Phantoms Read online

  As her father drove away, Cordelia looked deeper into the village. She could only see a few houses from where she was, but they were in excellent condition: a brown ranch with a rocking chair in the front yard, a rustic log cabin surrounded by evergreens, and a humble split-level that could have been airlifted from Cordelia’s neighborhood.

  “It’s a lot nicer than I expected,” Benji said.

  “See?” Cordelia said. “I told you it wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “We haven’t gone inside any of the houses yet.”

  They entered the main office. Everything had been artfully arranged like a showroom in a furniture store. A diffuser sent plumes of lavender-scented mist into the air. On the wall above a stone fireplace, the words Shady Rest were pieced together from stained strips of wood.

  A young woman wearing a business suit looked up from a tablet as they entered.

  “Welcome, friends!” she exclaimed, enthusiastically shaking their hands. “My name is Trisha Williams, but you can call me Trish. Everyone does!” She took a moment to point to each of them. “And you are Cordelia, Benji, and Agnes. Correct? Ms. Knox is so excited to give you the full Shady Rest experience today. Follow me, please. Isn’t this weather invigorating? There’s nothing better than a winter morning to get the heart pumping. . . .”

  Trish, who seemed to view silence as some sort of enemy that needed to be vanquished at every step, led them deeper into the house. Several rooms had been designated as offices. Through the glass doors, Cordelia saw employees going about their business: a few talking on a phone or working at a computer, one adding 24 Spruce Mill Lane to a list of addresses on a dry-erase board. In one room, a man with a concerned look on his face nodded in understanding while a well-dressed couple took turns talking. As Cordelia turned the corner, she saw the man reach for a tissue and hand it across his desk.

  “Here we are,” Trish said, opening a pair of double doors. “Ms. Knox will be with you in just a moment. There are chocolate-chip muffins and water on the table.”

  They entered a meeting room with a lot of plaques and framed newspaper articles on the walls. The headlines were all riffs on a common theme: LELAND KNOX GIVES SOMEONE A BUNCH OF MONEY. The causes varied greatly—a school in a Bolivian village, a soup kitchen in Detroit, a local bookstore on the verge of bankruptcy—but the photo ops were always the same: a man with a bow tie and front-page smile posing with a grateful beneficiary.

  “That’s my grandfather,” said Laurel, entering the room and catching them looking at the articles. “Leland Knox. He was a great man. Made his fortune early and spent the rest of his life giving it away. You name the charity, and I promise they have a check with his name on it. He died last summer.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cordelia said.

  Laurel gave a tiny shrug. “He left the world a better place, which was all he ever wanted. Shady Rest was his brainchild, and I hope to continue his legacy. Sit, sit. We have a lot to talk about.”

  Cordelia took a seat. Laurel gave her a giddy smile, as though she had been waiting for this moment her entire life. She was wearing a scoop-necked black top, designer jeans, and a gold ankh. Her knee-high boots looked fresh from the box. It was a cool outfit, and Laurel looked good in it. Cordelia could imagine wearing something like it when she was older.

  When everyone had settled in, Laurel tapped her watch and a screen lowered itself from the ceiling.

  “I have a video to show you. We made it for clients who come to us for help but have trouble grasping what we do here. It might be a good place to start.”

  The lights dimmed.

  Jaunty piano music started to play, and an animated haunted house with dark windows and tall gables appeared on the screen. A bolt of lightning struck the weather vane on the roof, and the walls suddenly turned transparent, revealing a cute ghost with big eyes and a friendly smile.

  “Aww,” said Cordelia.

  “Our business has several steps,” Laurel said. “The first is identifying ‘at risk’ spirits. In other words, ghosts whose haunts are in danger of being destroyed.”

  The music grew more ominous as a crane wielding a wrecking ball with demonic eyes pulled to the curb. Inside the house, the cute ghost cowered with fear, peeking through a window as the giant ball swung back and forth, warming up for the destruction to come. Right before it struck, however, a white van with SHADY REST emblazoned on the side screeched to a halt, blocking its path. The doors of the van flew open, and from it emerged a large man carrying a duffel bag, and a pretty, auburn-haired woman. (Cordelia glanced at Laurel, who gave an embarrassed shrug.) The pair ran into the house, which returned to its original, nontransparent mode. A few moments passed, during which the crane driver impatiently puffed on a cigar, and then the windows of the house exploded with indigo light. The heroes of Shady Rest exited the front door. In the woman’s arms was the cute ghost, cuddled up in a tube like a baby.

