The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,13

falling off? Most of the ladder steps are gone, too.”

“Then make another note, please. I’ll need a ladder.”

“But—”

“It’s a space.” He points to it. “It’s a shell. I told you. I’ll need to check it out. I’m not feeling much more around the house. Is there an attic?” He moves around the walk and scans the gabled roof.

“So you might find this interesting. This house doesn’t have one, technically. The Lambrys were ultra-modern. For their time. Those gables distract from what’s really a low peak, there”—she points between the brick chimneys—“and underneath the sub-roof every corner used to be stuffed with wool batten to keep the cold and wet out. Now it’s all high-tech fiberfill, of course. But you still can’t squeeze even a hand in. Cutting edge at the turn of the century.”

“And what about that oddity?” He looks down at the small, wooden-railed balcony off the second-floor gallery where more of Alice’s paintings hang.

“That’s an old balcony that got left in place during the remodel twenty years ago. It’s older than the Glass Room. It used to be the main viewpoint toward the cove, before this widow’s walk and the Glass Room were built. Alice loved to add things, but she didn’t or wouldn’t tear anything off.”

Because I told her not to. Let the balcony float, I whispered to her. It can float above the glass without falling in.

Pratt leans over. “So that’s why it’s stuck there over the dome.”

“What did you mean by you’re not feeling much around the house? Are you disappointed, Mr. Pratt?”

“Why don’t we make it Philip, Ellen. I have the feeling we’re going to be working together on this for a while. No, I’m not disappointed. I would say I’m … puzzled. There isn’t much to go on, yet.”

“I’m actually kind of glad. I didn’t want the house to be infested.”

“It isn’t.”

“You do sound disappointed,” she says, wonderingly.

“Because it’s my job to find what frightens people and lay it to rest.”

She leans her elbow on the railing. “I don’t know. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around what you do, Philip.” She looks out, and her bobbed hair blows toward the cliffs. “It must be a strange feeling. I mean, not just for you, but for the person you’re looking for, too. I try to imagine going along, you’re living, and then suddenly you’re dead, and then suddenly you find out, oh-oh, I’m not dead, but I’m not alive, either. And then you find out someone is trying to kill you all over again. I hope it never happens to me.”

I hope not either, truly, little Ellen. It’s not for the faint of heart.

“Then try hard not to become a ghost, Ellen.”

“Okay, but how do I do that?”

“Try to live a happy life.”

“Or else live forever?”

“No. Not that. Trust me. Forever’s a terrible, lonely place. You see it in their eyes.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re the one making it lonely for them. Killing all their company.”

He straightens in his coat at that jab, almost stiffening. Good on you, I nod at her, though she can’t see me. Not so faint of heart, after all.

“What I do,” Pratt insists, “is bring peace to the living as well as to the dead.”

It’s what they all say. It’s what they all tell themselves.

“But what if the dead don’t want your peace?”

“They do. Even if they don’t always know it.”

“But how can you know?”

I’ve wrapped myself, coldly, around the peak of the steeple, where I can’t feel them or what they are saying so much, resting my cheek against the point of the weathervane, turning it.

“Because being a ghost is pure torture.”

“You’re absolutely sure about that.”

“I can make it clearer. If you really want me to.”

In the shadow of the vane, his back to the cove, Pratt stretches his neck out, loosening it in the way I used to see the priest at St. Clements do when he was about to read the catechism.

There was a time, Pratt tells Ellen, when he wasn’t considered one of the very best. In the years when he was a young practitioner and had to pick up work wherever he could, he agreed to do nearly any job. His assignments included dirty missions in settings older hunters didn’t stoop to, hauntings that were messy and tricky.

In one case he took on, Pratt agreed to settle a haunt out in the gold country. The abandoned mine had been sitting empty for decades, but flush with cash the new owners had high