“Like what?” Duke said. He probably meant it to sound aggressive, but his words hung tired from his lips.

  Emberly swallowed. She needed this to come out exactly right. “I want to know, before you went to Cranberry Cove, did you believe in ghosts?”

  Duke blinked at her, sipping his drink.

  “And I want to know if that’s changed since you left,” Emberly said.

  She felt Conner’s gaze burning into her, but she refused to turn and look at him. She already knew what he thought—what he believed. But this was about Duke’s memory, Duke’s beliefs, and how they infected and transformed each other. She would watch only him until he answered.

  His eyes twitched to her. They were pale and gray, the irises wreathed by thin blood vessels.

  He blinked away from her. A heavy sigh shuddered out of him, and his tough guy posture melted into the couch cushions. He was curling against the soft furniture, shrinking into his jacket. A hand jutted over his knees and beckoned for Emberly and Conner to come closer, to sit in the circle of furniture.

  Emberly glanced at Conner, but he wouldn’t look at her. Wouldn’t waste this moment’s chance.

  They each stepped into the circle, chose a soft seat, and then turned their attention to Duke. Conner sat with his elbows on his thighs, his hands steepled over his lap, his fingers knitting and unknitting. Emberly sat up straight.

  Duke faced the floor. “My girl,” he said. “She knows something’s bothering me, but I can’t tell her this shit. And then she gets pissed, like I’m holding out on her. Saying we’re disconnected. Not like I don’t care about her. What am I supposed to fucking do, talk to her?”

  “Couldn’t say for sure,” Conner muttered. “You don’t want relationship advice from the twice divorced.”

  Duke gestured at Emberly without turning eyes to her again. “What about you? Got any wisdom from your—what’s it called? Your woman’s intuition?”

  Emberly spoke in a slow, gentle tone. “I don’t think you’re supposed to do anything. But if she knows something’s wrong, then yes, eventually you might want to talk to her.”

  She left out any suggestion that his talk with her and Conner might make good practice.

  Duke looked from one to the other again. “You won’t believe me,” he said, a hopeless weight settling on his shoulders. He bent toward a glass coffee table and dug for a cigarette and lighter. “It’s not the kind of thing anybody believes.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Emberly said. She reached over the coffee table and helped Duke light his cigarette.

  A stillness sank its fingers into the room. Emberly sat straight again, but now she needed every inch of self control to keep from shuddering when she looked around.

  There was another presence here. Not an entity like she had heard knocking or felt sniffing behind her at Cranberry Cove, but a thoughtless gravity that suggested she should not be encouraging Duke to speak, that she would soon feel the world’s axis shift, and nothing would be the same.

  Too late to stop it. She had done exactly as Conner hoped, found a method to peel this conversation open, and now Duke was going to talk with them. Whatever fingers held this room, everyone present was in their grasp, and there was no getting out.

  “You’re with friends here,” Conner said, in a smooth, welcoming tone. “It’s okay. Tell us what happened.”

  Six: After

  Half an hour later, Emberly returned to the sterile hallway with Conner close behind her. He shut the door to Duke’s apartment, and within seconds the music roared back, too loud for anyone to hear their own thoughts. Exactly as Duke needed.

  Emberly pretended not to notice as she started down the hall. Conner either pretended the same, or he was genuinely too uncomfortable to care.

  Nothing felt right. Duke’s comment again rang through Emberly’s mind, that they stood like cops, belonged on TV, and Emberly couldn’t blame him. It hadn’t turned into an interrogation on their end, but he had answered as if stuffed into a small room with a stiff chair and an uneven table that danced between which three legs it would stand on.

  Emberly felt the filth of standing on the other side of that table. The uselessness of it, and the cruelty, too, of encouraging a survivor to parse through a spiderweb of trauma. She liked to think of herself as a professional scalpel, but right now she felt like a careless hammer, the iron head forged into the shape of a hog.

  “He didn’t see anything,” Conner said when they were halfway down the blue hallway. A dismissive note colored his tone, as if he were saying Duke’s recounting had been a waste of their time. Almost worthless.

