“How did you even get my number?”
“I have my ways,” says Brenda. Then she grins, and says, “You work for a chain coffee shop. I called and said I was a district manager and I needed to verify some details of your employment to avoid fining the branch. I’m pretty sure they couldn’t have given me your number faster if they’d been beaming it telepathically into my mind.” Her smile dies. “I know it’s an invasion of your privacy. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been so important.”
“If the other ghosts hadn’t been missing.” It always feels a little odd to say things so baldly in the presence of the living. Never mind that most of them are paying less than no attention to the two of us, the older woman with her guitar and the gawky twentysomething who shows up every night for coffee and pie. We’re just part of the background noise, and all the talk in the world of ghosts and witches and hauntings won’t change that. No one believes in things like us anymore. There’s freedom in that.
There’s also sadness, deep and profound and undeniable. I come from a place where everyone knew everyone else, and where claiming to be a ghost in public would’ve had someone stopping by to have a talk with my Ma inside of the hour. It’s been a long time since I lived in Mill Hollow, but some things go deeper than breath. Some things go all the way to the memory of bone. This world, where most people come and go so quickly that they never realize how slowly I age, or that Brenda doesn’t age at all, this world isn’t mine, and it’s never going to be.
“If the other ghosts hadn’t been missing,” Brenda agrees. Her fingers sketch out one more silent chord on the neck of her guitar, and then, without fanfare, she sets the instrument aside. That’s enough to make me sit up straighter, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling as the skin tenses. Brenda never puts her guitar down. If she hadn’t told me about her connection to the corn, I would’ve thought that she was some sort of song witch. They’re usually fiddlers, but they can bond to any stringed instrument, if they pick it up early enough.
We sit in silence for a moment, me tense and pressed against the wall of the booth, Brenda empty-handed, fingers twitching slightly, like they don’t know what to do when they aren’t holding the guitar. Finally, she bows her head forward, hair falling to frame her face.
“I’m the oldest witch in this city, and I should have been watching more closely,” she says. Her voice is heavy with guilt. “Bill would be disappointed in me right now, and he’d be right to be. He always said I got distracted too easily, and I’d always tell him to mind his own damn business. Guess he’s minding his own business now.”
“Bill?” I ask—but really, I don’t need to. Women Brenda’s age, witches Brenda’s age, have to come from somewhere. Something drove her out of the sweet Indiana corn, where the magic came easy and the land knew her name, all the way to the towers of Manhattan, where the only corn comes in a can, or boiled down to cloying, syrupy sweetness. Brenda’s not a corn syrup woman. She’s a cornhusk crone, a Corn Jenny in jeans and lumpy sweater, and this is not where she belongs.
“Bill went to the corn about a year before I came here,” she says. She smiles, corner of her mouth twisting upward like an old tree root. “It was his time, and he walked in with his head held high. Said it was an easier exit than most get, going to the corn the way he did. He was a good man. We were together a long time.”
First Delia, now Brenda. Everyone mourns for someone. I just died too young to do my mourning for a lover, for a spouse, for a romantic love of my life who had to go while I stayed behind—or the other way around for Delia, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if I didn’t get off light by dying when I did. It’s hard to weep for what you never had.
Brenda shakes her head, smile fading back into shadow. “He was right, though. I do get distracted too easily. I get wrapped up in a single stalk and forget to watch the field. I didn’t realize that the ghosts were going until the ghosts were gone.”
“We’re not all gone,” I protest. Then I frown. “Why did you go looking?” Brenda’s a witch. This could be a trap. Maybe she knows exactly why the ghosts are gone.