Free Bristol House by Beverly Swerling Page B

way. Annie, you’re sure?”
    “I’m sure.”
    “Fair enough, I’ll let myself out.” He started for the door, then turned back. “Annie—”
    She looked at him expectantly.
    “I think you’re very brave.”
    Something about the way he said it—rather like the end of a story. She perceived a considerable amount of finality in the sound of the door closing behind him.

7
    Most of Wednesday she didn’t get out of bed. The white light shining beneath the door had been vivid and completely apparent to her, but Geoffrey Harris, who had appeared seconds later and while it was still bright, had not seen it.
    The only conclusion was that the ghost was speaking—or appearing, or chanting, or shining—directly to Annie Kendall. Whatever the monk wanted, and regardless of whether the direct line of sight between his ancient Charterhouse and the back bedroom of this flat was what made his visitations possible, his intention was to communicate with her. Moreover, in the past week he’d proven he was in charge. He came and went as he pleased. The phenomena that accompanied him could open windows and fling solid candlesticks across the room, even whirl her around until she lost consciousness, then leave his calling card in the form of red scrape marks on her body. This ghostly monk was not something she could study, not something or someone she could tame with her intelligence or the power of scholarship. Rather he had so far managed to control their encounters. If she gave in, followed wherever the ghost wanted to lead her, where would she end up? Not, she suspected, with the solution to the mystery she’d come to London to solve. Not with anything she could publish in a scholarly journal and thereby earn the renewed respect of her peers.
    Days like this she always went back to the custody hearing, to Zachary Johnson’s statement to the judge, the words that ever since were permanently entwined in the double helix that was the Annie-ness of Annie. “Her apartment reeked of urine and feces. There was no food in the kitchen, and the only bottle of milk in the refrigerator was sour. My son was wet and hungry and alone, crying in a crib he shared with one tattered blanket.”
    They’d never lived together, almost no one knew they were married, and she hadn’t seen him in months when their son was born; nonetheless she couldn’t bear to write “father unknown” on Ari’s birth certificate. She told the truth. So Zak had standing and the court granted him custody. It was an absolutely logical thing to do.
    “Kick the booze, Annie,” Zak said on the courtroom steps. “Find a program. Go into detox. Whatever works.” The social worker was waiting for him, holding in her stranger’s arms a three-year-old Ari who struggled to escape and cried for his mother. “Straighten up,” Zak said, before he turned away, “then get in touch. We’ll work something out.”
    She had tried, a little bit at least. Nothing took. Instead she had used that searing, unspeakable loss as an excuse for six more years of drunken havoc. Then four years ago she had walked into an AA meeting in Boston, and by some miraculous gift of undeserved grace she was saved. But by then what Ari wanted mattered as much as any arrangement she and Zak might make. And what he wanted was not her.
    Never again, she had promised herself, absolutely never again would she lose herself in that way, cede control of her life. She was not about to break that vow because of a ghost.
    Around four she got up to make herself a sandwich. That’s when she closed the kitchen door facing the back hall. From now on she’d only go into the kitchen from the dining room.
    She carried the sandwich back to the bedroom and ate it while walking up and down in front of the remarkable black and white mural with its jumble of tiny, detailed London scenes. If she focused on just one, she could sometimes identify a corner of Trafalgar Square or a bit of Piccadilly Circus. The scenes,