Haunting Investigation

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “Noncorporeal. I told you,” said Holte, looking down at the cat while he tried to rake him with his claws.

  “He can see you,” said Poppy in surprise.

  “Yes, he can. Most animals can, and some babies, too. A very drunken sailor saw me once, but I don’t count that. I send parrots into screaming fits.” He moved back in an effort to mollify the cat, and half-vanished into the draperies. “He can see me, but he can’t smell me, or touch me, and that bothers him.”

  Poppy could not think of any rejoinder to that, so she patted her knee, hoping to lure the cat to her lap. “I’m sorry he’s being so inhospitable.”

  “He’ll calm down in a bit,” said Holte as he side-stepped Maestro out of courtesy to the animal. “Cats usually do.”

  “If Maestro can see you, I guess I’m not dreaming. So I guess I’ve gone a bit crazy.” She lowered her head, confused at this abrupt change.

  “No, not crazy,” said Holte in what might have been a soothing tone, but Poppy didn’t find it so. “You’re just haunted. And to answer your earlier question: it was you or your brother I would have to haunt, and you seemed the likelier subject. More open to it.” The filmy figure gestured, offering what might have been an apology.

  “I didn’t say anything to you about that,” she said, startled at his perspicacity. “I didn’t mention it.”

  “You were thinking it,” he responded.

  “And that makes it better? Now you claim to be a mind-reader?” Poppy was incredulous.

  “Not a mind-reader. The question was obvious. I was expecting it. And I’ve observed your brother.” He let Maestro make another try at clawing him — to no avail.

  “And why is that?” Poppy asked, a surreal calm coming over her. “I mean, why did you come to me?”

  “You may not believe in ghosts, but you’ve got a lot of curiosity and an open mind, very unlike your brother, if you don’t mind my saying it. That should count for something. You aren’t dogmatic in your thinking, nor do you deny the evidence of your own eyes. I think your brother isn’t as flexible as you are.”

  Poppy smiled ruefully. “I’d say not. Tobias is pretty rigid.”

  “And after a little invisible surveillance — since it appears that I have to haunt one of you, I decided to begin with you. I thought I’d have a better chance of success.” Holte moved to the wing-back chair in front of the brick-and-tile fireplace, did something that looked like calisthenics and in the next instant seemed to be sitting down, but in the blank air a little above the chair’s seat.

  Maestro gave a yowl of frustration and began to stalk Holte.

  “When I wake up in the morning, I’m not going to believe any of this,” said Poppy with strong conviction.

  “No, probably not, not for now,” Chesterton Holte agreed. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

  Poppy looked at the unfinished paragraph on the page in the machine. “I have to get this done,” she said, doing her best to concentrate on what she had written.

  “For your work tomorrow. You have to be at the paper by eight, as I recall.” He waited for her next question, and when none came, he said, “I’ve been observing you for over a week.”

  “A week, is it?” She began to type again, making herself concentrate on the Fine Books Society. As she worked, she pretended she couldn’t see the filmy outline of Chesterton Holte hanging in the air, or hear Maestro muttering curses in what her aunt called High Cat. “I’m not going to get much sleep tonight,” she remarked as she got to the end of the page and inserted another into the machine.

  “That’s unfortunate. But you didn’t get back from the Fine Books Society meeting until nine forty-five. And that sandwich Missus Flowers made for you wasn’t much of a meal, for all it had roast beef and cheddar cheese on it. You need rest and nourishment, and you’re not getting much of either. Of course, Missus Flowers is just the housekeeper, not the cook, so you could hardly expect more than a snack, especially so late in the evening,” said Holte as if sympathizing with Poppy. “Missus Boudon doesn’t stay after eight most nights, does she? unless there’re guests in the house.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this household,” said Poppy, keeping up her determined typing.

