Emily's Ghost (5 page)

"Oh, Senator, please let
me come. Please."

There was another long,
unbearable pause. She forced herself to remain silent, to wait him
out. When at last he spoke he said, "Let me give you a time and
place --"

Yes! "I appreciate this so
much, Senator."

"Naturally the
s
é
ance, like this
telephone conversation, is off the record."

"
What
?"

"It has to be. I'm
sorry."

She absorbed the blow
well, all things considered. "I understand, Senator," she answered
calmly. It didn't matter. Somehow, someway, she'd finagle some kind
of qualified permission from him. Or she'd imply what she needed to
say. Or she'd work through third-party quotes. But the story of
"The Senator and the S
é
ance" would be told. There wasn't a doubt in her
mind.

The senator arranged to
meet Emily on the following Tuesday in Westford, Massachusets, and
gave her simple, clear directions for getting there. He said very
little about the nature of the sitting, only that there would be
some attempt to communicate beyond the living. The sitting was
scheduled to take place just outside the town, in a farmhouse with
a reputation for hauntings --frosting on the cake, as far as Emily
was concerned.

The week sped by. Emily
was as good as her word and said nothing to Stan either about the
phone call or the upcoming s
é
ance. Part of her, a big part,
wanted to one-up Stanley Cooper once and for all. And unless her
phone had been tapped by him the other day, that's exactly what she
would do.

When Tuesday came, Emily
was very careful to dress and behave exactly as she always did.
That meant a plain white shirt, a casual jacket, and stone-washed
jeans. That meant showing up early, eating lunch at her desk, and
exchanging sharp-edged banter with the boys all day. The only break
in routine -- it couldn't be helped -- came when she announced she
was ducking out early.

"Where to?" asked
Stan.

"Library," she said
briefly, pulling a vinyl cover over her computer screen.

Stan gave her a sharp
look. "Where's your book bag?"

"In the car."

"You brought your car? The
library's a block away."

"Not for that. I'm meeting
someone--Cara. For supper." She locked her desk.

But Stan was feeling
suddenly expansive. "Hey, how's Cara doing? God, it's been a
while," he said, leaning back in his chair and
stretching.

Stan had met Cara exactly
once, in the newsroom. At the time he'd called her a
silver-spooner. Now all of a sudden he was talking as if they'd
been raised in the same orphanage.
He
knows I'm up to something
, she thought,
dismayed. How did he do it?

"I'll tell her you said
hi," Emily said with a tight smile, and fled.

She shrugged off the
thought of Stan Cooper the way she would a wet sweater. He could
guess all he wanted, but he'd never actually know, not before she
was good and ready to let him know.

By the time she'd grabbed
a hamburger and shifted the Corolla into fifth gear on Route 128,
her mind was focused completely on the evening ahead of her. It
seemed to her an extraordinary thing that a U.S. Senator was
willing to risk looking like a jerk a week before a scheduled
interview. Where was the angle here? He couldn't be hoping to
impress her with his sincerity. Being a sincere believer in ghosts
wasn't exactly a character asset.

Was he hoping to
make
her
a
believer? Impossible. He must know that. Unless .... A wildly
irrational fear seized her. What if he belonged to some kind of
cult, and they were going to brainwash her, and she'd come out of
the haunted house some kind of, whatever, some kind of zombie or
something ....

Get a grip, girl. He's a
senator. You're a journalist. You're not driving into the Twilight
Zone; you're headed for Westford, Mass., a no doubt nice little
bedroom community to a bunch of yuppies from
Boston
.

Still, a person couldn't
underestimate the hypnotizing power of sheer personality. The
senator had it to spare. And more. What a charismatic man, she
thought, a little depressed. So that's what people really vote for:
the smile, the voice, the low chuckle. He'd certainly caught
her
off guard once.
Well, twice. But he wouldn't get away with it a third time. She was
ready for him tonight.

Which led her to another
possibility. What if the evening were set up as an elaborate
hoax--screens and rapping tables and flying trumpets, that kind of
thing? Obviously some of these people were really good; too many
otherwise intelligent observers had been sucked in by them. She
smiled grimly to herself.
Try pulling a
fast one, Senator, and our gentlemen's agreement is null and
void.

She played around with
various scenarios in her head, and by the time she turned off Route
495 onto the road to Westford, she was actually hoping for
something outrageous to happen. A haunted house and a debutante
medium -- it gave whole new meaning to the phrase
coming
out
.

Emily found Easton Lane,
which was unmarked, but she had an awful time finding the house.
She travelled the mile of potholed road up and then back down again
before she noticed a car turn into a driveway that was all but
hidden by overgrown shrubs. The car was a BMW. The senator had said
he'd be in one. She turned in after it, sidled around a huge
exposed rock in the center of the winding drive, rolled up her
window to keep out the scratchy branches that were poking their way
in, and fetched up in a kind of clearing, in the middle of which
stood a slate-roofed farmhouse made of stone.

The house was at least two
hundred years old and closer to three. At both ends huge crumbling
chimneys, cast in silhouette by the setting sun, stood like
brooding sentinels. A towering pine loomed over the heavy
Dutch-door entry to the house, throwing it into premature darkness.
Massive shutters, their black panels peeling, hung unused and
uncared for. The only light was lurid light -- streaks of red
sunset, cutting across the tattered, overgrown scene. From high
overhead a purple finch warbled notes of piercing sweetness, a
simple song of renewal amid continuing decay.

Emily tried hard to resist
being affected by it all, but it wasn't easy; the atmosphere of
foreboding was overwhelming her. She touched her hand to the
crystal she wore -- she'd begun to regard it as a good-luck charm
-- and looked around for the BMW. It must have gone alongside the
house, because suddenly the senator emerged from there with a smile
and a wave. Her heart lifted unreasonably in her breast.

