by Devon Glenn
“Emily, this is my mom, Katherine,” he said, though he knew they had already met.
“My nephew can talk to spirits, too,” Indra said. Everyone in the room looked at Elerick, waiting for him to say whatever it was he wanted to say to Katherine before she headed back to the Other Side. But tears had formed in his eyes, and he swallowed his words.
Katherine didn’t wait for him to speak. “Thank Chelsea for the Post-its and the paper clips. She’ll know what I mean.”
Within seconds, a paper clip and a Post-it note appeared in Emily’s Orbies dialogue box.
Elerick looked at the tiny sofa, where his aunt Indra sat with her two friends in matching sweatshirts. Chelsea was on her left, clutching a travel-size bag of tissues. When he relayed his mother’s message to Chelsea, she burst into tears.
“I spent hours cleaning out her desk after she died,” Chelsea explained. “No one really knows whose job it is to clean out a dead person’s desk. We had kept everything the way she left it when she went on sick leave. We all thought she’d be coming back. I didn’t know what to do, so I gave away her extra office supplies to other people in the office: the Post-its, the paper clips…”
Emily cocked her head to the side as she looked at the next hint from Orbies: a pen. Katherine, of course, had more detail. “Katherine is showing me a water pen that undresses a beefcake down to his underpants when you tip it from left to right,” she explained.
“Why, Mom? God.”
“I kept that one!” Chelsea’s eyes lit up. “Then I stayed up all night worrying that my coworkers would think it was morbid to steal a dead woman’s novelty pen and give away her Post-its. Should I have told them where all the extra office supplies came from? They thought I had found them in the secret supply closet that no one has a key to.”
Elerick sat down in the nearest chair and looked at Emily, begging her with his eyes to take over for him. He half-listened as the medium translated his mother’s reassurances to her friends that, yes, it’s OK to repurpose office supplies and, no, the final rose ceremony of The Bachelorette was not too trivial an occasion to open the bottle of wine that Chelsea found in Katherine’s bottom desk drawer.
Elerick’s mind had wandered back to one of the first things that Chelsea had said: We all thought she would be coming back. Elerick let the words echo in his head until they were loud enough to fill a stadium. He hadn’t been the only one in his mother’s life who hadn’t noticed that in the race for her life, the cancer was winning.
“The one good thing about the type of breast cancer that I had is that no one blamed me for having it,” Katherine said. “It was a painful way to go, but at least I died with everybody telling me how brave I was.”
She showed him a ship floating along on a calm sea, the sunlight dancing in the wake as the boat disappeared into the horizon.
“Water symbolizes a person’s emotional state,” Emily told the audience as a sailboat emoji appeared on screen. “Still water has a calming effect on the soul. She’s saying there will be smooth sailing ahead.”
Emily sounded like a self-help book, but her selective interpretation of his mother’s symbolism was enough to keep her audience involved without giving them all the details. Emily was an auntie whisperer, and Elerick was grateful. He looked at his mother. He knew the boat had a much more literal interpretation that his aunt may or may not want to hear.
Katherine nodded, adding, “I’d rather have a son who shows compassion for everyone he meets—blameless or not—than one who sits at a desk all day and doesn’t feel those personal connections that make life worth living.”
Elerick smiled, comforted to know that someone understood why he had quit a perfectly respectable job helping others to go live on a boat for a year. His mother always understood things like that, and now she was gone.
“Don’t hold on to Emily too tightly,” Katherine warned, her voice taking a more serious tone. “She needs a little wiggle room to find her own way. But if she focuses on the good people in her life, the rest will take care of itself.”
“I’ll do right by her, Mom,” he said, before adding quietly, “I’ll miss you.”
Katherine faded back into the distance, leaving behind a softness in the air that everyone could feel. Emily searched Elerick’s face for cues that he would be OK—that this encounter with his mother hadn’t reopened a wound too deep to be healed.
Locking eyes with Emily, Elerick mouthed the words, “Thank you,” and she nodded back, her heart pounding with the rush of having brought the right person to him at the right time.
She looked back at the crowd, where Liz and Tai were clinking glasses. The older couple whispered to each other while the young woman offered another glass of champagne to the husband, who looked restless. Hannah remained on the outskirts, still waiting for something Emily couldn’t see.
“Now, if you don’t mind,” said Emily, “I’m going to livestream the rest of this séance for the Orbies community to watch at home.”
The moment she hit On Air, Emily was shocked to see more green dots than she could count—much less respond to—lighting up the message board. “Um, welcome to the Black Wave,” Emily began. “The camera is set up so that if there are any spirits in the house who want to communicate, they can speak directly into the webcam.”
Indra gasped. “Will we be able to see them?”
Emily shook her head. “Apparitions are unusual, but we might be able to get EVP recordings and maybe see some orbs. We might even see an outline of a human shape—a specter.” She hoped that’s what they’d see. The site was still in what Alex the orb called its beta phase, which to Emily meant that anything could happen.
“Would anyone who is watching remotely like to ask a question?”
“I would,” a voice said, and a screen popped up to reveal a woman who looked, to Emily’s astonishment, just like Hannah the Towel Lady.
