“What the hell are you doing in here on your day off?” Morrison Beacham-Smith, one of the rotating ER physicians and Alan’s friend, looked like he’d been strapped to the undercarriage of a train and dragged for five hundred miles.

“I heard you were having fun?”

“Can’t have heard that. It’s been hell on wheels today.”

Alan feigned casual amusement. “Saturdays. Whatcha gonna do?”

“So... you here to help out?”

Alan laughed, and this time the amusement was real. “On my day off? No — but my suspicion that you’ve been into the narcotics cabinet just got a lot stronger.” Alan looked around. The ER actually looked pretty sedate at the moment. The nurses were walking, not running — always a good sign — he couldn’t hear anything beeping, and he didn’t smell blood. “Morrie — can you come for a walk with me? Ten, fifteen minutes tops?”

Morrie said, “Your timing is good. This is the first sane stretch we’ve had all day. And I so need some munchies.” He caught the attention of a blue-scrub-suited nurse propped against the nurses’ station, working on a chart. “Sheila, I’ll be in the cafeteria. Page me if things go boom.”

The nurse nodded and gave him a wave.

As they headed down the hall, Morrie was still on ER wires. “Back-to-back crashes, one blunt amputation, a guy with an ice pick in his skull all the way to, but not through, the fornix, who fucking walked in. Then we get three cardiacs, one of which coded before arrival and one after. The third we shipped upstairs with standard orders, but he’s been tearing downhill ever since. We’ve filled ICU and taken about half of the overflow up on Med-Surg. And at the moment, over in X-ray, we have this guy with a G.I. Joe doll stuck in—”

“Morrie,” Alan interrupted.

Morrie stopped.

“I’ll have to get the war stories later. I need to ask you something.”

They’d reached the cafeteria. Morrie went straight to the row of vending machines and bought a couple of candy bars, a can of soda, and three packs of peanut butter crackers. Then he led the way to a table in the corner.

“Okay, shoot.”

“I won’t have to. You keep eating like that you’re going to keel over on your own.”

Morrie just grinned.

Alan shook his head and smiled. But the smile vanished as he said, “I had a visitor last night.”

Morrie nodded, popped the top on the soda, and took a drink.

“I was inclined to think she was a charlatan, or some sort of gold-digger out for money, but I spent a lot of time thinking about this after I, ah, chased her out of my living room. A couple of things don’t add up.”

Morrie grinned. “You discovered that her hair really is that shade of blonde, that her tits are real, and that she and her little brother are orphans.”

“Not that sort of gold-digger,” Alan said. He didn’t allow himself to express his impatience; Morrie was always trying, but underneath the pain-in-the-ass exterior he was an intelligent, curious man. Excellent diagnostician. Explorer of things a bit beyond the pale.

“Too bad,” Morrie said.

“I’ll cut this short. She came to me last night to tell me that she’d talked with my daughter. That my daughter told her to come see me.”

Morrie put the candy bar on the table and sat up straight. “Your kid died in... Kentucky, was it?”

“Right.”

“This woman came from Kentucky to talk to you?”

“No. She lives next door to me, and has for most of the time I’ve lived in the place.”

Morrie nodded and rested his chin in his hands. “She hasn’t asked you for anything before now?”

“Never so much as said hello. I bumped into her getting home from work yesterday. First time we had any contact at all.”

“And what makes you think she might be legit?”

“Two things,” Alan said, wishing he had some way of not mentioning the second. “First, she exactly described what Chick was wearing the day she died.”

“Any place she could have found that information elsewhere?”

“No.”

“Okay. That’s pretty compelling, then. What’s the second thing?”

Alan took a deep breath. “I saw Chick yesterday, too.”

Morrie looked at him like he’d grown a second head and said, “Fuck me. You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding. I don’t intend to tell anyone else, but I’m absolutely serious.”

Alan described Chick’s visitation and the events surrounding it, from the brush of the curtain on the back of his neck while he was working clear through to the spring-scented rainwater on the carpet that was the last thing to vanish.

When he finished, Morrie sat there for a minute, then gave a low whistle. “Duuuude. Dude, dude — you must bring in a couple of guys with meters and cameras to see if they can validate this for you. No? What is this ‘no’ you say? This is potentially huge.” Morrie, in moments of excitement, fell back into the persona of Surfer Dude, which had kept the expectations surrounding him low through high school, college, and the first couple of years of medical school, while permitting him to pursue a slew of outside interests. Beaches. Babes. And, somewhat off the beaten track, ghosts.

Alan said, “This isn’t about science, Morrie. This is about my kid.”

“Well, of course, but... man, if you could do the science, too...”

