I let the insult pass. “I think that I was hired to oversee the start of a museum in the home of Captain Wilde that shows the story of his life and legacy.”
She argued, “But what you’re discussing now, with this”—her gesture took in all my papers and the box of artifacts—“you’re talking sixteen years before the date that we’ve decided we’re depicting in this house, the date of Captain Wilde’s inventory.”
“Well,” I said, because I had been giving this some thought, “I think the inventory’s useful when it comes to our refurnishing the house, I do agree, but if you’re saying that one day’s our only point of reference, then it really can’t be Captain Wilde’s museum.”
“What?”
“He wasn’t even here,” I said, “the day they did the inventory. He was off at sea. We’d have to make this the museum of his wife and children, and just tell their stories. Or, to tell the truer version, it should really just be a museum of the British occupation, because on the day they took that inventory there were British officers in charge here, so we really ought to tell their story—have their maps and charts and things spread out around the rooms, right?”
Sharon’s tone turned icy. “I do not appreciate your sarcasm.”
“It isn’t really sarcasm. It’s logic. If our mandate is to tell the story of the captain’s life, we should tell all of it. We shouldn’t just redecorate the past to make it look the way we want it to.”
She was starting to say something else, but Frank had reached the limit of his patience and he cut her off. “Enough. We all know, don’t we, what the right thing is to do? A show of hands, who thinks we ought to use that upstairs room to honour those two women that my family tried pretending never lived? Don, get your damn hand up. There now. We good? Then let’s move on.”
Across the table, Tracy tried to hide her smile. She always liked it when Frank lost his temper and shut someone down. She coughed, and brought the others up to speed with what our acquisitions committee had been dealing with.
“This painting Isaac Fisher has,” said Harvey, “are we sure we’re going to get it?”
Frank replied that I was working on it.
Sharon sniffed and got her own back, just a little. “Well, I hope she does better with that than she did with the Sisters of Liberty.”
I let that one slide by harmlessly, knowing I’d won the real battle this evening. Besides, I was already forming ideas of how we could come up with alternate funding to pay for the furnishings that we still needed.
“Security,” Don put in, “for this year’s Halloween ghost watch. Who’s going to give up their evening?”
There were various excuses and vague murmurings around the table.
I asked, “What’s the ghost watch?”
“Oh,” Rosina said, “that’s only what Don calls it. It’s not anything official.”
“Every Halloween,” Malaika told me, “people drive up here to park and party in the woods, so they can try to see the ghost light.”
“It’s a nuisance,” Eve agreed. “And now that our board’s officially in charge of the museum, it’s our problem, not the town’s.”
And Sharon said, “My husband said he’d try to get a few off-duty boys to come and help us out, but it’s a busy night.”
I looked around at all of them. “So . . . wait. We’re going to have a lot of people coming up here Halloween night, on their own, and we don’t even have to advertise?”
Malaika smiled, catching on. “What did you have in mind?”
? ? ?
Gianni met the cars as they were entering the parking lot. “I’ll bring my pumpkin,” he had promised, and he did—a plastic orange pumpkin bucket like the one I’d carried as a kid at Halloween around the neighbourhood.
“Hey, welcome to the ghost hunt!” he was greeting every new arrival. “Parking by donation, give whatever you feel comfortable with.” Parking by extortion, I thought, watching him in action. To one driver he said, “Really, Tony? Really? You feel comfortable with that? You want your girl to see how cheap you are? Yeah, there you go. That’s better.”
As the couples—they were mostly couples—left their cars, a little bit uncertain still what they’d just wandered into, they were met by Don, resplendent in his vampire teeth, who handed them a paper bag for garbage and a photocopied map of all the pathways and then started them along their way. “Be careful!” he called after them, each time. “You never know what might jump out at you.”
I knew what would jump out at them. First Lara, dressed as Lydia, would pass them in a pale and tattered nightgown with her hair all tangled up in imitation seaweed as though she had returned from being drowned.
Then one of Gianni’s friends, another waiter from the deli, in the role of Joseph Wilde, would stumble from the bushes and accost them with a toy rifle in hand and ask them, “Have you seen my sister?”
Harvey, who had rented the same re-enactment uniform he’d worn for our Fall Harvest, would be skulking around through the trees pretending to be the lost Revolutionary soldier who’d been guided by the ghost to safety, urging anyone he saw to watch out for the British.
And if anybody made it to the graveyard, they’d find Frank up there to tell them, in his practical but chilling way, the story of the fatal love affair between young Lydia and her French soldier, leaving those who’d heard the tale to find their own way back again along the dark and lonely path between the trees where every leaf that scuttled in the wind became a footstep just behind you.
By the time the moon was high and it was nearly midnight, we must have had eighty people, maybe more, assembled near the picnic tables in our clearing, enjoying the ghost-shaped cookies and hot chocolate that Tracy’s partner Veronica had set up there. We’d been lucky—since her family owned the deli she’d been able to persuade the town to waive the licence fee so we could serve the food and drink without a problem, and the deli had provided the refreshments free of charge.
One of the women standing closest to the house let out a shriek.
“It’s him!” She pointed to the woods. “Look, there he is!”
And everybody turned—including Lara, Gianni’s friend, and Harvey, who had finished with their acting parts and come back, still in costume, to join in the general fun. They turned and saw a small light, swinging slowly like a lantern in a hand, move through the trees along the far edge of the clearing.
Frank, who’d also left his post by now and stood among us, to the side, surprised me with his flair for the theatrical. “Now, everyone stay quiet,” he advised. “Don’t want to spook him. He’s just looking for his Lydia, to lead her to the cove.”
Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The light swung silently along, then turned away along the path that led down to the water.
Well done, Tracy, I thought, looking at Veronica, who winked.
A collective breath of satisfaction rippled through the onlookers, as conversation started up again. Within a half hour we were wrapping up, the tables wiped, refreshments packed away, the people leaving as they’d come, in couples.
One big middle-aged man with a leather jacket and a neck tattoo reached for my hand and shook it heartily. “I tell ya, I’ve been coming up here thirty years to see the soldier’s ghost, and I ain’t never had a better time than this.”
When Gianni came back from the parking lot, his smile was wide. “You shoulda seen them. People shoving tens and twenties at me. We must have a grand in here.” He held his plastic pumpkin bucket up.
We carried it into the kitchen. Tracy, as our treasurer, did the official count.
“Nine hundred eighty-seven dollars,” she announced. “And twenty-five cents.” She had scratched her face a little on her journey with the lantern through the woods, but she was smiling. “That’s so great.”
“It really is,” said Harvey, looking genuinely happier than I remembered seeing him, as though he had been caught up in the spirit of our shared success. He clapped me on the shoulder. “Good job. Good idea.”