7

They each packed a small, nearly identical suitcase. “Matching ugly luggage,” said Lise, tossing her suitcase next to his.

She was very excited, and of course she wanted to go; it would be an adventure, she said. Paul was delighted. It was their first chance to spend time together away from the clutter of their separate lives.

She pelted him with questions as they drove across the Bay Bridge. “He was an interesting guy. A few years younger than me, always had a camera around his neck. The kind of kid who had a telescope and a microscope, a scientific person, but only in that he was very interested in looking at things. He had an expensive HO-scale train set. We used to cause train wrecks, on a miniature scale. I’ve always liked people who seem smart.”

“Was he … too smart?”

“Not really. Just very curious.”

“What’s the big mystery?”

“He vanished.”

“But, what else?”

Paul had been embarrassed to mention ghost hunting. It made his cousin sound like a fool. He told her, briefly, about the attempts to photograph ghosts, and the supposedly haunted house, making an expression of mild distaste. “He was a very likable guy. Very curious. It was probably just a passing hobby. The way someone else might take up birdwatching for a while. I always liked Len a lot. I’m sure this is one of the unspoken reasons for my aunt asking me to look for him.”

A gust pushed the Volkswagen into the next lane. Paul struggled with the car. “These damn Bugs blow all over the place,” he said. “My secret theory, and I think my aunt was thinking along the same lines, is that Len has a homosexual lover somewhere up in the wine country, and has become hopelessly involved with him. I mean, it happens. This is why she doesn’t want even the slightest chance of publicity. All of this ghost business is irrelevant, just the pastime of a man who doesn’t have to work for a living. Maybe little more than an excuse for unexplained absences.”

“But how exciting!”

“A homosexual?”

“No, a haunted house! It’s fascinating!”

Paul made a world-weary smile. “We’ll have fun.”

“I wrote a paper on the etymology of the word ghost just last year. The word has a very interesting history. Its origin is, to make a long story short, mysterious. That’s why I wrote about it. I thought I could clarify the mystery.”

“Did you succeed?”

“Not at all. It comes from a pre-Teutonic word meaning ‘fury.’ It’s related to the Old Icelandic ‘to rage.’ Whatever the difference between ‘rage’ and ‘fury,’ it amounts to the same thing: Ghosts are trouble. It’s as if at some time in the distant past everyone understood that ghosts are dangerous.”

“So that to ancient superstitions, ghosts were always angry.”

“Not angry. Furious. There’s a lot of difference between anger and rage.”

They found the warehouse on a side street cluttered with wet trash. A stringy dog stopped and sniffed in their direction, then skulked up the street. Paul nearly slipped on the cracked sidewalk, but they both trotted through the rain, and up the steps. “He was always a fairly organized person,” Paul said, finding the key in the envelope. “I’m hoping that we can make sense of his files.”

“You know that what we are doing is not quite right.”

Paul looked up with mock surprise.

“Sneaking into someone’s privacy like this. What if he’s in there now? What will we say?”

“Hello, Len. He’d be glad to see us.”

“Would he be glad to know that we had a key?”

“Maybe glad is too strong a word. He wouldn’t mind as much as some people. Of course, I haven’t actually seen Len in years. Maybe he’s changed.”

The stairway was dark. The wooden steps were dusty, and the dust stuck to the soles of their shoes. They climbed toward the bright expanse of the studio above them, and emerged into it. A bank of windows let the gray-bright day illuminate the warehouse. The roof was high above them, a tangle of girders. The vast floor was bare, the entire place vacant, except for a crowd of furniture in one corner.

“You could play football in here,” Paul whispered.

“It’s huge!”

They reached the furniture, and ran fingers over a dusty desk. A draftsman’s table was equally dusty; every object had not been touched for a long time. It was a normal-size office and bedroom dwarfed by the immensity of the building. There was even a television. A closet had been built of unfinished plywood. It was stamped “exterior grade,” and the door was open a crack. Paul peered inside.

“Darkroom,” he said. “No files, though.”

“He doesn’t keep files. He has a computer.” Lise leaned over a small, blank screen. She pushed a switch and it squeaked. A green dot flickered and stayed on in the upper left corner. “Everything he wants to keep is stored here.”

“He was organized.”

“You gave me the impression he was a whimsical fellow.”

“Well, he was.”

“This is the working place of a very organized person. Look,” she said, whisking aside a shower curtain. “A toilet. A sink.” She touched an empty toothbrush holder attached to the wall. “He’s much tidier than most men.”

“You’re good at this. What we are looking for is an address book. Somewhere he might have put the address of the place he was going to visit.” The pad beside the phone was blank. A single, well-sharpened pencil leaned against the coils of the phone cord like a miniature javelin.

“I don’t want to look through his dresser,” said Lise.

Paul tugged open the top drawer and saw a pile of jockey shorts. It was a neat pile, and beside it was a single white athletic sock, folded neatly. He closed the drawer. “He’s taken all his socks. All the ones with mates, anyway.” He glanced into the other drawers, but he saw only clothing, or places where clothing had been.

