Shadow of a Life (16 page)

“
I’m really glad to finally
find out what happened on that infamous ship. I hope you’re able to
find what you’re looking for so that you can finish your business
and be extricated, honey. I sure would like to finish my own
business,” Simon said sadly.

“
Oh, Simon. You’re always in
such a hurry to leave. Who wants to leave to go to some unknown
place when there’s so much going on down here?” Phyllis
quipped.

Simon rolled his eyes.

“
Maybe I’ll come by to visit
another time,” Sophia said and started walking back toward the
mausoleum where she’d met Simon and Phyllis. They followed her and
soon vanished into the thin night air.

Sophia came back to the blanket where
the three of us were still huddled. Camille relaxed for the first
time since we’d started talking to the other ghosts.

“
Now what do we do?” I
asked.

“
I guess we’ll just keep
checking out places that were important to my family and keep an
eye out for this mystery couple. I really can’t think of who it
would be.”

“
Does that mean we can go
now? I’m pretty sure if I sit here any longer I’m going to freeze
to death,” Camille complained as she stood and rocked back and
forth on her heels.

“
Yeah. We can go now,”
Sophia answered.

I looked down at my watch. It was past
two thirty in the morning. I couldn’t believe we’d stayed out there
as long as we had. Peter stood and folded the blanket, shaking the
grass, dirt, and crumbs from it first. I wondered if he was over
his shock yet.

He turned to me and handed me the
blanket. “So, Jamie, do I get to come with you the next time you
search out Sophia’s past, or was this a one-time thing?”

“
I’m sorry, Peter, but
you’re stuck with us now. We can’t have you wandering around town
potentially telling people about Sophia. Think what it would do to
your reputation. You’d be the school idiot.” I winked at him,
trying to be flirtatious, but then realized that he probably
couldn’t see it in the dark. “Actually, I assumed you’d want to see
this through to the end now.”

He laughed. “Even if you told me I
couldn’t come, I’d probably follow you. This is the coolest thing
that’s ever happened to me.”

We piled into Sophia’s
little white car. When Peter had come to the cemetery, he intended
to walk to a nearby bus stop—after he left the obligatory flowers
on his grandparent’s graves—and take a late bus home, but then he
met up with us and he never made it to the bus. Sophia drove him
home and we promised to call him before we did anything else the
next day. There was no way I
wasn’t
going to call. As we pulled away from Peter’s
house it occurred to me that Camille and I had nowhere else to go
that night. We were both supposedly sleeping at each other’s homes.
We couldn’t exactly show up on our doorsteps in the middle of the
night without one of our parents asking questions. I suggested we
find a quiet street and sleep in the car. We all had jackets and it
wasn’t as if it were the middle of winter. Sophia, however, had
other plans.

“
It’s time you met Jack and
Rita, my fake parents. You’ll love them. I promise,” Sophia
insisted.

After meeting Simon and Phyllis at the
cemetery, and knowing Sophia, I wasn’t really scared to meet more
ghosts, but Camille moaned and muttered something about haunted
houses under her breath.

Jack and Rita lived in a modest,
well-kept home on a quiet street not far from our high school in
nearby Mattapoisett. Flower pots filled with pansies sat on each of
the steps leading to the front door. There was a shiny brass
knocker and a peephole on the front door. For some reason that made
me laugh. I imagined that Jack and Rita didn’t really get a lot of
use out of the peephole. Who needed one when you could walk through
walls? Camille and I hung back a little as we waited for Sophia to
open the door. She just stared at it as if she didn’t know what to
do.

“
Uhh . . . I don’t have a
key. I guess I’ve never needed one before. Hold on a second.” She
disappeared and Camille and I silently looked at each other. We
weren’t really sure what to do next, but we didn’t have to wait
long because only a moment later the front door opened and Sophia’s
smiling face was there to greet us.

“
Welcome to Casa Afterlife,”
she declared as she flung the door wide and we stepped
inside.

I didn’t really know what to expect,
but judging by the look on Camille’s face and the fact that she was
clinging to me, I’m sure she expected to see coffins filled with
vampires, bats hanging from the ceiling, cobwebs on all the
furniture, and jars filled with body parts on the shelves. The
house couldn’t have been more normal and homey. There were
beautiful landscape paintings on the walls, fresh flowers in vases
on all the little tables, a curio cabinet full of knickknacks, and
comfy bright-colored furniture arranged in an inviting manner. It
could have belonged to any normal human family.

“
Hello? Sophia, is that
you?”

A lady that looked to be in her late
thirties or maybe early forties stood at the top of the stairs
wrapped in a fluffy purple robe. Her brown hair was pulled up into
curlers and she looked as if she had just woken from a deep
sleep.

“
Rita, I’m so sorry I
disturbed you. This is Jamie Peters—the one I’ve been telling you
about. And this is her friend, Camille.”

Rita hurried down the stairs
and greeted us. “It is
so
good to meet you. It isn’t often that Jack and I
get to meet someone’s soul saver.” She turned back to the staircase
and yelled. “
Jack
.
Get down here. Sophia’s brought Jamie over.”

I quickly jumped in. “There’s no need
to wake him up. I can always meet him in the morning.” I felt a
little self-conscious. I still wasn’t completely convinced that I
really was Sophia’s soul saver. I hadn’t been of much help yet. The
way Rita acted you would think I was a movie star.

“
Don’t be silly,” she
replied. “Ghosts don’t really have to sleep. We just do it to pass
the time. Jack and I try to live as normally as we can so that we
don’t make the neighbors nervous. If we had our lights on all night
long they would start to talk. Besides, what would we do all night?
I can only take so many games of checkers before I want to tear my
hair out.” She threw her head back and laughed.

