by Sarah Wynde
Either way, Dillon had strongly suggested that they stop talking about it, at least until they’d all had a chance to calm down. The last thing any of them needed was for emotional conversations about their imminent permanent destruction to lead to exactly that.
Rose had finally caught up with them at GD just as Grace and Noah were leaving to go kayaking. They’d all stayed quiet in the car, but now some of the ghosts were exploring, others floating along the surface of the water.
“Mama, Mama, look.” Misam popped up in the midst of the water hyacinths. “There’s another sea cow under here.”
“You can swim right through them,” Joe reported, appearing next to Misam. “Just like people. They don’t even notice. I guess it’s not exactly swimming, though.”
Nadira was kneeling on the water’s surface, her long black robe draped around her, peering into the depths. “They are quite ugly. Their faces look squashed. Sort of like a camel’s face, only much bigger.”
“Come under, Mama,” Misam said. “You can see better from under.”
“I’m happy here, dear,” Nadira said decidedly. “I don’t like how dark it is down there.” She gave a delicate shudder.
“Speaking of that…” Joe rose up out of the water, drifting through it as if walking up an invisible slope. He looked toward Rose and Dillon and the kayak. “We all good?”
He wasn’t really looking at them, Dillon realized, but beyond them to where Sophia and Mona drifted. If a ghost could be exhausted, Sophia looked exhausted. She wasn’t crying anymore, but she was lying flat on the surface of the water, face down. Mona hovered near her, feather duster in hand.
Before Dillon could answer him, Grace finally responded to Noah. “How do you feel about meeting some ghosts?”
Dillon winced.
Joe swore under his breath.
“Oh, dear.” Rose twirled a curl of hair around her finger.
Noah’s mouth twisted. “Is that what we’re doing?”
“I hope so, yeah.” Grace fumbled with the bag at her waist, pulling out her cell phone.
“Ghosts don’t exist,” Noah said flatly.
“We need to decide what to do.” Dillon wasn’t going to ignore Grace, not again. He hadn’t had a chance to answer her when she’d talked to him in the diner, because Joe had dragged him away, but he’d spent so long unable to communicate with his family that he never took the moments when they reached out to him for granted. “Do you want to let Noah know that we’re here?”
Joe looked torn. He folded his arms across his chest. But Noah turned his head and looked in Dillon’s direction.
Dillon stepped back. Noah’s eyes were looking straight through him, no sign of recognition, but it still felt like he was responding to Dillon’s words.
“Ghosts don’t exist,” Noah repeated. Maybe he was still talking to Grace, but he wasn’t looking at her.
“Yeah, that’s what you think, dude,” Dillon replied. “Decision time, Joe. Come on.”
Joe sighed.
Sophia rolled over, staring up at the sky. “You’re never going to prove it to him. He doesn’t believe in anything.”
“Grace will have a plan. Grace always has a plan,” Dillon said confidently.
Grace had been thumbing on the screen of her phone, but now she handed it to Noah.
He took it. “What am I doing with this?”
She spread her arm to indicate the scene around them. They weren’t entirely alone — no one was ever alone on the St. Johns. There were other kayakers downstream and a bigger tour boat trundling along upstream. A rowboat held a couple of men fishing. But no one was close to them. Grace gestured toward the spot where they’d seen the manatee. “Our location is as random as nature can make it. I couldn’t have known where we’d find a manatee.”
She turned her head from side to side, pushing back her hair so that Noah could see her ears. “No mysterious ear pieces, no way someone could talk to me remotely.”
Noah didn’t look convinced.
“What?” she asked, letting her hair drop.
“If I, hypothetically, had a transmitter in my head, you could have one in yours, too,” Noah pointed out.
“Seriously?” Grace rolled her eyes.
Sophia snorted. “What are we supposed to be, some stupid radio play?”
Rose clapped her hands. “Ooh, I used to love those when I was little. My mother always listened to one about this family in San Francisco. We could act it out!”
“We are not going to pretend that we’re a radio play,” Dillon said.
Grace tilted her head to one side. “A transmitter in your head? Is that what you’re worried about?”
Noah’s chin rose. “I’m not worried about anything. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on down here and why people I’ve never met think I’m involved with it.”
Grace didn’t look convinced. Her eyes narrowed. “Can you hear them?”
“Hear what?” Noah didn’t blink but color rose in his cheeks.
“He’s lying,” Dillon said. “Look at him. He can hear us.”
“I think you’re right.” Joe sighed again.
Nadira and Misam had joined the cluster of ghosts now surrounding the kayak. Nadira folded her arms across her chest. “All these years.”
“Maybe he only started hearing us recently,” Joe suggested.
Grace shook her head. “If you had a broken transmitter in your head, why would I put one in mine? And if I had a working transmitter in my head, why wouldn’t I just offer to fix yours? I’m not asking you to believe in elves and fairies. Or even aliens.”
“Neural networks,” Noah muttered. “Sound bouncing off wi-fi signals somehow.”
