Maybe This Time (20 page)

“So you don't think they exist,” Andie said. “The thing is—”

“I would doubt they exist except for one thing: Every culture has ghosts.” Dennis took another bite of pizza.

Andie frowned. “I don't see—”

“Every culture in every millennium has had people from all social classes, all age groups, all degrees of education and intelligence see ghosts. Unless you're a believer in an ongoing worldwide, millennium-spanning mass hallucination”—he did his weird little
heh-heh
laugh, which ended this time in an asthmatic cough—“ghosts exist.”

“Yeah,” Andie said. “I know.”

Dennis bit into his slice again, but this time instead of concentrating on the pizza, he was concentrating on her. He swallowed and said, “You strike me as a skeptical kind of person. Not somebody who believes in the paranormal.”

“And a week ago, you'd have been right,” Andie said.

“But now you think you have a ghost,” Dennis said.

At the other end of the long table, Kelly jerked her head toward them, away from her conference with Southie. “What?”

“All we have for breakfast is toast,” Andie said, and caught Alice watching her, looking interested.

“We have cereal,” Alice said. “And French toast, which I will not eat.”

“And cereal,” Andie called down to Kelly, and then she looked at Alice. “Are you finished with your pizza?”

Alice shook her head.

“Then keep eating.” Andie turned back to Dennis. “So you don't think ghosts exist.”

“Oh, they exist,” Dennis said. “We just don't know what all of them are.”

“All of them?”

“There four kinds. Like the Beatles.” He heh-hehed again, but Andie was getting used to it now.

“Of course there are,” Andie said, thinking,
I had to get an academic who thinks he's a comedian.

“The most common is the crisis apparition. It appears once within twelve hours of a death or coma or whatever the crisis is.”

“Appears. Like . . .”

“Like a ghost.” Dennis smiled a tight little professorial smile. “Usually it's someone who's just died and needs to say good-bye, more telepathy than apparition. Crisis can activate that kind of skill.”

“Telepathy. For real,” Andie said.

“As real as we can test for, but yes, for real. Crisis apparitions are well documented with anecdotal evidence and fit with what we know of telepathy. They're often just voices, not really an apparition at all.”

Andie was pretty sure they hadn't lost anybody in the last twelve hours, so she said, “We don't have those here.”

“Then there's the haunting,” Dennis went on. “The apparitions show up in the same place, at the same time, doing the same thing. More like a voice-over.”
Heh heh.

Andie thought of May, dancing at the foot of her bed every night. “That kind. Are they dangerous?”

“They're not even a ‘they.' The theory is that it's just leftover energy from some cataclysmic event like a murder. The way you can smell perfume in a room after somebody has left, you can see the energy in the room after the catastrophe has passed.” Dennis kept plowing through the pizza as he spoke, his mind clearly divided between Food and Lecture, which Andie had a feeling was probably the majority of his life.

“Catastrophe,” she said. Archer House was definitely the kind of place that had catastrophes. Still . . . “I don't think it's that kind. At least one of them is more than perfume. We have conversations.”

“Then there are apparitions of the living,” Dennis said as if she hadn't spoken. “Also called astral projection. The doppelgänger.”

“No,” Andie said. “This one is dead. Let's go back to that second one again. I think that's the one we have.”

“Really,” Dennis said. “I would have assumed that you have the fourth one, a poltergeist. A noisy ghost. Throws things, breaks things—”

“It's really pretty calm here,” Andie said.
Aside from the ghost.

“—because you have an angry teenager,” Dennis went on, and then picked up his next piece of pizza. “Poltergeists are caused by telekinesis awakened by puberty.”

“Carter?” Andie said, looking down the table at him.

Carter caught her staring and rolled his eyes, probably at how uncool she was, but possibly about what a pain in the ass Kelly was being since she was trying to talk to him across the table.

Andie turned back to Dennis. “Carter's not a teenager, he's twelve. And if he wanted to throw something, he'd just throw it. Carter does not need an intermediary.”

Dennis shook his head as he chewed. “The children don't even know they're doing it. Completely involuntary.”

