Spirit Story - Chapter 7

Spirit Story

Chapter 7

Mara’s house had a junk drawer. This surprised people. Not that people routinely inspected her kitchen drawers, but on the few occasions someone had watched Mara work and then visited her home, there seemed to be an expectation that every object she owned would be labeled, catalogued, and stored according to a system requiring a key.

The junk drawer contained three dead batteries, two working batteries of uncertain size, four pens, a screwdriver, rubber bands, takeout menus, a tape measure, birthday candles, a packet of soy sauce, and a key Mara had been meaning to identify since 2022.

She knew the batteries were dead because she’d tested them. She had standards. She dropped her keys into the ceramic bowl beside the door and kicked off her shoes.

“I’m home.”

No response. Mara waited. “Your enthusiasm is overwhelming.”

A gray cat appeared at the end of the hallway. He stopped. Looked at her, then turned around.

“Good talk.” Mara picked up her shoes and carried them toward the bedroom. The cat followed. His name was Newton. This had nothing to do with Isaac Newton. Mara had explained that repeatedly. She had adopted him seven years earlier from a shelter where his name had already been Newton, and changing the name of a three-year-old cat seemed unnecessary. Nobody believed her, especially Daniel.

Mara changed into soft pants and an old university T-shirt, washed her face, and studied herself in the bathroom mirror. Daniel had been right. The circles under her eyes were impressive.

“Three hours was stupid.”

Newton sat in the doorway. Mara looked at him. “That wasn’t a request for commentary.”

He licked one paw.

Her house was small. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen that had been renovated sometime during an era when people apparently believed every countertop should be beige, and a living room with built-in shelves that had been the reason Mara bought the place.

She had filled them within six months. Books stood upright where they fit and sideways where they didn’t. Chemistry texts occupied two shelves, fiction three, history another. A stack of library books sat on the floor beside the armchair because there was nowhere else to put them.

A framed photograph of Mara and her parents stood beside the television. Another showed Mara at twenty-three, laughing so hard at something outside the frame that her eyes were closed. Claire was beside her. Mara hadn’t thought about that photograph in years. She picked it up. Claire’s hair had been long then.

Her phone buzzed. Mara didn’t need to look. She looked.

CLAIRE: Any ghosts yet?

Mara walked into the kitchen.

MARA: No.

The response arrived immediately.

CLAIRE: Guides. Sorry. I respect terminology now.

Mara opened the refrigerator. Newton appeared. “You don’t eat refrigerator food.”

Newton disagreed. Mara took out leftover chicken, vegetables, and a container of rice.

Her phone buzzed.

CLAIRE: Any 41s?

Mara stared at the message. Newton meowed. “Don’t.”

Another message.

CLAIRE: Mara?

She put the phone facedown. Newton jumped onto a chair. “You don’t need to know either.”

She reheated dinner. The phone vibrated twice more while she ate. Mara ignored it until she had finished half the chicken, then she turned it over.

CLAIRE: There was a 41.

CLAIRE: OH MY GOD THERE WAS A 41.

Mara closed her eyes. She should not tell her. There was no reason to tell her. Sample 41 had a legitimate laboratory explanation. More importantly, Mara couldn’t discuss case-specific information outside appropriate channels.

So she typed:

Nothing I can discuss from work.

Claire responded:

FROM WORK????

Mara regretted everything.

MARA: Goodnight, Claire.

CLAIRE: MARA ELLISON.

MARA: Goodnight.

CLAIRE: DID 41 HAPPEN AT WORK?

Mara turned the phone facedown. Newton stared at her. “Confirmation bias.”

Newton blinked.

“Evelyn tells me forty-one matters. I notice Highway 41 because she has made the number salient. Later, I encounter the same number at work.”

Newton began washing his shoulder.

“Exactly.”

Mara ate another bite. “The probability of encountering the number forty-one in ordinary life is not remotely extraordinary. There are addresses, highways, room numbers, sample identifiers, prices, times, ages—”

Newton jumped down.

“I’m not finished.”

He walked away. Mara pointed her fork after him. “This is why you don’t understand statistics.”

⸻

Mara had bought the house eleven years earlier. She had been twenty-seven and terrified, not of the mortgage... of the permanence.

Signing her name on thirty years of debt had seemed like an act of astonishing optimism. The first night, she’d slept on a mattress on the living-room floor because her bed frame hadn’t arrived. Her mother had cried when Mara showed her the kitchen. Her father had inspected the water heater. Both had asked, in different ways, whether she was sure she wanted to buy a house alone.

Mara had been sure. She still was. She liked living alone. That was sometimes difficult to explain without people hearing something she hadn’t said.

She wasn’t lonely. She wasn’t waiting. She hadn’t sworn off marriage because of heartbreak or made a principled stand against romantic attachment.

