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Two Ghosts

by Shel Senai

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The wind chimes hung still like frightened children, stupefied by a summer heat so dense it pressed everything into submission, drained all will to move, stifled all sound but the distant twin drones of lawnmowers and invisible airplanes. Joan Vorhees slouched in the aluminum lawn chair she brought everywhere, one leg draped over the plastic arm, smoking outside their motel door. It was the last of a king-sized joint she had been nursing since Richmond. Sunglasses covered her sensitive eyes, acid-washed jean shorts covered her belly and came up nearly to her ribs. They were only going to be there for a few nights, if all went well. Their 80s station wagon was packed to the brim with every possession to their names, its hood speckled with insect remains collected over thousands of miles of hot road—across Texas, Mississippi, down all through the Deep South, up through the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland. Now here they were in central, nobody cares Jersey, in the dead of summer. A pair of ghost hunters, low on cash.

Ludo Vorhees unpacked everywhere they went, even if they were only staying one or two nights. Joan let him, long past caring. Their website made clear — All inquiries must be made by phone!!! Joan was the customer liaison (Ludo, bless him, ate little and talked even less) and she preferred to sit and listen to the voicemails all at once at the end of the day, preferably with a joint. This she did now from her lawn chair outside the Blue Ostrich Motel.

They got a lot of calls, sometimes ten in a day. Almost all of them were junk and today was no exception. “Something is rattling in my attic every night and—,” “I keep seeing a strange shadow in my backyard when I take out the—,” “Con-gra-tu-la-tions, your business has been approved for a—,” “Joanie, it’s mom, please can we stop—,” “And I could swear I turned it off but then I go back in and the dang—,” “This is Alicia Duggan from the Holiday Inn in St. Petersburg, we have some unpaid charges—.”

Delete, delete, delete.

Done with his unpacking and suddenly full of energy, Ludo emerged from the room sighing happily, and stood rocking on his feet beside her chair, surveying the gravel parking lot.

Anything good? he asked, just by looking at her.

“Nothing,” she answered, slipping her phone into her pocket. “Let’s go eat.”

*

Dusk on a summer Friday and the town was dead. Joan looked out over the expanse of an empty parking lot from the front seat of the wagon. A fish sandwich and fries sat warming her lap. Ludo had an iced Coke that rattled loudly. There was a lack in the air, an absence of something that Joan couldn’t quite put her finger on. She felt as if everyone in the town was just out of sight, lurking, taking stock of the station wagon with the out-of-state plates and the not-quite-clear windows. She squished a French fry against the roof of her mouth with her tongue and relished the starchy ooze. Her upper thighs felt swampy. The weather app on her phone read ninety-five.

Ludo was thinking about tomorrow, she realized. Fretting in his silent way.

“Older couple,” she said, pausing to tear open another packet of ketchup with her teeth. “Sounded late 60s, maybe early 70s. Smart. I Googled him, he’s a retired genealogy professor.”

Ludo made an impressed face, then looked unsure.

“I wondered that, too,” she said, knowing where he was going. “A man of science, err, facts anyways. That’s why I booked him, actually. Pure curiosity. Well, that, and he agreed to Package One.” Package One was their most expensive package. Most people couldn’t afford it. It included a full scan of an entire property, a written report with relevant property history, readouts and photos, and a certificate stamped with real gold leaf, plus all the usual investigative stuff. Of course, none of the things in Package One were necessary to get the job done but it was an experience thing. Gave one the feeling they were being thorough in their de-ghosting efforts.

Anyways, some folks went for it.

*

The whole ghost hunting thing started with a YouTube video showing Joan in purplish night vision, sitting on the floor against a wall, talking calmly with an orb of light in the center of the frame, whom she calls “Baby John.”

“Baby John,” she says in the video. “I can feel you. I can feel you wanting to stay here. I know there was so much you wanted to do. I know you’re only trying to say ‘Hello’ to us, you only want to come and play but dear—” and here she falters, “oh sweetie, it’s time to move on.”

The orb hovers for exactly fourteen more seconds before fading into nothing.

Ludo had captured the footage at an old factory that had recently been converted into condos and posted it to his personal channel. It was the final eighty-five seconds of what had been a two-hour wannabe investigation. They weren’t ghost hunters then, though Ludo had messed around with EVP recordings in college, trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to capture spirit voices on tape. When “Baby John” appeared, Ludo just happened to have an old point-and-shoot with night vision on him. They were visiting a friend’s new apartment in a converted old building. The friend started talking over dinner about weird things happening, mostly stuff toppling off counter edges, lights going on unexpectedly, that sort of thing.