  As the van pulled away, the wrecking ball knocked the haunted house to smithereens.

  “Once we’ve determined a haunting is legitimate,” Laurel said, “we capture the ghost, just like you saw me and Kyle do in Gideon’s Ark. The spirit is then placed into a storage facility while we rebuild the ghost’s house from scratch right here in the village.” This played out on the screen, as workers wearing SHADY REST T-shirts built an identical house in a matter of seconds. “If at all possible, we prefer using the original blueprints. We had issues early on when we tried to modernize the plans. For reasons we don’t fully understand, the architecture of these houses seems tied to their . . . hauntability.”

  Cordelia thought Laurel would be very interested in archimancy. But that could wait for now. Today was about getting answers, not giving them.

  “What happens after the ghosts move into their new homes?” Cordelia asked.

  “They stay there. Forever. We’ve rescued forty-three ghosts so far. And built forty-three haunted houses to match.”

  “Can we see the ghosts?” Cordelia asked.

  Laurel grinned. “That’s why you’re here.”

  8

  The Tour

  They drove through the village. Each house was vastly different from the one next to it, creating some unlikely neighbors: a log cabin and an ultramodern glass house, a lavish mansion and a one-room cottage. Only their front yards were identical, a landscape of neatly trimmed lawns devoid of bushes or flowers. There were no cars in the driveways, no toys in the backyard.

  No sign of life at all.

  They parked in front of a squat brick house. As they walked up the front path, Cordelia was surprised to hear a dozen different voices talking at once, as though there were a party going on inside the house.

  “I thought ghosts couldn’t talk,” Agnes whispered to Cordelia.

  “We’re not in Shadow School anymore. Maybe things are different here.”

  As soon as they entered the house, however, Cordelia saw that the voices were not ghostly in origin. On almost every wall, loud videos were playing on flat screens like the one Laurel had used to subdue Seamus Gideon. These weren’t movies or TV shows, but a catalog of personal memories captured by phone: vacations, school concerts, cats, dogs, various people blowing out various candles. In the one nearest Cordelia, a baby giggled while an unseen playmate clapped her hands and made silly sounds offscreen.

  “I didn’t want our ghosts to feel lonely,” Laurel said. “So in each house, we’ve patched into the social-media feeds of all the people they left behind. This way they can see what everyone is up to and still feel like they’re part of the world. We call them ‘life windows.’”

  Benji made an exploding noise and threw his hands out from his head: Mind blown. “So they binge-watch their friends and family all day long? It’s like Netflix for ghosts.”

  Cordelia asked, “Doesn’t it make them sad, seeing all the fun that everyone else is having without them?”

  Laurel regarded Cordelia with a thoughtful expression. “The first thing you think about is th
e ghosts’ feelings. My grandfather would have loved you. How’s this? I’ll introduce you to Dr. Gill. You can tell me yourself if she’s happy or not.”

  They walked through the house, the floor squeaking at the unanticipated weight of corporeal visitors. Benji shivered beneath his hoodie. “Sorry it’s so cold in here,” Laurel said, blowing into her hands. “No use wasting money on heat when there’s no one here to appreciate it.” This wasn’t the only place where corners had been cut. The walls had been primed but not painted. There was barely any furniture. The appliances were cardboard models. Overall, it felt more like the set of a play than an actual home.

  And everywhere—everywhere—were the life windows. Cordelia felt like she was in an appliance store shopping for a new TV.

  She feigned interest in some kid’s high school graduation speech until Laurel entered the next room, then Cordelia reached into her pocket and slipped the spectercles over her head. The dizziness wasn’t as bad as it had been in the ark. Hopefully this meant her eyes were adjusting.