“Carter doesn't do involuntary. We don't have a poltergeist. So, the haunting. Is that common?”

“Oh, yes,” Dennis said. “Very common. Borley Rectory in England is probably the most famous, but there are many.” He picked up the last piece of pizza from the box.

“Okay,” Andie said. “How did they get rid of their ghost?”

Dennis looked at her over his glasses. “They discovered that the lady of the house was having an affair with a lodger and faked the haunting to fool her husband.”

“Oh. Well, nobody's having an affair here.” Andie thought of May. “Although the ghost I talk to is all in favor of it.”

Dennis stopped chewing. “You talk to it?”

“Yes,” Andie said, taking the plunge into crazy. “Either that or I've dreamed it. I think Alice's aunt talks with me. I think she sits with Alice at night in the rocking chair at the foot of her bed. Or it
might be the woman out at the pond who was looking at Alice. I'm not sure. This is all really new to me.”

“Alice?” Dennis looked across the table at Alice, now plastered with tomato sauce, strings of cheese on the napkin at her neck.

Alice looked up when she heard her name and stared back long enough that Dennis looked away.

Andie nodded, keeping her voice low. “The housekeeper thinks the ghost that sits with her is somebody who died a hundred years ago. I've only seen that one once by the pond, and really, she could have been anybody, a real person in fancy dress. Although why anybody would dress up and hang around a pond is beyond me.”

Dennis put down his pizza. “
You've
seen this.”

“The one by the pond, yes. And the one in my room.”

Dennis pushed his plate away. “No offense intended, but had you been drinking or taking sleeping pills or—”

“No,” Andie said. “Sometimes I have a cup of tea at night with a shot of brandy, but I hadn't been drinking when I saw the woman at the pond. Look, you just said there are hauntings—”

“I said that was a classification,” Dennis said, serious now. “I said there were stories. I didn't say they existed.”

“But you said poltergeists—”

“The other three kinds of ghosts aren't ghosts at all in the popular sense of the word. They're projections, telepathy or telekinesis, from living people or from people who have just died and are making the transition from one life to the next. They're ephemeral. The kind of haunting you're talking about lasts. On anecdotal evidence it can last for centuries, but it's completely unsubstantiated. The others all have been shown to be real and explainable, but the haunting is folklore or fraud.”

“Not here it isn't,” Andie said, annoyed that he'd led her on.

“You've only seen this woman once,” Dennis said.

“I thought I saw a ghost across the pond, and I think Alice saw her, too, but she wouldn't say so. In fact, she refused to look that
way at all, which is what made me think she saw her, too.” She looked over at Alice who was chomping into her pizza again, ignoring them with great purpose. “I've talked with her dead aunt several times. I thought I was dreaming, but now I don't know. I'm new to all of this, I'm still getting it sorted out.”

“I thought you said the ghost was at the foot of Alice's bed.”

“There's a rocking chair there that Alice talks to. It rocks on its own. Mrs. Crumb thinks it's the really old ghost that I saw at the pond, but I think it's the ghost of Alice's aunt who died this June. A new ghost.”
She has that new-ghost smell
. . .

“Uh huh. Well, Miss, uh . . .”

“Mrs. Archer,” Andie said, looking around for Mrs. Crumb. “But you can call me Andie.”

“Andie,” Dennis said awkwardly. “It could be a projection of, uh, repressed needs. Say if you had issues with an uncaring mother and wanted to see someone watching over Alice—”

“No,” Andie said. “My mother is not uncaring.”
My father was, but my mother is just odd.

“—or possibly not,” Dennis went on smoothly. “But sometimes our own needs—”

“Look, I'm not a believe-in-ghosts kind of woman.”

Dennis looked at her appraisingly, his pale eyes surprisingly shrewd. “No, I don't think you are.”

“So we'll just leave my mother out of it.”

Dennis nodded, and Andie turned to wipe down Alice, torn between being glad she had a ghost expert and thinking she was insane for being glad she had a ghost expert. At least he was nice, a little pompous but sympathetic, and he was treating her seriously, which was a relief.

