Emily's Ghost (21 page)

After work, on a hunch,
Emily went back to the Something Old shop on Newbury Street. She
was in luck. The Coco Chanel saleswoman was just closing up.
Reluctantly the woman let Emily in, but only just inside the
door.

Emily apologized profusely
and then said, "Do you remember my buying this necklace a couple of
weeks ago?"

She'd asked merely as a
formality and was astonished when the saleswoman acted unsure.
"That isn't at all the kind of thing we carry," the woman said with
a sniff.

"I don't have my VISA slip
with me," Emily answered, becoming annoyed, "but I assure you it's
from here. What I'd like to know, if I can--"

The saleswoman glanced at
her watch and then at her red fingernails. She was obviously on her
way out for the evening, and Emily was holding her up. "What I'd
like to know," Emily repeated with a patient smile, "is where this
came from. Who owned it before."

Emily might just as well
have accused the shop of fencing hot jewelry.

"Well,
really.
Every transaction is
perfectly legitimate. But it's impossible to know individual
owners. Terri buys from all over the world, usually in odd lots
from auctions, estate sales, open markets, whatever. The pieces are
itemized, of course, but,
well
-- really."

Emily bit back a retort,
asked for Terri's business phone, thanked the woman, and
left.

When she got back home the
television was on, but Fergus was nowhere in sight. Emily turned
off
Wheel of Fortune
and said aloud to the empty room, "Fergus, I said to turn off
the TV if you're not watching it." She was halfway to the bedroom
when she heard Pat Sajak's voice. She came back to the television
and turned it off again. It came back on. "How do you do that? I
suppose you have a built-in remote." She turned the set off
again.

It came back
on.

"Dammit, Fergus,
I like it quiet after work. I need to wind down.
And I've got to use the phone. If you insist on watching, turn
it
down
a little.
And put on PBS or something. What is it about men and Vanna
anyway?" she muttered to herself as she went off to the bedroom to
change.

The volume went
up.

After she'd changed and
eaten a quick meal, she tried calling Terri Simmer on the offhand
chance that an independent businesswoman was always available for
calls. She was right; Ms. Simmer, who sounded bright, hard, and
urban, took the call in her car.

"Yes. I remember the item
very well. No, I didn't buy it as part of a lot. I happened to be
weekending on the Vineyard and found it at a white elephant sale at
the Oak Bluffs Home for the Aged. I doubt that they gave me a
receipt. That's all I can tell you."

She probably paid
forty-five cents for it,
Emily thought as
she laid the Princess phone in its cradle. The Yankee in her
cringed at the thought of a five-hundred-dollar charge rolling in
on next month's VISA statement. Still, she had a promising lead to
follow up on, and for now that was all that mattered. The good lead
reminded her of the bad one; she'd forgotten all about the
photograph that was still in the pocket of the skirt she'd worn at
Talbot Manor. It was still in the skirt, lying in a pile bound for
the dry cleaners. She pulled out the photo, more crumpled than
ever, and took it into the living room.

She turned off the set in
the middle of a lurid account of a triple murder being covered
on
Hard Copy
and
said, "Please show yourself, Fergus. I don't have time to play
little games with you." She stepped in front of the television so
that the ghost's remote-control power wouldn't work.

But the television behind
her came back on anyway, madly flipping through its channel
selection. Emily jumped out of the way. "Hey! Don't do that! I want
to have children someday!"

Fergus materialized,
sprawled on the sofa like any other couch potato. He glanced at the
TV, muting it, but he continued to divide his attention between her
and the flickering images as he said, "Yeah? What's up?"

"My God," she murmured.
"Look at you. Listen to you. You're turning into Bart
Simpson."

"Don't have a cow over
it," he said in a dead-on mimic that left her speechless. Then he
grinned, got the TV to turn itself off, and sat up straight. "Ye'd
rather I were Fergus. Fergus it is, then. What's on yer
mind?"

His grin was roguish, but
there was something dangerous in it, too, and Emily realized that
she still had no idea who or even what Fergus O'Malley really was.
He had power, undeniably. But whether it was good or evil or some
kind of neutral energy, she couldn't say. One thing was sure: His
ability to adapt completely to the world he found himself thrown
into was unnerving. His approach simply could not be more different
from Emily's. Emily had spent all her adult life trying to make the
world over to her system of right and wrong: to correct every
injustice she happened to come across, and to encourage others to
tell her about the ones she hadn't. It was a big job, and it didn't
leave time for her to be frivolous. Television was frivolous.
Almost as frivolous as dating men.

Looked at a certain way,
even sex was frivolous. Sex didn't really
solve
anything. It just complicated
matters and knocked you off course. It made you think about it all
the time. She knew from the magazines she'd read that men had an
entirely different attitude from that of women. Men kept sex in
perspective. To them it was a deep, recurring need, like hunger.
They acknowledged it; they satisfied it; and that was that -- at
least until the next time. Somehow she had to become more
practical, more like them, in her approach. Somehow she had to put
the other night in perspective.

She looked up to see
Fergus waving his arms back and forth like a railroad signalman,
trying to get her attention. She'd been off in a daze somewhere,
just the way she'd been doing ever since the night Lee Alden had
made love to her.

"What did ye mean, ye want
to have children someday?" he asked her.

She shook off her
daydream. "Pardon me?"

"Surely ye're barren,"
Fergus said, a quizzical look on his face.

"Barren! What put that
idea in your head?"

"If ye --" He cleared his
throat. "If ye do it with a man, ye will get pregnant by him. It's
an old and fairly simple story," he added, finding refuge in
irony.

"Birth control, Fergus,"
she said, smiling at his discomfort. "We have that now. Women don't
have to get pregnant unless they want to."

