Grace didn’t stop her spinning, but murmured quietly, “David does have a flair for this, doesn’t he? You can see why he runs the ghost tours. Just remember this when you read the next issue of the Strait Rumor . . . I mean, the Strait Scoop.”
David scowled at her. “And that little organic market and sandwich shop? Turnip the Beet? People who work there say they can hear footsteps on the stairs and overhead on the second floor. But usually only when the store is quiet, or after closing. We even had one of those Hollywood TV shows come and do a program on that store. They caught orbs of lights on the camera and sounds on their tapes.”
Alex felt a shiver run down her spine.
“This place? The old Hadley house.” David leaned forward in his seat, his voice dropping, his eyes fluttering up to the ceiling, and the second floor above them, for a second. “The town has tried to rent this place over the years. Either as a home or a business. But people never stay. They complain about loud thumps and doors banging closed. Pockets of cold air.” He leaned in even closer. “I can tell you this. We love having our little spinners group here. But we always make sure that no one is stuck leaving here alone.” He arched his eyebrows dramatically.
Alex watched him, the library-science part of her brain going immediately to the history of the house. “Do you have any idea who lived here? Or what happened?”
David shook his head. “These places were built a hundred and sixty years ago. I’m sure there have been many people who lived here over the years. And probably a few who have died here, too. I mean . . . all you have to do is walk through that cemetery and look at the dates on the stones. People died young back then. No antibiotics. No Occupational Safety and Health Administration.” He knit a few stitches. “This was a mill town, you know. Lots of accidents at the sawmill or out on that water. A thousand ways to die young.”
Emmie stopped moving her feet on her wheel. She leaned back in her chair and raised her head to look at Alex.
Their eyes met.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be death. Something bad that happened,” Grace murmured.
All spinning and knitting stopped, and everyone waited for Grace to continue.
“We all seem to believe that there is a huge separation between the world of the living and the world of the dead. But what if there isn’t? What if the only thing that separates us is much more . . . fluid? What if it’s like a gauze curtain? We’ve all heard of the veil between the worlds. And what if that’s all it is? You can still see through it. As if the two worlds are floating in and around and over and through us, all the time. Overlapping. Always there.”
Everyone in the room was completely silent.
Grace stopped, her gaze going to the window that overlooked the water. “It’s not my idea, you know. Einstein came up with it over a hundred years ago. That the dividing line between past and present and future is an illusion. That time as we know it is an illusion.”
David leaned forward. “You’re starting to scare me, Grace.”
She sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. “I’ve lived here my whole life, you know. My husband and I bought our little house more than fifty years ago. After he died, there were times when I would look up from doing something, like washing dishes at the sink or spinning at my wheel.” Grace looked down at the wheel in front of her feet. “And I would swear that I had just seen him, walking out to the barn. It was something I saw a million times when he was alive. Him rounding the corner to the barn.”
She looked up and let her eyes go to each of the people in the circle. “Maybe the fact that he had done it so often left some kind of . . . oh, I don’t know. Some kind of energetic footprint. Like a shadow. That could explain that cat so many people see in the bookstore. Or the sound of footsteps on the stairs at the market.”
Grace let her eyes drift to the window, staring out at the gray water of the strait, the gray clouds pressing down on it. “It makes sense to me. Like tennis elbow or carpal tunnel syndrome. One action, repeated over and over again, and pretty soon you will get these little spaces where there are problems. Where the energy gets stuck.”
Grace turned to Emmie. “Wouldn’t you say so, Emmie?”
Emmie shrugged her shoulders and kept her eyes on the roving in her hands. “I have seen that happen with animals. Kick a dog once or twice and he’ll cower every time you come around. They hold the memory of everything that ever happened to them—maybe not in their minds but in their cells. In their bodies.”
Grace continued, “So maybe not a ghost, but an energy shadow. A memory. A pocket of energy. That could explain that cat in the bookshop.”
David spoke up. “Or that captain, at the house you’re staying in, Alex.”
Alex looked up sharply, her attention riveted on David.
