"They say you get used to it," Stan said, shrugging.
First the train, and now the roaches. I hoped the third place Stan had lined up for us didn't have any glaring flaws, or Jacob might scare him into an early coronary. And then Stan would haunt me for the rest of my life. I'd need to ask Jacob to tone down his macho.
The last condo on our agenda was an old motel from the twenties that had been chunked into eight sizeable units, four upstairs and four down. "Hotel," "twenties," and "Chicago"
didn't inspire much faith in me that it would turn out to be a ghost-free zone, what with prohibition and gangsters and whatever else was running wild back then. Since I was giddy from endorphins, work-related stress, lack of sleep, and digesting Thanksgiving dinner, I figured my opinions were less reasonable than usual, so I tried to keep an open mind.
"Are these the original floors?" Jacob asked. We were looking through a doorway into a living room-dining room combo that was probably bigger than my whole apartment combined with my neighbor's across the hall.
Stan sounded pleased with himself as he answered something about the developers tearing up carpets and finding the oak floors pristine, but I tuned him out since I can't say that a floor would sway me one way or the other in terms of living somewhere.
I walked over to a bay window and looked out over the street. Big old trees that were bare for the winter, expensive, late-model cars, lawns that had been meticulously raked of twigs, leaves, and garbage, now dusted with a light frosting of snow. It was a good neighborhood. I tried to imagine myself living in it with Jacob, and I couldn't make the image gel.
That didn't make any sense. We lived together already.
Sure, we called it something else, and he only kept the bare minimum of his stuff at my place because even though I wasn't much of a packrat, there wasn't enough room to merge two households in one three-room apartment. But we landed in the same bed every night. Christ, I'd met his parents. He'd dropped the L-bomb.
I hung my head and pinched the bridge of my nose. I needed some rest.
"Hey."
I turned and found Jacob holding up the doorway, same as he did in my apartment ... our current apartment ... minus all the clutter and cheap pressboard furniture around him.
"I sent Stan outside to wait for us," he said.
"I'll bet you didn't have to tell him twice."
Jacob crossed the original oak flooring and slipped his arms around my waist. The room was dark, though lights from the kitchen probably carried far enough that anyone who happened to be looking through our window would see our big gay Hallmark moment. "What do you think of this place?"
I shrugged. "I dunno. It's big."
Jacob's reflection in the bay window smiled. "What I mean is, are we the only two here, now that Stan's outside?"
Oh. Right. I was supposed to be checking for ghosts. I restrained myself from looking around the room, so that it wasn't too painfully obvious that I'd been slacking on my assignment. "So far," I said.
I snagged Jacob by the cuff of his jacket and started a clockwise sweep of the apartment, just as if I was walking a crime scene. "You like this place?" I asked.
"It's not bad. I'd need to see it at different times of the day, make sure the noise level's okay. But if all that checks out, yeah. It could work."
I looked into a closet, let my eyes adjust to the darkness inside and stared for a long while before I flipped on the light.
Spacious. And empty.
I tried to imagine my pathetic wardrobe hanging in the closet—heck, even half the closet, if Jacob needed the other half for his stuff. The closet was too good for it. I'd need new clothes. This must be how people got into debt. First they got a bigger place, then they needed to fill it up....
"Do you see something?"
"Uh ... no."
"Good."
I kept walking, passing room after room. I'd counted two bedrooms so far, plus a niche off the big combo room and a bath and a half. Damn. "It's bigger than your old condo."
"Because we're going to share it."
I peeked into another room. Bedroom, or maybe an office.
I couldn't really tell what I should call it without furniture in it to guide me.
Jacob pushed open a final door and waited for me to go in.
I crossed the threshold and stared out the huge picture windows into the yard that sprawled behind us, thick with the twisted, black branches of old-growth oaks, a couple of evergreens poking up on either side. It couldn't quite compare to the lakefront view of Jacob's old condo, but for the location, it was pretty sweet.
Jacob mumbled something, but I was busy trying to imagine the trees full of leaves, shielding Jacob and me from the chaos of the city. Was I a nature nut and I just never knew it? Scary thought.
