“What do you think’s happened to him?” I asked.
She made a sour face. “Maybe his crazy wife shot him. She thinks he’s humping me. Silly woman. He’s been all paranoid lately. He thinks people follow him around. I think it’s her. Or maybe that creepy albino guy.”
That was interesting. “Albino guy?” I asked. “Who’s he?”
“He won’t give a name and I don’t know what he wants,” the ghost of Christelle replied. “He comes by once in a while, says, ‘Tell him I’m here,’ and Rob gets kind of freaked out. It’s like he knows when the guy’s here before I say anything. And he always tries to ditch him and slip out somehow or not go home until he’s sure the guy’s gone.”
“Tell me about this guy,” I said. “Do you still see him around?” I needed to look for Dad and I was possibly wasting time, but I’d be willing to bet this “creepy guy” was the same one my dad had called the “white worm-man.” So he wasn’t a figment of Dad’s imagination, but what had he been? He wasn’t a ghost if Christelle had seen him. A vampire? Just a disturbing man who happened to be albino? What had he wanted with my father?
Christelle shook her head as if she were trying to shake her thoughts into place. “Well . . . I haven’t seen him in a while. Like . . . about as long as I haven’t seen Rob. As to his appearance . . . he’s really pale and he gives me the willies but it’s not just the way he looks. He’s got those scary kind of washed-out eyes that kind of stare through you. And . . . he wears eyeliner. Somehow it just makes him creepier.” She shuddered and then her face went blank and she returned to the repetitive track of her remnant existence.
“Did you want to make an appointment?” she asked again, forgetting our prior conversation. “I’m afraid Dr. Blaine isn’t in today. . . .”
I tried to get her back, but her attention faded from me and she started going through her daily routine, oblivious of my presence now. I wanted to ask her if she knew what had happened to her, even if she didn’t know what had happened to my dad, but I couldn’t get her off her loop again.
Disappointed, I set myself back to my original task. I had no idea which part of the suite Dad’s body had been found in, but I guessed that his personal office was most likely to hold some shade of him, even if it was just a loop of time playing over and over.
As I made my way through the glimmering fog-forms of corridors and treatment rooms, bright shapes darted past me, trailing blazing threads in every color. They weren’t ghosts as I knew them, just bits of energy and not quite like anything I’d seen before. They moved erratically and one or two hit me, zipping through my body with a sizzling, burning sensation and leaving a short-lived tremor in my limbs and a touch of nausea in my belly, as if I’d been mildly shocked. I couldn’t find a source for them. And I couldn’t find my dad.
I searched the office, increasingly tired and frustrated and dragging myself through the thickening Grey. The harsh little energy bolts took a greater toll on me with each strike until I was shaking constantly. I sat down on the shimmering floor, panting.
“Dad,” I called out. “Dad . . . are you here?” I wasn’t sure it would have any effect, but I was getting desperate. There was no trace at all, not a shadow, not a loop, not a glimmer that was Robert J. Blaine shaped, not a voice or a reflection. I even tried stepping out of the Grey and back in with a piece of mirror in my hand to try to catch any image of him that might be lingering around. I almost didn’t make it out, much less back in to look for him.
The ghost of Christelle drifted into his office, unaware of me, and bent over the desk, talking as if he was there, but he wasn’t. He should have been, since her lack of reaction to me this time indicated I was seeing a memory loop, and there was no reason he shouldn’t have shown up in it. I was feeling sick, and my whole body was quivering with fatigue and the effects of the energy blobs that zipped about like drunken insects.
I struggled out to the hall and collapsed onto the floor, gathering the normal back and rolling onto the ordinary wood of the corridor. The thumping from Belles Sauvages was still going on. What had felt like hours wandering in the memory of my father’s office had been about forty minutes of normal time, and I felt starved and sick, as if I hadn’t eaten in days. I levered myself up enough to prop my back against the nearest wall, panting and shaking.
