Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
I stayed after lunch and washed dishes I didn’t need to wash, because the kitchen was where Charlie kept trying to point me and I wanted time in it alone to figure out why. Ghosts can be odd. They’ll tell you what they want you to know but leave out the details you need to know. It can be frustrating.
I searched that room like a crime scene. I checked the water from the tap, smelled it, ran it hot and cold. I opened the cabinets and read expiration dates on cans older than Olivia. I checked under the sink, where I found roach spray from two presidents ago but nothing leaking. I looked at the stove burners, the vents, the back porch.
Nothing. Or rather, everything, because when you don’t know what you’re looking for, a kitchen is nothing but suspects.
I was drying my hands when the temperature dropped and the hair on my arms stood up. Charlie flickered in by the refrigerator. The sight of him scared me worse than any haunting ever had. He’d gone thin. Not thin like losing weight but like a photograph left in the sun.
“Charlie. What is happening to you?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Even his voice had static in it. “Listen. Every morning she— and then at supper she— it’s twice, Chantilly, it’s the—”
“Twice. What’s twice? Charlie, slow down. What am I looking for?” He pointed. I’ll swear to that on anything you hand me. He raised his arm and pointed toward the table, toward that crowded lazy Susan or the coffee maker or the window above them, and then his arm dissolved from the fingers back, and the rest of him quickly disappeared with it. The next thing I knew, I was standing there in Thelma’s kitchen talking to a refrigerator.
I spun that lazy Susan again. Vita-Glow. Fish oil. Cinnamon. Calcium. The blood pressure pills. A sticky note in Thelma’s handwriting that said BUY STAMPS. I picked up bottles and set them down. Twice. Every morning and then at supper. Twice what?
I called Jack from the back porch, where Olivia and Thelma couldn’t hear me, and told him everything.
“Twice,” he said when I finished. “Morning and supper. That’s a routine. What does she do twice a day, every day?”
“Everything. She’s eighty-something and set in her ways. Coffee twice. The news twice. She feeds the birds twice. She takes her pills morning and night, regular as church. She calls Olivia. She waters that fern she’s currently killing.”
“Anything in that list new in the last three weeks?” “That’s the problem. None of it. It’s the same routine she’s run for years. I watched her do the whole morning round today, and it looked like every other morning of her life.”
“Then either the routine changed in a way she doesn’t count as a change,” Jack said, “or something inside the routine did. People don’t report what they don’t notice, Chantilly. You taught me that.”
“I hate it when you quote me.”
“You love it. Do you want me to run anything down on my end? I can make a call to the hospital, see if we can get the labs.”
“Not yet. We’d need her approval for that anyway. Let me try my way first.”
“Your way.” I could hear him deciding whether to say it. “This is the part where you tell me the plan and I pretend to be comfortable with it.”
“Tomorrow night we’re holding a seance in Thelma’s living room to boost her dead husband’s signal strength. Del’s going to hate me, but I’ll figure it out.”
There was a pause with a whole conversation inside it.
“Give Bean a kiss for me,” he said, and hung up, and I loved him for it.
Back inside, I sat down at Thelma’s table and had it out with myself.
Here was the truth: Charlie knew the answer. He’d watched it happen, whatever it was, morning and supper, for three weeks. The only person in this world or the next who had eyes on Thelma around the clock, and he couldn’t get a full sentence to me, because he was spending every ounce of energy he had standing guard over her, and there wasn’t enough left of him to carry his own words across.
I knew what came next.
I didn’t need a seance to talk to Charlie. I’d said that to the girls a dozen times, and it had always been true, but in his depleted state, it wasn’t anymore. He needed the boost. A circle of people who loved him and loved her, all that living attention gathered up in one room, giving him something to draw on so he could hold together long enough to finish a sentence.
Which meant candles, a circle, and asking Delphina Beauregard, a woman who had once threatened to shoot a ghost with a shotgun, to voluntarily attend her third seance.
I put my head down on Thelma’s table and groaned.
From somewhere far off, faint and crackling and unmistakably amused, I heard Charlie say, “Better you than me, darlin’.”