It made no difference to me; I’d never drunk coffee in my life, so when I took a sip of the rich, bitter liquid, I wasn’t sure whether cream and sugar would even be able to improve the situation. But I choked it down, along with a couple scrambled eggs, while Aunt Kathy hurried off to her bedroom to get ready for our ghost hunt and Simon cleaned up in the kitchen. Apparently, he did not share his girlfriend’s curiosity about paranormal activity and was planning on spending his Christmas morning down at the Bikram yoga studio on the third floor of their building. When Kathy emerged from the bedroom ten minutes later, she was dressed in head-to-toe black Lycra and carrying a large metal contraption with a rubber handle and a series of dials on the side.
“What the hell,” I asked, “is that thing?”
“This,” she said, raising it above her head like a torch, “is a single-axis electromagnetic field meter.”
“A single-axis what?”
“An EMF meter, for short. Standard ghost-hunting equipment.”
I picked up the contraption and examined the various dials and screens.
“What does it do?”
“Oh boy,” said Simon, who was standing in front of the sink in tree pose, drying off a sauté pan. “Here we go.”
“Well, you see, Wendy,” she began, her voice taking on the instructive singsong of a teacher, “all conscious human minds emit an electromagnetic field, okay? When you die, your body disintegrates, but your electromagnetic field doesn’t. So what we ghost hunters do is, we carry this EMF meter around with us, and when it detects a spike in electromagnetic levels when there is no visible human presence, that’s a pretty sure sign there’s a ghost there. Conscious mind,” she said, pointing to her temple, “just no more body.”
“And you actually believe in that stuff?” I asked.
“You look incredulous.”
“Well, Aunt Kathy, it does seem a little . . . out there.”
“Let me ask you this,” she said, snatching the EMF meter out of my hands and stuffing it into her leopard-print tote bag. “How is this any different than you going to mass and praying to a totally invisible God? Religion is one kind of faith, ghost hunting is another. At least I have my EMF for evidence. What kind of evidence do you have that there’s a God?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sunsets? Mountains? Newborn babies?”
“She’s got you there,” Simon commented.
“Well, guess what, Wendy? One can believe in God and ghosts. The two are not mutually exclusive. Just go with an open mind, okay? If not for your sake, for mine. Ghosts can sense skepticism, and they don’t appear to people who don’t believe.”
The Hotel Belvedere, a short cab ride from Kathy’s condo, was a gray building with tall, narrow windows and its name advertised in big blue neon letters at the top with one of the Es burned out. I knew it immediately—you could see its big sign if you were driving down Lake Shore Drive—but from far away, it looked regal and posh. Up close, it was clear that the hotel had seen better days. The purple awnings were frayed along the edges and coated with a crust of salt and ice. The big revolving door was smeared with fingerprints, and a bored valet with an oversize gray uniform was slouched next to a luggage rack, scrolling through his cell phone.
Inside the black marble–floored lobby, a domed ceiling of ornate gold painted all over with fat pink angels had once probably appeared to be the height of luxury, but now it just looked sort of tacky. A skinny goateed guy, whose name tag read Emmanuel, smiled broadly at Aunt Kathy.
“Kathleen, baby!”
“Manny! Merry Christmas!”
He stepped out from behind the concierge desk and they hugged each other.
“All right, honey. What do you got for me?”
“Not much, Kath. A guy’s alarm clock went haywire in three oh two last week. Other than that, I got nothin’.”
Aunt Kathy pulled out a carefully folded bill from her wallet and palmed it to him.
“You sure?”
Manny took the money, slid it into his pocket, and smiled slyly.
“You’re always so good to the little people, Kathy. I just remembered something else. There’s been some serious activity in the Florentine Ballroom lately. Not one, not two, but three weddings in a row; we’ve gotten reports.”
“The Hand of Mystery?” Aunt Kathy stopped just short of grabbing Manny by his lapels. “The Twelfth-Floor Refugees? H. H. Holmes?” He shook his head slowly with each of these suggestions, grinning, drawing out the moment of reveal.