Back then Joan’s Sight, as she called it now, was crude. A skill that hovered on the periphery of her awareness, never named but always somehow there. She had said, “Sounds like a young spirit” and instantly felt a faint tap on her sternum. She knew she was right. In the months that followed, she worked to strengthen her Sight, discovering the terms for her abilities—claircognizance, clairaudience, clairsentinence.

My éclairs, she had called them once, poking Ludo in the ribs in line at the French bakery in Philly, where they were from. It was a pun. This was back when Ludo talked more, when he laughed easily. They were living together in her mother’s rowhouse basement at the time. It was before Bill entered their lives—Bill with his bad energy—before Joan’s night terrors and the constant tension that finally drove them away.

In time, Ludo would learn to apply the scientific method to their process. He would figure out how to turn yard sale electronics into actual equipment they could use. Joan would begin to sense energy as frequencies, finding herself attracted to those lower-level frequencies, those heavy, tortured Earthbound spirits that most mediums avoided.

But that first night, with Baby John, they were like babies discovering their own fingers: delighted, uncoordinated. Inevitable.

*

The state of New Jersey was, of course, terribly close to home, to the city and the state that had once been home, but Joan had chosen to ignore that fact when she accepted the job. Besides, home was a heavy thing, something she was trying to turn into a concept, like a Polly Pocket toy you could fold up and take anywhere.

The house was high on a hill with a lawn so green it looked artificial. Heat-wilted pink hydrangeas surrounded a broad Victorian porch with a handsome black front door. Joan whistled when they pulled beside the driveway. Clearly these folks had money. She saw Ludo clenching his jaw repeatedly, pulsing it the way he did when uneasy, and she thought as she always did of a tiny beating heart trapped inside his cheek.

Old houses, stubborn ghosts. That was their saying. Not that they avoided these projects. Joan chose clients based on feeling alone. They had wasted too much time in the beginning with “ghost gawkers” and busybodies. People who had watched too many ghost-hunting shows on TV and gotten paranoid, or who were just curious about how it all worked, but who never actually hired them. No, there had to be a certain respect for what they did, and, most importantly, there had to be a real ghost. Joan could sense it in their voicemails, the ones who had real ghosts. There was an edge of desperation to them. They were the ones Joan and Ludo could actually help. The tap on her sternum would confirm it. Those were the only calls she returned, cash flow be damned.

Joan knew Ludo was also thinking the house looked too nice. Nice houses, people who lived in nice houses rather, made him nervous. It may have been the very thing that alerted him early on about Bill, her mother’s new boyfriend, soon fiancé. Why would some rich guy like him come live with us? Ludo had whispered in the dark one night. And it was true, Bill drove a German car and looked perpetually tanned even in the dull gray of mid-Atlantic winter. His cologne was musky, and he walked too easily, as if the ground was made for him alone. Her mother said Bill had “lost” his family, that was the word she chose.

Still, Joan had tried to give Bill a chance. Ludo had him pinned from the start.

Now Joan returned her gaze to the house and thought about how they probably looked—like grubby hipster vagabonds. They slept in the wagon—their sole wedding gift, a hand-me-down from her mother—more often than Joan would have liked and wore the same greasy clothes over and over. Joan cut their hair herself and it looked it. To be honest it didn’t really bother her what people thought of them. She maintained that ghost hunters should be a little weird looking. It was, after all, on some level, a performance. Paranormal investigators—that was Ludo’s preferred term.

Right away, her Sight started up.

Joan stood at the base of the driveway while Ludo packed his backpack from the open trunk. She had the sense of someone standing to her right, trying to get her attention. Wanting to touch her. Wanting to snap their fingers in her face. The taste of metal filled her mouth.

“Ludo,” she said plainly, her eyes closed. “There’s even something right here.”

They had a firm agreement to always tell each other everything on the job, right away, as soon as it happened. Ludo had begged this of her before their first paid gig in Alabama, some nine months ago. I’m not like you, he had said. I’m going in blind. Joan promised him then. She may have even said something like, my Sight is your Sight. It was the only way she could get him in the house.

Ludo looked at her now. Good or bad? he asked wordlessly.

