Hologram: A Haunting Read online

  “That word fits, I guess.” Wenonah’s eyes narrowed. “Are you avoiding the other word?”

  “Ghost?”

  “Yeah, ghost.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “How strong do you feel, Meg?”

  “Strong enough not to run away after a week. I fully intend to have my baby here!”

  “Then do it, Meg. To hell with the damn ghost! Besides, it doesn’t seem to be a malevolent one.”

  “Malevolent?”

  “Yeah, like a poltergeist.”

  “Wait a minute, Win, what’s the difference?”

  Wenonah furrowed her brow. “I’ve heard a hundred theories, all different. But many consider ghosts to be the spirits of dead people and that poltergeists are disturbances that draw energy from the living who are sometimes called mediums.”

  “Which is this?”

  Wenonah shrugged. “Don’t look at me, Meg. I said I ain’t no expert. But the two are not totally dissimilar to one another. They both draw energy. That’s why you got the cold sensation. They both might start small, like the tapping you heard.”

  “Or the music?” Meg swallowed hard. “Are you implying they get bolder in what they do?”

  Wenonah attempted a smile. “Perhaps.”

  “But how . . . if it keeps acting out . . . And if Kurt— ”

  “Wait a minute, girl!” Wenonah’s eyes went wide. “You mean Kurt hasn’t experienced anything?”

  Meg cast her eyes down and shook her head.

  “And you haven’t told him?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, Meg!”

  “I know, I know. It’s just that my whim got us here in the first place. And I’m not sure that he’ll believe me as readily as you have.”

  “You’re right there. He is a little light on the soul side.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Sorry, nothing offensive. Just that he deals best with things in three dimensions.”

  “Oh, I guess you’re right. I would want him to believe me, but on the other hand, if he does, I’m afraid he’ll insist on selling the house.”

  Wenonah clucked her tongue. “You’re going to have to take the chance. Meg, you’ll have to trust in him a bit, yes?”

  Meg didn’t answer.

  “Meg, you can’t carry this yourself!”

  “I know.” Meg forced a laugh. “That’s why I called you, girlfriend.”

  “Me? Good god! What can I do?”

  “I don’t know. Give me advice?”

  “Look at me, Meg.” Wenonah’s voice deepened. “Good. Okay, here it is. Tell Kurt. Everything, do you hear? That’s the first of two pieces of advice I have for you.”

  Meg shrank back in her chair. “Tell him about seeing the face in the window before we bought? Oh my God, he’ll kill me.”

  “Then you can truly see the secrets of the other side. Listen, Meg, I don’t see how you can be selective about it. The truth’s the truth. You’ve got to tell him.”

  “Shit.”

  “Well, excuse me, Margaret Flaherty Rockwell from the school of the good sisters, what did you say?”

  “Shit.”

  “Why, I’m shocked!”

  “Don’t mess with me, Wenonah. This is serious. . . . What is your other gem of advice, pray tell? Pack up?”

  “Well, after you’ve rinsed the soap out of your foul mouth, I want you to get yourself to the library. I’m sure Hammond has a library—yes?”

  “Well, yes, I guess so.”

  “See what you can find out.”

  “Find out?”

  “About Hammond, about the house, its former residents, the past. And maybe that flyer in your dream! That’s something very specific. It may be a creation of your imagination but, you know, opera houses were fairly numerous years ago.”

  “The library—of course!”

  Wenonah shrugged and stood to take her leave. “Merely talk show trivia I’ve picked up.”

  “I should have thought of that.”

  Meg stood and they were starting for the stairs when Wenonah turned to Meg. “I lied—there’s one more bit of advice I have.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s fear, Meg, fear. You can’t let it in. It will take over.”

  Meg nodded, sighed. “You know, the dream, that’s the strangest part, Win, the dream. I get the sense that I’m dreaming, over and over, someone else’s dream, another woman’s dream.”

  “Holy cannoli, Meg. You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Well, it’s true. I’m dreaming someone else’s dream. I’m sure of it!”

  “Christ!—Or you’ve tapped into her life!”

  “Her life?” Meg asked. Wenonah had delivered the word like a slap. Meg grasped her friend by the wrist, preventing her from descending the steps. “Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

  “No, honey, that’s a puzzle for the experts,” Wenonah admitted, her dark fathomless eyes fastening on Meg. “Christ Almighty!”

  SIX

  Wenonah Smythe absentmindedly dodged both Monday’s afternoon traffic and the lake wind on Irving Park Road as she dashed toward the White Hen Pantry in the Lake Park Plaza building. The brutally cold wind whipped in off the lake—just a block away—and was sometimes strong enough to knock a person down. Wenonah took it in stride.

  She was again thinking about Meg. The visit the previous Thursday had been an upsetting one. She had never seen her friend quite so—vulnerable. If only she and Kurt had not bought a house, if only they had stayed at Lake Park Plaza. Or, better, bought something larger at the Pattington.

  The warmth of the little convenience store was a blessed relief. Wenonah shopped here only in an emergency, such as the weather today. The prices were too high. She found it inconvenient to pay the price of convenience. Her grandmother had taught her well how to pinch a penny. Wenonah still clipped coupons and went to a three-dollar second-run movie house.

