by Jodi Picoult
“Maybe you could take this number off your call list,” Eli suggested, and he threw the portable phone across the room to smash against the wall.
He was sitting on the floor with his hands splayed through his hair when Watson found him. The dog dropped the telephone’s battery into Eli’s lap and then stood over him. Eli rubbed his hand over his face. “If you’re hoping for a snack, Watson, you’re out of luck. Unless maybe bean curd tastes good with a Coors chaser.”
Eli wrapped his arm around the dog’s thick neck and stared into his mournful brown eyes. It was one of the reasons Eli had picked him from the Humane Society—one look, and you knew that hound would never be happy. Which meant that Eli could not fail again.
Working for the Warburtons, Ross had learned that the witching hour was between 10 at night and 3 A.M. Most of the thumps and bumps and visions that Curtis had seen—or pretended to have seen—occurred during that time. By 10:30, Ross and Ethan had set up the bedroom in the abandoned house to his satisfaction, if not his nephew’s.
“Where’s all the stuff?” Ethan asked. “You know, the cool equipment. Like they have on Real Scary Stories.” He eyed the video camera dubiously.
“Curtis says you don’t want too many bells and whistles the first time you go out to investigate,” Ross answered. “You’ll wind up getting distracted by the tools, and relying on them instead of yourself. Plus, entities disturb the magnetic field. They’re just as likely to make the equipment short out as they are to leave a trace.”
“Still,” Ethan muttered. “Without tools and stuff we’re as lame as Shaggy and Scooby.”
Ross laughed. “Zoinks,” he said, then glanced at his nephew’s crestfallen face. “Look. Whenever Curtis got the feeling that something was there, he’d come back with the cool equipment to back up his senses. We can do that too. Of course, first we’ll have to buy the cool equipment.”
The camera was pointed toward one of the bedroom walls, the junk food was within arm’s distance, the sleeping bags were unrolled to form a synthetic island on the filthy floorboards. The only source of light in the room was a small Maglite set between Ross and Ethan to form a bright puddle. Ross placed a small deck of cards in the spotlight and began to shuffle.
Ethan spoke around an enormous Bazooka bubble he’d just blown. “Considering that you think Warburton’s an asshole, you sure quote him a lot.”
“Watch your mouth. He’s not an asshole, he’s a liar. And even though I think he makes up half the stuff he sees, he knows his shit.”
“Watch your mouth,” Ethan parroted, then grabbed the deck. “Uncle Ross? You think the ghost here died some horrible way?”
“I don’t even know there’s a ghost here yet. Are you going to deal?”
“Yeah.” The boy started to divide the cards. “I wonder if it’ll be all mad at us. If it might confuse us for whoever chopped off its head with an ax.”
“What ax?” Ross tipped his hand into the single beam of the flashlight.“Okay, so having any member of the royal family is a good thing?”
“I can’t believe you never played this. Yeah, you want to get kings and queens. And aces. But more than that you want to get cards of the same suit in a row, like two-three-four-five-six. First you have to bet something . . . you have any cash?”
“Reese’s Pieces.”
“Well, whatever. A straight flush beats four of a kind, and four of a kind beats a full house. That’s good enough to start, so I’m going to draw.” He looked up. “That means pick a card.”
“Thanks,” Ross said dryly. “I’ll raise you two Reese’s.”
“I won’t be scared, you know, even if it comes after me.”
If put on the spot—something he had not allowed van Vleet to do—Ross would have had to say that he did not believe any entity was haunting the Pike property. In the first place, Ross had seen nothing in all his months of ghost hunting. In the second, even going on theory, it was crazy to think of a human spirit gathering enough energy to cause the events that had been attributed to it—from the ground freezing to rose petals raining from the clouds. Though unlikely, each of those circumstances could be explained by something natural—a latent ice floe running beneath the soil, a strange evaporation.
Then again, Ross had been wrong about things before.
At the very least, this night was good for Ethan. Ross stretched back on his elbows and watched his nephew lay out his poker hand. “I’ve got a straight.”