“Don’t know yet. Let’s go up.”

Joan readjusted her jean shorts and ran her fingers through her unwashed hair as they mounted the driveway. She took off her glasses and cleaned them. She felt anxious but couldn’t pinpoint why.

John J. MacMillan, their client, looked on from the porch as they approached. His appearance was ordinary in almost every way but for his thinning pale red hair which he styled brushed back, like he had been wind-blasted. He wore large glasses over deep-set eyes. He was the kind of man you would pass in the street without really seeing or giving much thought to, but he was immediately of deep interest to Joan Vorhees. She noticed a smudge on the corner of his glasses, a balled-up tissue hanging out of his pocket. Her eyes raked over him the way a mothers would, appraising him. Joan almost wanted to lick her finger and wipe his face, though it was clean.

He chuckled at them in an odd way as they approached. For a moment, she worried he was another one of those gawkers, giggling like the circus had come to town. Up close though, Joan could see that John J. MacMillan was simply nervous. She felt her lips glide placidly over her teeth and wondered how many times in her life she had smiled to put a grown man at ease.

They did the introductions. Call me JJ, he said. Come on in.

An older woman was perched on an antique pink sofa in the living room, held up by carved wooden feet painted black. She was watching The View. She didn’t look up when JJ introduced her as his wife, Louise, and the Vorhees as “the people I called,” smiling at them helplessly. Joan felt Ludo wanting to hold her hand. She crossed her arms, pressing her notebook to her chest. They had to be professional here. She gave him a reassuring nod instead.

JJ led them through a hallway to a massive, gleaming kitchen, then out to the rear patio.

“Okay,” said Joan, sliding out her pen. They were seated around a heavy, wrought iron table. The area was cool and shaded. Comfortable. “Tell us what’s been going on.”

JJ frowned. “Well, first,” he said, “let’s try not to bother Louise with anything, any of your testing or whatever it is you do.”

Ludo fiddled with his lens cap. Joan knew what he wanted her to say.

“Mr. MacMillan, JJ—it’s difficult for us to do our work without all inhabitants on-site fully on board.”

“She’s onboard, I just—she’s been kind of wound up lately. We agreed the best thing would be for her to try to forget all this was happening.”

All this, JJ would go on to define, was quite a lot. It was hard to say when it began because so many inexplicable things had happened that they had naturally tried to rationalize. Doors slamming—must be the wind. Mailbox hanging open—faulty latch.

But then there were the earrings, JJ’s mother’s pearl drop earrings, which Louise kept in a revered spot in her jewelry box, always in view beneath glass. They had their own special section. They could not have been misplaced or moved by any force of nature. Intruders? Impossible. One of the MacMillans was almost always home, and anyways they had the security system installed years ago. All the same—one day Louise noticed the earrings were gone. Panicked, she crawled around the whole bedroom on hands and knees, they both did, only to find them hours later on the edge of the tub of all places, as if someone had taken them off during a bath. Bewildered, she replaced them in the jewelry box. They couldn’t rationalize this one, but couldn’t make sense of it either. They decided to just move on and forget about it.

Then, a week later, JJ poured them into his cereal bowl with his Special K. It felt like a joke, and for a moment he wanted to laugh when he heard that tinkling of pearl upon porcelain before the flurry of flakes. But Louise had looked horrified, and she later told JJ she briefly entertained the thought that it was him—JJ—trying to trick her, but she knew, after forty years of marriage, it wasn’t his way.

“Have there been any deaths in the house?”

JJ twisted his hands together. He explained how his mother, Virginia, had died in the guest room. Peacefully, he pointed out. Old age. Just then the words precious son popped into Joan’s head and she wrote them down in the margin before continuing on with the interview.

*

Back in the Blue Ostrich in the hours before they were set to return to the house, Joan lounged in a bath towel and picked at the loose skin around her fingernails. She told Ludo what she had picked up, how she felt this would be an open and shut case—the old overprotective mother shtick. She’d talk to the mom, Virginia. Get her to see her son was doing fine without her.

Ludo nodded, relaxing a bit. He liked certainty. He liked when they could close a case, because often they could not. Often, they only picked up snippets of things. Flashes or partial orbs on camera, indeterminate whispers on tape. Those cases could not honestly be marked as closed and contrary to what most people believed about paranormal investigators, Joan and Ludo did try to bring their own brand of ethics to the profession.

