The Presence

Clarion Books
New York

Clarion Books
a Houghton Mifflin Company imprint
215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003
Copyright © 2003 by Edward D. Bunting and Anne E. Bunting Family Trust

The text was set in 15-point Goudy Modern MT.

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003.

www.clarionbooks.com

Printed in the U.S.A.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bunting, Eve.
The Presence / by Eve Bunting,
p. cm.
Summary: While visiting her grandmother in California,
seventeen-year-old Catherine comes in contact with a mysterious stranger
who says he can help her contact a friend who died in a car crash for
which Catherine feels responsible.
ISBN 0-618-26919-3 (Hardcover)
[I. Ghosts—Fiction. 2. Guilt—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B91527 Pr 2003
[Fic]—dc21
2003004034

ISBN-13: 378-0-618-2699-8 ISBN-10: 0-618-26919-3

VB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4

To my friends at Holliston.
May you never meet the Presence!

The ghost stood on the church stairs, watching, waiting for Catherine.

He was seventeen years old; he'd always be seventeen, though he had died 120 years earlier. He was as handsome now as he'd been then, unchanged but invisible. Invisible unless he chose to show himself—and he hadn't allowed that to happen too often in all the long, endless years.

The ghost did not like the word for what he was. "Ghost." It made him think of wraiths, of mists and formless forms who moaned and sighed. That was not his way. So he preferred to think of himself as a presence. Once he'd heard an old, old woman say, shivering and clasping her arms about herself, "I feel a presence in this church.
"

"
Of course. You feel god," her younger friend had suggested with a touch of exasperation.

"
I am not speaking of god," the old woman said, and the ghost had smiled his invisible smile and thought, She feels me. She is close to death herself, and so she senses me. He'd laid a feather touch on her old, wrinkled hand and laughed silently when she pulled away and rubbed it nervously on her coat. But she'd given him the word, and it pleased him.

The Presence waits for Catherine, he told himself now.

He was patient because he had nothing but time, time stretching before and behind him. She would come.

There was the sound of voices outside.

He tensed. Would she be right for him? Or another disappointment?

The heavy wooden church door was pushed open.

"
Here we are," a cheery voice said. He recognized Eunice Larrimer, Catherine's grandmother.

"
It's cold, I'm afraid." He knew that voice, too. Mr. Ramirez was one of the church elders, and he was holding the door open.

"
Go ahead, my dear," Mrs. Larrimer said to Catherine.

The Presence leaned forward, holding his ghost breath, clenching his ghost fingers around the scarred church banister.

Catherine! She was exactly the way he'd hoped she would be. Long-legged in her blue jeans, dark hair that
tumbled down her back, a face enough like the long-dead Lydia's that he shivered.

"
Lydia!" he whispered in a voice that could be heard only by him. Then he closed his eyes, filled with an old, remembered happiness. "Catherine!
"

The church my grandmother goes to is immense. It has red sandstone-block walls, turrets, an organ as big as a subway car, and a gallery that curves round and round into the roof shadows.

I'd come to California to spend Christmas with my grandmother because she'd written and invited me to be with her while my mom and dad were in Europe. She'd love to have me, she'd said. And they'd probably thought it would be wonderful for me to get away from home, away from Chicago and all its heartache. Dr. West might even have suggested it. "A change would be the best thing for her," she would have said. She was probably right.

So here I was.

It was my first day, and although it wasn't Sunday, I'd come to the church with Grandma because she volunteers in the office and she refused to leave me alone. She said she'd read in the paper about a fourteen-year-old girl being raped while she was home from school, sick, and that had happened in Alhambra, just a few miles down the freeway. Nothing on earth was going to persuade her that at seventeen I knew all about not opening doors to strangers—which in my case would mean every single person here in Pasadena. That could be her real reason. But perhaps she didn't want to leave me alone in case I started thinking bad and sad and desperate thoughts. And she could be right about that.

So she was in the office with three other volunteers, typing the church bulletin on the church's new iMac. She'd introduced me to her coworkers, and I'd repeated the names to myself so I'd remember them.

