Emily's Ghost (6 page)

"Kimberly -- should we
begin, dear, do you think?" It was Mrs. Lividus, moving things
along with a brusque but not unkindly push.

"Oh, okay, Aunt Lois.
Should I sit in the big chair again?"

"Why don't you,
dear."

The girl nestled into an
overstuffed armchair that had its back to an enormous brick
fireplace. Emily and the senator sat side by side on a painfully
hard horsehair sofa opposite. Mrs. Lividus stood behind them for
the moment, while the two others sat on each side of Kimberly in
oak spindle chairs. There was no table to rap, no trumpet to speak
through. The professor from Harvard produced a writing tablet, the
publisher a yellow pad. Emily jerked her head around to the
senator, hoping for permission also to take notes, but he frowned
again and shook his head imperceptibly.

Disappointed, Emily turned
her attention back to the girl. She had no idea what to expect. The
senator had said that Kimberly was a trance medium---that
disembodied voices might speak through a spirit "control" that took
possession of her. Assuming the poltergeist felt like talking,
would he speak through Kimberly directly, Emily mused, or did he
have to speak through a control?

Probably there's a certain
protocol, she thought wryly.

Kimberly laid her head
back into the dark green armchair and became quiet. She let her
half-closed eyes fall on Emily's rose crystal and murmured,
"Pretty." Then her eyelids fluttered shut. Mrs. Lividus dimmed the
lights, which put Emily instantly on the alert. Kimberly began to
yawn repeatedly. Soon after, her body fell into a slump. Her
breathing became heavy and even; she seemed to be asleep. Emily had
an impression, nothing more, that a trickle of tears flowed down
the girl's pale cheek.

The lights dimmed even
more. Emily strained to see. As soon as her eyes adjusted to the
darker room, the lights were turned down yet again, forcing her to
adjust again. It was distracting--and worse, disorienting. She felt
drugged, but she'd taken no refreshment there. She tried to focus
on something, anything--the paisley pattern of the oriental carpet.
But it was no use; the paisley spiraled madly beneath her, a
Persian maelstrom pulling her down, down into its
depths.

What saved her at last was
a sound she knew well: the scratching of pencils on tablets. Yes,
yes, notes! They were taking notes! Two men--educated men, rational
men -- were taking notes! They were watching a girl take a nap and
calmly recording their observations. She clung to the sound of the
pencils as a drowning sailor would to a floating log, miserably
grateful for its existence.

And then the pencil
scratching suddenly stopped, as a low moan came from the girl,
followed by a voice -- a shockingly male and angry voice -- that
said,
"I'll damn well go where I please
and do what I damn well want!"

There was a pause, and
then the man's voice again, now melancholy:
"Merciful God ... I cannot stand it any
more
." And then a cry -- a piercing,
blood-curdling cry that ripped through the hushed and darkened
parlor. Kimberly shuddered and awoke.

Immediately Mrs. Lividus
turned up the lights and went to her niece. Pressing her cheek to
the dazed and tear-stained face of the girl, she murmured
reassurances. The New Age publisher let out his breath in a rush,
as if he'd been holding it all night. The Harvard professor nodded
quietly to himself and resumed his note-taking. The senator was
leaning forward with furrowed brows and his elbows resting on his
knees, the fingers of his hands tented together, forefingers
pressed against his lips, as he studied Kimberly in the arms of her
aunt.

And Emily? She saw
everything in incredible detail. She missed none of it, from Aunt
Lois's apparent distress at her niece's pain, to the chip on the
Majolica plate that stood on the mantle behind them. It gave her
mind something to do while her body remained frozen In place on the
horsehair sofa. The temperature in the parlor seemed to have fallen
thirty degrees; she had goose bumps on her arms.

I don't like
this
, she thought.
This is sick and unkind, to the girl if nothing else. She's
obviously deeply disturbed.

Mrs. Lividus had whipped
out an enormous hanky and was handing it to the girl to blow her
nose. She placed her substantial bulk between her niece and the
audience, and that broke the spell for Emily. She turned her
attention back to the senator, who seemed still entranced, and
wondered:
Why does he bother with this
stuff? He's not old; he's not suffering from terminal disease. He
doesn't lead a dull and hopeless life.
He
continued to amaze her. Here was a man with looks, brains, charm,
money and power, who still needed to believe that after death we'd
all truck merrily along in some slightly altered astral
form.

The senator turned just
then and gave her an ironic and utterly charming smile. Her heart
fell down to the floor and when she picked it up again, she thought
it might be broken. She listened for the beat. Ta-thump ta-thump
ta-thump. Nope. Everything was still okay. But the incident gave
her a fresh new slant:
of course
he'd want himself to go on; how could he bear to
see himself end?

The senator locked his
fingers and thrust them outward in a quick stretch. He stood up and
turned to Emily. "I've seen enough. Have you?"

Emily glanced back at the
small group. Kimberly was pretty much out of her trance; the men
were packing up their things. The s
é
ance was over.

"Will there be tea and
cookies?" she asked the senator with an innocent smile. She wasn't
about to let him know that she'd been shaken by the
event.

His grimace was reasonably
good-humored. "Don't be a snot. C'mon. Let's say good-night to our
hostess." He took Emily by the arm -- she was very aware that it
was the first time he'd ever touched her -- and guided her towards
Mrs. Lividus.

The girl's aunt was upset,
or acting that way. Her brow was furrowed and she seemed
distracted. "Oh, yes, Senator, hmmn, well, it was good of you to
come," she said, almost mumbling the words. "I -- could I see you
for just one moment, Senator?" she added in an earnest
voice.

