Maybe This Time

Seven

They’d filed into the entrance hall and then into the Great Hall-“This is amazing,” Kelly had said, beaming at Andie as she shook the rain off her coat; “Terrible light,” Bill groused, shaking his head at the mullioned windows in front; “Early seventeenth century,” the professor said, gazing at the gallery-and Andie led them into the dining room, directed them to chairs, called on a hostile Mrs. Crumb to leave her gin rummy game and bring paper plates and sodas. She put the professor at one end of the long dining room table and Kelly at the other end, while Kelly tried to give Andie forty reasons why it was her duty to invite the undead to dinner or at least to a séance the next day.

“Not now,” Andie said to her, and when Southie called the little blonde back down to the other end of the table, Andie sat the professor down on her right and Alice on her left, put pizza in front of both of them, made sure Alice’s was cut into smaller pieces, that her jewelry and the front of her already grubby black T-shirt were covered with a paper napkin, and that her stocking-tied hair wasn’t flopping in her face or her dinner, checked to make sure that Carter had pizza and wasn’t sitting next to Kelly-the-child-interviewer, and sat down beside her ticket to enlightenment.

“So, Dr. Graff,” she said. “You’re a parapsychologist.”

“Uh, yes. Yes. I am.” He raised the pizza to his mouth and then stopped and said, “You can call me Dennis. It’s, well, you know. No classroom.” He laughed for a second-a reserved little heh-heh sound that was almost spooky in its weirdness-and then frowned and bit into his pizza, dripping tomato sauce onto his green argyle cardigan.

“Right,” Andie said, thinking, Well, the normal ones probably don’t go into parapsychology. She resisted the urge to wipe the sauce off him as if he were Alice and bit into her pizza, savoring the spices and the crunch of the crust, but keeping her eyes on the prize. “I’ve read about you. You’re a ghost expert.”

Dennis shook his head, trying to chew the gluey cheese and wipe the tomato sauce from his mouth at the same time. “No,” he said, when he’d swallowed. “I study ESP, telepathy, remote viewing, that kind of thing, which is how I got into poltergeists. Well, not into…” He shook his head, did that little insane laugh thing, and bit into his pizza again.

“So you don’t do ghosts,” Andie said. Damn.

“I’m well versed in general psychic phenomena.” Dennis reached for his Coke and noticed the sauce on his sweater. He dabbed at it with a napkin, making the spot bigger and the sweater uglier. “I have not, however, personally seen any kind of supernatural apparition, nor have I seen any irrefutable documentation.”

“That must be disappointing. I-”

“Not really. It stands to reason. Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler showed that skepticism suppresses psychic abilities.” Dennis gave up on the tomato sauce spot and went back to his pizza. “The very fact that I’m a scientist makes it impossible for me to see that which I most wish to study.”

“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.”

“Aren’t you leaving tomorrow?” Andie said, but he had already headed back to the booze, leaving Kelly to smile fixedly at Andie. The smile didn’t reach her eyes.

“You asked what am I doing here?” Kelly said. “I’m researching ghosts. Do you have any?”

“No,” Andie said, not planning on sharing anything with Kelly. “Also don’t talk to the kids.”

“I’ve been interviewing your Mrs. Crumb,” Kelly went on, and Andie thought, Oh, hell. “She tells me the house has been haunted for centuries.”

“She’s often wrong.”

“She says the house was brought over from England, and the ghosts came with it.”

“Yeah, how would that work, exactly?” Andie said. “I’m not up on my ghost rules, but wouldn’t they be sort of stuck in the old country?”

Kelly leaned closer. “Evidently,” she said, a thrill in her voice, “they’re tied to the house.”

“Kelly, there are no ghosts,” Andie said, and thought about siccing May on her. Let Kelly get quizzed about her lovers for a change. It was bound to be a longer conversation than she’d had with Andie.

“You know how we’ll be sure?” Kelly said, light in her eyes. “When we hold the séance. Isolde was booked today, but she’s driving down tomorrow-”

“No.”

“Well, let’s keep an open mind.” Kelly looked across the room to where Southie was talking with Dennis as he poured brandy from one of the old cut-glass decanters. “So, you and North Archer are back together!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You and North,” Kelly said, impervious to chill. “I understand you’re together again? That’s why you’re down here taking care of his children?”

“That would be private,” Andie said. Why would you want to know that?

“Well, yes, but since Sullivan and I are, well, you know, then you and I must-”

“No,” Andie said. Southie and Kelly? Lydia must be having a coronary somewhere. “We mustn’t.”

“After all, you’re here taking care of his children,” Kelly said again, watching her closely.

“Wards. He’s their guardian, not their father.”

“So he’s distant,” Kelly said sympathetically.

“Not at all,” Andie said, thinking, Hell, yes, he’s distant, have you met the man? “After all, he sent me.”

