The Empty Desk (8 page)

“It's Melinda,” Ned said. He was still using Eli's laptop, in search of anything that might help him discover who the ghost was, but he fished his phone out of his pocket as soon as it rang.

“Better answer it then,” said Eli. “Whatever she has to say might have a bearing on what you're trying to find. Might save you a little time too.”

He had barely said a word while Ned had run his fingers over the keys, responding only when Ned had something to say. He had made notes on the pad in front of him from time to time, but he left Ned to his own investigation without interference. It didn't stop Ned from being highly aware of his presence.

“Melinda,” he said. “What's new?”

“Not a lot,” she replied. “I was calling to see if you were serious about trying to do some research for me?”

“I'm already on it.”

“You are?” There was no hiding the surprise in her voice.

“Oh, nothing much yet,” he said. “I've had a talk with Eli about how I should go about it. We're hoping you might have found something out to make the job a little easier.”

“I'm afraid not. I'm sure that the girl's name is Alice, but that's about it.”

“That's a shame. Did you get to talk to her?”

“No. I was hoping that I would get the chance when the rest of the children left the classroom, but she disappeared with them. I'm going to have to go back again and try to get her to talk to me. It's the only way I'm going to be able to help her.”

Ned looked up to see that Eli was holding up his pad.

“How old was she?” he read.

“Five or six,” she said. “I wouldn't think that she was any older than that.”

Ned repeated this to Eli, who nodded and turned over the page to reveal another question.

“How long do you think she's been dead?” he read again, then added the single word beneath it. “Clothes?”

“Oh, yes,” Melinda replied. “I didn't get any real sense of how long she might have been dead, but her clothes looked a little dated. I would have said that they could easily have been ten or twenty years old. Maybe even older than that.”

“Ten or twenty years?” he repeated.

“I could be wrong,” she said. “And there's always the chance that they were hand-me-downs that had been passed down from an older sister. There was some kind of badge embroidered onto the shirt she was wearing, but I didn't recognize it. I don't think I saw anything else that might identify her.”

By the time Eli held up another question, Ned was becoming tired of being just the middle man, relaying information between the two of them.

“Hold on, Melinda,” he said. “I'll pass you over to Eli. I think he may have a few more questions for you.”

He handed the cell phone over to the other man, who looked at it for a moment, pressed a button, then placed it down on the desk.

“Hi, Melinda. It's Eli. We're on speakerphone. Can you hear me okay?”

“Hi, Eli,” Melinda answered, her voice sounding a little tinny.

“Can you describe the girl for me? What color was her hair? Anything you can think of could make the difference between being able to track her down and not.”

“Blonde,” she said. “Her hair was blonde. I didn't really get much of a chance to look at her full in the face, but I would have said she had blue or maybe green eyes. I can ask Aiden when I pick him up from his friend's house. He might have noticed something else.”

“That would be great, thanks, but don't worry if he can't remember anything straightaway. He might think of something later.”

“I'm going to try to go into the school again sometime tomorrow, but if you manage to find out who the girl might have been, give me a call.”

“No problem. I'll call you this evening to give you an update if that's okay, whether we've found anything out or not.”

The offer of a telephone call was turned into an invitation for them both to drop by the next weekend if they were free.

“It would be good to catch up,” she said. “It seems like forever since I last saw you, Eli.”

Dana returned her call later that afternoon, and Melinda was relieved to hear that the children had enjoyed her talk. Dana told her that they had spent a fair amount of time talking about the different things they could make pictures with, that they didn't just have to use pencils or paint. It sounded like they were going to be making a lot of their own art for the next few weeks at least. Melinda was already looking forward to hearing what Aiden's own ideas were. She didn't want to spoil the surprise by asking Dana too much about it.

“Sorry I got caught up with that ruckus outside the class,” Dana said. “Boys will be boys, and sometimes it takes a woman to put them in their place. I hope you didn't hang around too long?”

“Don't worry. I could see that you were busy and guessed that it might not be a simple thing to sort out, so I slipped away. I hope you didn't mind.”

“Of course I didn't. I'm just glad that you didn't waste too much of your time hanging around waiting for me.”

“Not at all,” Melinda said.

