“You mean, while you were voluntarily talking to me. On the old, weathered wooden planter.”
“Well, obviously you’d insert it when you had a rational explanation.”
“Excuse me,” Evelyn said gently. “May I?”
Despite how tactfully she’d said it, I fully expected Boswell to refuse. But he glanced down at the name badge clipped to her lapel—Dr. E. Hall—and actually entrusted his thumb to her.
“Itisa splinter,” I said, “isn’t it?”
Evelyn pulled a small multitool from her pocket and coaxed out the tiny fleck of wood. “Probably. But nanotechnology is always evolving. I’m happy to put it under the microscope and make sure.”
“What else would it be?” Boswell glanced in alarm at his thumb. “A microdose of some kind of neurotoxin?”
“Don’t worry,” Evelyn said calmly. “There was no capillary involvement. It didn’t penetrate past your epidermis.”
“That’s a relief—but it doesn’t mean I consent to ongoing surveillance, psychic or otherwise. I’m asking you, officially, to disengage all monitoring.”
Boswell had committed no crime. In fact, he was exactly the sort of disenfranchised psych the program was meant to support. Ideally, when a private citizen told us to buzz off, our protocol would be to do just that. But I’d endured enoughstalking of my own to know that once Big Brother was watching, he didn’t look away.
“Here’s the deal,” I said, “we simply want to settle the matter of the apartment.”
“The apartment?” Boswell scoffed. “That’s what started this all—theapartment? Fine. Let’s go there right now and put it to rest once and for all.”
And that was how I ended up riding shotgun on a pile of junk mail and unpaid parking tickets in a van filled with bottles of pee. The way Boswell acted when I suggested I do the driving, you’d think we tried to push him into the back of an unmarked car with a bag over his head. And while Jacob was willing to throw himself in front of a ghost for me, he’d been eager to suggest he and Evelyn follow in their own vehicle.
So it was just me. And Boswell. And a bunch of fluid that had started its life as Blast Cola. Luckily, Boswell was a scrupulous driver. Even so, I white-knuckled it all the way to George Street, imagining a sudden stop would leave me permanently anointed.
It looked like we would make the trip there in tense silence. But eventually Boswell broke it with, “Y’know how I pegged you for a fed?”
The black suit? The badge? The dead-eyed look of a federal employee? “No. How?”
“You might’ve been asking me about my website review…but I could tell you already knew something was watching.”
Hardly. I’d suspected—I’d entertained the possibility. If I’dknown, then things would be different. I’d have a game plan and I’d know where to go from here. But ghosts are slippery, and allI knew was that I still couldn’t tell if we were both jumping at shadows.
We stopped at an intersection, and the cargo shifted with a gentle slosh. I closed my eyes. Just a few more blocks.
“I didn’t ask to be this way, y’know.” Boswell sounded snippy. But beneath that, defensive. “I was a normal kid, once. With a normal family. A normal life. But one day I was playing ball with a bunch of neighborhood kids, and it was my turn to go get it when it landed in the yard of the abandoned house.”
I could picture it so well I was already sprouting gooseflesh. And he hadn’t even gotten to the money shot.
“I squeezed through the hole in the fence, just like the three kids before me had. And I made my way through the weeds. The house was probably normal once—like me. But that was before a guy lost his job and blew his brains out in the basement.”
I chafed my forearms.
“You know how sometimes windows are more like mirrors, when it’s dark inside and the sun is behind you just right? It was a single-story ranch, low to the ground, tan brick with blue vinyl shutters that were fading in the sun. And the window had mini blinds that were just a tiny bit crooked, tilted open. I stepped up to the building, bent down and grabbed the ball. And when I straightened up again, I thought it was just my own reflection I caught moving in the glass.”
I braced for it….
“And then I saw it was missing half a head.”
And there it was.
Boswell had figured it for a squatter—a logical enough conclusion in the city—and thought the guy was hurt. But when his folks called the cops, they sent out a unit for a quick perimeter check and found the place hadn’t been disturbed for ages.
“They didn’t even go in. You wanna know why? ’Cause they’d had so many crank calls about that damn house over the years, they practically drew straws over it to see who’d be stuck going out to deal with the false alarm.”
It’s his story, I reminded myself. Not mine. But I was already reliving my own first time: the long-haired guy in the courtyard of my junior high classroom, standing there in his bloody hockey jersey, locking eyes with me like some kind of sci-fi tractor beam.
