Emily's Ghost (35 page)

"That's not quite
accurate, Jim," Lee said amiably. "I'd read an interesting piece in
a magazine about poltergeists, and the house I visited had had
on-and-off reports of some kind of disturbances within."

"You mean the house was
haunted?"

Lee weighed the question.
"I don't know. Apparently some of its owners thought
so."

"And what did you
think?"

"I thought it looked like
an old house that needed work."

"What about this Kimberly,
this channeler?"

"I'd rather not say too
much about her because I understand she's just gone back to her
parents to live."

"You mean she's had a
change of heart? She doesn't want to do séances
anymore?"

"I can't say that she ever
wanted to channel. I think she was willing to give it a try, and it
didn't work out for her. Historically such people have been
sensitive and high-strung in the extreme. Whatever it is they do,
it seems to be a demanding, exhausting effort."

"You sound like you
believe in these so-called clairvoyants, Senator."

"I'd like to," he
admitted. "I think we all would. I think that people who
do
have the ability to
believe are in general happier than the skeptics."

"I'd love to ask you more,
Senator, but I think I'll throw the phones open and let our viewers
have the chance now. Yes," the host said into a mike. "You're on
the air. Go ahead."

The voice that came on was
sweet, young, and timid. "I wanted to know, Senator, if you've ever
seen your wife in any way or at any time after she passed
away?"

The bartender chuckled
maliciously. "That's cutting to the chase."

Emily watched with
trepidation. How would Lee get out of that one?

"After
she passed away? No," Lee answered after a pause.

"Oh." The caller was
obviously disappointed. "Then you're not --"

"Living on a deserted
island with my wife's ghost? Nope."

"That's too bad," said the
caller, and she really meant it. "It would've been such a romantic
story."

"That it would," said Lee
with a half nod and a smile that made Brenda sigh.

Another caller, this time
a man. "Senator, if you don't mind my saying so, this is horse
manure. No one much cares what you do with your spare time, as long
as it doesn't cost anything. But I don't mind telling you, I resent
any more money for SETI. Let's put the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence on a back burner for now. We've got other fish to fry
up front. Well?"

"You have a point, sir,"
said Lee. "There'll have to be cuts, and SETI is one of them. I
don't like it, but it'd be unconscionable to go forward with an
ambitious program until we've paid our bills and taken care of the
many who're going down for the third time."

Jack snorted. "See that?
Backpedaling. I knew he would."

Another caller, another
man. "I've voted for you in the past, Senator, but I've never felt
too comfortable about it. Now, with all these rumors flying right
and left, well, I wanted you to know that I'm voting for
Congressman Strom in the primary, and so are the guys I play poker
with. I don't exactly trust the fella, but like I said, we don't go
much for this supernatural stuff. We all believe you shouldn't be
poking around in it, even as a hobby."

In a carefully patient
voice Lee said something about keeping an open mind, but the rest
of his remark was drowned out by Jack. "Oh, yeah, that's how this
one's gonna go," the bartender decided. "Gals for him, guys for
Strom. That's because men vote with their heads, women with their
hearts."

"Men vote with their
heads?" cried Brenda. "Who you kidding? Men never bother to think;
they just vote a straight ticket."

They were off and running
on a track they seemed to have covered before -- politics.
High-spirited and noisy, the two of them easily shouted down Lee
and his call-in viewers. Emily was reduced to trying to read Lee's
lips. All things considered, she preferred not to concentrate
there; the memories of his kisses were still too
painful.

A customer came in,
forcing an end to Jack's lively defense of his sex and allowing
Emily to hear a voice say over the rolling credits, "Portions of
this program will be rebroadcast on Sunday morning at nine-thirty
on
Bay State Week in Review."

She tried to forget the
announcement she'd just heard, dropped a five-dollar bill on the
counter, and went away more frustrated than not. She realized now
that the day of her interview had been a turning point in their
relationship. She'd watched Lee walk a fence between faith and
skepticism, and then she'd watched him trip and fall on the wrong
damn side. How painfully ironic that he was being skewered for
being a believer.

In the last half hour it
had also become obvious that forgetting him was bound to be an
uphill battle. The trick was to avoid being reminded of him. In
some ways, that wouldn't be hard. It wasn't as though she had a
photo album of their time together, or love letters from him, or a
song they'd shared, or even some dried corsage to mope over. On the
other hand, the senator did have a distressing habit of popping up
in newspapers, in magazines, and now on television.

And with a primary coming
up, he was bound to be popping up more and more. Just that morning
she'd read that he'd hired a campaign manager (not Cara Miles --
praise the Lord -- but some heavy hitter who'd run the last New
York senatorial campaign). That person was being paid ten thousand
dollars a month to keep Lee Alden's face in front of Emily at all
times.

But
.
If he
did
lose the primary race -- and for
the first time Emily was beginning to believe that could happen --
he'd probably leave politics to become senior partner in some
high-powered law firm. He'd drop out of the public eye. And out of
sight, after all, was out of mind.

Gee, Em, why stop
there?
she asked herself
caustically.
Why not hope that he gets
kidnapped by an adoring constituent and locked away in her
basement? Wouldn't that be helpful?

Emily squared her
shoulders. Getting over the man was going to be a long, hard
battle. If it weren't for Fergus O'Malley, she wasn't certain she'd
be up to it.

****

On Sunday morning Emily
and Fergus were sifting for clues in the rubble of debris that
she'd dragged home after a week of research. Fergus, thinking he
was doing Emily a kindness, zapped on
Bay
State Week in Review.
Lee Alden's chiseled
face was being featured in close-up.

