Raising the Dead Read Free

them to eternal peace. Places were simply occupied by residual energy that was triggered by human action. The solution? Stop the action.
    It was the driving principle behind my parents’ careers. But after Charleston, I’d noticed a shift in how my mother and my father approached their work.
    While Dad continued his no-nonsense, scientific approach to all things paranormal, Mom seemed to take a step back. The first time I’d noticed the change was the day we returned fromCharleston. Our house was a wreck, the result of two angry spirits. Furniture lay on its side and the hundreds of sheets of paper scattered throughout the downstairs made me think a tiny tornado had touched down in the center of our dining room. Immediately, Dad went about fixing the big things, such as returning chairs to their rightful place and inspecting the ceiling for cracks.
    Mom took a different approach. She knelt on the floor, examining each piece of paper for clues and running her hands over every jagged line streaking the walls. She was searching for a pattern, I realized, some common thread that tied everything together. While Dad assumed it was all a random mess, Mom thought it represented something deeper and more complex. When she asked Dad to slow down, he laughed. “The sooner we put all of this behind us, the better,” he declared.
    Mom tried to explain her ideas to him, that maybe they should catalog exactly what had happened, but Dad dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “It means nothing,” he said. “Nothing a couple hours of hard work can’t fix.”
    Mom pursed her lips and looked like she wanted to debate the issue, but even I knew that when Dad decided upon something, it was final. Mom picked her battles, and this was one she couldn’t win. Yet.
    “Ranch or Italian?” Mom asked Trisha, bringing me back to the present.
    “Definitely Italian.”
    “Exactly what I was thinking.”
    I watched the way Mom talked with Trisha, the way she smiled and went out of her way to make Trisha comfortable. We rarely met Shane’s girlfriends. He only introduced us to women he had dated for more than a month, a population I could count on one hand. Trisha was special, and everyone in my family knew it.
    While the pizza cooked we converged in the dining room, eager for new flood updates. The same footage aired on the news, though, an endless loop of water licking the bottom of stop signs and cars gliding along on dark waves.
    “I haven’t seen a storm this bad since Noah was in diapers,” Trisha announced.
    Noah winced. He’d endured a full 24 hours of discomfort, beginning with having to dress in my dad’s old sweatpants after we made it home, to sleeping on our sofa with a snoring Shane sprawled out on the floor, to watching his mom feed chunks of grapefruit to Shane at breakfast. Noah looked miserable, and I wanted to do something about it. While the adults stared at the TV, flipping between the weather channel and the local news, I invited him up to my bedroom.
    “I think you need a break from all of this,” I told him.
    “Anything’s better than staring at the TV,” he agreed.
    As soon as Noah stepped into my room, I felt nervous and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. It wasn’t that I thought something would happen, but maybe being alone together would inspire him to make a move. I was suddenly aware of everything my room held and what those things might say about me. Would he laugh at the small pink teddy bear perched on top of my dresser? Would he dare open my closet? Normally my clothes were strewn in heaps across the floor, but when it became apparent that no one would be leaving the house Friday night, I had shoved everything into my closet. An avalanche of clothes waited behind the double doors, ready to tumble down on the unlucky person who turned the handle.
    Thankfully, Noah did not venture near my closet. Instead, he went straight to my bookshelf while I sat on the edge of my neatly made bed. “These are all