  “I know you and your widowed aunt are the regular occupants, but that her surviving sons — your cousins — come for weekends and holidays: one is married and has children, the other is still single and likely to remain so; that there is Missus Bertha Flowers, who lives in, having a suite of rooms in what used to be your summer-house behind the kitchen garden; and Hawkins, the butler and chauffeur, who lives over the old coach-house which is now the garage. Missus Boudon, the cook, lives about two miles away with her feckless husband; she arrives every morning but Sunday at six. There are two grounds-keepers, father and son, the Jefferies, who live half a mile away; they tend to the garden twice a week. And there’s Eliza, Eliza van Hooten, who comes in three days a week as general help for Missus Flowers. There are seventeen rooms in this house, it is more than five thousand square feet, and there’s room for three autos in the garage, which used to be your stable.” He recited this as if presenting a report.

  “You have been snooping, haven’t you?” Poppy asked as she typed the heading on the page, trying not to think about what he might have seen in his reconnoitering.

  “Well, that’s what spies do,” he said apologetically.

  She was more shocked than she let on, and somewhat offended, as well. Who was Chesterton Holte, to investigate her? Being a spy was no excuse. “You believe you’re in enemy territory?” The last two words were given in an angry whisper as she recalled that the rest of the household — her aunt, their housekeeper, and their butler — was asleep.

  “Well, in life I was a spy; it’s hard to lose the habit,” he said in a mixture of pride and disconcertion. “I need to know what I’m getting into.”

  “Not just a dispatch courier, then,” said Poppy, stopping to adjust the strikers again.

  “No. But so few couriers were just couriers, on both sides,” said Holte. “As everyone knew.”

  “I suppose you expect this will persuade me that you’re genuine; I’m not so credulous as that,” she said as she ended her article with an emphatic punch to the period key. “Delusions often do that — try to convince the delusional person that they are credible — or so I understand. Your demeanor doesn’t seem delusional, which proves my point. This is my first experience with a delusion, so I have nothing to compare to it.”

  “I was hoping it might increase my credibility, to use your word,” he admitted, and nodded to Maestro. “He’s convinced.”

  “He’s a cat,” said Poppy.

  “All the more reason to believe me — I cannot easily deceive a cat. No one can. Animals don’t respond to misrepresentation as human beings do. A false smile might sway a person, but no animal is impressed. Babies still haven’t learned what they’re supposed to notice and what they’re supposed to ignore. If I weren’t here, Maestro wouldn’t think I was.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’ve seen him do a full arched-back-and-puffed-out-fur at a blank space of air,” she said.

  “That’s not the same thing,” Holte protested. “At least, not often the same thing.”

  “If you say so,” Poppy told him, taking a moment to check the spelling of Auralinda Thistlewaite’s name.

  Holte sighed once and glanced at the clock. “Are you planning to rise at seven, as you usually do, or a bit earlier?”

  “Six-thirty. I’m surprised you didn’t know that, too.” She was making a neat stack of the pages she had prepared, paper-clipped her notebook pages to them for reference, and got to her feet.

  “I am aware that you are inclined to get up at seven,” Holte said with a touch of formality. “But I haven’t made a habit of lingering in your bedroom. I am aware when you wake. Not because I watch you, but I can tell when you’re not asleep.”

  “I can’t afford to rise at seven whe
n I have to deliver an article by eight, at the paper. The trip to the paper takes half an hour on the streetcar, and I need at least forty-five minutes to get ready and have a little breakfast. I don’t often wake up quickly; I do better staying up late. But I guess you know that already. I could have Hawkins drive me, but I think it sets a bad example.” It also made her seem less like her colleagues; she reached to turn off the desk lamp, remarking as she did, “I don’t know why I’m justifying my habits to you. You’ve figured our many of them for yourself.”

  “Because you don’t think I’m real,” he suggested. “You’re right: there is no cause for you to do so.”

  She turned off the light, and was at once aware of the faintly luminous presence of Chesterton Holte; he seemed more real now that the library was dark. “Are you going to remain in here?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “I may take a turn around the house, or I may slip away for a short while.”

  “Slip away to where?” Poppy couldn’t help asking.