“Hey,” came a voice from the stairwell end of the corridor. “Hey, you’re not supposed to be down here.”
I could see a dark-skinned man in a uniform coming toward me with care. He held a flashlight in his hand, not a gun, so I guessed he was a security guard.
“Sorry,” I croaked back. “I wasn’t feeling well, and I took the wrong door. Is there a restroom . . . ?”
“There’s one upstairs in the studio,” he said, drawing near. He stopped and peered at me. “You don’t look good.”
“I feel awful.” I could tell he was debating whether I was dangerous, drunk, or just ill. I tried to smile and I knew it was pathetic. “I just want to get some fresh air,” I added.
He grunted and made up his mind, putting out his free hand. “C’mon, I’ll get you out of here.”
I accepted his help getting to my feet and made my way out of the building under his aegis. It was frustrating to have nothing after looking so hard but I wasn’t sure there was anything to find. I might come back in the daylight and see if I could get at Christelle or the temporaclines, but I wasn’t convinced the result would be any better. There was something wrong with the space my father had once occupied, and the hole frightened me and left me with more questions than ever and a feeling of loss more profound than any I could remember.
I didn’t know what the energetic balls of light were, but I was pretty sure they were connected to whatever strangeness was going on in the office. As disturbing as it was, I thought I’d like to see if they appeared again in the temporaclines. Not that I’d know what that meant if they did, but it was information, and with so little else to go on, I’d grab for whatever data I could get. I walked slowly down the spanking clean street to a small coffee shop, sad and exhausted.
I bought hot chocolate and a sandwich, feeling the need to raise my blood sugar fast and bask in the warmth and life of the busy little restaurant. The shaking in my limbs was visible to anyone who cared to look and my hands trembled so hard I had difficulty holding the cup at first.
The waitress, a large woman in a bright blue dress and frilly apron with the name LILA embroidered on it, paused to watch me. “You all right, miss?”
“Very hungry,” I mumbled.
“Eat slower, or you’ll make yourself sick. That’s too good a sandwich to waste. I’ll get you some more chocolate.”
Lila whisked my cup away and brought it back refilled and overflowing with whipped cream. I’m not usually fond of sweets or chocolate specifically, but this was hot and stopped the quivering. I thanked her and asked for some water.
“You sure you want water now? It gives you cramps if you drink too fast.”
“This is good, but sweet.”
“Oh, yeah,” she agreed. “I’ll get your water. You eat that sandwich while I’m gone.”
I’d forgotten that you have to ask for a glass of water in California. The state’s so frequently in a drought that even in good years, a glass of water is treated like a luxury to be doled out one at a time. Some places even charge for the glass to offset the cost of washing it.
Lila returned and put a red plastic tumbler filled with water near my hand. “You came down from the dance studio?” she asked.
“Umm . . . yeah.” I’d have sworn no one saw me or that it was not even possible to see from the diner to Dad’s building. “How did you know?”
“Oh, lots of folks come in after class. Replace those calories they sweated off. But you . . . look a little more serious. . . .” she added, giving me a speculative look.
I’m not one to ignore an opening. “Well, really,” I started, “I’m scouting stories. I heard the place was haunted. . . .?
??
She gaped and made a squeaking sound. “You mean like on Ghost Hunters?”
I only shrugged. People will fill in their own blanks if I keep my mouth shut and it wouldn’t hurt to let her think I might work for a spooky TV show if that got information flowing, though I felt a bit grimy for the ruse.
She nodded to herself before speaking again. “I guess that’s not so strange. I mean . . . after what happened there, you’d think it would be haunted, right? Not that I’ve ever seen a ghost over there and my chiropractor is right in the office it happened in, you know.”
“Really? So what did you hear about it?” I asked.
