Final Breath (8 page)

She figured if someone had actually broken into their house and he was still around, a police presence might discourage him from trying again tonight.

"We'll check it out," said the woman on the phone.

"Thanks very--" Sydney fell silent at the sound of a click on the other end of the line. She realized she was talking to no one. Sighing, she hung up the phone.

She worked up a smile for Eli, who now stood in her doorway. At least he'd stopped brandishing the umbrella as if it were a weapon. Now he held it as if it were a walking stick. "They're sending a patrol car to check out the general area," Sydney said, moving to her dresser. "If someone did try to break in, I doubt he'll be back. I think we're okay, honey."

"It's weird nothing got stolen," Eli said, squinting at her. "Do you think it was our ghost?"

From the dresser drawer, Sydney pulled out a pair of long pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. She rolled her eyes. "You blame that
ghost
for everything."

"Well,
something
was screwing around in the kitchen," Eli said. "Think we got rats? I mean, after all, we're right on the water. They say rats like the water."

"I'd rather it be the ghost. Let's go back to that one." Her nightclothes slung over her shoulder, Sydney paused in front of him. "Move it, buddy."

Eli stopped playing with the umbrella and stepped aside. Sydney patted his shoulder as she brushed past him, then she ducked into the bathroom. She heard the floorboards squeak outside the door. He was retreating toward his bedroom. Sydney shed her sleeveless top and started washing her face.

Their
ghost.
For Eli, she always tried to shrug it off as an amusing little curiosity.

In truth, there was some kind of
other presence
in this place. It was why she'd been able to get a six-month lease so cheap. Even with her respectable salary from the network, Sydney couldn't have afforded any of the other apartments in Tudor Court. But this unit was different. Under Washington state law, the property management company was required to tell potential renters about the suicide here in Apartment 9. Sydney didn't get any details, just that a woman had killed herself in the unit about thirty years ago. Sydney used to wonder exactly how the woman had ended her life--and in which room.

Kyle had had misgivings about her moving in there. But Sydney had considered this beautiful, charming place--ready for immediate occupancy--a godsend. She and Eli had been living with Kyle for two very rough, emotional weeks after leaving Chicago. Sydney was eager to get on with their lives and settle in somewhere. And as much as her brother had insisted they were no imposition, Sydney knew they were. Kyle was used to living alone. She slept in his guest room, and Eli had the sofa in the TV room. Half their stuff cluttered up Kyle's immaculate apartment, and the other half was in storage. Sydney figured her brother would urge them to take the first place she didn't
hate
--just to get his life back to normal. Instead, Kyle was cautious.

He used his real estate connections and did a little digging around about Tudor Court's Apartment 9. He didn't uncover anything about the suicide, but he learned that in the last twenty-plus years, that apartment had had the highest turnover rate of all ten units in Tudor Court--and the longest vacancy stretches.

"Some rich doctor from Denver had it as his second home for several years," Kyle told her while barbecuing on his patio one warm night in mid-May. Eli was in the TV room, out of earshot. Sydney didn't want him to know someone had died in their prospective new home. "The Denver doctor wasn't actually there much," Kyle explained, flipping the hamburgers on his gas grill. "But the place is bad news. The guy I talked to on the QT at Tudor Court's property management company said the last renter endured it for only four months. And--get this--the renters before her, some incense-burning Birkenstock couple, they even hired a certified shaman to do a house blessing and exorcise whatever's in there. But I guess it didn't take, because Mr. and Mrs. Birkenstock got the hell out a few weeks before their six-month lease was up."

"So you're saying this place is haunted?" Sydney asked, setting place mats, napkins, and utensils around the umbrella-covered glass-top table near the grill.

"I'm just telling you what the property management guy told me, Syd."

She shrugged. "Well, maybe we can hire that short, little lady with the funny voice from
Poltergeist
. We'll have her throw some tennis balls in a closet, or whatever they did to fix their ghost problem. Listen, Kyle, I really like this place. Plus we can move in right away. If the place is truly haunted, I could always--"

"Pack up again and go back to Joe?" he said, finishing for her.