A human being, she thought
gratefully. "I'm definitely glad I saw your car, Senator," she
said, her spirits rising. "I could never have found this place on
my own."

The senator, dressed in
khakis and blazer, seemed grateful that she came. "I was here once
before," he said, taking her hand in a warm grip. "The house was
just as shabby then, but the owner was keeping the grounds up. The
woman was an avid gardener right up until the time she died, at
ninety-six."

"Is she the one who's
supposed to be haunting the place?" Emily asked with an awkward
giggle. The truth was, she was feeling very nervous and ill at
ease.

"You continue to be
amused," the senator answered in the deepening twilight. "I suppose
I can't blame you. No, it was the old woman herself who complained
about the hauntings. At first no one took her seriously. She was in
her seventies at the time and people sometimes get a little
paranoid at that age. She was living here with her grandson. The
grandson was twelve when he moved in with her, after his mother
died of pneumonia. The hauntings apparently began two years
later."

Emily glanced at the door
to the house. It did not open for them, and the senator seemed in
no hurry to approach it. So she said, "Maybe the boy resented being
stuck out here, and was just trying to frighten his
grandmother."

"That's the obvious
conclusion. The boy really was angry and resentful, about a lot of
things--the death first of his father, then his mother; having to
leave Boston and his pals. That's a tough age, anyway," the senator
added, sounding as if he remembered it well.

"But," he continued,
"credible witnesses said they were in the house when objects flew
off shelves, pictures fell from walls of their own volition,
windows blew out from their frames--"

"A poltergeist?" She tried
to look scientific.

The senator shrugged.
"Some say that. There's another theory going around: that any
so-called poltergeist is really a manifestation of a kind of
nervous energy in a disturbed child. Either way, it's intriguing,
don't you think?"

He was baiting her. He
couldn't be serious. And when where they going in to the damned
s
é
ance, anyway?
The bugs had turned fierce. Suddenly Emily was annoyed. "So you're
saying a disturbed child either attracts destructive energy or
projects it from his subconscious. Fine. What happens when the kid
grows up? What happened when this kid grew up?"

The senator was leaning
against her Corolla, perfectly at ease, as if he'd chanced upon her
at a Washington soir
é
e. "The hauntings stopped."

"There you are," Emily
said, triumphantly. "Can we go in now?"

"They'll let us know," he
answered, and went back to his train of thought. "Trouble is,
there've been new disturbances since the old woman's death two
years ago. A young Boston couple bought this place with all its
furnishings, intending to renovate it. Two weeks later they moved
out. The place is for sale and there are no takers."

"The market's flat all
over," she said, just to be perverse. "Is that why we're here
tonight? To identify the ghost?"

Again he shrugged, only by
now it was dark. Emily had a sensation of broad shoulders shifting,
but that was all. It really was eerie, and she really did not like
it. She saw thin slits of dim light through slightly parted drapes.
It was all so obvious now: first the senator would frighten her out
of her wits, then they'd pull her inside for some stunt. Maybe the
senator thought it would be funny. Maybe it was all a practical
joke. Maybe Stan Cooper was inside. Ha-ha-ha. Very
amusing.

Suddenly the door to the
stone house opened wide and Emily jumped. A stout middle-aged
woman, perfectly pleasant, appeared in the doorway and said with a
friendly wave, "Hello. I hope we haven't kept you waiting,
senator."

Emily and the senator
approached her and she held out her hand. "I'm Mrs. Lividus. You
must be Emily Bowditch. I'm so glad you agreed to come. Come along,
and I'll introduce you to our Kimberly."

She led the way. Emily
turned to the senator with eyebrows raised. "Kimberly?" she
whispered.

The senator whispered
back, "Her mother wasn't psychic."

"Well, that explains it,"
she murmured dryly.

She looked around
curiously at the darkly ornate Victorian furnishings, half
expecting to see Vincent Price tucked in a wing chair somewhere.
But when they reached the sitting room they found only a young,
very pretty girl and two gentlemen. Emily learned that the man with
the beard was a professor of philosophy at Harvard. The other--from
San Francisco--was a publisher and editor of New Age books. It was
impressive company--if they were who they said they
were.

As for the girl: she
looked exactly like a Kimberly. She had fair skin, straight blonde
hair and long legs set off by an emerald shirtwaist dress of
silk.

But Emily had been
expecting a gypsy, someone with dark hair and eyes and called
Allana or Sabrina. "I look more like a medium than she does," she
managed in an aside to the senator as they approached the girl for
introductions. She stole a sideways glance at her companion and saw
him frown. It occurred to her for the first time that she could
push the skeptic thing too far with this man.

Kimberly turned out to be
as sweet as her name. She was remarkably attractive. She wore not a
trace of makeup, only some pale lip-liner. Her porcelain skin and
pale green eyes gave the impression of openness and
naivet
é
, and
nothing in her brief exchange with Emily changed that
impression.

"What a pretty necklace,"
said Kimberly, singling out the pinkish crystal that Emily wore.
Her hand reached out, as Emily's had so often in the past week, to
stroke the crystal.

"Thank you," Emily said.
"I bought it on a whim. I shouldn't have. I'm not at all the type
for it, but you know how it is: you're feeling like you just ought
to get
something
,
and --" Emily felt a slight pressure from the senator's elbow and
stopped mid-babble. What was she doing? No one in the room wanted
to hear about her shopping spree.

Except maybe Kimberly.
"Oh, I know what you mean," she said in her gentle, childlike
voice. "Sometimes I do that and I get home and I wonder what I was
thinking of. Once I bought a live parrot --"