Ghostly Echoes (2 page)

“It's fine. I'm fine,” I lied, doing my best to make it true as I leaned on the desk and tried not to pitch forward and retch on the carpet. “I'm ready this time. Please. Try it again.”

I was not ready. Neither was she.

Jenny hesitated for a moment and then drifted closer, smooth and graceful as always. Her hair trailed behind her like smoke in the wind. She reached a delicate hand toward my face, and—if only for an instant—I could have sworn I felt her fingers brush my cheek. It was a sweet caress, like my mother's when she used to tuck me into bed at night. And then the biting cold returned. My nerves screamed.
This is a bad idea. This is a terrible idea. This is—

The office faded into a blinding haze of whiteness, and together we tumbled into a world of mist and ice and pain . . .

. . . and out the other side.

Chapter Two

It seemed like only yesterday I had been back home in England, packing for my first term at university. Had someone told me then that I would throw it all away and run off to America to commune with ghosts and answer to ducks and help mad detectives solve impossible murders, I would have said they were either lying or insane. I would have sorted them on the same shelf in my mental library as those who believe in Ouija boards or sea serpents or honest politicians. That sort of foolishness was not for me. I adhered to facts and science; the impossible was for other people.

A lot can change in a few short months.

The pain had ebbed to numbness and the blinding light had faded away. I did not remember moving into the foyer, but it was suddenly all around me. I blinked. How long had I been out? I stood in the front room of Jackaby's offices at 926 Augur Lane—of that there was no doubt—but the room was barely recognizable. In place of the battered wooden bench sat a soft divan. The paintings of mythical figures had been replaced by tasteful landscapes, and the cluttered shelves full of bizarre masks and occult artifacts stood completely barren—even Ogden's terrarium was missing. When I had been gassed out of the house by the flatulent little frog on my first day, I would not have expected to be so bothered by his absence, but now I found it most disquieting. The desk stood in its usual place, but it was uncharacteristically clean and empty. Behind it stood a pile of boxes and paper bundles bound in twine. Had Jackaby packed? Were we moving?

The front door swung suddenly open and there stood R. F. Jackaby in his typical motley attire. His coat bulged from its myriad pockets, and his ludicrously long scarf dragged across the threshold as he stepped inside. Atop his head sat his favorite knit mess, a floppy hat of conflicting colors and uneven stitches. I had been secretly pleased to see that particular piece of his wardrobe completely incinerated by an ungodly blaze during our previous caper. I shook my head. It had been destroyed, hadn't it?

“Mr. Jackaby?”

“Yes. This will serve my purposes nicely,” said Jackaby, walking toward me.

I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, my employer stepped right through me as though I weren't there. I looked down to find, most distressingly, that I wasn't.

“I'll need to make a few modifications, of course.”

I spun and saw that he was talking to Jenny. She hovered by the window, regarding Jackaby with cautious interest. Her translucent hair drifted weightlessly behind her. Her dress was moon-white, its hem rippling gently along the ground beneath her. Her skin was nearly as pale, pearlescent and as immaterial as a sunbeam. “Nothing too drastic, I hope? I understand, of course. You must make the place your own. I had the kitchen remodeled the year I moved in—but it's so darling as it is.”

“I'm sure you'll barely notice the changes.” He opened the door to the crooked little hallway and paused. “I
will
be making this place my own, Miss Cavanaugh,” he said, turning back. “But don't think that makes it any less yours. You will still have your space. You have my word.”

Jenny smiled, looking bemused and grateful. “You are a singular man, Mr. Jackaby. What have I done to deserve you?”

“I've been considering that. There is something you could do.”

She raised an eyebrow. The room was beginning to fill with mist, but neither of them seemed to notice. “What?” she asked.

“Promise me,” said Jackaby, his voice growing faint, “that you will never . . .”

And then, in a rush, the mist was gone and I was in the office again. I was lying on my back and Douglas was standing on my chest craning his head this way and that to regard me with his glossy black eyes. I shooed him off and sat up. My whole body felt tired and numb, with a prickling heat creeping into my extremities. I was back in the present, but I felt like I had spent all day in the snow and then climbed into a warm bath.

Jenny appeared above me. “That was sensational! It worked! Oh, Abigail, are you all right?”

