“Sure, sure,” Bradley said, and as he turned me, I flinched again. But the boy was gone, his whispers silenced.
There was a bench in the hall, Joan’s makeshift waiting room. It was deserted. We sat down.
My knees were shaking, and so were my hands. I leaned forward, my elbows on my thighs. Bradley was silent.
“A teenage kid in pajamas,” I said after a moment, my voice quiet in the empty hall. “About seventeen or eighteen. A boy. Dark blue pajamas with white stripes. He’s tall, stringy. Five-eight, five-nine, maybe even taller. Dark blond hair, curly, worn short at the sides and longer on top. Brown eyes. He’s been dead awhile. Why does he look familiar?”
Next to me, Bradley went unnaturally still. I stared at the floor.
“You saw him?” he asked, and I heard fear in his voice, a low hum under the words.
“He was talking to me.” I kept my gaze down, rubbed my palms together. “He was standing right there in the office, telling me to leave. But it wasn’t really…him, in a way. I’m starting to understand that now.”
“Then who was it?” Bradley asked.
“There was a ghost in my bedroom when I was growing up.” I rubbed my palms harder, squeezing them, squeezing back the fear. “A…hostile one. Angry. Evil, maybe. I don’t know how to describe it. She hated me. When I left that house, when I left Fell, I left her behind. But she’s still here. She’s sending messages through the others, I think.”
I sounded absolutely objectively crazy. I sounded like one of those people who hallucinates, hears voices. One of those people who wander the streets, shouting. That guy who said a dog made him kill all those people. Someone like that.
Someone who had no business raising her daughter.
Someone who should be locked up. Again.
Bradley was frozen still, and he wasn’t touching me anymore. He’d get up and walk away, leave me here. I wasn’t going to blame him. If I were him, it was what I would do.
After a long silence, Bradley said, “You saw Martin Peabody. We went to high school with him.”
I wiped my clammy forehead, racking my memory for the name. It was faintly familiar, but there was no face attached to it. “He was our classmate?”
“Tallest kid in school,” Bradley said. “He was six feet by senior year, skinny as a rail. Blond, curly hair. No one else looked like that. Quiet kid, no friends, didn’t talk much. That has to be him.”
My stomach roiled, sour liquid boiling over itself, and I wiped my forehead again. “What happened to him?”
“He ate his father’s shotgun three weeks after graduation,” Bradley said. “No one knows why. He didn’t leave a note.”
I made a choked sound. I’d been gone by then. I’d left Fell before graduating—on top of my other failures, I was a high school dropout. When Martin Peabody killed himself, I was in Long Island, waiting tables and probably trying coke for the first time. I hadn’t remembered Martin at all.
Fell was a cursed town, but it had its everyday tragedies, too. The kind that had nothing to do with the supernatural. The kind that weren’t mysteries, unless you counted the mystery of what had been happening inside quiet, friendless Martin Peabody’s head that day.
You could leave Fell and get away from the ghosts, if you really wanted. But anywhere you went, you’d still find the usual kinds of sadness, like the kids who wanted off the ride and eventually decided today was the day.
As always, I thought of Lisette. I wanted to touch her, feel her hair. She hated when I touched her anymore.
“Here’s the thing, though,” Bradley said. Some of the fear had left his voice, though not all of it. “Martin didn’t die in the hospital. He died in his bedroom. So why is he here?”
“They aren’t tied to their place of death,” I explained. “I’ve seen people where they died. I’ve also seen them in their homes when they didn’t die at home. I’ve seen them in other places. I’ve seen them in different stages of life, sometimes young, sometimes old. They’ve never spoken to me until now. The one in my bedroom…I don’t think she died there. She died somewhere else. I don’t know how I know. I just do.”
“Are they in graveyards?” Bradley sounded curious now.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably. I don’t hang out in graveyards.” I twisted to look at him. He was sprawled against the wall, his knees carelessly wide. “Why are you still sitting here, helping me? Can’t you tell I’m crazy?”
He blinked once. “I have so many questions, though. Can you talk to them? Can you ask Martin stuff if he comes back? There’s stuff I want to know.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” I said, though I didn’t really know anymore, did I? What was happening was nothing like it had been in the past. I had thought I had it bad when I saw the occasional dead person, silent and polite. Now I was wistful about how easy those days had been.
“Ask him what it’s like to be dead,” Bradley said. “Ask him if there’s God. Ask if Jesus is real. Does he have the beard and the long hair, like the pictures they show in Bible school? What’s he like?”
I glared at him. “I’m going to the ladies’ room.” I stood up.
