The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
—Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
OUTSIDE, THE STING of drizzle struck my cheeks as a rushing whoosh of briny wind battered my coat and ravaged my hair.
Shivering, I slammed the car door, tossed Emma Hudson’s gloves onto the dashboard, and quickly finger-combed my reddish brown tangle. Then I scraped it back into a ponytail.
I like it better when it’s down, baby.
“Tell that to the nor’easter.”
While the real rain had yet to fall, clouds of angry purple and ominous gray were moving in quickly off the ocean. Gazing through my streaky windshield at the menacing sky, I now wondered—
“Should I reconsider this drive?”
I’m a spirit, not a weather vane. Check the forecast.
I flipped on the radio, and the local news assured me the squall would pass soon enough, as opposed to the local traffic.
After pulling out of the alley next to our shop, I turned onto Cranberry, the main drag of Quindicott’s shopping district, for a straight shot to the town’s west side. Within two blocks, I ran smack into the jam-up Ciders had predicted—and predictably groused about.
The football game was over, and despite the coming storm, the streets around the town commons were clogged with revelers on wheels and on foot.
“Now what?”
When things stand in your way, you got two choices. You can stay still as a corpse. Or make your own road.
My ghost was right again.
One U-turn later, I was headed for the highway with a hasty plan to double back. This detour would add miles to my drive, but at least I was moving.
As I rolled off the highway near the burned-out barn that marked the edge of Prescott Woods, the deluge started. Fat raindrops splattered my windows as gusts from the cold Atlantic rattled my car. Then a boom of thunder shook the sky, and a lightning bolt bleached the swaying dark trees around me. With a loud crack, a branch broke off and tumbled through the air like a somersaulting high diver. When it slapped against my windshield, I jerked back in my seat.
Once more, a sky-flash turned everything ghostly white, and for a brief, disturbing moment, that ordinary fallen branch was transformed into my other ghost—the vision of my young husband sprawled on a Manhattan sidewalk.
A powerful windblast swept the large branch away, but not everything went with it. Leaves and twigs remained on the glass, beyond the reach of the busy wiper blades.
Just like those horrible memories, I thought, forever clinging to my edges.
Seeing a safe spot on the shoulder of the road, I pulled over, cut the engine, and listened to the storm battering the car windows.
It’s no wonder I feel so compelled to help Emma Hudson . . .
The woman’s unstable behavior reminded me of Calvin in those final weeks—paranoid illusions about people, places, and events, past and present; extreme shifts in emotion; sudden outbursts, all leading to tragedy.
I had no plans for singular heroics. If I found the woman in a disturbed state, I would simply notify the authorities. But I had to do something. I had failed—utterly failed—to help the father of my child. I wasn’t about to make the same mistake with our new customer.
As my thoughts swirled, the brightest flash yet split the air, and I felt a shudder go through me like sparks of icy electricity. That’s when he appeared, his long legs stretched out in the passenger seat beside me.
He had a rugged face and iron jaw with a dagger-shaped scar, as if the lightning had etched it on his anvil chin. His shoulders were broad, tapering down in a V to his trim waist. His strong body was clad in a double-breasted suit, and on his head sat a fedora of gunmetal gray.
Sitting next to me was the spirit of a dead man, but there was nothing lifeless about him. Energy pulsed around the ghost, crackling and exciting, as if the virility and vitality he’d possessed in life had been amplified in his afterlife.
In a frank and masculine gesture, Jack’s gaze swept me up and down, and the tingling connection raced through me again, from feet to fingertips.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out.
When I opened them again, the vision was gone, but the electric presence remained.
Such a preternatural contact should have been unsettling, if not downright frightening. But by now, the unfathomable relationship I shared with my ghost was both familiar and welcome, especially on this turbulent afternoon.
You know, baby, there’s something missing from your melodrama. Or maybe the thunder’s so loud its drowning out the violins playing “Hearts and Flowers.”
“‘Hearts and Flowers’? Isn’t that the sappy filler music they play during silent movies?”
Now you’re catching on.
“Excuse me? You’re likening my memories of Calvin’s suicide to celluloid melodrama?”
Yep. Both are flights of fancy, ain’t they?
“Calvin’s death is a fact. He jumped from the bedroom window of our high-rise apartment.”
And once again you’re taking the blame for it. Telling yourself you had control over something you didn’t. But listen, sweetheart, thinking like that is a dead-end road to nowhere.
“Except I still don’t have any answers. Not for myself, my in-laws . . . or my son.”
I’ve been in your head, baby. You have plenty of answers.
“Sure, I can tell you all about the succession of doctors and therapists Calvin gave up on. The medications he stopped taking. I can tell you about his mood swings—from his aloof silences to his verbal abuse. But none of it answers the most basic question of why. Why did Calvin McClure give up on life at such a young age? Why did he give up on me and Spencer? Why did Calvin kill himself?”
You’re still breathing air, so you haven’t figured it out yet.
“Figured out what?”
The mysteries that are hardest to solve are the ones in our own lives.
“Then how do I stop feeling guilty?”
You don’t. But here’s something you can do. Get off the mental merry-go-round. There are plenty of concrete problems to pound on in this mixed-up world of yours. And you’ve already got one ghost. Three’s a crowd. Stop flirting with your phantom from the past, and focus on something real.
“Coming from you, that’s not exactly self-serving.”
Don’t crack wise, honey. That’s my jigger of gin. All I’m saying is hammer at the walls you can break, and dump all the other garbage. Today you’ve got actual business on your plate, a genuine, bona fide mystery to crack open.
“That’s what I’m doing, Jack, although it’s not much of a mystery. Just a lot of extenuating circumstances.”
Don’t be vague. In my business, thinking like a rube gets you nowhere.
“I’m not trying to be vague, just polite—”
And politeness will get you killed.
“Fine. What do you need to know?”
I already know the facts. What’s your theory about this dame? She got a record?
“I doubt it, though she does appear to have some mental instability. When she fled with that thirty-dollar hardcover, I doubt she was even aware she was holding it. Today’s so-called crime is no more than petty larceny.”
Petty? In my day, three Hamiltons could buy you a month’s rent. And I put my life on the line for that sum, more times than I can count. So remind me, please. Why didn’t the local yokels follow up?
“They had other duties.”
Where? The doughnut shop?
“According to the chief, it was a matter of prioritization.”
Seems to me actual policing is as rare as the dodo bird in Cornpone-cott.
“There are too few officers here in QUINDICOTT, and too much to do on weekends. They don’t have time for petty theft—”
Baby, there’s nothing petty about theft when you’re the victim.
“What’s really bothering you, Jack? Are you bored because Spencer hasn’t been around to turn on those old TV crime shows?”
Sure, I miss the snot-nosed little piker. But that didn’t put the fly in my fedora.
“What did?”
That kooky klepto got under your sweet skin, right? So let’s find a way to pry her loose—together.