Nevertheless, She Persisted

by Mindy Klasky

  The evening was cool, but not chilly enough to warrant putting on an overcoat. Spring had arrived in Flint. Emma noted flowers blooming in the front garden Mrs. Joslin fussed over with such pride, and in the neighboring gardens as she walked down the street. She looked at Flint with an altered perception, noting each pleasant house and garden, each place that was the site of some fond memory.

  She turned her steps to the Casino hotel, not knowing where better to go. She regretted not having questioned Mr. Prentiss further, but the man was distraught as it was. She suspected this was the place to come, and when she inquired at the front desk, she learned she had guessed correctly.

  “I believe you will find him in the dining room,” the clerk told her.

  “Thank you,” Emma said, and made her way there.

  Few patrons were in the spacious dining room at this hour. Emma’s gaze swept the room, passing over empty tables laid with fresh linens for the morning, and came to rest on a gentleman dressed in a suit of dark blue, dining alone. She approached the table, her heart beating rather quickly.

  “Captain Morse,” she said, bowing slightly as the gentleman looked up at her.

  He looked older, somehow, though he had scarce been gone a month. His hair and mustache had been trimmed somewhat shorter, the hair just brushing the upstanding collar of his jacket. The shoulders of the jacket were adorned with straps of a lighter blue.

  Emma realized with a small shock that this was a uniform. She had seen Morse in his Grays uniform many times, but he seemed to wear this one differently, as if it was merely clothing instead of what amounted to a costume.

  “Pardon me for intruding on your supper,” Emma added.

  Morse’s brows rose slightly, then he smiled. “Not at all, Mr. Thompson. Will you join me?”

  Emma hesitated, her nervousness making her restless, then she thanked him and sat in the opposite chair. Captain Morse gestured toward the wine bottle between them, inviting her to share it. She shook her head. Morse picked up the bottle and replenished his glass.

  “What may I do for you, Mr. Thompson?”

  Emma found it hard to say what was in her heart, so she resorted to commonplace chat. “I heard you had returned… Mr. Prentiss called on Mr. Joslin this evening.”

  “Ah. Did he tell you to find me here?”

  Emma shook her head. “I remembered that you had given up your lodgings last month, so I thought you must have come to a hotel.”

  Morse nodded, watching her expectantly. Emma drew a deep breath.

  “I understand you are here to fill some vacancies in the Grays.”

  “Yes.”

  “I would like to put my name in for one of them, if I may.”

  Morse regarded her steadily. “It’s for three years, now,” he said.

  “I know.”

  Their gazes held, and Emma felt she was being measured. It was a feeling she often endured, yet still it made her heart skip.

  “What changed your mind, Mr. Franklin?”

  “It hasn’t changed. I would say, rather, that it took me a while to make it up. I knew I must serve the Union, but I was unsure in what capacity I might serve best.”

  Morse sliced a bite of his roast and regarded her as he chewed it. Emma found she was clenching her hands in her lap, and made herself lay them flat on her knees instead.

  “Well,” Morse said, “as a friend of ours has said, it is wise of you to consider carefully, especially now. This three-year enlistment took everyone by surprise. Some companies lost nearly half their number. I’m lucky I only lost a few.”

  “Do you think it will take three years to beat the Rebels?”

  Morse laughed. “I doubt it. More likely we’ll be home for Christmas.”

  Emma smiled, reassured by his confidence. Morse reached a hand across the table, returning the smile.

  “Welcome to the Grays, then, Mr. Thompson.”

  Emma shook hands, her heart rising in her breast. For the first time in many days, she felt she had done right.

  After Eden

  Gillian Polack

  The interview was in Eden. I aced it. Me. Erin. I aced an interview. I was abominably proud. My life was—at that moment precisely—perfection. I left Eden. Everything that was important happened after Eden.

  I was told to drive to the house in the forest at Edrom and wait. While I waited, I had a thought. “Why aren’t I working here?” To work in a mansion designed by its first owner, so distant from suburban Melbourne, so disengaged from reality. More perfection.