“Three of a kind. Jacks.”
“Maybe you should play with a handicap,” Ethan suggested. He dealt a second round. “I think I’ll come back.”
“Here?”
“No, not here . . . just here. After I die.” He looked around the room, then at his uncle, a dare. “I mean, I won’t be done yet. You know?”
Ross had gone to homes with the Warburtons where children had died of disease, or by accident. The mothers wore hope like mantillas, framing their faces as they waited for Curtis to give them back what they’d lost. In those cases, it was not moans and thumps and strange occurrences that had led to the call, it was the lack of them.
He thought of his sister, and folded his cards.
“I’m hungry,” Ethan said. He slipped away in shadow, fumbling around and causing a loud crash.
“You all right?” Ross swung the beam of the flashlight toward the pack of junk food they’d brought, but that entire corner of the room was empty.
Ethan spoke from behind him. “I’m here,” he said, his voice shaking. “That, uh, that wasn’t me.”
He plastered himself up against his uncle’s back. “Let’s just take a look,” Ross murmured. Everything was quiet, now, and there was no evidence that anything had fallen. “It could have been a brick outside, or a rat.” He slipped an arm around Ethan’s shoulders. “It could have been anything, Ethan.”
“Right.”
“Why don’t we sit down so that I can whip your butt this time around?”
Ethan relaxed a little. “As if,” he said, dredging up the courage to peel himself away and take a seat again.
Ross dealt the cards, but his eyes kept scanning the dark. Nothing unusual, nothing that captured his attention. Except the lens cap of the video camera, hanging down on a black cord from the side of the apparatus, which had begun to swing back and forth.
Although there was no breeze in the room.
From outside came the sound of a hollow thud—a tree falling, or a person landing on all fours. “Did you hear that?” Ethan whispered shakily.
“Yeah.” Ross walked toward the broken window and peered out into the woods that edged the back of the property. A flash of white caught his eye—the tail of a deer, a shooting star, the eyes of a barn owl.
There was a rustle of leaves, and two distinct footfalls. A hitched wail, like the cry of an infant.
“We may just take a walk down there,” Ross murmured.
Ethan shook his head hard. “No way. I’m staying here.”
“It’s probably just a raccoon.”
“And what if it’s not?”
Ross smiled slowly. “What if,” he said.
Shelby was not in the habit of allowing her son to do dangerous things; it was hazard enough for him to live in this world. But Ethan had a nine-year-old’s sense of adventure and wanderlust. Believing he was part of Ross’s mission—well, maybe it would be good for both of them.
She walked into his room, picking up his Game Boy from the floor, as well as a few cartridges that had fallen beneath the bed. A Red Sox game schedule was on the wall, along with the textbooks Shelby used to home-school Ethan, and a haiku he’d written last year as part of a unit on Japan.
Deep in the darkness
I wake to make the night day.
How does the sun feel?
Shelby sank onto his bed. She wondered if Ross was keeping Ethan safe. She wondered if Ethan missed her, just a little.
She stared uneasily at the computer. The last time she’d decided to check
up on her son, she’d hacked into his e-mail account to discover that he’d acquired six pen pals—all kids around his own age, all from different parts of the world. At first, Shelby had found this encouraging. For Ethan to have found a way to make a connection to other children seemed healthy, if not downright inspiring. But then Shelby had started to read some of the mail, and realized that Ethan had not represented himself quite accurately. To Sonya in Denmark, he was a sixth-grade preppie on the math squad. To Tony in Indianapolis, he was a star batter for a little-league farm team. To Marco in Colorado, he was an avid mountain climber who trekked every weekend with his dad.
In none of these letters did he mention his XP condition. In none of these letters did he seem any less than an average, athletic, normal American boy from a happy two-parent family.
In short, Ethan had turned himself into everything he was not.
