Ghosts of Columbia Read Free Page A

sure?”
    “To relax after a performance, some time it takes. The wine helps. Even if it is not true French.”
    Not knowing what else to say, I answered, “You sang well.”
    “I did sing well. And where am I? I am singing in a cold small Dutch town in Columbia, where no one even understands what I offer, where no one can appreciate the restraint of a Fauré or the words of a Villon—”
    “I do.”
    “You, my dear Doktor Eschbach, are as much of a refugee as I am.”
    She was right about that, but my refuge was at least the summer home of my youth.
    I had one complete glass of the Sebastopol, and she drank the rest of the bottle. It was close to midnight before she could relax and eat some of the sweet rolls I had warmed up. I left the dishes in the sink. Most days, Marie would get them when she came, but she didn’t come on weekends. I decided I would worry about dirty dishes later.
    At the foot of the stairs, I kissed Llysette, and her lips were warm under mine, then suddenly cold. She stepped back. I turned around in time to see another flicker of white slip toward the terrace and then vanish.
    “Someone was watching. Your ghost. That … I cannot take.” Llysette straightened the low shawl collar of her recital dress. I tried not to leer, at least not too much. “Perhaps I will go home.”
    “No. Not until we know more about what happened to Miranda. We’ve been over that already.”
    “Then, tonight, I will sleep in the …”
    “Just sleep with me. I’d feel you were safer.” I glanced toward the staircase up to my bedroom.
    “Just sleep?” She arched her eyebrows, as if to imply I couldn’t just sleep with her.
    “Just sleep,” I reaffirmed with a sigh. At least, I wouldn’t have to fire the steamer up and drive across to the other side of the river with the local watch running all over the township.
    At the same time, I was scarcely enthused about Carolynne’s appearance, but what could I say? Carolynne never spoke to me, hadn’t since I was a boy, not since that mysterious conversation she had had with my mother … and neither would talk about it. Since I couldn’t force answers from either a ghost or my mother, I still didn’t know why.

CHAPTER TWO

    S ince, for a nonbeliever in a believing society, the worth of any church depends on the minister, I attended the Vanderbraak Dutch Reformed Church. Father Esterhoos at least understood the need to make theology both practical and entertaining. Besides, I’d gone there when the house had been my parents’ summer retreat from the heat of New Amsterdam. Now my mother lived with her younger sister Anna in Schenectady, when they weren’t visiting some relative or another.
    When we’d spent the night together, Llysette and I usually went to church together, perhaps because Klaus Esterhoos, unlike Philippe Hague, the college chaplain, treated us more as old members or potential converts than scarlet sinners. Who knows? He could have told the deacons that saving us was worthwhile, not that I really believed that either of us could be saved.
    On Sundays, we took my steamer. Although I still kept the Stanley’s thermal-electric paint polished, after more than a year the flaxen-haired children walking up the mum-lined gray stone steps to the church no longer pointed at the car as my normally bright red Stanley glided around the square toward the church. It didn’t have to be red, but that was the color when I left the thermal switch off. Without the red paint, the steamer would have appeared almost boring, a staid dowager of vehicles. That didn’t include the actual engine or the suspension or the extras, of course, just the smooth-lined and sedanlike appearance. Columbia City had taught me the value of misdirection, although what I’d learned had barely been enough to engineer my escape from my past and the intrigues of the Federal District with a whole skin.
    That Sunday was different. I guided the Stanley across the one-lane stone bridge