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She started to form, as if the question required more of her presence. She was pacing from one corner of the room to the other, holding up and dragging the curtains, tugging at the faucet handles. Bit by bit they began to turn.
Caroline.
“Caroline? Okay. Caroline. ” Nick would be delighted. “Caroline who?”
She wasn’t
really in white, I didn’t think—but she had that light, faded look that spirits get when they’re only half holding on anymore. By her clothes I thought she might have been from the 1930s; she was wearing a short-sleeved dress that stopped just past her knees, chunky heeled shoes, and a small hat with a decorative bit of mesh. Her hair was ragged and she was wearing one gray glove, but missing the other.
She scratched at her wrist—the one without a glove covering it—and I wished I could see it better. I wondered what habit she’d had in life that made her keep up the gesture even after death.
But she wasn’t solid enough to show me any details.
“Caroline,” I tried again. “Do you know where you are? Do you know what’s happened?”
Read, she said, in an offhand sort of way that implied she was barely answering me, or not paying attention. I wasn’t sure how well the Q&A was going to go, if she was this distracted and confused.
I tried to encourage her, to keep her talking. “That’s right, you’re in the Read House. The hotel is being remodeled. Did you know that?”
The hotel. Again she spoke with her voice and her eyes in different places.
Since the events with Old Green Eyes, I’d spent a great deal of time on the phone and on the Internet with Dana Marshall, who chased ghosts professionally for a big cable TV station. She’d taught me a lot. I was learning to categorize the dead people I encountered, which was useful because it gave me a better idea of what to expect from them.
Before Dana and her methodical approach to the supernatural, I’d always walked into these situations freeform. I approached every strange event with an attitude of, “Hey, I’m here and ghosts talk to me. Let’s get this party started. ” But it didn’t always work very well, and I never knew why.
Come to find out, it’s because there are different kinds of hauntings—with ghosts that show varying degrees of sentience. Dana had it all worked out, with charts and everything; but I still preferred to take a more casual approach when I could get away with it.
I assumed, based on the general unresponsive nature of Caroline, that she fell into the popular “barely there” category. More often than not, these are the legendary dead who routinely follow some habitual path. They walk the afterlife in a loop of practice, no longer remembering much about what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. In time, most of them fade away to wherever it is they go, having completely forgotten why they stayed in the first place. Sometimes they need help, but more often they refuse it. Occasionally they’re too far gone to accept it.
The vast majority of the hauntings Dana and her crew investigate for her TV shows fall into this camp, and I was afraid that Caroline did too. Maybe she’d only been seen more regularly because there were more people around.
It could be as simple as that.
Nick wouldn’t like it, though. It wouldn’t make much of a story. Oh well. Everything unexplained can’t be a fascinating narrative. At best, most of it is charmingly mundane. Only at worst is it sinister, and therefore interesting.
But I tried again anyway. “Caroline, is there something you want? Something you’re looking for here in the world of the living?”
She hovered there, not really looking at me. Scratching at her wrist.
“Do you even know you’re dead?”
Burned. All of them. Burned them up. Blamed the flu.
Dana had told me about keywords, and how it was sometimes the only way to get them to speak. You had to find the keywords—the things they remembered enough to recollect. She told me to try repeating the ghosts’ own phrases back to them, and to build on them gradually; so I gave that a shot.
“Burned? Who burned, Caroline?”
In the church.
“The church—not the hotel here? Then you’re not talking about the Read House?”
In the church, she nodded. The mistake.
Outside the room I heard Nick pacing back and forth, gently kicking his foot against the bottom of the door. “How’s it going in there?” he asked, impatient like a man waiting for his turn in the bathroom.
I ignored him. He might have another key, but I didn’t think he’d try to follow me inside.
I hear them. Coming.
