Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story (47 page)

Footsteps echoed on the steps, and she bounded upright as Christian entered, Zoey at his side, her wide eyes soft and warm.

“Soot,” Christian announced.

“Soot,” Zoey repeated enthusiastically.

Emily frowned, unable to fathom what they were saying, and unconsciously rubbed her face, afraid that it might be dirty. Her fingers felt like ice cubes.

Christian held a candle in one hand. “May I borrow that ring of yours for a second? I’m not going to have it long, then you can have it right back,” he said reassuringly. “I want to try something. I think there’s an inscription on the inside, but I couldn’t see it before. This might help.”

Despite her misgivings and the foreboding she felt as she pulled it from her finger, her mind overruled her emotions, grateful to have something to concentrate on. He lit the candle and went to put the ring in the flame.

“No!” Emily cried out. “No, you can’t!”

He held out a hand to calm her. “Soot. I’m trying to build up a layer of soot on the inside of the ring. I’m not going to hurt it, I promise.”

She sat back, still uneasy, her brow creasing in alarm.

“I learned about this in a metallurgy lecture in college. It’s really cool. I remembered about it last night, but I just found my notes a little while ago.”

“I found your notes,” said Zoey with a pleased smile. “His room is a sty. I can’t believe you keep all that shit.”

Christian shrugged. “I kept all your letters.”

Zoey couldn’t conceal her surprise. “All of them?” There was something small and endearing in her voice, and Emily thought she could hear Zoey’s heartbeat in it.

“You see,” Christian continued, “sometimes the markings in antique rings, especially older ones like this, are so faint or worn down by wear that you need to ‘soot over’ them to even see that they’re there. Do you have any tape?” He looked to Emily, but she shook her head at him numbly.

“It’s in our kitchen, hold on.” Zoey ran off down the stairs, leaving the two of them alone.

“So Claudia went to stay at a bed and breakfast. Thought we needed our own bedrooms. Smart woman, that.”

Emily merely nodded blankly.

“It’s important not to heat the stones,” Christian informed her as he swirled the ring around the flame, kindly ignoring what had to have been the distress on her face. Emily looked on in growing fascination as a layer of blackened ash began to build up inside the band.

When he seemed satisfied, he blew out the candle and held the ring carefully between his fingers, waiting for Zoey to return.

“Has…” Emily cleared her throat. “Has Andrew called you today? I…I haven’t seen him.”

“No. No, he hasn’t.”

“Oh.”

Christian glanced at her, then back to the ring. “But his wallet and his phone are on the kitchen counter, so wherever he is, he won’t be gone long, right?”

It wasn’t the playful eyes or the continual smile that always struck Emily about Christian—it was his unyielding optimism. But it was an optimism she couldn’t share at the moment.

“Wonder what went on, though. Man, it was one hell of a knock-down, drag-out fight. I heard the screaming and the door slamming at the end of it. He usually reserves that shit for Simon. I’ve never heard him like that with Claudia. He adores her, and God knows she loves him like crazy.”

She swallowed at his choice of words and pulled at her jeans, praying that Zoey would return soon.

“But everything is all good—I mean between the two of you?”

“Yeah, absolutely. Sure.”

Mercifully, the sound of Zoey’s scampering saved Emily from lying further.

Christian took the dispenser from her. “Thanks, babe. Okay, now you take a piece of tape and place it over the soot.” He pressed the tape gently but firmly onto the interior of the ring before carefully removing it. “Paper, I need paper.” He shook one hand like a doctor in want of a scalpel.

A stack of pages lay scattered on a nearby table. Emily grabbed a handful, and then caught herself. It was sheet music, and Andrew’s familiar script noted the margins. One of the pages swept from her hand down onto the ground, the word
Emily
inscribed at the top.

“He…here.” She shoved the rest at Christian, unable to hold them. He took them, frowning in reaction to her ashen face.

“What do you do next?” Zoey asked, excited.

Christian returned his focus to the ring. “You place the tape directly onto the paper. The soot lifts the image of the marks like lifting a fingerprint. And there you go, a nice and easy-to-read copy.”

Three faces peered at the bit of tape on the paper; three hearts beat in suspense. Zoey whooped in delight.

A string of numbers was revealed: 75510791.

“What do you suppose it means?”

“I have no idea,” Emily whispered in fascination, feeling the first bit of hope that day. “But it’s something.”

Word of advice
, Andrew wearily noted to himself.
Don’t ever attempt to bathe in a university building’s lavatory. The sinks are useless, and the mirrors are for shit
. Not that he wanted to see his reflection.

“Christ,” he muttered, standing there, teeth chattering as he wrestled off the tap. “What the fuck have I done?”

“Trashed everything you love, kid,” the mirror mocked, like some smart-mouthed, enchanted looking glass from a fairy tale.

The soap tumbled from his hands; he would know that voice anywhere.

“And by the way, what kind of noble hero-on-a-quest shit are you playing at? ’Cause I ain’t getting it.”