The place was tidy and benign. There was a lack of the odds and ends Paul expected to find, and which a person would find in Paul’s own apartment. Scraps of paper, random paper clips, half-read books, magazines, empty cups. Perhaps when he left this place he had cleaned it compulsively, as people will before leaving on a journey.

“I get the feeling he wasn’t expecting to come back here for a while,” Paul said, touching the cold surface of a hot plate.

“There are hardly any books.”

“I don’t think Len was much of a reader. Here’s an old Webster’s, and one of those godawful Good Housekeeping cookbooks. If he had a working library, about photography and such, he took it with him.” He ran a hand along the spine of a three-ring notebook, the sort of blue canvas binder a student might use. He slipped it off the shelf.

Lise plucked something off the bulletin board. It dangled a white tag, which she peered at, and then she said, “Look!”

The tag read, Dup.

Paul fished into his pocket and brought out the key to the warehouse. It matched one of the keys. The other, a bronze brown key labeled Schlage, was enigmatic. “If this is a dupe, too, what’s it a duplicate of?” he wondered.

“Nothing interesting, I’m afraid,” she said. “Why would he leave a spare key to a place he was going to visit lying around? Why would he even have a spare key? Anyway, this isn’t a house key.”

Paul fingered the slim length of metal. “You’re right. You really are good at this. This is more like a key to an attaché case, or a desk. Or”—and he put out his hand to touch a green metal box which was not locked—“one of these metal boxes you usually don’t even bother to lock.”

“What’s in it?”

“The sort of stuff you might think about locking up, but would usually forget to.” He held up a handful of bank statements, and envelopes of canceled checks, all fastened with pink rubber bands.

Lise snapped a rubber band off an envelope fat with checks. She sorted her way through there, lips pursed. Paul turned his attention to the blue canvas notebook. He opened it, and it made a crinkling sound, like something new that had not been used much.

The notebook was filled with stiff plastic pages, and photographs had been fitted into slots in the plastic. A white label was pressed neatly into place beneath each picture, and careful handwriting, like the handwriting of a draftsman, deliberate, quick printing, described each picture. Colma 3–18, 2:15, read one caption. Above it was a picture of a dark green smear. Many captions, many dark pictures, deep shades of blue and green.

When he realized what he was looking at, he closed the notebook.

“What’s the matter?” asked Lise, looking up from a handful of checks.

“I’m beginning to think that Len was very strange indeed. I’m looking through a photograph album he rigged up. Thinking I might see some naked women. Or birds, anyway. Sunsets. Instead, look.”

“What are they?”

“Photographs of cemeteries. Look, you can see the nameplates in the grass. Headstones over there. He went to the cemetery many times. Look, over a period of weeks. They aren’t very artful, either. I mean, they’re boring. They don’t show a damn thing. Like he was deliberately taking the dullest pictures he could.”

“Or like he wasn’t interested in showing the usual things. Moonlight through the headstones, things like that.”

“Long stretches of lawn. Actually, very nice, when you figure that the available light was lousy. That’s why I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at first. Patches of grass taken at three in the morning.”

“He was trying to take pictures of spirits,” she said.

“Yes. I knew that already. And now I see it. The man is crazy.”

“This isn’t the studio of a deranged person.”

“I don’t mean that he is mentally ill. I just mean, he has a very weird hobby.”

She leafed through the album. “I wonder what he was looking for. If you saw a ghost, what would it look like?”

Paul turned away from the pages of the album, unable to think of anything but the dream. The steps in the hall. The hand on the shoulder.

“Crazy,” Paul breathed. “A fool’s errand.”

“I don’t see anything that looks like a ghost,” Lise said, sounding disappointed.

“What would a ghost look like? Stupid question, or little more than theoretical. But you could be looking right at a ghost in any of those pictures and not know it.” Paul stopped himself, suddenly irritated with this huge room. He got up and pushed a button on the computer. The machine sighed, and the dot vanished from the corner of the screen.

He laughed. “I can’t get over the fact that a grown man would spend all this time and effort chasing ghosts. What a waste.”

“You don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, closing the notebook. It was a statement, not a question.

“No.” He did not ask if she did.

She slipped the notebook back into its place on the shelf. “Maybe he doesn’t either. Maybe he is out to prove that there are no ghosts.”

“Maybe,” he said, doubtfully. “But it’s impossible to prove a negative proposition. We can’t prove that his address is not in this room. If we can’t find it, all it means is that we can’t find it.”

“We don’t have to find it,” she said, holding up a check.

Paul held out his hand, but she was coy. “‘North Coast Realty.’ On the bottom it says, ‘Deposit, Parker Cabin.’”

Paul held the check to the light from the windows high above, as if he could see through it. He turned it over. Pink bank stamps, and a line of fine ink, as if one of the check processing machines had leaked slightly. It was his cousin’s handwriting. Instead of delight at the discovery, he felt sorry to see his cousin’s handsome printing, his well-formed signature.

His sorrow confused him. Didn’t he want to find his cousin?

“The phone is dead,” she said. “We’ll call on the way.”

“You like this, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. It’s an adventure.”