She had dated. She had loved two men seriously and one rather unwisely. She had almost moved in with one of them. None of it had ended catastrophically. There were no dramatic betrayals. No engagement ring returned across a restaurant table. Life had simply moved in different directions.

Mara had discovered somewhere along the way that being alone and being lonely were entirely separate conditions. She experienced the first every day. The second, rarely.

Her parents lived forty minutes away. Her older brother lived three states away and called mostly when he needed someone to tell him whether something he’d read online was scientifically ridiculous.

It usually was.

Claire, apparently, had returned from the dead socially speaking and intended to resume harassing her. Daniel occupied more of Mara’s waking hours than either of them would willingly admit. And Newton believed her sole purpose was maintaining acceptable levels of food and climate control.

Her life was not empty. It was hers.

Mara carried her plate to the sink. One plate. One fork. There had been years when that had bothered her. Not anymore. She rinsed them and left them in the sink.

Tomorrow was perfectly capable of containing dishes.

She went into the living room. Newton had taken possession of the center cushion of the sofa. “Move.”

He did not.

“You have an entire house.” Newton closed his eyes. Mara sat beside him.

Her phone buzzed again.

DANIEL: Don’t forget 8:30 tomorrow. QA wants the additional runs before ten.

Mara typed:

I know.

Three dots.

DANIEL: Get some sleep.

MARA: Planning to.

DANIEL: No palm readers tonight.

Mara smiled.

MARA: Go away.

DANIEL: Ask your guides if they think I’m funny.

MARA: They don’t.

Mara froze. She stared at what she’d written. Newton opened one eye. Mara deleted the message before sending it.

Then typed:

Goodnight, Daniel.

She sent that instead. For some reason, the unsent words bothered her.

They don’t.

She didn’t have guides. Therefore they couldn’t have opinions about Daniel. The entire sentence had been a joke.

Newton climbed into her lap. Mara scratched beneath his chin. “You’d tell me if there were invisible people in the house, wouldn’t you?”

Newton began to purr. Mara looked down at him. "That was rhetorical.”

His eyes closed. “Useless.” She picked up her book. For almost an hour, nothing happened.

No strange sounds.

No flickering lights.

No cold spots.

No mysterious woman appeared in the hallway wearing a high-necked dress. The house settled around her in all its ordinary sounds. Mara read thirty-seven pages. She did not think about forty-one. She was rather proud of that until she realized she had counted the pages.

“Damn it.”

Newton’s ear twitched.

⸻

At ten-fifteen, Mara locked the back door. She turned off the kitchen light. Newton followed her down the hall. The second bedroom stood open. It was technically a guest room. In practice it contained a bed, a desk, two boxes Mara had never unpacked after replacing the hall closet shelving, and an exercise bike currently serving as a highly engineered clothing rack.

Mara paused, something was on the floor. She turned on the light. A cardboard box had tipped over beside the desk. Several folders and old photographs had spilled across the carpet.

Mara looked at Newton. He sat in the hallway. “Was that you?”

Newton looked away. “Strong defense.”

Mara crouched. The box had been sitting on the edge of the desk, too close, apparently. She gathered the folders first. Tax records. Closing documents from the house. Old insurance papers. A folder from college.

She stacked them back inside, then the photographs, most were prints her mother had given her years ago. People standing in front of places nobody remembered visiting. Mara picked up a photograph of her parents when they were young. Her father had hair. She smiled, another showed her brother missing both front teeth.

She put that one aside, blackmail had no expiration date. Newton wandered into the room and sniffed the overturned box. “Now you’re interested.”

Mara reached beneath the desk for the last photograph. Her fingers stopped. It wasn’t a photograph. It was a small rectangular piece of metal lay partly beneath the edge of the rug. Silver.

Mara stared at it, then picked it up. It was cold in her hand. Old, judging by the tarnish. There was a tiny hinge on one side and some sort of worn engraving across the front.

Mara frowned. She had never seen it before. She turned it over.

Nothing.

No name.

No date.

No number.

She felt a ridiculous rush of relief at the last one. “Not forty-one.”

Newton sniffed it. Mara looked at him. “Don’t eat it.”

She examined the box. It could have fallen out. The box contained old family material her mother had given her when she’d moved into the house. Mara had barely looked through half of it.

There was nothing mysterious about finding an unfamiliar object among things she hadn’t examined in years. She placed the metal piece on the desk.

Then stopped. Silver.

Something silver hanging at her waist. “No.”

Mara picked it up again, coincidence. Worse than coincidence, suggestion. Evelyn had mentioned silver. Mara had now found a silver object and her brain was trying to connect them. That was precisely how this worked.

Mara put the object down. “Unrelated.” Newton jumped onto the bed. “Entirely unrelated.” He circled twice and lay down. Mara turned off the light. She made it halfway down the hallway. Stopped. Stood there. Then went back.

She picked up the silver object and carried it to her bedroom, not because it meant anything. She simply wanted better light.

That was all.