He could tell from the expression on her face that he’d gotten through to her, but she wasn’t going to simply give up. “Contracts are made to be broken,” she said. “I should know. I’m a lawyer.”
“And you can somehow weasel us out of those hundreds of pages of rules and obligations that we signed? That you signed? Face it, unless we win the lottery, or Bill Gates hires you as his personal attorney and hires me to completely revamp Microsoft’s Web presence, we’re stuck here. At least for now.”
“Fine,” she said. “But we need to come up with a plan. I don’t feel safe here. And even if we don’t tell the kids anything—yet—they need to be protected.”
“Agreed.”
“So … ?”
“So we keep our eyes open. We try to find out ourselves exactly what’s going on, research the house, the neighborhood, whatever, and we make sure that Megan and James are never in the house alone, especially at night.”
“That’s about the lamest plan I ever heard,” Claire said. But she didn’t have anything better, and, for the moment at least, they seemed to have called a truce.
It was daytime, though. Morning. Tonight would be a different story, and he had no doubt that, mentally and psychologically, they would each end up facing once again what had happened. Megan and James would be home as well, and as he thought about it now, it seemed to him that their bedrooms upstairs were much too far away from the master bedroom.
He wasn’t about to mention that, however. He might be just as frightened as Claire, but it was his job to be strong, not only for her but for the whole family, and he needed to put a good face on everything, needed to pretend this was no big deal.
He had expected Claire to get up from the couch and leave, to get a drink or go to the bathroom or start doing the breakfast dishes or do whatever it was she would usually do when a conversation was over. But she remained in place, and there was a look on her face that he didn’t trust. He knew even before she spoke that he was not going to like what she was about to say, a feeling that intensified when she met his gaze, then immediately looked away. “You know,” she said, “I thought for a while that it might be Miles. Obviously, it’s not,” she added quickly. “But …” She let the thought dangle.
Julian didn’t trust himself to speak.
“I’ve thought I’ve felt him before. Not just here and not just on Farris Street, but back in California, in our old house.” She spoke rapidly, as though afraid he might cut her off. “I’ve never seen him, but there’ve been signs. Little indications that he was around, watching over us. I know you’ve seen them, too. Or heard them. Or felt them. And that last time? I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I just … I just wanted to tell you. I guess I wanted to know if you were thinking the same thing.”
She looked at him hopefully, but he turned away, unable to face her. Of course he’d thought the same thing, but he’d never allowed himself to dwell on it, and he would never admit it to her. Even now, the tears were close, and he forced his mind to change the subject, think about something else, before his eyes overflowed and he started to cry and he found himself unable to stop.
He stood.
Claire reached for his hand. “Julian? It’s all right. We can talk about it.”
He shook his head, unable to speak for fear that emotion might overwhelm him, and she let go of his hand, nodded. “Okay,” she said.
He was the one who went into the kitchen to get a drink, and he picked up his orange juice glass from the counter, rinsed it out in the sink, filled it with water and drank it down as he stared out at the backyard.
Some feelings never went away.
Claire came in to do the dishes, and he went back out to the living room to read the newspaper, both of them pretending this was an ordinary morning and nothing unusual had happened.
He finished the paper while she was still working in the kitchen, and he called out that he was going upstairs to work, could she answer the phone if it rang. He had always been able to lose himself in a project, and today was no exception. Nearly two hours passed before Claire came upstairs and he finally looked up from his computer monitor.
He stood, stretching, and glanced down at the lower right corner of his screen. It was almost time to pick up the kids. The phone must have rung without his hearing it, because Claire said her parents had invited them over for a barbecue lunch. Luckily, Julian was behind in his work and nearing another deadline, so he had a legitimate reason not to go.
“I’ll give them your regrets,” Claire said dryly.
“Do that. Let them know I wish I could be there; I really do.”
“You don’t have to be such a jerk about it.”
“Okay,” he apologized, but inside he was smiling.
She walked over to his desk and gave him a kiss, a real kiss, and he understood that there was no lingering resentment from their earlier discussion; everything was all right between them. It made him feel good, and he realized how lucky he was to have Claire. He vowed to spend the afternoon researching the history of the house, as he said he would. He should have done so already, but he really did have an impending deadline, and, as usual, he’d been laser-focused on his work to the exclusion of everything else.
Claire said good-bye and was getting ready to leave when she paused in the doorway. “Do you really feel safe staying here?” she asked. “All alone?”
He didn’t, but he wasn’t about to admit that, so he lied, nodding. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
As soon as she was gone, however, he became acutely aware of the fact that he was the only one home. The house seemed unnaturally quiet, and he could not help thinking of that shambling figure from the night before, imagining it shuffling slowly up the stairs, moving inexorably down the short hall to his office.
A car honked outside, and Julian jumped in his seat.
He wanted to laugh at himself for being so jittery but couldn’t. He had legitimate reason to be nervous, and he saved what was on his screen and went through the house room by room, checking to make sure he really was alone here. He even inspected the basement, not going into it but standing at the top of the stairs, turning on the lights and looking down, although just being this close to the room made him uneasy.
As far as he could tell, the house was clean (as the psychic in Poltergeist so confidently and incorrectly stated), and back upstairs, he put on a record, something happy—Beat Crazy by Joe Jackson—cranking it up to drown out any creaking or settling sounds the building might make. Sinking into his seat, he stared for several moments at his computer screen, wondering how he should start his research. Gillette, the realtor, sure didn’t want to talk to him again, and the previous owners had done everything in their power to make themselves untraceable. But if he could get a list of previous owners, maybe he could wrangle some information out of them.
Accessing the county recorder’s Web site, he found several names and addresses, going all the way back to 1979, but when he tried to follow up, the addresses were revealed to be out-of-date, and the individuals proved impossible to track, except for one—who happened to have died.
It was after noon, and Julian was getting hungry. So he took a break and went downstairs to make himself a sandwich. Once again, the house seemed too quiet, and he turned on the television in the living room, switching the channel to CNN and boosting the volume so he could hear it in the kitchen. He’d intended to eat at the breakfast table, the way he usually did, but the closed door of the basement was in his peripheral vision, and he felt more comfortable going into the dining room. He could see the TV here as well, and watching opposing pundits, framed by red, white and blue graphics as they discussed the president’s current approval ratings, made him feel relaxed and reassured.