A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara) (8 page)

“It’s not like I’m putting it on CNN,” he said reasonably, as
she fell into step beside him. They were headed to the restaurant she’d seen on
her first quick visit to the town, the one that looked something like a cross
between a café and a diner. “I told my sister, and she was bound to find out
anyway because of Dillon. And Dave won’t tell anyone.”

“Natalya’s not—she wasn’t—” Akira didn’t know how to ask the
question politely. She was sure that Natalya wasn’t Dillon’s mother from her
calm reaction to the idea that he was a ghost, but she knew very little about
the Latimer family.

For a fleeting second, Zane looked grim. “No. Lucas, the
brother I mentioned, is Dillon’s father. He’s not around much, though. My parents
were raising Dillon.”

“Losing a child is hard, I know. Is that why your dad—” Akira
searched for the words and finally settled on, “—has been looking for a medium?”
It seemed more tactful than saying, “lost his mind and decided that ghosts were
real?” Sure, she knew ghosts were real, but that’s because she could see and
hear them. Why would someone who could do neither decide to chase such a pipe
dream?

“Dillon and my mom died three days apart,” Zane replied. “Dillon
of a drug overdose, and my mom from a stroke. A couple of years ago, my dad met
the woman who told him that the car was haunted, but she—well, ever since, he’s
been looking for someone who could communicate with their spirits.”

Akira barely heard the words after overdose. Poor Zane. To
lose both his mother and his nephew in the same week. She’d only ever had her
father, but the emptiness that filled their house in the weeks and months after
his death had been horrible. And his death hadn’t been unexpected: untimely,
yes, but they’d known he’d lost his fight against cancer for weeks before he
died. And an overdose? For a teenager as young as Dillon? How truly sad.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said.

He looked down at her. In the late afternoon sunlight, his
eyes were bluer, almost the color of the sky behind them, and she could see in
his expression how hard it had been. And then he grinned at her, and said, “Yeah,
it wasn’t a great week,” as he pushed open the door and gestured for her to
precede him inside.

The restaurant was an eclectic mix of styles: as if someone
with modern taste had taken over an old-style diner without the money or time
to renovate from the ground up. The floor was ugly gray linoleum, and there was
a long plain lunch-style counter in the middle of the room, with an open
kitchen galley beyond it. But small tables were covered with bright linens, and
set with colorful cloth napkins, and a row of private booths along one wall had
wooden tabletops and comfy cloth seating.

As Akira looked around, noticing the fanciful artwork on the
walls, she realized that the restaurant was crowded, almost every table full,
and that most of the people in it seemed to be looking in her direction. Or was
it Zane they were looking at? She glanced at him.

“Small town, new face,” he murmured in her ear as he put a
comforting hand on her back and steered her toward a back corner booth, nodding
and greeting people at the tables they passed. “Nothing to worry about.”

She wasn’t worried, she thought defensively. Or not exactly
worried. She just maybe wished she’d found a brush, a mirror, and a little
make-up back at General Directions. Facing a roomful of curious strangers
looking like you’d recently been in a car accident wasn’t a confidence boost.

There was a man seated at the booth Zane was headed to, his
back to the restaurant. This must be the eccentric Max Latimer, Akira thought.
As she slid into the booth across from him, he looked up from his book and
smiled at her, and almost involuntarily, Akira smiled back. Dark hair gone gray
at the temples, blue eyes bordered with deeply engraved laugh lines, bushy
brows and a smile that lit up his face—she could see his resemblance to his
children and grandson.

“You must be the medium,” he said, putting out his hand for
her to shake.

Akira’s smile disappeared immediately. “I am not a medium,”
she said, turning to Zane with a glare as he seated himself on the bench next
to her. What had Zane said to his father? Hadn’t she made herself perfectly
clear when she told him she could see ghosts? Mediums got messages from
invisible spirits. They were spiritualists who believed in some mystical “other
side.” They held séances and went into trances!

