An Inquiry Into Love and Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

everything down in the dark just inside. Then I trotted back to the car and took out my stack of schoolbooks, hurrying back so the books would not get too wet. There was still time for studying tonight.
    I had been hoping against hope for a modern installation of electric light, but I was disappointed. I fumbled in the gloomy foyer and found an old oil lamp and a box of matches. I lit the lamp and opened the wick as far as I could, seeing only a dusty, cluttered hall, a door to the left, and a set of stairs before me. The place smelled just a little unused, as if the occupant had been gone only a little while. Toby had died three days ago.
    A quick look through the main floor showed a few rooms full of mismatched furniture, a sign of a succession of renters over the years. I couldn’t see any belongings sitting on tables or draped over chairs. At the back of the house, in the bare kitchen, I found the first evidence that Toby had even been there—a single ceramic bowl stood on the washboard, cleaned out and left next to a single, equally clean spoon.
    I sighed. A bachelor’s kitchen, and the long drive had made me hungry. Well, I’d been feeding myself for as long as I could remember; my mother could barely prepare toast. I’d have to make do.
    But as I swung my lamp in the direction of the larder, something in the light caught my eye. I leaned closer.
    In the middle of the wooden kitchen table—precisely in the middle—was a pocket watch. It gleamed dully, the lamplight reflecting from its glass face. I picked it up and turned it over, my fingers taking in the familiar surface. This was Toby’s pocket watch; I had played with it as a child. And suddenly, the weight of remembrance was on me again.
    Toby had often visited during my childhood. He had been a plain-looking man whose face gave nothing away, a man one would never notice in a crowd: of average height, neither slender nor fat. He had short dark hair and his suits were never new, less from poverty—though there may have been that—than from simple bachelor carelessness. He spoke little and seemed particularly tongue-tied around children.
    I suppose he was hardly the dashing, heroic type of uncle who told war stories at bedtime, or the kind of uncle whose visits delighted children, laughing and full of fun. Toby spent most of his visits reading and writing, talking with my parents about grown-up subjects, or pottering about our house and gardens, fixing things on his own. After my mother found he had unclogged a backed-up sink drain in the kitchen unasked, she declared him a gentleman and nearly kissed him; he blushed, shook his head, and said nothing.
    And yet, in his unguarded moments, like that morning on the beach—moments very rare in a man of Toby’s shyness—he was the best sort of uncle, the attentive kind who never made a child feel foolish or unwanted.
    I had a vivid memory of sitting on the floor of my father’s study, quietly reading my picture books, as Toby sat at the desk and worked. I had the same memory of reading chapter books next to him as I got older; we must have shared this ritual of quiet companionship for years. Most adults require something when in a room with a child: a peppered series of questions, usually, that seem like conversation to the adult but to the child are a test they cannot know the answers to. Toby had a gift for silence. He could simply sit with a child in peace and accept her companionship as something of value in itself.
    We had never exchanged gifts, but the pocket watch was utterly familiar in my hands, dredged up from an old, half-forgotten memory. Perhaps he had let his little niece play with his watch, for in my mind the watch had been larger and heavier, my hands smaller.
    None of this fit the idea of a ghost hunter. My parents had never hidden Toby’s occupation from me; I had no recollection now of how I learned of it, only that the idea made me so deeply uneasy I never spoke of it. Was it shame that