You look awful.”
“Thanks very much for the compliment.”
“Like death warmed over.”
“You’re too kind.”
“Like the ‘before’ segment of a sedative commercial.”
“I get the point.”
“When was the last time you got a decent night’s sleep?”
“Can’t remember. If I didn’t have you to talk to, I think I’d go insane.”
Raphaella smiled and tossed her hair over her shoulder. She was wearing a midnight blue T-shirt and a charcoal grey skirt that brushed the toes of her granny boots. The T-shirt read “Smoking Causes Profits.”
We were in the office of the store, where I had been making a catalogue of the books from the Maitland home when Raphaella dropped in after the Saturday-morning rehearsal of the WME, carrying take-out from the fish-and-chip restaurant down the street. Empty food cartons and juice bottles littered the desk.
“There’s something else,” I said, with hesitation.
Raphaella sat back in her chair, crossed her legs and gnawed at a fingernail. “Don’t tell me. The woman you love is too secretive.”
“Well, that’s for sure, but it’s not what I meant.” Haltingly, I told Raphaella about the woman in the forest, not sure how to relate the story without sounding like a hysterical airhead in a Hollywood horror flick.
“She’s been there every night?”
“Yup. At midnight and at 3 A.M. And now she has company.”
I related to her what I’d experienced for the past few days, how the men in my dream had become part of the … ritual, or whatever was going on. Raphaella heard me out without a word, her head tilted to one side, her deep, intelligent eyes fixed on mine.
“Wow,” she said when I finished.
“Exactly. I think I’ve gone over the edge.”
“No, you haven’t,” she said firmly. “I’ve been out there, remember?”
“So what do you think?”
“I think, Mr. Garnet Havelock, that what you have on your hands is a first-class haunting.”
A while later we were walking hand in hand in Tudhope Park, along the edge of the lake away from the main beach. Two toddlers stood in the shallows with their mother, tossing bits of bread to a family of ducks, while farther out the father hurled a stick for a golden retriever. The afternoon sun blazed down on us, and a cool breeze blew in off the lake.
We sat on top of a picnic table, looking past old willows with twisted, gnarled trunks out over the green rippled water where a few powerboats churned lines of white foam behind them.
“So, what do I do?” I asked finally.
“What we do,” Raphaella replied, “is go back into the past. Find out all we can about that maple forest.”
“And the clearing and ruined cabin. The one you haven’t seen yet.”
“Right. You said it was a weird place and that the woman seems to start and end her walk in that area.”
“It’s weird, all right. As if the little clearing has its own weather.”
“What is it that she calls out night after night?”
“The first word sounds like ‘joo-ball’ and then she says ‘Help me.’”
“Well, that’s easy. Jubal is a man’s name.”
The trouble with hanging around with sharp people is that every once in a while they make you feel stupid. Jubal. Help me, Jubal. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“Right,” I agreed, pretending I had come to the same conclusion myself.
“Jubal means ‘he who makes music,’ or something like that,” Raphaella said.
“How do —?”
“I’ve studied names and their meanings. Also numerology. Sort of a hobby.”
“A hob —”
“Never mind. Your name means ‘red jewel,’ in case you didn’t know.”
“And yours?”
“Divine healer. Anyway, we have to go back into the past. Learn stuff. Find out who the woman is. It might be fun,” she said unconvincingly.
“Yeah. And you know what else I want to do? Wait for her. In the bush. See her. But it might be dangerous, especially if I bumped into those men …”
One of the little kids shrieked with joy when the dog bounded into the lake in a shower of water, scattering the ducks in a chorus of angry quacks. Suddenly I felt ridiculous. There we were, calmly discussing ghosts. Or presences, as Raphaella would insist.
“There shouldn’t be any danger, Garnet. Spirits from the past don’t hurt you. Physically, I mean. They’re, well, sort or re-enacting something, whatever it is that keeps them walking.”
“I think I’d like to try to see her.”
“Okay, let’s do it.”
“You’ll come?”
“Yes. In the meantime, Sherlock Havelock, we’ve got some research to do.”
“This is crazy,” I complained. “How could I let you talk me into this?”
We were stopped at a red light near the Stephen Leacock Museum, just down the road from Tudhope Park, and I was having second thoughts. A bad case.
“Into what?” Raphaella asked, kicking off her sandals. She plunked her feet onto the dashboard and tucked her skirt around her legs.
I shook my head, disgusted with myself. “I think the stress is getting to me — Mom being away, moving out of my house, the stupid dream. And you’ve got me believing in ghosts.”
“Spirits.” There was an edge to her voice.
“Whatever.”
“And people can’t make you believe in something.”
The light changed and I pulled away. “But it’s nuts,” I said. “It’s the twenty-first century, the third millennium, two thousand and —”
“I know how to count, Garnet.”
“What we’ve been talking about all morning only happens in books and movies.”
“You’re slipping into techno-mode.”
“Into what?”
“Techno-mode. The attitude that science can explain everything, that computers and machines can solve all our problems. You sound like that physics teacher, What’s-his-name, the one whose classes I never go to.”
“Canelli.”
“Right. ‘Seeing is believing.’ ‘There must be a scientific explanation.’ That whole complex.”
“Yeah, well, I may be in techno-mode but I’m not too happy about the alternative view of the universe.”
“The alternative is there whether you like it or not.”