“No. I knew you were into this sort of thing, though, and I wanted to know if you were aware of any instances where... ghosts... appeared to people away from the place where they were killed.”

“Oh, shit yes,” Morrie said. He evidently felt himself on solid ground again, for he ripped open one of the packs of crackers and started munching. “Happens a lot. People get a visit from a son stationed across the ocean fighting for his country and find out later that he appeared to them the moment that he died, just to let them know he loved them. Or a parent in the hospital with something terminal shows up in the house of the one kid no one has been able to reach to let the kid know he needs to call home. Or ghosts will show up to tell the people they loved when they were alive not to go someplace or do something, and that bit of advice turns out to save the people who get it.”

“So Chick coming to me now...”

“She didn’t appear to you when she died. That would have been a bit more common. The message for that is usually just ‘I love you, I’m going to be okay.’ She’s come a long way, both from the time of her death and from the place of it. So odds are she’s trying to tell you something. Something fairly fucking important. Assuming you don’t have a tumor. We should schedule you for a CAT scan immediately to rule that out.”

Alan studied him sidelong and saw the grin. “Thanks, Morrie. You’re always reassuring.”

“That’s what friends are for.” Morrie offered Alan one of his plastic crackers, and Alan waved it off. Morrie shrugged, crunched his cracker, and said, “But you couldn’t hear anything when you saw her, right?”

“Right.”

“And it was after she appeared to you that she appeared to the next-door neighbor.”

“I’m not sure of the time sequence. Could have been before, could have been after. My neighbor and I didn’t actually, um, discuss this. But yes, I think so.”

“And the next-door neighbor could hear what she said.”

“She said she could.”

Morrie shrugged broadly. “Then, my man, this is easy. You go over, you make nice to the neighbor, and you try to find out why the hell your kid has come a very long way to talk to you.”

“You don’t think a... séance... or something like that would be better?”

“No,” Morrie said. “If your little girl can talk through the neighbor and is willing to do that don’t screw around trying some other method that probably won’t work. Use the method you know will work.” He was watching Alan’s face, and suddenly he grinned. “Oh, I get it. The neighbor looks like Magilla Gorilla, and you’re afraid if you go over and make nice, she’s going to want you.”

“Not exactly,” Alan said, “but I’d rather not deal with her again if I can figure out an alternative.”

Morrie sat there for a moment studying Alan, an expression of frank suspicion on his face. Then his eyes lit up. “Oh, sweet jumping Jesus, she’s a babe, isn’t she? She’s ripe, and suddenly my man’s little soldier has remembered he can do something besides piss.”

“She’s cute, in a short, starved, waiflike sort of way. But she’s not my type. And I don’t need that sort of complication in my life anyway.”

“Duuuude, you so need that sort of complication. I have never in my life known a man more in need of getting fucked through the floor than you. You are so rigidly uptight the nurses finally gave up on you and moved your name to the Not Running section of the Pussy Pool. You’re down there with Milton Stanback.” Milton Stanback was seventy-eight, the oldest physician on staff. “The best odds on you right now are under what circumstances your testicles will explode from lack of use.”

This diverted Alan for a moment. “The nurses have a... Pussy Pool?”

“Not that you heard about from me,” Morrie said. “They run little side bets about when various doctors get some, with payoffs based on mood when called at three in the morning, gender, age, and sex appeal of the voice answering the phone, and traitors like me who feed them details for a piece of the action.” Morrie waggled his eyebrows. “They should just call it the Get-Laid Pool, since about a third of the doctors on the list are women and only a couple of those are actively chasing other women. But a couple of the nurses liked the alliteration too much to give up the name.” He grinned and took a swig of his soda. “I’ll have to tell them to put you back in as a dark-horse candidate.”

Alan shook his head. “Do not do that to me.”

“Hey, it’s better than your only get-laid odds now, which are for ‘Sympathy fuck on the X-ray table’ and which are running an outrageous two hundred to one against. Shit, I have ten bucks on that one just because it’s almost impossible to get the nurses to handicap that high.” His eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t feel like... um... waiting a day or two and then hitting up, say, Denise in Respiratory Therapy for...”

“No,” Alan said. “I wouldn’t.”

Morrie considered that for a moment, then, apropos of nothing, said, “Odds on your nuts exploding during a code are three to one.”

“Thanks, Morrie,” Alan said, standing. “That’s always nice to know.”

Morrie shoved extra crackers and candy bars into the pockets of his lab coat, tugged the drawstring a little tighter on his scrub pants, and said, “Denise. X-ray table. Three minutes, dude, and you’d make me a happy man.”