  “To the dimension of ghosts, of course, where all of us go from time to time,” he said as if it were obvious.

  “How often do you do that? Are you going to leave now?” she asked sweetly. “Don’t linger on my account.”

  “I’ve tried to call in here once a week or so, just to get the sense of the place, and you. Originally I’d planned to keep out of the way, but in this instance, though, I probably won’t.” He sounded almost apologetic. “I want to see how you manage tomorrow, get accustomed to your schedule. So I’ll have to stick around.”

  “Oh, no,” said Poppy firmly. “Get that out of your mind at once. This is all very well for a late-night delusion, when I can account for it as an aberration, or an especially vivid dream, but come tomorrow morning, you’ll be nothing but a figment of my imagination, and I won’t want any reminder of you loitering about. So you might as well go to your ghostly dimension and forget about this family.”

  “I wish I could do that, but I can’t,” said Holte contritely. “Necessity compels me to remain with you until I’ve — ” He stopped suddenly.

  “Until what?” Poppy prompted him.

  Holte answered slowly, as if translating from a language he had heard but had never before spoken. “Until the premature loss of your father has been cosmologically recompensed; I can’t leave until the balance is restored, hence my haunting.”

  “Oh,” said Poppy rather blankly. “Table-rapping and spirit boxes too, I suppose?”

  “Of course not. Those are dramatic illusions, not — ”

  “ — a haunting?” she finished for him as she slipped her story and notes into a manila envelope she had removed from the center drawer of the desk, and started down the library toward the door. “You introduced yourself as a gentleman, so I presume you won’t follow me.”

  “Not tonight,” Holte said, amused. “At another time, when we’re better acquainted.”

  “That’s outrageous,” she said, ruining her outrage with a yawn. She put her hand on the brass door-knob and turned it, attracting the attention of the cat.

  “No. You have nothing to fear from me. Noncorporeal, remember?” He was already dissolving into shadows.

  “Noncorporeal,” she repeated as Maestro sauntered over to her. “Of course.”

  THREE

  ORDINARILY, THE CLARION CLANG OF HER ALARM CLOCK BROUGHT POPPY awake at six-forty. This morning it was the telephone in the upstairs hallway, its cord extending down into the entry hall; it rang at two minutes to six. She came half-awake, reached out to turn the alarm off, but recalled dimly that she had put it on her vanity, not her bed-stand, so that she would have to get up in order to silence it. Blinking against the faint pre-dawn morning light that came through her heavy linen curtains, Poppy managed to get out of bed and totter across the floor to her vanity. “All right, all right,” she murmured. “I’m up.” Then she realized that it was the telephone, and she stumbled into the corridor and felt her way to the telephone.

  “Dritchner residence,” she said, yawning at the end.

  “Miss Thornton? This is Carlotta Upshaw? Matthew Pike’s secretary?” She paused. “Are you awake, Miss Thornton?”

  “Yes?” Poppy said, catching the upward lilt from her. “What can I do for you?” She shoved the fingers of her free hand through her messy hair, wondering why the night city editor of the Philadelphia Clarion was having his secretary call her; he had little to do with the kinds of stories she usually did, and she had only a cursory acquaintance with Missus Upshaw, who usually arrived at the paper fifteen minutes before Poppy went home. Aside from greetings and small-talk they had never conversed.

  “Mister Pike has left, but he asked me to ‘phone you and ask you to come in half an hour early today. It’s about an assignment?”

  “What assignment?” She had a second when she thought she was still asleep — after all, last night she seemed to have a conversation with a ghost — and now this. She almost hung up and went back to bed, but she couldn’t quite do that.

  “I don’t know. Mister Lowenthal will be expecting you.” For once, this statement didn’t sound like a question. “He’s come in early, and wants you to do the same.”

  “Half an hour early. I’ll be there.” Then, mindful of courtesy, she added, “Thank you for calling.”

  The usually crisply demure Missus Upshaw gave a single crack of laughter before she hung up.

