Her voice got quieter as we walked and the colors around her became increasingly anxious shades of orange. “A while ago, he started writing stuff and then he started saying stuff. It really freaks my mom out. Well, it freaks me out, too, but I figure even though it’s kind of creepy, at least he’s trying. Y’know, somewhere in there he’s still . . . there, y’know?”
“So it makes sense. He’s writing to you and your mom?”
“No. That’s the creepy part. It doesn’t make sense. He’s not talking to us.” She stopped just before an open door and turned around to put a finger to her lips. She turned back and walked through the door, leaving me in the unfinished hall. I could hear the mutter and ping of life-support machines and monitors in the room beyond and see the dark green misery that rolled out of the room like smog.
My intrusive Grey vision left me with a strangely overlaid view of the room beyond the wall. Olivia’s fluttering colors of anxiety and anger buzzed through the cloud-filled space toward a storm front that boiled with ghosts and was pierced by a tight coil of green despair and fear.
“Hey, Mom,” Olivia said.
“What took you so long? Where have you been?” The words came forth strung on spiky orange filaments.
“I just went to the door, like you told me to.” Olivia sounded defensive and I could see her energy colors shifting toward red. It appeared that Olivia’s resentment burned on a short fuse and I wondered if this uncomfortable relationship was a symptom of stress from Sterling’s lingering state or if it had been this way before he was injured.
“You should have come right back. What took you so long and who were you talking to?”
I thought I could hear the eye roll that came with Olivia’s reply. “Mom,” she whined, making the word three syllables long. “Don’t get all over me. This lady was at the door and she said she might be able to help Dad, so I let her in.”
I figured that was my cue to step into the room.
Once through the door, I could see the room wasn’t much different from Julianne Goss’s—the space that had been a large bedroom was now a sickroom filled with machines—except that instead of paintings, drifts and piles of scrawled paper occupied every vertical space that wasn’t filled with equipment or plumbing. Stacks of yellow notepads and boxes of cheap pens lay on one of the rolling tray tables pushed near the large hospital bed. An emaciated form made barely a lump in the blankets on the bed, and had become the focus around which all else flowed, including the churning darkness-and-silver boil of ghosts.
A live middle-aged woman sat alone beside the bed on a desk chair that made her look waifish—not because the chair was so large but because she was so thin. I guessed from her pallor and the way her skin seemed loose over her bones that she’d been much plumper not long ago and her weight loss had been swift and unhealthy. Everything about her had gone dull. As there was no one else in the room, I assumed she was Olivia’s mother.
She looked at me as if she couldn’t imagine where I’d come from. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Harper Blaine, Mrs. Sterling. I work for a woman whose sister is in the same state as your husband.”
She frowned at me. “I don’t understand.”
“I’ve had information that Mr. Sterling has episodes of strange behavior—writing, talking—as if he were awake, but he remains in a vegetative state—”
Mrs. Sterling jumped to her feet and surged toward me. “Who told you that? It’s not true! My Kevin isn’t faking being sick!” She slapped me with all the strength she could muster. Her bony hand felt like a giant bird’s claw striking my cheek, her fingernails leaving tracks on my skin.
I flinched away from her. She shoved me backward, screaming, “Get out! Get out!”
I’m not easy to move, but her anger added force to her efforts and I took an involuntary step backward. Olivia hopped out of our way and for a moment I could see the man in the bed clearly. Most of the ghosts had drawn aside as if disappointed in their efforts, while two foggy forms lingered, pressing inward until the darker of the two had flowed over the man and covered him like a shroud.
The man shivered and his left hand started scrabbling at the covers. “No soup today,” he said.
I stared. Olivia and Mrs. Sterling turned around, frozen for a moment. Then they rushed to the bed. Olivia tried to put a pen in the moving hand, but Mrs. Sterling knocked it aside and clutched her husband’s hand. “It’s just a spasm,” she said, as if she were reassuring herself. “It’s nothing. Just muscles twitching. It means nothing.”
“No, Mom!” Olivia cried, pulling at her. “He’s trying to write. Let go!”
She turned a furious expression on her daughter. “Shut up! Shut up. It’s not true. And you get that woman out of here, Olivia Pearl Sterling. You get her out! Now!” Then she cast a look at me, saying, “Leave us alone! Go the hell away!”
I was already backing into the hallway. I’d seen what I needed, and Mrs. Sterling wasn’t going to be any help, even though the situation seemed the same as at the Goss house: A seeking cloud of ghosts circled the room, each waiting for its chance to occupy the body of the patient, trying to say something that we couldn’t understand. It wasn’t all I wanted to know, but it was enough for now.
Olivia brushed past her mother in a flurry of frustration and anger, striding to me and pointing down the hall. I half expected her to leave me to find my own way out, but she came along.
At the front door, she stopped me with a hand on my arm. She was breathing heavily, as if we’d run to the door. “My mother . . . I’m sorry—she doesn’t understand. She’s afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of losing Dad’s L&I case. If they decide he’s not really . . . vegetative”—she clearly hated the word —“they’ll take back the benefits and we’ll lose the house and stuff.”
I was familiar with the state Labor and Industries Board and their often hard-nosed and by-the-book attitude toward long-term injury cases. I’d investigated plenty of suspected frauds for them when I was a lot hungrier. They weren’t as bad as some insurance companies, but they weren’t easygoing, either, and a case like this had to seem hinky to them.
I patted at the stinging fingernail-scrapes on my face. No blood now, though they itched and irritated my skin.
“I’m sorry—about your face,” Olivia said.
“It’s nothing. Aren’t you worried about the L&I case, too?”
Olivia bit her lip. “I am, but I want to help my dad. You saw—”
“I did. He writes a lot, doesn’t he?”
She nodded. “Mom used to let him, but now she tries to stop him. She can’t. He keeps on doing it. If he can’t use a pen, he’ll just use his fingers like he’s drawing in the sand. I don’t understand most of what he writes, but it’s not nonsense. You said you could help him—can you?”
“Not right away. I need to know more.”
“Is this like the other lady? Like your client?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“What is it? Don’t tell me it’s just muscle spasms. I know what a muscle spasm is and that’s not it.”
I peered at her. “Do you believe in God?”
She gave me that look of incredulity and disgust that teenage girls are so good at. “What? Are you some kind of religious nut?”
“No, I just wanted to know how to express this. I take it you don’t go to church much.”
“No. So what?” she added, crossing her arms over her too-thin chest.
I returned my best professional briefing expression. “My client believes her sister is possessed. She’s a religious woman and that’s the word she understands for what seems to be happening. But when I say ‘possessed’ I don’t mean that a demon has taken over the body, but that some other entity is momentarily in control. That’s what I think is happening to her and to your dad. Some other spirit is pushing through, trying to say something but not making itself clear to us.”
“But what about my dad? Isn’t this my dad trying to talk to us?”
“I think he’s unable to shove the others aside—they’re stronger than he is and there are a lot of them. They’re very upset and if I can find out why, or who they are, I may be able to solve their problem so they’ll go away and let your dad come back on his own.”