“The nurses are a whole lot scarier than I thought they were,” Alan said, walking back toward the ER.

“Believe it,” Morrie said, grimacing. “You have no idea. They tell me things...” His voice trailed off, and he shuddered. Then his mood changed, and he rested a hand on Alan’s shoulder. “Let me know how this thing with Chick and the neighbor turns out. Let me know that you get through it okay, at least.”

“Thanks,” Alan said. “I will.”

Morrie gave him an evil little grin and said, “And if by chance you and your luscious next-door neighbor get nekkid, pleeeease let me know. Fortunes will be made and lost and empires rise or tumble, on such information.”

“No,” Alan said as they stepped through the double doors from the crowded hallway in front of the ER into the department itself. He was, however, grinning just a little as he headed for the door that led to the staff parking lot. And he could only shake his head as, behind him, he heard Morrie saying in a low, urgent voice, “I have a great tip on a returning player. Break out the Hot Sheet.”

* * *

Phoebe saw Alan sitting on the front step of her townhouse as soon as she came around the corner from the parking lot and started up the walk. For just a second her heart started to race.

Then she remembered that Alan had decided she was some sort of fraud with an angle, and she pulled her shoulders straighter and lifted her chin, staring through him.

She started to step carefully around him, but he stood up as she reached him and put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You... I wasn’t ready for what you had to tell me last night.”

Phoebe stopped and looked up at him. He looked sincere enough. Anxiety drew deep lines on his forehead and at the comers of his mouth, but then, last night she’d told him his dead daughter had dropped in to visit her. That would give almost anyone reason to be anxious.

“That’s all right,” she said. “You’re not the only person who ever reacted that way.” She even managed a smile, though she suspected it wasn’t a convincing one.

“I’d... really like to hear what you wanted to tell me about my daughter.” Wary eyes, nervous twitch of a smile, first two fingers and thumb of the right hand rubbing nervously against each other. Alan didn’t look like a man who’d ever asked a psychic anything. He didn’t look like he wanted his world to have dark corners or unexplained nooks. Phoebe felt for him — he’d probably spent a life lived in hard light without shadows, and now the shadows were there and they were moving.

“I’ll tell you what I can. There really isn’t much. She just told me I was supposed to come see you — and she gave me a quick image of who you were.”

“But you could hear her.”

“Oh, yes. Quite clearly.”

“And you could see her.”

“I could. I’ve never actually seen a gho— ...ah, an... apparition...” She fumbled to a stop. There was no socially acceptable way to refer to the spirit of someone’s dead child, was there? Nothing gentle, nothing soothing, nothing vague and kind. If there was, Phoebe couldn’t find it. “I’m not a spiritualist or anything like that. I... I read cards. Tarot cards. Sometimes I get impressions. Usually of the person I’m reading, sometimes of someone important to them. Voices, pictures. But not physical manifestations. It’s an inexact thing, usually.” She looked away, past the palms and the bougainvillea and the long spikes of the bird-of-paradise plants lining the privacy fences. The little girl’s visit hadn’t been fuzzy or vague at three in the morning. Phoebe, feeling again the chill in the room, shivered in the Florida heat, and Alan gave her an odd, searching look.

“But, yes — I saw her.”

“I saw her yesterday, too,” Alan told her. “In my office. It scared the shit out of me, and it was the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me.”

She caught the shaking in Alan’s voice, the fear and confusion and disbelief — and the trembling hope — that lay just beneath the surface of the man standing before her, and the sound of it almost broke her heart.

Phoebe knew the sounds of loss. She heard those same sounds more often than she could bear in the voices of the men and women calling her in the dark hours, asking without words for some proof of a world beyond the stark, harsh reality of their lives. They were searching for immortality at $3.99 a minute, looking for the face of God in the fall of painted cardboard circles and rectangles, listening for magic and compassion in the voice of a stranger. They wanted a touch of grace. They wanted hope. They had a thousand different questions, but at base, those questions were all the same: Is there more than this? Am I more than this?

And sometimes Phoebe could reach beyond painted cardboard; sometimes she could transcend telephone lines and the carnival Psychic Sisters schlock and her own tired desperation and worn-at-the-elbows despair and find for those waiting, broken strangers a single small flash of magic. A candle’s worth of light from somewhere neither she nor they had ever been. Sometimes she could give them a whiff of something outside of their workaday lives that would let them hang on. Let them believe.

Sometimes she could find hope for them.

And when she found it, when she connected with something real and true for them and heard the wonder in their voices — across a hundred miles of wire or across two thousand — sometimes for a moment she could catch a little of that wonder for herself. Sometimes the light shone for her, too, and she could believe that she was more than her despair, her shame and fear and loss and pain.