Now I was up in the gallery, exploring. The gallery wasn't used these days, since the congregation had shrunk. By the look of it, it wasn't cleaned very often, either.

Although it was December, it was California hot outside. Sun shafted through the big, round stained-glass window, making red and blue ribbons across the dusty pews and floor. Way down below, I could see the pulpit, where Dr. John Miller, the pastor, would preach on Sunday. The church had the hollow emptiness that immense, open buildings have, and there was a smell of old books and mildew and some sort of sweetness—not incense, because I'm fairly sure Methodists don't ever use incense.

I was standing, looking down, fighting a sneeze, when a soft voice spoke right next to me. "Catherine!"

I gave a startled yelp and jumped sideways. "Hey!"

I spun around. I'd thought I was alone, and I was. There was nobody.

But I'd heard my name.

"Who's there?" My voice was wobbly.

I went up a step and looked along the length of the next pew, wall to wall. Empty. But there had to be somebody.

Silence pressed around me. Was someone lying down, along the floor, out of sight? I didn't want to walk all the way up to the last row. What if the someone reached out, grabbed my ankle, and pulled me down? The poor girl who'd been raped just a few miles along the freeway was suddenly very real to me.

"This isn't funny, you know," I said in a shaky voice. "It's bad manners to scare people."

Only silence.

In a rush now, I started toward the stairs that led back down to the vestibule below, and I was telling myself, "You only imagined it, Catherine."

But I knew I hadn't.

And I was remembering how, after Kirsty died, I'd dreamed about her and thought I'd heard her voice whispering, "Help me, help me," the way she had that night, and it had been so real, as real as this. The thought made me feel worse. Was I going wacky again?

I was out now at the top of the stairs, my breath sobbing in my throat, and then I was scurrying down the steps, slipping, my elbows bumping against the banisters. Almost down. Almost down, glancing over my shoulder at the emptiness behind me.

That nice old man, Mr. Ramirez—Arthur, Grandma had called him—was pushing through the heavy front doors. He was carrying an egg-crate tray with five paper cups on it. "I got you a Coke—diet," he said uncertainly. "Is something wrong?"

"I—I—there's somebody up there," I gasped.

He set the egg'crate tray on the bottom step. "For goodness' sake! We can't leave these doors open for five minutes but somebody wanders in off the street. I hope he didn't frighten you."

"A bit." I kept peering up the stairs, not knowing what I expected to see.

"I'll just go take a look," Arthur said.

I grabbed his arm. "Wait!" I swallowed. "Don't you think somebody should go with you?" I didn't add, "Not I," but I was thinking it.

He smiled. His teeth were lovely, big, white, and fake, in his little wizened face. "My dear, I'm perfectly capable of throwing somebody out myself. It won't be the first time. It's hard, you know, because we feel so sorry for the homeless. But we've had thefts."

I watched him go. His gray suit was tweed. His shoes were black and pointy. He was tiny as a sparrow, and I could imagine someone crouching at the top of the stairs, giving Arthur one shove and him tumbling to land, splat at my feet.

From inside the office came the cheery hum of voices and laughter. I picked up the egg'crate tray and opened the door one-handed. The noise stopped, and three smiling, rosy faces turned in my direction.

"Hi, there," one of the women said. I think she was Rita. "Didn't I just hear Arthur's voice? Where did he disappear to?"

"He's upstairs. I think there's somebody there. We should go see if he's all right."

"Oh, my!" Grandma jumped up. "You stay here, Catherine." She picked up a fat roll of white paper that looked as heavy as a club. I had to move aside as the three of them rushed for the door. I set down the tray and followed close behind.

But when we got to the vestibule, there was Arthur on his way down.

"Nobody, thank goodness," he said. "Maybe he slipped out somehow."

"Did you see someone, lovey?" the one called Maureen asked me.

"I'm sure I heard a voice ... or, like, a noise." I let the words trail away uncertainly.

"Oh, goodness, we hear things all the time." Grandma rested her paper roll on the banister. "Animals come in, you know. It's cozy up in the roof space."