During their initial walk through at JJ’s, Joan had noted certain places in the house where energy was pooling, places where they would later set up their cameras. The main spots were the kitchen, the master bedroom and en suite bath, and down at the edge of the property by the mailbox. Ludo had more or less pieced together their process himself, from talking to other paranormal investigators on Internet forums, coupled with his own need for procedure and order. A one-off viral video may have made them famous, but it was Ludo’s fastidiousness, his passion even, that kept them going. Or at least that’s what Joan told herself. But now with her hair in a towel in the Blue Ostrich Motel, she thought back to Ludo’s fidgetiness at the MacMillan’s today, and their last case too, in South Carolina. She wondered if this was what they really wanted anymore, this work, this life. Or if they were both doing it for the other somehow.

In front of the motel, Joan popped open a new pre-roll and pulled out her phone. Her lawn chair appeared molded to her shape. She listened to her voicemails, phone atop belly. She played them out loud in full, letting them wash over her. Her mother’s voice, crackled and distant. We just want to know where you are, Joanie. Can we wire you some money? Bill says we should.

Delete.

As if they’d accept Bill’s trust money, which should be going to his ex-wife and kids anyway. It hadn’t escaped Joan’s notice that she and Ludo were avoiding their own ghosts. But these were living ghosts—a different sort altogether. Easier to find, much more difficult to be rid of.

*

On their way back to JJ’s for the night’s work, they found a convenience store. Joan whipped up two of her signature “Five Hour Slushies” in the parking lot. Before a case, they liked to swing their legs off the back of the station wagon and drink their caffeine-laced sugar cocktails as fast as they could. Ludo merely needed it to stay awake. Joan felt it opened up her faculties, increased her capacity for Sight. Well, that, plus the cannabis.

“Have you heard from Linda?” Ludo asked quietly, the straw still in his mouth.

Joan startled to hear her mother’s name. She shrugged.

Ludo would know what this meant. It meant, yes I have and I don’t want to talk about her.

Ludo always liked Linda. He’d beam under her attention, flourish under that hot sun gaze that made Joan want to shrivel up and hide. Initially that was why Joan thought he disliked Bill, some kind of twisted, territorial jealousy. Ludo had been raised by various relatives, his parents “off grid” at some commune, never to be heard from until his mother’s remains turned up in a box one day. Joan knew there was no commune, there were crack houses, and roaming, and shelters, and begging. Ludo, somewhere inside him, also knew. As far as he was concerned, Linda was his mother too.

But that wasn’t why he was asking. He didn’t have to say it, but Joan knew he was worried about their financial state.

“You wouldn’t have me take that money,” she said, noting the coolness in her own voice.

Ludo sighed.

Bill had proven Ludo’s instincts right the first time he came home drunk and made a mess of the living room. The anger started to pour forth after that, snide comments, snapping fingers, the loud “HA!” whenever he disagreed with someone, which was often. And then the last straw—the night he came home after a particularly tense dinner and wandered into the basement and smashed up their stuff, Ludo’s cameras in particular, and his laptop. They had only been living there until they could save up enough money to move into their own place. It was taking much longer than expected. Joan and Ludo left the early next morning out the basement door, no word, no note. Phones off—but Joan still knew every time her mother tried to call. She felt her mother’s worries pressing down on her shoulders. Heavy, even five states away.

*

They arrived back at the MacMillans’ just before nine o’clock. The red moon was full and freshly risen. The night was hot and humid, the air buzzing with life.

Joan asked Ludo to park away from the house this time. She wanted to approach the energy at the mailbox from a different direction. This time she stood in the middle of the street, about five paces in front of the mailbox, facing the flow of traffic. She moved her fingers, feeling out the air around her. She heard the persistent whine of the night insects and waited, knowing then that something was coming, not knowing what exactly, and then it hit her—the light—flooding her vision, blinding her, and then it was gone a moment later and she was left with a feeling like someone had taken a hammer to her torso.

Ludo was at the mailbox, working in the moonlight. He set up a cheap audio recorder inside the mailbox itself, with the flap left open.

“Ludo and Joan, walking away now,” he said out loud, into the recorder.

On their way up the driveway, Joan knew she should tell Ludo about what she just saw, what she could still feel, lodged in her chest. She didn’t quite understand why but just then, she wanted to keep it to herself. At least for a bit.

