A Fold in the Tent of the Sky by Michael Hale Page B

front porch. Anita Spalding was another recruit here at Calliope. A hiker, Peter thought. Probably owned expensive hiking boots. Short brown hair that seemed to hold her head like a knitted cap, a fine Roman nose. She was a psychic detective, and a freelance ghost hunter, she said. She’d go into a haunted house and feel out the “cold spots,” the vortexes of disturbance. She could see them sometimes, sense a ghost’s presence; had a knack for setting lost spirits back on the path toward the “light.” It sounded to Peter like she was more of a ghost bailiff.
    â€œI charge sixty dollars an hour plus expenses,” she said. She handed out business cards she kept in a small brass case. “The police work, I do for free.” Her services came with a lifetime guarantee, it said on the back—as long as you owned your home. She had a degree in structural engineering, which had led her to a job with a construction firm that did renovations in the Pittsburgh area. “And here I am.” She had turned to each of them in the small gathering with a glassy-eyed smile, as if the logic of the route that had brought her to Calliope was self-evident. The puzzled look on Larry’s face made her go on: “I started to notice things that had nothing to do with crumbling foundations or rotting beams.”
    It took Larry three tries at it before he got something—a murky picture that looked more like a dollhouse. The posts and railings of a porch, a window: black blobs in a grid of faint mullions. It turned out it wasn’t her house exactly: “That’s my aunt’s place on Chautauqua Lake,” she said, taking the still-wet Polaroid in both hands and sitting back down. It was a place she used to visit as a kid on summer vacations, she said. “A gorgeous gingerbread jewel of a place right in Chautauqua Institute.”
    Larry lit another cigarette, poured himself some more coffee, and drank it down right there at the urn; he came around to where Peter was sitting and leaned on the back of the couch so that his head hovered near Peter’s at about ten o’clock. Not saying a word; as if someone had called a time-out. He just stared off into the distance along with Peter: at the hypnotic vista of the sea and sand and all that sky. Larry smelled of old French fries and cigarettes—and in that instant Peter knew without a doubt that the shirt he was wearing had belonged to his brother.
    Larry was about to fill him in on the details now, the details of his brother’s death—Peter could feel it coming—tell him about his past. They all liked to share the same kind of story it seemed, now that they were getting comfortable with each other. Peter had been through it with Anita over lunch—the childhood stuff, the dreams, the uncanny second sight, the embarrassment of it all.
    â€œThey got me working on videotape now,” Larry said, sitting down across from him. “Yeah.” He nodded, as if Peter were contradicting him. “Doing it right onto this machine. No camera. Look, Ma, no camera!” He laughed out loud, hismouth wide open, teeth no one deserved to see staring Peter right in the face. He wondered how a guy like Larry had managed to reach sixty-two, or fifty-two—whatever age he was; it was hard to say—with any teeth at all. He seemed to owe it all to his brother; the one that had died; as if his brother were a poultice that had drawn all the poison out of Larry’s life. “One night we were out walking home, from somewhere, pissed out of our minds; we’re taking a shortcut along the tracks; must have sat down somewhere to take a rest— anyway we pass out right there on a siding under this freight car. There’s this horrible noise wakes me up.” He stopped to take a long drag from his cigarette. “Jesus, I—” He sniffed loudly. “This fucking train cuts him right in half.” He held up