They were skirting around the reason they both wanted to speak to each other. The talk to the children might have been important and the disturbance afterward a distraction, but it was the ghost who sat at the apparently empty desk that had led them to being in that room together. The child who was still attending school long after her death.

“So did you see her?” Dana asked.

“She was there, but she disappeared as soon as the children started filing out of the classroom. I waited for a couple of minutes, but she didn't come back.”

“So you didn't get to speak to her? I was hoping that you might have had the chance while I was sorting out the troublemakers.”

“I had hoped that she would have stayed behind to talk to me too, but no such luck.”

“But it was definitely a girl? I mean, you got a good look at her?”

“Oh, sure. She was there the whole time I was there, and she seemed to be paying attention as much as the other children. And she knew that I could see her. Maybe she just needs to overcome her shyness.”

“A shy ghost? Is there such a thing?”

“You'd be surprised,” Melinda said. “There can be as many different kinds of ghosts as there are people. And you can't trust them all.”

“So you still don't have any idea of who she might be.”

It was more of a statement than a question, but there was no accusation of failure hidden within the words. But she was right. Melinda didn't feel any closer to knowing who the girl was than when she had woken up that morning.

“I've got Ned working on it,” she said.

“Do you think he's got enough to go on?”

“I'm sure that you're right about the girl's name being Alice, and at least now he has a description of what she looks like. Or at least what she must have looked like in life.”

“Oh?” The interest in Dana's voice rose a notch. “What does she look like?”

Melinda repeated the description, but it didn't bring forth any sudden idea of who the girl might have been, no long-forgotten memory jogged back into the light.

“Do you think Ned will be able to find anything from that? It doesn't seem like very much.”

“He's got someone else at the university helping him with it. Maybe they'll come up with something between them.”

“Another ghost hunter?”

“We're not ghost hunters,” Melinda laughed. “We have more than enough ghosts coming to us for help without us having to go looking for them.”

“You don't just happen to see them, then?”

“Oh, I see them often enough, but they don't all approach me. Sometimes they find out about me somehow and come to me for help. I was hoping that I might be able to slip into your classroom again in the morning,” she said. “Maybe you could keep the children in the corridor for a moment before they all go in.”

“Do you think that might help?”

Melinda shrugged, even though she knew that her friend would not be able to see it.

“I don't know, but I hope so. Maybe she sticks with the other children, going in and out with them, or maybe she just turns up when the bell rings for the start of class. At the moment I'm just trying to guess what she might do without having a great deal to go on.”

“Sure, I can play for time, but it might be hard to make it last for more than a few minutes before someone starts asking questions.”

“A couple of minutes might be all it takes,” Melinda said. She certainly hoped it would be that easy.

“Then I'll see you in the morning,” Dana said. “Hope you get the chance to talk to her.”

The lights were on in the repair shop when Melinda and Delia pulled up later that afternoon—which had passed without a phone call. Delia's car was still inside with the hood up, but there was no sign of anyone working on it. Clearly Jez's son still hadn't been able to solve the problem of the strange noise yet. Delia gave a heavy sigh when she saw it, but that was all that was holding her anger back.

“I'm not paying him a cent until he's fixed it,” she said. “I don't know why I even brought it back to this place. I could have taken it to one of the big, fancy repair shops. I'm sure someone there would have been able to get to the cause of the problem in a fraction of the time it has taken this guy.”

“You'd have paid through the nose, though, if you'd taken it to one of those places,” Melinda offered.

“Maybe, but at least it would have been back on the road and I would have been driving it around, rather than relying on people like you and Ned for rides. It doesn't look good, Melinda.”

“Since when have you worried about how things look? I didn't think that kind of thing mattered to you.”

“It doesn't,” she said, though Melinda suspected that success might have started to go to her head, just a little. It had taken a while for her real-estate business to take off, but now she could afford to pay other people to do most of the work if she wanted to take more of a back seat.

“Let's do this, then,” Delia said as she opened the door and climbed out. No sooner was she out of the car, though, than Jez took her place, catching Melinda by surprise, even though she knew she should have expected him.

“I wondered when you'd be back,” he said. “I hope you're going to sort him out this time. Don't take any nonsense from him.”

“Mr. Lowe, you're just going to have to let me deal with this my way,” Melinda said. She hated it when spirits told her how she should be dealing with things that they were no longer able to.