Once again, JJ was waiting on the porch. In hushed tones, Joan explained what would happen over the next eight hours. She told JJ how they’d set up in the kitchen and master suite. Louise, the wife, had blessedly gone to her sister’s house for the night. Joan reminded her client that they were mainly there to collect evidence. “If an opportunity arises to interact, with your permission I will engage,” she said. JJ hesitated, but then nodded slowly, his lips pressing together. Permission granted.

Joan got a picture in her mind then, of JJ as a boy. Wild red hair. A devilish grin.

Bad, she heard. A voice in her head. This happened sometimes. Clairaudience.

No, not bad!

Bad! Mean! Hateful!

No, sweet. Good. Too smart.

It was if the spirit was of two minds about JJ. Joan felt Ludo’s elbow in her ribs.

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JJ repeated himself. “Guest room. If you need me.” He let himself into the house. His figure could be seen ascending the stairs in the near dark.

They started in the kitchen, setting up the camera, trying a few angles, running an extension cord. Ludo knew something was up with her.

“Okay, there is something,” she told him as she rifled through her tote bag, “but I don’t understand it yet. Something happened down by the mailbox. I think…” Here she lowered her voice to mere breath, and brought her mouth close to Ludo’s ear, “I think possibly there was an accident down there.”

Ludo frowned. He jerked his thumb up at the ceiling.

“I know,” she said, and shrugged. “He said he told us everything he knows.”

Or everything he wants you to know, Joan heard. She dismissed this as her own cynicism speaking. They relied on their clients to give them the history of a property, but maybe there was something JJ didn’t know. Joan considered the possibility of extending the investigation. Going to the town library and hunting through the microfilm. This kind of research was, technically, included in Package One. But then they’d have to stay a few days longer at the Blue Ostrich, which would really cut into their bottom line.

*

The first few hours passed quietly, normal set up work. Upstairs, Ludo took baseline temperature readings and set a motion-triggered camera to turn on an infrared light and take a photo if any motion was detected.

Around 11, Ludo’s phone buzzed. Motion detected in the master bedroom. The photo of the room looked empty at first, but then Ludo traced the faintest white line along the doorway to the bathroom. It could have just been the glow of the white bathroom door, but no. It definitely had a vaguely formed curvature to it.

Go look, something said inside Joan’s head.

“I’m going to get the earrings, you stay here,” she said. She took a recorder with her just in case. “Joan walking upstairs,” she breathed heavily into the mic.

The room was dark but the full moon ensured it was not pitch black. Joan closed the door quietly behind her, whispering, “closing door” as she did. A feeling presented itself then, a solemnity, like she was going to visit a sick friend. The room appeared empty, but Joan sensed an energetic presence, a woman, yes.

“Virginia?” she said quietly, sinking onto the bed. JJ’s mother. She had to be here.

She waited for a response, but there was nothing. She went to the jewelry box on the dresser, using the light from her phone to locate the earrings. Then she went back to the bed and sat with them cradled in her hand.

“Virginia,” she said again.

Mine. The word was in her head.

“Virginia, yes. I know these are your earrings. I hope it’s okay that I’m holding them.”

No, mine. She felt the pressure on her sternum. Tasted metal in her mouth again.

At once everything clicked into place, like a record finding its groove. Oh, Joan thought. But of course. Why hadn’t she seen it before?

She rose from the bed, moving instinctively now into the master bath, where the moonlight streamed in from a skylight above the clawfoot tub. Her left hand tingled, another sign she was on the right track—the quickening. Sinking onto the tile, she began to See more easily. Two children, a boy and a girl. JJ—and a sister. In her mind she saw the tricks they played on one another. Spiders left on pillows, worms wriggling in socks. Child’s games? At first. But then. A tack in her shoe. Pushing and pinching. Bruises and scratches. Tit for tat.

She runs to Mother when he wets his bed, then locks herself in the bathroom. Runs a bath to drown out the yelling and the pounding.

And then, his hands are on her shoulders. He’s found her in the bath, he’s broken in. He’s holding her down under the water, wanting to scare her, wanting to show his dominance once and for all. White knuckles. Then Mother is there, scolding Johnny, sending him to his room. Joan hears the name now, Sylvie. Why Sylvie? Mother screams. As if it’s her fault. Sylvie’s gasping, coughing, retching. Rolling out of the tub. Dressing, shaking. Mother is back. Mother has a towel. Mother wants to comfort, make it all go away. Starts to fold her eldest into an unlikely hug, all bony arms and pats on her wet head. He’s a good boy, she coos, he didn’t mean anything, he’s not like that, he must have been provoked.