She frowned, and set down the utensils. They clattered against the glass tabletop. "I wasn't going to say that."

"Yeah, but you were thinking it," Kyle replied soberly. "Let's face it, you're miserable, Syd. All this time, you've been hoping for some excuse to make up with Joe. And hell, maybe you'd have one--if the son of a bitch ever bothered to call you. I really don't think he gives a damn. He probably wouldn't even be talking to his own son if Eli didn't
call him
every day. That's another thing. I used to think Joe was such a great dad. I can't believe he didn't put up more of a fight to keep Eli with him."

"You don't know the whole story," Sydney muttered.

"I know he
hit
you. That's enough for me. That makes him an asshole in my book."

"Can we switch the subject, please?" she said, gazing down at the tabletop.

Kyle was silent for a moment. He flipped the burgers again. "So nothing I've told you about this freaky
Blair Witch
apartment in Tudor Court has changed your mind," he said, finally. "You're still moving in anyway, aren't you, Syd?"

She sighed. "I signed the lease this afternoon."

Sydney didn't know what to expect their first few days and nights in the apartment. She wondered if she'd hear strange voices--faraway moaning, laughing, or crying. Maybe the walls would start bleeding or something. Perhaps the lights would flicker for no reason.

If some kind of
spirit
resided there, it allowed her and Eli to move in their stuff without making its presence known. None of the new pieces from Macy's, Ikea, or Georgetown Furniture Liquidators suddenly toppled over in the night. Doors didn't open or shut by themselves. There was no unexplainable tapping from inside the walls.

The only disturbances were from
outside
--the occasional late-night drunken swimmers, screaming and laughing on the beach. Sydney would crawl out of bed and glance out her window. Often the clandestine swimmers were naked or in their underwear though it was too far away for her to really see anything. No cheap thrills. Still, it made her heart ache for Joe when one night, she spied a young, amorous couple skinny-dipping in the moonlight.

She also understood why Eli--who shared pretty much the same view of the beach she had--suddenly wanted binoculars for his birthday.

They had been in the apartment a little over a week and had unpacked the last of the boxes when it happened. Sydney had just switched off her bedside light to go to sleep one Tuesday night. Down the hallway, Eli had already gone to bed. His door had been closed--and the light off--for at least an hour.

"Mom?"
His voice was muffled.

She sat up, uncertain whether or not he was talking in his sleep.

"Mom, is that you? Mom?"
he repeated, louder and more panicked than before. Then there was a loud crash.

Sydney switched on the light and jumped out of bed.

"Oh, God, Mom!"
he yelled. Dressed in his T-shirt and undershorts, Eli threw open his bedroom door. He almost tripped bolting out of there. "Were you just in my room, Mom?" he asked, catching his balance--and his breath. He braced himself against the corridor wall. "Were you just in there?"

Bewildered, Sydney shook her head.

"Someone came in there--like thirty seconds ago--"

"Honey, it was probably just a dream--"

"I wasn't asleep!" he insisted. "Somebody's in the house! He came in my room and sat down on the end of my bed. I felt it, Mom! He brushed against my foot. I felt the weight on my bed..."

They searched the apartment, both upstairs and downstairs, including the closets. There was no sign of a break-in.

Eli kept insisting that he'd been awake. He'd heard her using the bathroom about ten minutes before this
person
came in his room. He'd thought it had been her at first. He hadn't seen anything, because it had been too dark, but he'd felt someone hovering. Then the person had sat down on the end of his bed. In his panic, Eli had knocked over the Homer Simpson lamp on his night table while trying to turn on the light.

Homer had survived the fall, but the bulb had gotten smashed. Eli slipped into his jeans and shoes and helped her clean up the glass. It took him another hour to settle down for bed again. But after that night, he wanted the hallway light on and kept his bedroom door open. The last time Eli had needed a light on so he could go to sleep, he'd been eight years old.

