with Clothilde’s method for bringing her out of her hiding. She sits down on the windowsill, her hands clutched so hard to the edge that part of her right hand goes through the stone, her legs wide to occupy the most space possible, and her dark eyes fixated on Clothilde in a very creepy and, well, ghostlike manner. Her long blond hair isn’t quite as active as Clothilde’s when she’s angry but it’s definitely lifting in a rather aggressive way.
“You know this is my spot,” she says. “Why would you do that to me?” Her voice is higher than the last time we talked and I believe it’s wobbling. Since ghosts don’t have physical vocal cords that can be affected by emotion, this either means she wants us to see how much Clothilde’s action upset her, or she’s so upset she has forgotten she doesn’t have a body anymore.
For someone who’s been a ghost as long as Constantine, that would mean she’s very upset, so I’m going to hope she’s aiming for communication.
“I’m sorry,” Clothilde says. And I think she actually is sorry. The look she sends Constantine is full of compassion and regret—not two emotions I’m used to seeing in my friend. “I didn’t think. We were in a hurry to talk to you—because we want to help you—and I just did the first thing that came to mind.” She sends a glance in my direction. “I don’t always think things through.”
I guffaw. There’s an understatement. Not that I’m exactly perfect on the subject.
But I did get to live a few more years past puberty before I died, and that probably helped.
This thought brings my attention back to Constantine. She was hardly a teenager when she died, but she wasn’t much older than Clothilde.
“When we were here yesterday,” I say, “we mentioned figuring out what your unfinished business is, but we were pulled out before we could discuss it further.”
Still holding on to her windowsill, Constantine isn’t about to let her guard down any time soon, but she’s listening. “How come you’re here now, but yesterday you were pulled away?”
I glance at the bracelet on the nightstand and find myself hesitating to tell her. This is what keeps us out of the cemetery, it’s what allows us to follow Evian when she looks into our pasts and searches for our killers. If we lose the link, we lose everything.
But Constantine is just a ghost. Like us, she has no power over the realm of the living and therefore the bracelet. And on top of that, her body appears to be trapped in the wall of the building, meaning she’s stuck here—at least until someone digs her out.
So in the hopes that sharing some of our information will increase our chances of her doing the same, I tell her. “We’re attached to that bracelet,” I say and point toward the nightstand. “It contains one of my finger bones and one of Clothilde’s. So wherever that bracelet goes, we go.”
Constantine cranes her neck trying to see better, but she’s not willing to abandon her post at the windowsill yet. “So, what? That woman carries you around on her wrist all day? How’d you manage that? And why did she drop you off in here now?”
Her gaze sharpens and the fact that she’s clearly gearing up for a fight would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad. “I’m not sharing my room. This is my space!”
“Don’t worry,” I tell her, holding my arms out as if to show I’m unarmed. “We’re only here for a visit. Evian will take the bracelet with her when she leaves tonight.”
At least I hope she will.
Constantine studies me for several seconds before nodding. “She better. But how did you get her to drop it off in here? Were you the reason the old lady came in for no reason?”
“As I’m sure you’ve noticed,” I say dryly, thinking about all the guests that must have come through here for a memorable night with Constantine, “some people are more sensitive to ghosts than others. Evian is particularly sensitive. She can’t hear our exact words, but she usually gets our meaning—and acts on it if we push hard enough.”
Clothilde, clearly trying to appear non-threatening, has sat down on the floor by the wall the farthest from Constantine’s spot. “We wanted to come in here and talk to you, so we got Amina to use the bathroom, Robert’s mother to open the door, and Emeline to drop the bracelet off.” She chews on her cheek before adding, “It took quite the effort because of the stunt you pulled on Emeline yesterday. She really didn’t want to come in here again.”
A proud and somewhat malicious grin starts to spread across Constantine’s face.
“That’s not something to be proud of.” Clothilde seems to want to jump up and get into the other ghost girl’s face but thinks better of it. We didn’t come in here to rile her up even further. She takes a deep breath. “That woman is an ally, all right? If there’s anyone who can help you get out of this place, it’s her. So play nice from now on.”
I sit down on my mother’s perfectly made bed and lean against the headboard. The contrast between the colorful and modern bedsheets and the drab colors and stressful patterns of the wallpaper is kind of confusing. So I focus on the ghost girl in the tattered wedding dress.