  “That’s a good look for you,” Benji whispered with a barely suppressed grin. Cordelia stuck out her tongue. As if needing the spectercles in the first place wasn’t humiliating enough, they made her look like she had giant bug eyes.

  She followed the rest of the group into the master bedroom. A hazy pink shape was sitting on the edge of the bed. Cordelia blinked a few times until the image settled into that of an older woman wearing a fuzzy robe. Her feet were bare, and there was a white towel wound around her head. All her attention was riveted on the life window across from her. This footage was grainier than the other samples Cordelia had seen around the house—taken from a time when people had used actual video cameras and not their phones. In it, a wedding couple was dancing, the bride’s head nestled against the groom’s shoulder.

  “Judging from the looks on your faces, I’m guessing Dr. Gill is sitting right there,” Laurel said, pointing to the bed. “I’m not surprised. This is her favorite spot. She also likes to watch the toothpaste commercials downstairs.” The kids looked at her in bewilderment, and Laurel added, “Dr. Gill was a dentist for forty years.”

  Benji knelt down and assessed the ghost. “She looks happy enough.”

  Cordelia would have said “mesmerized,” but there was no denying the faint smile on the ghost’s lips. “That’s Dr. Gill in the video, isn’t it?”

  Laurel nodded. “Her husband posted it on the anniversary of her death. He’s a dentist as well—still practicing, believe it or not.” On the video, the couple was feeding each other from a cake shaped like a giant molar. “Dr. Gill was haunting the old office they used to share, which was due to be demolished. We rescued her just in time.”

  Cordelia loved that word: rescued. Sure, there weren’t any Brightkeys involved, but if Laurel hadn’t intervened, Dr. Gill’s spirit would have been lost forever. And Laurel can’t even see them, Cordelia thought. Imagine how many ghosts we could rescue together!

  Maybe Shadow School didn’t need her anymore, but Shady Rest did.

  “Show us more,” Cordelia said.

  Over the next hour, they traversed the empty streets of the village and visited four different houses. Each was haunted by a single ghost. Three of the spirits were older and seemed at peace, having enjoyed their full allotment of years on Earth. The fourth resident was a young man who would never graduate from the college he had been attending at the time of his death. If he felt cheated by his untimely demise, however, he didn’t show it. Like his older brethren, he seemed content to roam the halls of his manufactured haunt, staring at the recorded memories of his life (including many video-game streams) and watching the lives of his loved ones continue without him.

  Around noon, they returned to the conference room, where an elaborate lunch had been set out on the table: several sandwich choices cut into neat triangles, a variety of salads, and freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies. The moment the kids sat down, Trish ran into the room with mugs of hot cocoa topped with whipped cream and cinnamon.

  “So, what do you think?” Laurel asked as everyone started to eat.

  “This is the most amazing place I’ve ever seen in my life,” Cordelia said. “You’re like a ghost conservationist!”

  Laurel looked pleased. “That’s exactly how Grandpa used to describe it. ‘Some people save pandas. We save ghosts!’”

  “You should put that on a T-shirt,” Benji said.

  “I’d love to, but it’s crucial that Shady Rest remain under the radar. I trust the three of you can keep everything you’ve seen today to yourself? You can’t even tell your parents.”

  The kids nodded. They were used to keeping secrets.

  “Are you afraid people won’t believe you?” Cordelia asked.

  “That’s part of it. I can’t say I even blame them. It’s hard to believe what you can’t see with your own eyes. But Grandpa was also afraid of other companies stealing our system in order to turn a profit.”

  “How?” Benji asked. “Ghosts don’t have money.”

  “But their relatives do. Imagine knowing the spirit of your beloved grandmother was about to blink out forever because her house was due to be demolished. How much would you pay to move her somewhere safe? That’s just one example. There are a lot of ways for other people to monetize what we do here. I don’t want that to happen.”

  “But you must make money somehow,” Agnes said, perhaps remembering Mr. Shadow’s comments earlier that week. “Otherwise how are you able to build new houses? Or pay the people who work here?”

  “Her gramps probably left her a boatload of cash,” Benji said.

  “Benji!” Cordelia exclaimed.

  “What?”

