“Whose ghost is it?” she asked.
“Thank you,” I said as she handed me a cup of coffee. After a sip, I asked, “What do you mean?”
“Well, last night, you said this really was a ghost. Not a prank, not my imagination, a real…” she paused, and I half suspect she was about to say “flesh and blood” but had stopped herself. “…the real McCoy.”
“It’s a real ghost,” I agreed, “but I don’t know who it was.”
I took another sip of coffee and watched her troubled face through the rising steam. Lovely, a little harrowed, her hair a mess. I could imagine, I did imagine, what a lovely face it would be to see every morning over a hot cup of coffee. Thinking such things and more, I suddenly realized that she was talking.
“…I could ask.”
“What?” I asked.
She frowned, and even this was delightful to me.
“Well, we need to find out who he, she, it was. So we can…”
I waited, raising my eyebrows.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said quickly. “You know.”
“Yes, or, I think I do. You have a wonderful habit of not getting to the point, dear lady. You think, probably from watching some movie or book or something—you have some idea in your head that our next move is to hunt down the history of this house, find out who died here and how, start puzzling together the reason this specter hasn’t moved on, and, finding the reason, help the poor little ghost come to terms with its past and pass on, am I right?”
“Well…” she’d heard my derisive tone, and I watched as she turned that lovely face away from me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting the cup down. “I didn’t mean…okay, yeah, but I mean, I get it a lot; it’s tiresome. This isn’t a romance novel. This isn’t Casper the friendly ghost, alright. Whatever this was, it was once a human, but it isn’t anymore. It’s a foul, corrupted thing. It tried to kill you. It doesn’t want to pass on because where it’s going isn’t that nice of a place.” I shuddered. “I should know.”
Tale Told 