“Nick!” Andrew whirled around.
Niiiick
echoed back off the tile walls. “Where are you?”
Yooooouuuu
.

“So let me get this straight. You just flat out told her you didn’t want her?”

Andrew couldn’t see the ghost anywhere. “Yes,” he shot back with venom, about to explain, his eyes still scouring the room for the apparition.

“Were you drunk?”

“No.”

“High?”

“No!”

“Then kindly explain to me how a man who doesn’t have a bottle in his hand or a broad in his bed can be so damn oblivious. That’s your problem, kid. You cock off without thinking things through, without knowing all the facts.”

“I know what I know.”

“You don’t know shit.”

He stared at the mirror, hands quaking in anger and exhaustion. “Bugger off, Nick.”

“You don’t have time to screw up, kid. In fact, you don’t have much time left at all.”

“Stop it. I don’t want any part of this ghost chasing anymore—I’m out. Find someone else. I’m not your man, and stay away from her as well. Go haunt some other goddamn place. She’s suffered enough without death threats from dead people.”

“Ever the hero,” Andrew heard Nick snap at him as he stormed out the bathroom door.

Back in the hidden confines of the practice room, he huddled down next to the piano, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, with no desire to talk to anyone, human or otherwise. Bone chilled and shaking, he wrapped his busted up hand in a spit soaked towel left by some brass player, probably. Wincing in pain, he grimaced at the sight of his swollen fingers.

What the hell had happened to his quest? What kind of hero was he? Not the kind Emily deserved, that was certain. She deserved someone sane and stable, someone who wouldn’t hurt her by the very act of existing. Someone safe. He looked at his palm, at those lines. Did Neil have the same ones? Was that what his future really held—that he’d only use women and not stay around to see it through?

Andrew’s good hand groped above him like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver. He found the piano keys. Plink. Plink. Plllllink.

With the determined growl, he hefted himself up onto the bench. Slowly one note came, then another, dredged up from all the anger that simmered within him. Music raged for hours in that solitary room. The intricate chords were an escape—they allowed him to forget. But how could he?

He had attacked his mother, cursed her for her regrets, called her a liar and a whore. Mum, a whore. And she had hit him. Which he deserved.

He had told Emily they were wrong, that he was wrong. Which he was.

He slammed the keys as the crescendo gathered force. Outside, the late evening fog had given way to blacker clouds, a dark reflection of his mood. He was poison to her, he knew that. Whatever twisted way their lives were joined only kept getting more violent, more unexplainable with each passing day. He would end it, cut it off so mercilessly and brutally she would hate him—with an act so heartless, so cruel, she would never look back and wonder. She would never, ever have regrets.

He felt S.J.’s business card cut into his leg, and he slammed the keys harder.

As the kitchen clock ticked on, Emily knew with certainty that Andrew wouldn’t be coming home tonight. He had no wallet, no phone, and the weather was getting worse and worse. But where would he go? Images seeped into her mind: images of him sleeping frozen on the street, huddling cold and alone under an overpass; images of him sitting in a café with a girl offering him a warm place to stay for the night.

“Emily,” Zoey said with a thinly masked attempt at levity as she finished washing the last of the dinner dishes. “Was it just your first fight, or should Christian be looking for a day job?”

Christian shot her a look, having poured himself another glass of wine.

“He only did what Vandin said he would do.”

Zoey put down a plate and stared at her. “Emily?”

“I was the one who had believed in the fairy tale, who let myself think that I could be a part of Andrew’s life, but I was wrong.” She said more to herself than to anyone. She went on to relate the whole conversation she had overheard into their shocked faces. From Claudia’s doubts, to Andrew’s accusations, to Claudia’s confessions, to Andrew’s flight.

“And then…and then he stood there and said, ‘Stay away from me, Emily, I’m not right—I never have been—I’ve lied. We’re…all bloody wrong.’ He really thinks he’s no good. That he’s just like Neil,” she finished, wiping her nose with her sleeve, unaware she had been crying.

“But Neil is wonderful,” Zoey argued. “He’s cool and kind, and he really wants to help the band—you heard him. And he brought us muffins, remember? What kind of horrible man brings muffins?”

Christian quickly poured more wine.

“Maybe Neil didn’t know?” Zoey looked into Emily’s bleary red-eyed mess of a face with her brilliant eye-shining optimism. “Maybe Claudia never told him? You saw how he looked at her, in awe, almost. Maybe he’s always loved her? Maybe she never told him she was pregnant and that’s what she meant by not holding him back? So she wouldn’t hurt him?”

“But she has! Don’t you see? She’s hurt him and herself and Andrew most of all. And now…Maybe it’s better this way? Better to deal with it now, get it over with, than let it go on,” she said bitterly. For she knew if she lost herself completely, unspeakable heartache was sure to follow. There would be no turning back from that pain. She would become one of those crazy women poets and perhaps put her head in the oven when he left again, which he would of course—it was in his nature to do so. She wasn’t unrealistic; she knew falling in love with Andrew came with a price. Living in a fantasy world always did. “Andrew doesn’t want…us.”