Restless Spirits: Love Letter
Other titles by Jean Marie Bauhaus
Restless Spirits
Dominion of the Damned
Eucha Falls
Midnight Snacks
Weather Witch
Shiny: A Clockwork Fairytale
Fragments & Fancies: Ficlets, Flash Fiction & Shorts
Restless Spirits:
Love Letter
Jean Marie Bauhaus
Vinspire Publishing
www.vinspirepublishing.com
Restless Spirits: Love Letter
The house was quiet.
Spooky quiet.
That doesn’t happen much these days. We’ve gotten so used to the sounds of hammers banging and saws buzzing and drills drilling that it’s kind of eerie now that it’s all stopped.
I guess the renovations are done. That should make Joe happy. Poor guy. He’s been stuck in this house for like a century, and he’s been having a hard time with all the changes Chris has made since she bought the place.
I should probably back up a bit. My name is Ron. That’s short for Veronica. Don’t ask. Anyway, I’ve been haunting this house for going on about a year now, along with my… boyfriend? Afterlife partner? I still haven’t settled on how to refer to our relationship. I just know that he’s my Joe. Oh, and in case you haven’t guessed, he’s a ghost.
And so am I.
It’s a long story.
The quick and dirty version: in life I helped my little sister—that’s Chris—with her ghost hunting business, until I got the bright idea to go by myself to the most haunted house in town—and now I’ll never get to leave this place, at least not permanently, which is why Chris decided to buy it.
Chris is what you might call a medium, although she’d prefer that you didn’t. But she can see dead people. So that works out for all of us.
At least it’s not the city’s most haunted house anymore. The place was pretty crowded when I first died, but now it’s just Joe and me. And Buster, an adorable pooch that got left behind when his former person crossed over to the other side, along with all our other house mates.
As for why Joe and I are still here, that’s an even longer story, and one that’s already been told.
I can’t believe it’s been almost a year already. I don’t really keep track of time these days like I did when I was living and had things to do and people to see, but the past year has been kind of a whirlwind. Joe and I were just starting to get used to having the house all to ourselves when Chris decided to buy it, shortly after which the renovations started.
Considering its reputation and the fact that it was definitely a fixer-upper, she got a pretty sweet deal on the place. Not that she needed one. See, helping her with the whole ghost thing was just a side gig for me. My real career was writing romance novels, and things were just starting to take off when I died. My publisher went nuts over my posthumous manuscript, which Chris submitted under the guise of having finished it herself. They loved it so much, in fact, that they offered her a three-book contract if she’d keep ghost-writing under my name. The advance was more than enough to pay for the house and restore it from top to bottom.
So now I’m ghost-writing my own novels. Literally.
And the deadline for the next book was looming, which was why, with the renovations complete, the moving and delivery guys done stomping around all over the place for the day, and Joe and Buster taking a snooze together, I thought I’d take advantage of the peace and quiet to get some work done.
I could have just popped downstairs with a thought, but I decided to take the long way down from the attic where Joe and I made our home, admiring the changes Chris had made as I went. It was hard to tell at night, with the lights all turned off, but the paint and decor she’d chosen had taken the place from a dark, creepy mausoleum of a house to bright, cheery, and downright homey.
I made my way down the front staircase—a coat of white paint and new carpet hadn’t completely erased the memory of my fatal fall down those steps, but it sure helped—and into the front parlor that Chris had converted into an office. The room’s crowning jewel had been delivered the day before, and now took up the center of the room—an antique desk made of solid oak, covered with ornate Jacobean-style carvings and polished to a high sheen. It was beautiful, and I was eager to sit myself down at it and see how working at such a fancy desk might influence my writing.
Chris kept a laptop there just for me, booted up for just such an occasion. I sat down in the antique wooden task chair that she’d paired with the desk, closed my eyes, and focused my energy on the task at hand.
Writing was hard enough when I was alive. Now, besides the challenges of focusing my attention and connecting with my muse and figuring out the story, I also had to work up the energy to physically interact with the keyboard. By this point touching things and manipulating my environment was practically second nature, but it still took a lot out of me.
I sat like that for a little while and then suddenly a scene began to unfold before me. Weirdly, it wasn’t a scene from my current book. These weren’t my characters—at least, not any I’d dreamed up before. A handsome older man sat at a desk—my desk, I realized with a jolt—covered with stacks of paper surrounding a manual typewriter. He leaned back in his chair, dangling a pair of glasses in one hand while rubbing the bridge of his nose with the other. On the other side of the desk, a dark-haired beauty paced back and forth as she accused him of being a workaholic, of caring more about his writing than their marriage.
Even though this had nothing to do with my current story, my fingers flew over the keyboard as I tried to describe what I was seeing and get down every word of dialog. The woman finished her diatribe and faced him, arms crossed over her chest as she asked, “Well? Don’t you have anything to say?”
A deep sigh emanated from the man’s chest as he settled his glasses on his face. “Why bother?” he spoke in a polished English accent. “You don’t listen.”
