Chapter 1

What does a ghost look like?

Todd was bone-tired, exhausted, rung dry. That’s how he accounted for the bizarre thing he’d seen the first night in his new house. He had spent the whole day alone moving all of his stuff from Chicago into the little house in Fawcettville, the small town on the Ohio River where he’d grown up.

So it would make sense, wouldn’t it, that his eyes would play tricks? At least that’s what he told himself. Yet, in all his thirty-odd years, his eyes had never once played tricks on him, not really. That was just something people said.

Wasn’t it?

He trembled as he stood in the bathroom, looking down the short hallway to his bedroom, and turned the hallway light off again. And, again, it happened—in the dark a figure, perhaps a woman, stood very still, just outside his bedroom. She was little more than a silhouette, but she was there. He could see the outline of her chopped-off-at-the-neck hair and the knee-length baggy dress or robe she wore.

Todd flipped the light once more, illuminating the hallway.

And it, or she, was gone.

He darkened the cut-glass overhead light once more—and she was back. Full light and she was gone. A burst of giddy laughter shot out of Todd’s mouth, having nothing to do with humor or mirth. His hand shot up to suppress it.

He left the light on and lingered near the bathroom in his flannel boxers, wanting nothing more than to crawl into bed, but he was paralyzed, frozen.

He wished there were someone he could call for moral support. But he’d left his old friends behind in Chicago. And Fawcettville—well, he hadn’t lived in this little burg at the foothills of the Appalachians in something like fifteen years. Besides, his phone service wasn’t scheduled to be turned on until tomorrow.

“So you can stand here all night until your legs refuse to hold you anymore, maybe sleep on this orange shag carpeting your mom once loved so much. Or you can use up even more of what’s in your dwindling bank account and head out to the Fairview Motel on Route 11.”

It was silly. His eyes had to be playing tricks on him, even if this had never happened before.

He was simply tired. Who wouldn’t be? It had been a long day. His muscles ached. His eyes burned.

He sucked in some air, straightened his shoulders, and forced himself to put one foot in front of the other and march down the hallway to the bedroom that had once been his mom’s but was now his.

He never did turn off the hall light. When he crawled into bed, he pulled the covers up over his head and told himself it was to keep out the light seeping in through the sliver where the bottom of the bedroom door met the floor.

But he wondered if she was out there….

The morning, bright and sunny, washed away the fear from the night before. When Todd awakened to sparrows chirping outside his window and buttery yellow light spilling across the beige carpeting, he could laugh at himself, imagine how maybe what happened in the hallway was nothing more than a dream. His love of horror movies was simply catching up with him, that was all.

“Anyway,” he said to himself as he sat up in bed, the sheets and the patchwork quilt his grandma had made many years ago slithering from his too-skinny form, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

He yawned and stretched, looking around the bedroom. Floor-to-ceiling boxes occupied the wall opposite the window, and Todd traced the route that had brought him here, to this bedroom, where his parents, now gone, had once slept when he was a little boy.

He glanced down at a small sore on his instep—brownish red, no bigger than a quarter—and thought that sore, or at least what it represented, was instrumental in getting him here. So was his mom passing away from cancer a month ago and leaving this house and her meager savings—all $976.18—to him.

He stood up and pulled on his jeans and an old Cubs T-shirt that had a hole in the armpit and shut the bedroom window against the morning’s chill. “Death,” he said, brightly, smiling in spite of himself. “That’s what’s brought me here.”

He wondered if this business of talking to himself would last much longer, if it would get worse as he rattled around the house on a bluff above the mud-brown Ohio River. Would he become that bachelor who people in small towns whispered about, that tragic, lonely figure who had something peculiar going on? No one could ever put a finger on exactly what it was….

“Now you’re a character out of Winesburg, Ohio,” Todd said to himself, heading out of the bedroom and recalling one of his favorite books from freshman English at Miami University in Oxford. That seemed like forever-ago.

The house was pretty much as Mom had left it, save for the bedroom, which Todd had cleared out before he’d arrived with his small U-Haul containing only his bedroom set and a few boxes of clothes and other personal items.

He padded down to the brown and gold kitchen, with its wood paneling, maple breakfast set and hutch, and “harvest gold” appliances. “Jesus, Mom, it’s 1997. Couldn’t you have gotten something that at least looked like it wasn’t lifted from the set of The Brady Bunch?”

Whatever. The appliances worked. Right now the refrigerator had a relatively healthy sounding hum and Todd, ever hopeful, opened its door to peer inside. Even though Mom had passed away a month ago, he prayed there still might be something to eat in the refrigerator.