"Possums, skunks, raccoons." Maureen pretended to hold her nose. "Oh, those skunks are terrible." She went back into the office and inspected the egg-crate tray. "Arthur? Which one is the real coffee? I can't stand this decaf stuff you all drink."

"The one with the napkin under it," Arthur told her.

I looked over my shoulder, up the wide curve of staircase. They were making it all sound so ordinary. But that
had
been a voice, hadn't it? It hadn't been a skunk or a possum or a raccoon. The voice had spoken my name.

The bottom steps of the staircase were shiny clean.

I pictured kids sitting there, after the service or after Sunday school, keeping them polished with their Sunday pants and Sunday dresses. The dust began about five steps up. I saw two sets of footprints: Arthur's shoes, thin and pointy-toed; and my tennies, with the wide rubber tire tread going up close to the banister, coming down in a series of streaks and skids. In some places his and mine overlapped. But there were just two sets of tracks. Who' ever or whatever had been up there was up there still.

I stood around the office, sipping the drink Arthur had brought. I was glad of the cold Coke. The ice cubes rattling against my teeth were real and solid.

"Sorry for the fuss," I said, managing a smile.

"No problem," Rita assured me. She was a jolly' looking heavy woman with dangling earrings shaped like teaspoons and a bright green sweater with silver jingle bells hanging on the front.

"You're even prettier than your picture." Maureen beamed at me.

Grandma beamed back. "Indeed." She laid a loving hand on my shoulder. "I wonder what's keeping Collin," she asked.

Arthur took a cautious sip of his decaf. "He's probably late getting out of water polo practice. He'll be here."

I rolled my eyes. "Water polo? In December?"

"Yep. It's an outdoor pool, too."

Collin was the pastor's son. He was supposed to pick up Grandma and me and drive us to get the thirty-six poinsettias that had been ordered to decorate the Christ- mas church.

Grandma leaned across Rita's desk and quirked an eyebrow. "Are you going to get along all right without me this afternoon, Rita?"

"We'll flounder," Rita said. "Since Collin isn't here yet, could you spend five minutes with me, Eunice? It would be a blessing." She appealed to me. "We got this new computer...." Her voice trailed away. "I suppose you're an expert, Catherine. All you young people are."

"Not really."

Grandma peered over Rita's shoulder. "What have you done? You've cut and pasted in the wrong place, Rita. Here, let me at it." She sat in the wooden chair Rita happily vacated.

I took another sip of my Coke and looked around the office. There were two battered desks, one of which held the computer and a printer, a scarred wooden table with papers strewn over it, and four metal filing cabinets with framed photos on top—children and grandchildren, I presumed. There was one of me, smiling, holding Fluffy, our cat. A humungous wall clock ticked loudly.

Grandma squinted at me over the top of her glasses. "Collin won't be long, I'm sure. He's very dependable. Why don't you take a look around the sanctuary while we wait, Catherine? It's very beautiful."

"I think I'll just stay..." I began politely, reluctant to leave the cozy safety of the office.

"I'd be happy to give you a little tour." Arthur slanted a shy smile in my direction.

So he'd be with me. Nice Arthur. Nothing to worry about. I dropped my empty paper cup into the overflowing wastebasket.

Rita gave a sudden shiver and pulled the collar of her sweater higher around her neck. Her long earrings shivered along with her. "Always a draft," she said. "It'll be warm, and suddenly we get this rush of cold air. Old buildings," she added apologetically.

The cold touched me, and I wrapped my arms around myself, noticing the goosebumps rising on my skin. "Brr," I whispered.

"We've stopped saying it's someone walking across our graves," Maureen said. "That's how we used to explain a breath of cold when I was young, in New Orleans. Oh." She stopped, and I knew immediately what she was thinking. She was sorry she had mentioned the word "grave." Sorry if she'd reminded me of things better forgotten.

Grandma would have told them what had happened. She might even have shown them a clipping from the
Chicago Tribune.
A car accident where one teenager had survived but the other one, visiting from another country, had died. They hadn't been found for two days. It was the kind of story the press loved.