"Do you think of Celia as a real person?”
He blinked at me, his Grey shutters sliding back into place. "A real person? No. A real personality, yes." He frowned and sucked in his lower lip. "Does it matter?”
I shrugged. "I don't know. What does Tuckman say?”
"Huh. He'd probably say the reality of the personality is the only thing that matters.”
We both sat back and I watched the glassy emptiness around him. I wondered just what the hell he was trying to hide. He wasn't very good at keeping his shield in place and I couldn't tell if he did it on purpose or not. When it faltered, something bright and passionate showed through, but he always hid it again. Some vulnerability, in spite of the tough-guy pose? Or something else?
My silence made him uncomfortable. Ken looked at his watch. "Wow. I have to get going.”
"Thanks for talking with me.”
"Hey, it was a pleasure. Seriously.”
"Can I call you if I think of anything else?”
"Sure. No problem. Gotta go.”
I watched him grab his bag and stride out. I wasn't sure if I'd learned much from Ken except that he was hiding something I wanted to discover. He'd answered my questions—not saying he'd been a theater major before switching to art. His obsession about Celia's portrait seemed a bit unusual and I knew I'd missed something through my own annoyance. I didn't think he knew how he affected the Grey—if he'd known I could see it, he would never have let his shield slip. Something had caused that psychic wall to rise, but I had no clue what, no matter how much it bothered me.
I put down money for my breakfast—the waitress had forgotten to charge for Ken's coffee—and picked up my still-strange cell phone. I thought I might be able to catch a few more of Tuckman's group at home now and I was pleased I didn't have to waste time going back to my office. Eventually I'd have to get in some background research on this lot—Stahlqvist and Ken both left me wanting to dig, and who knew what I'd get from the others? — but since all offices were closed, I'd do better spending the small grace period Solis had given me interviewing the principals than grubbing Internet records.
I made calls and was able to catch up to most of the rest of the group and schedule time to talk before Tuesday. I wondered why I hadn't gotten a cell phone long ago.
Patricia Railsback—the harried and unhappy housewife at the séance sessions—met me at the Harbor Steps play yard under a sky that threatened rain, but hadn't yet produced any. Her hair was pulled back into a hasty ponytail that left her made-up face strangely naked and let too much light fall onto the stains of sleeplessness under her eyes. No amount of makeup could hide her expression of pinched dissatisfaction and frustration. She hunched her shoulders under her fashionable wool jacket and stared into the small play yard wedged between two of the complex's four towers.
Three children rollicked over the climbing equipment and kicked clouds of cedar bark into restless wakes whenever they touched ground. Greenery dripped from overhead galleries and orange beams running between the residential towers. Patricia put herself sideways to the yard, leaning her hip against the rubberized rail so she could talk to me and watch the kids at the same time.
I looked over the shrieking, giggling mayhem. The kids were playing some elaborate game of climbing and jumping. "Which one's yours?" I asked.
She sighed. "All of them—Ethan, Hannah, and Dylan," she added, pointing at them in age order. "Demolition experts in training." A large bit of beauty bark winged Patricia on the temple. "Ow!" she shouted, brushing it aside. "You brats stop that! You know better than to throw things at people!”
Hannah and Ethan stopped and stared at her. "It wasn't us! It was the ghost!" Hannah yelled.
Patricia rolled her eyes. "Damn it," she muttered under her breath. "OK, I'm sorry," she called back. "You guys just play carefully, now, OK? Ghosts can fly but you can't, so no jumping around. And no throwing and blaming it on the ghost.”
A careless "OK, Mom" came back, but the kids were already back in motion.
I gave her a sideways look and spotted a bright yellow gleam around her head. "Your kids know about the project?”
"Oh, God. . yeah. Sort of." Her mouth turned down as she spoke and her vowels seemed to spill out the corners. "It's not like you can miss the stupid thing with their dad gone all the time. It's their best little playmate—most kids have imaginary invisible friends, mine have an honest-to-goodness poltergeist to play with.”
"Are you certain this is Celia at work?”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. "What else would it be? It's not like I have any other life outside my home, my kids, and this project.”
Bitterness spilled out with every flooding word. She felt abused by life—although I thought that for a woman with no college degree and no apparent skills or charm, she hadn't done too badly in a socioeconomic sense. I wondered if her whining was bred from her husband's constant absence or the other way around. Half a life led in the shadows of a successful man to whom she no longer felt more than a mechanical duty might lead to many things. Yet she would not break from him, except to join this insane project. She was on the fence about the whole thing—life, family, project.
She'd been a drama major in high school—a bit of a drama queen to my mind—and that seemed to have been the high point of her life. I got the idea she resented the children who kept her tied to her gilded cage and that she wanted attention from someone, anyone—preferably male—and the project had seemed like a place to get it. But it wasn't working out so well. She didn't fit in with the younger members or the older members, and the only person she'd ever had a reasonable conversation with was Mark, whom she'd driven home once when his bike had a flat tire. She didn't really like any of the rest of them, though she wouldn't say so. But she did believe that their poltergeist was real, that they'd made things move and caused the knocks and light flickers through their own power of the mind. She didn't see any contradiction in the idea that everyone else was hateful, yet they somehow worked together.
As she babbled on, bemoaning her life, I glanced at the three kids who had sat down on the ground with a pile of cedar chips and leaves and were tossing them up one at a time. Once in a while, one of the leaves or chips would make a sudden shift to the side and the kids giggled. What were they doing? I peered at them through the Grey and could see a scribbled yellow shape, continuously shifting, stabbed randomly with silvery shards, hovering around them and moving the wood and leaves. Patricia noticed I'd stopped listening and looked at the children also, her yellow thread stretching toward the uncanny shape of the same color.
"What are they doing?" I asked.
She threw her hands into the air. "Who knows? They're kids!" She balled her fists on her hips and shouted. "Hey, stop that! You're getting dirty!”
I took a step closer to the kids and their Grey companion, but as they turned to look at Patricia, they saw me moving toward them. The kids jumped up, dusting at their clothes, and the yellow shape imploded with a muffled bang that sounded a lot like the table raps from the recordings and left a weird ringing in my head. I frowned and peered harder at the kids, but there was only the thinnest yellow strand now, looping around them from a source in Patricia's body, and the thread which had tied her to the shape now pointed only to the empty space where it had been.