Vanished

CHAPTER 7

I needed to talk to my dad, however dead he was. Whether he’d been crazy, or paranoid, or dead-on truthful, he’d been connected to Grey things. I’d have to go for a walk in the Grey and see if I could find him. The problem was I’d never done that, and though I thought I could, I wasn’t sure how to find a specific ghost in the roiling, uncertain mist-world between the normal and the paranormal. I wasn’t a medium or a necromancer; I couldn’t just call to the spirit I wanted and expect it to show up. At least I didn’t think I could, since that wasn’t how my abilities worked for anything else—I’d gotten lucky with Cary showing up since he’d been trying to reach me as much as I’d been trying to find him.

There was also a practical limit to how long I could spend wandering around in the Grey. It was exhausting to move through fully immersed, and it was just as big—in some places bigger—than the normal world. The Grey was filled with the sinkholes and rifts of time layers I called temporaclines, which stopped and started and broke or rose as they pleased. There were lots of places in the Grey where something in the normal or paranormal created a barrier that could only be negotiated by emerging back into the normal and going around the ordinary way.

It was almost dinnertime—I’d missed both breakfast and lunch—but I put off eating a little longer to pick up the phone and call the Danzigers. Sometimes they don’t know the answer to my questions, and sometimes they had an answer that was wrong, but they at least had more experience with the bizarre than I did, even after two years more than knee-deep in it.

The phone rang longer than usual before Ben answered.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Ben. It’s Harper.” Background noise at the other end washed the emotions out of my voice.

“Oh, hi, Harper! How’s Los Angeles?”

“Like the antechamber to hell. I have a question.”

“All right.”

“Any ideas on how I can find a specific ghost? I need to talk to a particular individual who’s been dead for about twenty-two years.”

“Well, you could—Oh, no. you can’t call them. Hrm. Hang on. ” I could hear him cover the mouthpiece with his hand as he turned to call for Mara.

I could barely hear some mumbling on the other side. Then a thump as the phone fell out of Ben’s hand and dropped onto the floor.

A very young voice cackled into the phone. “Harper! Hahahaha! Come play with me!”

“I can’t today, Brian. I’m way far away.”

“Are not! You’re in the phone!”

A few more noises preceded the return of Ben’s voice, although his son’s carried on in the background. I figured he was probably holding on to the kid while he talked. “I’m sorry. ”

“That’s OK. So what do you two think?”

“Well. we’re agreed that you’ll have the best luck looking in the places strongly associated with the person who died. Like their home or office or the place they died. You know a ghost can haunt several places simultaneously, but they manifest intelligence in only one at a time.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought. I know I can’t always get the attention of a repeater.”

“And if that’s the only manifestation they have, it’s going to be hard to get any information out of them.”

“Nearly impossible, actually.”

“Really? I should write that down. ”

Ever since he’d been mauled by a legendary monster on Marsh Island, Ben had been on disability, staying home with their precocious son while Mara taught full-time. Bored, Ben had started working on a field guide to ghosts, mixing the research he’d been doing for years with the proofs-through-misadventure that I’d made Greywalking for the past two years.

I thought over his suggestion and decided it seemed plausible. I’d have to give it a try. Of course, I couldn’t remember the addresses of our home or Dad’s office. I thanked Ben for the idea and hung up, staring at the box of junk. I stiffened my spine and wondered if I could find the addresses in there and not have to go back to my mother right away. I’d have to show up again eventually; I wanted those shining boxes of photographs and I wanted to know what had actually happened to Christelle. Maybe my father had just gone crackers and only imagined the destruction of his receptionist. I wanted to believe it, but I doubted it.

I scrabbled through the shining pile for the appointment book, hoping someone had thought to put the office information in it. It had Dad’s name and office address on the cover; it was in Glendale, a middle-class suburb just northeast of Hollywood. Since he’d died there, the office seemed like the best place to start looking for him.