“Have you heard about that, Alex?” David asked. “The captain?”
Alex glanced at Caroline for a moment, and then shook her head. “No.”
“He built that house, back in 1860-something,” David said. “Lived in it for years. Had a wife and four children. His oldest son took over the house after the captain died. It was in his family for quite a long time.”
Grace nodded. “Exactly. He loved that house. People would see him, standing in the windows, looking out to sea. Or looking out to town, as the case may be.”
“Huh. Is that why Maggie has had so many interns leave? They see the captain?” Alex asked.
There was rustling from the back corner. Emmie gathered her fiber in a bag and folded her spinning wheel, packing it into a cloth bag. She stood quickly, her face flushed, her movements hurried. Her hands shook. “Excuse me,” she whispered. She maneuvered through the circle, and when she got to the door, she stopped. Without turning to look at anyone, or say anything, she left.
They all listened to the sound of the door closing.
Grace watched the door, watched as Emmie walked down the sidewalk and turned the corner. She sighed. “Don’t mind her, Alex. She isn’t trying to be rude. Emmie is . . . extra sensitive. That’s what makes her such a great healer with the animals. But being that sensitive can be a problem. Sometimes being in a group is just really difficult for her. Almost like a diabetic, when their blood sugar gets too high. She gets this . . . I don’t know . . . sensory overload. Five of us—especially if two of them are David and Caroline—can just be too much. And we all know that when she needs to leave, she needs to leave.”
Alex nodded and let out a long sigh.
Caroline shivered. “Okay, then. I think I’ve had enough of you spinsters with all your ghosts and energy shadows and phantom cats. I’m headed to Strait Up for an oatmeal stout. Anyone want to come along?” Caroline rose and slipped her coat up over her shoulders.
The other three shook their heads and moved back to their knitting and spinning. Alex shuddered, dislodging herself from the quiet of the stories and stood up. “I don’t think I’ll go to the bar, but I am going to head home. It was nice to meet you all.”
“We’re here every weekend. Sundays at two. Like church. The church of fiber. You should join us,” David said. “But we also show up down here almost any afternoon. If the light is on, a few of us are here. If you’re working for Maggie, you will find you crave contact with a few sane people.”
Caroline laughed. “As if she’s gonna find any of them here.”
David took Alex’s hand. “Whatever. Come back again. We’d love to see you.”
NINE
“Sure you don’t want to join me, Alex? Copper Cove is one of the few places where you don’t have to worry about driving while intoxicated. Although walking while intoxicated has its own set of dangers.” Caroline and Alex stood outside the Hadley house; Caroline was wrapping a scarf around her neck.
Alex’s eyebrows lifted.
“We are on an island. Surrounded by water. You do have to retain enough sense to stay out of the drink. Pun intended.”
Alex smiled. “Thanks for asking, Caroline. But I’m going t
o head home.”
Caroline gave her a long look. “Okay, if you’re sure. It’s the holiday crowd in there. Might be some PBMs.”
“PBMs?”
“Potential boyfriend material.” Caroline grinned and turned toward the tavern on the corner. Alex could hear the voices, the energy of a vacation crowd, as Caroline opened the door and disappeared inside.
Alex stood on the main street of Copper Cove for a moment, drinking in the sea air. She gazed at the town, at the hundreds of twinkle lights wrapping the trees and fences and homes. The waters of Haro Strait lapped gently against the sea wall, just behind and below the businesses. She absorbed it all for a moment, the calm, the quiet, the beauty, the lulling sound of the water. Then she turned and headed up the hill.
The sounds of town grew softer as she climbed. It was only four in the afternoon, but dusk had dimmed the landscape to a dark ice blue. Alex stopped at the gate to the cemetery and gazed into the fenced grounds. Stones leaned at precarious angles, some of them having already toppled; others dangerously tipped, bowing to the effects of time. They were the color of old iron, blackened by time and weather and too many seasons of rain. She thought of what David had said earlier, that there were a thousand ways to die young back then.
