replacement.
'I'm in the music room, Helen,' he called loudly. 'I'm almost done, just have to get my video gear in place and we're all set for tonight. You're welcome to look, but please don't touch. It's all calibrated and a little delicate.'
She didn't answer, but he heard her continue through the front hallway and into the echoing dining room. Edgar took out the visible light video camera, slipped in a new data disk, then dug in the side compartment of the case for the right lens. Mrs. Wainwright stopped at the doorway.
Bent over the case with his back to her, he didn't turn. 'It's a wide-angle lens, so it'll take in the whole room. Does make things look like a fishbowl, but it'll make darn sure we catch our ghost if it emanates visible light.'
She didn't respond, so he turned to greet her. But she wasn't there.
'Helen?'
No one answered.
'Mrs. Wainwright?' Edgar stood and went to the dining room door. The big room was empty, as was the long hall that led down the landward side of the house.
The skin up and down his spine prickled. He ran into the corridor, to the kitchen, then back to the front entry hall. Looking out, he saw only his rented minivan there, door-handle deep in the uncut winter-brown grasses of what had once been the driveway.
Edgar felt a little dizzy. It had happened! He'd experienced a ghost heard one, anyway! He'd witnessed a paranormal phenomenon! It was eerie, and that sense of standing blind in a huge, mysterious place deepened. It was intimidating, awe-inspiring, chilling.
He recovered enough professionalism to note the exact time of the event, then went through the whole house just to make sure no one was there. For the first time the attic under the cobwebbed mansard roof struck him as creepy, and the basement was almost unbearable – that sense that anything, absolutely anything, could happen. Edgar Mayfield could fall through a hole in the fabric of space-time, a crack between dimensions, and vanish forever.
But nothing out of the ordinary happened. And there wasn't anyone there.
Calming a little, he returned to the music room, where he stood silently for a few minutes, listening. Beyond the erratic whistle and rattle of the wind, there were no more sounds. At last he decided he couldn't wait any longer, the Wainwrights would be wondering where he was. Still, there was one more trick he liked to pull. Before he left the room, he opened the bag of baking flour he'd bought on his way over. He took a small handful and, working his way from the back toward the doorway, sprinkled flour until a uniform white film covered the floorboards from wall to wall. As an afterthought, he continued dusting through the dining room and down the hallway. It was a primitive but effective way to reveal whether a manifestation recorded by the equipment had a tangible, physical presence as well – whether it could disturb matter as it made disturbances in the electromagnetic spectrum. Also a way to snag would-be hoaxers: an entity that left, say, size-eleven Nike waffle-soled prints in the sifted flour would probably not be a compelling candidate for further study.
Getting into the van, he looked back at the house, stark and lonesome on its hill, and felt the shiver return. With it came a wild exhilaration. Cree, he thought, / did it, it happened to me! I understand now! At least a little.
'Yeah, but unfortunately, it isn't that simple,' he told the Wainwrights.
Along with a mix of other local citizens and out-of-season tourists, they had taken a booth in the North Harbor Diner and were eating cube steak and haddock filets. Helen Wainwright was in her late sixties, a slim, tough old Gloucester native whose ancestors had been whalers and fisherfolk for many generations. Despite her hip replacement, she was fit and made a point of walking three miles every day, rain or shine. Her husband, James, was a little older and wasn't faring as well: emphysema. He had a habit of puffing out his cheeks, blowing his breath through pursed lips as they walked, and had taken to making every move, even lifting a water glass to his lips, slowly – a strategy to conserve oxygen. He'd been a fishing boat pilot for most of his life before buying in as part owner of a fish-processing plant in his later years, and he knew the waters of this coast as well as anyone alive. They were both practical people, sharp and alert. And very keen on the ghost they and their daughter had seen, very interested in the whole phenomenon of paranormal research. Not wanting to bias their stories, Edgar had decided not to tell them about his recent encounter. They'd been talking about what he hoped to record with his equipment, what he'd found in past cases.
'Well, why not? Why isn't it proof?' James huffed indignantly. 'You say you've recorded physical evidence of ghosts. With all this high tech nowadays, what's the problem?'
Edgar had chosen the haddock, as he had every day since he'd arrived – it was the best fish he'd ever eaten, broiled with butter, salt, pepper, and nothing else, perfectly fresh and flaky white. He took a bite and chewed reflectively as he thought about how to answer.
'The advances in technology are a double-edged sword,' he said finally. 'It's true that they provide us with new ways to perceive and record anomalous or very subtle phenomena. But they've also raised the bar of proof.'
'How so?' Helen asked.
'Well, think of technological changes in your own lifetimes. Once upon a time, a photograph was proof of something, right? Then, as our knowledge of the medium improved, we learned to fake photos so well you couldn't tell. Okay, then we went to film – surely, if you had a moving picture of something, it was genuine, right? And that was more or less true for some years. But you folks saw Forrest Gump, right? Tom Hanks talking to Richard Nixon and all that? To say nothing of, say, furassic Park. Nowadays the media of film, magnetic-tape video, and digital DVD are so easy to fudge that even a clean, focused recording of a ghost doesn't prove anything to anybody.'
'But you've got your, your infrared things and all that business – ' 'Oh, yes, I've got supersensitive equipment that'll record physical phenomena of all kinds – 1 don't have even a tenth of my stuff here now. But what can I prove? I can show a skeptical scientist the record of my near-field EMF readings, say, and a seismic record of vibrations in the floor, and I can claim they occurred at the same time as the video I've got of a spectral light moving in a room. But how can I prove they have any connection? And any one of them can be easily faked, especially in the digital era.'
The Wainwrights toyed with their food, frowning.
'So, what's the point?' Helen asked. 'If no one's going to believe anything you come up with, why bother?'
Edgar chuckled. 'Sometimes I feel the same way! I get especially mad at these professional debunkers, those hypocritical pricks, lemme tell you – ' Edgar caught himself getting wound up and had to make an effort to bring his righteous indignation back down to a dull roar. He gave them an apologetic look. 'To answer your question, nothing'll ever be proved to die-hard skeptics until it can be shown to fit an encompassing physical theory, one that accommodates accepted scientific theories and applies also to other, accepted phenomena. So that's my long-term goal to find the overarching patterns of paranormal events and test them against what we know from normal-world observation. My partner is a psychologist who studies the role of human emotion and neurology in paranormal phenomena. Between our two approaches, sooner or later, we'll put it together.'
Mr. Wainwright looked at his wife. 'Got his dander up about them debunkers, didn't he,' he observed drily. 'Can't say I blame the fella.'He gave Edgar a wink of complicity with one rheumy eye. The Wainwrights had experienced skepticism from their community after they'd seen and heard the specter at the house.
Edgar felt a rush of affection for these two. He'd been here for less than a week, and already he felt as if he'd known them for years. Their daughter, the primary witness, was a different matter – she struck him as a chilly bitch with a big chip on her shoulder – but the elder Wainwrights felt like family.
'So what's on our agenda this afternoon?' Helen asked.
'Okay,' Edgar said. 'Sighting times. I need you folks, and your daughter and her husband, to tell me when you've experienced anything out of the ordinary at the house. I mean literally the day, the hour, the minute. Patterns – it's all about patterns.'
Helen took her husband's wrinkled hand. 'I think we can do that, can't we, dear?'
James nodded and squeezed his wife's hand. They'd been married, they told him, for forty-four years, and their closeness, that sense of being a team, moved Edgar. What would it be like to know someone that well?
And then he thought, Damn it, Cree. With the familiar ache came something of a determination. Maybe it was time to do something about this, be up front with Cree. Try to move past the status quo of their relationship, take it
