Laying a Ghost (4 page)
“Thank you.” Nick absently took a look at the house for the first time, as the wind ruffled his hair.
It was bigger than he’d expected it to be -- not a huge house by any means, but still larger than what he’d been picturing. The exterior paint on the trim, a medium gray, was peeling in some places, no doubt from the wind that came up off the sea. Nick was turned around and unsure where they’d come from, but he’d seen maps of the island and knew that wherever they were, the sea wasn’t far off.
There were white shutters that looked functional rather than decorative, and he noted that one of the windows on the second floor was cracked. He hoped the glass wouldn’t need to be replaced right away -- actually, he was hoping that there wouldn’t be too much he’d need to do to the place right off the bat. He was so tired that all he wanted to do was sleep and get settled in. Then he’d deal with whatever needed to be dealt with.
John walked past him with two handfuls of shopping bags, and Nick went back to the car and took out the last few bags with his good hand, leaving the one that contained John’s groceries, and following him into the house. As they walked, he let himself study John from behind, noting the way the man’s clothes fit. It wasn’t, Nick told himself firmly, anything more than curiosity.
Inside his new home, Nick paused on the threshold, letting the dusty smell of the place wash over him, and waiting.
There was nothing, and he sighed with relief and walked over to John, glancing around the kitchen, which looked pretty much as if it had been abandoned for a couple of years, a thick layer of dust and grime on top of the stove. “This is so weird.”
John finished rinsing out a mug and shook it free of water before setting it aside to dry. “Seeing it for real, you mean? Is it not what you were expecting then?” John glanced around the kitchen, at wooden cabinets and a solid, functional table and chairs, and didn’t seem to find it bare, or ill-equipped. Nick tried to picture his mother in this house, in this kitchen, and failed.
“I guess.” Nick set the bags down on the table and just stood there. He felt like a stranger; the house felt more like John’s than his. There were things in those cabinets that had belonged to his uncle, sometimes talked about but never seen. Some of those things had probably been his grandparents’, things that his mother had used when she was growing up here, anxious to leave school by the time she was fourteen. She’d talked about it a lot; about how she’d hated living here. She’d always encouraged Nick to live a casual existence, teaching him that setting down roots just meant stagnation, leaving him stuck to the earth instead of free to roam, to do whatever interested him.
They’d been lessons he’d taken to heart, words he’d lived by until ...
Nick cleared his throat. “No.” John was putting the eggs into the small refrigerator and fiddling with the temperature dial. “It’s not what I was expecting. I think I’d been picturing it empty. Furniture, sure, but not ... his whole life is here.”
“He left knowing that he wouldn’t be coming back.” John slammed the fridge door. “I’m sure of it. But even so, he insisted nothing be changed and the house be locked up and left alone. My mother went to visit him now and then, and she says the first thing he asked was always if the house was safe, and she’d tell him it was. It was all he had left, you see. While it was waiting for him, just as it’d always been, he could picture it and know what he saw in his head was true.” John rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, flushing slightly. “Och, listen to me run on. Sit down and I’ll make you a drink and then leave you in peace.”
To his mild surprise, Nick found himself obeying, sitting down at the table. He knew from previous experience that peaceful wasn’t a state that he was likely to achieve when John left. Matthew had understood and hadn’t left him on his own for the most part, which was something Nick had always been grateful for, although maybe not quite as grateful as Matthew would have liked; Nick knew that his friend had wanted more from him.
“That’s nice -- that your mother went to visit him, I mean. Were they friends?” Nick was struck with a sudden desire to know more about the man who had lived in this house.
“Friends?” John frowned. “Not as such, no.” He walked over to the kettle and with a minimum of fuss produced a cup of instant coffee, bringing it over to the table and setting it down in front of Nick before dragging out a chair for himself. “He was just -- he was from here, d’ye see? And she knew fine that he’d be missing the place. She’d take him the local paper, tell him what’d been going on, smuggle in a drop of whiskey too, if I know her.” He smiled. “She’s not one for following rules when they don’t suit her.”