  Emberly corrected him. “He didn’t see anyone,” she said. “That’s the same as you and me.”

  “Doesn’t make it a ghost.” Conner looked over his shoulder, back at Duke’s door. “Or a devil.”

  No, but it did make a pattern. The snuffling of the guy-thing at Emberly’s back, and the animal one of those true crime podcast hosts had heard inspecting her in the dark—Duke had heard the same. That recounting of his experience echoed Emberly’s and the podcast host’s, except he’d faced less hesitation from his attacker. Less assessment needed.

  Like it had known Duke was closer to what it was looking for than either podcast host. Than Emberly. Summoner. Grant. Where?

  “You led him,” Conner said.

  Emberly snapped to him. “I did no such thing.”

  “It was a leading question, about ghosts.”

  “Cut me some slack, Conner. I had to get him talking, and you were out of ideas.”

  “Right,” Conner said. “But it led the whole conversation. I know a thing or two on that, from CPS swinging by when I was a kid, that they have to ask careful questions. People like to have the right answers. You suggest what those answers are, it distorts the info. Taints it.”

  “It didn’t taint anything for me,” Emberly said.

  She thought again of the true crime podcast. It came sniffing at me, like it was looking for food, Stephanie had said to Vivian, except she’d had no idea what her visitor had really been seeking. Neither had Duke. Had he been inventing a story to please Emberly, he wouldn’t have known this detail, or he would have come to the same conclusion about it.

  The guy-thing hadn’t asked Duke a question. It had come to its own conclusion, and then it had hurt him.

  “He’s making a mistake,” Conner said. They were nearing the hall’s end, where an elevator waited to take them down four floors. “A few of them.”

  “You don’t believe him?” Emberly asked.

  “I wouldn’t put it that way exactly.” Conner reached the elevator first and pressed the call button. Its burnt-orange eye glowed in the wall. “But it’s a trauma defense. Or survival tactic. Makes people forget details, or confuse them into new stories. I know from experience. Had to work on it in counseling, and even now, whole chunks of my childhood are sitting out of order. Even if we talked through every single one, tried to rearrange them back to a truer chronology, I can’t promise it would stick. And personally, I’m not all that interested in doing so.”

  He left unspoken that Duke hadn’t been too interested in talking through this one event.

  Emberly wondered if the brain jumbling might be the same for her. She couldn’t remember whether she had it rough when she was small, could only speculate that was the case by the black chasms in her memory, and she was pretty sure she hadn’t spent all those years with the lights off.

  And like Conner, it was not an abyss she wanted to challenge in a staring contest. Some things were better left buried.

  But not Cranberry Cove.

  “He was alone,” Emberly said. “He should have stayed alone when Kristof went investigating the sound of someone’s knocking. I heard a knocking first, too. And so did Duke, right before hands grabbed his shoulders from behind.”

  The elevator chimed, and its steely doors slid open, inviting Emberly and Conner into a wood-paneled box. Conner hit the button to the first floor. Another angry eye.

  “You say you believe me,” Emberly went on. “And you know I wouldn’t have talked to Duke before today.”

  “But he had his back to the other bed and the window,” Conner said, sounding annoyed. “Doesn’t make sense. There’d have to be hidden paths in the walls, or the floor, somewhere for some creep to slip in and out. That knocking could be a gear grinding while panels slide open.”

  The elevator hummed as Emberly turned to Conner. “In and out, that quick?”

  “Em, what do you want from me?” A haggardness sank into Conner’s cheeks, hollowing his big face. “No way we can go to Ricard Morrison and tell him a ghost sexually assaulted his son. We cannot. I cannot. He has faith in us, do you know that? Otherwise, he’d have never let us talk to Duke about this.”

  “I know,” Emberly said.

  “But that faith will turn dry if we bring him bullshit,” Conner said, grinding his teeth between sentences. “Bone dry. We’ll be skeletons, all the meat stripped off, worthless at heart. Ricard would never trust our judgment again.”