Maybe I could see myself in that condo after all, pulling my stylish and wrinkle-free clothing out of a closet with elbow room to spare, and getting dressed in front of my tree-shaded window while the coffee brewed in our eight thousand square foot kitchen. I felt surprisingly little anxiety as this fantasy played.
Jacob said something else I didn't quite catch, and I figured I might as well pay attention. "What?"
"What?" he said back to me.
"What were you saying?"
Jacob opened yet another closet door and peered in.
"Nothing."
"Just now."
"I didn't say anything," he assured me. His voice faded as his whole body disappeared into the closet, but I could still understand him, muffled or not. "This is really nice."
"You sure you didn't say anything?"
Jacob appeared in the doorway with his brow creased and his eyes trained on me. No wonder people didn't lie to him.
His eyes were scarier than the knowledge that his partner, Carolyn, was a telepath.
I was about to insist that he repeat whatever he'd said right after we walked into the bedroom when I heard it again, that low murmur. Like a neighbor's TV playing too loud, only without a wall to soften the high end. Words. A sentence that repeated itself.
"Tell Georgie that I know about him and my wife."
I pressed my eyelids shut and did my best not to sigh.
Damn it.
When I opened them, Jacob was looking at me even more closely, and if I thought about it hard enough, I could sense a cold spot in the middle of the room. I stared at Jacob. He stared back at me.
"Tell Georgie that I know."
"Tell him yourself," I muttered, leaving the bedroom without looking back at the tree-lined view.
I'm not sure if Jacob took the haunting out on Stan. After all, how was Stan supposed to know if the place was haunted or not? Mediums are few and far between, and it's harder to detect the voice-only apparitions than it is to spot the full-blown, bleeding and blubbering deceased. You needed a pretty strong medium to pick up on those voices. Like me.
I wished I hadn't combed through the whole damn apartment before Georgie's nemesis found me. Hadn't seen all those wide, elegant closets, or the bay window, or the yard with all its damn trees.
Too bad there wasn't some sort of ectoplasmic sensor I could just wave around when I walked in the door before I got my hopes up, like a paranormal pregnancy test. Sorry, the dot turned red. It's not a ghost-free zone. Can't live here.
Next.
It would be so comforting to be sure, to know that I wouldn't throw away all my pressboard furniture and buy the new wardrobe to fill up the spacious closet, and then find some dead asshole who'd tried to get a piece of burnt toast out of the toaster with a metal fork standing in my kitchen at four in the morning. That'd be even worse than falling in love with a "view" and then figuring out that the bedroom's haunted.
Jacob and Stan emerged from the front door, then stood on the stoop, talking. Jacob made notes on a pad of paper.
Stan looked like he was only pretending to be calm. I watched the two of them set up their appointments, and I wondered how much longer I'd be able to look for missing people all day and real estate all night. Jacob had seen at least twenty or thirty places. At the rate of three properties per night, I'd probably be a basket case by Monday. Unless I narrowed down the playing field.
I really hated to bother Lisa over something so mundane, but I was sure she'd understand that things were getting desperate. Roaches could be sprayed, but as far as I knew, disgruntled ghosts are forever. Or at least a hell of a long time. I flipped open my cell phone and hit memory dial three as Jacob approached the car. Lisa could use her "si-no" ability to tell me if any of the places on his list were haunted or not, and save me from looking at a bunch more ghost motels.
Then we'd only need to worry about noisy neighbors, roaches, and freaky occurrences like Uncle Leon's arm.
Lisa and I hadn't gotten to spend much time together before she shipped off to Santa Barbara, but she and I were still two of a kind. I'd been a medium before anyone even acknowledged that there was such a thing, and she'd played the "si-no" game with her sister even though it was frowned upon by her strict Catholic-Hispanic-cop household.
Now that Lisa was learning some kind of new age whatnot at a place in Santa Barbara called PsyTrain, she didn't get much free time to walk on the beach or chat on the phone.
But I could at least leave her a message and run my idea by her.
Her phone rang a couple of times, and then instead of her usual "I can't come to the phone" message, I got, "Hello?"
