The Patchwork House by Richard Salter

find Chloe and leave.”
    “Hang on, Jim. This is just weird.”
    “Yeah, the ghost cleaned up. All of this is weird. Let’s go.”
    Beth shook her head.
    “This is not just cleaning up. Look.”
    She kept the angle of her torch low so as to illuminate anything sitting on the surface. There was nothing at all.
    “What’s your point?”
    “Jim, the ghost has cleaned the fucking table !”
    I laughed at that. The image in my head was almost worth the price of admission to this night from hell. And then I realized what she meant.
    We had not been careful eaters. We’d spilled grains of rice, splashes of sauce, flakes of spring rolls, all over the kitchen table. Since we’d never finished our dinner it was certainly odd that the empty bags, the leftover containers and the dirty plates had all gone. But Beth was right, there was absolutely no trace of our meal. The table was completely clean. I took my lamp over and peered in close.
    “Even if you accept that there’s a ghost in the house that can move a bookcase, it doesn’t explain this.”
    “You know what it’s like?” Beth said.
    “What?”
    “It’s like we were never here.”
    A chill gripped me when she said that. The gravity of her words settled on my shoulders and I realized she was completely right.
    “Are we ghosts?” I asked. It seemed a logical conclusion.
    “Well you don’t look like Bruce Willis.”
    “And you don’t look like Nicole Kidman.”
    Neither of us laughed.
    “Maybe that’s the answer,” Beth said after a moment’s pause.
    “The answer to what?”
    “The answer to what happened to Chloe.”
    I blinked. “I don’t get you.”
    “Maybe she’s gone, just like our stuff, and our food and the fricking crumbs on the table. Maybe she was never here.”
    “That’s ridiculous.”
    “Then where the hell is she?”
    “Well you mentioned the alternative back in the drawing room.”
    “Did I? Oh, the bottom of the lake?”
    My grim expression told her she was now thinking what I was thinking. But we had to keep looking, and calling. We could hardly abandon her.
    Footsteps came crashing down the stairs in a serious hurry. Beth and I flashed alarmed glances at each other and then we moved back to the hall door. Derek was running towards us, a determined expression on his face.
    “She’s in the apartment,” he said as he pushed past us.
    “Are you sure?” I asked.
    “I heard her, through the wall.” He didn’t wait for us. He burst through the door to the upstairs apartment and bounded up the steps two at a time, torchlight swinging wildly in his wake.
    “Chloe?” he called, even as he disappeared around the turn half way up the stairs. “Chloe, are you there?”
    Beth and I hurried to follow. What a relief to know where she was. Maybe now the four of us could jump in the car and leave.
    But it wasn’t to be.
    As Beth and I reached the top of the stairs, we saw Derek run back from the small living space to the bedroom.
    “Chloe,” he called. “Where are you?”
    “Chloe?” I said. Beth and I joined the search.
    We must have checked both rooms a dozen times. We threw open cupboards and closets, checked the tiny bathroom and even looked under the bed. Chloe wasn’t here.
    “Maybe you heard an echo of her voice coming through pipes or something,” I said. “Like what happened earlier when I thought you were screaming in the kitchen but you were in the library upstairs.”
    Derek shook his head. His torch was still sweeping over every single item in the room.
    “She told me, I heard her through the wall. She said she was trapped in the apartment.”
    “Shit,” I said.
    “So either she was lying,” Derek said, smacking his hand against one solid wall in frustration, “or she was lost, or she was moved after I spoke to her.”
    “Well the only entrance is via the kitchen, and we were in there for a while. The apartment door never opened.
    “Maybe there’s another way in?” Beth said.
    I shook my head. “What