Sketch Me If You Can by Sharon Pape

had just scaled the horizon when she jumped into Mac’s Volvo. She started driving with no destination in mind, because her mind was too preoccupied to come up with one. She stopped at traffic lights and stop signs. She signaled before turning. She maintained something close to the speed limit. Yet when she finally bothered to look around, she found herself on Jericho Turnpike two towns away in Syosset, with no real sense of how she’d gotten there. She needed someplace where she could stop and think before she found herself in Ohio.
    It was too early to go back to her parents’ home, especially if she didn’t want to explain why she was, quite literally, up at the crack of dawn. Then she spotted one of the ubiquitous Starbucks signs up ahead. Low on options and craving caffeine, she pulled into the lot.
    Given that it was a Sunday and most decent folks hadn’t even awakened to go to church yet, she was the only patron in the coffee shop. The middle-aged man behind the counter gave her a broad grin, pleased to have a customer to wait on. She ordered a mocha frappachino with extra whipped cream. If he thought it was a strange beverage for that time of day, he didn’t say so.
    Rory settled herself at a table in a back corner. She sipped the creamy confection that was only loosely related to plain old coffee, and tried to bring some order to the anarchy raging in her head.
    She wondered if her reaction would have been different if she’d read the letter immediately, as Mac had asked her to do. She decided that under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have mattered very much, except that she might have questioned her uncle’s state of mind as she now questioned her own. In the absence of a family gene for a highly specific hallucination, she would have to accept that Ezekiel Drummond was real, or at least that he had been. Since Mac had never mentioned a belief in ghosts during any of their long talks over the years, he must have gone through a hectic period of adjustment himself before he was able to accept his unexpected housemate. On the plus side, if Mac’s letter were to be believed in its entirety, Drummond had been a good man, the best kind of man, one who went to his grave trying to find justice for those young girls and their families. Of course, the downside was that if she wanted to keep the house, she was going to have to learn to live with a ghost.
    Rory sighed and took a big, icy swallow of her frappachino. How she would love to crawl beneath the covers of her childhood bed where she had once dreamt of things fearful and fantastic but had been able to leave them all behind her when she awoke.
    She had long since finished her drink when the tables around her started to fill up with the usual complement of drowsy, caffeine-starved Sunday patrons. She tossed her empty cup away and went back to her car. She’d had no epiphanies and the only conclusion she had reached was that it was going to take more than a couple of hours and a sugar-caffeine high to come to terms with this new world order. Although it might prove to be impossible, she needed to put it on a back burner of her mind and try to go on about the normal business of her life. With any luck, her mind would acclimate in its own good time. Any decision she made regarding the house would have to wait until then.
    Since the normal business of her life now included Jeremy Logan’s case, she’d planned to drive out to Mount Sinai for a firsthand look at the house where his sister died. According to Jeremy, the place was up for sale again and there was an open house scheduled for today. The owners had apparently decided that they didn’t want to live in a house where someone had died. After the past twenty-four hours, Rory couldn’t say that she blamed them. In any case, their decision came at a fortuitous time, since she’d had no idea how she would have gotten inside to look around if the owners had been living there. She couldn’t very well have told