The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,19

into the bathroom.

Dirt. Dirt. Dirty. Why that word? Why, when all we’re trying to do is survive? You just watch, the village gossips used to say about me, now her father’s dead and she’s in the boardinghouse, she’ll fall into dirty ways with that pretty face of hers. She will, she’ll get herself into trouble, turn herself into a slatternly thing, slopping around with mill hands and who knows what. When all I ever wanted was to take a long hot bath, too, after a day of cleaning and cooking and filling the plates of men who stank, handing me their laundry, their drawers stained with ash and pitch, in those days when the smoke from the mills hung over the village, clinging to your neck, to everyone and everything, rolling in billows through the doors. I sweated, so of course I stank at the end of a day—just like the loggers who came from ferreting out the trees with sticks of dynamite, sweating and grinding them downriver toward the mills and the men who took what had been living and whole and turned it into one dead thing only, and that the same thing over and over again. The same plank of wood, the one grand lush thing turned into a thousand dead, dull things. That’s how the living think of us. That we’re all the same.

But I wasn’t any thing. My black hair was long and shining. My back was sturdy, my hands and nails clean and clipped. My face, shaped like a heart, mirrored my father’s chin, with his cleft in it.

I run away from Ellen, leaving her to her bath, and wind through the dead rows of the forest, dragging dirt with the edge of my skirt. The earth might touch me, but it doesn’t stain me. I spy the skeleton of an old, cracked greenhouse, tucked in its shadowy dell, a place once used by the sellers of smoking pipes and forgetfulness in these woods. Now its door hangs from one loose hinge. I go inside, rest in its room of empty clay pots. But only for an instant. I don’t, won’t linger in such places. I can’t. Nothing lasts, nothing can live in a hollow place. Only loneliness. And it’s loneliness that makes a soul easier to snuff out.

Like that poor boy in the mine.

And yet this is where Pratt thinks he’ll find me—like any other ghost, hiding in a ruin, in an empty building, in a deserted hut, along a wall of mirrors, in a buried shaft. I look around at the abandoned shell of the greenhouse. But what—for I do have a mind, Mr. Pratt—what if a hunter could be tricked into thinking he’d found the very thing he thought he was looking for, in the very place where he thought he might find it?

What then?

For it’s sure, my Da used to say to me, that there’s nothing simpler than to give a man what he wants.

So. Give it.

7

I walk in darkness under the sparkling drops of the chandelier.

I pass like foam over the deep Turkish carpets and glide along the smooth paneling, my sleeve brushing it.

I pass in front of the fine mirrors and the carefully framed watercolors.

It’s night again. And this is my place, now. My home. Lambry House.

I always dreamed I’d live in a fine house, someday. When I was young, not yet nineteen, I’d walk back from Evergreen Hill with a basket on my arm, after tending to the graves of my family, and I’d glance up and see the elegant globes of light in the Lambry parlors. I’d think: how wonderful it must be to live in such brightness. I’d stop in front of the closed garden gate, its metal glistening with dew, and study how grandly the white pillars held the porch roof up, like a kind of throne, with fine copper gutters trimmed all around it, and I’d wonder what it must be like to be someone whose rainwater passed through money.

A servant would move into the light. Mrs. Broyle, the housekeeper, or the girl who served the meals, who was Irish, like me. Sometimes, I saw the Chinaman who took the ashes out. Sometimes, the lace curtains in the Red Parlor would be pulled back, and I could see deep inside, into the dining room, where the men lounged in their smoking jackets and the Lambry girls, in gowns as pale as honey, stood by the mirrors and seemed to chatter with their own