Free Emily's Ghost by Antoinette Stockenberg Page B

for the first time
that she was wearing jeans and a shirt. God, she'd been truly
exhausted last night. Automatically she tried to slip her feet into
the slippers that hadn't been placed neatly by the bed before she
turned in. Instead she kicked a can, which went rolling off to the
side.
    A can of mace.
    Oh, good god. No. No. I
can't go through this again, she thought,
free-falling into hysteria.
    "Come out!" she cried
impulsively. "Come out and get it over with!"
    She was standing now, and
her head was splitting as if she'd been on the beach in the sun all
day. She actually stamped her foot. The pain in her head doubled.
"Fergus O'Malley!" she screamed, even though she felt extremely
silly doing it. She glared at the open door.
    When he sauntered through
it her first thought was, I am making this
hallucination happen. This is the first step in the descent into
madness.
    He spoke. "What's the hue
and cry?" he asked, surprised. "I was letting ye sleep as ye
implored me, and now ye sound like I've gone and stole yer
horse."
    He looked real -- even younger in the
daylight, more hopeful somehow.
    "Are you here or are you
not?" she demanded. "If I'm crazy, then tell me and I'll go back to
New Hampshire and my people will take care of me." She gave him a
lofty look, fully expecting an answer to that.
    He shrugged. "Ye seem all
right to me. A little prickly, maybe."
    What am I doing? I'm
asking my hallucination if I'm hallucinating! "Look, O'Malley, if you're real--really a ghost -- then prove
it. Make something levitate. Tell me something about myself no one
else knows."
    "Can't do either one, as
it happens." He rubbed his chin as if he were due for a shave, then
said, "Ah. I've got it." He glanced around the room, then settled
on the stripped-pine dresser that was her grandmother's. He stared
at it intently, and the room began to fill with the blinding,
hurting light of the night before.
    "Not that, not that!" she
cried, shielding her eyes.
    "Ye want the bloody proof
or not?" he answered, annoyed; but the light subsided.
    When Emily opened her eyes
again she saw, burned into the top drawer of the honey-colored
pine, the name "Fergus O'Malley" in a childish, scrawling
signature.
    "I never went but to fifth
grade," O'Malley explained self-consciously.
    Stunned, Emily approached
her grandmother's bureau and put a finger to the deeply scorched
drawer. It was hot to the touch. Her nostrils filled with the smell
of charred wood. From behind her she heard O'Malley's voice,
irritated and impatient once more, say, "Now. Can we get to
work?"

Chapter 6
     
    "Well, well: designer
furniture," Emily quipped; but all the while she was
thinking , That drawer front could just as
well have been my thigh . The thought sent
her spinning.
    "That bureau was my
grandmother's." Her voice came out high and shrill and full of
crazy indignation. "Erase it, please."
    O'Malley's surprised
chuckle gave her courage.
    "I mean it! We have to
have some rules."
    The ghost continued to be
amused. "Such as?"
    "Such as, you may not harm
me, or anything of mine -- or any one of mine."
    "Or else?"
    "This investigation
will not go
forward."
    She watched the muscles in
his clenched jaw grind her impulsive threat into dust. At last he
spoke. "So ye think ye cannot be replaced?"
    She seized the chance to
protect herself from his wrath once and for all. "That's right.
Even assuming it was possible for you to get someone else to take
over the job, who would do it? Not a lawyer--no one's going to
do pro bono work
for a ghost, not when he can be pulling down two hundred dollars an
hour."
    "An hour? When I didn't
earn that much in a year?"
    "Yeah, well, different
dollars. A doctor won't do it, either. They save bodies, not souls.
Librarian? Too meek. A man of the cloth? Maybe, but most of 'em
would balk at wearing the necklace. No, I'm the one you
need."
    "You didn't think so last
night," the ghost said sullenly.
    "I was tired last night.
What about it, O'Malley? Deal? No harm to