luxury.

It'd be just my luck to
solve the crime tomorrow and have to be back in the office on
Monday.
And here was another first: She
didn't want to. She, the tireless one, was tired of having to be
somewhere on Monday. From waiting on tables to selling shoes to
investigative reporting, she'd had it with Mondays. "Is that all
there is to life?" she whispered. "An endless series of
Mondays?

"It's time to get a cat,"
she said, disgusted by her self-pitying mood. "At least then I
won't be talking to myself all the time."