  The coffin wasn’t with me, just so’s you know up front. I didn’t even know there was a coffin. Or a man-eating platypus. Or feral pies. Or…

  The coffin came first. I want to start in the place I heard about that damned coffin, after I left Eden, before perfection had entirely dissipated, because place is everything. Every story has a place. This part of my story begins with me being told (back in Eden) to find that place. A bit past Robertson, they said. “You can get meat pies in Robertson,” volunteered the bright young thing on the interview panel. Metro, that young man. Very metro. Not just metrosexual, either. He didn’t belong in Eden; he was all city.

  I wasn’t thinking about meat pies. Five hours, I thought. Five hours in my own car. I didn’t know if I wanted the job enough to drive five more hours. I’d left Melbourne at five a.m. to make the interview. It was beginning to add up.

  I can pace myself, I thought. I can take six hours and lunch in Bateman’s Bay. I could find this second place, do my follow-up interview, score the job, and I could move out of the damned shared house.

  My shared house was abominable, but what had driven me there was worse. A school friend had told him where I lived. This was why I’d gone to Eden. A job my school friends couldn’t find out about would be a safe job. Officially, though (to myself), it was all about housemates who ate my food and damaged my possessions. So here I was, waiting in the house in the forest at Edrom.

  “Ask Rachel what you need when you meet her,” said the elderly woman on the panel. “It’ll be like down on the farm, doing everything properly.” She wouldn’t say who Rachel was. Her hair was so neat that a gale wouldn’t budge it and it didn’t surprise me when she said, “Down on the farm.” The skin around her eyes crinkled, just so that I’d know she was saying it to point out she had a sense of hokey humor rather than because she thought she was making sense. She was the tough interviewer, and I was willing to lay odds she won all the prizes for best jam and biggest pumpkins at the local agricultural show.

  None of the others told me who Rachel was, either. They thought that Rachel was less important than meat pies.

  And that’s how my story started: I left Eden.

  “I want my father’s coffin. Now.” The voice cut through the early evening’s peace.

  “I beg your pardon?” Erin was sitting quietly on the wide veranda, looking out towards the bay. She didn’t know anything about coffins. Yet. She’d only left Eden an hour ago. In her head the booming sound of the waves echoed this place. Edrom, they said, Edrom. The high voice shoved that calming tone rudely into the background.

  “I was told that if I came here, I could find my father.”

  “In his coffin?”

  “Preferably.” The word was not said reassuringly. In fact, it was said as if the father and the coffin were both affronts to existence.

  “Hi, I’m Erin.” The words were proffered to she-of-the-high-voice without getting up, the name presented as an appeasement. “Are you Rachel?”

  The-one-with-the-voice nodded, her neck dipping like a brolga’s, forming a curve with the body like that bird in dance. All line. All grace. Erin was fascinated by her. “They said you’d be here. You’ve got a car.”

  Erin looked down at the big tree for support. It held the lawn stalwartly against the sea wind; it could certainly lend her a modicum of fortitude. She knew she had to collect something here, but she hadn’t expected a person. Or was it the coffin? Either way, she didn�
�t want the task. She did, however, want the job in a kinda-sorta way (she wanted the escape, at least) and obviously the task came with it. But which was it? The girl or the coffin? A sulky woman in her early twenties or a monstrous wooden box carrying a body? The first hurt her ears, and the second needed a hearse.

  “How did you get here without a car?” Erin looked up at the reed-like young woman and wondered if she perhaps had flown. From Eden, perhaps?

  “Mr. Smarty-Pants dropped me. They said you’d help me find my father.”

  “Is this the same ‘they’ that told me I needed to come here and collect a miscellaneous thing? If it is, I doubt they’re reliable.”

  “Get me to wherever you’re going, and I get my father. The old woman said.”

  “You were at a job interview?”

  “Yes. But in the middle of it I got a text saying the coffin was missing. Mr Smarty-Pants sent it.”

