It was late in the evening when the ghost arrived. Ada was laying in her bed when a familiar, ghostly light appeared out her window. She ran to get Pete, who was fast asleep in his own bed, and pulled him into her room.
“The ghost is coming!” she said. “And he’s got a neat coat!” Pete rolled his eyes. “What?” she replied looking at him incredulously. “He does!”
“I’m just not very taken with the idea of helping out the recently deceased because you want to get a story for your newspaper,” Pete said groggily. He was standing next to her now and staring out the window, too.
“Well, it is my newspaper that I print,” Ada responded.
“Let’s not get carried away,” Pete replied. “You are getting us caught up in trouble for a newspaper that you print from dad’s computer. A newspaper that he doesn’t even like.”
The ghost suddenly appeared at their window, looking a little confused.
“Ada? Ada, is that you? Blanche sent me.” He cupped his hands around his eyes and peered through the window even though his spirit self passed right through it like a hand in water.
Ada beckoned him in and the ghost crawled through the window and spilled onto the floor. “Sorry, sorry. I’m a little disheveled. I feel as though I was just shot from a cannon. There is something nagging at me terribly.”
He looks quite old-timey, Ada thought.
Ada and Pete’s Cat, Garfunkel, who was a chubby cat with tall ears and a cute little face was sitting between Pete’s legs, woke from his slumber. He looked from the ghost to Ada and then to Pete. With an act of utter annoyance, Garfunkel began his morning grooming routine even though he was five hours too early to start.
“So, how can we help you?” Ada asked.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” said the ghost, and he sat down on a chair next to the open window. His light glow emanated enough light to illuminate the children’s faces in the darkness. The ghost crossed one leg and began picking at his nails. “You both don’t know me, but I was informed that you might be able to help me…”
Ada went to her old roll top desk—gifted to her by a father who thought he wanted it for writerly aspirations, but decided the kitchen table was a better spot to get his work done–and she removed a legal pad and a pen and took a seat on the floor in front of the ghost, shaking the pen vigorously before placing it to the paper.
“Go ahead,” she said seriously, the tone of a serious attendant in her voice.
“She’s very professional,” said the ghost, looking at Pete and the chubby cat.
“Our dad is a teacher,” said Pete, and he held his great-great-grandfather in his arms and ran his hands through his hair. “She gets it from him.”
“I am honing my skills to be a journalist,” Ada added. “Stories like yours give me the experience I need to do my job right.”
“But you have seen ghosts in your stories?” asked the spirit somewhat surprised.
“Oh, yea,” Ada said, already writing down the necessities of their encounter on her notepad: time, date, place. “Our father may be the teacher, but we have witches and warlocks in our family.”
The ghost raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment, and said, “Well, it just so happens that I talked to a witch who told me that you were the ones to talk to about helping me.”
“It was Blanche,” Pete said. “She’s the one that cursed our cat to be a grouch.”
Garfunkel hissed and went back to licking his paws.
“That’s very clear,” said the ghost looking at the chubby cat with curiosity.
“You may begin,” Ada said, shrugging off the noise in the room, posturing herself over her notebook, and ready to madly scribble notes at a moment’s notice.
The ghost nodded and began, “Well, it’s silly really…do you know how they say that some people become ghosts because they have unfinished business? It’s the only thing that explains my lifeless meandering. I guess I do have unfinished business, but I have no idea what that is exactly.”
Ada’s pen flew across the page, her hand steady.
“That means you just have to find your purpose,” Ada said cheerfully. “That’s an easy task for us—we are good at solving problems for lots of strangers, whether alive or dead.”
“Er, um, that’s not exactly it,” said the ghost.
“What did you do in life then?” Pete asked. “Maybe that could help us help you.”
“Right, right,” said the ghost again. “Here’s the thing: I have no idea who I am or how I died.”
“Oh,” said Ada, and she looked up from her transcription. “That’s going to make finding your unfinished business a little harder.”
“That’s what I thought,” said the ghost.
“You don’t remember anything at all?” Pete asked.
“I really don’t remember anything at all,” said the ghost, and he kept dabbing his forehead uncomfortably. “This isn’t really the spot I wanted to be in, nor was it the spot I would be in after death. In fact, I kind of waited around the first hundred years expecting something to happen…and then nothing did. I just stayed in Barrows End with no place to go. Then, I spent another hundred scaring away people who I thought could help me. You know, the people in this town ought to start realizing that things aren’t normal around here.”
Ada and Pete looked at each other. “We thought the same thing,” they said in unison.
“Who did you try and talk to?” Ada continued.
“Well, first it was a doctor, but he responded very badly. He thought I was a patient who had come back to get him for an accidental surgery that went the opposite way it should have—he moved straight out of town.” The ghost thought for a moment. “Oh, and then there was the lawyer, who I thought should be completely reasonable, but it turns out that he was completely unreasonable and ran in the other direction. I assume he thought I was more than a bit of undigested potato.”
“Lastly, and most recently, I tried to talk to the mayor, and he fled faster than the others, but he’s still in Barrows End. He just won’t come from his house anymore. I doubt he is hurting up there, though, it looks like a swell place.” The ghost pointed out the window and in the direction of the mayor’s mansion. “And that’s really it,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got.”
Ada thought for a long while, and the ghost sat quietly in the corner. Pete searched the bed for Garfunkel, who had disappeared, and found him asleep where the pile of blankets was the deepest.
“I have a thought,” Ada said finally, after looking over her notes. “You were buried in the Barrows End Hillside Graveyard?”
“That’s right,” he said. “I couldn’t afford the one at the other end of town. Who can pay for a mausoleum?”
“Why don’t we start there tomorrow evening?” she asked him. “We can look at your grave spot, find a name, and start our research once we get that far?”
The ghost thought for a moment and shrugged. “At least it’s something. I doubt I will have any records. I lived a quiet life, right up until…” And then he put his finger out and his eyes widened as though he had just been struck with a revelation. He pointed at Ada, and then Pete, and then the pile of blankets, and then back to Ada.
“You still don’t remember anything, do you?” Ada asked.
“I’ve got literally nothing rolling around in this head of mine,” he said, and he lowered his finger and dropped his brow. “I’ll see you tomorrow at Hillside. Meet me there around dusk.”
At that the ghost left, and Ada and Pete crawled back into their respective beds to finish off sleep for the evening. Ada watched the ghost’s light disappear behind a row of houses and wondered what kind of story she was working on exactly. It certainly seemed to be a mystery.
