Page 48 of Paper Ghosts

“No. He’s gone. I would never have asked you back if you had anything to fear.” Mim took one more sip of her tea before setting her cup down. “Where do I begin?” she asked herself. “At the beginning, I suppose. Hen Town was a very different place when I was young. There were few newcomers, so when someone new did come to town, it caused a stir. My grandmother didn’t like it. People who weren’t from here thought she was a joke, because locals called her psychic. But no one ever underestimated her for long. She controlled every aspect of my life, grooming me to become her successor, but the single freedom she allowed me was to choose my own friends. And when I was eighteen, those friends betrayed me on a scale of such magnitude that I still haven’t recovered. I didn’t want the same for you. I know I made you dependent on only me and your father for companionship, but I thought it was the one thing that would keep you safe until you could make your own decisions. But what really happened was you grew up desperate to feel connection, which led you to Clutch. If I had just told you this story of the man I fell in love with, instead of imposing on you something you didn’t understand, things would have ended differently.”

This ranked up there as one of the last things Bailey expected to hear. “Are you saying this story is about Andy Smooth?”

“No. But I understand why you thought it was him. I know the rumors. And the first time you mentioned the Feathers, you must have seen in the yearbook about him coming to Hen Town, because afterward you listened to his music and looked up all you could about him in your room.”

“How could you possibly know that?” Bailey asked, surprised.

Mim smiled. “I was a teenage girl once, too. The man I fell in love with was named Jack.”

Bailey suddenly turned to stare out the sunroom windows, trying to capture a strange memory. She finally caught it and turned back to Mim, only to find her looking at her with such fondness that she almost forgot what she was going to say.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Mim said. “I was just thinking of how beautiful you are.”

Bailey put her hand to her hat self-consciously. “The night you sent me away, you said it would be a relief to finally tell someone about Jack. Is this the story you were going to tell me?”

“It’s the same Jack, but a different story. Will you stay for a few days and listen to the rest? Please? I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”

It was hard not to wonder if Mim had ulterior motives. She surely knew that promising Bailey a story, which would have been a gift greater than gold to her as a child, would make her stay. Bailey finally nodded.

“Good. Thank you. We’ll continue tomorrow.” Mim reached for the umbrella leaning against the settee, and stood slowly. “Please excuse me. I need to lie down.”

Bailey watched her walk away. “Why did you decide to finally take the umbrella out of the vent?”

“It was time. It belonged to Jack, actually. It had been his grandmother’s.” She turned at the door. “He once told me he called her Mim.”

“So how was it?” Tug said, coming out of his office as Bailey set the tea tray on the kitchen counter.

Strange, she wanted to say. “To be continued,” she said instead. “She gets tired easily, doesn’t she?”

“She hates that it’s noticeable. I’m glad the two of you are talking. I’m glad you came. We were both a little worried you wouldn’t.”

Bailey had been worried, too. Now, she had to admit, she was curious where this tale was going. “Did she ever mention someone named Jack to you?”

“No, I don’t think so. But there was a time when we first moved here that you had an imaginary friend named Jack. You were very secretive about him. For weeks, every time you walked into a room, you whispered, Are you here, Jack?”

“The piano man.” She smiled. “I’d completely forgotten about him.”

“The piano man?”

“I associated him with the piano, for some reason.” She shrugged. “Maybe I imagined him playing it? I don’t even remember what I thought he looked like now.”

“You had such a big imagination as a child.” Tug watched her twist the long strings on either side of her hat around her fingers. “Okay,” he said. “What’s with the hat? You haven’t taken it off since you came home.”

Bailey laughed. The house reacted the way it always did, with a sense of joy in its lonely world. “Just a few more minutes, and I would have gotten away with it,” she said, taking it off. “I bought a bleach kit this morning. I get on these color kicks sometimes. I bleach it out when I know you’re coming to visit, because I don’t want you to worry I’m having another crisis. I’m not. I’m just trying on things and seeing what fits. When you called about Mim, I didn’t have time to change it, so I bought this hat at the airport.”

He mulled it over, then said magnanimously, “The blue matches your eyes.”

“Nice try,” she said as she headed upstairs.

Certain parts of the Wester House were falling into disrepair because neither Willamena nor Tug had the skill set to fix them, and repairmen still weren’t allowed inside because of the Wester Rules. Only one bathroom was functional on the second floor, the plumbing in the other was shot, so Bailey sat on the edge of the chipped bathtub while the bleach itched and smelled so acrid she had to open the tiny window over the commode.

After leaving Hen Town, she’d given up on her hair. At night she would party, but during the day she would ditch classes and sit in an empty student gallery where no one wanted to display because it was rumored to be haunted by an art student who had taken her life.

One day as she sat there, a girl she’d never seen before walked in. She looked as unhappy as Bailey. It glittered around her. She floated listlessly around the room as if looking at artwork that wasn’t there; then she turned to Bailey. Bailey knew she looked horrible. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d bathed.

“Start with your hair,” the girl said. “Believe it or not, you’ll feel better.”