Hologram: A Haunting Read online

  Suddenly a movement or shadow at an upper window drew her attention. Meg squinted in the sunlight and shaded her eyes.

  There behind the filthy glass, Meg was certain, was the face of a child. A little boy and a mist of some kind that was enveloping him. He seemed to stare out at her with unnaturally large, pleading eyes—his visage like some old Renoir portrait—as if to call for help. Yes, the mouth seemed to be moving . . .

  The sun blinded Meg for a moment, and she blinked. When she looked again, the image had vanished.

  “Meg! Hurry up!” Kurt called. “We’re going in!”

  Inside the main house, she took the realtor aside. Mrs. Shaw laughed politely, her high platinum hair shifting slightly. “A child? In the coach house? Impossible, my dear. Impossible! I’ll tell you the truth, Mrs. Rockwell, the coach house is in falling-down condition, and it’s been sealed tighter than an Egyptian tomb. No child would be at play there, I can assure you. It must have been a reflection you saw.”

  “Yes, I suppose it was,” Meg said.

  But she knew otherwise.

  “Meg!” Kurt was calling from the second floor. “Wait till you see the size of the bathroom up here and the wonderful old fixtures!”

  “Coming!” Meg called back.

  Later, Meg herself saw the large padlock that secured the entrance to the second floor of the old coach house. As they entered and climbed the long narrow staircase, Mrs. Shaw recounted the building’s history. “It started out as a barn. This was all farmland, of course. Then it was used as a garage and charging facility for electric cars. But a fire took it to the ground. It was rebuilt as a coach house and the upstairs here was fitted out with this very quaint little one-bedroom apartment. Unfortunately, the building is no longer sound.”

  “Will we be able to rent it out—with repairs, of course?” Kurt asked.

  Mrs. Shaw shook her head. “The city has declared this a dangerous building. I’m just being honest with you, Mr. Rockwell. And, besides the block is zoned for single families. Any grandfather clause that might have pertained expired long ago.”

  “I see,” Kurt said, lacking the interest of a motivated buyer.

  Mrs. Shaw went on talking, pointing out how a large and modern garage might be erected on the site—once the building was razed.

  Meg walked into the small bedroom that fronted the house. She looked out the dirty window and down the drive to where she had stood earlier. The image of the child came back to her. She only now recalled that he had been wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Simultaneous with this image came a rush of cold that penetrated every part of her body. She had never felt such a cold.

  “This would make a great little apartment, huh, Meg?” Kurt had followed her into the room, startling her. “But don’t you think,” he whispered, “we’re wasting Mrs. Shaw’s time?”

  As she turned to him, she took a step away from the window. The cold dissipated, almost as if it had moved through her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “What? Oh, yes, just chilled a bit. Come over here, Kurt. Take a look out the window.”

  Kurt took Meg’s place at the window. “Yeah? Now what?”

  “Nothing. I just thought this view of the house was a good one.” Kurt had not experienced the cold—that was clear.

  “Yeah, it’s great architecture all the way around. I’ll give you that.”

  Kurt left the room to check out the little bathroom. “Well, this room is hopeless,” he called. “The ceiling has fallen in.”

  Mrs. Shaw appeared in the doorway. “You see? No child. It must have been light and shadows playing tricks on you. Nothing here, Mrs. Rockwell.”

  Meg smiled. She was not about to press the issue of the little boy. She would have seemed quite the fool to insist that someone had been there. Clearly, no one had lived or played there for many years.

  Meg didn’t mention it again, certainly not to Kurt. She had already decided that the house was to be theirs and wanted nothing to stand in the way.

  She would not admit it to another soul or even to herself, but somewhere, in the smallest, most secret chamber of her heart, Meg knew that she had seen a ghost.

  Meg started to leave the little bedroom. Something made her turn around in the doorway. She saw only a dingy room in serious disrepair. At that moment, the cold took her again—possessed her for but fleeting moments—and fell away.

  Something had moved through her and out into the hallway. Something not of this world.

  TWO

  Hammond, Indiana

  On a Saturday in April, at dusk, Meg stood on the second floor balcony of her house on Springfield Street, watching the Allied Van Lines truck pull away, heading east to the Illinois border, just a block away.

  The dream had materialized.

  Yet a sudden and inexplicable depression gripped her. She felt sick to her stomach, dizzy as she looked down at their tree-lined street. It wasn’t the old vertigo—it was a plunging rush of self-doubt, unusual for someone who seldom second-guessed herself in day-to-day situations.

  But, like her marriage to Kurt, this was of major import. What have I done, she asked herself. What have I done?

  She stared out at the old willow tree in the front yard. It and the house were theirs. Kurt had called her insistence in buying it her whim of iron.

  She had such whims, she knew.

  But was this merely a whim? Two doors down a family of four was getting out of their Honda Civic. The woman looked up and gave a little uncertain wave before guiding her little son and daughter into the house. The husband hadn’t noticed her. What was life to be like in this great, rambling sixteen-room house?

  She stared down the quiet street.

  Is this a mistake? Her stomach took on a dull, churning pain. Had Kurt been right in thinking Hammond was too far from their roots? What was it about the house that had prompted her to bully him?

