Ghosts and Other Lovers (29 page)

I'd chosen the right topic. He couldn't resist a reply.

I'm going to write it all up and submit it as an article somewhere. Till I manage that, here's a quick breakdown of my findings: roughly 60 percent thought they saw some sort of human figure; another 10 percent saw "something moving" which they thought might have been an animal or a person; 5 percent thought they just glimpsed something but couldn't say anything positive about it at all, another 5 percent "heard" or "sensed" something they couldn't see; and 20 percent experienced no ghostly or inexplicable manifestations at all.

Of the (most interesting) 60 percent, slightly more than half described the figure as female, usually as wearing a "long gown," but otherwise their descriptions varied widely. Of those who saw a male figure, nearly half described the figure as a monk or a priest! (The long gown again?)

Guess I'll have to try to make sense of the data, draw some kind of conclusion. Might be good to have your input on that; how would you feel about collaborating?

Nobody else saw our woman.

But I didn't hear from him again for a couple of weeks. It was early December when he phoned and asked if I could come and meet him in Houston.

He didn't sound like himself. There was something in his voice I'd never heard before. "What's up?"

"I've found our ghost," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Come and see for yourself."

I met him in Houston, the next day. It was the middle of the week and should have been a working day for both of us, but there we were, playing truant. He'd given me explicit directions for how to find a restaurant called The Black-Eyed Pea, where he would be waiting for me.

I couldn't figure it out. The scenario I imagined centered around old newspaper clippings, maybe the story of a murder in Travis County, maybe the discovery of a young woman's body in the lake. I surely wasn't expecting Hutch to greet me, when I joined him in his booth beside a window, by pointing out at a high-rise bank building across the street and saying, "She works there. She'll be coming out of the building for her lunch break in about . . ." -- he checked his watch -- "thirty-five minutes. You should get a good view of her then."

I looked at him. He didn't look well. I could tell he wasn't sleeping, or eating right, and he was drinking too much coffee. "Who are you talking about?" I asked, although I already knew.

He waited for the waitress to take my order, and then he told me. "Her name is Melanie Caron. She's twenty-six, single, works for First City National over there and lives by herself in a townhouse in a little subdivision off the Gulf Freeway. Not a rental; I think her parents bought it for her -- there's money in the background, I think." He paused, seeming to lose track of what he was saying, and ran a hand over his face.

"But why?"

"Oh, the car she drives, the townhouse--"

"No, I don't mean the money! I mean, why her, why are you so . . . interested?"

"Wait'll you see her."

"No. I don't remember what I saw. Not well enough to be sure."

He slammed his hand down on the table, making the silverware judder. "Don't say that! You drew her picture!"

"It's a
drawing.
I'm not a camera."

"I know it's her," he said quietly. "The second I saw her -- sitting at a table just over there," he canted his head. "As soon as I set eyes on her it was like little
things
just crawling all over me . . . the creepiest sensation. I
knew
it was her." He raised his haunted eyes to mine. "I don't know why. I don't know what it means. But I saw her ghost. It has to mean something."

"Why? Why does it have to mean anything?" This was
his
line when I'd tried, in my clumsy way, to argue for the existence of God, an afterlife, or even the significance of coincidence.

"Don't be an asshole, Becky," he said irritably.

"Don't
you
. You want to know what it means? OK, I'll tell you: you don't want to know. It's a warning."

He became more alert. "You really think so? I need to tell her?"

"
No.
You need to keep the hell away from her." The way he looked when I said that told me everything. My heart sank. "You've told her?"

"Not about the ghost, no, not about seeing her -- but
you
could. Maybe she'd believe you."

"And she wouldn't believe you, because why?" He didn't answer; he didn't have to. "Because you came on to her, and she didn't want to know. And instead of letting it drop, you've been following her around, spying on her. . . ." I turned to gaze out the window at the bank where this unknown woman worked. I felt a horrible, cold dread filling me up from my feet to my head. "Oh, lordy. You're stalking her."