Lila glanced around to be sure no one wanted her attention and then turned back to me and lowered her voice. “Well, back a while ago there was a doctor up on the second floor. Must be . . . twenty years ago—before I moved up from Long Beach, anyway. So, anyhow. He was having an affair with his nurse and then one day she just up and disappeared. No one knows what happened to her, but they say he killed her and hid the body somewhere. But whatever happened, she was never found, and one day he just shot himself. Dead.”
NINE
It hurt to hear my dad described as a womanizing murderer. Even if I suspected he might be responsible for Christelle’s death—and with her ghost wandering the remnants of the office, there was no doubt in my mind that she was dead—it didn’t feel good to hear someone else say it. I decided to pretend that it really was not my father and Christelle she I was talking about, but some nameless doctor and his nameless nurse. That I could talk about without feeling queasy.
I swallowed some water before speaking. “So he killed himself?” I asked. “It wasn’t his wife, or the girl, or her boyfriend who shot him?”
Lila shook her head. “Not the way I heard it.”
“Interesting. Do people see his ghost there? Or the nurse’s?”
“Well, like I said, my chiropractor has that office now. I’ve never seen anything weird there, but . . . it’s funny how the room is always too warm.”
“Too warm? Most people say ghosts are cold.”
“Yeah, well, you’d think so. But this one’s warm. And there are noises at night.”
“I couldn’t hear anything over the music in the studio,” I said. I hadn’t heard anything at all, not even the sound of Christelle opening the door, now that I thought about it. Usually the Grey is full of sourceless muttering and the singing of the grid, but except for Christelle’s voice, the general Grey buzz, and the zing of the flying energy balls, there’d been no sounds in the ghostly office. I’d have to take another look, but this time I’d try to get into the right layer of time and see if that made a difference.
“Do you think your chiropractor would let me look around his office? After dark, that is. When the ghosts are more active.”
“Oh, I think so. He’s a nice kid. Paul Arkmanian, that’s him.”
I raised my brows. “Kid?”
She turned her head and blushed. “Well, not really a kid you understand: He’s Sandros Arkmanian’s son,” she said, as if that not only made sense, but made him perfectly safe. On the sense side, I wasn’t so sure, but considering how tight-knit the neighborhood looked, maybe “safe” wasn’t so far out. Everyone knew everyone and everyone’s children, and they probably knew who was having an affair with whom, who was drinking too much, and who was dying of which tragic disease without their selfish kids ever coming around to visit. They’d all know who was “good folks” and who wasn’t. I’d bet the neighborhood ladies brought casseroles and baked goods around for christenings and funerals, too.
Lila was glancing around the room again, her face lighting up as she waved a hand at someone, beckoning the person closer to our table. A burly, square-shouldered man got up from his own table and strolled over to us. He looked to be about six feet tall, mid-sixties, and prosperous without being full of himself over it. He gave Lila a kiss on the cheek when he reached her side.
“What can I do for you, Lila?”
“Sandy, this nice woman wants to meet Paul. She works for that ghost hunter show and they want to talk to him about the office ghost.”
Sandy looked a little less excited at the prospect than Lila had. “That’s just a story, Lila. Paul’s office isn’t haunted.” He turned his attention to me and gave me a hard, evaluating stare. “You sure it’s the place you want?”
“Suite 204,” I replied. “I just want to take a look.”
He shrugged his eyebrows and sighed. “Well . . . I suppose that’s OK. Really, I don’t think it’s haunted.” He looked at his watch. “You want to come over, have some coffee? We can talk it over, see if Paul’s all right with the idea.”
“Now?” That startled me. Even Seattle’s notoriously friendly residents don’t issue invitations with such alacrity.
“Of course now. What’s the point in waiting?” He turned toward the table he’d come from and waved. The three other men sitting there waved back. “I’m taking this pretty girl home to meet my son!” he called.
They laughed and flapped their hands at him, waving him away. “Good luck, Sandros!” one of them called back.
I finished off my sandwich in a couple of huge bites and left money on the table for Lila. I had a bad feeling about Paul Arkmanian as I followed his father down the street. Was he gay? A misogynist? What was the big deal with going out with a female? But I wanted into that office without having to do another Grey version of a B and E, so I was willing to try anything.