  Just the same, she was a familiar face here because the store had a Cash Station, an attraction that drew her like a gumball machine had once done.

  The store was busy. Wenonah made a bee line for the cash station machine. Only one person was ahead of her. An old white man stood working the device as if it were a slot machine that refused to pay off. A minute or two passed as his difficulties in mastering the system increased.

  Wenonah watched as his face colored slightly. She tried to remain patient, absently watching the bald head glow hotly under the fluorescent lighting.

  Suddenly a voice pierced her consciousness. A voice she recognized.

  Kurt Rockwell’s.

  Wenonah turned about to see him at the tiny deli and sandwich counter and was about to call out a greeting—no one had ever accused her of being shy—when she realized that he was in conversation with a woman.

  Wenonah stared for a moment.

  A blonde. Shapely, animated. Expensive coat. Educated. Beautiful. Wenonah was adept at immediate assessments. Working in ER at Ravensfield had taught her.

  She turned back to the machine. The old man was finally finishing up.

  Meg strained to hear the conversation. It was light, something about cheeses and wine, it seemed. She tried to discern the tone. Was this pleasant, pass-the-time counter conversation? Or did he know her? Neighbor? She was not a fellow worker—Wenonah knew everyone at the hospital.

  Or are they here together?

  Wenonah froze at the thought.

  The old man turned around now and apologized for having taken so long, launching into a convoluted story of what he had been doing wrong and admonishing Wenonah not to make the same mistake.

  Wenonah smiled solicitously, suppressing her desire to tell the old geezer
that she could probably take the machine apart and put it back together. The fool was keeping her from hearing the conversation at the deli counter. She wanted to reach out and grab one of his jug ears and send him toward the door.

  Simultaneously, she wondered whether Kurt had seen her. Had the old man brought her to his attention?

  Or is the blonde too riveting?

  The man was finally leaving. Wenonah stepped up to the machine. She would take her sweet time.

  She inserted her card, entered her code. She paused then, listening, trying to fasten on the voices on the other side of the aisle.

  Presently she heard steps behind her. She turned around.

  A woman stood behind her, waiting for the machine. Wenonah managed a thin smile, then turned back.

  Damn!

  Wenonah lengthened her stay at the machine by selecting several unneeded transactions. As she played for time, she thought she could hear the woman behind her periodically sighing. Too bad, she thought, at least she didn’t have Chuckles the Clown in front of her.

  She finished up now. Turning around, she saw that Kurt had his back to her. His words were muffled. Was he trying to be as inconspicuous as possible? Had he caught on to her presence? Was he avoiding her?

  Wenonah quickly left the White Hen. She recrossed Irving Park Road, hurrying into the west courtyard of the Pattington. In her vestibule, she turned around. The White Hen’s entrance was clearly visible. Her eyes fastened on the door.

  She knew that Kurt was more likely to use the door that exited into his building’s rear lobby. But would she? Might the blonde exit to the street? Perhaps she lived in a building nearby and the deli conversation had been nothing more than that.

  Harmless as ham on rye, Wenonah thought. Unless you’re Jewish. A blonde!—how trite!

  Wenonah watched for what seemed a very long time. If the woman did not exit to the street, it might not mean anything other than the woman also lived in the building.

  Maybe.

  The woman’s throaty voice had been on sexy overdrive. Wenonah knew a woman on the make when she heard one. In the old movies she loved, such women were called hussies. Wenonah chuckled. The woman was an old fashioned hussy. Immediate assessment. Today there were other names.

  And Kurt? His voice was neutral, nothing unusual there. No real evidence of attraction. Was he merely being polite?

  Wenonah looked at her watch. Ten minutes had gone by without any sight of the woman.

  She quickly climbed the four flights to her top floor condominium, pausing to spy from the window of each landing as she went. For once she wasn’t wishing for an elevator.

  By the time she entered her unit, Wenonah had resigned herself that both Kurt and the hussy had exited the store through the high rise’s rear lobby. It was an unsettling and provocative conclusion. And innocent, perhaps . . .

  Wenonah tried to put the matter to rest. She went into the kitchen, popped a Stouffer’s spaghetti dinner into the micro and sat down at her little table to read the paper.

  Concentration wore thin. Nothing but politics and celebrities gone amuck. Her mind kept coming back to Kurt.

  The shrill tone of the micro alerted her that her supper was ready. Wenonah sprang into action, moving not to the counter, but to the hall closet.

  It took some doing to find it. Wenonah’s unit was cluttered. She was the first to warn her guests of the fact, but it would have been even more cluttered had she not stuffed her closets floor to ceiling.

  It lay there at the rear of the closet, under a mountain of linens and towels. Without repairing the damage her rooting had done, Wenonah hurried to the living room, the powerful telescope in her hands. It was the telescope André had bought and left behind, his only legacy.

  The living room had a bay with three curved windows. Wenonah carefully set up the telescope in front of the window that faced the Lake View Park building.