“After three nannies.” Kelly smiled as if to soften what she said. “That’s pretty distant.”

How do you know about the three nannies? “And as soon as I was available, he sent me,” Andie said.

“And what were you doing before this?” Kelly was wide-eyed with interest now.

“None of your business,” Andie said. “I thought you were interested in ghosts.”

“Oh, I am. That’s why the séance tomorrow is going to be so important-”

“There is no séance tomorrow.”

“-and you’ll be glad to know that Isolde Hammersmith is the absolute best medium in the tristate-”

“I’m thrilled, but there’s still no séance.”

“-so we’ll get wonderful results, guaranteed.”

“She guarantees results?” Andie said.

“No, I guarantee results,” Kelly said, the grimness in her voice holding a ring of truth. “Mrs. Crumb showed me the Great Hall, and I think that would be perfect for-”

“Here we go.” Southie interrupted them with two glasses, one of which he gave to Andie, the other of which he shoved in Kelly’s face. “Here you are, darling. I promise you a better selection tomorrow.” He took Kelly’s elbow. “Come over here and talk to Dennis. He seems a little confused about what his role here is.” He turned her in the direction of the couch, mouthing “Sorry” to Andie over Kelly’s head.

Kelly craned her head back. “But Andie and I were just-”

“Oh, you go on ahead,” Andie said. “I’ll just stand here and… drink.”

Southie steered the little blonde across the room, but it didn’t last. Kelly patted Dennis’s shoulder and left him and Southie to go to Bill, who was going through his camera bag. Bill looked surly, and she looked like she was trying to do something about it, so Andie joined Dennis and Southie on the green-striped sofa to watch.

“Bill does not look happy,” she said to Southie.

Dennis looked at his drink with caution. “I hadn’t noticed. This brandy is interesting. Did you say they make it in the basement?”

“That was a joke,” Southie said, and then sipped his brandy again. “I think it was a joke.”

Andie leaned closer to Dennis. “So what is Kelly up to?”

“I don’t know.” Dennis sipped his brandy, made a face, and sipped again. “She was very interested in hauntings, but now…”

“I’m beginning to wonder, too,” Southie said. “She hasn’t been asking about the ghosts, she’s been asking about the kids.”

Andie drank her brandy, tasting an odd but not unpleasant woodsy undernote that the tea must have muted, and watched Kelly as she bent close to Bill, whispering to him between belts of her own brandy. Kelly was socking it right down, woodsy undernote be damned. “Well, her specialty has always been children.”

“Child ghosts?” Dennis said. “That’s a narrow specialty.”

“No, live children. In peril. And as it happens, I have two of those. I don’t trust her.” She glanced up at Southie. “And you brought her.”

“She brought Dennis,” Southie pointed out. “It’s a package deal. The kids-in-peril thing, though, that’s bad.”

“Well, the peril is…”-Dennis heh-hehed-“not true. There are no ghosts. Ghosts don’t exist. People are very good at faking them, but in the end, that’s all they are: fakes.”

Andie knocked back the rest of her drink and put her glass on the table beside Dennis’s. “If I take you upstairs, show you where I saw Alice’s rocker move, can you tell me how those things could be faked?”

“Of course.”

“Then come with me.” Andie stood up, and the brandy rushed to her head and made her blink.

“Now where are you going?” Kelly said gaily from across the room, and Andie said, “Away,” and waited until Dennis refilled his glass and then took him out through the Great Hall while Southie blocked Kelly from following by handing her another glass of brandy and asking her about the séance.

There is no séance, Andie thought, and took Dennis upstairs.

“It was here,” she told Dennis when they were standing in Alice’s room while Alice propped herself up by her elbows in bed. Dennis was sipping his drink and looking at the drawings she’d done on her walls with a mixture of academic interest and paternal disapproval. “The rocking chair, right there.”

Dennis stared skeptically at the chair at the foot of Alice’s bed. “That chair.”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s not surprising that it rocks. It’s a rocking chair.”

“I know.”

“Is she there now? Your, uh, ghost?”

“I can’t see her.” Andie looked at Alice. “Alice, is the woman in the old-fashioned dress there now? Or your aunt May?”

“What woman?” Alice said, pretending to yawn.

“The woman in the long dress with the tiers, the flounces, that we saw out by the pond. Is she the one who makes the rocker move?”

Alice slid down under the covers and ignored her.

“You said she was wearing a long dress with flounces,” Dennis said. “Was her hair in a bun?”

“Yes,” Andie said. “How did you know?”

Dennis pointed to the Jessica doll on Alice’s bedside table, her age-mottled dress in three tiers and her hair in a bun.

“Yeah,” Andie said. “I noticed that, too, but I can’t figure out what it means.”

Dennis nodded, and Andie wanted to kick him. Then he said, “Could I see you in the hall, Andie?”

