Anna held out her hand to the apparition and smiled.
“Rupert,” she said quietly. “It’s okay.”
A wisp of a smile appeared on the boy’s face, as if the sound of Anna’s voice comforted him—as if he hadn’t truly heard his name spoken by a human voice in a very, very long time.
His arm slowly extended, he accepted Anna’s hand and placed his in hers. Su Ling watched as her daughter’s hand enveloped what appeared to be an insubstantial shape, but the girl had no reaction to show that anything was out of the ordinary.
Anna led the boy further on, toward the old man who still stood, confused and frightened, by her side. As the boy neared, the old man began to shake. His eyes grew large, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
Cantrell was the first to see it. The eyes of the boy and the old man were identical—sharp and intensely blue, with a shape that was unmistakably the same.
The old man began to back away, the boy’s face reflecting a similar fear.
“It’s okay, Rupert,” Anna said, smiling at each in turn.
She brought them closer together.
“Don’t be afraid.”
At last, they allowed their hands to touch, their blue eyes to make contact.
Recognition flooded their features; not that of two people long parted, but of a self divorced from self.
A mutual self.
It was a coming together, after an eternity of separation—a powerful déjà vu, but grounded in reality. A body and a soul—forced apart by fear—reunited by a little girl’s love.
The boy’s shimmering slowed, then stopped. The confused and lost expression on the old man’s face was replaced by serenity and awareness, and something that looked like joy.
They melded together, the larger, corporeal body of the old man absorbing the smaller, ethereal, form of the boy.
Su Ling began to weep when she saw the two of them become one, finally understanding what was unfolding.
Cantrell held her tightly in his arms, trembling as he shared her understanding.
Anna’s smile grew wider. She’d done what needed to be done, and it felt good.
Behind them, unnoticed at first, the gray pall began to lift. In its place reappeared the familiar environment of the Exeter’s conference room.
The joining now completed, the old man—and the spirit that the young boy had returned to him—took one deep breath. The wide smile on his face mirrored that of Anna.
He collapsed on the carpeted floor, holding out his hand for the girl to take. Anna took it, looking directly into his blue eyes.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
Anna leaned over and kissed him gently on his wrinkled forehead as he died.
EPILOGUE
The plain wooden casket of Rupert Gustafson slowly descended into the cold ground.
Beneath the bare trees and blue sky of a cold sunny day, five mourners stood at the graveside: Cantrell, Su Ling, Anna, Detective Maudlin and the clergyman who’d been hired to speak a few final words.
The minister had spoken of the peace that for so long had eluded the deceased, and which he finally achieved in the last moments of his life. “For that, Rupert can count himself fortunate,” he intoned. He closed with a few psalms, including one that dealt with facing the valley of the shadow of death without fear.
The minister left after the last benediction, shook the hands of those present, and walked back to his car.
Anna stood at the edge and lovingly tossed a single white rose into the open grave. She smiled, blew a farewell kiss and returned to her mother’s side. Together, the group began a slow stroll away from the grave.
The child, tempted perhaps by the sunshine and plentiful open space around her, felt playful and exuberant. Spotting a lonely patch of snow that had yet to melt, she plopped down on her back and waved her arms, forming a perfect snow angel.
Despite the somber surroundings of the cemetery, her mother could not suppress a giggle. She followed as Anna skipped along through the tombstones, darting here and there, laughing gleefully.
“Remarkable talent for recovery, wouldn’t you say?” Maudlin asked Cantrell as they walked along the stone path. “God, to be a kid again.”
“She’s happy, thank heaven,” Cantrell said. “She knows she did the right thing. The preacher was right. Rupert found peace, and it was all Anna’s doing.”
“Is she back to normal?”
Cantrell chuckled. “Oh yeah, to put it mildly. It’s amazing what a chatterbox she’s become. It’s like she’s making up for lost time.”
“That’s good.”
From a distance, the two men watched Anna’s playful running and Su Ling’s attempt to keep up with her.
“I began to check up on the history of the Exeter shortly after the second incident, after the whole Stuart Brown thing,” Maudlin continued. “I kept it to myself because I don’t like being a laughingstock, and I wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with this case. Now I’m convinced that it has everything to do with it.”
“What did you find?”
“In 1940, one of the employees of the old Exeter Packing Company was killed in the slaughterhouse. Impaled by a steer that had somehow gotten loose prior to slaughter. That in itself wasn’t terribly unusual. I found a number of fatal accidents there over the years. But what was unusual about this was that his son—a boy by the name of Rupert—happened to be on the killing floor and witnessed the whole thing.”
“My God,” Cantrell replied. “That’s exactly… ”
“That’s just what you saw in there, isn’t it?” Maudlin asked.
“Yes. Anna knew, somehow. It was in her drawings… ”
“Anyway, the kid was traumatized by what he’d seen, not surprisingly. He never recovered. He spent years, decades, institutionalized, pretty much a walking
vegetable. As far as anyone ever knew, he didn’t speak a single word in more than 70 years. Not until the other night, that is, according to what you’ve told me.”
Cantrell stopped and looked the old cop in the eye.
“I think they were the same person, Maudlin. The old man and the little boy were one and the same.”
“I believe the appropriate word is doppelganger,” Maudlin replied.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve been doing some reading since things started going crazy at your place. Doppelganger is an old German expression, means roughly double-goer. They applied it to a certain kind of ghost—the ghost of one’s self. It was believed to be a premonition of death to see one’s own spirit. But in this case, Cantrell, I think it was something else.”
“A separation,” Cantrell offered.
“Yes. I can’t believe I’m really saying this, but nothing else makes sense. Somehow, after what happened in 1940, the little boy’s spirit and his body were ripped away from each other. The body went on to the care facilities; the spirit stayed in the Exeter, full of fear, no doubt confused.”
“And it was that spirit that caused all of these things to happen to people—these horrible things?”
“Not so much the spirit, Cantrell, but the fear. I think that’s what it was all about. The place must have been lousy with it.”
They stopped when they reached their cars, waiting for Su Ling and Anna to catch up.
“Did I tell you that I’m retiring next month?” Maudlin asked.
“No.”
“It’s time to hang up the badge, Cantrell. I’m old and I’m tired. Not too long ago, I believed that I’d seen just about everything one could see as a cop. I believed in blackand white, in pure logic and hard science. That all went out the door with your building. I don’t know what the hell to believe anymore.”
The old detective laughed.