  As soon as the connection was broken, Poppy stood for about thirty seconds before a sharp buzz reminder her to replace the receiver; why, she wondered, hadn’t she asked what assignment was so important that it merited a special ‘phone call? To receive such a summons was something new in her experience. At least, she thought, she had left a note for Missus Boudon about her early breakfast before she had retired. She frowned, more at herself than the telephone, and made her way back to her bedroom, wanting to go back to sleep, but going to her vanity table. She sat down on the padded stool and stared into the tall oval mirror. “Ye gods,” she exclaimed as she caught sight of her pale image in the gloom. She had almost added she looked like a ghost, but after her experience — if that’s what it was, and not some lingering dream — of the night before, she couldn’t bring herself to utter the word aloud. Picking up her silver-backed brush, she began to put her fine, fashionably short-cropped brown hair in order. A second glance at the mirror reminded her that while she was an attractive young woman, she was no beauty: her face lacked the softness to be pretty, though her skin was flawless. Her chin was firm and had a hint of a cleft, her mouth was too full to be a true cupid’s-bow, and her eyes — a somber grey-green — were much too keen to be pretty. Added to that, she was coltishly angular, a bit too tall and lean for current fashion. She didn’t have to wrap her bosom to achieve the proper flat-chested look, for Mother Nature had been skimpy in that part of her body. “Still,” she told her reflection as she did most mornings, “I’m not going to frighten horses and small children.”

  When she had bathed and dressed, she emerged from her room in a neat but not too fashionable business-suit of dull-green wool crepe with long, shawl-cut lapels over a blouse of ecru cotton with a narrow edging of lace at collar and cuffs. A single-strand necklace of red Baltic amber hung around her neck, and a discreet gold pin ornamented her lapel. She carried a slim brief-case and a small purse of embossed leather into which she put a pair of matching gloves. Her high-heeled shoes also matched her bag and the seams of her silk stockings were properly straight. What little make-up she wore was in discreet shades.

  After leaving a short note on the occasional table outside her aunt’s bedroom door explaining her early summons, Poppy went to the library to collect her work from the previous night, glancing at the curtains as if half-expecting to discover the hallucination from last night still lingering in their folds. “Ghosts,” she scoffed at herself. Chiding herself for foolishness, she left the library and found Maestro waiting at the top of the stairs, as if he expected an explanation from her. �
��Come on, cat; let’s have breakfast,” she said, resting her hand on the bannister as she went down to the main floor.

  Missus Boudon was in the kitchen, just beginning her work for the day. She was smiling brightly in spite of the bruise on her jaw. Short, round, with her sleek dark-blonde hair done up in a French bun, she was good-looking and relentlessly cheerful. “Good morning, Miss Poppy; thank you for the note about your early day. Eliza brought it down to me after informing Missus Dritchner. Missus Flowers will be up in half an hour. Your aunt will be down shortly, to join you,” she said brightly, as Poppy came into the kitchen. “I’ve put your eggs to coddle and I’ll have your toast ready in a moment.”

  “You might as well feed Maestro while you’re at it,” said Poppy, reaching for the cup of coffee the cook held out to her. “He had an active night last night.”

  “One sugar, a dab of cream,” said Missus Boudon.

  “You know the way I like it,” Poppy approved, and went into the breakfast room to wait for her meal, leaving Missus Boudon to put her food in order while she attended to Maestro, who had begun to express himself vociferously. She contemplated the flower prints hung on the wall, trying not to imagine what the Clarion wanted of her.

  “Oh, there you are,” said Josephine Dritchner as she came into the breakfast room to take her place at the head of the table, Duchess trailing after her with forlorn determination. “You’re ready to leave, I see.” Unlike her niece, Josephine was in a pale-blue silk wrapper over her nightgown, and her badger-gray hair was in a single braid down her back. Elaborate slippers kept her feet warm. “I think it’s unconscionable for you to have to be there so early. You’re not a drudge, or shouldn’t be.”