Aunt Kathy couldn’t take it anymore. She grabbed his arm.
“Not—not Lady Clara?”
“That very one.” Manny nodded triumphantly. “Not only have we had people hearing her, one of our maids claims to have actually seen her—nightgown and all.”
“No!”
“Yep.”
“Manny, we’ve known each other a long time—can you please, pretty please, just because it’s Christmas, open up the Florentine Ballroom for us? Just for ten minutes?”
Manny sucked his teeth.
“I’d love to, Kathy, you know that. But you know hotel policy.”
Kathy reached for another bill, palmed it to him again.
“Ten minutes. All we need is ten minutes.”
Manny glanced down at the bill to see how large it was. He must have been happy with what he saw, because he slipped a small key card across the concierge desk.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “And if anybody finds you in there, you don’t know me.”
“Thank you!” She leaned over the desk, planted a red-lipsticked kiss on his cheek, then grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the lobby and down a long, narrow hallway of faded burgundy carpet. Doors stood on either side of us, framed in gold-leaf designs that were flaking off, revealing the dull wood beneath. As we walked, she told me the story of Lady Clara.
“Lady Clara was a beautiful Gilded Age debutante, the daughter of an American mother and a British father who made piles of money in the railroad industry. Not only was Clara rich, she was gorgeous—long black curls, flashing black eyes, a tiny waist, and feet so small her father had to employ a children’s bootmaker to custom-make her stacked heel shoes.
“Lady Clara had everything, and she could have had any man she wanted. But like so many beautiful catches over the millennia, from Desdemona to Whitney Houston, what do you think she did?” Kathy looked at me, but didn’t wait for me to answer. “She fell in love with a jagoff.
“His name,” she continued, “was Cornelius Clark. What a jagoffy name, right? The wedding between Clara and Cornelius was planned, down to every beautiful detail. The date was set—a Saturday in June, 1886. The day before the wedding, all of Chicago was abuzz with anticipation. Three-foot bouquets of hydrangeas were arranged on all the tables in the Florentine Ballroom. Caviar was imported from Moscow, champagne from France, lobster tails from the coast of Maine. The trains chugged in from New York and San Francisco, on tracks her father had built, bringing all the country’s powerbrokers toward the Belvedere. The wedding gown and corset—designed by House of Worth in Paris—hung in the penthouse suite where Clara and Cornelius were supposed to spend their conjugal night together. An orchestra arrived. Ice sculptures of winged horses were carved and displayed in the four corners of the ballroom.
“The night before the wedding, after the rehearsal dinner and the cognac and cigars, Cornelius kissed his bride-to-be goodnight and went up to his bedroom to get some shut-eye before the big day. When he got there, he found that someone had slipped an anonymous letter under his door. It revealed, with proof, that Lady Clara’s father had lost all of his money in a series of bad financial deals—he had paid for the entire wedding on credit and his good name. Turned out, the lovely, gilded Lady Clara was almost entirely destitute.
“Now, a good man—a man who really loved her—would have felt a pang of disappointment, maybe, upon realizing that the spoiled life of leisure he’d been expecting was now slipping away. But after a few mome
nts of self-pity, he would have tossed the letter aside and gone ahead and married the woman of his dreams. But not this jagoff. Nope, what this jagoff did was, he packed up his suitcase, hustled up a couple of his servants, and stole away into the hot June night for Union Station. He took a train to San Francisco, where, the story goes, he married another beautiful black-haired girl—the daughter of a gold speculator—and the two of them lived happily ever after in the golden hills of Sonoma County.” She glared. “The men always have it easier, don’t they?”
“But who sent the letter?” I asked. “Who had it out for poor Lady Clara?”
She waved her hand impatiently, and her bracelets clacked against one another.
“That’s not the point. You’re focusing on the wrong thing.”
“Okay,” I said, “so what happened next?”