The senator acquiesced and
she took him aside, where the two spoke in quiet undertones. Emily
was left to create small-talk with Kimberly. What could you say to
someone who'd just been taken over by a demon, inner
or
outer? "At least it
wasn't for long"?

The Harvard professor and
the New Age publisher were making no attempt at all to join them.
Maybe they were all going out afterward to a late supper. Maybe
they were Kimberly's handlers or agents or whatever. Maybe they
were afraid of the girl; Emily was.

So she treaded water while
she waited for the senator. Afterward she remembered saying inane
things like: "I hope this wasn't too much of an imposition." And:
"Have you been doing this for very long?" And worst of all: "I had
a really interesting time."

To everything that Emily
said, Kimberly just shook her head in sad silence. At the end she
fixed her pale, tear-stained eyes on Emily and said only, "I'm
sorry."

Puzzled and flat out of
chit-chat, Emily decided to wait in silence for the senator. She
saw him put his hand on Mrs. Lividus's shoulder and saw the elderly
woman impulsively take his other hand in both of hers, clinging to
it and murmuring emotional good-byes.

Yep. The man had her vote.
And probably a campaign contribution as well. These guys ran for
office from one end of the year to the other. She wondered if there
was a Political Action Committee for Psychics, and whether he'd
ever taken an honorarium from them for a speech. An interesting
angle for a story.

Mrs. Lividus let the two
of them out with a warm smile and a friendly good-bye, and despite
everything, Emily found herself liking the woman. She said so to
the senator as he walked her in near darkness to her
Corolla.

"Lois Lividus isn't
actually Kimberly's aunt," he explained, "but a second or third
cousin by marriage. She's Hungarian, and in her village she was
considered to be something of a psychic healer. She was the first
to recognize Kimberly's so-called abilities. When she came back
East from her visit with Kimberly's family in California, the girl
came with her."

"Kimberly's parents didn't
mind?" asked Emily, incredulous.

"They minded," the senator
answered cryptically. "Watch your step here," he warned.

Almost as soon as he said
it Emily tripped on a rock and fell forward. The senator grabbed
her and kept her from going head over heels; she ended up more or
less in his arms. Emily had considered a dozen different endings to
the s
é
ance, but
she hadn't considered this one. She felt herself blushing furiously
-- both because of her clumsiness and his nearness -- but in the
light of the two-watt bulb that bleared over the entry door it was
impossible to read the senator's face.

"All in one piece?" he
asked in a whisper that she thought was more polite than
husky.

"Sure. Sorry.
Dumb."
So. I no longer can form
sentences.
This was interesting. Was it
Kimberly who'd addled her brain, or the rock?

He released her. She hated
herself for feeling disappointment when he did. "Now comes the real
trickery-- getting out of here," she quipped, mostly for something
to say.

"Just fall in behind me;
I've done battle with this driveway before. And, look--can we have
coffee somewhere? You're looking shaky on your pins, and you've got
a long ride home. An evening like this can be a little
unsettling."

"In every way," she
admitted, and then instantly regretted it.

"Yes. Well." The silence,
like the darkness, loomed between them. "There's a coffee shop not
far from here," he said at last in a softer, lower voice. "Will you
follow me to it?"

"Thanks," she answered in
a voice as soft, as low. "I will."

Emily got in the Corolla
and bumped and bounced her way out the drive behind the senator's
BMW, all the while thinking,
What just
went on here? Anything?
Yes. No. Or maybe;
it was the kind of night where anything was possible. She had to
smile: in sixty minutes she'd gone from fearing being abducted into
a cult to wondering if one of the most eligible single men in
America was coming on to her.

"In your dreams, girl,"
she said aloud, with a laugh. She was letting herself get tangled
in the house's cobwebs. By the time the senator pulled his car onto
the dirt-and-gravel parking lot of the Time Out
Caf
é
, she'd vowed
ten times over to resist the man's spell and come down hard. She
owed it to the taxpayer.

The Time Out was one of
those little diners with vinyl tablecloths and polyester lace that
always seem to be located next to a John Deere dealer. It was
clean, cozy, and empty. With less than an hour to go before
closing, the owner was refilling the ketchup bottles and packing
Sweet 'N Lows into the pressed-glass sugarbowls that were standard
issue at every table. They took the table farthest from the
counter, which wasn't very far, and the senator held up two
fingers. The owner nodded and brought them two coffees. Emily
wondered whether the senator had been there before.

"Well, what did you
think?" the senator asked as soon as they were left alone.
"Self-hypnosis? Delusion? Hallucination?"

"Mine or hers?" asked
Emily, peeling away the top of a creamer packet.

He looked impressed that
she'd done her homework. "Touch
é
," he said with a smile. "But no, I
don't think I'd ever consider you the type to have a fantasy-prone
personality."

"You probably don't mean
that as a compliment," she countered with an even look.

"I do and I don't. I was
hoping you'd walk in to the s
é
ance with a really open
mind--"

"I did!"

"Do you think so? I
watched you as we went through the house. You were like a kid at a
carnival. Nothing would've pleased you more than to have had a
table levitate. You'd have been all over it, looking for
cables."

"I consider myself a
reasonable skeptic," she replied with dignity.

He sighed. "I suppose it's
a sign of the times," he added, sitting back in his chair. "A
hundred years ago people would've run from a haunted house. Now
everybody wants to spend the night."

"Blame it on Stephen
King," she answered, laughing. "He's made fans of us all." She was
liking the senator a lot just now. For a believer, he was awfully
tolerant of her mocking ways.

She was liking the senator
for another reason as well: he was looking at her over the rim of
his coffee cup with eyes so crystal-blue that it made her ache to
have to look away. But she couldn't just gawk at him like some
political groupie. So she looked away.