  “He would if he couldn’t dispute it.” The elevator chimed, its doors slid open, and Emberly hurried into a white hallway. “Hell, Conner, I don’t know.”

  “Me neither.” Conner walked beside her. His body seemed to throb, as if he carried some of Duke’s overloud music in his thick muscles.

  They needed answers. The concrete, indisputable kind. Their alternative was letting Ricard wage war on Tyrone and paint the street in blood for no good reason. At this rate, Conner might do something drastic to get this sorted.

  Except Emberly couldn’t imagine anything too drastic when their investigation so far had come up empty.

  “Could go back to the hotel,” Conner said. It sounded like an olive branch. “Try to be ready this time.”

  In better circumstances, Emberly imagined she would have laughed. Hadn’t they been prepared last time? They had carried goddamn semi-automatic shotguns into the time-eaten ruin of Cranberry Cove. If that wasn’t ready, she didn’t know what readiness looked like.

  Conner smirked as if reading her thoughts. “Our guard was down. We thought we were picking through the mess, looking for clues. Our mistake.”

  “And what would you do differently?” Emberly asked.

  “This time, I’ll expect a threat,” Conner said. “I’ll expect a fight.”

  Seven: Ghost

  Emberly needed to forget about Cranberry Cove, at least until morning. And force of will alone was not enough to punch that hole in her memory.

  When she split from Conner, she swung by her apartment, changed into a black spaghetti-strapped dress, added glittering jewelry she’d never wear on the job, ruby-red earrings of the kind men thought they didn’t care about, and a level of makeup that felt like overdoing it, but she made it work. This was the kind of getup that drew the eye and the hand. An outfit to entice the type who would want to distract her and then tear the outfit away.

  She avoided greasy dive bars as a rule, but distractions would be easier to find in a forgotten little hellhole with residue from all imaginable narcotics dripping from its every surface. Her intent was to get drunk, fool around, and either go home with someone or take someone home herself.

  And likely, she would bring home a mistake. Her usual. She felt ready to handle dangerous types, knew how to avoid most of them, and for the ones who wouldn’t take a hint, she had experience at buying the few seconds she needed to draw out pepper spray or her handgun. Sometimes she missed out on a good thing via misjudged situation. What Duke called woman’s intuition was a lie to undermine a systemic guessing game based on experience, education, instinct, and a little luck in trying to be less lonely in a carnivorous world. Always vigilant, expecting a moment when she might be overpowered and looking for ways to preempt it. She was used to that.

  But the difficult ones were another story. The selfish lovers, the kind who got too attached. That time she went into her bathroom to freshen up and found the guy passed out on her couch.

  She would try not to let that last one happen again, at least. The other types, she couldn’t really help. She could only do her best and roll the dice.

  The alcohol wouldn’t take. She could tell from the first sip that her blood had somehow grown an ironclad tolerance of the like unseen in the modern age, and she wouldn’t be getting tipsy tonight, let alone drunk. Her thoughts insisted on haunting her body, a physiological manifestation of never letting go.

  But she did meet someone.

  He was cute enough, the scrawny pale type of near-thirty who wore ragged black clothes and a mop of dark hair and listened to The Cure, his imitation of the outcast Gen-Xer he could never become. Yesteryear would forever dodge his grasp.

  Emberly knew the feeling, in an entirely different way, but she wasn’t going to think about that tonight, and he was going to help her. He would be the distracting type, the hungry type, the type she could take down if needed.

  Except she wasn’t going to think about that, either. She was going to bring this guy home, and fuck him, and then drift away in a satisfied haze until dawn brought the world screeching back on sunrays and wakeup alarms.

  They had another drink at her apartment. She felt it this time and wondered how much water that dive bar had swirled into their liquor, whether that would ruin their wine—no, the trouble had been her discomfort in a strange place. Here at home, she would quit being trouble and start to have a good time.