  “The interview panel kidnapped your father’s body.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. I just want that damn coffin back. With my father in it. Dead. I want to bury him and forget about him and I don’t want him to turn into one of those walking bloody dead people.”

  “So you’re retrieving his body.” Nods. “But why don’t you have it?”

  “It was stolen. I’m not going to talk about it.” And Rachel turned her back on Erin and moved over to the low veranda wall, looking down the steps and down the slope focused on nothing, not even the incoming tide. Around them, the boom of two bays echoed.

  “Dinner,” Erin said. “We need dinner now, if we’re making an early start.” The two moved inside as if they’d known each other forever. Rachel turned left inside the door.

  “Wrong direction,” Erin said. “That’s the old study. The kitchen’s at the back. Go straight through the hall and then look on your right.”

  “There’s someone in there.”

  The study was paneled and brown and had a fireplace built from gaping faces. Erin tried not to look at it. It was easily the most haunted fireplace she’d ever seen. It freaked her even when she’d looked closely earlier and discovered the faces were carved out of rocks by the waves. Poised on the mantelpiece surrounded by those screaming faces was a fading photograph of a man.

  “There’s no one here.” She said this softly, as if gentleness would make it true.

  “It’s not my father’s ghost,” Rachel dismissed it. “It’s someone else. Grumpy guy.”

  “Let’s get out of here.” Erin hated ghosts, and they hated her. Even if she didn’t believe in them and had never seen one, she was certain that she hated them and that they hated her.

  “Wait.” The voice was diminished by time. It rasped unhappily.

  “We’re sorry.” Rachel’s voice was full of appeasement. “I was looking for my father.”

  “My daughters left me. I want them, not feeble replacements. One angry, one damaged: you’re both worthless.”

  At these words, Rachel drifted as if she’d waft away. She didn’t. Instead, she asked, “What can we do for you?”

  Don’t ask ghosts questions, Erin wanted to say. They’re not real. But the fireplace was real and the voice was real and the presence was real and Rachel was right: grumpy guy.

  “Take what you came for, and go. Tonight. I don’t want you here. Either of you.”

  “What did we come for?” Rachel asked, still placating. The edge to her voice made it clear why she hated her father. She was trying to avoid violence. She was used to violence. Erin wanted to weep for her. No women should be bound by such a thing.

  “There’s an envelope, in the kitchen. Have your dinner and drive away. You don’t belong.”

  “Sir, yes, we’ll do that. We’ll just back out gently and not bother you.”

  “The car’s out by the back door,” said Erin. “We don’t even need to come through the main house again. Rachel, do you have a bag?”

  “It’s on the lawn outside. I’ll get it.”

  The ghostly presence became so intense that it invaded Erin’s personal space, sucked air out of the room.

  “We’ll just get a move on then,” she said. “We’re terribly sorry to have bothered you.” The oppression faded enough for her to back out of the door, into the hallway. Erin drew a gulping breath and looked for Rachel, who was coming in off the veranda, a backpack in each hand.

  “Let me close the front door—”

  “And shut out the sea?” Rachel made it sound as if Erin were threatening to drain her lifeblood.

  “And lock up. We said we’d leave by the back after dinner, so it’s easier to lock the front now.” The entrance felt almost as it had before, but not quite. The presence still lingered, watching them. It watched them as they walked down the corridor, past the over-built inglenook (made for a prince, the young man had told her “worth going to Edrom to see the inglenook,” he had commented) and out through what had once been a room fit for dancing with a long and thin musician’s gallery up a flight of stairs but was now a lino-lined hall with plastic tables. They took themselves through to the kitchen.

  The women silently made themselves up picnic packages.

  “We need hot drinks,” Erin said, dubiously. Rachel withdrew a big flask from her green pack. Then she took out another, and following that, she brought out a small one. “Tea and coffee and milk,” she said, pointing to each in turn. Erin nodded and took care of that, while Rachel explored sandwich fillings.

  “I was looking forward to a night here. I wanted to walk the beach at dawn, leave after breakfast and be in Robertson before dinner.”

