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teaching for a few years, and I don’t know
many ten or eleven year olds who hire private investigators.”
    Mary slowly walked forward and stopped at the first desk in
the row.   She leaned against the desk
that had been affixed to the floor and smiled at the ghost.   “You made a great impression on him, you
know,” Mary said. “Your words on his spelling test made him finally believe in
himself.”
    “Words on a spelling test?” Kristen said, shaking her head.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
    “Andrew Tyler,” Mary said. “Do you remember grading his
spelling test?”
    “Well, I do remember Andrew Tyler,” she said. “But I just
graded his test last night, so unless I’m Rip Van Winkle, I don’t think you
were hired by Andrew.”
    “Do you remember going home last night?” Mary asked.
    Kristen stared at Mary. “Well, of course…” she began,
pausing almost immediately.   She looked
up at Mary, her eyes wide and her face filled with concern. “I can’t seem to
remember…”
    “Tell me what you do remember about last night,” Mary urged.
    “I was grading papers,” she said slowly. “I’d just finished
Andrew’s paper, and then I took a moment to read Danny’s letter.”   She looked up with an embarrassed smile. “Danny’s my fiancé.”
    “Congratulations,” Mary said. “Then what happened?”
    Kristen paused for a moment while she searched her memory.
“Then I heard a sound in the hall,” she said slowly. “I got up and looked, but
no one was there.”   She looked up at Mary
again and shrugged. “It kind of spooked me, so I decided to pack up and do the
rest of the grading at home.   I’m not
very brave when it comes to those kinds of things.”
    “I guess you would have packed up your briefcase and your
purse,” Mary said, “and locked your classroom door?”
    Kristen nodded. “Yes, I did,” she said easily, but then her
face fell and she looked down at the floor, studying it for a few minutes.   When she looked up, her eyes were wide with
horror. “He was there,” she whispered, her voice shaky.
    “Who?” Mary asked. “Who was there?”
    “I don’t know,” she stammered. “He grabbed me from behind.”
She shuddered. “He touched me.” Closing her eyes tightly, she wrapped her arms
around herself. “He was…he was disgusting.”
    “What did you do?” Mary asked.
    “He grabbed me,” she said slowly, translucent tears sliding
down her cheeks. “And he forced me to the stairs.   He said he was going to take me.”   She looked up at Mary’s eyes. “I had to get
away.”
    “Yes. Yes, you did,” Mary agreed.
    “I kicked him,” Kristen said, her voice breaking into sobs.
“I kicked him, and he pushed me.   He
pushed me.”
    Wracked with sobs, tears flowing freely, she could barely
speak. She took a deep, shuddering breath and looked at Mary, heart-breaking
anguish in her eyes. “I fell,” she whispered. “I fell, and I died.”

Chapter Ten

 
    “What happened?” Andrew asked, his
eyes wide with curiosity and apprehension as he glanced around the room. “Is
she still here?”
    Mary shook her head, still staring at the empty space where
Kristen had just stood. “No, she’s gone now,” she replied with a sigh.
    “Why?   Why did she
leave?” he asked.
    Taking a deep breath, Mary wiped the sadness from her eyes
and turned to Andrew. “She just remembered what happened that night and
comprehended that she was dead,” she explained. “That’s a fairly traumatic
realization.”
      “What?” he asked.
“She’s been dead for over forty years. Why didn’t she figure it out sooner?”
    “Well, I don’t have this all figured out perfectly yet,” she
said. “But it seems to me that often when death happens quickly, the spirits
don’t always understand they’ve passed on.   They wake up in their spirit form and just keep repeating the actions
from the life they lived.”
    “But forty years,” he insisted. “Wouldn’t