What the Dead Want Read Online Free PDF Page B

SPIRITS, HAUNTINGS, HAD MADE A BUSINESS OF it. Gretchen spent her childhood sitting by Mona’s side—looking at photographs, going to the gallery after school, meeting artists and empaths and psychics and channelers. Gretchen knew her mother’s interest in ghosts went back further than her friends’ deaths; it was a part of her character. After her mother’s disappearance, she and her father were contacted by dozens of people who believed they could help, supernatural believers of all stripes.
    For months Gretchen would actually see Mona out walking. And every time she did, her heart raced and she feltdizzy. She went looking for her mother in all her old haunts, went to the playground at Tompkins Square where they used to play when she was small. There were always women who looked just like Mona until they turned at a certain angle, or until Gretchen ran up close.
    She never told anyone. Certainly not her father or the therapist her father arranged for her, but there were times when she clearly saw her mother in the apartment, sitting at the kitchen table looking through photographs.
    Once or twice, she was almost sure she’d seen her father kissing her mother on the Eighth Avenue L subway platform. Or rather, her mother kissing her father—who seemed distracted and not to notice. The whole thing seemed crazy but true. One of those mysteries her mother would have been researching to prove or disprove. Maybe she was living in the city, right under everyone’s nose. Maybe she was living between worlds. Either way, these Mona sightings needed to be accounted for.
    And then one Saturday, Gretchen understood what she needed to do: take her mother’s photograph. She needed proof. It was what her mother would want her to do. To prove that she was alive or to prove that she was a ghost walking the city. Either way, it was up to Gretchen now to carry on this kind of work.
    It was October, her mother’s favorite month. Gretchenhad her Leica X2 and she was in a fine mood to go shooting. That morning the sky was so astonishingly blue, the leaves on the trees so vibrant, it seemed they were painted with liquid neon. The air was crisp and she was wearing a long cashmere sweater of her mother’s that she hadn’t taken off since the first chilly day of fall because it still smelled like her mother. It was too big, flopping around her, slipping down her shoulders, almost dragging on the ground, but Gretchen wore it everywhere. She felt reassured by the thump of her camera against her chest as she headed to her mother’s gallery.
    The gallery had always been a place of excitement, intense study, and speculation. The space was only really the size of a small shop, but there was always a new opening to plan for, or an artist coming into town from Amsterdam or Rio. Every day Gretchen had gone straight to the gallery after school, where her mother would be immersed in her work. She knew the place like the back of her hand.
    Getting there was routine. She smelled the bus exhaust and felt the subway rumbling and thundering beneath her feet as she walked. She had fallen asleep every night of her life to sounds like these, so why, today, did the island of Manhattan seem to be rocking all around her—louder, stranger, more unstable than it ever had seemed before? It must be a sign of how alive everything was—how hermother was just around the corner.
    And then she saw, across the street, with a clear purposeful expression, obviously headed to the gallery, her mother.
    Mona wore a new black dress that morning, and it fit her perfectly. It was slim, a little clingy, maybe jersey material. A red purse dangled from her elbow, also new. She was carrying a large white box in her arms, and her wildly curly dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Gretchen knew the way that hair would smell—tea tree oil shampoo and chai tea—and she wanted to bury her face in it. To feel her mother’s arms