  “Hi!”

  Meg looked across the street to where two little blond girls stood. They were about six-years-old and clearly identical twins. They waved.

  “Hi, yourself!” Meg called, waving. Small children seemed to be a part of the Springfield Street landscape. It would be a good place to raise her child.

  The girls giggled and ran away.

  She turned now, thankful for the diversion, and moved toward the French doors leading to the sitting room and master bedroom behind it. As she did so, her eyes swept the façade of the coach house, but she did not allow herself time to focus. In their subsequent trips to the house following their first visit with Mrs. Shaw, Meg had carefully avoided the coach house. She had no wish to see that face again, no wish to enter that structure again. Once Kurt’s condo was sold and money was more fluid, they would have the coach house bulldozed.

  Meg stood just inside the door, her eyes scanning the sitting room, then—visible through open mahogany double doors—the bedroom. Her heart tightened a bit. Furniture, boxes, and bags were everywhere. Any sense of organization had given way to the sheer quantity of things. Not only had things come from the condo, but both she and Kurt had also granted freedom to myriad items in storage—from Kurt’s first marriage and from her own collection of antiques and family heirlooms that had crowded her tiny one-bedroom on Halsted Street. The aggregate result was daunting.

  Rex, who loved exploring new surroundings and containers of all kinds, pounced happily from one box to another. Meg smiled at him, took in the whole space again, and sighed at the magnitude of the task ahead of her.

  The master plan was to put all the boxes on the second floor while they organized the downstairs rooms. For the time being, they would sleep in a back bedroom on the first floor, one that Mrs. Shaw said had once been the music room. Meg loved the horizontal panel of windows there, made up of clear and frosted leaded glass and green and
amber stained glass. She thought the design was Prairie.

  The piano, Meg told Kurt, had no doubt been positioned under the bank of windows. How did she know that, he had asked. Meg shrugged, calling it a logical guess.

  She did not say that she had been visited with the clearest possible mental image of a polished upright sitting there, the word Steinway in bright gold letters above the keyboard.

  Meg didn’t allow herself to dwell on the image. She had had such moments before. After her grandmother’s passing, she had helped her parents clear out her grandmother’s apartment, and she found she could picture in those rooms people and furniture out of the past. She had no idea whether such images had somehow crossed time’s threshold or had come from her imagination.

  She began to work on sorting through the boxes, tossing the empties down the rear stairway just off the enclosed back porch.

  An hour later, Kurt trudged up the front stairs. “The phone is on already.”

  “Good.”

  “Made the first phone call, too—the local pizza parlor. I’m starved!”

  “I am, too.” Meg smiled even though she was silently counting calories. Her waistline was thickening by the minute. She had already gained seven pounds in the first trimester. Seven pounds! But she would eat at least two pieces, three if they weren’t too big. She wasn’t about to dampen Kurt’s enthusiasm. Once he had made the leap, agreeing to buy the house, he began to invest his own enthusiasm in the move—even when the condo hadn’t sold and they had the chance to back out of the house deal.

  For the time being they had two residences. Things would be tight until the condo sold, especially with her cutting back to a part-time job. Only the day before, Kurt had suggested that he stay at the condo during the week until it sold. Meg didn’t like the idea but agreed. After all, it was Kurt who would have to commute by train every day.

  “I’ll go down and clear a spot for us to eat,” Kurt said, kissing Meg on the cheek.

  Meg watched him descend the steps. She anticipated—with ambivalence—seeing Kurt off on Monday morning. She would miss him, of course, but she savored the thought of having the house to herself. Why was that? Her mind leapt to a writer who wrote of houses as living entities with powers to welcome, protect, disturb, or alienate. He was English, she knew. She thought hard, but the name eluded her.

  Meg studied the twelve-foot-high panel of three stained glass windows that lighted the front staircase. The green and amber shades of the glass were beautiful. It awed her to look at it, filled her with warmth.

  Kurt came bounding upstairs again. He grabbed Meg’s hand. “Come downstairs, Meg!”

  “The pizza couldn’t get here that fast!”

  “No, it’s the buffet! Wait till you see. You’ll love it!”

  “What?” Meg laughed as he steered her down the stairs, past the windows on the landing. “Does it fit?”

  For weeks they had argued in friendly fashion as to whether Meg’s grandmother’s Empire buffet would fit into the alcove in the dining room. They had measured the buffet and the opening a half dozen times. The opening seemed no wider than the buffet.

  Kurt had been pessimistic about its chances. “Just sell it,” he joked, “we’ll find something else to fit—something maybe in Formica.”

  Meg had laughed, providing Kurt with a mock slap. But she knew Kurt could sell everything he owned and be content—as long as he had his computer, phone, and briefcase.

  Meg gasped now as she came into the dining room. Not only was the buffet snugged neatly into the elegant opening, but its dark oak matched the frames of the three little leaded glass windows high above it. “It fits!” she said. “Oh my God! It really fits!”

  “As if it belongs there,” Kurt replied. “And there isn’t an eighth of an inch to spare, I can tell you!”

  “I knew it would fit.”