She seems to be taking Clothilde’s words to heart. The grin is gone, though I won’t be holding my non-existent breath for an apology.
“We only have about thirty minutes before they finish dessert,” I remind Constantine. “We’d love to help you move on and in order to do that we need to figure out what your unfinished business is.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by that,” Constantine says. She must trust we won’t be coming for her spot again because she relaxes into a more comfortable position on the windowsill, with her back against one side and her legs pulled up so her toes touch the other side. “I didn’t have a business. I worked at a grocery store on the boulevards.”
“Not that kind of business,” I gently tell her. “It’s usually more…emotional business. Like saying goodbye to a loved one. Or, if you were murdered, making sure the killer is found and made to pay. Or setting to rights something you regretted doing while you were alive. Or anything else along those veins.”
“Basically anything that will make you cling on to the world of the living,” Clothilde supplies quietly. “And stop you from moving on to what is bound to be a better place, all things considered.”
No emotions show on Constantine’s young face but her lips purse slightly as her gaze moves back and forth between me and Clothilde.
“If moving on is such a great thing,” she says, “why are you two still here?”
“That’s our business,” I reply. Then, when I realize shutting her down isn’t going to help our case, I add, “And we’re working on solving it. It’s why we’re tagging along with Evian. She’s investigating our murders. But right now, for this short time we have together, we’d like to help you.”
Her eyes light up at the mention of murders—she’s curious—but she doesn’t probe. “I don’t know what this business could be.”
“How did you die?” Clothilde asks.
The murder victim theory does seem like the most likely for someone whose body was stashed away inside a wall.
Although the wedding dress also points a finger toward her husband, whoever he might be.
Constantine shrugs and picks at one of the loose threads of her dress. “I don’t remember.”
“What’s the last thing you do remember from when you were alive, then?” Clothilde asks.
“I was here.” Constantine looks around the room, but she’s not seeing it as it is today. “It was a Friday night and I’d stolen the key to our apartment from Jacques to come see how the renovations were coming along.”
A dreamy smile takes over her face and her dress becomes a little less tattered, a little whiter. “Money were tight in the beginning, so we had been living in the basement of his parents’ house, while we saved up for our own place. This place. We finally had the funds, and Jacques somehow managed to buy the apartment from its previous owner for almost nothing since it was going to be renovated. This is where we were going to start our family.”
I don’t move but I see Clothilde looking around the room again, trying to see it with Constantine’s eyes in the fifties. I’m thinking if this apartment is the mirror of Evian’s with this guest room added in, this would be the smaller of the two bedrooms.
The room that would become a nursery for a newly established couple.
“They’d installed the new locks the week before,” Constantine continues, her eyes distant and her hair now hanging normally down her back. “Jacques was so proud to tell me we were the very first to have the keys. He wanted us to come here together for a visit but then he was always kept up at work for this or that. So when he took off for a night out with his friends on that Friday night, I grabbed the keys and decided to come look for myself.”
Constantine wraps her arms around her legs and leans her chin on one knee. “I could see it, you know? The foyer downstairs was so large and somber and regal. There was a brand new elevator, although it wasn’t ready to be used yet so I had to take the stairs. And in here…my heart soared at the idea of living here alone with my Jacques, of us cooking dinner together, of having our own space with no risk of interruptions.” She runs a delicate finger along the edge of the windowsill. “Of setting up the nursery.”
I think I hear Clothilde swearing under her breath. I keep completely quiet, hoping Constantine will continue without prodding.
“I was all alone in the building. Took my time. I even visited a couple of the other apartments on this floor since none of them had locks yet. This one was definitely the best.” She smiles at this, and it’s nothing like the expressions we’ve seen on her up until now. It’s open and sincere and beautiful. She looks like a young bride inspecting her very first home of her own, with a lifetime of happiness ahead of her. Her dress is almost completely mended, with only one or two loose threads at the hem.
“The other rooms were almost done,” Constantine says. “Only thing left was to get the wallpaper up and start bringing in furniture. But in here, there had been some sort of problem with the plumbing.” She nods to the wall on her right, where, if I remember the layout of these apartments correctly, the bathroom is. “They’d had to open everything up to get to the pipes or something. The windowsill had been totally ruined and a whole mess of pipes were sticking out.”
