The Girl in Blue by Barbara J. Hancock

of the dark.
    But she couldn’t let the fear stop her. She was an adult now. It was time. She couldn’t run from the eerie dead girl who wouldn’t leave her in peace no matter how far she roamed. She couldn’t ignore her and hope that she meant no harm. She couldn’t fight her. But she might be able to find her and discover what kept her restless and wandering.
    The doors screeched from disuse when she turned the knobs and pressed them inward. Cold, unheated air rushed dustily out to greet her. She released the knobs and stepped forward, barefoot in her nightgown with nothing but the pounding of her heart in her chest to make this real and not a walking dream.
    The hallway stretched out from her in a long expanse, but what made her stop and draw in a sudden startled breath wasn’t the appearance of The Girl in Blue. Clara Chadwick didn’t appear. Trinity didn’t hear another haunting tinkle of laughter. What she saw was the spill of lamplight from one of the east wing bedrooms and what she heard was the archaic sound of a typewriter with decisive staccato strikes of fingers on its keys.
    * * *
    She should have taken into account what she was wearing and the lateness of the hour, or the odd fact that she was wandering the halls in search of a ghost after midnight. Instead, she was drawn to the warm glow of light and the industrious sound of the typewriter, step by step. She pictured what she would find before looking into the room, but nothing prepared her for the intimacy of Samuel Creed at work.
    He sat at a cherry desk with his hands pounding away at a vintage machine the likes of which Trinity had only seen in movies. But it wasn’t the typewriter that held her attention.
    It was Creed.
    His hair was wild and mussed. His pale face intense. His concentration held and riveted to the paper scrolling upward, ever upward.
    Then he noticed her and the full intensity of his concentration moved from the paper to her.
    She actually took a step back because the look in his eyes held such ferocity of feeling.
    “Trinity,” he said as if he conjured her from thin air by speaking her name. The power of creation was in his tones. When he said her name, and only then, did she become a part of the world in which he currently dwelled.
    She watched him straighten and blink and pull his hands from the keys. She’d known a musician once who had woken in much the same way from a jag of composing. There was an otherworldly quality to a passionate artist, one that said they brought a little of wherever they went when they were in a creative fugueback with them when they reentered the real world.
    Maybe Creed’s dark eyes couldn’t be entirely attributed to his death. Maybe where he went when he was writing shone through. Of course, she’d seen the book filled with death with his name on its jacket so maybe they were both one and the same.
    “I heard something,” Trinity said. It was a lame excuse for showing up at his door.
    His bedroom door.
    Her gaze quickly inventoried. Unlike his rooms in the other part of the house, this room held no memorabilia. Only personal items like a coat thrown over a massive leather chair and a stack of books by the large rumpled bed. She looked away from his pillows and back to his desk which only held paper and notebooks and reference materials. No ragdoll. No crow. No tiny black Mary Jane. Though she did notice, finally, when she quit seeing slick burgundy sheets every time she blinked, that he had a glass filled with Maiden’s Tears from the lake beside his typewriter.
    The sight sent a stab of unease through her abdomen, but it was nothing compared to what she felt when she also noticed a pile of discarded matchsticks beside the glass.
    “Sometimes I work late,” Creed said. “I didn’t know you could hear me in your room. I like the noise of the keys. Drowns out…other things.”
    The matchsticks meant nothing. She’d found him in the glow of the fireplace the first night, after all. But