The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,2

and joy now. I can feel, twisting toward the smell of the headlands, each wildflower rubbing up against the other. That ticking sound—it’s a poppy opening up to the June sun. That whisper—it’s the mustard seed losing its buttery fluff and color. I sense, too, the dirty bits of a tern’s nest loose in the wind and the stench of a single starfish dying on the rocks, having aimed too high.

I can smell the mossy rankness that clings to our village’s old-fashioned water towers, loitering like headless windmills behind the houses. On some, the rotten wooden tanks have fallen away or been pulled clean down, and shingled rooms built in between the struts, bed-and-breakfast nooks for the tourists. These visitors are the ones I can hear stretching and yawning in the distant yards, as they open their heather-wreathed doors, hungry.

I cross the lawn ahead of the hunter, moving along the flagstone path and onto the curved porch, drawing aside as he comes close. He’s done nothing dangerous yet, as he nears the steps, only wiping his hand along the smooth white railing as he climbs, lifting his fingertips and rubbing the grit between them. He squints again and turns and looks back across the lawn as though gauging the distance between gate and arbor and house. He listens and glances down at his coat pocket before taking out his black device. Someone is calling for Mr. Philip Pratt. I know his name, because I’ve heard the real estate agent (the little one who always comes to the house now) say it. He taps the device and puts it away and looks off in the direction of Evergreen, the cemetery. He might look and look and look, I think, and yet he’ll still know nothing of all the poor souls who sleep there. The loggers and the millers, the sailors and the boardinghouse keepers, the maids, and the dead washerwomen like my mother. I can feel myself beginning to grow angry, upset, which isn’t wise with a hunter near—giving way to anger gives up the ghost, as they say. I know I must calm myself and leave the porch and rise up toward the strengthening sun, whose light keeps me safe. I sit on the steeple and wait. Like all of his kind, this Mr. Pratt won’t be able to see me unless I’m foolish enough to let anger paint my face, my jaw, my father’s cleft chin, and my wide Finnis forehead, stark white.

Any ghost who hopes to hold her own against a hunter has to know how to still the rage inside her and blend with the weather of every moment. And so I do. I still myself. The sun is cheerful, bright enough to screen me. How odd it is that most of the living think we spirits live in shadows. Why, when we are always trying to hold back the darkness?

Pratt will be waiting now for the young real estate agent, Miss Ellen DeWight. I’ve been watching her all these weeks. She’s a small, sweet thing, trying hard to make her way in a world that will tell you when you’re small, you’re nothing at all. I remember how she went around the property talking to herself that first day she came to the Lambry House. Bucking herself up, reminding herself not to be nervous that she’d landed such a prize but to stay sharp and not be flustered by the new people about to come calling. She’d stood on the fine, wide porch that noonday with me beside her and waited, sweating, her little suit buckling at the ankles and shoulders, her face like a folded dinner napkin, white and fresh but with lines on either side of her mouth, as though her lips had been pressed for a long time into a single, careful shape.

Her telephone device had rung, and she’d pulled it from her leather satchel and answered the woman on the other end.

“… No. No. I won’t overdo it, don’t worry. I have a good feeling about this. I really do. They said they’ve been waiting for a property exactly like this one. I will. You can count on me. I’ll be sure to call you right after. Okay. The office is fine. Everything’s fine. Have fun in LA.”

She put the thing away and looked at her watch, puckering her small mouth, but also keeping it steady. It’s her littleness, maybe, that makes me feel so free and easy around her. I haven’t