There was a moment of silence, and Shane nodded.
“She’d like to know why.”
Jack answered the question truthfully. “I need to know everything. It’s the only way I can understand things.”
A little girl’s form slowly took shape in front of the sink, and it took all of Jack’s training to retain his composure. In his life as a police officer, he had seen corpses both fresh and old, but he had never seen one appear or seem so wretched and broken.
By her size, Jack guessed her age to be either eight or nine, although it was difficult to tell exactly. Her flesh was desiccated, stretched tight over her thin bones. The girl’s yellow teeth reminded him of broken rocks on the coast of Maine. Her stringy brown hair was held back with a red bow, and she wore a gray dress that was moth-eaten and stained. Eloise’s feet were bare, bones protruding from them.
“Eloise,” Shane said, his voice filled with a tone of firm control, “I want you to be nice. Captain Thompson is a welcomed guest.”
When she spoke, her voice was sweet and polite.
“I am Eloise,” she introduced herself, curtseying. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Captain.”
Jack found his voice. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Eloise.”
The dead girl smiled, and bits of her cheeks flecked off. “What are you drinking?”
“Hot chocolate,” he told her.
She looked to Shane. “Better than you and your liquor, Shane Ryan.”
Shane tapped the head off of his cigarette into the ashtray as he answered, “You know I’ve cut back.”
“Only because of Ms. Perez,” the dead girl countered. “You better not chase her away with your bad habits.”
“You know,” Shane said, “I really didn’t want a lecture, you old hag.”
“You’re rude,” Eloise laughed. “I’m going to play. It was nice to meet you, Captain Thompson.”
Jack went to respond, but the dead girl was already gone. He stared at the kitchen floor, expecting there to be bits and pieces of the child.
There was nothing.
“Why does she look like that?” Jack asked.
“Because that’s what she remembers,” Shane explained. “What she latched onto. Most ghosts aren’t like that, though. She’s an exception to the rule. If she had followed most other ghosts, she would have revealed herself as a starved corpse. Emaciated, but that would have been it. But no, as a ghost, she went past her body, again and again, finally only seeing it as a corpse that had begun to mummify. Imagine seeing her in your bedroom when you’re a freshly minted nine-year-old.”
“Damn.”
“‘Damn’ is a fine way to describe it,” Shane chuckled. “I need more coffee, Jack. Maybe, if we’re lucky, James Moran will give me a call before I’m done with it.”
Jack nodded, sipped his hot chocolate, and found his attention drawn back to the sink, and reflecting on the dead child who had stood there only moments before.
Chapter 12: Disappointment
Tuesday, Noon
“Are you getting up?”
Miriam’s voice dragged Walt out of a fitful sleep. He opened his eyes, and as they moved, it felt as though someone had lined their sockets with sandpaper. Walt hissed at the pain, rolled a little, and fell out of bed, landing hard on the floor. The tenant in the room below him yelled, and then another person on the lower floor snapped back an insult.
As the two unseen men argued, Walt rolled onto his back and gazed up at the cracked plaster of the ceiling. He focused on the room’s light, illuminated by the daylight streaming through the open window. Walt saw the corpses of insects in the ceiling lamp’s glass fixture. He blinked, closed his eyes, and then let out a cry of pain as something cold and hard struck him in the head.
Walt scrambled into a sitting position, afraid that someone had broken into his room while he had slept.
The only person was Miriam, and she was dead.
The ghost stood by the door, a look of angry disappointment on her face.
“I asked if you were getting up,” she said, her voice low. “I want an answer.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. He picked up his kit off the floor and remembered with dismay that he had never scored a hit. Walt became aware of the queasy sensation in his stomach, the dryness of his throat, and the relentless itching of his arm.
“I need a fix before I can do anything,” he told her, getting back onto the bed. He dropped the kit onto the blanket beside him.
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Heroin,” he answered, not bothering to hide the pain the effort of speaking cost him. “I need a hit of heroin, or I’m going to be useless for the rest of the day.”
Miriam raised an eyebrow. “You can’t waste money on that. You need to save it.”
“Why?” he asked, rubbing at his temples and trying to wake himself up.
“For traveling,” she answered.
Walt nodded. “Yeah, we’ll save some of the money, but I need a hit. I don’t get one, I can’t do anything.”
“I don’t want to wait,” she informed him.
He shrugged. “You’re dead. What does it matter how long you wait?”
She smiled at him. “True. What does it matter? You know, Gregor used to say the same.”
The name Gregor was familiar, but Walt couldn’t remember why. He sank back against the wall, trying to gather the energy to get up off the bed and go out. Walt turned to speak with Miriam, but the dead woman was gone.
Part of him was sad, but the rest was pleased.
I can rest for a few more minutes before I find a hit, he thought. A few more minutes.
***
Ivan Gagnon was in the middle of doing dips on the edge of his chair, exactly as he had when he was locked up in Concord, when the woman appeared in front of him.
He knew a dead person when he saw one, and he had spent plenty of time with his grandmother to know that ghosts were real. She and his grandfather had both escaped from the Soviet Union in the sixties, and she told him all about the legions of dead soldiers who haunted the fields between villages.
The dead woman, who had been undeniably good-looking when still alive, eyed him warily.
Ivan got to his feet and pulled on his t-shirt. There was a thump above him, and he wondered if the junkie had fallen on the floor again. Ivan shivered as the sudden chill in the room dried the sweat he had built up. When he looked back at the door, the dead woman was still there.
“What do you want?” he asked, taking a beer out of the top drawer of the dresser. He popped the tab and took a drink of the lukewarm beverage.
“I want your help,” she answered.
He looked skeptically at her. “With what? Unfinished business or whatever BS is supposed to hold spirits here?”
The dead woman laughed. It was a high, sweet sound that sent ripples of excitement racing through him.
She’s dead, he reminded himself, and he tried to hide his reaction from her.
By the glint in her eye, she had caught it already.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not anything like that. There’s a drug addict upstairs.”
“So?” Ivan asked, dropping onto his bunk. “What’s that got to do with me?”