  It would be dark soon. The last time she had used it, Meg had been here. It was the night of Kurt’s bachelor party that began in his condo and then moved on to some unknown destination. Meg and Wenonah had used the telescope to try to spy on the party. They hadn’t seen much, but it had been such fun. After the party moved on, Wenonah and Meg spent the evening gossiping, laughing, drinking, and spying into other units across the way. They swore to remain the best of friends always and forever.

  Wenonah put the thought aside and started counting floors. The Rockwell condo was on the twenty-sixth. She counted up to twenty-five, for the building had no thirteenth.

  The angle from the fourth floor of a vintage building to the twenty-sixth floor of a high rise did not allow for much to be seen. Wenonah would be able to see someone only if he—or she—came close to the window. In a very short time dusk would necessitate lights that would be visible.

  That is, if Kurt had gone to his condo. And if there were two people there, chances were good that at least one would pass near to the window—or pause to take in the view of the park and lake.

  Wenonah retrieved her supper from the microwave, grabbed a coke, returned to the window and sat. She ate but tasted little.

  As dusk fell, she became more and more disconcerted with herself. “Just what am I doing?” she asked herself aloud.

  It suddenly seemed so bizarre, staring up through a telescope in order to check on the fidelity of a friend’s husband. I’ve become a G. D. twisted sort of Angela Lansbury. She laughed to herself but still felt foolish.

  Something else bothered Wenonah, too: the sudden realization that she rather enjoyed the notion that she might catch Kurt in adultery. Why? She loved Meg! She didn’t wish heartache on her for a moment.

  But Kurt was another story. Wenonah had never taken to him. What was it? There was something strangely impersonal about him. He was good looking, strikingly so. He was polite and friendly to her. Not the honeyed kind of friendliness that masks prejudice, either. And he seemed to love Meg—he had been relentless in his pursuit. But where was the warmth in his veins, the fire in his soul? Oh, he did have a preoccupation for baseball, but he was a man born to business.

  Wenonah acknowledged to herself now that it was his business that had turned her off. When the non-profit Ravensfield had been taken over by Hospcore, he became part of the medical establishment that was turning vocations in health care into numbers, statistics, money. Business. How could Meg not see that? His position as Vice-President of Finances was predicated on streamlining the hospital into a mega-money-making operation. It was he who called in the team of Anderson and Mertz, a consulting firm of lawyers without conscience. Oh, he was just a cog in the nationwide healthcare machine moving in this direction. But at Ravensfield he was a Titan. It was big politics now, screw the patient, screw the family, screw the hospital worker—social workers especially.

  In choosing a career path, Wenonah had thought about Social Work, but her grandmother had encouraged her to take up nursing: “As a nurse, you’ll never be out of work, Win. People is always sick, always dyin’.” She was glad she listened because Social Work as a field, as a profession, was effectively being eliminated. Ravensfield had moved from eight to two social workers for the 400-bed facility. A piss-poor joke. A social worker there no longer addressed the real concerns, fears, and frailties of the patient. Psychological or sociological evaluations were things of the past. The two remaining social workers were there only to process the patients: get them in, allow them a stay as short as possible—shorter!—and get them out, finding for those with no place to go, some place, no matter how terrible.

  It was the same way throughout the city, Wenonah knew, throughout the country. Kurt was not a major player in it, but she couldn’t forgive him for the part he did play. How had Meg been able to turn a blind eye? Had she not quit, her job would have been cut, too, most likely, Kurt or no Kurt. As it was, when she left,
her position had not been filled.

  And now they were teaching nurses at Ravensfield and elsewhere how to do much of what a social worker does, and they were giving the duties of nurses—nurses’ aides even—to social workers in order to blur the lines of responsibility, puncture job esteem, hold the line on salaries, and eliminate positions.

  Down-sizing.

  But now even nurses were on the endangered list. Underschooled and underpaid “nursing associates” were replacing nurses everywhere—to the great saving of the hospitals and insurance companies—but to the detriment of the patient.

  It was fully dark now. Two hours had passed, and no lights had come on in the Rockwell condo. Wenonah’s gut belief was that Kurt had gone to the woman’s apartment for dinner.

  Kurt was having an affair.

  What other possibility was there?

  Wenonah’s heart sank. Any mean pleasure she might have embraced dissipated at once. She wished she had never seen Kurt and the blonde. She didn’t want to be reduced to some needling, nosy Jessica Fletcher type.

  She didn’t want to have to tell Meg.

  SEVEN

  On the third Monday in April, after having dropped Kurt at the station, Meg began her new job.

  The weekend had gone by without incident, without dreams, and she felt re-energized. She loved the idea of making her own schedule—and that there would be time to work on the house. Much had already been done in two weeks.

  Meg drove south on Hohman to the Hammond suburb of Munster, a community that was upscale in comparison with Meg’s neighborhood. Upscale, but characterless. No doubt, she thought, this is where many of the old citizens moved in the 50s and 60s when the city began to slide.

  It was here that Clara Ivey lived with her sixty-year-old daughter in a little ranch home. At ninety, Clara was recovering from a broken hip. She was a large woman with long braids wound about the top of her head. She had a predilection for sweets, her daughter said. Meg found her as lucid and informative as Time Magazine. And funny.