My brother had a gift for making broken things shine. I was pretty sure he was hoping that tonight his magic would work on me.
Losing our parents four years ago threw us together, even though Thomas and I hadn’t been close when I was growing up. I was a surprise baby, and there were almost two decades between us. He hadn’t exactly been ready to raise his younger sister, and I’d done my best to keep my particular brand of crazy out of his life. Receiving that scholarship had been an answer to a prayer. I wanted to get away from my hometown, all its memories, and Thomas’s renovation sites. I didn’t like the position I was in, now that my scholarship had evaporated.
Mainly because of “my problem.”
“Hello.”
The unfamiliar voice threw me off balance. I spun around to see a man standing by the wall of windows, looking unreasonably at home and completely out of place at the same time. Exceptionally handsome, tall, and slim, he was dressed in a black suit. A lock of hair the color of wheat fell over one eyebrow but didn’t mask the elegant features of his face. Slipping a silver pocket watch attached to his vest into his pants pocket, he clasped his hands behind his back.
“Can I help you?” I tried to keep the sound of apprehension from my voice but couldn’t. He hadn’t been there a second ago.
“My name is Jack.” He made no attempt to move toward me but stood still, his bright blue eyes assessing me. I shivered. He was giving my goose bumps a field day. I sure hoped this wasn’t the new contact Thomas was talking about. He was a little creeptastic for my taste.
“Are you here to see my brother?”
“No, I don’t know your brother.” A slight smile lifted the corners of his mouth, causing my heart to skip a beat. “Actually, I’m here to see you, Emerson.”
The pocket watch and the suit could be from another generation. His hairstyle didn’t fall into any specific era. Maybe this guy was one of my hallucinations, but if so …
How did he know my name?
Chapter 2
Thomas!” I yelled, before anxiety choked off my air supply.
I turned my head toward the sound of a chair clattering to the floor in the kitchen. It seemed to go on forever. When I looked back at the windows, Jack was gone. Thomas flew into the room, skidding to a stop beside me.
“Why, why, why?” I asked, slumping back against the side of the bookcase, hitting my head against it with each question. “Why do you have to keep renovating buildings? Why can’t you just put up a new one?”
Thomas’s mouth dropped open in shock. “It happened? Here?”
He was asking about my problem with those who were … no longer living.
Not dead, exactly. I hadn’t quite figured out what the things I saw were; I knew only that I’d never heard a ghost story that involved the ghosts popping like balloons and dissolving if someone touched them. I’d started seeing them when I was thirteen, just before my parents died. Thomas had been renovating an old glass company, turning it into office spaces.
My first time on the job site I’d had a lovely conversation with an older man wearing a hard hat. He smelled of tobacco and sweat. His nose sat slightly off center, the veins decorating the bulbous end indicating he liked his brewski. He was pleasant enough, even offered to share his dinner. I declined, but he insisted I have a taste of the icebox pie his wife had included in his well-used lunch pail.
That was when things got tricky. As he tried to place the food in my hand, I realized he wasn’t solid. He came to the same conclusion, dropping the pie and pail, screaming like a woman who forgot to take her panties off the clothesline before the preacher came to call. Then he disappeared. Poof.
Welcome to insanity. He was followed by a long string of people—dead people—who showed up in the strangest of places and disappeared only when I touched them. From my restroom stall at Denny’s to the dressing room at Macy’s, I never got used to it.
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into living here. I should have known nowhere this old was safe. And this guy knew my name.”
That had never happened before.
Thomas visibly tensed. “He knew your name?”
I nodded, closing my eyes. Jack had also said he was here to see me. Thomas didn’t need to know that part.
“Em, I thought it stopped.”
My boarding school had been in Sedona, Arizona. Pioneers didn’t roll up on the town until the turn of the century, so it wasn’t real hard to tell the difference between an ancient Yavapai potter and, say, my gym teacher.
I had thought things were better, but now I wasn’t so sure. Unless their clothing was obviously from a different time period, I couldn’t always tell if people were part of the here and now or that window from the past. I had become a historical fashion guru, not because I loved clothes but because being able to identify attire from different decades was helpful. Women were easier to nail down, but with the exception of the butterfly collars and blue tuxedos of the 1970s, classic menswear spanned generations and posed a bigger problem.
I avoided any theme parks or museums where the employees dressed true to period. Complete nightmare. I also spent a lot of time trying not to touch people. Unless they happened to be wearing a hoopskirt. And they were standing in my way.
“It did stop. I thought it did,” I said.
At least until I flushed my meds.
My brother had walked a hard road with me. Keeping the grief locked away inside—both from losing my parents and the insanity of seeing people who weren’t really there—hadn’t been a good mental health choice. Hospitalization followed by a strong cocktail of medications to stop the “hallucinations” worked for a while. But last winter, tired of living in a zombielike fog, I took the plunge and weaned myself from the pharmaceuticals without telling anyone.
Even Thomas.
The visions slowly returned. Em the Zombie Girl was gone, but Em the Potentially Psychotic Girl wasn’t working out so well either. Now I was back to wondering if the people I spoke to on the street were real.
“I’m sorry, Em.”
I looked up at Thomas. “You have no reason to apologize.”
“I am the one who bought the building.” His eyebrows were puckered so close together it looked like a caterpillar was inching across his forehead.
“Well, hells bells, by all means change your occupation to coddle your freakish little sister.” I pushed myself away from the bookcase. “Like I haven’t caused enough trouble in your life already.”
“Don’t say that. You’re still going to come to the restaurant opening, aren’t you?” Thomas asked, anxiety evident in his expression. “Bring Lily.”
Since my feelings of guilt were already on the surface, it didn’t take much for Thomas to swing the decision to his advantage.
“We’ll be there.”
To avoid any more accidental freakiness, I went to Lily’s to get ready.
Most of the people I had grown up with avoided me like a cold sore. It all stemmed from the one key public event that got me committed. Long story short, I had a loud argument with a guy in the cafeteria at school about how rude he was to take my seat when I’d only left it to get a fork. I then proceeded to threaten to poke him with said fork.
No one else saw him.
In case the straight-up screaming argument with thin air wasn’t enough to convince the lunch crowd I’d gone over the edge, the hysterical laughing that followed did. It turned to blubbering when Lily wrapped her arm around my waist and hurried me to the bathroom.
