“May I tell you the story of Brady Hartsfield? That might help.” She looked at Ralph, again making an effort to meet his eyes. “It may not make you believe, but it will make you understand why I can.”
“Go ahead,” Ralph said.
Holly began to speak. By the time she finished, the sun was rising red in the east.
3
“Wow,” Ralph said. It was all he could think of.
“This is true?” Jeannie asked. “Brady Hartsfield . . . what? Somehow jumped his consciousness into this doctor of his?”
“Yes. It might have been the experimental drugs Babineau was feeding him, but I never thought that was the only reason he was able to do it. There was something in Hartsfield already, and the knock on the head I gave him brought it out. That’s what I believe.” She turned to Ralph. “You don’t believe it, though, do you? I could probably get Jerome on the phone, and he’d tell you the same thing . . . but you wouldn’t believe him, either.”
“I don’t know what to believe,” he said. “This rash of suicides brought on by subliminal messages in video games . . . the newspapers reported it?”
“Newspapers, TV, the Internet. It’s all there.”
Holly paused, looking down at her hands. The nails were unpolished, but quite neat; she had quit chewing them, just as she had quit smoking. Broken herself of the habit. She sometimes thought that her pilgrimage to something at least approximating mental stability (if not genuine mental health) had been marked by the ritual casting off of bad habits. It had been hard to let them go. They were friends.
She spoke without looking at either of them now, looking off into the distance instead. “Bill was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the same time the business with Babineau and Hartsfield happened. He was in the hospital for awhile afterwards, but then he came home. By that time all of us knew how it was going to end . . . including him, although he never said so, and he fought that fracking cancer right to the finish. I used to go over almost every night, partly to make sure he was eating something, partly just to sit with him. To keep him company, but also to . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Fill yourself up with him?” Jeannie said. “While you still had him?”
The smile again, the radiant one that made her look young. “Yes, that’s it. Exactly. One night—this wasn’t long before he went back into the hospital—the power went out in his part of town. A tree fell on a line, or something. When I got to Bill’s house, he was sitting on the front step and looking up at the stars. ‘You never see them like this when the streetlights are on,’ he said. ‘Look at how many there are, and how bright!’
“It seemed like you could see the whole Milky Way that night. We sat there for a little while—five minutes, I guess—not talking, just looking. Then he said, ‘Scientists are starting to believe that there’s no end to the universe. I read that in the New York Times last week. And when you can see all the stars there are to see, and know there’s even more beyond them, that’s easy to believe.’ We never talked much about Brady Hartsfield and what he did to Babineau after Bill got really sick, but I think he was talking about it then.”
“More things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy,” Jeannie said.
Holly smiled. “I guess Shakespeare said it best. He said pretty much everything best, I think.”
“Maybe it wasn’t Hartsfield and Babineau he was talking about,” Ralph said. “Maybe he was trying to come to terms with his own . . . situation.”
“Of course he was,” Holly said. “That, and all the mysteries. Which is what we need to—”
Her cell phone tweeted. She took it from her back pocket, glanced at the screen, and read the text.
“That was from Alec Pelley,” she said. “The plane Mr. Gold chartered will be ready to take off at nine thirty. Are you still planning on making the trip, Mr. Anderson?”
“Absolutely. And since we’re in this together—whatever it is—you better start calling me Ralph.” He finished his coffee in two swallows and stood up. “I want to arrange for a couple of unis to keep an eye on the house while I’m gone, Jeannie. Any problem with that?”
She batted her eyelashes. “Just make sure they’re good-looking.”
“I’ll try for Troy Ramage and Tom Yates. Neither of them looks like a movie star, but they’re the two who actually arrested Terry Maitland at the ballfield. It feels right for them to have at least some role in this.”
Holly said, “There’s something I need to check, and I’d like to do it now, before it’s full daylight. Can we go back to the house?”
4
At Holly’s request, Ralph pulled the shades in the kitchen and Jeannie closed the drapes in the living room. Holly herself sat at the kitchen table with the markers and the roll of Scotch Magic Tape she’d bought in the office supplies department at Walmart. She tore off two short lengths of tape and placed them over her iPhone’s embedded flash. These she colored blue. She tore off a third length, put it over the blue strips, and colored it purple.
She stood up and pointed to the chair nearest the archway. “That’s the one he was sitting in?”
“Yes.”
Holly took two flash pictures of the seat, moved to the archway, and pointed again. “And this is where he sat.”
“Yes. Right there. But there were no marks on the carpet in the morning. Ralph looked.”
Holly dropped to one knee, took four more pictures of the carpet, then stood up. “Okay. That should be good.”
“Ralph?” Jeannie asked. “Do you know what she’s doing?”
“She’s turned her phone into a makeshift black light.” Something I could have done myself, if I had actually believed my wife—I’ve known about this particular trick for at least five years. “You’re looking for stains, aren’t you? Residue, like the stuff in the barn.”
“Yes, but if there is any, there’s much less of it, or you would have seen it with your naked eye. You can buy a kit online to do this kind of testing—it’s called CheckMate—but this should work. Bill taught me. Let’s see what we’ve got. If anything.”
They gathered around her, one on either side, and for once Holly didn’t mind the physical closeness. She was too absorbed, and too hopeful. I have Holly hope, she told herself.
The stains were there. A faint yellowish spatter on the seat of the chair, where Jeannie’s intruder had sat, and several more—like small drips of paint—on the carpet at the edge of the archway.
“Holy shit,” Ralph murmured.
“Look at this one,” Holly said. She spread her fingers to enlarge a splotch on the carpet. “See how it makes a right angle? That’s from one of the chair legs.”
She went back to the chair and took another flash photo of it, only this time down low. Once more they gathered around the iPhone. Holly spread her fingers again, and one of the chair legs leaped forward. “That’s where it dribbled down. You can raise the shades and open the drapes, if you want.”
When the kitchen was once more filled with morning light, Ralph took Holly’s phone and went through the pictures again, swiping from one to the next, then going back. He felt the wall of his disbelief beginning to crumble, and in the end all it had taken was a bunch of photos on a small iPhone screen.
“What does it mean?” Jeannie asked. “I mean, in practical terms? Was he here, or wasn’t he?”
“I told you, I haven’t had the chance to do anything like the amount of research I’d need to give an answer I felt sure of. But if I was forced to guess, I’d say . . . both.”
Jeannie shook her head, as if to clear it. “I don’t understand.”
Ralph was thinking about the locked doors and the burglar alarm that hadn’t gone off. “Are you saying this guy was a . . .” Ghost was the word that first came to mind, but it wasn’t the right one.
“I’m not saying anything,” Holly said, and Ralph thought, No, you’re not. Because you want me to say it.
“That he was a projection? Or an avatar, like in the video games our son plays?”