Ghostly Echoes (Jackaby #3)(6)
The pale man stood in the foreground of the picture, a smug smile on his face. He was not alone. In the background of the picture, five men stood around a worktable in what appeared to be an industrial factory. Bright lamplight illuminated their faces and left hard shadows on the wall behind them. The men wore dark work aprons, thick gloves, and tinted goggles pushed up on their heads. The one in the center was Howard Carson.
There were no other pictures of Howard in the house—none hanging in Jenny’s room nor propped up on her nightstand. She spoke of him fondly but rarely, and always with trepidation, as if feeling gingerly around a bruise.
Along the bottom of the picture had been inscribed five words in tight cursive: For posterity. From humble beginnings . . .
“He worked with my fiancé.” Jenny’s voice was quiet.
I tensed, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling up. “Jenny? Are you still with me?”
She pursed her lips, nodding. “I remember now.” I held my tongue, not daring to tip the balance. When she spoke her voice was scarcely more than a breath. “He was called Pavel.”
The photograph had been in her case file for years, but Jenny had never been able to identify the pale man before, nor anyone in the file save Howard Carson. There had been something about the image she responded to—an uneasy remnant of a feeling—but like Jenny herself, the memory remained frustratingly intangible. Looking at any of the photographs in her file for too long put her in a fragile state, but still she tried. When I had recognized the pale man as the same wretch whose trail of havoc we had followed across the valley, she had tried even harder, wrestling with the demons in her mind for anything—a detail—a name—but the effort had only triggered her to echo every time. Until now.
“Is he . . . ?” I whispered. “Is he the one who . . . ?” Jenny’s eyes narrowed in concentration, and a cold breeze crept under my collar. My trip into her thoughts might have brought a flickering light to Jenny’s memories, but those corridors were still shrouded in something darker than shadow. “Perhaps we should take a rest,” I said.
“He was here. Why was he here?” Jenny’s silver hair whipped in a sudden breeze, though the windows were latched tight. “I don’t like him. I don’t trust him.”
“Neither do I, Jenny. I think we ought to stop.”
“He came to the house. He’s at the door. He knows that Howard is here.”
“Jenny, stop.”
“I don’t like him.” She blinked, her eyes drifting in and out of focus, and then her stare turned icy. “I know who you are. You work with my fiancé.”
I stuffed all of the photographs and the loose clippings and notes back into the file and slammed it shut as a bitingly cold gust of wind pressed into my back. When I looked around Jenny was already gone.
“Jenny?” I called to the silence. The silence deepened.
“Give her time.”
I jumped at the sound of a man’s voice. “Mr. Jackaby!” I gasped, clutching my heart. “I didn’t hear you come in. How long have you . . . ?”
“I just got back. I won’t be staying long. I wasn’t expecting to find myself stepping into an icebox.” He dropped his satchel with a thump and picked up Jenny’s file as he walked around the desk. “Be careful, Miss Rook. Our undeparted friend has a thorn buried deep in her metaphorical paw, and we find ourselves in the lion’s den.” He tucked the file into his desk and shut the drawer with a click. “I assure you, we will do everything in our power to remove the injury—but I have no intention of making it worse and getting torn to ribbons for our efforts. Patience and diligence are paramount.”
“With all due respect, sir, ten years stretches the definition of patient. She is already a decade into her afterlife.”
He stared at the old papers and receipts spread across his office floor. “Still, we must consider the possibility that the thorn and the lion are one.”
“Sir?”
He met my gaze and sighed. “Ghosts are beings of discontent, Miss Rook. The undead remain bound to this earth by their unfinished business. Either we will not succeed because we cannot succeed—because her soul will never be content—”
“Or we will succeed,” I said, realizing his implication. “And her business will be finished.”
“And she will depart from us at long last.” Jackaby nodded. “That is her decision, though. She says she’s ready. We will provide her with what few answers and what little peace we can, but there’s no benefit in rushing the job.” He slid into the chair and leaned heavily on his desk, his gray eyes gloomy.
“Sir?”
“I dislike the idea of being without Miss Cavanaugh.”
“Have you told her that?”
“She has her own concerns to attend to right now.”
“She really can handle more than you think, sir. She’s making considerable progress.”
“The state of my office says otherwise. I noticed the glass in the wastebasket, by the way. I take it this is not her first echo today. How long was she incorporeal for the last one?”
I hesitated. “Only an hour. Maybe two. It was just a little one.” His gaze drifted to my cheek, and I could feel his eyes catching on the slender scar on my cheekbone. The mark was a trivial thing—already it had faded to a soft pink line—but it was a souvenir of a nearly catastrophic brush I’d had with a Stymphalian bird, another supernatural force I had woefully underestimated. Getting Jackaby to stop treating me like a fragile thing was difficult enough without having reminders of past close calls etched on my face. It didn’t help that the injury in question had been inflicted by nothing more than the creature’s feather. I redirected the conversation. “She had a revelation.”