Midnight Voices

counter, deciding that the glasses should be close to the sink.

“Very good,” Tony observed as she opened one of the doors to reveal two shelves filled with glasses of various sizes. “How’d you sleep?”

Again Laurie wasn’t sure what to do. Should she tell him about the noises she’d heard? How frightened she’d been? But before she could say anything, her mother appeared, looking barely awake, accepted a cup of coffee from Tony, then sank onto one of the chairs. “I’ll fix breakfast in a minute,” she said. “Just let me drink this.”

Tony winked at Laurie. “In case you haven’t noticed, some of us didn’t sleep all morning. Breakfast’s almost ready.”

By the time Ryan came in — dressed in the same clothes he’d worn yesterday — Caroline was fully awake. As Laurie put a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of her, she looked up to thank her, but as she got a close look at her daughter’s face, her words died on her lips. Laurie looked more tired this morning than she had last night. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Laurie shrugged uncertainly, still not sure whether she should tell the truth. In fact, with the morning light pouring into the kitchen, the fear she’d felt last night when she’d thought she heard people in the next room suddenly seemed stupid. “I’m fine. I just…” Her voice trailed off.

“Just what?” Caroline prompted, reaching out to lay a hand on her daughter’s forehead. There was no temperature; if anything, Laurie’s skin felt slightly cool. “Do you feel sick?”

Laurie shook her head. “I just didn’t sleep very well.”

Caroline’s brow furrowed, but before she could say anything, her son suddenly spoke.

“I didn’t sleep at all,” Ryan announced. “I hate this place.”

Mystified, Caroline glanced from one of her children to the other. There were no traces of Laurie’s dark circles around Ryan’s eyes, nor did he look as tired as his sister. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What kept you awake?”

Ryan’s expression clouded. “It was like ghosts, or something, just like Jeff Wheeler said! They were laughing and whispering.”

“Ghosts?” Caroline echoed. Her eyes shifted to Laurie. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

Laurie looked uncertain. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she began.

“There are too!” Ryan flared. “Jeff Wheeler said—”

Caroline held up a hand to stop the flood of protest. “I just want to know what happened.” She turned back to Laurie. “Did you hear something, too?”

Laurie nodded reluctantly. “I heard something,” she admitted. “It — well, it was like there were people in the apartment.”

“There were,” Tony said, finally joining the rest of them at the table. “All afternoon and evening.”

But Laurie shook her head. “After that. After everybody left, and we went to bed.” Slowly, she told her mother and Tony what had happened.

“And you heard it too?” Caroline asked, turning to Ryan. Ryan nodded, his eyes belligerent, as if he expected her to tell him he was imagining things. She turned to Tony. “Did you hear anything like that?”

Tony shook his head. “But I’m not saying the kids didn’t hear anything. I sleep like the dead, and last night you did, too.”

Just then the doorbell rang, and Tony went to answer it. A moment later they heard Virginia Estherbrook’s voice fill the entry hall. “Scones!” the actress boomed, and a moment later appeared framed in the kitchen door, a spotless and perfectly starched apron covering the top of a dress that Caroline was almost certain was a costume from a revival of ‘Picnic’ the actress had starred in several decades ago. She was carrying a basket covered with a red-and-white checked cloth that could have been a prop from the same play, and looking as if she had, indeed, slept for a month, as she’d threatened to do just yesterday. “I just couldn’t resist bringing some for the children,” she went on, sweeping across the kitchen as if it were a stage and placing the basket exactly between Laurie and Ryan. “Now don’t you touch them,” she admonished, swatting Caroline’s hand away as she started to uncover the delicious-smelling pastries. “Scones are fine for children, but you know what they can do to ladies like us.” Opening the cloth herself, she placed a scone on Ryan’s plate, then another on Laurie’s. “Eat, darling,” she urged, gazing intently at Laurie’s face. “You look a little peaked.”

“I–I didn’t sleep very—” Laurie began, but her brother didn’t let her finish.

“We heard ghosts!” he broke in.

Virginia Estherbrook gave the boy a dramatically exaggerated look of horror. “Ghosts! What did you do? I would have fainted dead away!”

“Somehow I doubt it was really ghosts, Miss Estherbrook,” Caroline began.

“Virgie,” the actress corrected. “Miss Estherbrook sounds so old, don’t you think?”

“It was just voices,” Laurie said. “Like someone was having a party. Only it sounded like they were in the room right next to mine.”

Virgie Estherbrook held a hand to her forehead. “Oh, my darlings, I’m so sorry,” she said. “It was my fault! I had a few friends in last night, and we were having such a good time — you know how actors are — we get so used to projecting that we never stop. And in these old buildings—” She fell silent, her features twisted into an expression so overly tragic that it was all Caroline could do to keep from laughing. “How can I ever apologize? The poor darlings must have been frightened half to death!”

“It was hardly that bad,” Caroline began, but Virginia Estherbrook shook her head violently.

“It was terribly thoughtless of me, and I can assure you it will never happen again.” She knelt next to Laurie’s chair, clasping her hands beseechingly. “Can you ever forgive me?”

“If a critic ever sees this performance, I can guarantee you’ll never work again,” Tony Fleming observed, earning himself a glare from the actress. But despite the glare, she got to her feet, and when she spoke again, her voice had dropped into a normal register.

“Never mind what Tony says: I am sorry, and I shall try not to let it happen again. All right?”

“Of course,” Caroline assured her, then turned to Ryan. “See? No ghosts. Just a party.”

“Be glad she wasn’t rehearsing Lady Macbeth,” Tony put in. “That would really be scary.”

But even after Virginia Estherbrook had left, Ryan still didn’t look convinced. “I don’t like this place,” he insisted. “I want to go home.”

“You are home,” Tony told him. “Try one of the scones — that’ll make you forget all about last night.”

The boy only glowered at his stepfather. “I don’t have to eat anything I don’t want to eat.”

“Ryan!” Caroline said a little more angrily than she’d intended. The boy’s eyes widened and he started to speak, but then seemed to change his mind. “It was just the first night,” Caroline told him. “It’s going to be fine.”

Ryan’s face set stubbornly. “I hate this place, and I hate my room. I want to go home!”

Before Caroline could speak, Tony held up a hand to silence her. “Maybe you’d like your room better if you made it really yours,” he suggested. Ryan looked at him suspiciously. “Tell you what,” Tony went on. “You’re going shopping for school clothes today, so why not shop for your room, too? Do it up any way you want, and in a couple of weeks you’ll feel like you’ve always lived here.” He shifted his attention to Caroline. “Might as well start with the kids’ rooms, right? Then you can just keep on going, right though the whole place.” He laughed out loud at the look of surprise on her face. “You think I couldn’t figure out what you and your friends were talking about yesterday? I may not be able to read lips, but I can see when a woman thinks a place needs redecorating. So do anything you want, but just don’t touch my study. That’s the one room I like just the way it is.”

Though Laurie’s excitement at the prospect of redecorating her room was instant, Ryan said nothing at all, and the look on his face told Caroline that he was going to be as uncooperative about this as he had been about everything else. He hadn’t wanted her to marry Tony, and he hadn’t wanted to move to this apartment.

Now he seemed determined to be unhappy about everything else, too.

And Caroline wasn’t sure she knew how to stop it.

Ryan gazed darkly at the elevator cage hanging in the stairwell. “What if the cable breaks?”

“It’s not going to break,” Caroline assured him, unable to keep her annoyance out of her voice. They were on their way out to start shopping for the redecoration of his and Laurie’s rooms, and for the last three hours he had barely spoken at all, sullenly watching as Tony tried to interest him in measuring his room. “You have to know