"Becky, come on!" He gazed at me, anguished. "I thought you'd understand! It's not like that. If you'd help me . . ."

I prayed that I could.

"Look, Hutch," I said gently. "Think about the ghost. Think about how she looked. I don't just mean her face, I mean her, whaddayacallit -- her affect."

He frowned at me. I spelled it out. "She was
terrified
. Somebody was after her. Maybe you?"

"I wouldn't hurt her."

"So how's she supposed to know that? Telepathy?"

Just then the waitress arrived with the food I no longer wanted to eat.

"Would you like to order now, sir?" she asked him, but Hutch shook his head. "Just some more coffee, please."

He turned his attention back to me as soon as the waitress had gone. "You could tell her the truth. You could just recognize her and go up to her, tell her about the ghost. I bet she'd believe you. Why shouldn't she? And I bet she's heard of Greg. If he invites her to a party she'd probably be thrilled."

"What if she's not? What if she doesn't believe me? What if--"

He held up his hand to stop me. "Quit borrowing trouble. We can deal with any problems when--"

"No."

He blinked at me in disbelief. "You won't help me?"

I was trembling, but determined. "I'm trying to, believe me. This is insane, Hutch. Look at what you're doing -- try to look at it from her point of view--"

"But she doesn't know about the ghost!"

"What difference does that make?"

He sighed and shook his head. "Becky, it's the whole point! I'm not trying to
woo
this woman -- I'm not in love with her; she's a mystery I'm trying to solve!"

I swallowed hard. "The mystery is all in your head."

"And yours," he shot back. "You saw her too -- don't you care why?"

Before I could begin to answer, he froze. His head came up like a hunting dog's and he stared through the window. "Here she comes."

I followed his gaze across the street. But he must have sensed her before she appeared because all I could see was a couple of gray-suited men just emerging from the building. Behind them, a second later, a slim blonde woman in a salmon-pink suit came pushing through the heavy glass doors.

"See? It's her."

"She's not wearing a gray hooded coat--"

"Look at her face."

I tried, but from that distance she was just a generic pretty young businesswoman. I'd already made up my mind how to play it, though, so I said, definitely, "That's not who I saw."

"What! You're lying!"

"I am not. That's not who I saw."

"Wait. Maybe she'll come in here for her lunch, and you can see her close up."

For a minute it did seem that was her plan. She crossed at the light and seemed headed straight for the restaurant. But as she came nearer, she looked nervous. I saw her eyes flickering across the cars in the parking lot, and over the big window where we sat, watching.

I think she caught a glimpse of Hutch, and that decided her. Because instead of approaching the entrance she turned abruptly and walked past.

I spent the next half-hour doing my best to argue him out of his obsession, then pointing out how dangerous it was. But he was no more convinced by my attempts at putting forward the rational viewpoint than he'd ever been by my emotion. Even the irony of our reversed positions was, I think, lost on him.

Well, you know the rest of the story. Nothing, not my refusal to help, nor my attempts to make him see reason could stop what was to come.

Hutch became ever more obsessed with Melanie Caron. When charm, reason, and persistence all failed, he finally just went after her, to take her by force. His gun wasn't loaded -- after all, he didn't want to hurt her, only to make her go with him -- but she didn't know that. He didn't know she had her own gun, that she'd started carrying it with her always, against the threat he posed. . . . But, of course, he didn't think he was a threat. Even after she'd shot him, as she believed in self-defense, even as he was dying, did he understand what he had become?

Yet wasn't he still the same Hutch I'd known and loved?

Everyone else seems to think he'd changed, become a monster, monstrously pursuing the object of his desire.

Even Greg, even his parents, seem to have written him off, sadly, as mad.

Yet if he was mad, it was with the same madness which had always driven him: that of the single-minded scientist, the engineer in pursuit of a practical solution to some material problem. He wasn't "in love" with Melanie Caron in the sick, obsessive way of stalkers; he just wanted to know what she
meant.

And so did I.

