The Haunted

“Come on! This wasn’t some teenage keg party. Guys from other neighborhoods weren’t sneaking into our house to meet chicks and score free booze. This was a housewarming party with a countable number of people attending. And just because I didn’t recognize that man in James’s room doesn’t mean you didn’t invite him. I’m pretty sure he’s a neighbor. But that ghost …” She glared at him. “Cole said it was a man who died in our house. You didn’t even tell me about that.”

“I didn’t know,” he lied.

“Right.”

“I didn’t.”

“I don’t care right now. But I do think Cole’s right. I think we should sell the house.”

Julian sighed. “We just bought it. We can’t—”

“We can’t what? Sell it? Of course we can. We’ll find another house.”

“We can’t afford it.”

“Our house is haunted! What part of that don’t you understand?”

“Even if it is haunted,” he told her, “and I’m not saying it is, a ghost can’t hurt anyone. They might frighten people, but they can’t physically harm a person.”

“Fear can cause heart attacks. And ghosts can make people trip and fall if they startle them. If they can also play records and move laundry baskets …” She exhaled heavily, disgusted. “I’m not going to argue with you about the physical properties of ghosts. What I’m saying is, I’m not going to live in a haunted house.”

“You’re going to have to. Look, I don’t have any jobs lined up after this one. And the town of Jardine is not exactly a hotbed of legal activity, so your phone’s not ringing off the hook, either. We have to be realistic. If we were in California, we might both have enough business that we could afford a do-over. But right now, that’s not an option. We have enough money coming in, and in the bank, to make our house payments and pay our monthly bills, with a little bit left over. But that’s it. The down payment for this place pretty much cleaned us out. We can’t afford to do it again. Or pay all those points and fees. Even if we did qualify for another loan. So we can’t just pull up stakes and move. It’s financially impossible.”

He could tell from the expression on her face that he’d gotten through to her, but she wasn’t going to simply give up. “Contracts are made to be broken,” she said. “I should know. I’m a lawyer.”

“And you can somehow weasel us out of those hundreds of pages of rules and obligations that we signed? That you signed? Face it, unless we win the lottery, or Bill Gates hires you as his personal attorney and hires me to completely revamp Microsoft’s Web presence, we’re stuck here. At least for now.”

“Fine,” she said. “But we need to come up with a plan. I don’t feel safe here. And even if we don’t tell the kids anything—yet—they need to be protected.”

“Agreed.”

“So … ?”

“So we keep our eyes open. We try to find out ourselves exactly what’s going on, research the house, the neighborhood, whatever, and we make sure that Megan and James are never in the house alone, especially at night.”

“That’s about the lamest plan I ever heard,” Claire said. But she didn’t have anything better, and, for the moment at least, they seemed to have called a truce.

It was daytime, though. Morning. Tonight would be a different story, and he had no doubt that, mentally and psychologically, they would each end up facing once again what had happened. Megan and James would be home as well, and as he thought about it now, it seemed to him that their bedrooms upstairs were much too far away from the master bedroom.

He wasn’t about to mention that, however. He might be just as frightened as Claire, but it was his job to be strong, not only for her but for the whole family, and he needed to put a good face on everything, needed to pretend this was no big deal.

He had expected Claire to get up from the couch and leave, to get a drink or go to the bathroom or start doing the breakfast dishes or do whatever it was she would usually do when a conversation was over. But she remained in place, and there was a look on her face that he didn’t trust. He knew even before she spoke that he was not going to like what she was about to say, a feeling that intensified when she met his gaze, then immediately looked away. “You know,” she said, “I thought for a while that it might be Miles. Obviously, it’s not,” she added quickly. “But …” She let the thought dangle.

Julian didn’t trust himself to speak.

“I’ve thought I’ve felt him before. Not just here and not just on Farris Street, but back in California, in our old house.” She spoke rapidly, as though afraid he might cut her off. “I’ve never seen him, but there’ve been signs. Little indications that he was around, watching over us. I know you’ve seen them, too. Or heard them. Or felt them. And that last time? I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I just … I just wanted to tell you. I guess I wanted to know if you were thinking the same thing.”