With a sigh Shelby left Ethan’s room and started down the hall. Passing Ross’s door, she hesitated. She was eight years older than Ross; it seemed she had been taking care of him all her life—from diapering him as an infant to sitting by his side after his suicide attempt to worrying for his safety when he did not call her for months. Mothering had always come easily to her; when their parents had died years ago, she simply stepped into their shoes and took over.
She believed that unadulterated devotion had its share of protective power, as if love were a steel girder the Fates could not snip through. She also believed that the moment you relaxed your guard, the moment you were anything less than ferocious in your keeping, that was the moment it all could be snatched away.
Which brought her right back to wondering when Ross would bring Ethan home.
She pushed open the door and began to clean in there, too. She made Ross’s bed. She lined up his toothbrush and his hairbrush on the dresser. She put his shampoo, nail clippers, and toothpaste into his toiletry kit and zipped it shut.
The chair was piled high with her brother’s rumpled clothes. With a sigh she lifted one soft shirt and creased it neatly, set it on the edge of the bed. She balled together a pair of socks. She stacked boxers and tees and finally shook out a spare pair of jeans. As she began to fold them with military precision, something fell from the pocket. Shelby leaned down to pick up what had dropped: three pennies, dated 1932, which she set on the dresser where Ross would be sure to see them.
Ross turned and waved up at Ethan in the window, then cautiously approached the spot in the woods where he’d last seen the flash of white. He had left Ethan with the Maglite, which meant Ross fully expected to plunge headfirst over an exposed root. Although he couldn’t see more than a foot in front of him, he could still hear the sounds of someone—or something—scrabbling around.
Ross shivered; it was colder out here than he’d expected it to be, and he wished he’d brought his sweatshirt. He could suddenly smell wild roses, as if there were a field of them underfoot, and he knew from Curtis that this, too, was a way a ghost might make its presence known. Show yourself, he thought.
But any hopes he had of encountering his first apparition died as he came upon a young woman, crouching as she tried to dig into the frozen earth.
She was wearing a flowered dress, and her pale hair was wild around her face. The white flash Ross had seen was a lace collar. She was feverishly busy, intent on her task. And she was as real as the ground beneath his feet.
Clearly, she had not heard him approach, or she would have realized she’d been caught in the act of . . . well, whatever she’d been doing. Ross found himself tongue-tied—not only wasn’t she the ghost he’d been hoping for, but she was young, and pretty, and uninvited. He seized on that, if only to have something to say. “What are you doing here?”
She turned slowly, blinking, as if surprised to find herself in the middle of the forest. “I . . . I don’t know.” Glancing down at her hands, dirt caught beneath the nails, she frowned.
“Did van Vleet send you?”
“I don’t know Van Fleet . . .”
“Vleet.” Ross frowned. Maybe it was only an unlikely coincidence that the night he began his investigation, an insomniac would come wandering onto the property. There were other homes in the vicinity, and stranger things had happened. He found himself wishing that he hadn’t started this conversation on the defensive. He found himself wishing she’d glance up at him again. “What are you looking for?” he asked, nodding toward the hole she’d been digging.
The woman blushed, which lit her from the inside. When she shook her head, he could smell that floral perfume again. “I have no idea. The last time I sleepwalked, I wound up in a neighbor’s hayloft.”
“With or without the neighbor?” Ross heard himself ask, and the woman looked so mortified that he immediately wished he could call back the words. He dug his hands into his pockets instead, trying to make amends. “I’m Ross Wakeman,” he said.
She looked up, still discomfited. “I have to go.”
“No, see, where I come from, the appropriate response is: Hello, I’m Susan. Or: Hey, Hannah’s the name. Or: Howdy, I’m Madonna.”
“Madonna?”
Ross grinned. “Whatever.”
A tiny smile played at the corners of her mouth. “I’m Lia,” she said.
“Just Lia?”
She hesitated. “Beaumont. Lia Beaumont.”