Before now, Alex had never really thought about the idea of ghosts, or energy shadows, whatever they were called. Until recently, she had never had a reason to even think about the dead. But the loss of her mother had changed all that, and she wondered if it were true—what Grace had said about the overlap between past and present. It gave her comfort, to think her mother might still be around somewhere, that she might be with her, even now, separated by only the most ephemeral gauze.
She stepped inside the gate and wandered slowly up and down the rows of stones. Louisa Victoria Henderson, aged twenty-six years, seven months. Jefferson Myers, aged two years, four months. Henry Black, aged eighteen years, four months, two days. The stones were so precise in marking exactly how much life each person had accumulated. The dates were old; many of the deaths had occurred more than a hundred years ago. At the end of one row, she stopped and looked out at the water.
Fog had swallowed the far horizon, and it was now swirling across the water and winding through town, snaking its way up the hill and through the trees. It blurred all the edges, made parts of the landscape disappear. Sounds were muffled, as if buried under a blanket. The fog over Main Street took on an eerie glow, a vague reflection of the lights below. Curls of mist pooled around the gravestones, reaching to absorb her feet. For a moment she watched, as if waiting for the fog to swallow her. To make her disappear, the way the landscape around her was. She took a breath and turned to leave.
Somewhere in the trees up ahead, a dog barked. She started up the hill toward the captain’s house. The fog was playing with sound, creating an echo effect, almost as if there were more than one set of footsteps headed up the hill. Alex stopped, listening carefully, her head tipped slightly. When she stopped, so did the sound. She took a breath and moved farther up the hill, her shoes clicking on the pavement of the street. There it was again—the sound of footsteps, hitting the pavement just a fraction of a second after her own steps. A shudder ran down her spine. She stopped again, turning to scan the street behind her.
She could see nothing but the curves of fog, weaving through the trees. The sounds had stopped exactly when she had. Perhaps she should look this up, do a little research on the phenomena of what happens to sound when it is filtered through fog.
Turning back to the hill, she gazed into the towering cedars that surrounded the captain’s house. The house was dark, and it was hard to spot through the thick mass of branches. She had not anticipated being gone this long and had not left on any lights. As the fog rolled in, she caught the reflection of dim light in the windows upstairs, just enough pale light to see where the house stood. She stared at those windows, waiting, but if the captain were inside, he did not make an appearance.
Silly, she thought. All she had done was listen to a few ghost stories, and now she was staring into the twilight, looking for things that could not possibly be there.
And that was when she heard it—a woman’s voice, talking in low tones somewhere in the trees. Alex turned and scanned the landscape around her. Shadows were thick, particularly around the trees and bushes. Thick vegetation framed every space, every corner of the cemetery, even the sides of the road she was on, and all of it was swirling with fog, like the way watercolor paints would churn and mix on canvas.
A gleam of white caught her attention—white hair almost glowing in the dim light. Emmie Porter stood in the far back corner of the cemetery, in a clump of trees. She spoke softly and waited, as if listening to a reply. As if she were having a conversation. Alex could see no one else in the dark. She could not hear the words being said, only the rise and fall, the soft murmur of Emmie’s voice, a one-sided exchange.
Alex shivered and hurried back to the house, moving fast enough to block out any other sounds.
TEN
When Emmie climbed on the back of Dusty’s Indian motorcycle that sunset evening in 1969, she had no idea where they were going. As it turned out, Dusty didn’t, either.
It wasn’t until their first night together, at a hotel in Missoula, Montana, that reality started to seep into their headlong rush to escape Dalton. After the flames of passion had been quenched, at least temporarily, Emmie began to feel the tiniest sliver of misgiving. For the years that Dusty had been out on his own, he’d been working cattle ranches, mostly through the spring and summer and fall. He slept in a bunkhouse, shared with the other cowboys doing the same thing. Emmie could not very well sleep in a bunkhouse with a room full of cowboys. And Dusty wasn’t sure how to make a living any other way.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered into her hair. “We’ll figure it out.” And when she was cradled in his arms, she wanted very much to believe him. In his arms, she found all the comfort and connection that had been missing at that sad, quiet house in Dalton. He made her feel as if they were a team, as if whatever happened now, they would face it together.