  “So you said.” Kurt laughed. “But lots of things seem to fit in just so.” He stepped aside so that she could see into the half of the double parlor that fronted the dining room. “Take a look there, Lady Rockwell!”

  Meg stared in amazement. Kurt had wasted no time. In perfect proportion, her oriental carpet hugged the darkly varnished floor. On either side of the great red brick fireplace sat their two modern leather loveseats, new purchases. Kurt’s Aunt Nelly’s rocker claimed a corner of the bay. And in the bay’s center, on a walnut Eastlake table, sat Meg’s most cherished possession: an antique lamp with a base made from a Rookwood vase and an all-glass domed shade, both components handpainted in a vivid blue and purple iris pattern. The glass dome had what one antique dealer termed a chipped ice effect, one that sent fractured slivers of light out into the bay.

  Meg walked to the lamp and gently touched the shade. “How beautiful it must be from the street!” she exclaimed.

  “Like everything else, it just fits, Meg. I bet that lamp is almost as old as the house.”

  Meg stopped to think. The lamp had come with a short oral history by way of her mother. Her heart stopped for a moment.

  “What is it, Meg? You look odd.”

  “My grandparents received it for their wedding, Kurt.”

  “Yeah?—So?”

  “Kurt, they were married in 1910.”

  “Now that’s a strange coincidence. The same year the house was built!”

  Meg slept well. Despite their exhaustion, they christened the house with lovemaking.

  The bed frame had yet to be assembled, so Meg and Kurt lounged in a bed close to the floor that first morning, playing with Rex. They were in no hurry to get up.

  Meg thought how in less than six months—God willing!—they would be playing with their own child. She was at last going to experience birth and motherhood. She would hold her own child in this bed, in this house.

  Suddenly, Rex’s body became tense, his ears on alert. He bounded out of the room and ran through the hallway to the front of the house.

  “What’s gotten into the cat?” Meg asked.

  “Cats do that, Meg.”

  “Not Rex so much. It’s strange. I’m going to see what he’s up to.” She was pulling herself up from the low, frameless bed when she heard the sound.

  It was a human sound, she was certain, high, tremulous, yet exuberant, exclaiming just once: “Kitty, oooh, kitty!”

  Meg stood over the bed, paralyzed, one arm in her robe. “Did you hear that?” she cried, turning to Kurt.

  “What?” Kurt was wiping the sleep from his eyes.

  “That sound, that voice, didn’t you hear it? Kurt, it was a child’s voice!”

  “Oh, Meg, it was Rex. You know how cats often sound like babies.”

  Not Rex, Meg wanted to say. She thought better of it.

  Instead, she hurried out into the parlor, pulling on her robe as she went.

  Rex stood in the middle of the room, staring up at her, the amber eyes huge and his back arched high in fear or caution.

  “Everything all right?” Kurt called. “It was probably a neighbor kid outside, Meg.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Meg said. Pulling the robe around herself, she went into the kitchen to scramble eggs.

  THREE

  The train had been on time: 7:32 a.m. If Kurt resented his first commute, he gave no indication.

  Returning home from dropping him off, Meg drove her blue Saturn south on Hohman, through downtown Hammond. It didn’t look too bad, she told herself, despite much of what she saw. Stores were nearly extinct, victims of the craze for malls in the 70s and 80s. Empty lots stood where small businesses, theaters, banks, and small hotels once provided a grid of urban activity. Three huge department stores had fallen away to broken shells, corroding in the sun and rain, waiting to be demolished.

  Meg did a double take when she passed the old Fred Astaire studio. The tra
ffic light went to red and she braked. She turned her head now and studied the structure. The studio comprised the entire second floor of a block of stores. She looked up to where the tall broken windows of the ballroom allowed for the wind to blow in against the once-elegant, once-red drapes. Nearly every small city had its Fred Astaire Studio, she thought, in a happier era, before changing times and insolvency. What had become of those armies of people who mamboed, fox-trotted, and waltzed their way through the post-war period? Damn few were still dancing. Not even Fred himself.

  Is there dancing on the other side? Meg laughed out loud at the whimsical thought. The light flashed green and Meg stepped on the gas, putting the thought and studio behind her.

  According to Mrs. Shaw, there was hope for Hammond. The mayor had initiated a program to attract white collar businesses, to some success. A Thai restaurant just recently opened and seemed to be doing well. Incredibly, hardware and plumbing supply stores had survived on the sheer tenacity of their octogenarian owners. One of the local banks had just opened a branch adjacent to and within blocks of the house on Springfield Street, and a new Federal courthouse had just been built.

  Meg put the car in gear, driving past St. Margaret Mercy, a Hammond anchor for a century. She wondered how social work was addressed there, then put it out of her mind. She was through with hospital social work. She longed for the freedom of part-time social work in home care. The interview the week before had gone extremely well, and Meg knew the job was hers even before the call came two days later.

  At her own request, she was not to begin her job for two weeks, and she looked forward to the interim as a bit of a vacation in which she would settle into the house and into a decidedly slow Hammond pace.

  It would be a luxury, too, to leave Liz Claiborne hanging in the closet. Slacks and wash and wear blouses would be the order of the day for house calls, jeans and sweats for home.