Noah’s mind replayed the words he’d just heard. She’s going to Hell and taking us with her.
Great. His hallucinations had found religion. That was just what he needed. He was going to turn into a religious crazy, one of the ones who believed they were Jesus, he just knew it.
Ignoring his voices, he tried to focus on Grace. She was frowning, craning her neck to see across the room behind him. There’d been a pop and a tinkle of breaking glass from that direction.
One of the twins stood up, perching on the foot rail of his stool and peering around the cash register to look toward the back of the room. “Wow, cool! Didja see that?”
“Stay in your seat, please,” his mother said with a worried frown.
“What happened?” Noah asked Grace.
“Just a light bulb breaking.” Grace tried to dismiss it, turning her attention back to him, but she was biting her lower lip and her brow was creased.
“Noah, my man, it is time to get the hell out of here,” Joe said right next to his ear.
Noah straightened automatically, eyes doing a fast, surreptitious scan of the room. What had his subconscious noticed? What was he missing?
“Quickly, quickly,” the Arabic woman’s voice said urgently.
“I don’t want to go to hell.” That was the little boy’s voice, just two notches above a whimper.
“Are you okay?” Grace asked.
Noah tried to smile, but his face felt stiff. It probably looked more like a grimace. “Fine.”
Her phone chimed. She put a hand over it, but didn’t pull it toward her, her eyes still intent on his.
“Check your phone, Grace. Check your phone!”
Noah nodded toward her phone. “You can get that,” he said, trying to sound casual. “I don’t mind.”
“It might be the office. They might have found your stuff.”
“That’d be great.” Noah scanned the room again. Nothing. The older couple were smiling, laughing, not paying attention to anything but their own conversation. The waitress was heading toward the back table where the light bulb had blown, a dustpan and brush in hand.
“Now would be a good time to hear me, Noah. A real good time.” Joe laughed. It was a reckless, breathless, desperate laugh. The laugh of a man on the edge.
The laugh he’d given the first time they drove into a firefight instead of away from one.
Noah stood, pushing away from the table in an abrupt movement just as Grace looked at her phone.
“I’ve got to go. Sorry.” Noah glanced over at the counter. The kids were eating, the boys still chattering about the light bulb. One of them, Noah didn’t know which, was up on his knees on his stool, following the letter of his mom’s injunction to stay in his seat, if not the spirit.
Noah paused. Were the kids in danger? Despite the waitress sweeping broken glass off the table, he still couldn’t see anything that would tell him why his subconscious was freaking out.
Feeling like an idiot, he muttered the question under his breath. “Are the kids in danger?”
“No, just us,” Joe responded, as if he and Noah had been having these conversations for the past decade.
A decade during which Joe was dead, Noah reminded himself. For a moment, he felt torn. He knew he shouldn’t do what his hallucinations told him to do.
“You need to leave.” Grace stood, too. The crease on her brow had turned into a scowl. Her phone in one hand, she put the other on his arm, as if she would force him out the door. “Now.”
Noah froze. Why was she saying that? If she’d heard him talking to himself, she should be asking what he meant by danger. If she hadn’t, what did she know?
If all the things that had happened to him since he’d met Sylvie Blair in a DC hallway were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, surely he had enough information to see the bigger picture.
The conversations, as if he was overhearing real people instead of snippets of sound. The strange encounters with people who acted like they knew him. The remote control, changing channels on its own. The innkeeper, speaking a language he’d been hallucinating for months.
Brain scans and job offers, blueberry waffles and burgers like Big Macs.
That kiss in the forest.
None of it added up to anything that made sense.
His voices were all babbling at once and behind them, he could hear the agonizing sound of the crying girl, sobbing as if her heart were breaking.
“Go on.” Grace tugged at his arm. “Get out of here. Quickly.”
With a confused shake of his head, Noah started toward the door as a woman came out of the kitchen. He kept moving but his eyes widened in instinctive appreciation.
That was the cook?
Wow.
And she could cook.
She stood in the kitchen doorway, hands on her hips. A wide, colorfully-printed headband held back long dark waves of hair, and a clean apron covered casual clothes. Her eyes snapped as she pointed toward the broken light, directing her words to the woman at the counter. “Is that your father’s fault?”
“He’s not even here,” the doctor objected with a laugh.
“The last time we lost a lightbulb, it was because he was inviting ghosts to live here. I am not interested in running a haunted restaurant.”
Noah paused, his hand on the door. Last time… ghosts… What?
“Ghosts?” The boy kneeling on the stool clapped his hands, his balance perfect. “We have a ghost who watches tv with us. She’s nice but she doesn’t like football. Jamie got mad at her ‘cause she kept changing the channel, but then him and Dad went and watched tv downstairs, ‘stead of in the movie room.”
Noah stopped moving, the door to the restaurant half open.
“Rose,” the cook agreed with a nod. “She’s all right.” Raising her voice, Maggie added in the direction of the back table, “At least she doesn’t make a mess.”
The doctor was watching him, Noah realized, with a small smile playing over her lips. She didn’t look worried, not like she thought he was going to freak out again. She wasn’t rushing over to talk him down from some kind of psychotic break. She just looked calmly interested, like she was waiting for his response with amusement and a sort of warm affection that he had done nothing to deserve.
“Don’t try to take the base out while the power’s on, Em,” the cook said. “We can put a new bulb in when we close.” Shaking her head, the cook returned to the kitchen.
Grace had followed Noah to the door. “You need to go,” she said, her voice urgent. “Leave. I’ll take care of this and catch up with you.”
“Yeah, all right.” He nodded. But he didn’t move. His brain felt like it was spinning in circles. Dead was dead. Ghosts did not exist.
Or did they?