“On the morning of the wedding,” Kathy resumed, “she dressed in her gown of white bobbin lace. Her mantilla, hand-sewn with a thousand seed pearls, was pinned into her hair. She stood at the end of the aisle of Holy Name Cathedral on the arm of her father, the eyes of Chicago and New York and London society upon her, and waited. And waited and waited and waited. The women fanned themselves and the men wiped their faces with their handkerchiefs. The murmuring began after fifteen minutes had gone by and no jagoff. After thirty minutes, people began opening their collars and asking each other—where was he? And after an hour, they began to get up, one by one, and, casting a sympathetic look at the stricken bride, slipped out the doors of the church and into the hot afternoon.
“Clara’s mother and a couple servants whisked her back to their hotel room. God knows what they said to her, what comfort they could give after a humiliation that complete. But whatever they said, it wasn’t enough. That night, after her mother had fallen asleep, Clara slipped out the door of the hotel room and, dressed in a diaphanous nightgown—”
“Diaphanous?”
“Great word, isn’t it? It means, you know, translucent.”
“She was wearing a see-through nightgown in public?”
“Wendy, stay with me here!”
“Sorry!”
“She slipped out of her room dressed in a diaphanous nightgown and came down to the Florentine Ballroom—the grand room where her wedding reception was meant to have taken place. She climbed to the second-floor balcony overlooking the parquet dance floor—”
“And jumped?”
“Splat.” Aunt Kathy nodded sadly.
“Killing yourself over a guy,” I sighed. “What a cliché.”
“Yes, well, here’s where things get weird: When the maids found her body the next morning, all of the winged-horse ice sculptures, which had been placed in the far corners of the ballroom the day before and that weighed no less than four hundred pounds apiece, had moved. They now stood at each corner of the dance floor, their icy eyes frozen on Clara’s poor broken body, as if they were waiting for the signal to gallop her into the afterlife.”
“Yikes,” I said.
“And get this: despite the oppressive June heat and the stuffiness of the closed ballroom and the lack of air-conditioning, all of the sculptures were totally unmelted.”
She paused dramatically, then continued. “Now this sad story is over one hundred thirty years old, but to this day, whenever events are held in the Florentine Ballroom, anyone who sits alone at a table while people are dancing may hear the nearby whispering of a woman’s voice.”
“What does she say?”
“Oh, various things. Sometimes fragments of poetry. Sometimes lamentations. And sometimes, according to Manny, words of wisdom, pieces of advice, things that the listener might really need to hear at that particular moment of her life.”
We had reached a pair of giant gilded doors. Aunt Kathy slipped the key into the slot, and the lock clicked.
“And if you ever dance on that dance floor, you’re meant to feel this—life—pulsing through you. A presence, you know? Of poor Lady Clara, who can’t escape her heartbreak, even in death.”
“Aunt Kathy,” I said, “do you really believe that story?”
“See for yourself,” she said. “Just tell me—tell me—that this place doesn’t give you the creeps.” With that, she flung open the door, and we stepped inside an enormous dark room, as huge as a football field. The floor was lined with a streak of dim emergency exit lights, and in the bluish gleam, I could see that the walls were painted with the sad faces of cherubs and angels and mythological creatures: centaurs and Minotaurs and harpies. The royal blue carpet was so thick I wobbled in it in my winter boots. I followed Aunt Kathy as she walked toward the center of the room, across a large dance floor, smooth and shiny as an ice rink. Far above me were the golden domes of the ceiling, and the scrolled iron bars of a balcony stood all around the perimeter. I looked up.
“It’s a long way to fall, isn’t it?” Aunt Kathy stood next to me, our shadows reflected in the glassy surface of the dance floor.
“If you’re gonna jump from there, you must really want to die,” I murmured. Despite my skepticism, I did feel a little bit goose-bumpy. I nearly screamed when I heard a click behind me, followed by a whooshing sound. I whirled around and saw a glowing object—Aunt Kathy had turned on her EMF meter.
“Ideally,” she said, holding the thing up in the air and scrutinizing the digital reader from behind her rhinestone-studded reading glasses, “we would walk, step by step, in a grid pattern around this entire room, but that would take ten hours, and we only have ten minutes. So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to concentrate on the dance floor. Smaller, more manageable, and chances are that if Lady Clara’s here, she’ll be haunting the place where she, as they say, gave up the ghost.”
