I had heard those, too. As I lay in bed, hoping for sleep. They had been soft, almost friendly, like a good night from Ben. I’d waited, but they hadn’t come again.
“All right,” Charlotte said, her voice calm, as soothing as the cold aloe I used to put on my sunburned shoulders. I understood, then, why Vail had called this woman. Why he’d called someone, anyone.
We thought we were handling this, but we weren’t. We were too close to it, and all three of us were crazy. We needed someone dispassionate. A professional. Preferably one who talked like the queen. We needed Charlotte.
“I’ll just take a look around and get started,” Charlotte said. “I’ll be as unobtrusive as possible.” She gestured to the ransacked cupboards. “Is there a possibility of tea in any of this? A kettle?” Whenwe gave her blank looks in reply, she said, “Never mind, I’ll do without. Could someone direct me to the writing on the wall?”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
“No.” Vail shook his head. “I’ll do it. Charlotte, get your briefcase. Come with me.”
30
Vail
In some ways, Charlotte had changed, but in others, she hadn’t changed at all. When I’d last seen her in Colorado, she’d had the same cool manner, the businesslike poise. The difference now was in her eyes and the barely perceptible sag of her shoulders. Even after Colorado, her shoulders hadn’t looked like that. Something had happened that had made her sad. Maybe more than one thing. Well, she could join the club.
“Your sisters are nice,” she said politely as she carried her briefcase into the living room, following my lead.
“No, they’re not.” My sisters were many things, but no one used the wordnice. One of them annoyed the shit out of me and the other one bossed me around. Then, for kicks, they’d switch places. I could hear their voices in the kitchen—low, hissed whispers overlapping each other. They were talking about us, no question.
Charlotte didn’t argue the point. She was staring at the wall, with the wordsWAKE UPscrawled in crayon. Her gaze went to the crayon still on the floor, to the shards of glass swept in the corner. “Your manifestation did this?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “I already took pictures. You can take your own if you like.”
That was the usual procedure with any investigation, whether hers or mine. Get out the camera, the tape recorder. Get out the electromagnetic meter, the infrared lens. Take pictures, record the interviews from the witnesses, record your own notes as quickly as possible. Dates, times, names, as if you’re a cop. Document, document, document.
The goal of every investigation was proof. No one believed in this thing you spent your life on. Everyone made fun of it, or they thought you were a con artist or a fool. In defense, you became a cross between a detective at a crime scene and a scientist. You became Sherlock Holmes. You became the fingerprint analyst and the blood analyst and the detective figuring out which window the killer had entered through. You employed cold logic and technology, because you wanted toknow, and you wanted other people to know. You wanted to be right. You wanted it to be real and for everyone else to think so, too. You didn’t want to be thought of as the nutjob anymore, the one who is either an idiot or a charlatan or both. You wanted other people to see what you did, see the world the way you did, just once. Just once.
Charlotte didn’t take out her camera, or her recorder, or anything else. She stared at the words on the wall and said, “Tell me what happened.”
My throat tried to close. I flexed my hands at my sides, opening and closing my fists. “You don’t want to start an investigation? That’s why I called you.”
“I’ll investigate however I see fit. What I want is to hear you tell it.”
My cheeks stung hot. No one had ever asked me this. I had done hundreds of interviews, but no one had ever interviewed me. I had talked to Dodie last night, but this was different. Charlotte was in the business of talking to people who had seen things that terrified them.I had never truly understood before how it feels to have someone listen to you without judging. People called VUFOS and Charlotte because they were crazy or because they were lying, sure. But they also called because they wanted someone to listen for once. To see them.
I talked.
I told her the events of that night, beginning with Dodie screaming and ending with me smashing the vase over whatever had grabbed me. It was only a sliver of the whole story, but where was the beginning, really? Not with Dodie screaming. Where, then? I had never known where the story began, and now I didn’t know if it had a beginning at all. So I told her that one part, that one night. It was something.
Charlotte listened without interrupting. She put her briefcase back down without opening it. She stepped forward and inspected the letters closely, then crouched down to look at the crayon.
When I finished, I dropped into silence. Charlotte still studied the crayon, and it looked like she was thinking. She should have asked a thousand questions, but instead, her thoughts seemed far away.
I studied her profile, the shape of her chin, the nape of her neck where her hair was tied back. She had told the truth when she said that we knew each other through our lines of work. When someone experienced something strange—like, for example, what happened in this living room the other night—they didn’t always know how to define it. Sometimes, more than one person had the experience, and they differed as to what it was. Charlotte might get called if it seemed to be ghosts. VUFOS might be called if it seemed to be aliens. If I was nearby and available, VUFOS would send me.
Charlotte and I had worked the same case only a few times. Once, we both concluded that the person was an obvious liar. Once, I had been reasonably sure the problem was some kind of ghost, so after I called Charlotte in, I had bowed out.
In Colorado, a man claimed that something was tormenting him.Tormentingwas the word he used. According to his account, the thing—he had not seen it except from the corner of his eye—followed him to work and back, rang his doorbell, tapped his windows. It stomped on his roof and dug up the garden. He claimed that this entity had dogged him for years, though in recent months, it had gotten worse. His doctors could find nothing wrong with him, except that he might be crazy.
He’d talked about this problem to a retired college professor who lived down the street. The professor had known someone who knew Charlotte, who agreed to come assess the situation. Then Charlotte had called VUFOS, who called me.
Charlotte and I had spent seven days in the man’s house, going over every inch of it, including his garden. We kept vigil at night, waiting for the sounds to come on the roof or at the windows. We shadowed him to work and back. In all that time, we saw and heard nothing unusual.
The man insisted that the thing knew we were there, so it was being quiet to make a fool of him. This was entirely possible, so Charlotte and I stayed as long as we could, hoping to help him. Then we both had other commitments, so we left.
Twenty-four hours after we left, the man took his gun from the safe in his basement and killed himself with it. He didn’t leave a note. Since he lived alone, he wasn’t found for several days.