Every line of her body was poised for flight. Then again, coming across a stranger in the middle of the woods when you were sleepwalking was bound to be upsetting. If possible, she seemed even more unsure of herself around Ross than Ross felt around her. She nodded, still awkward, and started to walk off. Ross was filled with an unaccountable need to keep her from leaving, and tried to think of one thing to say that would keep her here, but all the words dammed up at the base of his throat.
Suddenly, she turned back to him. “Were you sleepwalking?” “No, actually, I’m working.” Ross wound the thread of conversation tight around himself, an anchor.
“Here? Now?”
“Yeah. I’m a paranormal investigator.” He could tell the term didn’t ring a bell for her. “Ghosts,” he explained. “I look for ghosts. In fact, I came out here because I thought your collar was . . . well, anyway. You’re not quite what I was expecting.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
She tipped her head to one side, studying him. “You really believe people can come back after they die? Like Harry Houdini?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” She wore sorrow like a hangman’s hood; it shrouded her delicate features. “Who knows?” he teased. “We may even have company right now.”
But his words made Lia glance behind her wildly. “If he finds me . . .”
Who? Ross wanted to say, as he realized that this woman’s skittishness was not about being discovered by him, but being discovered by someone else. Before he could ask, an earsplitting scream curled from the house. “Uncle Ross!” Ethan shrieked. “Uncle Ross, come back!”
Ross looked up at the window, where there was no longer any residual light from either the flashlight or the video camera. The blood drained from his face as he imagined what Ethan might have seen. “I have to go,” he said to Lia, and without any further explanation, took off at a dead run.
From the New York Times:
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE
NIGHT?
by Kerrigan Klieg
Comtosook, VT—The residents of Comtosook, a small town in the northwest corner of Vermont, are eager to tell tall tales. There are stories of maple sap running in the dry summer months, of flower petals falling from rain clouds and of ground freezing solid in the middle of August, of cars that suddenly can only move in reverse. Yet the strangest part of this gossip is that it happens to be true, and these odd occurrences are just the tip of the iceberg. Experts at the nearby University of Vermont in various fields have not been able to explain the numerous events, but residents have their own ideas about what’s causing the commotion: a spirit, a restless one who
doesn’t want to be moved.
Weeks ago, Comtosook was a bucolic Vermont town. Then the Redhook Development Group struck a deal with an elderly landowner to acquire a small tract of property. Immediately, a local band of Abenaki Indians began to protest, insisting the land was a native burial ground. Archaeological testing done by the state has not revealed any human remains, although that is incidental, says Az Thompson, a local Abenaki leader: “I wouldn’t expect some flat-lander real-estate group to know where my ancestors are buried, but I sure didn’t expect them to tell me I’m lying about that, either. Who gave them the privilege to rewrite my history?” Adds Winks Smiling Fox, a fellow protester, “Enough has happened here lately to prove that as much as Redhook wants in, there’s something else that doesn’t want out.”
He refers to the growing list of oddities that have begun to wear down the general public, even those who live miles away from the disputed property. Abe Huppinworth, proprietor of a local general store, has become used to sweeping rose petals off the porch. “They fall all night long, like snow. Three, four inches deep when I come in to open up. And there isn’t a rosebush within three miles of here.” Ava Morgan took her two-year-old son to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington when he awakened one morning speaking Portuguese, a language with which none of his family was familiar, much less fluent. “The doctors couldn’t tell me what happened, either. They tested him forward and backward, and then one morning it all just went away, and Cole was back to saying Mommy and milk.” Not all residents are as complacent, however. Over six hundred signatures filled a petition that was given to Rod van Vleet, project manager on site for the Redhook Group. Mr. van Vleet declined to be interviewed, but has previously dismissed all claims of paranormal activity on the property as preposterous.
Reports allude that van Vleet may not be as confident as he asserts. Sources say that the Redhook Group has commissioned an investigator to explore the property.
To the townspeople, however, both the hidden intents of a real-estate developer, and the angry fury of the Abenaki, are equally unimportant. “All I know is, this is wearing me out,” says Huppinworth, at a pause in his endless sweeping of petals. “Sooner or later, something’s got to give.”