  She puffed a joint to help her along the path and then settled into making out with her guest. Ricard liked his crew to keep clean, with an exception for his son, but Emberly had long-time experience with this kind of smoke, and she knew sex with strangers went down better with a high.

  Her guest’s tongue was overeager. He tasted of cheap beer, but she warmed to the flavor as she led him into the bedroom. She ignored his comments about how nice the place was, how beautiful she was, how much he liked the skull and crossbones Jolly Roger tattoo on her shoulder, peeking out from her dress. None of that mattered. She hadn’t invited him here for his assessments.

  She showed him better reasons for visiting as they pressed close, slid from each other’s clothes, and slipped back onto the bed.

  Immediately she noticed a mild tightness. She’d lathered them both from the bottle on her nightstand. What was the trouble? Was she supposed to dilate this afternoon? Did she forget? The high might have made her sensitive, a side effect she’d felt before and should have considered.

  “Hang on,” she said.

  She rolled onto her stomach, tucked her knees underneath her middle, and stretched her arms ahead. There, the position made all the difference. No more discomfort.

  Her guest hovered over her from behind. His hands went fumbling along her body, too gentle in some places, too rough elsewhere, but she ignored it. He was doing everything else right, thrusting right, kissing her tattoo.

  Until his head leaned past her shoulders. It was only a wet breath behind her head, but the sound seized through her muscles.

  Not right now, she thought. She needed to forget about Cranberry Cove.

  The high was not the only trouble. Men had told her in the past that she was too sensitive in general. Skin too thin, hearing too acute. She was doing it again, distracted from her own distraction in a spiral of unpleasant self-sabotage.

  Her guest’s breath came wet again, a quickness in her ear, weighing upon her. She might not have had enough to drink, but he had gulped down more than was good for him. It made him sloppy, and she wasn’t in the mood anymore. She needed to forget Cranberry Cove tonight, but that didn’t mean the world would let her.

  “Stop,” she whispered. And then louder: “Stop.”

  He stopped, sat back, and then waited, still inside her. She slid from him and turned around again. He looked hurt, an insecure question of Did I do it wrong? haunting his puppy eyes, and she briefly wondered if he’d never had the opportunity before.

  Pity guided one of her hands to his face, and that remaining need for distraction guided the other. She drew him close, on top of her, her legs bracing his waist. They could try again.

  The glee in his eyes was almost pathetic, but he wanted her. She tried to remember a time when that had been enough as he reached over her to grasp the headboard.

  His knuckles struck the wood in a clumsy cacophony. Like knocking on a door.

  A deflating sigh ran from Emberly’s chest, and she shook her head. The momentary thrill was gone, if she had ever found it tonight.

  Her guest made a peaceful retreat, said he understood, hurried into his clothes, and left her apartment. She silently wished him a happy masturbation when he got home, or better yet, to meet someone else on the way who would like him better than Emberly did. Someone who wasn’t messed up.

  But why was she messed up? She’d fallen down the hole of a bad trip before, but this high was altogether too gentle. She was entirely present, only a slight tingle in her skin, a brief haze in her head. Weak weed, or a joint decayed. Everything had a shelf life.

  Her sensitivity lingered. Not in her body, but in her head. Emberly was the problem, her heart thumping with undesired sensations.

  She didn’t have a right to these feelings. Nothing had actually happened to her at Cranberry Cove. Only almost happened. Less than that—she’d felt like something almost happened, but even that wasn’t true. Nothing was ever going to happen to her there.

  She had no right to feel upset, or traumatized, or whatever else was bothering her right now, especially compared to Duke, or the others, or the missing. No right to anything. Because nothing happened to her at Cranberry Cove and nothing would. She was safe.

  “Nothing happened,” she whispered. “Grow up.”

  But what about other nights? Other locations? She had known threats before, dealt with them when she could, dodged them when she couldn’t. Vigilant in necessary ways, but eventually fortune’s dice rolls might glare at her with snake eyes. Threats and encounters nudged the black depths of memory. The empty spaces inside her, ripe for haunting.

 

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