They found temporary work on a ranch in Idaho, Dusty working the cattle and Emmie helping the cook. When that work ran out, they kept moving west, into Eastern Washington, and then toward the Cascade Mountains. September found them finishing up a cattle drive at a ranch in Ellensburg. They collected their pay, and Dusty leaned against the motorcycle, thumbing through the bills in his wallet.
“Winter’s headed in,” he said, lifting his nose toward the mountain peaks. “Not a good time to be on a bike. And not a whole lot of work for a cowboy. What do you say we go live on an island for a while?”
They pulled out a map, picked an island in the north end of Puget Sound, and started riding.
Doc Taylor was the veterinarian on the north end of Saratoga Island. He and his wife, Kate, owned a small ranch, where they were raising organic grass-fed beef long before most people had even heard of such a thing. They had two colts that needed training, and they provided a cottage on the property for Dusty and Emmie to live in. It was the first time, in the few months since they had run off together, that they actually had a small place to themselves and time together without a coterie of cowboys at every turn.
In some ways, it was not much different from the life Emmie had left. She lived on the small ranch, smelled the horses and the cows every morning when she made coffee. She took a job in town at the Drift Inn, waiting tables, and so she also had a daily dose of the sight of the water, and the dramatic displays of emotion that crossed the sky and the water and the horizon. Her first few months on the island, she felt as if she had been dropped into the best possible world, a perfect cocktail of the ranching and animals that she loved, and the water that called to her like the serenade of a lover. October passed with a brilliant display of leaves turning.
The trouble started in November, when they got their first real taste of life in the Pacific Northwest. The rains started on
All Saints’ Day and didn’t let up. Both she and Dusty had to ditch their cowboy boots and don the ugly monstrosities called mud boots. By the end of November, it didn’t appear that even those knee-high mud boots would be enough to navigate the muck around the barns.
Those short days and long nights and eternally gray skies affected the two of them in completely opposite ways. For Emmie, the darkness and damp made her want to nest, to snuggle into the little cottage that the Taylors had provided. She found knitting needles and yarn, and started making afghans and hats and scarves. Kate Taylor taught her to spin.
But just as Emmie settled in deeper with each passing day, Dusty grew more restless and irritable. He stood on the porch in the evening, watching the rain come down in sheets, smoking cigarette after cigarette and running his hands through his hair. He didn’t sleep well when he did come to bed, and Emmie would often wake to hear him pacing.
The charms of that quiet cowboy that she had found so enticing back in the summer—being taller than she was and not struck dumb in her presence—turned out to be not quite enough for long-term relationship success.
She knew he was going, sensed it in the coolness of the air between them, in the space that had developed between their bodies in the bed. In her innermost being, she was preparing herself for that—for the day she would come home from work at the café and find him gone, shirts and cowboy boots packed onto his motorcycle, mud boots left behind.
What she hadn’t anticipated was the way in which he would do it. She came home from the café, footsore, her back aching from all the standing and bending, to find Ms. Taylor sitting on the porch of the cottage she shared with Dusty. Kate Taylor was composed, but Emmie took one look in her eyes and knew that her whole world had just reversed direction. There was something about the eyes that always revealed painful news, even before words were actually spoken. It was worse than just Dusty clearing out and leaving her behind.
He had been hit by a car, riding his motorcycle on a rain-slick highway, the gray and the water and the slap of windshield wipers making him invisible to the driver who hit him. He was on the highway, headed toward Sea Rose Harbor, the place where the ferry landed. The accident left a trail of litter in its wake, a bumper from the motorcycle, shattered glass and pieces of metal, and the spilled contents of his suitcase: every shirt, every pair of socks and Levi’s. It was a messy trail of crumbs that led to his body, which had flipped up in the air and landed on the side of the road in a horrible tangle of limbs. Kate did not supply those details, but somehow, they popped into Emmie’s mind, a sickening portrait of the word accident.
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