“Um, hi, Hannah. How did you get back to your room so fast?” Emily turned around to see if her guest had wandered off during the channeling session with Indra and Katherine. But no, the Hannah she had seen earlier was still in her seat by the door. And if Hannah was still in the room, then who was on the screen?
“Well, I got so danged cold after my massage this afternoon that I decided to dial in to the séance rather than come down,” the Hannah on the computer said.
“There you are!” the Hannah by the door shrieked. She pushed through the crowd, and as she did, the others shivered slightly but kept their gazes fixed on the screen in front of them. As soon as Door Hannah reached the computer, the webcam sprang into action with rapid-fire clicks that shot bursts of light into the room as if taken by a physical camera from a ghostlier era. Nice touch, Emily thought as she waited for the stills to show up. When a link to a file appeared, Emily clicked on it and held her breath.
There was a picture of all of them, in the room, with the addition of a glowing orb right next to Emily. Door Hannah was nowhere to be found. The audio clip crackled with a woman’s voice: “Can you hand me a towel?”
Emily looked behind her, then back at the screen, and pieced it together. “Hannah, I’m seeing a woman who looks exactly like you. She’s standing right here in this room,” Emily said to the person on the screen. “Do you know why?”
The other guests looked around, puzzled. While the woman was unusually vivid to Emily, she was invisible to everyone else. Emily played back the recording with the ghost filter on. Watching from her hotel room, Hannah gasped when she saw the faint outline of a woman’s body moving toward the screen. “That’s my twin sister, Donna,” she said. “She drowned in a Jet-Skiing accident.”
Emily paused to enjoy the feeling of solving a decades-old mystery before addressing her decades-old feud with the Towel Lady. “Donna,” she said to the room. There was no sense in hiding her conversation from a group of people who had just heard the ghost’s
voice. “You do know you’re dead, right?”
The voice recorder picked up Donna’s answer with astonishing clarity: “I do now.” How could she have known? Hannah and Donna were twins: when Donna saw her sister’s reflection in the mirror of the hotel bathroom, she assumed that she herself was still among the living. Her specter had even aged accordingly.
“All these years that you’ve been finding wet towels in the room had nothing to do with the plumbing,” Emily said to Hannah with wonder. “It’s just your sister trying to dry off.”
“All these years that I’ve been to your séances, you’ve never brought her through,” Hannah replied. “I thought you just didn’t like me.”
Emily quickly taught Hannah how to use Orbies to continue her conversation with Donna. Emily didn’t know how long a ghost would be able or willing to communicate using the app. But she’d find out soon enough.
A new message popped up on the screen, bearing an attached video with the title “Saint Joan.” Emily, as well as Liz and Tai, immediately recognized the promo video that the playhouse was trying to circulate on YouTube to sell more advance tickets.
Emily clicked the Play button. Everything seemed normal about the video: the actors, dressed in Sadie’s costumes, were delivering their lines while ticket information for the play flashed on the screen and the music bobbed along in the background. The problem was, Emily soon realized, that the actress who was wearing a silky chemise was missing her head. In its place was a glowing white orb that, once Emily applied the filter, looked more like a human head but was still indistinct. It seemed that Lorelei had found her way back to the screen after all—and had cast herself in the lead role.
“What happened to the video?” Liz asked. “This is not what it looked like when we uploaded the file last night.”
“It’s haunted by a silent-film actress,” Emily said. “Don’t worry, she’ll give up when she realizes that no one will recognize her face.” The last part was for Lorelei’s benefit.
“Not yet,” Lorelei typed in the message box, and her orb vanished from the screen.
Elerick raised his eyebrow at Emily. “What does she mean, not yet?”
CHAPTER 31
Scented oils and a
tracking device
Emily splashed cold water on her face and tried to make herself as presentable as possible for breakfast. In her old house, she could scramble her own eggs in the guest cottage undisturbed, but in a way, she was glad to be going into her family’s restaurant with everyone else. She liked hearing how the guests had slept after a midnight séance, especially when their active imaginations had turned creaking floorboards and leaky pipes into demonic possessions and paranormal love affairs.
When Emily arrived, Burt was already milling about the dining tables, pouring orange juice, loading trays full of bacon and sausage, and charming guests by tossing oversize pancakes from his skillet onto their open plates. “There she is!” he exclaimed, winking at his daughter.
“Hey, lady,” Tai from the arts commission greeted her warmly. “Great show last night.” The other guests smiled sleepily, much more relaxed and friendly now that they had something to talk about besides Burt’s pancakes.
Emily smiled and took her seat, holding out her cup for Burt to fill with strong black coffee, which she doctored with sugar and milk from an antique serving set. “How did you sleep?” she asked the group.
“I would have slept fine,” Liz said, accusingly, “if someone hadn’t made me sit in the lobby all night practicing his lines from Saint Joan.”
Tai smiled. “Well, I needed someone to play the martyr.”
“How about you three?” Emily asked the half-marathon runners.
