The 'Geisters (7 page)

Michael didn’t object.

Ann found herself in the kitchen as Thea was cleaning up for the night.

“Quite a fellow,” said Thea, lifting a thumb to the saloon door leading to the dining table, “that Mr. Rickhardt. He doh eat nice.”

“I’m sorry?”

Thea smiled. “He say all sorts of things, don’t he?”

“Did he say something to offend you?”

“To offend me?” Thea laughed. “Oh no. Nothing to offend me.”

Ann opened the fridge, took out another beer and a fresh lime. “Thanks, I’ll cut it myself,” she said when Thea offered.

“He pay for your wedding, that one. Must have a lot of money.”

“He does.”

“And you don’t like him.”

Ann carved out a wedge of lime and stuffed it down the neck of the bottle. It fizzed and twisted in the amber liquid.

“You
should
not like him,” said Thea. “Here he is, uninvited, on your honeymoon. He pay for your wedding, think he can do that? Come here and vex you so.”

Ann took a swig of beer. It was tart and hoppy and just what she needed. “I don’t like him,” she said. “But I suspect we won’t see that much of him once we’re settled.”

You suspect that, do you?” Thea smiled, shook her head. “He flew in a plane to show you a movie of that wedding he bought you. On your honeymoon. Ah,” she said, and turned back to the dishes, “I’m overstepping. None of my business. But I will tell you something, Mrs. Voors. He’s very charming that fellow, yet he not going to leave you be. That monkey know what tree to climb.” She smiled and shook her head when Ann tried to hand her a bottle. “No thank you. Better I loll off no more.”

Ann put the second beer back in the fridge.

“You’re not overstepping,” she said to Thea, “and I won’t tell.”

“Tell if you like,” said Thea. “It don’t really matter to me.”

“You were gone awhile,” said Michael when she came back and fell into her chair. Ann smiled at Michael, then at Ian.

“Just thought I’d give you two a chance to catch up.” She raised her bottle, now half-empty, and made as if to toast.

Ian and Michael had been hunched together, talking in low tones, as Ann was talking to Thea; Ann had noted it over the saloon doors from the corner of her eye. Now Ian was leaning back, hands behind his head—Michael, arms crossed.

They both looked, she thought as she sipped the dregs of her beer, vaguely guilty.

“You didn’t have to do that,” said Ian.

Ann smiled and said, “Liar.”

She’d meant to say it sweetly—but she’d had . . . three bottles of Ian’s beer now? That sounded right . . . and her ire must have leaked out. Ian and Michael shared a glance.

She tried to recover. “Nice liar, I meant. You two have business to talk about. I can leave you to it. . . .”

Ian smiled and shook his head. “Taken care of,” he said. “And really, I wanted to show you this.” He lifted a DVD in a plain white case from the table. “What can I say? I’m an old woman. They really did a fantastic job of it. I couldn’t wait.”

Ann shook her head. “I can’t believe you flew all the way down. Couldn’t you just upload it onto YouTube? Send it by courier?”

Ian’s eyes widened and he clutched at his chest theatrically. “YouTube? A courier? Heathen! This is special stuff! You don’t just fling it on the internet, give it to some lackey. It’s a treasure!”

Ann and Michael shared a glance themselves at that.

“Why don’t we watch it,” said Michael, “right now.”

“Excellent idea,” said Ian. He looked out the open French doors. “It’s about dark enough.”

It certainly was getting dark; the sun had pretty much set—there was just a tiny line of purple at the horizon. Stars were emerging overhead. But Ann didn’t see what that had to do with watching a video and said so. Rickhardt laughed.

“You didn’t think I was going to show it to you on the TV set they’ve got here.” The TV set being an old 27-inch Toshiba that occupied a corner in the living room. “I’ve set up something special,” he said, and got up.

“What—” Ann began, but Michael put a hand on her arm.

“It’s all right,” he said, “Ian told me about it while you were in the kitchen. Speaking of which—Thea?”

“Yes?” she called from the kitchen.

“You can finish up,” he said and they stepped around the kitchen to the living room. Ian was already there, unzipping a black nylon case and pulling a laptop computer out. As he plugged it in, and pulled out what Ann recognized as a projector, Michael lifted down a framed lithograph of a tall sailing ship and set it aside. The frame left a faint outline on the white wall.