  “Sounds good, but not gonna happen.”

  “I know. But we can’t get too far tonight.” Erin stalwartly ignored the ghost at the other end of the house.

  “How big’s your car?”

  “Old station wagon.”

  “We can sleep in it. If you like, we can find a bit of beach and sleep by it.”

  “I’d like that. We need to shower here first, though.” Erin decided that being practical and mundane was good.

  “Near the old man?” Rachel shuddered, the movement going through her whole body. What must it be like to be leaf-slender, Erin wondered, with one’s feelings so physical? Not comfortable.

  “The showers are out the back here. We can even pack the car and lock up first, if you want.”

  “I want. I don’t mind being warm and clean, though, if we’re going to drive.”

  “Do you know a beach?” Erin felt that she was bursting with questions, but most of them would never come out. This was always the way. That one question, however, gave results. Of course Rachel knew beaches. Erin should’ve known this instantly: Rachel had the tan and high spirits of a beach babe.

  “About a half hour from here. Barely outside Eden.”

  “So we just need to find this message, then we’re right.”

  The message was pinned to a board in the pantry, and had both their names on it. Rachel tore it open before Erin could say anything. “Nothing new. We’re to go to Robertson and find more directions at the pie place.”

  “What the…” Erin read the paper for herself. It was true. “But why? It’s a job interview, for goodness sake. With the same people. Why can’t we just go back to Eden? Or why didn’t that bunch of… Why didn’t the interviewers just come here?”

  “A job interview with a ghost if we stay here. I’ve never seen a ghost before.”

  “I didn’t see one then. I merely felt it.”

  “I saw it. Angry man. Almost as angry as my father. Hate it. Hate it.” Rachel’s voice was as fierce as her words.

  “Is his coffin on our list?” Erin turned the page over. “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a note for you. I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t like a note for me. Selfish bitch.”

  Erin sighed and handed the note over. “Oh. Sorry.”

  The note said that the coffin would be restored subject to Rachel’s good behavio
r. “Respect” was the word used.

  “In all my life I’ve never encountered anything this bizarre,” was the only thing Erin could think of that was worth saying.

  Rachel nodded. “Let’s get out of here and see if things improve.”

  If a place is a start to a story, then this story is going to be odd, Erin reflected, as she showered. And it’s an adventure story written by someone with a warped mind. She wasn’t sure which was odder, the cheap shower stalls or the sumptuous house with its resident ghost. The water was hot, and in an hour they’d be eating and they’d sleep on the beach and they’d make an early start, pick up all the garbage and be done.

  Or maybe they could walk away from it all. Except that Rachel couldn’t. She had to find her father’s coffin. And so Erin couldn’t, for if she didn’t play this particular game then Rachel would be stranded in an old house in the middle of a forest with an angry ghost for company.

  Rachel managed to encourage Erin not to feel so sympathetic and helpful, first thing the next morning. They were up, and Erin had swum to get fresh, when Rachel declared, “Gotta change. What’s okay to sleep in doesn’t work for travel. Gotta be respectable.” She used the toilet block and was out in a moment.

  Erin looked across at Rachel’s legs. They were very bare. Her shorts were impossibly short and her top was so skimpy it almost didn’t exist. For the first half hour Erin bit her tongue. Finally, she said, “Couldn’t you wear more clothes? A bra, perhaps?” Only she didn’t say it. She thought it. Mainly, she was objecting to the sexuality expressed by a certain lack of clothes because she had hidden herself for twenty years. Rachel’s clothes worried her. Would her being so very visible cause them problems?

  In a perfect world, of course, Rachel could dress however she wished, but this wasn’t a perfect world. Erin thought back to her marriage and how she had always, always dressed to hide, and how in the end it made no difference. The anger chased her. It was about male gaze, not female dress. Erin didn’t like Rachel’s lack of garb, but if Rachel felt respectable in it, Erin would survive. Her mind rang with Gloria Gaynor, and she rolled open the window to get the smell of the countryside to give a scent track for her sound track.