“We’ve been playing with Orbies,” Indra said. “Take a look at this!” She pulled out her phone and showed Emily a photo of Indra and her two friends sitting on a king-size bed facing the mirror. Indra had the camera in her hand, and a burst of light filled the area where the flash had gone off. Beyond its jagged rays, surrounding all their heads, were dozens of perfectly round orbs. “There’s no mistaking them,” she gushed. “But when you apply the filter”—she touched the screen to pull up the tool—“the orbs just look like smudges. Do you think the app is broken?”
“It worked for us,” a guest named John piped up. He held out his tablet so Indra and the others could see. “We caught one orb—here—and with the filter on it, you can see the outline of what looks like a little old lady.”
“We got an EVP, too.” John’s wife, Laurin, took the tablet from him to pull up the audio file. “Do you hear that?” she asked when the recording was done. “‘I’m covered in feathers!’”
“That’s Elva,” Emily interjected. “She’s one of my favorite Cape May spirits.”
“Why is she here?” John asked.
“I don’t know,” Emily said. She’s been saying she’s covered in feathers ever since I was little, but I don’t know what that means.”
“Maybe she’s a night owl, like me,” Laurin suggested. “She’s throwing on her feather boa, and we’re going dancing!”
Listening from the next table, Barbara cleared her throat. “She’s paraphrasing the Bible,” she explained. “Psalm 91, to be specific: ‘He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. You will not fear the terror of the night’…It means you’re protected from evil.”
Emily could feel the hair on her arms stand on end. It was time to change the subject. “The pancakes are good this morning, Dad.”
“Enjoy them while they last. I can’t feed a hotel this size by myself. I’m going to need to hire a chef before the busy season starts.”
Emily gulped down more coffee, motioning for Burt to warm her cup.
“It’ll stunt your growth, young lady,” he reprimanded her.
Emily patted her father on the head, for he was a delusional old man who must be stopped, she thought. “I reached my full height many years ago, Dad,” she said. “It’s not coffee’s fault that I’m short. It’s yours.”
Puzzled by the strange turn the previous night’s séance had taken, Emily wandered over to the Washington Street Mall, where she could always count on a sample from the fudge shop to cheer her up. Sadie had been working at the flagship location in the outdoor pedestrian mall on and off since high school, and now that she was done making costumes for Saint Joan, she had decided to pull a few extra hours to save up some money for school. In a town that size, Sadie was free to pick up a job when she needed one and then put it back like a rental bike as soon as she was tired of it. The outdoor shopping center was a stone’s throw away from the Black Wave. Today the white-trimmed storefronts were covered in garlands and the street lamps were wrapped in red ribbons for the holiday season.
“Still pushing fudge on tourists, are we?” Emily teased.
“Say it,” Sadie said with a serious look on her face.
“No.”
Sadie pushed a tray full of fudge samples under Emily’s nose. “Do it, or you can’t have any of these.”
“Fine. Milk, milk, lemonade,” sang Emily, pointing to the corresponding parts of her anatomy. “Round the corner—”
“Fudge is made!” Sadie finished her sentence, bent over, pushed the tray between her legs, and presented it to Emily. It was a ritual they had shared since they were young enough to get away with it, and Sadie had carried on the tradition with even more gusto now that they weren’t.
“Wow, I should sneak up on you two more often,” a voice said behind them. Emily whirled around.
“Elerick, what are you doing here?” she tried to say, but her mouth was full of chocolate. Just once, Emily wished that Elerick could catch her doing something sophisticated, like listening to jazz, smoking a cigar, or perhaps filing her tax return, to show that she was an independent woman who was down for
business as well as for pleasure. But no, so long as she was rocking the cradle of her hometown, she’d find stuffed animals in every closet and poop jokes around every corner.
Elerick grabbed a handful of fudge and shoved it in his mouth. “I wanted to find out where the fudge is made!”
“What?” Emily said, finally swallowing her candy.
Elerick swallowed his as well. “I’m looking for new venues for my Luddite lifestyle. Do you want to go bird-watching with me?”
Emily looked at Sadie, feeling pretty sure that her heart was beating out of her chest like a cartoon character’s while stars spun around her head. Sadie couldn’t see those, but she motioned for Emily to wipe some fudge off her face. “That’s a yes!” Sadie answered for her. “See you guys later.”
Elerick took Emily’s hand and led her to the bicycle rack where he had parked a tandem bicycle. “For us?” Emily asked.
“Just for us.”
Together, they rode to Cape May Point. Elerick’s scarf hit Emily in the face as they picked up speed, but she didn’t care. It was her turn to be the tourist, and having Elerick as her guide was a welcome change. They parked in front of the hawk-watch platform at the end of the parking lot. At the top of the stairs, a large wooden deck held panoramic views of the marsh and the back of the beach dunes, the latter of which had a light dusting of snow from the morning’s flurries. The air was cold, but in the absence of wind, the atmosphere felt gentle for that time of year, and the sky was now clear and blue.
Elerick picked a bench to sit on and handed Emily a set of binoculars. She knew that he was still upset with her when he left her room the other day; the binoculars were an olive branch. Emily lifted them to her face, frowned, and brought them back down again.
“Sorry, my head is big,” Elerick said as he watched her squeeze the lenses closer together on the adjustable frame. “I tested both pairs before we got here to make sure they work.”