The Other Side

by J. D. Robb

  “How old are you?” M.J. asked of Imogene, whom she’d only seen in pictures as a sad, dour-looking woman.

  Her aunt smiled and wrinkled her nose in a cute, impish way. “As you’re seeing me now, you mean? In my late twenties, I think. I was a looker, wasn’t I?”

  “And now you’re a ghost. The three of you are ghosts.”

  They all seemed to think about the term and weighed it against the way they felt.

  “That’s such a generic term, don’t you think?” her mother asked, looking as she always did—expecting better of M.J. “What about specter or apparition?”

  “I’m fond of ghoul myself.” Odelia giggled.

  “There’s a list of things you could call us, dear, but the facts are these: our bodies are no longer alive, and the rest of who we were can’t leave this house until we find what we lost here.” Imogene had a plain way of speaking, which M.J. liked.

  “Which is?”

  “Well, that’s just it.” Odelia giggled again. “We have no idea. If we knew what we were looking for, we could have turned this place inside out eons ago, found it, and moved on. We need your help.”

  “Mine?” She felt the blood drain from her face and sweat pop out on her forehead. “No way. First off, I don’t have the time for this, and secondly, I don’t think I believe in ghosts . . . or whatever you prefer to call yourselves. I’m leaving.”

  “Sorry.” Mr. Brown rushed into the room, huffing for breath, with a wide-beam emergency flashlight in his hand. “Never fails that when you want something it’s always on the bottom. Here ya go.”

  Stymied for a second, M.J. took the flashlight and aimed it at the tea table . . . and the aunt thereon.

  “Tell me what you see, Mr. Brown.”

  “The table you want me to send to someone in Florida.”

  “Wait a second, wait a second.” Odelia called out, rushing toward her sister—with steps, not floating as one expected of a ghost. “I love being in the spotlight. Shine it on me, dear.”

  “Anything else, Mr. Brown?”

  “The thingy and the dish on top?” He cast her a sidelong glance and looked back. “And a lot of dust.”

  “Really, darling, do you think we’re going to let just anyone see us?” her mother asked. “In this particular state of disarray?”

  “Did you hear that, Mr. Brown?”

  “What’s that?”

  M.J. sighed and shook her head. “Let’s just get the table and get out of here.”

  They both stepped up to the table. The closer M.J. got, the stronger Odelia’s scent became, until she wanted apple pie so bad her salivary glands overflowed.

  “Please move aside,” she said to Odelia, and Mr. Brown sidestepped a few inches to be directly across from her.

  Taking the edge of the table in four places they tried to lift it. It didn’t even quiver.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked Imogene, her voice cross and frustrated.

  “Trying to move the table,” Mr. Brown snapped back.

  “I’m sitting as hard as I can,” Imogene replied with a grimace and a grunt.

  “I want this table.”

  “I get that. But it seems to be stuck to the floor.”

  “Not you—” She stopped herself. If not him, who? “Okay. Fine. Have it your way. Mr. Brown, you were right. The house is clearly possessed or whatever you want to call it, but I’m a firm believer that where there’s a will, there’s a way.” She adjusted her purse strap on her shoulder and her heels marched a snappy tattoo toward the front door. “So come Monday morning I want this place loaded with dynamite and blown off the face of the earth.”

  The next morning, Saturday, a reluctant M.J. once again made the trip from Alexandria to Johnnie’s Bend.

  Mr. Brown had whittled a fine point to the fact that the harder they fought against the house, the more likely they would be to draw attention to its peculiarity, which would then draw peculiar people who would in turn, no doubt, provide her with any number of peculiar situations far worse than having a house that refused to fall down. He hadn’t had to stab her with it; she got the point—the last thing she needed was more peculiar.

  Furthermore, given a little time and distance to cool off and gather her thoughts, she found she had a few questions, such as:

  “If you can lock us out of the house, why didn’t you lock us in last night?” she asked her mother and aunts as they congregated in the kitchen to watch Odelia make pies. “You said you needed my help, and I wasn’t planning to ever come back here. Why’d you let me leave?”