“She sees ghosts,” Zane told his father. “Apparently there’s
a difference.”

The sympathy that Akira had felt for him moments earlier
evaporated as her annoyance returned. Had he not listened to a word she’d said?

“Aw, come on,” he said to her, apparently reading her
expression. “We had to tell him.”

“No!” she said. “No, we didn’t. This is not—I don’t—I’m a
scientist. A physicist. With, I admit, a slightly unusual—” she paused,
searching for the right word.

“Gift?” Max offered.

Akira shook her head, rejecting his choice, and finally
settled on one of her own. “Quirk. It’s just a quirk. And I don’t want people
to know about it.”

Max and Zane exchanged looks. “Tassamara is a town that
attracts people who have quirks,” Max said. “No one here will think anything of
it.”

Akira sighed. It was a weird little town, she had to
acknowledge that. But that didn’t mean that seeing ghosts was a socially
acceptable skill to have. “I don’t like ghosts,” she said slowly, trying to
find the right words to explain how she felt, but before she could continue,
Max interrupted her.

“Miss Malone,” he started, and then smiled and reached across
the table, patting the back of her hand comfortingly. “Akira. You leased a car
with a ghost in it. You rented a house that’s known to be haunted. You can’t be
that afraid of your association with the spirit world.”

The spirit world? Oh, hell, Akira thought, as she protested, “Every
place the realtor showed me was haunted!”

“The last thing on the list was a nice little modern
apartment,” Zane said mildly. “Fifteen miles outside of town, so not exactly
convenient, but brand-new and unlikely to have any spectral tenants.”

“You knew the properties she was going to show me?” Akira
asked.

He shrugged. “Perception tests, remember. We didn’t find you
because we were looking for a physicist.”

“But I am a physicist,” Akira protested. “Look, seeing
ghosts—it’s just some kind of energy. That’s all. It’s not entirely crazy to
think that human beings might be more than matter or chemicals. We’re complex
systems. Yes, I’ve got this ability, but it’s like being a super-taster or a tetrachromat,
just some genetic variation in a sensory faculty. Rare, obviously, but then so
are tetrachromats.”

“Super-taster I know,” Max said. “Picky eaters, but with more
taste buds than most people have, so food tastes more intense to them. But what’s
a tetrachromat?”

“Most people have three types of cones in our eyes, each of
which responds to a different wavelength of visible lengths. Three cones, so we’re
trichromats,” Akira explained. “But some people—women, most likely, because of
the two X chromosomes—could have four types of cones. Theoretically, they could
see into the ultraviolet, like zebra fish can. An average human being can
distinguish about a million shades of color, but a tetrachromat could
distinguish about a hundred million shades.”

Momentarily distracted by the idea, she added thoughtfully, “It’d
be hell to get dressed; nothing would ever look like it matched.” Then she
shook her head and continued, “It is scientifically possible that I have a
sense that allows me to see energy. A type of energy. A type of energy that
other people can’t perceive, like seeing into the ultraviolet, only not exactly
like that because. . .” She let her words trail off as she saw that Max was
smiling gently at her.

“You hear them too, don’t you?” Zane asked. “How does that
work if it’s a visual sense?”

He was so damn matter-of-fact, thought Akira. There was
something profoundly annoying about it. She sighed. “Okay, so it’s a little
more than a visual sense. Seeing different wavelengths, plus hearing different
frequencies. Or maybe my brain just translates the extra sense into something
more comprehensible to me? The point is, it’s not who I am. It’s like being
left-handed, or having perfect pitch—just a, a quirk.” She waved a hand
dismissively.

“A quirk that allows you to speak to my grandson,” Max said. “And,
I hope, to my wife.”

Akira wanted to cry. Relatives. Oh, how she hated dealing
with the relatives. “Yes,” she said simply, and then shrugged. “Or maybe, I don’t
know about your wife. But yes, I can talk to Dillon. And?”