“I don’t know much about sound, but I’m sure it’s possible to create a technology that could cause you, and only you, to hear voices. Some sort of electrical nerve stimulation, maybe?” Grace leaned back in the kayak, one hand on the paddle next to her. “Sound waves cause vibrations in the cells of our ears that turn into signals that travel along the auditory nerves. Maybe an implant of some sort could skip the sound wave step and just vibrate inside your head.”
“That’s not knowing much about it?”
Grace lifted a shoulder. “I read a lot. We don’t have anyone working on anything like that, but it doesn’t seem impossible.”
Noah didn’t respond.
Grace gave him a bright smile. “Of course, the question you have to ask yourself then is why? Why would we do something like that to you? What do we get out of it?”
Noah grimaced. “Nothing. Which should always have been obvious. People who hear voices are crazy. That’s all there is to it.” He nodded toward her paddle. “Let’s head back.”
Grace put up a hand. “Not yet. You promised me a chance.”
“To prove that ghosts are real?” He gave a skeptical laugh. “That was a mistake. It’s not gonna happen. I might be crazy, but I’m not that crazy.”
“Have a little faith.” Grace nodded toward the phone he still held. “Dillon, you’re here, aren’t you? Please say hi.”
“What do you think?” Dillon asked the others. “We ready to try talking to him?”
“Which is better, ghosts or insanity?” Joe asked, but the question sounded rhetorical as he nodded toward the phone.
Sophia answered anyway. “Insanity,” she yelled, smacking the surface of the water with her hand.
“Oh, dear,” Mona murmured.
“It’s not right,” the angry man said.
“Ghosts,” Nadira said with a frown.
“Ghosts.” Misam nodded.
“Oh, ghosts, definitely,” Rose said.
“And the ghosts win.” Dillon closed his eyes, concentrating on texting a message to the phone Noah held. Hi, Noah. My name is Dillon.
Noah stared at the screen, his expression grim. “Big deal, so you got someone to text me at a certain time.”
“Right, because I knew exactly when we’d find a manatee,” Grace
said, voice dry.
“If it wasn’t the manatee, it could have been something else. Maybe you point out that big black bird over there,” Noah said, pointing to an anhinga sitting on a low branch, its wings outspread. “Maybe even that boat going by. It looks like a tour boat, so it’s probably on a schedule, right?”
“Excellent critical thinking skills,” Grace said, sounding amused. “But we’re not done yet. Ask me a question.”
“How does a ghost send texts?” Noah asked.
She laughed. “Not the kind of question I had in mind. But they’re beings of energy, capable of manipulating electronic signals. It’s not easy. It took Dillon a lot of practice and quite a few phones to figure it out. If Akira hadn’t helped him, he probably couldn’t have done it.”
“And I suppose that’s why everyone’s not getting text messages from the dead,” Noah said sarcastically.
Grace’s smile didn’t change. “Cell phones haven’t been around that long and ghosts don’t get a handbook. Or even usually meet many other ghosts. Often they’re trapped where they died.”
“You sound like an expert.”
“I’ve read all the research. And I’ve got a personal involvement, of course.”
Noah stared at her. “All right. Tell me about that.”
Her smile faded. “Still not the kind of question I meant,” she said, looking away from him, out across the water. “But you’re right, it matters.”
Dillon hated seeing the sadness in her eyes, hated hearing it in her voice. And he didn’t want to listen to her tell the story of how he’d screwed up. But if Noah could hear them, hear him, then this was an opportunity. Dillon could add details as Grace spoke, details that Noah would have no way of knowing. He’d have to believe her when she confirmed that the details were true.
“My parents came to Tassamara before I was born,” Grace began. “Their car broke down while they were on their way to Disneyworld, stranding them here, but they fell in love with the place. They went home. Virginia, at the time. My dad was in a doctorate program at the University of Virginia in biochemistry. He’d already had some — well, you might call it luck — with investments. But my mother didn’t think it was luck. He joked about serendipity and intuition, but she believed he could see the future.”
“He doesn’t really see it,” Dillon said. “It’s more like he just knows stuff that hasn’t happened yet. Like the way he recognized you, even though you’d never met him before.”
“They moved here and started the company, General Directions. At the time, it was my dad working out of a home office, buying and selling stocks. Again, it was before I was born. I don’t remember it. But he did well. The company grew, expanded, hired people, started the research division. And, whether you believe it or not, it became clear to both of my parents that some psychic abilities are real and that Tassamara is a place that, for whatever reason, strengthens people’s natural abilities.”
“Not everyone, though,” Dillon said with a sigh. “Only if you’ve got the power to begin with.”
“Psychics. You’re serious,” Noah said.
“I am.” Grace paused, as if waiting for more of a reaction.
“She is,” Dillon confirmed. “Lots of people here are psychic. My dad, my other aunt, my uncle, people in town. Akira. Everyone who works for the Special Affairs division, pretty much.”
“Are you claiming to be psychic?” Noah asked Grace.
Grace spread her hands. “Not me. Normal as they come.”
“Not me, either.” Dillon stepped closer to the kayak, his voice getting soft. He hated talking about his death, hated thinking about it. He’d been so stupid. “I really wanted to be psychic. My dad and my uncle were always gone, always busy doing cool stuff. Working for the FBI and shit. And I was just the kid, stuck at home. Curfew, 11PM, even on weekends.”
