The Haunted

Dad,

Zoe and I stopped by while you were gone. Don’t tell Mom.

We heard a loud noise upstairs and the lights came on by themselves.

You need to get out of here. You can’t stay. It’s dangerous. Please!

I’ll call you when I get back to Grandma and Grandpa’s. Leave your cell on. Don’t stay here, Dad.

Please! I don’t want anything to happen to you. I’m scared. I love you.

—Megan

She left it where he would be sure to see it, leaning the envelope against the TV screen in the living room.

There was another loud noise from upstairs, a thump, followed by a high-pitched whistle that could have been a teakettle, could have been a bird, but was undoubtedly something else.

She hurried outside, closing and locking the door behind her, then looked around for Zoe. Her friend was nowhere to be seen, and, worried, Megan called her name. “Zoe!”

There was an answer from the backyard, and it was with a feeling of dread that Megan walked up the driveway and around the side of the house. It had been wrong to come here, and she wished now that she had just listened to her parents and stayed away. Something could happen, and if it did, no one knew where she was.

Zoe was standing by the back fence, by the gate that led out to the alley. “Your yard’s dead,” Zoe said, motioning in front of her. “Don’t you guys ever water it? All your plants …”

“They died overnight. We don’t know what happened.” She was about to say that it was probably some disease, but she decided not to lie. She wanted Zoe to know what was going on, wanted someone besides her family to be a witness.

Her friend seemed to sense that it was something serious and significant, and it was with a solemn expression that she walked over the dead grass to meet Megan.

Megan told all. Well, not all. There wasn’t time for that. She wanted to get out of the backyard and away from the house as quickly as possible, so she didn’t go into too much detail. But she told Zoe that the house was haunted and hit the highlights, including the guy who’d committed suicide in their garage. Zoe had been frightened enough by the Ouija board and the sleepover that she didn’t require a lot of convincing, and when Megan said that she’d tell her the whole story later but that right now they needed to get out of there, Zoe didn’t argue.

She did, however, pause. “Wait. I hear music. Maybe your dad’s home.”

Megan heard it, too. It was coming from the house, and it sounded like one of her dad’s records. Joe Jackson? Elvis Costello? Graham Parker? Someone like that, someone he’d taught her about. But her dad wasn’t home, and there was no way—no logical way—that his stereo could have been turned on. She listened carefully, and the lilting tune wafting from the open upstairs window of her dad’s office gave her chills. She recognized it now. Joe Jackson. “It’s Different for Girls.”

Was that some sort of message?

The music disappeared.

The open upstairs window? Whenever her dad left the house, he always made sure all doors and windows were closed and locked. She looked up, sensing movement behind the screen. A figure was standing there, looking down at them. It was too dark to see any details, but she could make out a backward yellow baseball cap.

It was the man who’d killed himself in their garage.

Screaming, Megan ran down the driveway toward the street. Zoe was screaming right behind her, and she grabbed the handlebars of the bike, kicked up the kickstand, leaped onto the seat and started pedaling. Megan kept running. Neither of them slowed down until they reached the park.

Zoe reached the park first, and was already off her bike, walking it, when Megan caught up.

“Told you,” Megan said, breathing heavily.

Zoe, trying to catch her breath, just nodded.

They stood there for several moments, staring at each other, frightened, and it was not until a Hopi woman on the outskirts of the Kachina festival smiled at them, motioning toward a table full of little wooden dolls representing demigods and demons, that they started moving again, passing through the festival to the other side of the park and Old Main.

Twenty-nine

Julian met Claire for lunch again at her office, bringing takeout tacos this time, and it felt just as awkward as it had the day before. He didn’t think she was still mad at him, but there was not much talk while they ate, and when they did talk, the conversation seemed forced. He hated this feeling of estrangement, but he knew that the only cure would be for him to leave the house and stay with her and the kids at her parents’ place, and that he was not willing to do.

At least, not yet.

Although … he was not sure why. After his experience last night—an experience he was definitely not going to tell her about—he should have been falling over himself to get out of there. But something was keeping him in the house. He told himself that it was the hope, the possibility, that he was close to finding out what was really going on and figuring out a way to stop it. But he didn’t believe that, and whenever his mind even approached the subject, he quickly steered it in another direction. He didn’t want to think about what he was doing or why.

Lunch today didn’t last as long as it had yesterday. They both avoided talking about the big-ticket items, and their efforts to discuss small stuff were downright painful. Julian didn’t jump up and leave immediately after finishing his tacos, but shortly after she finished and he sucked the last of his Coke through the straw, he stood, wadding up his napkin and throwing it in the wastepaper basket. He told Claire he still had to finish work on that Web site and had better get going, and they parted amicably but without hugging.

He was outside and had just unlocked the driver’s door of the van when Claire stopped him. “Julian?”

He looked up to see her standing in the doorway of her office. “Yeah?”

“I don’t want you to stay there. You’ve proved your point. Whatever it was. You’re a big macho guy, and you’re not afraid of anything.”

He felt himself hardening against her. She must have sensed his antipathy, because she quickly added, “I’m just afraid for you. It’s dangerous there. And you have two kids, you know. They should be your priority.”

That hit him where he lived, and he tried to come up with a response that made sense, but she was right. Nothing was more important than Megan and James.

Still …

“Something’s happened,” he told her. “Something’s changed. You’re not there, so you haven’t noticed it, but it’s like …” He tried to verbalize what he’d been feeling. “You know how the basement used to be creepy? It’s not anymore. The garage is. It’s like this new ghost somehow deposed the old one. I don’t know what it is about our house that makes the spirits of dead people hang around, but it seems like the people who die there stay there. At least until someone else takes their place. And right now, the guy who killed himself in the garage is our ghost du jour.”

Claire gave him a hard stare. “You think that’s cute? You think you’re being funny?”

“I’m not trying to be. I’m sorry. But I think I’m onto something here. I think I might be able to—”

“I don’t care if you find a way to exorcise every single ghost in every haunted house in the country. It’s not worth the risk. You have two kids who need you. I need you. That house is just a house. We sell it, get rid of it, find another. People do it all the time for all sorts of different reasons. It’s not a big deal. Let it go.”

They’d attracted attention. A couple who’d just exited the sandwich shop were walking slowly down the sidewalk, pretending not to look or listen but doing both. In the van’s side mirror, he could see the owner of the used-book store across the street pausing in his rearrangement of the outside paperback rack to watch.