The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler Page 0,74
temple. They’ve visited the thin-columned house at the end of Main Street that keeps the files and photographs preserved by the historical commission. They’ve driven over to St. Clements Church, to check the parish records, trying to guess at her name—my name.
Emma, I could tell them. Sometimes, when I’m tired of being hunted, I almost want to. Just to hear my name spoken again. Emma Rose Finnis. That’s who I was and always tried to be—a friend, a hard worker, honest.
They sit together in Pratt’s car, going over their notes. There’s a lingering stiffness between them, like the tightness over a healing cut.
“All right, Ellen?”
“I’m fine.”
“Need to call it a day? Go home?”
“No. Where would I go?” She taps her slate. “Nothing’s safe till we finish this. I want to finish. What do we do now? I don’t see a sign of any missing girl who might have wanted to haunt the Lambry family.”
“Unless we consider their housekeeper, Mrs. Broyle.”
“She died an old woman. Her grave is in Evergreen. Where else can we look?”
“In the gaps. The empty spaces.”
“Well, we’ve done that, haven’t we?”
“A different kind of gap is where we are now. The gap in a story.”
“So how do we fill it?”
“My answer might surprise you.”
“Try me.”
“If the head is getting you nowhere, go with the heart.” He taps his chest.
Is that what he thought he was doing, whenever he stroked his shirtfront?
“The Benito Gazette,” he says, looking out his windshield, “reported the Lambrys lost their son aboard the schooner Lorna.”
“But the Gazette listed all travelers in their shipping news section, always.” She checks her device again.
“And they had no female passenger listed on board, that voyage.”
“The schooners were packed with cargo, the docent said at the historical commission.”
“‘Trains of the sea,’ they were called.” Pratt frowns. “And piled high with lumber, more than any other commodity. Wood was given precedence over human cargo. Tickets for passengers were expensive.”
“Mrs. Fanoli stressed the girl we’d be looking for wouldn’t have had very much money. She’d be working class.”
“A ‘slattern,’ she said they called her.”
“A slut?” Ellen says the word as though it means nothing.
“Or maybe only someone who sweated at her work. But a dirty name. Who did the dirty work in those days?”
“The washerwomen pounding the laundry.” She flips through the black and white pictures. Of girls like me and Franny. “Cooking in the camps and in the boardinghouses. Tending to everything no one else would do, or wanted to.”
“And how do you think they felt doing that?”
It felt unimportant, I think, sitting right behind them.
Ellen closes her eyes and leans her head back against Pratt’s fine, stitched leather. “I know exactly how they felt. At least, I think I do. I had to tend to someone all the time. Do everything. Because nobody else would. It makes you feel like nothing.” She opens her eyes. “It makes you feel, if no one notices you, small.”
“And when you felt that way,” Pratt asks, “what did you want to do?”
“Escape. Get away.”
“But what if you couldn’t?”
“I did as soon as I could … As soon as I … As soon as there was nothing left for me to do.”
“You say you left when there was nothing more for you to do. And then you left for somewhere peaceful. You told me that.”
“But,” she says and sits up sharply, turning, “that’s why I don’t think whoever we’re looking for was on the Lorna. Because the Gazette said it was only taking a special load of lumber north to the fort and then turning around and coming right back to the village. It was just going to another roughneck place. An army post. Not even as nice as Benito. You saw the pictures at the history museum. Half of Fort Kane was nothing but mud and canvas. I wouldn’t go there. Much less only to come back.”
“But would that have mattered to you, if you just wanted to get away?”
“Not if I had any idea my ship was going to founder at—” She stops herself, blinking.
“Go on, Ellen. It’s all right. We have to use our instincts for other lives. It’s all we have. That’s what we’re doing, right now.”
They sit silently for a moment under the cover of Pratt’s roof. I don’t know what’s coming next, but I need to stay close. I need to be ready.
“The boat never got any farther than Lighthouse Point,” Ellen says.