  “It’s okay,” Laurel said, though the smile had faded from her lips. It was clear she had been close to her grandfather, and his death probably still weighed heavily on her mind. “Believe it or not, Grandpa died a penniless man. I inherited Shady Rest, but that’s it. We do have some income flow, though. Occasionally homeowners ask us to remove a troublesome spirit, and we take a minimal fee. No more than we need, of course.”

  A sudden thought struck Cordelia. “You’re not going to rebuild Gideon’s entire ark, are you?”

  Laurel laughed. “There’s no need. Any ‘hauntable’ house will work—it’s not specific to the ghost. Grandpa insisted on rebuilding each spirit’s personal haunt, but I don’t see the purpose when we know of several simple house plans that will work for any ghost. We’ll use one of those for Gideon.” Laurel took a nibble of her sandwich. “It was such a stroke of luck you were at the ark that day. We wouldn’t have been able to catch Gideon otherwise. We make a good team.”

  “It wasn’t luck,” Cordelia said. “It was fate.”

  Laurel raised her mug. “Even better.”

  “Wait a sec,” Agnes said. “If you need someone with the Sight, then how did you catch all the ghosts that are already here?”

  Laurel nodded, as though this was something she had meant to mention but overlooked. “We did employ a young man named Victor who could see the ghosts, just like you two. He helped Grandpa for years. It’s because of him that we were able to save the ones we did. But he’s been gone for nearly six months now, and I’m afraid our entire endeavor has ground to a halt without him.”

  The color drained from Benji’s face. “He died?”

  Laurel nearly spit out her cocoa. “No! Of course not! He just quit. Not everyone is cut out for this. Victor was tired of seeing ghosts every day. He wanted a normal life.”

  Benji said, “I can understand that.”

  “So what do you think?” Laurel asked. “Would you three like to join the staff of Shady Rest? We could really use your help. Benji and Cordelia, for your amazing talent, and Agnes—I was thinking I could teach you how to work the equipment.”

  “I’m totally and completely in,” said Cordelia.

  “I’m game too,” said Agnes.

  The girls turned to Benji.

  “Sorr
y,” he said. “It’s cool what you’ve done here. And I won’t tell anybody what I’ve seen today. But I don’t want any part of this.”

  “Because it’s dangerous?” Laurel asked. “Don’t go by what happened at the ark. I would never allow you anywhere near a phantom. Besides, Kyle and I will be doing the actual capturing. You just need to point us in the right direction.”

  “My answer’s still no,” Benji said.

  “Don’t you want to think about it first?” Cordelia asked.

  “No need. I really hope you and Agnes like it here. But I’ve made my decision, and there’s nothing you can do to change my mind.”

  “I understand,” Laurel said. She broke off a piece of a chocolate-chip cookie. “One last thing, though. I would, of course, be paying you for your service—something commensurate with your unique abilities. If that kind of thing matters to you.”

  Benji ran a hand through his hair, no doubt thinking about how badly his family could use the money. Finally, he smiled.

  “How much?” he asked.

  9

  Learning the Ropes

  They returned to Shady Rest the following Saturday for more “volunteering.” Since this was going to be a weekly routine, their parents decided to divvy up the driving tasks. This week, it was Mrs. Núñez’s turn. Benji’s mom usually loved to chat with the girls, but today she barely said a word. It was like some vital light inside her had been extinguished. Cordelia wished there was something she could do to help, but the concerns that haunted her distant gaze were real, grown-up problems. There was no Brightkey to fix them.

  Trish was talking on the phone when they entered the main office. Now that the kids were officially employed by Shady Rest, she greeted them with complete indifference, as though her initial friendliness had been a show for their benefit. When the kids continued to stand there, waiting for directions, she gave them an annoyed look and turned away. Her phone conversation definitely wasn’t work related, unless work involved a “hottie” named Josh who had just moved into Trish’s apartment building. Cordelia caught a glimpse of Laurel as she entered one of the interior offices and decided it would be easier to approach her directly instead of waiting for Trish. She crossed the lobby and peeked her head through the open door. A younger guy with a goatee and slicked-back hair was showing Laurel something on an iPad. Cordelia could smell his cologne from where she was standing.