Sometimes.

Phoebe looked back at Alan, stared deep into his eyes, and the chill inside her deepened.

It was the same question once more: Is there more than this? Is my daughter still out there somewhere, not lost forever but simply somewhere else?

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

They stood on the walk in front of her door, with the never-ending heat cooking both of them. Yet the cold lay bone-deep in Phoebe as Alan told her about sitting in his office and having a window to another place and time open beside him. He could easily enough be a madman, a kind man shattered by his life and fallen off the edge of reason. It would have been easy for her if he were. But he finished by saying, “Then I took a step away from the window and almost everything disappeared,” and against her will and against her wishes, Phoebe believed him.

“Almost?” she asked, shivering, with the oppressive Florida sun too weak to melt away the cold inside her and burn through her fear. No sun, she thought, could burn hot enough for that.

Phoebe’s dread sprang from a simple enough equation: If Alan’s daughter could step beyond death into her father’s life, then Phoebe’s murderous, comatose ex-husband could step beyond whatever ties bound him to flesh and bone to reach into her world. The possibility of one meant the possibility of both.

Hope for Alan meant deeper terror for Phoebe.

She wanted to run. To hide. But where would she hide from a man who could reach from a place as near to death as any living human could dwell to find her?

Alan said, “For a few minutes after... she disappeared... the carpet was still wet where the rain blew in through the window. It soaked into the knees of my pants before it was gone, too.”

And all Phoebe could think was, Oh, my God.

She said, “Where’s your office?”

“In my townhouse. Upstairs.”

Phoebe blew out a short breath, feeling the pain in her knee from just standing still with her weight half on it. “Of course it is. How did I know?”

“Because you’re psychic?” Alan’s faint smile suggested that this was intended as a joke.

Phoebe laughed politely. She’d heard that one before. “No. Because Murphy’s Law has a corollary that says if you have a blown knee, everything you desperately need to reach will be at the top of stairs.”

“You need to see the office?” Alan shook his head. “It wouldn’t be worth your effort now. The carpet is dry. There’s nothing left.”

But Phoebe gestured that Alan should wait for her; she walked to her front door, unlocked and opened it, tossed her few purchases on the couch — she’d gotten nothing that would be destroyed by a few hours outside of the fridge — and scooped her Universal Waite and her Motherpeace deck from her work space on the table. She rejoined Alan on her front stoop and closed the door again, stopping to lock all three deadbolts. “Not a waste of time,” she told him. “The room might hold some sort of residue of what happened there. Maybe I can read it for you and give you something useful.”

Alan nodded, though his arms crossed over his chest and his lips pressed together in a small, tight line. “How much do you charge for this, by the way?” he asked, and the question, and the faint tone of suspicion that underlay it, lit quick-burning rage inside her that she had to fight to quench.

Chin lifted, jaw tight, she said, “I don’t.”

“Oh.” Alan had the conscience to look embarrassed.

As they walked the few steps to his front door, she regained control of her temper and told him, “I’m not an expert on spiritualist things. I’ve read on the subject, but it isn’t my area. The event you describe — where your daughter actually created a physical contact from you to her into this whole other realm — sounds like the spirit-world equivalent of jogging to the top of Mount Everest. If it happened, that amount of energy should leave traces even I could pick up. Reading physical manifestations is not my talent. I read cards. Still, there had to have been a huge reason for your daughter to make that degree of contact. Maybe if I go up there, I’ll be able to figure out why she went to so much trouble. I’ll sit up there and throw some cards and see if I can draw out what’s going on for you.” She shrugged. “No sense in me not using what does work for me.”

“If it happened?” He glared at her.

As he unlocked the door to his home, she repeated, “If it happened. I tend to believe you, but you must realize that there are other, much more logical explanations for what you describe. From my perspective, I have no way of knowing if you did drugs in your youth — or last night, for that matter. You might have fallen asleep at your desk and dreamed the whole thing. I’ve read that brain tumors can cause very complete, realistic hallucinations.”

“I don’t have a tumor,” he growled. “And how would any of those things explain what you saw and heard?”

“I might have a brain tumor, too,” she said evenly. “In which case we have the beginnings of a very nice class-action suit against the property management company. Have you seen how they spray around here?”

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t say anything at all.

Phoebe sighed. “I already told you that I tend to believe you. But I do think you need to consider all the possibilities.”

He shoved the door open. “I’m relieved that you tend to believe me. To reassure you, then — I never did drugs. I was wide awake — I’m quite certain of that. And my colleague Morrie asked me this morning if I wanted a CAT scan, and if necessary I can look into that later, but I haven’t had any other incidents of this sort, I don’t have headaches or sensory alterations, and I’m willing to take my chances on the brain tumor angle for just a bit.”