I wiggled my fingers and toes experimentally and felt my face. Aside from the fading numbness, everything seemed to be in working order. “I'm fine. What just happened?”

“Legs! I haven't had honest to goodness legs to stand on in years! And you're so warm, Abigail—I had forgotten how blood feels. It's like being wrapped up in a cozy blanket from the inside.” She spun and sighed happily, drifting up toward the ceiling. I had not seen her so content in weeks.

“It worked?” I pushed myself up, leaning on the desk to steady my swimming head. “You mean I was possessed? You were walking me around and everything?”

“Well, not walking, exactly. I kept us from falling down for the better part of a minute, though. You couldn't see it?”

“I saw . . . something else,” I said. “I saw you and Jackaby. It must have been the day he moved in. He promised you that you would always have your space in the house.”

“He did say that,” Jenny said, sinking back to my level. She regarded me thoughtfully. “You saw my memories? What else did you see?”

“Nothing much. He asked you to promise him something in return—only then I slipped back here. What was it he never wanted you to do?”

“A promise?” Jenny thought for a moment. “I don't remember.” She crinkled her brow. “Do you think you could see further if we tried again?”

“I suppose so.” Jenny looked completely in control, invigorated, even—but I could not forget Jackaby's cautions about pushing her too far or too fast. “It isn't upsetting to know that I was inside your memories?”

“What's upsetting is knowing that I might have secrets hidden inside me and I can't get them out.” Jenny looked at me pleadingly. “Abigail, this could be the answer.”

It really could, I had to admit. With practice, possession could grant her the means to leave the house and pursue secrets that had been hidden from her for so long—and at the same time, it could grant me the means to uncover the secrets hiding within.

“All right,” I said. Douglas was bobbing back and forth, looking more disapproving than a duck has any business to look. I ignored him. “Let's try again.”

This time I was ready for the pain. I leaned into it, and it passed over me more quickly. The blinding whiteness returned, and when the mist cleared, I found myself not in the foyer of 926 Augur Lane but in a drawing room I did not recognize. The sky outside was black, and the room was dim. I had entered a different memory.

“No. That's no good. The output will be half what they asked for,” said a man's voice.

“It'll be twice what it should be. There's no way to stabilize at these levels.”

Two figures stood directly ahead of me, their attention fixed on a stack of schematics spread over a wide desk. Something about them was familiar. The first was an energetic, handsome man. I felt uncomfortably drawn to him, although I could not say why. And then he smiled and I knew. This was Howard Carson. This was Jenny's fiancé—the man who had loved her—the man who had left.

Across from him stood a man with white-blond hair. He wore a scowl and a three-piece suit, tailored impeccably to his slim figure. “They're not going to be happy about this,” said the slender man.

“They'll be a lot less happy if the whole thing blows up in their faces,” countered Howard Carson. The thin man grimaced as Carson rattled on about conductivity and tensile strength.

In a chair behind them sat a third man, heavyset with a chubby face and a mustache waxed into thick curls. He said nothing as he fidgeted an unlit cigar from one hand to the other, watching the men work. Beside him stood a prim woman with ink-black hair holding a clipboard and a pen. “Are you getting all of this down?” the big man asked quietly.

“Yes, Mr. Poplin, every word.” She remained expressionless, her pen scratching away.

“Good girl.”

“Don't forget, boys,” came a soft voice from behind me. Before I could turn to see her face, a woman with brunette locks stepped through me toward the desk. I shuddered, or I would have if I had a body to shudder; I would never get used to the sensation of not physically existing. “The copper fittings in the prototype lost conductivity as they tarnished. Silver will cost more, but it will also increase the output over time.”

The thin man grimaced. “What do you know about it?” he said.

“She knows quite a lot, actually,” interjected Carson. “I told you already that my fiancée has been assisting me with my work. She's as sharp as they come.”

Jenny Cavanaugh stepped behind the desk and turned to face the room. Had I been in possession of my own jaw at the time, it would have dropped. The Jenny I knew was a beautiful ghost—but the woman before me, with real weight to her steps and a flush in her cheeks, looked like another person entirely, so vibrant and alive. Her hair framed her face rather than hovering in weightless silver waves. She wore a honey yellow dress, practical and pretty, and around her neck hung a little pewter locket.