Nick smiled at the thought, and then realized that he was looking into John’s eyes a little too warmly and dropped his gaze. If he was going to stay here, the last thing he needed to be doing was making anyone uncomfortable with unwanted attraction, even if it wasn’t Nick’s fault that John was warm and charming and much, much sexier than he seemed to realize. A small community like this, one made up of families that had been here for generations ... it would be asking for trouble to open up. “Did he have any friends? Anyone I could talk to?”
“Start with my mother,” John told him. “She’ll know. But I think you’ll not find many he was close to. He wasn’t unhappy, not exactly, but he was a lonely man.” John pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’ll bring in your cases, shall I? And it’s a little chilly in here; when it’s aired out a little, you’d best light a fire or two. There’s peat stacked behind the house ...” John paused and chuckled at himself. “Imph. You’ll not be knowing how to build a peat fire, now will you?” He pursed his lips in thought. “Look; if you’re wishing me long gone, say the word, but I’ve nothing I was planning to do this afternoon and I can help you get settled in if you’d like.”
Almost pathetically thankful, Nick nodded. “If you don’t mind, that’d be great. I don’t even know where to start.” He drank a good third of his coffee in one swig and stood up. “But I can help with the bags. And if you could show me where the peat is?”
They went outside into the fresh air. Some clouds were threatening, but not enough that rain seemed imminent. Nick realized that he really needed to go through the house and find out where everything was. If they lost power, he’d need candles, or a flashlight at least. He’d need to know how to work the chimney -- he knew vaguely that there was something called a flue, but he wasn’t sure what it did -- and if there was a washing machine. He hadn’t planned this properly. All he’d thought about was getting as far away as possible, and Traighshee had seemed to fit the bill.
“If you plan on staying, and you’ve got the money, you might want to think about installing radiators,” John told him as they walked back to the car and got out Nick’s luggage. “The smell of a peat fire doesn’t make up for the dust they make, and if the peat’s damp, you’ll be choking on the smoke.” Nick’s face must’ve been more expressive than he’d intended, because John grinned again. “There’s a water heater, and that’s electric, so you’ll be able to have a hot bath tonight -- oh, and the water will likely be brown, but that’s the way it comes up here, so don’t panic.”
“Is that why you drink so much tea here?” Nick hitched the strap of his bag over his shoulder -- God, it was heavy; he should have had all of the books shipped, instead of trying to bring some of them with him -- and watching as John closed the trunk of the car again. “To hide the color of the water?”
John’s mouth twisted in a smile as he picked up Nick’s suitcase. “Maybe,” he agreed, beginning to walk back to the house. “But the best way to do that is to put it inside a dram.”
Nick had been doing a fair amount of drinking himself in the past month, once he wasn’t taking what felt like a small arsenal of pills every day -- painkillers, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics -- so he was no stranger to a good glass of whiskey. The thought that the water in said glass of whiskey might be brown, though, noticeable or not, wasn’t all that appealing. Maybe he’d switch to vodka.
Inside again, Nick considered putting the bag down, but realized he’d just have to move it upstairs anyway. Might as well do it now. “Have you been upstairs?” He gestured toward the staircase that he could see through the doorway between the front hall and what seemed to be a sitting room.
“The first time was when I helped carry your uncle down them,” John replied. “But, aye, I went up there when I brought down the bed linen, remember? There’s a bathroom and three bedrooms. Only two beds though; your uncle wasn’t much for visitors and I know he had one room shelved for his books, for it was my father who put them up for him.” John stepped back, allowing Nick passage. “After you,” he said with a courteous inclination of his head. “And while we’re up there, I’ll take a look at the water heater.”
The thought of having a room just for books was appealing; the discovery that his uncle had cared for books, something that Nick had never known, made him smile. He started up the stairs carefully, feeling the creak of solid old wood underneath his feet, noting the scars and scratches in the finish.
He kept going when he reached the top of the stairs, making room behind him for John with the heavier suitcase and glancing into the room that overlooked the front yard, which had only a single bed in it along with a bureau and a small bookshelf.