  In the sunny kitchen they were considerably more . . . nimbus than they had been the night before in the gloomy shadows of the evening. In the light of day the house took on a fascinating second life—the only way she could describe it—one hovering over the other so that while the three of them sat at the kitchen table together, M.J. sat at one as solid and real as she was while her mother and Aunt Imogene lounged in chairs across from her that were as hazy and transparent as they were.

  The same was true of Odelia, who worked happily rolling out crusts on a butcher board that was now a ceramic countertop and baking in an oven that was in the same place in the kitchen but larger and from a different era.

  “Goodness.” Imogene laughed. “We let you leave because if you have even a single drop of our blood in your veins, then you would have been mad enough to chew nails and spit rivets if we’d locked you in. Better to let you go and let your natural curiosity bring you back.” She held her hands out as if it were as clear as she was.

  “I told them you could be quite stubborn, Mari—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “It’s your name.”

  “I prefer M.J.”

  Her mother played with one of the diamond rings on her fingers. There were four of them, one from each of her marriages. She sighed. “Well, anyway, I’m gratified to see you’re learning to flex a little, darling.”

  “Flex? Are you kidding? Living with you, I flexed like a freaking Slinky, Mother. It always had to be your way. Did you know about these two before you died? Is that why you refused to sell and move to a retirement community?”

  “I refused to sell because this was always my home—except when I didn’t live here, of course. After Papa passed, Odelia lived here because she had nowhere else to go. And you and I came to visit from time to time—”

  “Between marriages.”

  “Well, where does one go when one’s heart has been shattered, first by death and then by unfaithfulness and greed and neglect? One goes home, of course, to where she has always been loved and sheltered and protected from the harsh realities of the world.”

  With a fond, sisterly smirk, Imogene chuckled. “I don’t suppose it’ll surprise you to hear that your mother wanted to be Sandra Dee when she was a teen.”

  Her mother gasped. “Early teen.”

  Odelia giggled. “She really wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor, but Papa nearly had a stroke when she told him.”

  “Why? Hasn’t she always been considered one of the all-time greats . . . as an actress, I mean? Her personal life aside?”

  “Oh, it wouldn’t have mattered if it was Meryl Streep or Sally Field. Acting was not what he considered an acceptable profession for a woman.” Odelia made the comment casually, her hands on her hips, looking around the kitchen in confusion. She snatched up a small wicker basket with an exasperated “My stars,” and headed for the back door.

  “Where’s she going?”

  The sisters were unconcerned. Her mother answered. “She wants more apples.”

  Okay, first off, M.J. had no idea the ghosts could leave the house. And secondly, not only were the pies as phantom as everything else involved with the three sisters . . . aside from the aroma . . . but where the hell in the backyard was Odelia getting apples?

  “Wait a second.” She jumped up from her table and reached the back door in time to see Odelia passing through a five-foot wooden fence on the far end
of the yard as if it weren’t there. “Odelia. Wait. Where are you going? Odelia?”

  She heard her happy, chubby aunt giggle from a distance greater than the neighbor’s backyard. “Not to worry, dear, I won’t be long.”

  “But where are you going?”

  “To my orchard. Papa planted it just for me. There are several different kinds of apple trees, cherry trees, peach trees, and pear trees.” She paused, her voice echoing. “The peach tree doesn’t bear much fruit, but it tries. Don’t you, you sweet old thing?”

  M.J. jumped as high as she could to peek over the fence to see which tree she was talking to . . . though there didn’t seem to be any trees there at all. “Odelia. How far away from the house did he plant the trees? Where are you?”

  “Oh dear, Imogene is better with feet and yards than I am, but it’s a ways,” she called back. “Flies, you know.”

  “Flies?”

  “They come for the ripe fruit if I don’t get to it first. If the trees were too close to the house . . . oh my, Papa would be so angry. They’re pesky, you know. Summer flies. And it’s like he always said, I can certainly use the exercise. The hard part is hauling all the fruit back to the house.”