She protested, then went
over to the television to turn it off. But she didn't, or couldn't,
and ended up standing next to the tube with her hand on the remote
-- ready, willing, but not quite able to switch Lee Alden out of
her life. She was painfully aware that he'd made no attempt to see
her since the interview. Granted, Congress was still in session,
but she knew full well that the senator had been spending weekends
in Massachusetts on damage control.

"The bloke's under siege,"
Fergus said thoughtfully as he studied the senator's image
flickering on the screen. "Ye think he'll pull through in one
piece?"

"It doesn't look good,"
Emily admitted. "Stan Cooper's roughing him up pretty badly in my
paper. And Stan's not the only one."

"Aye. They travel in a
pack, them press people -- present company excepted, o' course.
Times haven't changed much that way. It's funny, though. The man
don't even believe."

"Ah, but he's admitted
he'd
like
to
believe, and that's enough for most of them."

The program ended; Emily
turned it off with a funny little sound, as if she were straining
to move a heavy piece of furniture.

"I'd vote for him," Fergus
admitted. "It does puzzle me why some folks want him brought down.
He's quick, honest, smart --"

"Three good reasons, my
friend," Emily said tersely. "Can we talk about something else
now?"

"I understand," Fergus
said.

He did understand. Lately
the two of them seemed to operate on exactly the same wavelength;
Emily could hardly remember their last sharp exchange. Despite the
fact that they were divided by sex, status, education, even the
centuries themselves, they were completely in tune. When Emily
bothered to wonder why, she always came to the same conclusion:
Each of them had decided to trust the other because neither of them
had anything to lose. That just wasn't true between Lee Alden and
her.

Perhaps more important,
Fergus and Emily shared the same obsession: solving Hessiah
Talbot's murder. Ironically it was the shrewd Mrs. Gibbs who'd
pointed Emily to her most interesting find recently. On Wednesday
the librarian had called Emily at home. "Are you aware," she had
asked, "that the
Newarth Sentinel
has complete archives of all the newspapers it's
published --"

"Sure, that's standard
practice," Emily, puzzled by the call, had told her.

"--and that the
Sentinel
also keeps
copies of pieces that were written up but never
published?"

"I didn't know that! As
far back as 1887?"

"Well, maybe the records
aren't complete, but it's worth a look."

"I'll go there tomorrow,"
Emily had answered.

On Thursday Emily had
called the
Sentinel
and got permission to go through its library. On Friday she'd
spent the day carefully sifting through crumbling copy that had
never made the leap to the printed page. The archives seemed almost
maniacally in order; some old New England newspapers were like
that.

She'd managed to pan out
one gold nugget: a column, written by what passed for a society
columnist back then, that covered what had to be the last ball in
Hessiah Talbot's life. It seemed to Emily that the account of the
ball must have become suddenly awkward after the murder of its most
prominent guest and had been pulled at the last minute.

It was written in the
typically breathless, gushing voice of the society writer and
described the guests, their clothes, the decorative theme (silver
and gold), and the designated charity (local soup kitchen). It was
a fascinating piece, filled with small and telling details. When
Emily returned to her condo that night, she called Mrs. Gibbs and
thanked her profusely.

Now for the tenth time she
was reading the column back to Fergus.

"Okay, let's see what
we've got," she said, between spoons of oat bran cereal. "We've got
Mrs. William Wellington the Fourth. She sounds like an enormous
woman, or she'd never have been able to wear a gown with 'a
thousand golden roses sewn into its folds.' Would her husband Will,
the 'prominent physician,' still find her attractive? Dr.
Wellington must have hobnobbed with the Talbot family. Could he
ever have treated Hessiah Talbot? Known something about her? Could
she have known something about him?"

"Can't answer ye," said
Fergus steadfastly, sitting opposite her at the kitchen table.
"Never saw a physician in me life, either professionally or
socially."

She killed the last of her
orange juice. "All right. Next. Jeremiah Blood. Obviously a
nouveau riche.
Proprietor of a string of liveries and smithies in the area.
A bachelor, but clearly would be looking for a wife. Think, Fergus.
Could he have loved Hessiah from afar? Shod her favorite horse
before he worked his way up the ladder and became a
parvenu?"

"Will ye drop that foreign
talk, woman?" he groused. "I have trouble enough with modern
English."

"Okay, okay; I'm just
being snotty about this ball. It's so easy for me to picture it.
Small town, not enough bluebloods for a quorum, they're forced to
let in the upstarts, all in the name of charity. I can imagine the
sniping and the put-downs all evening long. C'mon, Fergus." She
gave him a dangerously tender smile. "Don't be mad at
me."

He returned her look with
a slant-eyed, half-mocking one of his own, and they were friends
again. Emily ran down the rest of the list, which included the
local priest whose soup kitchen was benefiting from the charity
ball.

"It bothers me that Father
O'Neil keeps popping up in this investigation," she admitted.
"You've said that he played whist regularly at the manor, that he
was close friends with Hessiah's mother before she died,
that—"

"What's yer point?" Fergus
interrupted, more shocked than angry. "Ye think a man of the cloth,
a Catholic priest, actually strangled this innocent young
woman?"

"It sounds unbelievable, I
grant you. I'm just trying to be thorough. Anyway, since when is
Hessiah Talbot an 'innocent young woman'? You once called her a
bitch, remember?"

"That's because I was
remembering the way she ordered me hauled off to Father O'Brien's
mission. I didn't really mean it," he said, a little
sullenly.