Sydney didn't tell him the place had a vague history of weird occurrences. She didn't have to. He figured it out on his own a week later, after a second, similar late-night episode in his bedroom. He claimed he also heard voices this time--a soft, undecipherable muttering and a woman crying. Eli bought himself a night-light. Sydney thought about doing the same thing. She had her own
night visitor
. She didn't hear voices, but otherwise it was just as Eli had described it--an inexplicable sensation that someone was
hovering
over her as she lay in bed. It had happened enough times that Sydney tried to discern a pattern in the erratic visits. Was it a certain day of the week--or a particular time of night? Not really. Was the bedroom window open or closed that last time she'd been spooked out? She couldn't be sure. She became very superstitious, a slave to certain illogical bedtime rituals to ward off whatever was haunting her and Eli--until another unnerving
night visit
proved those rituals meaningless.

She went online and researched how to deal with a ghost. Apparently in some haunted houses, a happy cohabitation of the living and the spirit residents was quite possible. The Web sites recommended acknowledging the ghost, talking to it, and asking it to leave--even shouting at it if necessary.

"Okay, dude, I'm going to bed now," Eli had taken to announcing some nights--right after brushing his teeth. "I gotta have my sleep. You need to leave me the hell alone for the next eight hours." From her study downstairs, Sydney would hear him some nights going through his bedtime monologue. They tried to make jokes and shrug it off as a minor annoyance--just one of those things that came with living there.

But it was still unnerving.

The bathroom seemed to be the center of this paranormal activity. Sydney had a framed Georgia O'Keefe print on the bathroom wall. For no logical reason, it fell to the floor on three different occasions--the glass shattering twice. She finally put the print away and left the wall blank. Twice, water started gushing out of the bathtub faucet on its own--both times late at night. She'd had to crawl out of bed and switch off the valve under the sink. Eli called the occurrences
water raids
.

Sydney suspected her son might have exaggerated some of his own brushes with the supernatural, and maybe--out of boredom or resentment toward her--he'd been triggering the water raids himself.

But one night last week, Sydney had felt that otherworldly
presence
while in the bathroom. Washing her face, she half-expected to catch a glimpse of something in the medicine chest mirror--a dark figure lurking behind her or a strange light. By the time she'd dried off her face and switched off the bathroom light, Sydney had managed to give herself a thorough case of the creeps. She was just down the hall, about to step into her bedroom, when she heard the water start in the tub. A chill raced through her. That made three times. She waited in the corridor and listened. The gushing only lasted a few moments, and then there was a steady drip. She crept back to the bathroom, and switched on the light. "Oh, God," she whispered. One of the towel racks was bare; the two bath towels that had been draped over it were strewn across the floor.

The door to Eli's room had remained shut the entire time.

Sydney often thought the woman who killed herself in this apartment years and years ago must have done it in this bathroom.

Drying off her face, Sydney glanced down at the old, chipped powder blue and white tiled floor and wondered if the body had been discovered here, curled up by the toilet. She knew when people overdosed they sometimes died on or near the toilet. Or perhaps the woman had cut her wrists in the sink or in the bathtub.

Was that why their
night visitor
kept coming back to this bathroom?

A sudden, loud pounding on the door startled her.

"Mom?"

"What? What is it, honey?" she called back, a hand over her heart.

"The phone light's blinking," Eli said. "You got a message. I checked caller ID. I thought it might be Dad, but it looks like someone in New York."

"You have one new message," the computerized recording told her ten minutes later. Sydney had taken the cordless phone out of the kitchen and now sat at her office desk. Nearly all the wall space was taken up by shelves and cabinets full of books, files, and equipment. But there was a small space beneath her window that had framed family photos--and Joe was in some of them. There wasn't one of just him alone.

Eli had the TV on in the living room. Sydney could hear him channel surfing with the remote control. She'd already checked the caller ID. Eli had been right; the call had been from New York. Someone from the network had phoned--probably about an assignment. She was supposed to be on a summer vacation, but that had never stopped them before.