"Hey! It's me!" Well, duh. Her cell phone would've showed her my phone number before she picked up. But some habits die hard. Heck, I'd grown up with a rotary phone. And Jacob even admitted to having a party line as a small child in rural Wisconsin.
"Hey! How did the parents go?"
Jacob opened the car door and got in. "Hi," I told him, "I'm talking to Lisa."
"Tell her we miss her."
That was too mushy for me to convey, so I hoped she'd heard it straight from Jacob's mouth. "Jacob says hi," I summed up lamely. "Um ... his family was good. I think they want to become ghost hunters."
"Good," she said. "I knew they'd like you." Lisa knows lots of things. Anything that she thinks to ask herself that can be answered with a simple yes or no.
"There was something a little weird," I said, and a wave of fatigue washed over me as I thought about Leon's bloody spectral arm flopping around next to the mashed potatoes,
"but I'll tell you about it later. You might be able to stump your professors with it. Listen, why I really called...."
"Wait a second, Vic."
"Yeah?"
"Before you say anything else, I just wanted to..." she sighed, and I suddenly caught the awkwardness in her voice, the stilted timing. I tried to imagine what was up. It couldn't be good.
"If you're gonna ask me something," she said, attempting to start fresh with a new sentence, "I mean, a 'si-no,' then ... don't."
"Why? Is something wrong? You're not taking anti-psyactives, are you?" I felt Jacob glancing at me as he drove, but I didn't want to make eye contact with him, not until I figured out what Lisa was trying to tell me.
"No. I don't need the pills. It's not like seeing ghosts, where you can't ignore them if they're there. I just ... I don't have to play the 'si-no' if I don't want to."
On one hand, I was relieved. I never wanted Lisa to go to stinking PsyTrain to begin with. I don't trust any of those psychic mills as far as I can throw 'em. But on the other hand, I didn't liked what I thought she was trying to say.
"Vic, it's too hard to have all the answers. You know?"
"What, are you tired? I thought playing 'si-no' was as easy as saying your name. It never seemed to wear you out before."
"It's not like that," she said, and she was still choosing her words too carefully for my taste. "But ... I just don't want to be the one with all the answers. I want to be myself."
West coast psychic airy-fairy granola bullshit. "How does the 'si-no' make you any less yourself?"
"I doesn't—if I don't let it. I've got to stop doing 'si-no' with you for a little while."
I hadn't realized how important the "si-no" was to me until it was slipping out of my grasp. Heck, I probably wouldn't have let Jacob get me into bed if the "si-no" hadn't told me he was on the up-and-up. "Lisa, this is crazy. The 'si-no' is part of you...."
"And you have a question."
My mouth worked. I couldn't exactly deny it.
"I know you do," she said, "because I asked the 'si-no' when my phone rang."
"Well, yeah, but...."
"You only call me when you have a question."
"Don't normal people call other normal people when they have questions?" I asked her. "Not that I'd know what the hell normal people do, but maybe we can pretend for the sake of argument."
"I knew you were gonna be mad."
"I'm not mad," I lied. "I'm just wondering when you started resenting me for asking you questions."
"I don't resent you," she said.
Even I could tell it would be a bad idea to have her prove she didn't resent me by telling me which apartments on Jacob's new list were free of spirit activity. "Is everything really okay there?" I asked. "Nobody's forcing your eyes open and making you listen to Beethoven while a slide show is playing?"
"It's good here," she said. "And I'm okay. I'm gonna go right now. I just need some time. Goodbye, Vic."
I listened to the dead air after she disconnected and gritted my teeth.
"Is she okay?" Jacob asked me when I flipped my phone shut.
I sighed and sagged into the car seat. "I think Lisa just broke up with me."
The sinking feeling I'd been expecting to feel in the pit of my gut at the sight of my new partner, Zig, wasn't as much like riding a roller coaster with a stomach full of stale beer as I'd thought it might be. It was more like the nausea you get from reading too long while the car is moving. I'd made progress.
It helped that I had a stack of missing persons files on my desk to stare at. The people in those pictures paperclipped to the manila file folders might still be alive. So I had to get my ass in gear and find them.