What the Dead Want(43)

“You gotta wait for a while for anything good,” Hope whispered to Gretchen.

“Tonight we will all be together in the house. Nine generations.” Her narrative seemed a little slow and obvious and Gretchen had had enough. She stood up with her camera and snapped a picture of Annie. Then she called out.

“Who burned down the church?”

“A man . . . ,” Annie began, but then stopped as if in the middle of a mystical vision.

“Well, that narrows it down. Men are only responsible for ninety-nine percent of all violent crime in the world since, like, the dawn of time. Who specifically? What was his name?”

Hope laughed and covered her mouth, nudging Gretchen. “I think you’re channeling Esther,” she whispered.

“You were there, Fidelia, You saw it,” Gretchen said again loudly. “What happened?”

At that Annie fell to the floor and began sobbing. “Celia. Rebecca. No. No. It was to be their First Communion. They wore matching white dresses. They . . .”

The theatrics were becoming too much for Gretchen. Nobody would take this long to answer a simple question back in the city. No one—not even a spirit being channeled through a hippie. In the city they would just tell you—and then go on their way, because they would have something to do or a train to catch.

“It was the White Christian Patriots, right?” Gretchen asked impatiently. “But the WCP is made up of people, so who did it? How did they do it? Why are you still hanging around, Fidelia? Why is everyone stuck here?”

The people on the benches stared at her with shock and indignation. She smirked at them and then snapped their pictures. Hope nudged her again, this time seeming really concerned.

“Do you people want to do this every year of your lives?” Gretchen yelled. “Really? I mean seriously? You want to spend your lives stalking people who’ve already died in a horrible way?”

At this the crowd gasped. “She’s channeling Esther!” a thin, meticulously groomed man shouted, pointing at her, and the rest of the crowd murmured their agreement, then stared at her even more intently.

“It might be fun for you to do this every year,” Gretchen went on, “it might be a game for you to talk to the dead victims of a mass murder—but for us”—she gestured to herself and Hope—“for us it sucks, okay? Get it? Real people were murdered, by psycho bigots. Looks like my relatives have a habit of committing suicide and now my family home is a disgusting, neglected mess. It’s really not cool or spooky!”

“Esther,” a woman in the audience said to her gently, as if she were talking to a dangerous animal that needed to be pacified. “Esther, you’ve passed over, tell us what it was like.”

“Good lord!” Gretchen said. “You couldn’t have asked me what things were like when I was alive? What was it like? Living alone for forty years? Hating it here so much I drank photo chemicals?”

At that they gasped again. And Gretchen gave a little vindictive chuckle. She had no idea why she was talking in the first person when they’d addressed her as Esther—why she was using the word “I” at all. She felt light-headed, wanted a drink. A real drink, a double.

“If you’d all leave your patchouli-soaked campsite here and get the hell out into the real world you’d see that death is no big deal!” Gretchen shouted. “I don’t goddamn care about death. I’ve had it up to my neck with death.”

“Esther!” many people in the crowd cheered, nodding at one another, as if Esther was indeed sitting among them. Some of them started to smile, others looked at her in awe. She could feel herself getting angrier and angrier the more they stared at her. For a moment she felt like she could understand Celia and Rebecca’s desire to trip and scratch people. The reason the ghosts wanted to overtake or even kill the people just living their quiet lives like nothing had happened.

“We’re talking about a crime here—an unsolved crime,” she went on. “It’s nothing to revel in. Not a thing for you to come over to our property and howl at the moon about!”

“What do the spirits want?” one particularly odd man in his thirties, who looked like he’d escaped a science fiction convention, asked.

“What?” Gretchen asked incredulously. “To be left the hell alone, goddamn it! If you’re not going to help solve this crime then quit poking at us, asking us dumb crap about what some old relative of yours is doing in the afterlife. We don’t have a clue! And stop trying to take our pictures. Live your own goddamn lives!”

When she was done scolding the crowd she leaned back and put her hand on her camera. She badly craved a cigarette. “Doesn’t anyone here smoke?” Gretchen shouted. Hope looked at her with eyebrows raised. Then she shook her head slowly.

“Oh shit,” Hope whispered. “You are not yourself.”

Annie stared at Gretchen and Hope as if she had been shaken out of a trance. She came and sat on the edge of the stage, “You look like them, you know,” she said to Hope and Gretchen. “You look like the girls, like Celia and Rebecca, all grown up.” Then she slipped off the stage and came over to them. “Come,” she said. “Come back to my place, and have some tea.”

“We’re gonna need something a hell of a lot stronger than that,” Gretchen said.