She lifts her head and leans it against the windowsill at her back while her eyes go to the dark sky outside. “So I just sat here, right about where you are now, Clothilde, and imagined what it would look like once they fixed everything.”
She falls silent. When I hear chairs scraping against the floor in the next room, I say, “Then what?”
Constantine’s head tilts back toward us so she can meet my eyes. “Then nothing. That’s the last thing I remember.”
Huh.
Clothilde and I both have similar issues with remembering details of our last days of life, but I’ve always attributed that to us being drugged before we were killed. Most of the ghosts we’ve met remember every little detail of dying, no matter how horrible.
I turn to Clothilde. “Died during her sleep? Somehow drugged without realizing it? Ingestion of something poisonous while she toured the building?”
Clothilde raises an eyebrow. “Killed in her sleep by someone else wandering around in an empty building on a Friday night? Maybe one of the workers, if her body was hidden in the wall.”
Could be any of those. A couple of the options would mean we’re looking for a murderer who’s most likely already dead.
How do you bring dead people to justice?
“It doesn’t matter,” Constantine says, her voice firm. She turns to face the room again, letting her legs dangle down from the windowsill. “What matters is that I died. And that Jacques probably never knew what happened to me.”
“You really don’t care?” Clothilde asks. “Somebody might have murdered you in cold blood, just for the hell of it, and you can simply let that go?”
Constantine shrugs. “What does it matter? Knowing who or if someone killed me won’t bring me back to life. It won’t give me the family I never had.” She bites her lip and takes a calming breath. “It won’t change the fact that Jacques probably thought I left him without a word because he preferred a night out with his friends to an evening with his wife.”
I never knew the man, but that does sound pretty terrible.
“Did you ever see him again?” Clothilde asks.
Constantine gulps. “Twice. He came here maybe a week later, when he realized he couldn’t find the keys to the apartment anywhere, hoping this was where I was hiding. But the wall was already sealed up by then and he never found a trace of me. I think I saw part of him die that day.
“Then he came back two months later, to sell the apartment to some other couple. I hardly recognized him. He’d lost weight, he’d grown a beard. The life had gone completely out of his beautiful eyes. I tried talking to him, guiding him to this room. But he didn’t react favorably to my intervention and left the other couple to fend for themselves to look around. I never saw him again after that.”
We sit in silence, contemplating the life of a man who thought his young wife had left him to disappear completely.
I hear more noise from the living room. Plates and glasses being cleared, the water running when someone starts doing the dishes. We don’t have long.
“You’re certain you don’t care about finding out who killed you?” I ask.
A firm nod.
“I guess this means your unfinished business is with your husband.” I look to Clothilde. “Do you agree?”
“It certainly seems like it.” Clothilde is answering but I don’t think she’s quite here right now. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say she’s coming to terms with meeting a woman so similar to herself but with such a different outlook.
I’ve never heard Clothilde mention the life she never got to live. All right, so she hasn’t talked about much of anything, but I’m absolutely certain that what she needs to get closure, is to catch the people responsible for her death.
Something that Constantine doesn’t care about at all.
The doorknob turns; our time here is about to run out.
“Thank you for sharing your story with us, Constantine,” I say. “We’ll do our best to help you. But I believe this will first and foremost go through getting your body out of that wall, so if we ever get to that point, you can’t keep scaring people away, okay?”
Constantine doesn’t answer but I’m going to take her look to mean she agrees anyway.
“We’ll work on Evian and Amina,” I continue. “See if we can figure out a way to give them the message.”
“Thank you,” Constantine says. “And thank you for coming in here. It’s been a while since I last had a conversation with anybody.”
About seventy years by the looks of it.
“It was our pleasure,” Clothilde replies and stands up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to avoid getting sucked out of here again.” And she moves toward the door, where Evian is leaning in to grab the bracelet from the nightstand.
“There it is,” Evian says to someone behind her. “Must have dropped it when I came in here earlier.” Without so much as a glance into the room, she slams the door shut.
And I’m sucked out after her. Constantine’s wide-eyed look is the last thing I see before I’m suddenly in the living room, facing at a smug Clothilde.
In some ways, this girl is a lot smarter than I am.