She scoffed at him bitterly. “I don’t listen? You can’t be serious.”
“All I can say is the same thing I’ve said time and time again,” said her husband. “You know how important this book is to me—to my career, our future—and yet you storm in here during a writing session with your petty insecurities and jealousies.”
“Jealousies?” She spat the word back at him.
“Yes, jealousies,” he repeated, knocking his chair back as he sprang to his feet and leaned forward, propping his fists on the desk. “You’re jealous of my work, and you always have been!”
His wife matched his posture. “You’d be jealous too if I worked fourteen hours a day and you barely ever saw or spoke to me.” She thought over what she said and shook her head, smiling sadly. “Except you wouldn’t, would you? You’d just be glad I had something to distract me.”
The man straightened and took a deep breath. “Helena, listen to me. I’m at a crucial juncture in this story—”
“Oh, just stop it, Brandon. You haven’t even been writing!” She picked up a stack of papers and moved out of his reach before he could grab it back from her. She held up the top sheet for him to see. “When did you actually write this page? Weeks ago? Months? You need a break! Sitting in here, staring at that typewriter for hours on end, day after day … it's not healthy!”
Brandon exploded. “I have to finish this book! You don’t underst—” He stopped talking, and his face drained of all emotion—and then lit back up with fear.
“I do understand that it’s important,” said Helena, not registering his expression. “But so is your health. So is our marriage!”
“Helena—” he gasped.
“Brandon, all I’m asking is for you to take a vacation. Or just to work
shorter hours. I worry about you. And I miss y—” She stopped talking as he clutched his chest, bracing himself against the desk. “Brandon?”
“I—” He collapsed without finishing.
“Brandon!” The stack of papers slipped from her grasp as she bounded around the desk and dropped to her knees beside him.
I stopped typing.
“Well, that’s not very romantic,” I grumped at my muse. “How’s about we try this again?” I started to scroll up to read what I’d written when something flickered in the corner of my vision.
I froze. Slowly, I turned to look behind me. And then I let out a startled scream.
Some ghost I am.
The man standing behind me jumped back and let out an equally startled-sounding yelp. We stared at each other for a good, long moment. And then it dawned on me. “Brandon?”
“You—” he started, then faltered. “You can see me?” His look of amazement quickly turned into one of confusion. “How do you know my name?”
“I think I just watched you die,” I said. “Where did you come from?”
Before he could reply, Joe suddenly appeared next to me, holding a squirming Buster in his arms. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I heard you scream.” Then he noticed the new guy. “Who are you?”
Brandon looked back and forth between us, clearly astonished. “You can both see me?”
“Yes, we can see you,” I told him. “We’re both ghosts like you.” I clapped my hand over my mouth. “I mean … you do know you’re a ghost, right?”
“Yes,” he said, removing and polishing a ghostly pair of glasses identical to the ones in my vision. “I’ve been aware for quite some time.”
“Oh, good,” I said, getting out of my chair. “Sometimes people don’t realize they’ve died, and they don’t take the news very well.”
“Well, I can’t say I took it well when it happened,” he said, putting his glasses back on, “but I’ve since had time to adjust.”
“Somebody want to tell me what the blazes is going on?” asked Joe as Buster got free of his grip and went to sniff out the newcomer.
“I wish I knew.”
I got up from my chair. “I think I might know.” I moved over by Joe and nodded to where I’d been sitting. “That’s your desk, right?” I asked Brandon.
He looked at it a long moment. Nodding his head, he sounded wistful as he said, “Yes.”
“I knew it!” I smacked Joe in the middle of the chest. “Residual haunting.”
“Ow,” he said, rubbing his chest. Then, “What?”
“It’s when your spirit gets attached to an object instead of a place. Where the object goes, you go. Or he goes, in this case.” I waved a hand at Brandon.
“I gather you’re correct,” he said. “The last place I remember being was an antique shop.”
“See?” I said to Joe, sounding a little too pleased with myself. Turning back to Brandon, I added, “And you’ve got unfinished business with your wife.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“You were reliving your death a minute ago, weren’t you?”
He looked embarrassed, but his face turned sad as his gaze drifted to the desk. “Something I’ve done countless times since it happened.”
“That’s never a good time,” said Joe.
“I think I inadvertently tapped into your memory,” I told Brandon. “I, um … I sort of witnessed your last argument.”
“Well. That’s …” He took off his glasses and polished them again, apparently not knowing what to say.
I didn’t either so I just said, “Sorry.”
“But don’t you worry,” Joe told him. He pointed at me. “Her sister’s just the person you need to talk to. She’ll get you sorted.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I should go get her.” Chris still had a few months on her current lease before she would start living here. In the meantime, she was using it as her paranormal agency’s headquarters. She wouldn’t be in until eight o’clock.
“Ron,” said Joe, “it’s three o’clock in the morning. If you go poppin’ over there and disrupting her sleep, you know she’s just gonna give you another lecture about boundaries and send you back home to wait for a more godly hour.”