“She's quite keen, you know,” Carson was saying. “And she's right about the fittings.”

“Thank you, Howard.” Jenny Cavanaugh and Howard Carson looked at each other for only a moment, but their affection was obvious.

“We discussed this already,” said the blond man flatly. “We will move forward with copper.” I did not like him. It was more than his sanctimonious sneer. Something within Jenny disliked the man, so I disliked the man.

“If you insist,” Howard said, taking a deep breath. “Copper will do.”

Jenny was not satisfied. “It would save us all a great deal of time and effort if we knew the exact purpose of our efforts.”

The man glared at Jenny. “Our benefactors have provided us with very clear objectives.”

“Objectives are not an ultimate purpose. What exactly are your benefactors building?”

“Jenny—” Howard said.

“The future!” declared a new voice, and all eyes turned to the door. “We're building the future, young lady. One shiny cog at a time.” The man who stood in the doorway was stout and unshaven. He had coal-black hair and wore a shabby black coat over a black waistcoat. His skin was deathly pale, save for a bluish shadow across his chin and under his eyes.

I knew that face. That was the face we had fruitlessly hunted across the countryside and back into the shadows of New Fiddleham. That was the last face our client poor Mrs. Beaumont had ever seen before she died. I watched as that face spread its pallid lips into a crooked grin. “Doesn't that sound exciting?”

Chapter Three

“You knew him?” I gasped as the dark drawing room faded away and Jackaby's office reappeared, the midday sun streaming in through the windows. I stood up abruptly from the leather armchair and immediately regretted my decision. My vision reeled and I sat back down.

Jenny—my Jenny—hung pale and translucent in the air ahead of me. She had been beaming, but the smile was rapidly melting away. “Knew whom?”

I breathed, holding on to the armrests to keep from falling out of the chair. Slowly the world stopped spinning and the feeling returned to my skin. “How did I get—Jenny, did you possess me all the way into the armchair?”

She nodded, but the pride had left her face. “I knew
whom
, Abigail?”

“That man. The one in the photograph.”

Rising more gradually this time, I stepped over to Jenny's open file. My temples were throbbing and the room felt as though it were slowly spinning to a stop. Jenny stood beside me as I tried to pull my mind together. When the world was finally stable again, I looked up to find that she had already fixated on a picture. Her translucent hand brushed the image of her body, sprawled across her bedroom floor.

“Jenny . . .”

“Howard gave me that locket,” she said. “It's not in the house any longer. I've looked and looked. It had a note inside. ‘From Howard with love.' It's just a little pewter thing, but it's the little things you miss.”

“Jenny, stay with me,” I said cautiously. “Please? This is important.”

She pulled her eyes away from the picture. “I'm with you, Abigail.”

I plucked the photograph of the pale man off the top of the pile and held it up for her to see. It was grainy with a sepia tint, but the face was unmistakable. I had seen him watching my window from the street corner, and then again, lurking outside the train station. Now I had seen him up close through Jenny's memories, and not a hair on his head had changed in those ten years.

The pale man stood in the foreground of the picture, a smug smile on his face. He was not alone. In the background of the picture, five men stood around a worktable in what appeared to be an industrial factory. Bright lamplight illuminated their faces and left hard shadows on the wall behind them. The men wore dark work aprons, thick gloves, and tinted goggles pushed up on their heads. The one in the center was Howard Carson.

There were no other pictures of Howard in the house—none hanging in Jenny's room nor propped up on her nightstand. She spoke of him fondly but rarely, and always with trepidation, as if feeling gingerly around a bruise.

Along the bottom of the picture had been inscribed five words in tight cursive:
For posterity. From humble beginnings . . .

“He worked with my fiancé.” Jenny's voice was quiet.

I tensed, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling up. “Jenny? Are you still with me?”

She pursed her lips, nodding. “I remember now.” I held my tongue, not daring to tip the balance. When she spoke her voice was scarcely more than a breath. “He was called Pavel.”

The photograph had been in her case file for years, but Jenny had never been able to identify the pale man before, nor anyone in the file save Howard Carson. There had been something about the image she responded to—an uneasy remnant of a feeling—but like Jenny herself, the memory remained frustratingly intangible. Looking at any of the photographs in her file for too long put her in a fragile state, but still she tried. When I had recognized the pale man as the same wretch whose trail of havoc we had followed across the valley, she had tried even harder, wrestling with the demons in her mind for anything—a detail—a name—but the effort had only triggered her to echo every time. Until now.

