“I didn’t say you were. All I mean is, stuff happens here. You just need to get used to it.”
Yeah. Maybe he’s right.
The park is busier than ever, populated by the usual dog walkers, runners, cyclists, and skaters. Today there are picnicking families, kids’ birthday parties, and weekend sports leagues with spectators on the courts and fields.
Stacey scans the crowds and landscape for the man, afraid he’s going to step into her path again, or that he’s lurking nearby.
Every bench they pass is taken, but there’s space on the low stone ledge surrounding the fountain. Lennon lights a cigarette as they sit, and his tobacco smoke mingles with the sweet scent of pot wafting from a group of kids nearby.
“Wait.” Stacey holds out her hand as he starts to return the pack and lighter to his jacket pocket. “I’ll take one.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“Does it calm your nerves?”
“Yeah.” Looking pleased, he holds out the pack.
“I won’t get addicted, will I?”
“Nah.”
“So you’re not?”
“Me? That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Jules,” he says, like that means something.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m an addictive personality, like her. She was a crack addict.”
“Crack?”
“Back in the ’90s, a lot of people were. And addiction is hereditary. So as long as your parents are as squeaky clean as they look . . .”
“Definitely.” She plucks a cigarette from the foil and looks at it, checking to see which end goes into her mouth.
“Let me.” He takes it from her, puts it into his own mouth, and lights it, shielding the flame from the breeze. “Here you go.”
“Wait. Show me how.” She’s seen enough movies and TV shows where someone chokes, sputters, and gasps on their first attempt at smoking.
He demonstrates how to hold it between her forefinger and middle finger, how to take in some smoke without inhaling it deeply into her lungs, how to exhale, how to tap the ash.
He hands it to her. “Go ahead.”
The first cautious drag isn’t particularly pleasant. By the third or fourth, she gets the hang of it.
Lennon gives pointers like a coach teaching her how to pitch a ball. “Right. Great. See? You’re a pro.”
She raises an eyebrow. “A professional smoker? Yeah, that’s not a thing, Lennon.”
“Professional wiseass is a thing.” He grins. “Nerves calmed down yet?”
She shrugs, watching a couple stroll by, arm in arm. They look dreamy and content, lost in conversation and a private world free of Peeping Toms and unsolved murders.
“He called me Anna,” she says after a few moments, without looking at Lennon.
“Did he see you come out of the house?”
“I guess so. He must have been watching. Not just now, but I think I’ve seen him hanging around. On the street, and . . .”
What will happen if she tells him the whole story?
He’ll either take her seriously, or he won’t. If he does, he might want to do something about it. Like tell the police, or his moms, who will in turn tell her parents. And her parents will either take her seriously, or conclude she’s mentally unstable, just as they suspected.
“Stacey?”
“You can’t tell anyone about this, Lennon. Promise me you won’t.”
“I promise.” His eyes are kind. He’s her protector, just like she thought.
“I think I saw him on the roof of the shed behind our house the other night, watching me through binoculars.”
She lifts the cigarette to her lips.
Maybe people like smoking so much because when you’re having a conversation you’d rather not be having, you get to do something other than say things you’d rather not be saying and then wait for the other person to say something you’d rather not hear.
“Wow. So do you think he’s just some psycho who’s into true crime? Or the one who did it?”
“You mean the one who killed the Toskas? You think that guy could have been the murderer?”
“Don’t you? He called you Anna.”
“I know, but . . .”
Dammit. He isn’t supposed to support that theory. He’s supposed to argue it.
“Who else could he be?” he asks.
“I don’t know. He said something in a foreign language.”
“French? Spanish?”
“I have no idea. Nothing I’ve ever heard before. Do you think he was just some random vagrant? A pickpocket? A ghost?”
“Not a ghost.”
“You’re the one who believes in the paranormal.”
“Right, and spirit doesn’t just pop up on a busy street in broad daylight.”
“‘Spirit’? Why can’t you just say ghost? Or at least, ‘a spirit’? Spirit is so . . . it’s . . .”
“It’s the proper term, if you want to get scientific and specific.”
She does not. She only said ghost to show him—and herself—that the man could have been anyone.
Anyone other than the escaped killer returning to the scene of the crime.
“I really don’t think there’s anything scientific about paranormal stuff, Lennon.”
“You’d be surprised. I read that—”
“And I really don’t think there’s much that can surprise me right now. Did you see him?”
“Was he wearing a cardigan sweater?”
“No.”
“Was he Black?”
“No.”
“Then I didn’t see him. Maybe you imagined—”
“I didn’t. Everyone else there saw him, too, and interacted with him. Would that happen with a ghost?”
“I doubt it. And anyway, whose spirit would he even be?”
“Um, the murderer’s?”
“We don’t know that the murderer has crossed over to the Other Side. Now if you were talking about being home alone and Anna popping up, or one of her dead parents . . . that might be spirit.”
Stacey inadvertently takes a deep drag on the cigarette. The smoke enters her lungs. She manages to expel it without choking as Lennon talks on about unsettling supernatural scenarios involving the late Toska family haunting 104 Glover.
As soon as Stacey regains her ability to speak, she changes the subject. Sort of.
“Hey, I did some research online yesterday about the dead girl in the Victorian portrait.”
“Oh, yeah? That’s cool. What’d you find out?”
“A lot, actually.”
She tells him about John and Margaret Williams, who’d lived at 104 Glover in the nineteenth century. It was John who’d discovered the Revolutionary War cannonball when the house was being built. She’d found an 1876 newspaper article about Brooklyn’s role in the Revolutionary War a hundred years earlier. There was a photo of John standing on the steps, proudly holding his historic find. The house is easily recognizable, as is the relic that now sits beneath glass in the hallway where—according to other newspaper articles from the 1880s—a teenage Gertrude Williams had died in a tragic accident.
Or was it? John Williams had never recovered from the economic downturn following the Panic of 1873, and made plenty of enemies through unscrupulous business dealings. Margaret had reportedly mentioned seeing a strange man scrutinizing the house in the days before Gertrude’s fatal fall down the steep stairway.