Chance of a Ghost Read Online Free PDF

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    “Okay,” I said. “I guess we’d better get those groceries put away, and then I should get going before it starts to snow.” The snow wasn’t forecast to start for some hours, but I had the uncomfortable feeling—which I’d never had before—that Mom wanted me to go.
    “I don’t need help with the groceries,” Mom said, again too fast and too curt. “You go ahead. I don’t want to worry about you on the roads.”
    So I did. I made sure Mom agreed to call me if sheneeded anything in the oncoming snowstorm and got into my trusty (and rusty) Volvo wagon. I was on the cell phone to my best friend, Jeannie, before I made it out of Mom’s development. (This is the place to note that I was using an earpiece, because New Jersey has laws prohibiting one from holding a cell phone to one’s ear while driving, and everybody in the state obeys that one. Okay. Maybe not everybody .)
    “My mother’s acting strange,” I told Jeannie.
    “She’s not acting,” Jeannie answered. “I love your mother, but she really is strange. She thinks she can talk to ghosts.”
    I couldn’t really defend Mom there. Jeannie, you see, doesn’t believe in ghosts. She doesn’t believe in them despite having seen things happen that could not be explained in any way other than to assume that there is at least one being present who is not visible. She doesn’t believe in ghosts even though I’ve told her they were there, and she doesn’t believe in them despite the fact that her husband, Tony, does, and has sort of communicated with them himself. It’s a long story. I’d learned over the past fifteen months (since I started spotting spooks) that there are some people who simply aren’t going to believe in things they can’t see, even when those things were directly in front of their eyes. Jeannie could be the queen of those people.
    “Well,” I said, sidestepping the whole ghost issue, “that’s not the strange part.” I told Jeannie what had happened (pretending for her sake that the voice coming from my mother’s bedroom had emanated from a live person) and asked her opinion.
    “She’s got a boyfriend,” Jeannie suggested. “She doesn’t know how to tell you, and so she’s embarrassed and acting unusual.” There was the sound of a baby crying so loudly I had to pull the phone from my—that is, I had to move the earpiece away from my ear. “Sorry,” Jeannie continued. “Oliver gets cranky when I switch sides.” Jeannie’s son, Oliver, now four months old, had clearly been breast-feeding while I was talking to her.
    “Thanks for that mental image,” I said. “Couldn’t you have told me he needed a pacifier?”
    “Pacifiers are unsuitable substitutes for the real thing,” Jeannie said, no doubt rolling her eyes over my thick-headedness. This was not the first time we’d had such a conversation. “They make the child dependent on something that they don’t need and create a need to wean the child”—Jeannie always says “the child” when she’s dispensing parenting advice I don’t need given that I’m the one with an almost-eleven-year-old daughter—“twice later on. That just makes the child cranky and the parents frustrated.” Or was it the other way around?
    “My mother,” I reminded her.
    “I’m telling you. She’s found some guy and maybe they meet every Tuesday, so she had forgotten he’d be there because she thought it was Monday. And when he showed up, she got flustered and sent him away.”
    “Sent him away? What, he climbed out the window? Besides, how did he get into the house to begin with?” If she wanted to play that it was a living guy, I could do that.
    “Maybe he has a key,” Jeannie answered. “Maybe she’s living this secret life.” I heard gurgling on her end of the conversation. Oliver, no doubt being difficult. It’s in the genes.
    “Why would he be waiting in her bedroom?” I asked. And I knew I shouldn’t have said that even as the words were coming