Oh, he was already seriously pissed. I could tell by the way the little muscle in his jaw was pulsing.
Helen returned just as I was scrawling my name on the signature line. “Fair warning, guys. It’s a little musty back there.”
She wasn’t kidding. If the main part of the building was drab and inhospitable, the archives were downright forbidding. The area was about the size of the Markses’ basement, but broken up by floor-to-ceiling shelves. While the shelving definitely made the space a lot more organized, it cast pretty deep shadows, and turned the room into more of a maze. A funk hovered in the air that I couldn’t quite place. Maybe dry rot. Maybe despair. Helen showed us to the microfilm reader, then left us to our research with a stern parting look.
Jacob took in the drawer of microfilm arranged in tidy rows. “If we were at work, I’d have these scanned for optical character recognition and we could search it for even the smallest mention of the hospital in seconds.”
Maybe so. But if we were at work, undoubtedly someone would have shut us down by now. In this dusty back room, we did have a couple of things going for us. At least the local rag only published weekly, so we had less film to look through. And at least we could narrow it down to a rough date based on the year his grandmother stopped taking him to the creepy carnival.
We fired up the reader and loaded the most likely film roll. “We’ll scan headlines first,” Jacob said. “The closing of the only local hospital would’ve been big news.”
Given that the first headline to pop up had to do with the County Fair, I suspected he was right.
Even though we were focusing only on front-page headlines, there were still fifty-two newspapers a year to scan, and no way to jump from one to the next without spooling through the whole damn thing. Unlike Jacob, I have no glutes—and after a couple of hours on a hard wooden chair, my sit-bones were starting to complain. Loudly.
The tiny library might be low on natural light, but there were plenty of chairs. I stepped away to go grab one with some padding and nearly collided with Helen in the dim hallway.
“Listen,” she said, “sorry about giving you folks a hard time.”
Somewhere in the stacks beyond, the shadows shifted. It was subtle enough that I might not have noticed if Helen hadn’t stopped me to talk to her. And it could be something as innocuous as a potted plant by an air vent casting a shadow.
But given the overall sense of discomfort I’d been experiencing, I highly doubted I was dealing with a plant.
Helen must’ve been blissfully unaware. Either that or she was just used to it. “This morning I got a nastygram from the county threatening to merge us with another branch if we don’t get our numbers up.”
“That sucks,” I said carefully, searching for movement.
“Mightily. The nearest branch is over half an hour away, and my patrons will lose valuable work time traveling an hour just for a trip to the library. A lot of them will stop going at all, especially the older ones who depend on us for their large-print books and magazines. You know what the funny thing is? All my regulars tell me I’m a heck of a lot nicer than their last librarian. But no matter how I try to keep luring people in, our usage keeps dropping at a higher rate than anywhere else in the state.”
“The last librarian....” I couldn’t just come out and ask, She’s dead, right? “Maybe she could give you some advice.”
“Not without a Ouija board.”
The hair on the back of my neck prickled.
“Sorry, that was a pretty tasteless thing to say. I didn’t really know her well.”
“No, it’s fine….” A shiver raced down my spine.
“When she interviewed me for the job, she made some weird remark about the ‘big-city scarf’ I was wearing. What does that even mean?”
I forced out an uneasy laugh. The bookshelves formed tall narrow corridors casting way too many shadows. I did my best to scan them without being obvious.
“Frieda Berkenkopf,” Helen said. “Haven’t thought about her in ages.”
Movement? Maybe. Maybe not. I was about to get back to the microfilm when, at the far end of the narrow aisle of bookshelves, a figure crossed from one side to the other. And it was most definitely not Jacob.
Helen said, “When you think about it, I guess, Frieda was a real character.”
Yeah. That was putting it mildly.
22
WHITE LIGHT CAME rushing down, and my visual perception went glowy around the edges. The telltale spot behind my eyeball that tells me I’m totally topped off gave a little twinge—but I couldn’t get a bead on the ghost. Hard to say if she was deliberately camouflaging herself or just following her own ghostly agenda. Either way, I’m especially leery of non-corporeal stuff I can’t quite track. I wanted to grab Helen by the elbow and hustle her out of there, but I couldn’t risk the off-chance that she was some sort of undocumented Psych and my light would bounce over to her. To buy myself some time to think, I tried to get her talking about herself. “This is quite a place, how long have you been here again?”
My interest surprised Helen, but like most people, she was happy enough to talk about herself, given the chance. I barely listened as she spun out a mundane story about transferring from a big, well-funded library with the intention of helping people who really needed it. I was busy surreptitiously wiping sweat from my upper lip while keeping my eyes peeled for another flicker.
Maybe there was some sort of Bloody Mary effect in play—a magical summons achieved by the speaking of the ghost’s name. To test that theory, when there was a gap in Helen’s story, I said, “So you didn’t work with Frieda at all.”
“No, she was already in hospice by the time the Library Board gave me a job offer.”
I scanned the shelves. No dead Frieda.
Maybe she was bound by time and could only pop in at the hour of her death. Or maybe she was nothing more than a mindless repeater. But judging by the ick-feeling creeping down my back, I suspected Frieda’s consciousness was still with us.