We went down Brand and turned onto a much smaller side street. In a few blocks, all signs of business had vanished and single-family houses in neat little yards appeared. It was like something from a fifties sitcom, and I recognized the houses as the sort I’d walked past every day as a child. The nostalgia was thick enough to choke on and my eyes watered a bit.
Arkmanian stopped and unlatched the gate of a pink house on the right. “This is it.” He glanced toward a side window that flickered with television light. He sighed. “And Paul’s home. Let’s see what he says. . . .”
We went up the flagstone walk and into the house, which wasn’t locked. The flickering blue light from a computer monitor turned the room the harsh metallic color of dance clubs. Sandros Arkmanian turned on the overhead lamp, killing the shadows that held sway in the living room and driving the rest back into the dining room.
The dining table was probably an antique, given the heavily carved legs that I spied under the mass of books and computer equipment. It was like a microcosm of Quinton’s lair crushed into the ten-foot-square room. A man I guessed to be Paul Arkmanian sat behind the table. He was in his late twenties, tall like his father but rangier, judging by his arms and shoulders. He wore a pair of expensive headphones and was deeply immersed in whatever was displayed on his computer screen, twitching his mouse and keyboard and staring without blinking while he grimaced at something.
Suddenly he reared back, pounding the table and shouting, “Damn it! Damn, damn, damn! Stinking orc!”
I glanced at Sandros. “Computer games,” he explained. “From the moment he gets home until he goes to bed. I tell you, I don’t understand it. He’d rather play with imaginary monsters than have a date.”
Better imaginary monsters than the real thing, I thought, but still, I didn’t think I’d ever met an adult man who’d rather romp with pixels than with women. He wasn’t bad looking, and he was plainly not stupid, judging by his reading material, so . . . where was the problem?
Sandros walked around and tapped Paul on the shoulder. The younger man jerked, blinked up at his father, and shoved the headphones down onto his neck.
“Oh. Hi, Dad. Am I making too much noise? Did you want to watch TV or something?”
“No, Paul. I brought this young lady to meet you. She’s interested in your office.”
Paul Arkmanian frowned at me. “My office? It’s not for rent.” His eyes flickered back to his screen for a moment. He wanted to get back to his game.
I’d h
ave to be more interesting than a computer game, and I knew that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. “I don’t want to rent it,” I said. “I want to talk to your ghost.”
Paul pulled the headphones off his neck, setting them on the table. Behind him I could see Sandros raise his eyebrows at me, surprised that I’d managed to snare his son’s attention from the realm of computerized mayhem.
“Who said there was a ghost in my office?”
“It’s pretty common knowledge. Lila was filling me in, but I had already heard it before.”
“She works for the ghost buster show—you know the one,” the elder Arkmanian said.
“Ghost Hunters? Yeah, I’ve heard of that. You guys really think the place is haunted?”
“Do you?” I asked. “After all, a previous tenant did die there.” My voice didn’t shake, though I’d feared it would.
Paul bit his lip in thought and glanced down at his keyboard. “I don’t know. . . . Oh, hang on.” He made a few motions with his mouse and keyboard. Then he reached up and turned his monitor off, leaning back in his chair to get a better look at me. His father stared at the back of Paul’s head with his mouth agape. “OK, now that I’m not going to get killed by the first NPC that comes by, let’s talk.” He stood up and went into the living room, expecting us both to follow.
I did, but Sandros paused a moment in the dining room. “I’ll . . . get us some drinks, yeah?”
Paul started to wheel back around, saying, “Thanks, Dad, but I can get that—”
“No, no! You have a guest. I’ll get it. Sit down with the lady and talk. What do you want?”
“Oh. Umm . . . whiskey and Coke?” the son replied as if he wasn’t sure that was acceptable.
“Sure, no problem! You, young lady—what is your name, anyway?”