And then she’s pushing Mother away, pushing the whole world away. Running from the cursed house where no one loves her. Running down the drive. She doesn’t see it coming until it’s upon her. Until the metal is in her mouth, and the light is in her skull, and she’s floating above that pale wet body on the road. Her own huddled form, white against the black pavement, clean bathwater still dripping from her hair.

*

The heat wave broke as they packed to leave—minutes from check-out, on only a few hours’ sleep—a cool blessed rain that came on suddenly, washing away weeks of bug carcasses and grime from their wagon, bathing Joan’s lawn chair already strapped to the roof. The MacMillan investigation would be marked as closed, though it had not ended like all the others, with a report and a wave. With a good luck, call us if you need anything.

Joan had flown down the stairs, switching off mics and cameras and gathering their things in a flustered rush. Her blood was flowing. She could feel it needling along her arms and legs. It was 3 am. She asked Ludo to go wake JJ. Ludo didn’t ask why. He only saw her packing up and felt relief.

“Did you find something?” JJ had said softly, closing the door behind him and joining them on the porch.

“You tell me,” Joan had snapped.

JJ looked as if he had been struck.

It was unprofessional, and yet she couldn’t help herself. She ran her fingers through her hair and paced. Fluttered her hands around. He was paying them to find the ghosts, and she had found them. Mother and daughter, the pair.

“Only one death on the property, right? Your mother? Peacefully?”

“That’s right,” JJ said. “Did you… find her?”

Joan stifled a bitter laugh. She grimaced instead.

“I found her. I found someone else too.”

“O��?”

Sylvie’s anger was in her now. She had to get away from this place, from this man in particular. JJ leaned against the pillar beside the porch stairs, too easily. He pressed his fist into a yawn. Joan felt herself wanting to push JJ right off the porch. Hold him down in the mulch with all her weight.

“I think you knew her,” Joan spat.

JJ’s eyes searched hers for a moment, before darting out across the lawn.

He looked down. “Oh.”

Joan was silent then, waiting for an explanation, trying to control herself. She longed to grab his shoulders and just shake and shake. She had never been this angry before, and that’s how she knew the anger wasn’t hers. Not most of it, anyway. Yes, JJ had hidden the full truth. She didn’t like that. But this was more than that. Her blood was boiling. The intensity of it frightened her. She’d never felt so driven to hurt another person.

“That was such a long time ago,” JJ said. He was practically whispering now. “I, I didn’t think…”. He sighed. “I don’t even subscribe to all this, you know? Louise was the one, she made me call. She was saying we’d have to sell this place if I didn’t find a way to make it all stop.”

Joan saw him again, young Johnny, finishing his dinner as fast as he could, balancing on the porch railing, this very porch they were standing on. Anything for Mother’s attention.

JJ went on, his voice low and sorrowful. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. It was a mistake. A terrible, tragic mistake. I missed her terribly. And Mother—she never blamed me. If anything, she was too nice, too gentle with me. I wanted to pay for what I’d done. Mother insisted it wasn’t my fault. But it was my fault.”

Something inside of Joan eased then.

His fault. His fault.

“Say her name,” Joan urged softly. “She wants you to say her name.”

Though he remained standing, JJ the man seemed to crumble in front of her. The form of a little child stepped forward, holding his arms out to Joan.

“Sylvia,” JJ said finally. He drew a sharp breath. “Sylvie.”

*

Joan made the mobile deposit as Ludo tipped the wagon onto a highway, JJ’s check balancing on the tops her bare thighs as she snapped the photo. It pained her to accept his money, and yet she didn’t feel she had a choice. She looked over at Ludo, his hands light atop the steering wheel. Ludo was driving aimlessly, patiently awaiting her direction. A person so gentle and true, it was hard to conceive of him as merely a man.

Just then her phone began to buzz. A call was coming in, from Tennessee.

Ludo glanced over. They both knew it was another job. More work, more money, more ghosts. Joan knew then she didn’t want it. And she knew Ludo didn’t either.

She declined the call.

An apartment might be nice after all, Joan thought, turning her face toward the window. A coffee maker. Her very own washing machine. After a minute, she grabbed Ludo’s phone and put in their next destination. Far, far away, where the heat was dry and never left.

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