“What do you mean?” Max asked.

“What then?” Akira asked in return. “Yes, I can talk to your
relatives. So can you, for that matter, but okay, I can maybe actually have a
conversation with them. And then what?”

“Can’t you help them? Help them move on or do whatever it is
they’re supposed to be doing?”

She shook her head. “No. Ghosts—they just are. They’re not a
problem to be solved. Well, except sometimes for me. But they’re not a thing
that needs fixing, any more than, well, than say, lightning needs fixing. They’re
just energy. Leftover energy. “

Max rubbed his chin. “But why are they still here?”

Akira exhaled, a quick breath that was almost a laugh. “Ask
me about low-temperature collision dynamics. You’d get a better answer.”

“I’m not actually interested in low-temperature collision
dynamics,” Max responded, voice dry.

Akira’s mouth twisted. It wasn’t a smile. “Nor
sonoluminescence, I assume?”

“I don’t even know what that is,” Max admitted.

Akira closed her eyes and sighed, inwardly cursing herself.
She should have asked more questions. She should have remembered that things
that look too good to be true are too good to be true. “I don’t know why ghosts
exist,” she said. “For obvious reasons, it’s not a subject that’s easily
researched. But I don’t fix them, I don’t make them go away, and—before you
ask—I don’t know anything about any white lights.”

She pressed her lips together. Across the table, Max was
silent, his disappointment obvious. “I should go back to California,” Akira
realized. “If I had known you were—” She let the sentence end there. She didn’t
want to accuse either of them. And yet her disappointment was acute. She had
wanted to believe that this would be a place for her, that she had found a new
home.

“Not a chance,” said Zane.

She glanced at him. Sure, she’d signed a contract, but there
was nothing in it about ghosts.

“I bought you a very nice digital oscilloscope, and I took
the money for it out of Smithson’s budget,” Zane continued. “If you don’t show
up tomorrow and play with it, he’ll get annoyed, and that’s never fun. Grace
will yell at me—it’ll be a whole messy thing.” He grinned at her and it was
such a comforting smile that it almost felt like he’d rubbed a consoling hand
along her back.

“Yes,” agreed Max. He too smiled at her, and if his smile was
a little more strained, a little more disappointed, it was still a smile. “Regardless
of whether you can help me, this is a good place for you. And I’m sure your
research will prove interesting.” For a moment, his eyes stilled, and then he
added in a tone of mild delight, “Hmm, and profitable, too. That’s nice.”

“Profitable?” Akira was startled.

“Not that sono-thing, though, I don’t think. Something else.”

Akira looked back at Zane. What was his father talking about?

“Max is psychic,” Zane said. “He can see the future.”

Psychic.

Right.

Were they kidding?

A small smile was playing around Zane’s lips, but he wasn’t
looking at her. He seemed focused on catching the attention of their waitress.

According to Einstein, past, present, and future were simply
a stubbornly persistent illusion. Akira wasn’t a quantum physicist herself, but
she knew that they postulated that on an atomic level, the future could be
known. If they were right, then theoretically seeing the future could be
possible. But still, it sounded highly unlikely to her. Although not really any
more unlikely than seeing ghosts.

Maybe it was time for some basic scientific inquiry. “So, did
you know we’d be having this conversation?” She tried not to let any emotion
slip into the words, to make them as calm and neutral as she could, but even
she could hear the hint of skepticism that slipped out.

Max’s smile was approving. “No. No, if I could see
everything, I’m sure I’d be institutionalized. It would be impossible to
function. No, I just sometimes know the outcome of an event before it happens.
Rather random events, it seems. There are events I would have given a great
deal to have foreseen that were obscured to me.” The sadness in his eyes didn’t
match his smile.

“He’s mostly good with money,” Zane said, turning his
attention back to the table.

“Money?” Akira was startled. That seemed so practical.

“Things that make money, really,” Max corrected his son. “The
money itself was your mother.”