Emily's Ghost by Antoinette Stockenberg Page B

threw a switch on
the living room wall. As always, her little condo looked perfectly
happy to be what it was: a little condo. Everything was neat and
tidy, because everything had no choice.
    Emily ran the place like a
ship, which is why she noticed, even half-asleep, that one of the
silver candlesticks on a small writing table was knocked over.
Automatically she stood it back up; she must've hit it when she
dumped her book-bag on the table that morning. She pulled open a
louvered door to a tiny hall closet to hang her jacket inside, and
wrinkled her nose. Tobacco. She stuck her face in the sleeve of her
jacket, but now the smell eluded her. The Harvard professor, she
remembered. A pipe smoker. The two were practically
synonymous.
    Still, somewhere in the
deepest part of her brain she was toting up the irregularities as
she found them. She had long ago decided that messy people lacked a
certain gene, which is what enabled them to live long and happy
lives. Neat people, on the other hand, were always noticing things
and worrying about them, just as she was doing now.
    When Emily went into her
bathroom, she suddenly got a lot more worried.
    She was reaching for her
nightgown behind the bathroom door when she saw that the jewelry
box she kept on the top of a small bureau -- the little inlaid
wooden jewelry box her brother had sent her from Korea -- had been
thrown open and its three drawers pulled out and left that way.
Short of fleeing an earthquake, Emily was incapable of having left
that kind of mess behind. Shocked, she went through the box quickly
and inventoried the few things she kept there. Coins, earrings,
broken watches, her mother's wedding rings, an old charm bracelet--
all present. Frightened and relieved and very much awake, she
thought: They took one look and decided it wasn't worth
it.
    Mere bravado. Exactly four
seconds after that thought, Emily had another: that they -- or he
-- didn't actually finish the burglary. She ran back to her living
room. The VCR was still there. The TV. The stereo. Oh, God. Oh, no . If they
hadn't finished, where were they now? Had they been scared off by a
neighbor in the hall? Were they trying to find a closer parking
place for their van? Oh,
God . They weren't in the kitchen. The
kitchen opened out into the living room. She could see the kitchen.
They weren't in the kitchen.
    She looked across to the
bedroom, the dark, unlit bedroom. The bedroom with no wall switch,
where the nearest light was a lamp on a dresser located exactly six
and a half steps to the left of the door. The bedroom where to date
the only phone was plugged into the only jack. She cursed the lamp,
the phone, the darkness. She would not go in there.
    She would go to a neighbor
instead -- Mr. Olafson, who had to get up at 5:30 for the commute
to New Hampshire -- and bang on his door, and beg him to come to
her apartment to find the burglar for her. He would ask if her door
had been open. She would not be sure. He would ask what they took.
She would say, "Nothing." He would ask why he, Mr. Olafson, was
standing in the hall instead of lying in his bed.
    No, she could not go to
Mr. Olafson.
    If this were a boarding
house we'd have a pay phone at the end of the hall and I could call
the police, she realized, furious with the
management. But would she call the police?
    Mace! I have mace! Her brother the policeman had given it to her, a
big, unwieldy can that she kept next to the Raid under the bathroom
sink. She crept back into the bathroom, her heart hammering wildly
and erratically in her breast, and took out the can of mace. She
had practiced it a thousand times, grabbing the can so that the
button fired away from her. But she grabbed it backwards anyway,
and dropped it in her panic, and picked it up again, backwards
again, and finally got it right side out, and marched out of the
bathroom with it at arm's length, just in case she hadn't got it
right after all.
    She stood in the lighted
living room at the threshold to