“You’re projecting it,” said Ann, “like a presentation video.”

She’d done this more times than she cared to admit in the service of Krenk & Associates.

Ian nodded. “Full cinema experience,” he said. “Nothing but the best.”

Thea popped in to say goodnight as she left, and patted Ann on the shoulder where she sat.

“Funny ideas,” she said, so only Ann could hear. “Don’t let ’im spoil things.”

And then she was gone, and Ian slid the DVD into the side of his laptop and said, “Enjoy.”

Michael set an open beer down in front of her and flicked off the lights.

And their wedding began, anew.

A black screen.

A cool, descending bass line for a few bars, and then a trumpet joined in, blowing all over the place. The screen shifted to blue—the sky, over the Rickhardt Estates winery, two weeks ago—while on the soundtrack, Louis Armstrong put the trumpet down and wondered what good melody and music was without swing.

“Did you pick the song, Ian?” asked Ann.

“Hey, be thankful,” said Ian. “Michael wanted Sinatra. ‘Love and Marriage.’ Or was it ‘The Tender Trap?’”

Michael barked a laugh as Ann punched him in the shoulder.

The camera came down on the treeline, then the rooftop, and then the milling guests outside Rickhardt’s winery. The image faded to sepia and froze, and the title faded in.

THE JOINING OF TWO

And there was a date, and a location, and their names, and then the whole picture swam out of focus.

Literally.

As the trumpet faded out, it seemed as though the picture spun—as though Ann were spinning herself, dizzily reeling in a dance across the floor of Rickhardt’s winery. She couldn’t say how he did it—the screen simply shifted from a sepia exterior to an interior pan across a row of inverted wine glasses, a fiery stand of maples seen through a window.

And yet . . .

“Wow,” she said, and looked down and took a sip from her beer.

“Wow,” echoed Rickhardt, softly.

The camera was moving along the floor now, or near to it, past
rows of guests seated in front of the dais where she and Michael would say their vows. Michael was at the front, hands crossed in front of him, smiling in genial terror. She would have been in the limousine still, sipping a small flute of champagne with Lesley at her side.

This was the part of things she hadn’t seen.

Faces, now—most of them strangers, some of whom she might know the name of—some of whom she knew more intimately. The lens drew across each of them, fading between so that sometimes one might seem to morph into another. Drew Sloan, one of the partners at Michael’s firm, laughed as he blended into the hollowed cheek of an older woman, who brushed a lock of her blonde hair from her eye and looked past the camera with wry approval, as she melted into the face of a young African boy, who looked bored and sullen, sitting in his chair beside his mother and transforming—into Jeanie Yang.

“Shh,” said Ann, as Ian kicked off a sandal, and it thumped on the floor. She leaned forward.

Jeanie was wearing a dark blue satiny dress, her black hair braided tight at the back of her neck. She was standing and talking and laughing, her purse under one arm, her other reaching out as if to touch the shoulder of her companion. But the camera pulled out to show her standing, alone. Who was she talking to? Someone on her Bluetooth maybe? Hard to say, because she quickly slid away. In her place sat Susan Rickhardt, Ian’s wife.

She had not been having a good day that day (Ann had never seen Susan having a good day), but this shot made the most of her. She was seated by a tall window that overlooked the vineyard. The sun came in at a high angle. It caught the fringe of her pageboy haircut, illuminated the ridge of her wide nose and perhaps, the hint of a smile—and bathed it all in a warm, golden glow. She might have been in Tuscany that afternoon. She saw the camera, turned, broadened her smile to just shy of Mona Lisa amperage, and with two fingers made a tiny wave.

And the screen went black.

It couldn’t have stayed black for as long as it seemed to; the single breath that Ann drew as Susan Rickhardt ended her wave couldn’t have sustained her.

The editor was working his art again, and the act of transition was somehow transformed into something more. But this time, Ann didn’t feel as though she were spinning; she felt herself a fixed point in space and time. All of it slowed to an instant, and that instant stretched.

