Bone Crossed

Frowning at the leaded glass glistening in the sun, I wondered when I’d last cleaned the windows in my house. Had I ever cleaned the windows? Samuel might have.

I was still thinking about it when the door opened. A startled boy gawked at me, and I realized I hadn’t rung the doorbell.

“Hey,” I said. “Is your mom home?”

He recovered quickly and gave me a shy look out of a pair of misty green eyes under long, thick eyelashes, and turned to ring the bell I hadn’t.

“I’m Mercy,” I told him, while we waited for Amber to emerge from the depths of the house. “Your mom and I went to school together.”

His wary look deepened, and he didn’t say anything. So I guessed she hadn’t told him anything.

“Mercy, I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.” Amber sounded harassed and not at all grateful, and that was before she saw what I looked like—covered in old oil and parking-lot dirt.

Her son and I turned to look at her.

She still looked like a show dog, but her eyes were stressed. “Chad, this is my friend who is going to help us with the ghost.” As she spoke, her hands flew in a graceful dance, and I remembered Charles had said her son had some sort of disability: he was deaf.

She turned her attention to me, but her hands still moved, letting her son know what she was saying. “This is my son, Chad.” She took a deep breath. “Mercy, I’m sorry. My husband has a client coming over for dinner tonight. He didn’t tell me until just a few minutes ago. It’s a formal dinner ...”

She looked at me, and her voice trailed off.

“What?” I said letting sharpness creep into my voice at the insult. “Don’t I look like I’m up to a formal dinner? Sorry, the stitches in my chin don’t come out for at least a week.”

Suddenly she laughed. “You haven’t changed a bit. If you didn’t bring anything suitable, you can borrow something of mine. The guy who’s coming is actually pretty well house-trained for a cutthroat businessman. I think you’ll like him. I’ve got to do some inventorying and run to the grocery store.” She tilted her head so her son could see her mouth. “Chad, would you take Mercy to the guest room?”

He gave me another wary look, but nodded. As he went back inside the house and started up the stairs, Amber told me, “I’d better warn you, my husband is pretty unhappy about the ghost. He thinks Chad and I are making it up. If you could manage not to mention it at dinner in front of his client, I’d appreciate it.”

THERE WAS A BATHROOM ACROSS FROM THE ROOM I WAS staying in. I took my suitcase and went in to scrub up. Before I stripped off my grimy shirt, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

Sometimes ghosts only appear to one sense or another. Sometimes I can only hear them—sometimes I can smell them. But the bathroom smelled like soap and shampoo, water, and those stupid blue tablets some people who didn’t have pets put in their toilets.

I didn’t see anything or hear anything either. But that didn’t keep the hair on the back of my neck from rising as I pulled off my shirt and stuffed it into the plastic compartment in my suitcase. I scoured my hands until they were mostly clean and brushed the dirt out of my hair and rebraided it. And all the while I could feel someone watching me.

Maybe it was only the power of suggestion. But I cleaned up as fast as I could anyway. No ghostly writing appeared on the walls, no one appeared in the mirror or moved stuff around.

I opened the bathroom door and found Amber waiting impatiently right in front of the door. She didn’t notice that she’d startled me.

“I have to take Chad to softball practice, then do some shopping for dinner tonight. Do you want to come?”

“Why not?” I said with a casual shrug. Staying in that house alone didn’t appeal to me—some ghost hunter I was. Nothing had happened, and I was already jumpy.

I took shotgun. Chad frowned at me, but sat in back. I didn’t think I impressed him much. No one said anything until we dropped Chad off. He didn’t look happy about going. Amber proved that she was tougher than me because she ignored the puppy-dog eyes and abandoned Chad to his coach’s indifferent care.

“So you decided not to become a history teacher,” Amber said as she pulled away from the curb. Her voice was tight with nerves. The stress was coming from her end, I thought—but then she’d never been relaxing company.

“Decided isn’t quite the word,” I told her. “I took a job as a mechanic to support myself until a teaching position opened ... and one day I realized that even if someone offered me a job, I’d rather turn a wrench.” And then, because she’d given me the opening, “I thought you were going to be a vet.”

“Yes, well, life happened.” She paused. “Chad happened.” That was too much honesty for her though, and she subsided into silence. In the grocery store, I wandered away while she was testing tomatoes—they all looked good to me. I bought a candy bar, just to see how much she’d changed.