at once, a cold front blasting down out of Canada. As if God were clearing the air now that the sheriff was under the ground. It felt like a good morning to laze under the sheets. Clara fluffed her pillow and settled back while Logan dressed.
“Good Lutherans don’t believe in ghosts,” he was saying, fresh from the shower, clad only in tighty-whities and black socks, his chest and legs pink with steam.
“But what about the Holy Ghost,” Clara said. “It doesn’t seem fair if God gets to have a ghost, but none of the rest of us does.”
She had finally told him about her sense of Seth’s ghost troubling her, the drawing of the wolf someone placed at the door, the figure at the edge of the corn.
Logan plucked his ironed khakis from a wire and stepped into them. “Whoever said that God was fair?”
“Not me. Glad I don’t have that job.”
“I don’t have that job, either.” He straightened. White-blond hair circled up from his stomach and feathered his pale chest. His muscles were taut and tense, the blue veins prominent. Her beautiful, boyish husband smiled briefly at her sarcasm, but his eyes were serious. “I would be careful about encouraging whatever it was you think you sensed. This ghost or spirit.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He took down an indigo-colored clerical shirt and shrugged it on. “In Ephesians it says we struggle not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities, the powers of this dark world. Against evil.”
She clapped a hand to her forehead. “So now I’m possessed?” Hysteria, she thought. In Greek the word meant “from the womb,” since supposedly only women could get hysterical. It was useless to try talking to Logan about these things. There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. She had let him have his devil, but he wouldn’t allow her a simple ghost.
Sighing, Logan sat at the foot of the bed and pulled on his socks. “You never knew your mother. I think you long for her.”
What did that have to do with Seth’s ghost? And yet she had told Logan once before about running away, about that sense of her mother calling to her. “You remember what we talked when we first talked about coming here?” she said. He rubbed her feet through the comforter, listening while she told him what she’d learned about her mother from Bynthia and Nora. Who her mother really was.
Logan was quiet for a long time. “Do you think it’s true?”
“Nora seemed sure of it.”
“I worry about you.” His hand smoothed the blanket over her legs, stopping just above her knee, squeezing. His voice gently insistent. “What if you don’t like the answers you find?”
She caught his hand, squeezed back. “We’re all mixed up in this, aren’t we?”
He sighed in answer. “Maybe there are some things we aren’t meant to know. And you think you’re hearing things again now in a moment of great stress. Seeing things.”
“I know what I saw.”
“It’s just this. If there really is something not of the living talking to you, then you should be careful. I believe this spirit means you harm.”
Clara let go of his hand and turned over on her side, away from him. Poltergeist: from the Low German, meaning “rumbling spirit.” She didn’t know what was worse, that Logan believed her or that he had made what she saw into something frightening.
On his way out, Logan paused at the door. “Let the dead be dead, Clara. Let the dead rest.”
“And what if I can’t?”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, SHE decided to paint the bedroom down the hall using the only passable shade of yellow she had found at Toby’s Hardware downtown. She needed to take her mind off her unfinished dissertation waiting in the desk drawer. The wolf stories her father had told her wandered through her imagination while what was supposed to be her true work, her lonely research, gathered dust. And now there was a job offer. In less than a week Clara would be a teacher again.
The paint can promised to evoke memories of a summer afternoon, but once applied looked like partially digested mustard. She had taped plastic sheeting to the hardwood floor and laid down newspaper, but the paint came off the brushes in thin, watery streams that spattered and speckled everything—the oak paneling, the floor, her arms and face and clothes.
Logan returned later that day, his tread heavy. For a thin man her husband