Phoebe did not permit herself to laugh out loud at his clear annoyance. He didn’t enjoy being doubted any more than she had, but she didn’t see any benefit in pointing out the parallels. She just said, “Why don’t we go upstairs and I’ll throw cards and see what I get.”

“You don’t think she’ll just come back?” Alan stood at the foot of the stairs, frowning. “She looked so real, and I thought if I could just get out to her before she left, I could be with her again. She didn’t look anything like a ghost. She wasn’t any older... she looked just the way she did the day I lost her. But I couldn’t see through her or anything. I should have climbed through the window while it was open.”

That last comment slithered down Phoebe’s spine, and she shook her head vehemently. “No. Definitely no. If any more of these windows open, don’t go through them. A window like the one you describe might just throw you out your second-story window to the ground below, which would be bad enough. But if it led to where your daughter is...” She faltered to a stop and shrugged up at him, palms wide. “Where is she, Alan? Wherever she is, it isn’t someplace where you belong right now.”

“I don’t care. If I could have my kid back, do you think I’d care where I had to be to get her?”

“I don’t suppose you would. But I doubt that she went to all this trouble to reach you just so that you could kill yourself. They’re usually trying to save the people they love, you know.” Phoebe stood beside him, eyes closed, listening and smelling. The too-dry stale scent of air-conditioned air, the drip-drip of a leak in the faucet in the downstairs bathroom; the hum of the fluorescent light over the washer and dryer behind their louvered doors in the kitchen; coffee and the faintest memory of sizzled steak.

No false scents — potpourri, carpet freshener, lemon cleaner. No off scents — spring or autumn, rainstorm or smoke from burning leaves. No off sounds — voices, bells, music.

She could feel nothing uncomfortable.

“You okay?” he asked her, and she opened her eyes to see him, very close and concerned, looking at her with eyes both beautiful and kind, and his clear concern shook her. She thought, No, I’m not all right I’m getting myself in trouble, and I already have enough of that. If I were smart, I’d turn my ass around and go home. But she smiled. “I’m fine. Just trying to get a feel for anything... supernatural. Hokey as I know that sounds.”

He smiled — a real smile this time. Like he was on her side. White teeth, slightly crooked. Crinkles at the corners of his eyes. He had a wonderful smile.

“Upstairs, then,” she said, and swallowed hard.

He started up the stairs at a jog, and she reminded herself that she was alone by choice and that she was never going to let a man into her life again and she tried hard not to notice his butt in the tight jeans.

I’m hopeless.

She followed him, stepping up with the good left leg, bringing the weak right one up second. She climbed stairs the way three-year-olds climbed stairs, and she hated it.

She had her head down, focusing on the next tread, grimacing from the pain. She expanded on objects of her hatred — she hated climbing stairs, but she also simply hated stairs. She hit the third one wrong, and her right knee twisted just a little, and in spite of her usual control, she hissed breathing in.

And Alan was right beside her.

“There’s no sense in this. You’re light. I’ll just carry you.”

He scooped her into his arms before she had a chance to protest, and he was careful of her knee, and he was strong and his hands were sure and she damned near stopped breathing. He started up the stairs holding her close, cradled against his chest

His right arm brushed against her right arm and their skin touched.

Phoebe closed her eyes, fought off her hunger for that touch. She’d taught science, for God’s sake. She knew that at the moment of contact between two people, the skin transmitted electrical signals and pheromones and other chemicals; she knew that the instant chemistry some people felt toward each other truly was chemistry — a compatibility of the chemicals their bodies were excreting. She knew. But knowing was not experiencing — and until that instant she’d never collided with chemistry.

Alan’s touch went straight to her brain. Her heart raced, her mouth went dry, her breasts tingled, and her skin ached for more.

“Oh, you don’t need to carry me,” she murmured. “I’ll get there.” But that protestation would have earned a big fat zero on a sincerity meter. For the first time in her life, a man was holding her in his arms like that, and she lost anything he might have said in response to the sheer wonder of his touch, and the feel of his arms around her, and the brush of his warm breath against her cheek. She couldn’t say that it had been a long time since a man had touched her like that. It had been a long time since a man had touched her — but until exactly that moment, she’d thought that was a good thing. Because in her entire life, a man had never touched her like that.

Her body hummed with an electricity she had never known before.

In her mind Phoebe ripped Alan’s clothes off of him, ran her hands over his warm skin, buried her face against his chest and...

Damn.

Thank God he wasn’t psychic.