Andie picked up the Jessica doll and put it beside Alice. Then she leaned over and kissed the little girl on the top of the head. “Good night, baby.”

“Good night, Andie,” Alice said, her voice muffled in the covers.

Andie followed Dennis into the hall and closed the door.

“I think Alice is a telepath,” Dennis said.

“What?”

“Oh, she doesn’t know it. She’s had a most unusual childhood and she’s highly emotional and those probably combined to awaken latent talent. She’s probably a natural. Add to that the fact that she’s been alone so much, and that she probably wants to see somebody sitting at the end of her bed taking care of her, and it’s not surprising that she imagines there’s somebody there. That’s very common, the imaginary friend.” He smiled at her reassuringly. “It’s not at all dangerous. She’ll be fine.”

“Imaginary friend?” Andie said. “But I saw the woman by the pond.”

“You saw the telepathic image that Alice projected, based on the doll.” His tone was kind, he wasn’t patronizing her at all, but he was very definitely in the there’s-no-ghost-here camp.

“Okay, Alice is telepathic,” Andie said. “But the chair rocked.”

“Telekinesis. Making a rocking chair rock would not be a problem for somebody with the psychic energy Alice has probably accumulated.”

Psychic energy. “There is no ghost.”

“I’d say almost certainly.”

“Almost.”

“There is no ghost.”

Andie tried to wrap her mind around it, wanting to feel relieved and yet… “What about May, the kids’ aunt? I thought I was dreaming but I don’t think so anymore, I think she was real. The room was really cold.”

“But you’d had a drink,” Dennis said, swirling what was left of his brandy in his glass.

“Tea with Amaretto,” Andie said. “One cup of spiked Earl Grey. I don’t think-”

“But it was at night, you were half asleep, and this house has a very definite mood to it.”

“Creepy.”

“Exactly. It wouldn’t be surprising if late at night, on the edge of sleep, you thought you saw something.”

“I didn’t just see her, I had conversations with her.”

Dennis shook his head. “Did she talk about something that had been bothering you?”

North. “Yes.”

“The subconscious finds ways to work out its problems. A dream state is as good a way as any.”

It was so plausible, it was demoralizing. “I feel like a fool,” Andie said. “I was really starting to think there were ghosts.”

“I’m worse,” Dennis said morosely over his glass. “I was hoping there were. Just once, I’d like to see one. It’s like studying the dodo. No matter how much you know, you can never get primary evidence.” He sighed. “If they were real, I could write a groundbreaking paper on them. It could revolutionize the field. I could be…” He met her eyes, his face flushed now. “Because, unlike Boston Ulrich, I am respected in my field.”

“Of course you are,” Andie said, startled. Then he took another sip of his drink and she realized the brandy was doing its good work. But even tipsy, Dennis made sense. There were no ghosts, of course there were no ghosts. “Listen, I am very grateful. And I will make you a huge breakfast in the morning before you go back as a thank-you. If you give me your sweater, I’ll even get the pizza sauce out for you.”

He smiled at her, his face relaxed now. “That’s very kind of you.” He handed her his glass, and then took off his ugly green sweater and handed it to her. Then he patted her arm as he took back his drink, his basset-hound eyes sympathetic. “You get some sleep now.”

“All right, thank you,” Andie said, and watched him toddle down the big stone staircase, weaving a little. The guy could not hold his after-dinner drinks. But still he’d been patient. And he knew about ghosts. Good guy, she thought, and took his sweater into the bathroom and washed the tomato sauce out of it and hung it to dry, patting it a little in sympathy with its owner who’d been kind without making her feel like she was crazy. All that angst over nothing.

I really did believe in ghosts there for a while, she thought and went back to Alice’s room to make sure she wasn’t upset about the whole ghost conversation, cracking the door just an inch to make sure she was asleep.

The woman in the tiered dress was standing at the end of Alice’s bed, pale and dreadful, watching Alice. Andie clutched the doorknob, and opened the door farther, and the chill in the room hit her as the woman looked up. Andie saw two black, blank eyes staring at her, empty and implacable, as the cold went into her bones.

Not a woman. Not telepathy. A ghost.

“Oh, my God,” Andie whispered, staring at the thing, and Alice sighed in her bed, fast asleep, unaware that the temperature in the room had dropped by thirty degrees.

Alice. I have to get Alice out of here.

She stepped into the room and the ghost wafted toward her, sepia toned and translucent, like old tea. “I have to take Alice,” she whispered to the thing, trying to keep from screaming. “It’s too cold in here for her. She’ll get sick.”

The thing grew darker, the form stronger, and then Andie heard a whisper from behind her.

I wouldn’t do that.

She turned around and saw Aunt May in the little hallway, swishing her long skirt that became translucent as it moved.

She’ll kill you as soon as look at you, May said. She killed me.