Scarecrow’s Dream Read Free Page B

anything. Hell, I’m happy just to know my name and not spend my days wandering around the park howling like a banshee asking everyone I see to tell me who I am.”
    Addie winked at me—or, more accurately, at the dog since she assumed I’d be close by—and began speaking in a heavy Irish brogue. “’Tis a very pretty name too, Holly Malone. Christmassy, like a painted ornament on a berry tree, young lass.”
    She switched back to her normal voice. “You are aware I’m the one who chose it? Had to fight Paul. He wanted Jordan. Nice name—which is why we used it as your middle. But Holly was so you. I knew you’d look like my grandmother and your great-granny and I was right. Forgive me for the metaphors but I hear your name and I envision a painting set in County Kilkarney. Red hair and green eyes and too damned stinkin’ tall and ethereal. I had those first two until half the hair went white but never the last. It’s hard to be ethereal when you’re five-foot-one on a good day and have a tendency to overeat.”
    I snorted. “Well, you’d have to use ethereal anyway. How else would you describe a ghost?” I shivered hearing the word even though we’d both settled on dead and back as the best explanation for what had happened two days ago.
    I glanced at the DVDs scattered on the coffee table. Jesus Christ Superstar . I’d loved the music and the Broadway show I’d seen last year, which in this strange new reality had actually been more than forty years ago. Beetlejuice . Saturday Night Fever . Star Wars. Romancing the Stone . Good Morning, Vietnam . A trinity of Back to the Future films. The American President . The Birdcage . A bunch of movies with Die Hard in the title. A trio of Terminator flicks. Pirates of the Caribbean . Four Indiana Jones movies. All three Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit sequels or prequels or whatever Adelaide had called them. Hairspray . August Rush . Step Up and Step Up Revolution . Eight Harry Potter movies. Dark Shadows , the movie, not the soap opera I’d rushed home from school to watch when I was in high school. Ghost , which I’d watched twice last night in an effort to figure out how Patrick Swayze’s character had coped.
    “You know what I don’t understand? Patrick could move through solid objects but had difficulty picking things up. I’m the opposite. And then there’s Curtain Call .”
    Addie interrupted. “I loved that one! James Spader, Maggie Smith, and Michael Caine. Awesome. All three. And Buck Henry the few times he had a scene. Sorry. Go on.”
    “Okay. Maggie and Michael could eat and drink. Like me. But they could also pop out of visible and not visible with what appeared to be very little effort. Why can’t I?”
    “I have no answers. I’m not sure it really matters as far as whole mysterious ways to haunt go.”
    “You’re useless but I love you anyway. Oh! I also watched three episodes of the TV show Ghost Whisperer . Do you suppose she makes house calls?”
    Addie wisely ignored that inane question.
    “It’s going to take me another forty years to watch all these,” I proclaimed. “Thank heaven I can recall most of my childhood memories up through high school and some of college. But as for the few months, well, actually a year or two before the great dive into the river? Nothing. Zippo. Well, except for events and I’m not quite up to date on most of those either. I mean, I vaguely remember Nixon getting reelected and a scandal brewing about the burglary at the Watergate Hotel, although not sure how much is memory and how much was watching All the President’s Men this morning. It was in the batch of DVDs you left for me. Another cool movie, by the way.”
    “Well, catching up on good flicks is better than sitting around here moping.”
    “Believe me, I’d rather be doing something else. I’d hop on out and take Boo-Boo for a walk except people would see she’s alone with a leash floating in the air and want to call animal control.