Familiar Spirit

And then she had it. That photograph—the torn snapshot which she had found the day she had taken the house. She remembered now where she had seen the face of the man in her dream, the stranger she had recognized. He had been the man in the photograph.

But what had she done with it? Sarah scrabbled through her purse without success before remembering—seeing the image so clearly she could not doubt it—that she had put the torn picture away in her desk drawer. It was in the house.

Shoving aside her half-eaten hamburger, Sarah gnawed her lip instead. Now that she had thought of it, she was certain that the photograph was yet another connection—not merely with her dream, but with Nancy Willis Owens and the murders that had taken place there decades earlier, and with the man or the spirit called Jade. She had to see it again. Clear as it was in her memory, Sarah knew she would not be content until she had held it in her hand again.

So despite her promise to Beverly, despite her promise to herself, Sarah drove back to the house on West 35th Street, and this time she went inside.

Nothing happened. All was calm.

Sarah looked around the familiar, empty kitchen, her mind alert for signals of another presence. Jade, wherever he was, made no sign. Sarah wandered through the house, wondering where he was. In the air? In the walls? As well ask where the soul resided in the body, she thought, and yet the mind demanded a material answer.

She found the photograph in the desk drawer where she remembered putting it, and she gazed at it eagerly. The shadowed face, the faintly glinting eyes, told her nothing, did not even mock her.

Sarah suppressed a faint feeling of disappointment, and made another slow circuit of the house, both the diary and the snapshot clutched together in one hand. It was still daylight, and the slanting rays of the sun lit the high-ceilinged rooms gently, making the worn wooden floors gleam. It was a comfortable house, Sarah thought with regret, but it wasn’t hers. It belonged to Jade, even if she could not feel his presence.

She told herself to go. She knew she should leave the house, drive across town to the library, find a comfortable chair and settle down to read the diary. But the stifled, public air of a library did not appeal to her; nor did the idea of returning to the Marchants’ apartment to face Pete’s guilty hostility and Beverly’s bewilderment.

What she wanted was to stay here. To curl up on her own couch in her own house, in comfort and privacy. Why shouldn’t she do something so simple? She felt safe, and why shouldn’t she trust her own feelings? If there was a trap in her logic, Sarah didn’t want to know about it. She would stay.

Feeling pleased with herself, Sarah took a beer from the refrigerator and settled down on the couch to read.

Chapter Ten

February 2

I can delay no longer. Tomorrow I must take my children and move into the new house. To think that once I longed for this day . . . It was to have been our home, but now it is merely another trial to bear, a strange place, without warmth or meaning. Walter and I planned that house together, watched it grow as we watched our children. Without him, it means less than nothing to me. Somehow I imagined that when the house was finished he would come back to me, and we would be a family once again in our new home. Foolish of me, I know, but even now, as I write, sitting in this room for the last time, spending the last night in the house where I was once so happy, I still expect a reprieve. I still strain my ears for the sound of his footstep outside, the sound of his voice calling the children as he enters. I tell myself that he is gone forever, but I cannot believe it. I cannot believe that I mean so little to him, that the years we spent together, the love we had, has all been for nothing. To be thrown away as if I meant nothing to him. My pride, I suppose. Aunt Gena said as much, although I was not meant to hear; said that it was my haughty ways, my pride in my good education, my constant talk of books and art that drove Walter to the arms of a simpler, more properly submissive woman. But Walter liked my learning, and my pride, when he met me, and he must have known—surely I proved, in all the years we were together—that I never thought of anything more, any higher calling, than to be his wife and the mother of his children? I would have done anything he asked. I would still do anything. Anything, to have him back.

February 10

Caught up in the chores of moving, I have been remiss in writing. But perhaps it is just as well. This will be a boring legacy to read over in my old age, if ever I should read it again. Only one thing I want to write about or talk about; only one subject on my mind: Walter. I feel dead inside, like a ghost in this house that was to have been ours. How can this be my home, when Walter is gone and has never lived here, will never live here?