I liked Rita immediately. She was full
of life—even though she was technically dead—and genuine. Jack came
down the stairs in a blue robe, almost identical to the one Rita
was wearing, and put his arm around her shoulders. He was tall and
had brown hair so dark it was almost black. He shook our hands with
a firm handshake and a confident smile. I guessed that he had been
some sort of businessman when he was still alive.

“
Nice to meet you, Jamie and
Camille. Sophia has been telling us about you. I know she was quite
nervous about revealing who she really was. I’m glad to see you
took it in stride,” Jack said in a deep masculine voice.

“
So what brings you to our
doorstep at . . .” Rita looked at an ornate grandfather clock in
the corner, “three-thirty in the morning?”

“
We were hoping to find a
place for Jamie and Camille to crash for the rest of the night.
It’s a long story, but neither of them can go home tonight,” Sophia
explained.

Rita wasn’t fazed at all.

“
By all means. I’ll go grab
some blankets and you can sleep right here on these couches if
that’s okay.”

“
That would be great,” I
said. I turned to Camille, but she had already sat on one of the
couches and was in the process of removing her shoes. She was
exhausted. Usually Cam and I stayed up late whispering when we had
a sleepover, but that night was different. As soon as Rita gave me
a blanket and a pillow I laid down on the other couch, and even
though I was sleeping in a house full of ghosts, I fell asleep
immediately.

I had no idea how much time had passed
when I woke up, but I felt refreshed so I figured it must have been
a while. I stretched each muscle slowly before I even opened my
eyes. I was warm under the blanket—it smelled like lavender—and I
didn’t really want to get up. I finally sat up and looked over at
Camille. She still slept deeply with her head turned into the back
of the couch, her legs curled up in the fetal position with the
blanket wrapped tightly around her body. The curtains were closed
and all the lights were off, so I pulled out my phone to check the
time. It was ten thirty in the morning.

It was about that time that I realized
what must have woken me. The smell of sizzling bacon and fried eggs
wafted in from the kitchen. I rose from the couch to follow the
smell down the hall.

I entered the kitchen to find Sophia
sitting on a barstool, watching Rita cook. Sophia had changed into
a clean pair of shorts and a t-shirt. Her bare feet showed off her
manicured red toenails. Rita, too, was dressed for the day in
stylish jeans and a button-up blouse that showed off her slim
figure. The curlers were no longer in her hair and it cascaded down
her back in subtle curls. Her makeup made her look like a fashion
icon. I could see why she and Sophia had hit it off with each
other.

“
Good morning. Welcome to my
kitchen.”

“
You didn’t have to cook for
us, Rita. I know that it’s not necessary for ghosts to
eat.”

“
Honey, don’t worry. It was
no trouble at all. I love it when I have guests I can cook for.
When I was alive, I owned a small diner called
Rita’s Place
out in San Francisco.
This was in the 50s, of course, and people actually knew how to
cook back then,” she said as she waved a spatula at me. “I miss
getting to do what I did best. Sometimes I cook just to see if my
sense of taste has returned, but sadly it never does. I just have
to live through my sense of smell.” She closed her eyes, tilted her
head back, and breathed in slowly through her nose.

“
So is your sense of taste
the only thing that changes when you become a ghost?” I asked the
two ghosts.

“
Pretty much. Unless you
count the whole not-being-able-to-age thing, that is. Our ghostly
bodies function almost the same as a real body. If we eat, the food
just moves right through us, but if we don’t eat, we’re still
okay,” Sophia explained. “It was the strangest feeling I had to get
used to when I died.”

I climbed onto a barstool next to
Sophia, and Rita placed a plate full of perfectly cooked scrambled
eggs, bacon, waffles, and fresh fruit in front of me. I took a bite
and felt like I had died and gone to heaven. Ironic, I
know.

“
If you are ever out and
about and get hungry, feel free to come over and Rita will happily
feed you. We buy groceries to keep up appearances, so we might as
well put them to good use,” Jack said as he entered the
room.

He walked straight to Rita and wrapped
his arms around her. He kissed her so deeply that I became
uncomfortable and looked away. Sophia just smiled and looked on.
There was a hint of sadness in her smile as she watched the two
lovers.

I waited for them to separate before I
asked, “Is it rare for two people who love each other to die and
both come back as ghosts? Did the two of you die at the same time
or something?”

Jack laughed. “Nope. I was killed on
the beaches of Normandy during World War II. Rita here died when
she crashed her car into a tree while trying to apply lipstick on
her way to work in 1956.”

“
I’ve gotten better at
driving since then.” Rita playfully punched Jack in the
arm.

He continued, “We actually
found each other after we died—in 1992 to be exact. Neither of us
ever married when we were alive, so we decided to move across the
country to places neither of us had ever been so we wouldn’t
accidentally
extricate
and be separated from each other.”

“
Isn’t that the sweetest
love story you’ve ever heard?” Sophia asked with a giant grin on
her face.

“
It’s definitely up there.”
I grinned back.

“
I guess I better get going
so I’m not late. I’m meeting a client at eleven.” Jack gave Rita
another peck on the cheek and walked out of the room, picking up a
briefcase on his way out.

“
You look bewildered,
Jamie,” Rita commented as she tossed another waffle onto my
plate.

“
Does Jack have a
job
?”

“
Of course. How else would
we pay for the house?”

“
Wow. This just keeps
getting crazier. Do you ever work, Sophia?”

“
Sometimes. I look much too
young to get any good paying career-type jobs. I can never pass for
older than 21 or 22. The only people who want to hire someone who
looks as young as me are fast food joints or big box retailers.
Neither of those options appeals to me so sometimes I have to find
alternative ways of earning money.” Sophia squirmed in her seat.
The new topic of conversation made her uncomfortable.

I looked to Rita, but her head was
down and she avoided eye contact with me.