“If you wanted him to have fun, Skye, you could’ve taken him to the fun-fair. Don’t tell me this was about anything other than skinning a rabbit.”
“Well, as usual, you’ve missed the point. It was about making a stone bastard pay for what he’d done. Nathan was the perfect lure. He looked just like what the doctor ordered. And he’s smart.”
“If I see you anywhere near him again, I’ll call the cops on you — you and Mr. Bo. You’re right Nathan is smart. He followed you, too.” That shut her up — for a few seconds.
Then she said, “Tell me, Sis, what present did you buy yourself with my money?”
She’d probably looked in the bag when I went running after Nathan so there was no point in lying. I said, “A CD — The Best of Blondie. What’s so funny?”
She stopped laughing and said, “That was Mr. Bo’s favourite band. He taught us to dance to Blondie numbers.”
I was struck dumb. How could I have forgotten?
“Don’t worry about it, Sis,” Skye said cheerfully. “On evidence like that, if you never qualify, and you never get to hang out your shingle, you can comfort yourself by knowing you’d have made a lousy psychotherapist. Oh, and Happy Holidays.” She hung up.
Eventually I dried my eyes and went to the kitchen for a glass of wine. I sipped it slowly while I opened my books and turned on the computer. I will be a great psychotherapist — I can learn from the past.
Lastly I put my new CD on the hi-fi. It still made me want to dance. Mr. Bo can’t spoil everything I love.
The Advent Reunion
by Andrew Klavan
This new story began life in 2009 as an online performance piece (a video) rather than as prose fiction. The author has rewritten it for the page and created a fine Christmas ghost story. Andrew Klavan is well known for his internationally bestselling crime novels, which include True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say A Word, starring Michael Douglas. He’s been nominated for the MWA’s Edgar Award five times and has won it twice.
1. Ghost Hunter
I’ve wanted to tell this story for a long time. It began when I was a young man, during my junior year at Harvard.
To come, as I had come, from a crumbling house on a sandy lane in a dying town just west of nowhere to the aged brick and history, high culture and customs of one of the most prestigious universities in the country was a daunting journey for so inexperienced a boy. I spent my first year holed up in my room, buried in my books, working on my writing. Only after a very unpleasant summer break at home did I return to school determined to make friends.
I soon fell in with an aspiring composer named Jonathan Wilson and, through Jonathan, I found myself part of a little clique of brilliant artsy types — brilliant in our own minds, anyway. Among this group was a girl named Amanda Zane. She was blond and willowy and had a dreamy, wistful quality about her. She wrote songs and played guitar and sang. Her voice was high and clear and sweet, with a sad, yearning tone that just grabbed me by the heart. I was crazy about her pretty much on sight and, for some reason, she seemed to like me as well. We became a couple within the clique. It was the first truly happy time in my life.
No wonder that, as the Christmas break approached, I began to dread the thought of going home again. And when Jonathan came up with an alternative, I was delighted. His parents had decided to spend the holidays in Hawaii. Their house in rural upstate New York was going to be empty. Jonathan invited our little gang to spend Christmas there with him. Five of us accepted the invitation, David, Lucy, Rosemary, Amanda, and I.
It was, it turned out, a perfect setting for Christmas. The house was enormous, stone and stately. It sat in a little valley with hills of forest on every side, everything white with snow as far as the eye could see. When we first arrived, we tried to behave with our usual pseudo-sophisticated pseudo-detachment but the spirit of the season very quickly overwhelmed us. Within an hour of tumbling through the front door, we were laughing and shouting like the excited children we were. We found decorations in the attic and spread them all about the house. We found sleds in the garage and raced each other down the slopes. We cut down a large pine tree at the edge of the forest, tied it up with stout ropes, and dragged it home over the snow. We hung ornaments on it and sang carols around the piano and basically had as much good, clean fun as it’s legal to have.
We were having so much fun, in fact, that I didn’t notice — none of us noticed — that Amanda had begun acting very strange. Shy and distracted at the best of times, she’d grown almost silent in our boisterous midst. More and more often, she withdrew from our festivities without excuse and went wandering on her own for hours.
Finally, one afternoon, when the others were planning a shopping excursion to the nearby mall, she asked me if I would remain behind. When we were alone together, she broke the news to me: She was pregnant.
She had actually managed to convince herself I might be happy to hear about the child. But how could I be? I had no money. I had worked like a slave, year after year, to win my place at school. I had ambitions — big ambitions — to become a writer, a novelist — not exactly a very secure profession, not something you can count on, not in the beginning, at least. I was in no position to take on the support of a wife and child.
I didn’t have to tell her any of this. Amanda took one look at the expression on my face and saw it all. The next moment, she was in hysterical tears, raging at me, completely irrational. I had never seen her like that before. She screamed that I was selfish. I was thoughtless. I was this and that and the other. And when I tried to reason with her, when I suggested there might be another, better time for us to have a child together, she lost control completely, took it in the worst way, practically accused me of being some kind of homicidal maniac.
Thankfully, the worst of it was over by the time Jonathan and the others returned from their outing. When they burst through the door, shouting and laughing, I was in the living room, sitting alone in an armchair by the fireplace, staring into the flames, torn between panic and despair.
“Where’s Amanda?” they all cried out at once. “We’re going to play games! We’re going to make cookies! We’re going to play Ghost Hunter!”
I hesitated — but I finally managed to smile and tell them Amanda had gone to bed early with a headache. I didn’t see the point of spoiling their good mood with the truth.
It was already evening, already dark. We all went into the kitchen and made popcorn and cookies, swilling wine and beer as we did. I forced myself to join in the fun with a show of enthusiasm. After an hour or so, we began our game of Ghost Hunter.
Ghost Hunter, for those who’ve never played it, is basically just hide-and-seek in the dark. One person is designated the Ghost Hunter, then you turn off all the lights and everyone else scatters and hides. The Hunter moves through the house with a flashlight and if he leaves the room in which you’re hiding without finding you, you’re allowed to jump out and scare him. Each person who comes out of hiding then joins the hunt for the others.
I didn’t want to sit out and ruin the game, but with everything that was weighing on my mind, I didn’t know how long I could keep up the pretense of high spirits. I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. I hid down in the basement behind the boiler. It was, I felt sure, literally the last place anyone would look.