AllFreeNovel
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Gus had stopped in at lunchtime and then come home early to check on her, despite her protests that she was fine. They’d gone back to the parking lot outside the grocery store to look again for her cell phone, before stopping downtown to buy her a new one when the search proved fruitless. That evening they’d eaten on the couch while Gus worked and Theo read. Horse had barked ferociously at one point, but investigation revealed nothing. Horse had been known to overreact to cats. They’d brought him inside and all seemed well with the world again.
Gus was leaving for the airport straight after breakfast. He’d be back the next evening. And Horse would be only too pleased to sleep indoors. With an uneventful day intervening, they were all a lot less uneasy.
Theo made scrambled eggs while Gus ran around the house looking for files and briefs and socks. She added the leftover duck, which she assumed Gus had ordered in, when he did whatever he did to the beef she’d bought. She asked him about it as she served the eggs on toast.
“Ex-client who’s a chef at On the Hill. Jac called in and picked it up.”
“What happened to the beef?”
“Horse. It turns out he likes his meat very well done.”
Gus ate his eggs while shaving in the kitchen. He delivered garbled instructions about being careful as he brushed his teeth. Theo gathered his files for him and searched the living room for his phone. John Crane’s car had pulled up and was sounding its horn when Gus raced out with his tie stuffed in his pocket and his arms full of files. “Oh…Mac may come round to borrow a thing.”
“A thing?”
“Yes…a tennis racquet. He wants to borrow my tennis racquet.”
“A tennis racquet? Why?”
“He wants to play tennis, I suppose…something about the country club… Gotta go.”
“Where is your tennis racquet?”
“In one of the cupboards. Lock the door.”
Theo shook her head as she closed the door after him. “Fly safe.” Mac could have easily picked up the tennis racquet at dinner the night before last. She had no doubt that Gus had asked the poor man to check that she was all right.
She cleaned up after breakfast and fed Horse before letting him out into the backyard. Now that she’d promised to stay home, the thought of going out was enticing. She laughed at the predictable contrariness of it, with no intention of giving in to the impulse.
Theo had decided to begin a new novel that day. A ghost story. The idea had set seed when she and Dan had discussed the Stull Cemetery. Perhaps that’s why she loved thinking about it. It was a little like talking to Dan again. On the kitchen table she set out and taped several pages of clean paper end to end, and upon the blank pages, she began to plot a general sequence of events—a plot derived from a single flyaway thought that had passed through her mind in that conversation with Dan. A strange thought that came from she knew not where. Were the dead haunted by the living? After Dan had died, the thought had returned in quiet moments when loneliness caught her unawares, and she had started to mull over the possibilities.
It was past midday when the doorbell rang, and Theo was startled out of her immersion. The banner was scrawled with hundreds of notes and arrows and the odd symbol that only she understood. She glanced at it with not a small measure of satisfaction before she went to the door. A squint through the peephole revealed Mac Etheridge on the doorstep, and she remembered the tennis racquet. She opened the door and invited him in. “I’m afraid I haven’t found Gus’s tennis racquet yet… Would you like a cup of tea…or a beer? Gus drinks something called Copperhead.”
“In that case, I’ll have tea.” Mac glanced at the kitchen table. “Is that a manifesto of some sort?”
“Not entirely. It’s the notes for my next novel.”
“May I look?”
“If you’d like,” Theo said a little shyly. “It probably won’t make much sense.”
“Would you explain it to me?”
Theo hesitated.
Mac apologized. “Sorry…being nosy is a something of a professional habit, I’m afraid.”
“Oh no, I didn’t mean… It’s a ghost story.”
“For real…a horror then?”
“Not exactly.” Theo explained the concept.
Mac folded his arms, listening intently. “So why are the dead afraid of the living?”
Theo thought about that. “For the same reason that we’re afraid of ghosts…because seeing them might mean we are about to join them. Perhaps the dead are afraid to live as much as we are afraid to die.”
Mac was nodding before she’d finished speaking. “That’s brilliant.”