She dug into her leopard-print tote bag and handed me a notebook and a pen.
“While I operate the EMF meter, I need you to write down all my measurements. If we get a concentration of high electromagnetism: bam.”
“Okay.” I shrugged, turning to a clean page and uncapping the pen.
Kathy took a position at the far corner of the dance floor, and called out to me, “Ten point one milligauss.”
I scrawled down the number.
“Is that normal?”
“Pretty much anything between nine and thirty is normal. What we’re looking for is anything between a two and a seven—these low readings signify paranormal activity.”
I watched her as she made her way at a glacial speed up and down the dance floor. She’d call out a number—10.2, 12.5, 15.3, and so on—and then take a big step forward, call another number, and move on. It was a little like watching a character in one of those old fashioned video games going up and down in a maze.
“Who knew ghost hunting could be so boring?” I yawned. “How much longer is this going to take?”
“Bear with me, Wendy,” she said, pivoting on one foot and heading up the dance floor in the opposite direction. “Lady Clara is my spiritual soul mate. I really feel something in here.”
“Okay, Aunt Kathy, but can you at least try to hurry up? It’s kind of freezing in here.” I zippered up my coat to emphasize my annoyance.
“Freezing? I’m practically overheating. It’s these old radiators—they always work too well or not at all. It’s got to be eighty degrees in here.”
“Well, not where I’m standing. Where I’m standing, it’s cold as hell.”
“Wait a minute.” Aunt Kathy stopped abruptly in the center of the dance floor. She ran over to me and pushed me to the side.
“Hey!”
“You’re right!” she gasped, and looked at me with wide, excited eyes. “It is cold right here.”
“Told you.”
“What this means, Wendy, is that you’ve found a cold spot!”
“A cold spot?”
“Yes!” She grabbed me excitedly by the shoulders. “See, all ghost hunters believe that ghosts exist, obviously. But we don’t know how they exist. Still, one thing we do know—one universal law of science—is that
any kind of energy will alter its environment in some way. When you walk into a room, for example, the heat from your body will change the temperature of the room—imperceptibly, of course. And ghosts are no different. They need to draw energy from their environment in order to manifest themselves—hence, cold spots.”
I shivered a little. It was all so weird, but Aunt Kathy’s enthusiasm, and her pure faith in the process, was kind of catching. Also, it really was cold, and only right where I was standing. She turned on the EMF meter. It went nuts.
“Two point four! Did you see that?” She waved the metal device in my face. “Two point four!”
“Okay, so now what?”
“Lady Clara,” Aunt Kathy said, closing her eyes and arranging her face into a serious, gypsy-like expression. “We know you’re here. You are safe—we wish you no harm. We, too, have known heartache. We, too, have been disappointed by the men in our lives. Ex-boyfriends, in my case. A father, in my niece’s.” Her eyes snapped open. “Sorry, honey. You know what I mean, though.” She closed her eyes again. “Show yourself to us, and we promise, we will share it with no one.”
She had grabbed my hand and was holding on to it tightly as she whispered into the empty room. We stood there, nerves on edge, the painted angels watching us from the walls, waiting for the slim shape of a dark-haired girl in a diaphanous white nightgown to appear. We waited. And waited. But nothing happened.
“Come on, Aunt Kathy,” I said gently. “It’s been over ten minutes now. Manny could get in trouble.”
She sighed, nodded. As she began to arrange her meter and notebook back in her tote bag, I looked up to the balcony, where Lady Clara had jumped to her death. I half expected to see her brokenhearted lovely face, a pale oval in the gilded shadows. But instead, directly above our cold spot, what I saw was a large vent—and it was blowing directly down to where we stood. I opened my mouth to tell Aunt Kathy—to make a joke about our gullibility—but before I could, she’d thrown her arm around me, and her velvet cape was soft against my cheek as she pulled me toward her.
Neighborhood Girls Page 13