“I just thought of something I need to tell Jacob,” I blurted out, and back-pedaled into the archives for all I was worth. Helen must not have thought my abrupt departure was too weird—or if she did, at least she didn’t follow to see what the hell my problem was.
A glance over my shoulder showed Jacob hard at work scanning headlines. “Ghost,” I whispered, and the gentle whir of the microfilm reel went silent.
He was up and out of his seat immediately, but despite moving fast, he was careful not to touch me this time. “Where?”
“Out there.” I gestured vaguely. “It’s the old librarian. We haven’t had a chat yet, so I can’t tell if she knows she’s dead.” I pulled a bag of salt from my pocket and opened myself to the white light, shoving the energy toward the salt. Jacob watched. These things never got old for him.
So it surprised me when he wasn’t on board. “Was she threatening?”
“Not…exactly.”
“Then aren’t you going to try reasoning with her first?”
“Just wanna make sure I’m not walking into a gunfight with nothing but my dubious charm to back me up.” Okay, maybe that wasn’t my original intent. But now that Jacob had pointed out the fact that I’d been willing to “shoot first, ask questions later,” I knew in my gut that he was right, and I should be leading with my powers of persuasion.
Fantastic.
With Jacob following an arm’s length away, I eased out into the spot where I’d last seen Frieda. Non-Fiction, with its outdated textbooks and its Dewey decimals. Elsewhere in the library a phone rang, followed by the faint murmur of Helen speaking to the caller. Hopefully she’d be occupied long enough to stay out of my hair.
“Frieda?” I whispered. “I just want to talk. You’re here…somewhere. And this would all be a lot easier if you showed yourself.”
A flicker…which I strongly suspected was sunlight bouncing off the chrome of a passing car. Even so, the sight of it made that tender spot i
n my brain throb. Since I was full of adrenaline (and therefore, mojo) I gave the place another scan. Again, nothing.
It’s bad enough talking to ghosts while someone else is listening in…I couldn’t even be sure Frieda was there.
But where else would she be?
“Look, you don’t want to have a discussion with me, that’s fine. But what if you just listened? Because I might not know all of your particulars, but I’ve dealt with a lot of folks in your, uh, situation.” Was that a flicker, over by the magazine racks? I eased closer. Found nothing. “You’re not physical anymore. Not…alive. Not anymore.”
“Tell her not to be afraid of the veil,” Jacob prompted. “Tell her there’s nothing to be scared of—that it’s a relief to finally cross over.”
It was tempting to ask him who was the medium here—him or me? But given that his past was apparently as shrouded in fucked-up machinations as mine, I wasn’t about to go there. “He’s right,” I said to the empty air. “The physical world is for the living, but that doesn’t mean you stop existing once your time here is up. There’s something else waiting for you beyond the veil. And whatever it might be, it’s a heck of a lot better than haunting your library to the point that no one can stand being here. You care about this place, right? I’m sure you don’t want to drive it into the ground.”
White light fatigue was setting in—it was taking more effort to try and hold it, and no matter how hard I clenched, I could feel it starting to ebb. I hated it when there was no clear answer. Do I leave dead Frieda roaming around where she might someday hop into a body that wasn’t hers? Or do I hunt her down and salt her like a mindless repeater and get on with my day?
Hell, maybe by failing to act when I first saw her, I’d made my choice. Because now I couldn’t even tell if she was still lurking around, or if the goosebumps prickling along my forearms were a result of my own vivid imagination.
From the front desk came Helen’s voice telling her caller to have a good day, followed by the click of a phone hitting the cradle. No doubt pretty soon she’d wonder why I’d wandered away from the microfilm, and she’d come over to check on me. If I sent Jacob to run interference, would he take that as me benching him—again? Probably. Plus, I was the one Helen had inexplicably warmed up to.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Jacob. “Stay quiet.” Frieda would probably prefer that he keep his voice down, anyway.
I headed off Helen somewhere by the DVD collection. “Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked.
Oh, we’d found something all right…but it had nothing to do with the hospital. As much as I probably could’ve used her help digging up dirt on Sacred Heart, now that we had a ghost situation, it was more important to keep her out of the possession zone.
And so I did what I do best, and lied through my teeth. “It’s going great.”
“Good. But we’re closing in fifteen minutes, so if you need to print anything out, you’ll want to get started now. The microfilm printer is phenomenally slow.”
“Will do.”
She must’ve bought it, because she headed back to the main room and started turning off the reading lamps and tidying up the newspapers. It wasn’t exactly a huge place, and pretty soon she’d start to hover. I shook myself off and sucked down a fresh volley of white light, then headed back to shelve that librarian ghost once and for all.
I found Jacob more or less where I’d left him, staring at a sad little display of gardening books. I was about to point out that neither of us had a green thumb when I saw Freida was standing right beside him.
“Three o’clock,” I told Jacob. He gave a little start, then backpedaled away.
Freida was so close I could describe her to a sketch artist. The stern set of the mouth, the slightly crooked glasses…and the fact that she was looking back at me with some glimmer of consciousness. We had a full-blown ghost on our hands, then—not just an empty repeater.