Darn. He was right. “So,” I began, hoping maybe we could pass the time in conversation, “you’re a writer, right? So am I.”
“Oh, really?” said Brandon. “What do you write?”
“Romance novels,” I said, not bothering to suppress my pride.
“Oh.” He sniffed and went back to polishing his glasses.
My high-beam smile dimmed. “So, what do—I mean, did—you write?”
“Literary fiction.” He pronounced it “lit’rary.”
“Ah. So, how long ago did you … I mean, how long have you been—”
“I’m not quite sure. What year is it?” When I told him, he seemed surprised. “Is that all? Well then, I suppose that makes it about six years.”
“You only died six years ago?” I asked. “And you still wrote on a manual typewriter?”
“I miss typewriters, don’t you?” said Joe, clearly trying to keep things friendly. “I mean, not that I ever wrote much on one. And never on a computer. But I always liked the sound they made. Didn’t you?”
“Yes, quite.”
“Weren’t you a little old to be a hipster, though?” I asked, but all that got me was a quizzical look from both men.
“So, what were you working on?” asked Joe, moving on.
Brandon’s face lit up. “Well, you see, it was about a drug-addicted American expatriate traveling through Southeast Asia on a quest for the perfect high. It’s a satirical look at the themes of …”
My eyes glazed over. I looked at Joe. To my surprise (and his credit), he actually seemed to be interested. I turned back to Brandon and tried my best to do the same, but when I felt something bump my legs I gratefully crouched down to scratch Buster behind the ears. When I looked back up, Brandon had launched into a scene-by-scene description of his plot.
I sat back at the desk and surreptitiously checked the time on the computer. It wasn’t yet a quarter past three.
Eight o’clock couldn’t get there soon enough.
I couldn’t do it.
Brandon seemed like a nice guy and all … okay, to be honest, that vision made him seem like kind of a selfish tool. And I’m not even going to talk about the typewriter. Or his snotty attitude toward the romance genre. But I will mention how he droned on for over an hour about the plot of his novel—and I’m using the term “plot” in a way that means no cohesive plot whatsoever.
Even Joe, who spent like half a century finding things to talk about with Ruth and Maxwell Baird, two of the stiffest shirts who were ever stiffs, had begun to glaze over by the time the guy was done. The silence that followed got awkward fast. When I stood up and said I was gonna go ahead and go get Chris, despite his earlier protestations, Joe gave me a look that said not to waste any more time reciting my plans and to just go already.
So I did.
To my surprise, when I appeared in Chris’s bedroom I found her bed empty. I found my sister in her living room instead, curled up on the sofa with a big mug of steaming coffee and her laptop. She was just taking a drink when I said, “You’re an early bird today.”
She spewed coffee all over her laptop and sloshed a good deal of what was in the mug on her robe and the sofa. “Ron!” she shouted, carefully setting the half-empty mug on the coffee table. “Why not just jump out at me and shout ‘Boo!’? You’d accomplish the same thing.”
“Sorry!” I popped into the kitchen to grab a wad of paper towels then popped back and held them out to her.
She swiped them out of my hand and mopped up the mess. “What are you doing here?”
“We have a situation.”
She stopped dabbing at the upholstery and looked up at me. “Is Joe okay?”
“That’s kind of relative. I should get back to him pret
ty quick.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You have a new customer waiting for you back at the house.”
“Can this customer not read my office hours? They’re posted right on the front door.”
“This customer sort of bypassed the front door.”
Chris sighed as she picked up her mug and headed to the kitchen. “What are you talking about?”
I followed her. “You know that desk that was delivered yesterday?”
She chucked the wet paper towels in the sink and went to top off her coffee. “Yeah. Why? Is there a problem with it?”
“It’s haunted. Does that count?”
“What? No, it’s not. I would’ve picked up on that when I bought it.”
“Well, I guess not, because there’s a tweedy English ‘lit’rary authuh’,” I made air-quotes along with a poor imitation of Brandon’s accent, “who came as a gift with purchase. He’s back at the house treating Joe to a lecture on the superiority of lit fic over all other genres.”
“Oy.” She took a big gulp of her coffee. I tried not to stare longingly. I never felt so jealous of the living as when I watched my sister consume food and drinks. “Wait. Tweedy English guy, you say? Is he about yea tall—” she held her hand about a foot above her head “—with glasses? Handsome in a Giles-y kind of way?”
“That’s the guy.”
“Huh. I thought he was an antique dealer.”
“Understandable. He fits the profile. So anyway, he keeled over in the middle of being a total jerk to his wife so he’s gonna need your help with that. Now I’d better get back and rescue Joe.”
“All right,” she said. “Let me shower and get ready for work, and I’ll head over early.”
“Wait, no. You’re coming now.”
“What? Now?” She looked at me askance as she indicated her coffee-stained bathrobe.
“Please?” I whined. “Don’t make me have to listen to his lit lecture.”
“I’m not showing up there like this.”
Love Letter Page 1