After his death, seeing the image of Melanie Caron on TV and in the papers, I became convinced that she
was
"our ghost." I felt awful because I could never tell Hutch I'd been wrong, could never apologize . . . I'd completely screwed up the real chance I'd had of helping him.

I felt horribly guilty. Of course, I'd thought I was doing the best, by warning him away from her -- and I
had
been right about the danger. But I should have known he wouldn't listen to me. He couldn't walk away from an unsolved problem; it just wasn't in him. I should have known that, and tried to avert this horror in some other way. Maybe, if I'd done what he'd asked, and approached Melanie myself, I could have talked her around, reached some peaceful accommodation. Would it have hurt her to spend a little time with him, with us? To help us solve the mystery of her haunting?

The mystery remained, and, after all, it was
our
mystery. Solving it felt like one last thing I could do for Hutch.

Although my intuition that the ghost had been a warning to stay away from Melanie Caron turned out to be horribly right, that didn't solve the mystery. The logic was circular, like a time paradox: the ghost we saw was a clip from the future, when Melanie had cowered in fear from her stalker -- but that future could never have come into being if Hutch hadn't first seen her cowering in fear. . . . I couldn't accept the idea of a totally predetermined universe, that our fates were scripts written before our births, so that brought me back to Hutch's original question. Why her?

I took my time and thought carefully about how to approach her. I couldn't afford to blow what might be my only chance.

I decided to approach her as a journalist, and told her I was researching a story on the subject of stalkers. She wasn't a Galveston resident, so had no idea how unlikely a topic that was for the weekly
Shore Times.
And although she told me she didn't want more publicity, when I swore I wouldn't use anything she didn't approve, and said I just needed some "insider detail" to help me understand the experience of being stalked, she agreed to meet me, suggesting a Starbucks near her office. People do like to tell their stories.

I made the most of our first meeting. I've never worked harder to make somebody like me. Never felt so desperate for acceptance. But it worked. I racked up a lot of miles on my old car, pretending urgent business in Houston so that I could take her up on her invitation to "call, if you happen to be in town." To keep her talking to me about Hutch, I told her that although my editor had spiked "our" story, I was considering writing a book about stalking.

I sucked up to her shamelessly -- and it all paid off, finally, when she invited me out to her house for dinner. She knew I would have a long drive back to Galveston, and one of the things we had in common was a liking for good wine with our dinner, so she invited me to stay the night.

I had been afraid that she might have sold her house and moved, unable to bear to go on living in the place where she had killed someone, but no, she was still there, in the house where Hutch had died.

"Why not?" she asked me, shrugging. She liked it there. Why should she let "that bastard" drive her out? Since "that business" she'd had an alarm system installed. She felt as safe here as she could feel anywhere.

"So you don't feel the house is haunted?" I held my breath waiting for her answer, hoping. . . . Maybe, despite his determined materialism, Hutch's spirit was still hanging around.

But she shook her head firmly. "I'm sure it's not. I had this psychic, she's supposed to be really, really good, come to check it out, and she said there was no evil here, nothing but good vibrations, lots of love."

I felt my heart turn over. Poor Hutch. . . .

"But I did get the kitchen completely redone, just to be on the safe side, and I had a Feng Sui expert advise me about the energy flow. . . ."

"The
kitchen
?" That was where we were sitting now, with glasses of wine and bowls of olives, nuts and taco-chips set out. I gaped at her. "Why the kitchen?"

She stared at me, obviously suspecting my journalistic credentials. It must have been publicized, or maybe she'd told me when I wasn't listening. "Because this is where I shot him, of course! He actually died in the laundry room, just there" -- she pointed across at a louvered shutter, painted sunflower yellow, which screened off the narrow back hallway from the rest of the room -- "but there's not much to redesign in there. It's not like I ever spend much time in there, anyway, not like I do in the kitchen. But I did everything I could. I had the carpeting taken up, of course, put down Mexican tiles instead, and had the walls repainted blue, a very harmonious color, instead of white like they were before, because white's the color of the dead in China, after all, and . . ."