At first, Ann thought she couldn’t look away, that something was holding her gaze on the screen. As the breath rasped through her throat, she began to think that she
could
look away, could look anywhere she wanted in fact—but the blackness had replaced everything else, so it didn’t matter. Ann began to panic. It manifested in attempts—at screaming, at getting up, at just asking Ian Rickhardt:
Please could you turn it off a moment?
Nothing would come of it, though. She wondered if she might be dead.

And here was the fulcrum of it, as Eva might say. The point where we can make a choice: dead or alive.

Ann wasn’t going to be dead.

And thinking of Eva, Ann began to imagine—to construct—to inhabit—the safe place.

It was a struggle; she recalled that first time, sitting with Eva at the hospital, building the castle stone by stone in her mind, clearing the woods around it . . . fashioning, or at least conceiving, the architectural details. It was a true act of creation.

Here, creation was barred from her. She saw the place she and Eva had made as through a dense fog. Standing in the high corridor, the fog’s tendrils clutched and flowed through the tall windows. Ahead, a blackened branch poked through. She could barely see anything; when she willed a candle, it snuffed out.

She shuffled down the corridor, which was, she discovered, covered in mud. Sensation returned to her as she did. She felt the cool mud between her toes, rotten leaves sliding beneath her bare heel. She ducked beneath the branch, felt its bare twigs catching in her hair.

She stood in front of the door to the tower room, the rot of swamp, of cesspool, filling her nostrils.

And there, she stood and listened.

Wood scraped against stone—as though a great trunk were being dragged across the floor of the tower room, one end to the other. The dragging stopped. There came a creaking sound then. And a great exhalation of air, as though an old man, an old woman for that matter, had just finished a big job.

Then came a humming, and a scratching—with an occasional rending sound, as though a claw had found purchase in the wood.

The humming sounded like a man. The tune was hard to place. It might have been random. It sounded like insanity.

Quiet down
, Ann wanted to say.
Behave
.

But she still couldn’t summon the voice to say that. She was still drawing that single breath, and she could only watch—as her lungs filled—as the door buckled—

—and cracked.

“Hey li’ si’.”

She was looking at Philip. He was wearing his jacket-and-tie wedding uniform, although she could only see the collar, the knot of tie, because the camera was in close. His mouth was twisting like it was its own creature; his eyes, though, were steady, gazing straight into the camera as he tried to say,
Hey little sister
.

“Con’a—hin,” he said.
Congratulations.

Ann coughed, and gasped, and sucked in lungfuls of fresh air.

“Oo boofoo.”
You’re beautiful.

She looked around, sat up on the sofa, and took stock of her situation.

The living room was darker than it had been when the video began. Michael and Ian were gone.

“Uv oo,” said Philip from the wall.

I love you
.

Another wicked bass line came up—“Bang a Gong” by T-Rex; actually one of Ann’s choices—and the scene cross-faded to a shot of Ann and Michael and Lesley dancing, very badly, while Mr. T-Rex went on about how dirty, sweet, skinny and black-clad his girl was.

Ann got to her feet. She was unsteady. Her mouth tasted sour—of too much beer. Had she had too much beer? That might explain things. She rubbed a chill out of her arms.

T-Rex’s girl was weak, and also had hydra teeth. This was Jeanie, bopping side to side as she breached the fringe of the dance, showing every one of those teeth in a broad grin. She and Bridal-Ann faced off on the screen and yelled at each other to bang gongs, get things on.

Where were the men? Ann did a check of the main floor. The kitchen was empty, pristine. The entry hall. A little coat closet. She called out: “Michael? Ian?” as she climbed the stairs to the second floor, the bedrooms.

T-Rex went away and laughter and squealing replaced it. “Congratulations Mikey!” shouted a woman on the TV. People clapped.

Partway up the stairs, Ann steadied herself and flicked on the hall light and climbed the rest of the way. The doors to the two bedrooms were open, their interiors dark. The bathroom door was closed. So was the door to the linen closet.

“Guys?” she called as she stuck her head in one bedroom, then the other. “Guys?”

Nothing. The beds were made.

“Insect?” she whispered as she touched the freezing cold doorknob to the bathroom, and as she thought of that other door, she pulled this one open.

The bathroom in the beach house was nice but nothing fancy. There was a biggish bathtub with jets, next to a fibreglass-formed shower stall opposite the toilet, whose tank was high on the wall. You flushed it by pulling on a chain at the bottom.