“Is he here?” Delia said, bending down so she could look back inside the car. “Can he hear me?”

“Of course I can hear you,” he said, though it was clear that Delia could not hear him. She could not even be sure that he was there.

“Yes, he's here and he can hear you loud and clear. There's no need to raise your voice.”

“Okay, Jez,” Delia said. “Why don't you give us a few minutes to have a word with your son and we'll see what happens. I'm sure that Melinda will be able to sort this out, and then maybe you can find your way out of here.”

“She's done a great job so far,” he said sarcastically, but Melinda didn't bother to pass the message on. Instead she climbed out of the car and slammed the door behind her.

“Come on,” she said and started across the street toward the light of the repair shop.

“What did he say?” Delia asked as she hurried after.

“Doesn't matter,” Melinda said. “But he clearly doesn't think I'm up to his exacting standards. I want to get this sorted out so we can send him on his way.”

“That's not being very charitable,” Delia said. “You shouldn't badmouth the dead.”

Melinda stopped when she reached the sidewalk.

“Are you kidding me? If you knew how much of a pain some of these ghosts can be, you wouldn't be saying that. You'd want to get a medal for service above and beyond the call of duty.” She turned without waiting for a response and carried on marching toward the open door.

No one was working on the car this time.

“Mr. Lowe?” she called out, but there was no reply. There was no sign of anyone in the workshop or in the small customer waiting room next to it either. The office was empty, but it was clear by the amount of paperwork that had built up on the desk that he had not been coping with that any better than he had been with the business itself. It was a mess. Maybe the old man was right after all. Maybe this was all too much for him.

“Who's there?” came a call from outside the door at the back of the building. A moment later Jez's son appeared in the doorway, then saw Melinda and Delia waiting for him. “Oh, it's you.”

“Have you fixed my baby yet?” Delia demanded. “I think you've had her long enough.”

“It's proving more difficult than I thought,” he said apologetically.

“Still? Are you sure you're up to this job?” Delia asked. Melinda could tell that she was in danger of losing her temper. If she did, the man was unlikely to have any idea of what hit him.

“Please don't,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “You sound as bad as my father. He never thought I was good enough either. I really don't need this.”

Melinda tried not to look at the pile of papers on the desk. She was sure that he would only take it as another accusation of failure, and while she was starting to feel that might be the case, she didn't want to make him feel any worse about it. She needed him to open up a little if she was going to get to the bottom of this, and that wasn't going to happen if he turned against her again. Melinda already knew that she was going to have to work to get him back onside, and that might mean revealing that she had seen his father's ghost. But that would be a gamble, a final throw of the dice, and she wasn't sure that she was ready for that. At least, not yet.

“If you'd rather that Delia took her car somewhere else, I'm sure that wouldn't be a problem,” Melinda suggested. She tried to sound reasonable, as if she was on his side and giving him the chance to have the problem taken away from him.

“Of course it would be a problem,” he said. “If she takes it anywhere else, they'll ask who looked after it before them. It wouldn't take long before the whole town knew that customers are going somewhere else. I've lost a few customers just because Dad was no longer running this place. That was hard enough, but they were also sending out the message that they didn't trust me to take his place, even if they weren't saying anything bad.”

“Well, maybe they're right,” said Delia, her arms folding tight across her chest. “You don't seem to be able to sort my car out. If you're not up to the job, it should come as no surprise that customers leave you. I know what having a bad name can do to a business, so you have to work hard to make sure that you give people what you say you will.”

The man looked broken and close to tears. Melinda wanted to put her arm around him and tell him that they could work it out, but she didn't know if that would help in the least. He probably needed a lot more than that. She nodded her head to one side to get Delia to leave them alone, but she didn't seem to be taking the hint.

“Why don't you give us a moment,” she said eventually. Delia gave her a look to say that she still didn't understand, but eventually she did as she was asked. She gave a shrug and headed back out of the office and into the workshop.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot. I'm Melinda,” she said.

“Tom,” he replied, looking at his oil-streaked hands and not offering to shake hers.

“There's nothing wrong in admitting that you're struggling,” Melinda said. “I've got my own business, and I know just how hard it can be sometimes. You have to do everything and take all the blame when things don't go right.”

