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were poking their way
in, and fetched up in a kind of clearing, in the middle of which
stood a slate-roofed farmhouse made of stone.
    The house was at least two
hundred years old and closer to three. At both ends huge crumbling
chimneys, cast in silhouette by the setting sun, stood like
brooding sentinels. A towering pine loomed over the heavy
Dutch-door entry to the house, throwing it into premature darkness.
Massive shutters, their black panels peeling, hung unused and
uncared for. The only light was lurid light -- streaks of red
sunset, cutting across the tattered, overgrown scene. From high
overhead a purple finch warbled notes of piercing sweetness, a
simple song of renewal amid continuing decay.
    Emily tried hard to resist
being affected by it all, but it wasn't easy; the atmosphere of
foreboding was overwhelming her. She touched her hand to the
crystal she wore -- she'd begun to regard it as a good-luck charm
-- and looked around for the BMW. It must have gone alongside the
house, because suddenly the senator emerged from there with a smile
and a wave. Her heart lifted unreasonably in her breast.
    A human being, she thought
gratefully. "I'm definitely glad I saw your car, Senator," she
said, her spirits rising. "I could never have found this place on
my own."
    The senator, dressed in
khakis and blazer, seemed grateful that she came. "I was here once
before," he said, taking her hand in a warm grip. "The house was
just as shabby then, but the owner was keeping the grounds up. The
woman was an avid gardener right up until the time she died, at
ninety-six."
    "Is she the one who's
supposed to be haunting the place?" Emily asked with an awkward
giggle. The truth was, she was feeling very nervous and ill at
ease.
    "You continue to be
amused," the senator answered in the deepening twilight. "I suppose
I can't blame you. No, it was the old woman herself who complained
about the hauntings. At first no one took her seriously. She was in
her seventies at the time and people sometimes get a little
paranoid at that age. She was living here with her grandson. The
grandson was twelve when he moved in with her, after his mother
died of pneumonia. The hauntings apparently began two years
later."
    Emily glanced at the door
to the house. It did not open for them, and the senator seemed in
no hurry to approach it. So she said, "Maybe the boy resented being
stuck out here, and was just trying to frighten his
grandmother."
    "That's the obvious
conclusion. The boy really was angry and resentful, about a lot of
things--the death first of his father, then his mother; having to
leave Boston and his pals. That's a tough age, anyway," the senator
added, sounding as if he remembered it well.
    "But," he continued,
"credible witnesses said they were in the house when objects flew
off shelves, pictures fell from walls of their own volition,
windows blew out from their frames--"
    "A poltergeist?" She tried
to look scientific.
    The senator shrugged.
"Some say that. There's another theory going around: that any
so-called poltergeist is really a manifestation of a kind of
nervous energy in a disturbed child. Either way, it's intriguing,
don't you think?"
    He was baiting her. He
couldn't be serious. And when where they going in to the damned
s é ance, anyway?
The bugs had turned fierce. Suddenly Emily was annoyed. "So you're
saying a disturbed child either attracts destructive energy or
projects it from his subconscious. Fine. What happens when the kid
grows up? What happened when this kid grew up?"
    The senator was leaning
against her Corolla, perfectly at ease, as if he'd chanced upon her
at a Washington soir é e. "The hauntings stopped."
    "There you are," Emily
said, triumphantly. "Can we go in now?"
    "They'll let us know," he
answered, and went back to his train of thought. "Trouble is,
there've been new disturbances since the old woman's death two
years ago. A young Boston couple bought this place with all its
furnishings, intending to renovate it.