“Six years ago,” Grace started. She hesitated, biting her lip.
“I stole some pills,” Dillon said. “A lot of them. I’d read about hallucinations maybe kick-starting psychic abilities. I figured it was worth a try.”
“My nephew died,” Grace finally said.
“She’s skipping the hard part.” Dillon wasn’t looking at the other ghosts, wished they weren’t listening although he knew they were. “I guess the pills did make me hallucinate. I felt like I was floating. Levitating would have been a cool psychic ability, but I wanted more. I wanted to fly. So I kept taking the pills. Finished off my grandma’s Ambien, started on her high blood pressure medication.”
“And then my mother died, three days later.” Grace stared down at her own hands.
“She had a stroke. You know what causes strokes? High blood pressure,” Dillon said. “I guess maybe she didn’t have a chance to get her prescription refilled.”
“Oh, Dillon,” Rose murmured.
Dillon didn’t look at her. He could hear the sympathy in her voice, but he knew he didn’t deserve it. “Go ahead,” he said to Noah. “Ask her. You know you want to.”
But Noah didn’t say a word, just sat in the kayak with his lips pressed together.
“My father insisted that their spirits weren’t gone.” Grace lifted her chin, her eyes meeting Noah’s steady gaze. “We… well, I, at least, took it for his grief talking. It’s one thing to believe that my sister knows her own future and another to accept life after death and ghosts walking among us.”
Noah opened his mouth, then closed it again without speaking, giving his head a minute shake.
“He started searching for someone who could communicate with spirits. Last year, he found Akira. She’s not a medium. She doesn’t speak to the dead. For some reason, that distinction is really important to her. But she does see ghosts. And she can talk to them. One of the ghosts that she met in Tassamara was my nephew, Dillon.”
“You believe you’re haunted by the ghost of your dead nephew?” Noah asked.
“Not me.” Grace’s smile was wry. “Not anymore, anyway. I think he’s haunting you, now.”
Noah’s grip on his paddle tightened, but he looked as if he wanted to thrust the phone back at her.
“Akira hates trying to convince people that ghosts are real, whether they believe her or not,” Grace said. “Skeptics accuse her of being a con artist, doing her research, that kind of thing, but believers… well, no one’s ever happy to learn that the person they lost is a ghost.”
21
Noah
Noah had heard every word the Dillon voice had said to him.
He would still rather believe that there was a transmitter in his head. Long-distance cameras recording his every move. Maybe some kind of mini-satellite following him, with a crew of artificial intelligences responding to his actions.
Because if ghosts were real…
“So let’s get started,” Grace said. “I need you to ask me a personal question, one that my baby brother would know the answer to.”
“Baby brother?” Noah asked.
Grace lifted a shoulder, just as the Dillon voice said, “I grew up with her. My dad was just a kid when I was born and my mom wasn’t around. Grace is more like a sister than an aunt.”
It wasn’t the first time the voice had said something of the sort. Noah rubbed his forehead, feeling the pinch of an incipient headache as he remembered the day he’d arrived in Tassamara. What had the voice said then? Not really an aunt? Something like that, anyway.
“Close enough. My parents raised Dillon,” Grace replied.
Eight years older, that’s what the voice had said.
“I think the traditional approach is for a ghost to tell me something that only you and he would know,” Grace went on. “But the only ghost I know how to communicate with is Dillon. I don’t know whether there’s anything he’d know about you that I might not have been able to find out other ways, and I did tell you I’d run a background check. I want this to be fair. I don’t want you to think I’m tricking you. So you ask a question, we wait for Dillon to answer via text, and then I
’ll answer, too. If our answers match — when our answers match — you’ll know that I’m telling you the truth.”
She looked so honest, her green gaze meeting his without hesitation. She’d looked away when she was telling him about their deaths, but not as if she was lying, more like it still hurt to talk about.
Noah could understand that. He never mentioned the friends he’d lost, not to anyone. He remembered them, but what good would talking about them do?
“Come on,” Grace coaxed him. “Something simple. What’s my favorite color?”
A corner of Noah’s mouth lifted. It was too obvious. Her office, her shoes — his subconscious was smart enough to know she liked pink.
“Easy one,” the Dillon voice said. “Purple.”
“Really? But she never wears purple,” the Rose voice said.
“Purple is not her color,” the Arabic woman’s voice said. “She should wear warm colors. Peach, moss green.”
The phone dinged and he glanced at the screen. Purple, it said.
All right, so his voices and whoever was sending him texts were in agreement. He couldn’t decide if he was surprised by that or not. If his voices were hallucinations, how could the person on the other end of the phone line know what they were saying?
So they weren’t hallucinations. They were computer-generated. He was overhearing transmissions of some kind. Maybe the voices saying the same things over and over again were code. Maybe the fake Chinese guy was using a very complex code.
“Purple,” Grace said. “Always has been.”
Noah paused. That made it three for three: the voices, the phone, and Grace herself. Yeah, that was weird. “You don’t wear much purple.”
She flashed a smile at him, quick, amused. “I’m too vain. It doesn’t look good on me. I still like it, though.”