“I only came back to this business because Dad wanted me to. I was happy working on new, modern cars with one of the big dealers, but he said he wanted to take things a little easier and needed someone to take over.”

“I thought you were the one who told him that you didn't want him around.”

“Who told you that?” There was more than a little surprise in his voice. “He was the one who wanted me to come back and work with him. I was more than happy doing what I was doing.”

“So you never told him that he had to choose between the business and his grandchildren?”

He looked away from her and picked up a rag to wipe his hands. Was he trying to work out a story, or was he deciding if he should tell her the truth? She hoped that it was the latter. The truth was what she needed if she was going to be able to resolve this situation.

“We had a falling-out,” he began. “But it was all a misunderstanding. He wanted me to come and work with him for a while so I could take over the business when he was ready to retire. But he didn't like the way I worked, and I couldn't do things the way he wanted them done. Whenever I came across something I'd never dealt with before, he didn't show me how to do it—he just pushed me aside and did it himself without showing me what he was doing. I said that he should either let me get on with it or I would go and look for a job somewhere else. I lie awake most nights wishing that I'd done just that.”

“Baloney,” said a familiar voice.

“Will you be quiet?” Melinda said, unable to stop herself from speaking out loud. She was close to just letting it all come out.

“Sorry?” Tom said.

“Sorry,” Melinda said. “I wasn't talking to you.” She was already cursing herself for reacting to the ghost like that. It was now or never. If she was going to tell Tom what had brought her there, she had to do it now.

“So who were you talking to? I thought your friend had gone outside.” He peered through the door to see if there was any sign of her lurking in the doorway.

“She has,” Melinda said, taking a deep breath. “It wasn't her that I was talking to.”

“So?” He was clearly puzzled, and he had every reason to be.

“I know this is going to sound weird,” she began. “Really weird. But it's the reason why I'm here.”

“I thought you were here because of Delia's car?”

“I am, but it's more than that. I've spoken to your father.”

“My father's dead, I'm afraid. How long ago did you speak to him?”

“That was your father I was speaking to now,” she said, fearing that this was going to be harder than she had expected. She waited for the look of puzzlement to change to surprise, then disbelief, before he began to understand what she was trying to say.

“What on earth are you talking about? Are you trying to tell me that you can commune with the dead or whatever you call it? Have you got a direct line to the other place?”

“Something like that,” she said. “But I don't get to choose who I talk to. I can't talk to everyone who dies whenever I like. They come looking for me.”

“You're crazy. I don't know what you're trying to prove here, but I think you should leave.”

“Really, you have to listen to me. He was the one who knew you were having trouble with Delia's car. He wants to help.”

“Yes, of course he did. I don't suppose he gave you the winner of this year's Super Bowl while he was at it, did he? That would be really useful and might make up for saddling me with this place.”

“I doubt very much if he would know that, but he was convinced that you wouldn't be able to fix the car.”

“And you say that you've just spoken to him? Was he here? Is he still here now?”

Melinda was not sure if he was accepting what she was telling him or just making fun of her. Either way, she was having doubts about whether or not she should have told him so soon. She wasn't convinced that he was taking it well.

“He's just worried that you can't cope. That maybe you need some help.”

Tom threw the oily rag down on top of one of the piles of papers. “If he's so clever, maybe he'd like to tell me what I should do. Maybe he can tell me what's wrong with the damn car. I've tried everything I know, and it still makes the noise.”

Melinda looked at the older man and waited for his response. He had removed his cap again and was scratching his head.

“Get him to drive it around the block,” Jez said.

Melinda repeated his request, knowing that this was the same thing that she had asked him to do the last time they had been there, but this time Tom relented. He went back to the car and dropped the hood back down. He fired up the engine and drove out of the bay, revving the engine for a moment before he pulled away.

“Where's he going with my baby?” Delia demanded. She had been standing outside in the fading light waiting to be able to leave, with or without her car. Now she was watching it drive away without her.

“He's just taking it for a drive. I think Jez wanted to listen to it.”

“Please, don't tell me that he's still here.” Delia looked around as if she was likely to be able to see him. It was starting to wear a little thin.

“I think he's gone in the car with Tom.”

“It's probably good that Tom can't hear him either, then.”

“You're likely right,” Melinda said. “I know that I'm glad I'm not sitting in the car right now.”