The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,1
sailors; and the peak-roofed storefronts all along Albion Street; and St. Clements Church, its white steeple driving away the last of the Indians; and finally the temple the Chinamen built, with its roofs curled like red shoes left out in the sun. And closer in, on the first hill after the fine houses of the merchants, Evergreen Cemetery was laid out. Evergreen, where even now my poor family rests, broken footstones all in a row.
Above the marble monuments of the wealthy, the gulls rooked and called, and the white-waisted clouds floated, while down in the cove the doghole schooners bobbed at anchor, creaking, and over at the Point, the lighthouse swung its jeweled lamp in a wide circle, warning of hidden dangers.
Just because you can’t see a thing doesn’t mean she isn’t there.
The hunter has parked his bright car at the foot of Evergreen Hill and is coming, now, from the direction of the cemetery toward me. I know what he is. I’ve seen and heard a hunter’s boots before. They make a sound like a sawblade scraping on sand. This one, he’s tall and bulky and box-jawed. He squints at the house, his cheeks taking up the slack skin under his beard. I’m standing in the rose garden in my white dress with my red ribbon twining though my hair, and a little shiver runs through me, a piece of my own will. I hold steady, the way you do when you know a wave is coming, and you lock your knees to meet it. The sandy street leads him to the wrought iron gate at the edge of the garden. He opens it, then turns around to make sure he’s latched the groaning lock securely behind him, but maybe also to be certain he’s alone. So this is a hunter, I think, who watches his back. He looks up and sees the black-railed tower of the house, the steeple meant to rival the church’s with its white shingles layered like gulls’ feathers, though here the paint is starting to flake off and show the older white underneath, the ghost of its old self. He narrows his eyes again, and I see that his skin is rough—a working man’s face—and that his clothes are black and simple—a working man’s clothes—and that although he is, to be sure, one of the living, he’s one of the dying, too, because there is gray at his temples and gray blurring his whiskers, his own flake showing.
He turns his peppered cheek to his left, then to his right, and sees, not me, but the great bundle of life beside him: one of our famed Lambry rose bushes. He reaches his hand out, entranced, cupping one perfect, yellow bud. A breeze coming from far out at sea stirs its petals and my dress. And it’s this flutter of wind, he might decide, and be wrong, that pushes the black thorn deep into his skin, under his sleeve, at the wrist.
The name the living give to such blows is “accident.”
I watch him lick the blood from the root of his palm. I see the flash of silver inside his sleeve. It’s that metal band these hunters all wear. The thing that marks them.
Then, with a motion as calm as when he opened the gate, he takes the yellow Lambry bud and lifts it gently back into its place in the overgrown, latticed arbor, as though putting a child back in its high chair, and he turns away to move farther along the garden. As though I hadn’t just warned him not to.
I’ll need to adjust my thinking, then. His is the strut of a man who takes the first cut lightly. Or maybe he’s like me. Emma Rose Finnis. Irish born. Irish stubborn. Raised to be staunch in the face of wounds. The bells of St. Clements are ringing, and the sun can’t make up its mind about where it wants to burn, dancing in and out of the mists over the cove. But I’ve made up my mind already. I’ll keep this man close.
2
It’s ten in the morning by the church bells, and in the cove the seals are moaning and sliding off their barnacled black rocks in search of some breakfast. My hearing is so much finer than when I walked alive and with a heartbeat. It’s something I’ve had a century to ponder: how much does the beating heart of one creature drown out the heart of another?