I slipped my hand into my pocket and squeezed the comforting heft of the salt-filled baggie. “Look, Frieda, I’d love to continue lecturing you on the pros and cons of digging in your heels on the wrong side of the veil, but we’re running out of time. Fact is, you don’t belong here, and you’re not doing this place any favors by sticking around. So leave the library in the capable hands of the person you hired—”
Freida moved. Not like a living person moves. More like a series of still photos. One, standing there, staring me in the face. The next, still looking directly at me—but pointing at the wall. Before I could even blink, she was gone, as if maybe it was really costing her to stay in the physical plane. Hopefully so. I’d rather face off with a weak spirit than a strong one.
The spot she’d indicated was just about where Jacob had been looking, only a couple of feet higher. “What’s over here?” I said, and edged closer to the display. There was a framed poster on the wall above.
No, not a poster….
“A plat map,” Jacob said.
“A what?”
“A real estate map that shows the boundaries of all the land parcels.” The two of us peered at it more closely.
This particular map was old—decades old. Not because the library couldn’t afford to replace it, but because it celebrated the year the library was built. The parcel of land we were currently standing on had been decorated with vibrant strokes of paint, and the map all around it was covered with a variety of groovy ‘we love our library’ type slogans. But despite the psychedelic 1960’s teenage paint job, the other parcels of land were visible enough.
“There.” Jacob prodded something with his finger. “Sacred Heart is right there.”
Since I doubted my ability to sweet-talk Helen into letting us take the map home, even as much as she seemed to inexplicably like me, a picture would have to do. I grabbed some snapshots with a burner phone, double checked that, yes, I’d captured the old hospital, then tucked the phone away by the time Helen came to regretfully shoo us out the door.
We climbed into the car and sat together in silence. My heart was pounding. Not from the ghost—as far as I could tell, Frieda was harmless, just doing her job—but from the knowledge that we were one step closer to Sacred Heart.
Days are long at the cusp of summer, and there was enough daylight to go take another look, especially now that we had a better idea where to put our attention. Jacob pulled out the satellite photo to compare with our plat map while I flipped through our road atlas, a big, floppy book I could never seem to make heads or tails of. We were right on the verge of something big—I could feel it in my bones.
And then Jacob’s phone rang. Barbara’s ringtone.
He made no move to answer.
“Aren’t you gonna get that?”
“She’ll have to wait.”
Eventually the ringing stopped. And then started again…on my phone.
The thing Jacob doesn’t get about Barbara is that she’s no good at being ignored. Maybe they’re just too much alike. I decided it was better to face her now than to give her annoyance the opportunity to really ratchet up. I took the call and cautiously said, “What’s up?”
“Where are you? We’re supposed to be at the supper club.”
“Oh. We must’ve lost track of time….”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got another assignment from Pastor Jill. Honestly, it’s ridiculous how much homework she’s giving you, what with your wedding in three days. Whatever it is, finish up and meet me at the club.”
23
APPARENTLY, “SUPPER CLUBS” are a big Wisconsin thing. When I’d asked what the difference was between a supper club and a restaurant, my question was met with a vague shrug and speculation that supper clubs were more likely to put a relish tray on the table. (I didn’t even bother asking what a relish tray was.) Whatever the finer distinction of restaurant vs. supper club might be, thanks to a cancellation, Kaiser’s Downtown Inn had a banquet room available on the night we needed it. That’s all that mattered to me.
Bar
bara had been less than thrilled to hear it would take us nearly an hour to get there, but short of teleportation, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot she could do about it. We found her at Kaiser’s pacing back and forth in front of the door, likely scaring away customers.
“It’s about time,” she snapped. “They close at nine on weekdays.”
“It’s barely eight,” Jacob said. I personally would have let it drop. But he had “that look” about him: the one that preceded the digging in of heels.
Unfortunately, so did Barbara.
“Look, Jacob, you can’t just go around expecting everyone to pick up your slack. I get that planning a wedding is stressful, but the least you could do is deign to show up.”
“It’s barely eight,” he grit out again. At which point I decided they should probably have this conversation without me.
As venues went, the supper club was old-fashioned to the point of being kitschy, which was fine. But it was filled with wood, wood…and more wood—which meant the whole place was also full of shifting shadows. We had researched the club before agreeing to host our reception within its wood-paneled walls, and according to all records, no one had died there. Even the original owner was still alive, though in terms of age, he’d give Grandma Marks a run for her money.
Ghosts usually end up in the spot where they died…but not always. Case in point: the library. But stepping through the door with all my feelers out, I didn’t get that same sense of foreboding I had in the library. Oh, I’d still figure out some way to salt the corners so I didn’t have to worry about anyone dead crashing the party, but I still thought I was getting off to a pretty good start.
At least until the current owner bustled up, a chunky white guy, roughly my age, in a suit that looked to be camouflaging one hell of a beer belly. “Jacob Marks?” he asked.
“No, Victor Bayne.”
“Ah! The…husband.”
He said the word with a half-laugh, as if it was something foreign he wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce.
Other Half (PsyCop book 12) Page 15