but the simple Grey memory of it had been squared away and orderly. The writing on his business correspondence didn’t quite cross the line to fussy, but it was careful. In the journals it had been looser but still very legible, which I couldn’t say for most people’s casual writing.
All right: He’d been a bit type A, the sort of man who wore a button-down shirt even on his days off. I could remember him smiling and being silly with me, so he hadn’t been too stiff, but if I was being honest, he hadn’t been the life of the party, either. I had idolized him and built him up as an ideal parent in contrast to my demanding, peripatetic mother. I might not have been right about her, either, but that was not the issue of the moment.
I paused to eat and pour more coffee, and then I shuffled deeper into the box. At the bottom I found a couple of paperback books: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester and Chuck Yeager’s autobiography. I’d never read either book, but I knew who Chuck Yeager was and, according to the blurb, the Bester was a sort of space-faring version of The Count of Monte Cristo . Space adventures, ordinary guys rising to heroism and glamour. I hadn’t pegged my dad as fanciful, but it might have explained his marriage to my mother. They had both been starry-eyed, but his romanticism had turned inward while my mother’s had turned outward. If I hadn’t seen the hole where the end of his life should have been, I might have thought his visions had gone as sour as my mother’s and written him off as merely crazy, but that void—whether it was caused by him or something else—and the terror that had poured out of Christelle changed everything. He might have been nuts—he sounded it near the end—but he hadn’t been imagining that something uncanny and terrible had surrounded him.
Melancholy seemed to ooze from the box as I piled Dad’s things back inside. I set the journals on top; I’d have to ask my mother if I could keep them and the little metal puzzle, which I put into my pocket. By then it was nearly noon, so I called her.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Oh, hi, sweetie!”
“Are you going to be home this afternoon? I want to bring the box of stuff back and take a look at those photos.”
“Sure! Come right up.”
There was one more thing I wanted to check; a last-ditch chance but I couldn’t ignore it. “I want to drive past the old house first. What was our address when we lived in Glendale?”
“You mean the house on Louise?”
“Did we ever live in another house in Glendale?” How could she irritate me so much with so little effort? I wondered.
“Well, no, of course not!” she snapped.
“Then the house on Louise must be the one I want.”
She sighed dramatically and rattled off the address. “When will you be done?” she asked.
“In a couple of hours. I’ll bring the box by about . . . two.”
“All right,” she replied, her voice a little sharp. “We can have lunch.”
I hoped it wouldn’t be the same minuscule meal of fruit I’d seen abandoned on her breakfast plate the previous morning, but I didn’t think I should refuse. “I’ll see you then.” Hanging up was a relief. She still made me feel unreasonable and clumsy even on the phone. I hoped I’d get the last of what I needed from her today, so I could go home as soon as possible. Any good feeling I’d had for my hometown was curdling fast.
The house on North Louise Street would be my last shot at finding any trace of my father’s ghost, short of dumb luck. I couldn’t think of any other places he might linger, and the house was a long shot as it was. The strangeness in his office made me think he wasn’t going to be found just haunting around, but I might find a loop or some other trace that might tell me something.
I’d kind of expected something more . . . impressive, but once I got to it, it was just a house. Plain California stucco on a narrower lot than its neighbors, palm trees at the
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