“I'm done now,” Alice said, as Andie wiped pizza sauce off her bat necklace, and she slid off the chair and went upstairs to get ready for bed, Carter close behind her.

At the end of the long table, Kelly waved to her. “We need to talk about the séance,” she called.

“The séance?” Andie said, looking at Dennis.

He rolled his eyes.

“So you don't believe in séances.”

“I'm here to provide skepticism,” he said.

“Oh, that's why you're the counterpoint. And Kelly's the believer?”

“No, I believe that's Mrs. Hammersmith, the medium. She's due to arrive tomorrow. She apparently had an engagement with the Other Side tonight.”

“Would a séance do any good?”

Dennis looked at her with great patience. “Since ghosts only exist in folklore, fiction, and fraud, no.”

“You are not much help,” Andie said, exasperated. “You and Boston Ulrich—”

“Don't put me in the same sentence with that man,” Dennis snapped, the first lively thing he'd done since he'd arrived.

“Really,” Andie said, impressed. “I read you were on a panel together—”

“Complete charlatan. Advertises himself as an academic and a . . .
ghostbuster.
” Dennis said the last word with such loathing that Andie was taken aback. “He's everything that's wrong in the academic paranormal world. He wants to be
popular.
” He looked off into the distance, practically grinding his teeth. “And he just got another book deal.”

Okay, don't mention Boston Ulrich again.
“Dennis, I
need
a ghostbuster.”

Dennis said, “No you don't, there are no such things as ghosts.” He bit into the last slice of pizza. “I could write a book on ghosts, too, you know. But I'd have to point out that they don't exist. Nobody wants to hear that.”

“Okay, then,” Andie said, ignoring Kelly's call for a chat and Dennis's obvious disapproval as she stood up. “Thank you for explaining all of that. Enjoy your pizza.”

So much for an expert opinion,
she thought, and went to help Mrs. Crumb handle four overnight guests.

 

An hour later, after a scowling Mrs. Crumb had taken Southie, Kelly, Dennis, and Bill to four of the six bedrooms on the second floor and then put out the house's meager supply of decantered booze for after-dinner drinks; after Andie had cleaned up the pizza and checked that Alice was ready for bed and told Carter he had to shut down his computer and go to bed, too; after Southie had come up to give Carter a book on the history of comics and Alice a book on butterflies and then told Andie how good it was to see her again and made her feel he meant it; after all of that normal stuff, Andie was almost back to believing she'd imagined everything. Going downstairs to endure Kelly O'Keefe in the sitting room didn't do anything to improve her day, but at least it was something that normal, non-haunted people did.

Kelly was relentlessly cheerful and clearly up to something.

“
There
you are.” She swept up to Andie as she came in, her sharp little face avid under her feathered blond hair. “Where
have
you been?”

“Putting the kids to bed,” Andie said, as Southie followed her into the room. “So what is it that you're doing here exactly?”

“Let me get you a drink,” Southie said to Andie. “You deserve one.” He went over to the table behind the sofa where Mrs. Crumb had arranged the decanters, and Andie watched him, ignoring Kelly so she could see his face when he realized all they had was peppermint schnapps, Amaretto, and the bastard brandy that Mrs. Crumb was so fond of. He came back and said, “My God.”

“I know,” Andie said sympathetically. “But it's alcohol.”

“Plus it's been decanted,” Southie said gloomily. “God knows what label that stuff was.”

“Is there a top-shelf peppermint schnapps?” Andie said, and he grinned at her, like old times.

“On the bright side,” he told her, “I have a Bert and Ernie bedspread in my room. Let me guess: Alice is your decorator.”

“It made her happy,” Andie said, laughing at the thought of Bert and Ernie and Southie sleeping together.

“It makes me happy, too,” Southie said.

“Just get me
something to drink,
” Kelly said.

“I'll make a run to a liquor store tomorrow,” Southie told her. “Assuming the road doesn't wash out in this storm.” He looked at the decanters again. “No, even if the road is washed out. I can walk it for decent booze. For tonight, I'll make you a . . . something.”