It was a profound
revelation to him, she could see that. "It's finally come, then,"
he said in a strangely melancholy voice. "I can think of some who
might've turned out different," he added softly. "I had a sister,
she were only fifteen, she died giving birth. Not that she wanted
to live. The man never come forward. The neighbors shunned her.
Frances hid at home, away from the windows, away from their
tongues. She cried all the time. Mum said it was her tears poisoned
her. I remember her tears used to fall on the cat, and the cat
would lick herself clean. I thought it was strange they never
poisoned the cat."

Emily saw that he was
somewhere else in time. "Birth control, Frances," he said softly to
his sister, wherever she was. "Imagine that."

He pulled himself out of
the nineteenth century and came back to the twentieth. "Ye don't
have to worry, then," he said to Emily with an inexpressibly tender
look. "I would never do anything to hurt yer hopes for a
family."

"I know that, Fergus. Not
on purpose," she added, because she really did believe that about
him now. She sat down beside him, the photograph in her
hand.

He was silent a moment,
ruminating. "So," he said at last, "who's the father to
be?"

"I haven't made any plans,
Fergus," she said dryly. "When I do, you'll be the first to
know."

"Ye ain't gettin' any
younger."

"Thank you for the
reminder. Can we talk about something else now?" She held the
photograph out in front of him.

"What about that senator
fella? He looks able."

"I'll put him on my list,"
she answered with an embarrassment of heat. "Fergus, please. I need
your cooperation in this investigation. Do you recognize anyone in
this picture? I found it in the tower of Talbot Manor."

He stopped smiling and
stared thoughtfully at the family members for a long while, then
shook his head. She turned the photograph over. He said, "This was
taken in 1862! I was nowhere near Talbot Manor then. In 1862 I was
cabin boy on a fishing schooner out of Gloucester. I showed up in
Newarth only a few months before Hessiah Talbot was
murdered."

"It was a long shot," she
admitted. "I thought maybe the mother in this photo might have
reminded you of Hessiah, or the father of her brother Stewart.
Sometimes family resemblances run deep."

"It could be anyone --
uncles, friends, neighbors. Why do ye think it's the Talbot family?
Who's the extra lad, in that case?"

"I don't know; I suppose
you're right. This is all that was left in a desk Maria Salva
emptied after I started asking questions. One thing I
do
know: Maria knows
much more than she's let on about the Talbots. But why keep it so
secret?"

"Money or love," Fergus
offered. "There are no other motives to speak of, for
women."

A vivid picture came to
Emily of the mysterious Maria with her vague smile and silky walk.
So intense was the memory that Emily forgot to be offended by
Fergus O'Malley's chauvinist remark.

"It's not money," she said
firmly.

Fergus appeared to Emily
early the next morning as she was toddling half asleep to the Mr.
Coffee machine. It was the first time he'd actually shown up before
her morning shower, and being a very private person, Emily didn't
take kindly to it.

"Fergus! For Pete's sake,
I haven't even brushed my teeth," she said, raking her fingers
through her hair and yanking her T-shirt a little closer to her
knees.

"I'm only doin' what ye
told me, showing meself if I'm in the room," he answered, surprised
by her vehemence.

It was true. After her
mortification over Lee Alden, she'd made Fergus promise never to
observe her unseen in intimate situations. As far as she knew, he'd
been as good as his word.

"Sorry. Haven't had my
coffee," she mumbled. It was just so weird, having a ghost around
in her most unguarded moments. It was like having to adjust to all
the disadvantages of marriage with none of the advantages that make
it worthwhile.

"I remembered something
that might be of some use to ye," Fergus said as she poured herself
a cup of coffee. "Yer Mrs. Gibbs just may be right. Once or twice
while I lived in Newarth I heard whispers of a curse that lay on
the house of Talbot. No one would ever say what the evil was behind
the curse. Either they didn't know, or they were too frightened to
say. At the time I thought it was just idle gossip, and after the
trial, of course, it didn't much matter to me. I believe there was
a feeling it had to do with Mrs. Talbot. She were exceeding
religious, people said. Who's to say she hadn't got wind of
something? Them kind often do."

"But Celeste Talbot must
have died fairly young if she was thrown from a horse. Which would
mean the evil had happened a whole generation before her daughter
was strangled. I don't see the connection, Fergus; that trail is
even colder than the one we're on.

But even as Emily said it,
an image of moldy, leather-bound journals peeping out from a desk
drawer ripped through her thoughts. Who was more likely to keep a
diary than a religious woman torn from her homeland and married to
a workaholic millowner? She dismissed the thought; it was wildly
speculative. Still, the feeling that Maria Salva was hiding Talbot
secrets was growing stronger by the minute. "I've got to go back to
Talbot Manor," she said, leaning against the counter and sipping
her coffee. "Help me think of an excuse."

"Ye cannot go back,"
Fergus said, incredulous. "I've told ye that."

"For heaven's sake, how am
I supposed to get to the bottom of this thing? I'll be careful,"
she added absently. "I know better now." Her mind was deep in the
case.

"I forbid it!" Fergus said
angrily. "Get what ye need some other way! Ye claim to be so
clever. Show it!"

It was her turn to be
surprised. She stared into the angry depths of his green eyes and
thought,
Is it possible he cares for my
welfare?
But no, she'd been right the day
before. If he did care, it was because she was his ticket to
eternity. If something happened to her, happened to the necklace,
he might be trapped forever in nothingness. "All right, Fergus,"
she said calmly, not wishing to distress him. "Have it your way. I
have another lead I can follow up on for now. Have you ever been to
Martha's Vineyard?"