“Is he . . . ?” I whispered. “Is he the one who . . . ?” Jenny's eyes narrowed in concentration, and a cold breeze crept under my collar. My trip into her thoughts might have brought a flickering light to Jenny's memories, but those corridors were still shrouded in something darker than shadow. “Perhaps we should take a rest,” I said.

“He was here. Why was he here?” Jenny's silver hair whipped in a sudden breeze, though the windows were latched tight. “I don't like him. I don't trust him.”

“Neither do I, Jenny. I think we ought to stop.”

“He came to the house. He's at the door. He knows that Howard is here.”

“Jenny, stop.”

“I don't like him.” She blinked, her eyes drifting in and out of focus, and then her stare turned icy. “I know who you are. You work with my fiancé.”

I stuffed all of the photographs and the loose clippings and notes back into the file and slammed it shut as a bitingly cold gust of wind pressed into my back. When I looked around Jenny was already gone.

“Jenny?” I called to the silence. The silence deepened.

“Give her time.”

I jumped at the sound of a man's voice. “Mr. Jackaby!” I gasped, clutching my heart. “I didn't hear you come in. How long have you . . . ?”

“I just got back. I won't be staying long. I wasn't expecting to find myself stepping into an icebox.” He dropped his satchel with a thump and picked up Jenny's file as he walked around the desk. “Be careful, Miss Rook. Our undeparted friend has a thorn buried deep in her metaphorical paw, and we find ourselves in the lion's den.” He tucked the file into his desk and shut the drawer with a click. “I assure you, we will do everything in our power to remove the injury—but I have no intention of making it worse and getting torn to ribbons for our efforts. Patience and diligence are paramount.”

“With all due respect, sir, ten years stretches the definition of patient. She is already a decade into her afterlife.”

He stared at the old papers and receipts spread across his office floor. “Still, we must consider the possibility that the thorn and the lion are one.”

“Sir?”

He met my gaze and sighed. “Ghosts are beings of discontent, Miss Rook. The undead remain bound to this earth by their unfinished business. Either we will not succeed because we cannot succeed—because her soul will never be content—”

“Or we will succeed,” I said, realizing his implication. “And her business will be finished.”

“And she will depart from us at long last.” Jackaby nodded. “That is her decision, though. She says she's ready. We will provide her with what few answers and what little peace we can, but there's no benefit in rushing the job.” He slid into the chair and leaned heavily on his desk, his gray eyes gloomy.

“Sir?”

“I dislike the idea of being without Miss Cavanaugh.”

“Have you told her that?”

“She has her own concerns to attend to right now.”

“She really can handle more than you think, sir. She's making considerable progress.”

“The state of my office says otherwise. I noticed the glass in the wastebasket, by the way. I take it this is not her first echo today. How long was she incorporeal for the last one?”

I hesitated. “Only an hour. Maybe two. It was just a little one.” His gaze drifted to my cheek, and I could feel his eyes catching on the slender scar on my cheekbone. The mark was a trivial thing—already it had faded to a soft pink line—but it was a souvenir of a nearly catastrophic brush I'd had with a Stymphalian bird, another supernatural force I had woefully underestimated. Getting Jackaby to stop treating me like a fragile thing was difficult enough without having reminders of past close calls etched on my face. It didn't help that the injury in question had been inflicted by nothing more than the creature's feather. I redirected the conversation. “She had a revelation.”

“A revelation.” Jackaby nodded with a deep breath. “Splendid. Because nothing bad ever happens in Revelation.”

“The pale man. His name is Pavel. She remembered him.”

Jackaby's eyes darted up, but he quickly hid his interest. “Pavel? A given name only. Likely an alias.”

“She can do more.”

“But she should not. It's too dangerous, Miss Rook. In light of recent developments, I think it best we suspend Miss Cavanaugh's direct involvement altogether.”

“What? That's absurd! This is her case!”

“Precisely my point! She is far too emotionally invested to handle the minutia of this investigation. With each new twist and turn we risk pushing her over the edge, and we cannot foresee what might lie beyond the next curve. Walking this path was hard enough on her when the trail was cold.”