At the top of the staircase to the left was the bathroom, painted a pale shade of gray and containing an old-fashioned claw foot tub as well as shower fixtures. The hallway was larger than Nick would have expected, with another, taller bookcase full of books and a bench with a padded seat that appeared to open for storage. At the back of the house were the other two bedrooms -- the makeshift library on the left behind the bathroom and the master bedroom to the right.
Nick moved into the master bedroom and set his bag down onto the mattress, which was covered with a thin mattress pad but otherwise stripped. There was a phone on the bedside table, he noted.
John appeared in the doorway but didn’t cross the threshold. His gaze went around the room, and then came to rest on Nick for a long moment before he looked away. He put the suitcase down just inside the room and left without speaking, heading toward the bathroom.
Nick frowned, but assumed that John would be back in a few minutes. He moved about the room slowly, picking things up and setting them down where they’d been. A watch, of the wind-daily variety, which he was pretty sure was real gold. A handful of coins, still foreign-looking to him. He wondered how long it would take living in another country before the money looked like actual money and not Monopoly money.
The wallpaper was dark; navy blue stripes with cream and, when he ran his fingers down along it, thinly coated with the same dust that lay thick everywhere else. An asthmatic would have a hell of a time getting settled here, Nick thought. He opened a dresser drawer and looked inside at the neatly folded sweaters.
Wandering over to the bookshelf against the wall near the window, Nick crouched down and looked at the books. A few titles that he recognized, but for the most part none of them were ones he was familiar with.
When he stood up and glanced out the window, the first thing he saw was a small white church.
The second was the graveyard that lay between the church and the house -- his house. Nick froze, staring at it without blinking, his eyes tracing over each headstone, most of them old and rounded with time and weather, only a few of them appearing to be more recent. Possibly a hundred in total.
“My father’s buried there.”
The voice behind him was quiet, but in the silent house a whisper would sound loud, Nick thought. Unwilling to make a fool of himself in front of John twice, he forced himself to look away from the graves, dropping his gaze to the wide windowsill, bare of ornaments, like the rest of the house, and staring blindly at the cracked, peeling paint.
“Does it bother you, then? The graveyard?” John crossed the room, coming to stand behind Nick. “I can see it from my house too.”
A hand came to rest on Nick’s shoulder, turning him slightly so that he was looking beyond the cemetery to a small gray house in the distance. The warmth of the touch was a welcome distraction. “Over there, see? On top of the hill. If you don’t count the sheep and the rabbits, I’m your closest neighbor, now I come to think of it.”
There was a faint whisper in the back of Nick’s head, but he didn’t want to listen to it. “I remember. I must have still been awake when we drove past it.” Nick didn’t comment on the graveyard because there was nothing he could say that would change anything, and anything he did say was likely to make him sound even stranger than he probably already did, an outsider and an American. The graveyard was there. Sooner or later, he’d have to deal with it.
“I didn’t know there was a church so close by. Does everyone on the island go?” He hoped that might be an indirect way of asking if John went.
“Most do, aye.” John’s hand dropped away, leaving Nick standing alone. “I go myself once in a while, but I can’t say that it’s for more than the chance to make my mother smile. I’m not much for being told what to do and I can’t be doing with the notion that something’s sinful on Sunday and not on Monday.” He sighed. “There’s people on the island won’t watch television on the Sabbath, let alone fish. Pure foolishness to my mind.” He paused, and then added diffidently, “I’ve not offended you? Are you a churchgoer yourself then?”
Nick looked out across the fields between the house and the church, the blue sky and clouds, the rays of sunshine, then shook his head. “No. I’m not ... no.” He turned again to John, who was watching him with what might have been relief. “My mother always said that she thought God could hear her better when she wasn’t in a building full of other people all trying to talk to him, too.”
“She sounds like she was a sensible woman. Although I’ve sat in the church as a boy, when every soul in it was praying for one thing and felt the comfort of it.” John’s eyes clouded. “I can’t seem to recall a time when the prayers were answered, mind you.” He shook himself and gave Nick a small smile. “Not even when it was for