  Papa, Hobart Hedbo, was beginning to sound like someone M.J. was glad she’d never had the chance to meet. “I can smell your apple pies, you know.”

  “Really?”

  She remembered Odelia as a sweet, kind, older woman. She died of breast cancer in her late fifties before M.J. had a real chance to get to know her. . . .

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true, she realized, shifting her weight uncomfortably. She could have gotten to know Odelia had she been a different sort of youngster, she supposed. But then, who thinks farther than the tip of their nose when they’re young?

  “They smell delicious, Aunt Odelia.”

  “Secret recipe. I have a million of them. I wanted to be a great chef, you know.”

  “What, like Martha Stewart and Rachael Ray?”

  Odelia scoffed. “Our Lady of the Ladle. There’s never been another like her.”

  “Who?”

  “Julia Child. She didn’t just cook. She studied cooking. She knew food. She wasn’t simply a television personality who knew how to cook. She was a larger-than-life chef. An American culinary icon.”

  M.J. smiled, enjoying her good-natured aunt’s show of vehemence.

  “I wanted to study at Le Cordon Bleu or even the CIA.”

  “The what?”

  “CIA. The Culinary Institute of America in New York.” Her voice was getting closer; she was coming back. “Or even Kendall College in Chicago, but no. Papa said if I wanted to go to college, I could become a teacher or a nurse. If I wanted to study history or anthropology, he could help me get a job in a museum or a library, maybe. Those would be acceptable professions. But all great chefs are men, he’d say, and he wouldn’t waste his money to get me cooking classes when he could pay Mrs. Wheimer to teach me. . . . She was our cook then. He said even Betty Crocker was made up and named after William Crocker, one of the company directors at the time.”

  She stepped back through the fence suddenly, startling her niece, her arms around the wicker basket that was now full of hazy-looking apples.

  “So what did you do?” M.J. asked, giving the little ghost a moment to catch her breath, struggling with the impulse to take the heavy basket from her. It was a short struggle. Feeling ridiculous, she reached for the apples, and Odelia gave them up gladly. She held her arms out in a circle as Odelia had, knowing full well that they’d pass straight through the basket if she didn’t.

  “Oh, I cried. I cried and cried, hoping Papa would change his mind, but he never did. Eventually, I let Mrs. Wheimer teach me what she could. Imogene and Adeline bought me all of Julia’s cookbooks . . . and of course as every fine chef is wont to do, I did a great deal of experimenting on my own while I waited—” She caught herself and looked ashamed.

  “Waited for what, Odelia?”

  She leaned in so close, M.J. could almost spit apple juice, then whispered, “For Papa to die.” She stepped back, aghast. “I’ve never said that out loud before. My stars. You must think I’m just a terrible person. Oh my.”

  “No, no. I don’t. Really. I understand completely. I do.”

  “I don’t!” An angry male voice from the other side of the fence was quickly reinforced with the scowling face of a man as he peered over the fence at her. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Are you nuts?”

  Three

  “What?”

  He glanced down at her bowed arms, and she immediately dropped them to her sides.

  “My apples! Now they’ll all have bruises,” Odelia exclaimed, falling to her knees to gather them up from around M.J.’s feet.

  “Are you rehearsing for a play or something?” the man asked, giving her a better explanation than nuts—not that it was any of his business in the first place.

  Unless he was standing on something, she gauged him at close to six feet, his dark hair clipped short and neat; the lack of fashionable facial hair a plus in her book. But it was the way his eyes flashed from angry to intrigued that popped her defenses in place.

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because my six-year-old son heard you talking to yourself, and now he thinks you’re able to speak to the ghosts that he thinks live in that old house.” He frowned again. “Come to think of it, what are you doing over there? I didn’t know the place was for sale.”

  “It’s not, and I don’t have to explain anything to you.” She hesitated. “Sorry about your little boy though. I didn’t mean to upset him.”

  The tough-soft paradox of her nature fascinated him. He shook his head. “He wasn’t upset. I was. He’s been obsessed with the ghosts since we moved in here two years ago. At least once or twice a week he’ll come in and tell me one walked across the yard looking for apples. I come out, there’s nothing here. I explain there’s no such thing as ghosts, distract him with other things like the doctor told me to, and he’s right back at it the next week. At least today he had someone else back here besides the ghost.”