“She's stronger than ever!” In my frustration, I nearly told him about our secret practices, about our remarkable success with possession—but I bit my tongue. The secret was not mine alone to tell, and Jackaby was being especially bullheaded right now. A cog clicked in my mind. Something had happened. “Wait a moment. What recent developments?” I asked.

“See for yourself.” Jackaby flipped open his satchel and passed a handful of papers across the desk to me. They were torn at the top, as though ripped out of a booklet. “Lieutenant Dupin of the New Fiddleham Police Department very kindly lent me his notes on the matter.”

“Does Lieutenant Dupin know that he very kindly lent you his notes?”

Jackaby shrugged. “I'm confident he'll piece it together sooner or later. Marlowe keeps him around for something.”

I shook my head, but turned my attention to the notes.

The body of Mrs. Alice McCaffery was found early this morning by one Rosa Gaines, age 32, a maid in the McCaffery household. Mrs. McCaffery had been at my desk in the station house only the day before to file a missing persons report for her husband, Julian McCaffery. En route to investigate now.

I arrived at the McCaffery home just prior to 8 o'clock in the A.M. The scene within is as Ms. Gaines described it. Alice McCaffery lies on the floor of her chamber. Her dress is torn at the neck and signs of a struggle are evident. Cause of death is a single deep laceration to the chest. Blood has dried in a wide pool around the body. My word, but there is a lot of blood.

I stared numbly. I could see why Jackaby was hesitant to share the news. The missing person, the bedroom struggle, the body, the blood. I might as well have just read the police report in the file sitting beside me. It was Jenny's murder to the last detail.

“What do you make of it?” Jackaby asked.

“Eerily familiar, sir.”

“More than you know,” said Jackaby. “Julian McCaffery was a research scientist, not unlike Jenny's fiancé, Howard Carson. Carson and McCaffery both studied under Professor Lawrence Hoole at Glanville University, although years apart.”

I swallowed. “That's an awful lot of coincidences. Hoole went missing, too, didn't he? Yes, I remember. It was in the
Chronicle
weeks ago.”

Jackaby nodded. “He makes an appearance in the lieutenant's next entry, as well.” He gestured to the papers in my hands. I flipped to the next page and read aloud:

It is not yet midday and I have been presented with my second corpse of the day. The discovery was made by Daniel & Benjamin Mudlark. The brothers, ages 7 and 9, disclosed the information in exchange for compensation. They agreed to 5¢ payment and escorted me to the scene.

The body appears to have washed up with sewage runoff on the northern bank of the Inky. Based on physical description and documents found on the body, the deceased is Lawrence Hoole, age 56, a professor at Glanville University. The corpse is waterlogged, but given the minimal state of decay, I estimate he is not more than two days deceased. The only visible injury is a puncture wound at the base of his neck, surrounded by a circular bruise.

The professor is survived by his wife, Cordelia. Glanville Police Department has responded to my inquiries, but inform me that the widow Hoole is . . .

I turned the page over, but that was the last of it. “The widow Hoole is what?”

“Bereaved?” suggested Jackaby. “Disconsolate? Something mournful, I imagine. Probably ‘sad.' Lieutenant Dupin is nothing if not frugal with his adjectives.”

“Those poor people,” I said. “A single puncture wound and a rounded bruise—that's Pavel's dirty work and no mistake. There can be no question that this whole mess is connected, then.”

“What about Cordelia Hoole?” Jenny's soft voice caught both of us by surprise. I spun to find that she had rematerialized by the window, the sunlight slipping in sparkling beams through her translucent figure.

“Jenny,” I said. “How long have you—”

“I'm sorry, Miss Cavanaugh,” Jackaby cut in. “We really ought to follow up on these leads more thoroughly before we trouble you with the details. I don't wish to—”

“Jackaby, ten years ago my fiancé vanished and I was murdered. Yesterday that McCaffery man vanished and Alice McCaffery was murdered. Their mentor, Hoole, vanished, and now we know he was murdered as well, and you're—what? Waiting for the pattern to complete itself? You're ten years too late to save me, detective. You're a day too late for Alice McCaffery. The question is, what about Cordelia Hoole?”