  Odelia giggled at her feet. “That’s my little friend, Jimmy. Sweet boy.”

  M.J. glowered down at her aunt as she got to her feet and picked up her basket of apples.

  “Like I said, I’m sorry about that.” She turned to go inside with Odelia.

  “Ryan Doyle,” he said with a friendly smile, extending his arm over the fence to his elbow.

  She turned back and glanced first at his smile and his outstretched hand, then at the unruly gone-to-seed-and-weed flowerbed below and decided just to wave a hand from where she was. “Hi. M. J. Biderman.”

  “M.J?” he said and she watched in trepidation as a slow, sexy smile spread across his face. “M.J. . . . Maribelle Joy.”

  Now in reflex mode, her molars ground against each other, and she growled as she stomped her right foot in disgust. She stared at him as if he were a hideous six-headed snake. “How do you know that?”

  “That’s your name, isn’t it?” He laughed, the light in his eyes dancing. “Your mother told me. She said you were a little touchy about it.”

  “Ridiculous names are the Hedbo curse.” She didn’t need to, of course, but she automatically held the screen door open for Odelia because her arms were full.

  “And you married Biderman?” His eyes continued to twinkle with delight.

  “No.” She grimaced at him, not wanting to enjoy the fact that he was enjoying himself at her expense. But her name was ludicrous. How could anyone hear it and not laugh? “I was born a Calvert. My father died. My mother married Larry Biderman, who adopted me before she divorced him and married Michael Moore, who I refused to let adopt me because he already had four kids and it was the only way for me to stand apart from them until my mother finally dumped him for Jonathan Shaw, who insisted I call him Uncle Jon instead of Dad because it made him feel old. I was in my early twenties by then anyway, so”—she shr
ugged—“I just stuck with Biderman.”

  “Well, it’s not a moniker I’ll forget anytime soon.”

  She simply nodded, simpered, and followed her aunt into the house.

  “Mother, how could you?” she asked before the door was closed completely. “Is nothing sacred to you? Telling family secrets to perfect strangers . . . Who else have you told?”

  “Oh posh, your name is not a family secret, darling.” She waved diamond-encrusted fingers in the air. “It comes from the Latin Mabel, meaning lovable, as both your father and I believed you to be the moment we laid eyes on you.” She threw her arms out wide. “And you filled us with such joy. What else could we name you but Maribelle Joy?”

  “Jane, Susan, Linda . . . Mabel?”

  Her mother laughed. Even Imogene and Odelia wore indulgent smiles.

  “You would have hated Mabel much more than Maribelle, darling, trust me. Besides, you looked like a Maribelle Joy as a child. A little fairy named Maribelle Joy, with your soft brown curls and your big green eyes and you were so perfect . . . everything was so perfect. It was the happiest time of my life. Just you, me, and your daddy.”

  Adeline sighed contentedly, and a look of happiness and . . . peace settled in the fine slopes and planes of a face that had always been beautiful and animated but now radiated with an inner glow and verve M.J. couldn’t recall seeing before.

  “But then Daddy died in the accident, and I could never quite live up to your expectations, could I? Instead of the perky, cheerleader-type daughter you wanted, you got a shy, awkward math nerd.”

  “I just wanted you to have some fun, darling.”

  “You paid my stepbrother to take me to my prom.”

  “He told you?”

  “I guessed, and you just confirmed.”

  “Ow. She gotcha,” Odelia muttered as she sorted out bruised apples.

  “That’s not fair.” Adeline looked indignant. “And it would have been wrong to miss your own prom, sweetheart.”

  “It’s more wrong to meddle in my life simply because it doesn’t meet with your standards, Mother.” Also, Adeline hadn’t denied M.J.’s original statement—that she’d never once lived up to her mother’s expectations. Despite the fact that she’d known this for most of her life, it hurt. A lot. “I have a headache. I’m going for a walk.”