The Ghost Bride's Last Contract

A Mother's Safe House

Maribel Cross would not enter a room until someone promised there was another way out.

At Elias's workshop, Mae opened the rear door. The ghost came through the front, turning sideways although there was space for two people. Her burned collar left a black line across her throat. Below it, her dress was clean.

"They don't give you all of it at once," Maribel said, noticing Mae look. "That would let you get used to it."

Elias sat at his bench with a blanket over his shoulders. It was the afternoon after the drowning. He had slept four hours. He listened without offering Maribel the chair he had offered Lenora the first night.

"Who told you to come here?" he asked.

"Lenora. Through the chapel glass."

Lenora kept very still beside the stove.

"You knew I wasn't going to cut anything else today," Mae told her.

"She has been burning for twenty-seven years."

"I've been breathing normally for nine hours," Elias said.

Maribel made a small movement toward him. "I didn't know."

"That's becoming a popular answer."

Mae expected her to leave. Instead the ghost set her photograph on the bench. The child in it wore a knitted cardigan and a serious expression, as though the camera had asked her a difficult question.

"Nina," Maribel said. "She was eight when I died. She's thirty-five now. Does she still look like this?"

"You haven't seen her?" Mae asked.

"I see the mill. Not outside it. Her father took her away. When he died, she came back. I know her footsteps. She drags the right heel when she's tired. But I can't look through the door where she lives."

The mill had become housing. Mae knew it as Cross Court, six floors of cheap flats in a district where there were very few left. Iris's sister had lived there before her second marriage. The windows stayed dry when all the neighboring buildings sweated with damp.

Maribel reached toward the photograph but did not pick it up.

"Would you go? You don't need to cut anything. Tell me if she's happy."

Mae disliked the request. Happiness was not something she could determine through a visit from a stranger. It also sounded too much like a reason to forgive a woman for what she might have done to keep a child safe.

Elias rubbed his throat.

"I'll drive you," he said.

"You need rest."

"I need to see where the next dead woman wants to take me."

Cross Court had geraniums on the sills and a lift that worked only if someone held the basement button. Nina Cross met them carrying a laundry basket against her hip. She recognized the photograph at once.

"Where did you get that?"

Mae explained enough to be believed. Nina set down the basket, took a blue cardigan out of it, and folded it with careful fingers. Somewhere upstairs, a child shouted for a lost shoe.

"Is she in pain?" Nina asked.

"Yes."

"Does she know I tried to get her out?"

Mae glanced at Elias. "When?"

"Every year. The breakers said the marriage settlement owned her remains. I couldn't afford to fight it. Then a man from Wren's office offered to let me hear her voice if I renewed the lease."

"Did you?"

"I listened to one sentence. She told me to keep my feet warm."

Nina opened a cupboard beside the lift. Inside hung six old wool socks, darned in bright thread. They were the only things she had taken from the house when her father sent her away.

"I used to mend them with the wrong color," she said. "So I'd know which work was mine. Now there's hardly any of hers left."

Mae recognized the impulse so precisely that she had to look away. In her mother's storage boxes were three coats she would never wear and a cup with a broken handle. She had called paying to keep them an obligation, as if the dead had sent an invoice.

"Did he let you go to the funeral?" she asked.

"There wasn't one. He said it would upset me. Then, when I was older, he said I hadn't asked."

Elias bent to pick up a sock that had fallen from its hook. He gave it to Nina with both hands. His own mother was alive; Mae knew that from his hospital form. She wondered when he had last called her, then put the thought aside. There were enough other people's family debts in the corridor.

"I gave them back the earphones," she said. "I won't have her sold to me by the minute."

Mae liked her then, immediately and without intending to.

They climbed the stairs. Elias paused on the fourth landing, fingers resting against a c***k in the plaster. The c***k ran around the corner and through the frame of Nina's door. Someone had painted over it three times.

Her flat had three small bedrooms. Her two children, both grown and working irregular shifts, shared one because a neighbor's family had lost their tenancy. The kitchen table was laid for seven. Nina offered tea in whatever cups were clean.

When Mae asked whether she wanted her mother's contract broken, Nina answered before the kettle finished.

"Yes."

"It will put Elias at risk."

Nina looked at him properly for the first time.

He was gazing at the ceiling.

"How much risk?"

"Possibly my life," he said. "I haven't agreed."

Nina gripped the kettle so tightly that Mae reached for it. She let Mae take it but turned away to fill the cups herself.

"Then I won't ask."

There was no performance in it. Elias looked down from the ceiling.

"Do you know what's holding this place up?" he asked.

"My ability to argue with the managing agent."

He showed her the c***k. She led him to the back stairs, where a notice from a structural engineer had been pasted under a residents' petition. The notice recommended closure. The petition said the structure had shown no measurable movement in twenty years.

Both documents were old. Neither settled why the mill remained standing.

In the basement, an iron fire door stood beneath a carved lintel. On it, the Cross family motto had been painted over but remained visible in the light from Mae's lamp.

NO FIRE SHALL TAKE WHAT I KEEP.

Maribel appeared at the far end of the corridor. She could not cross the doorway. Nina stopped so suddenly that Elias nearly walked into her.

"Mum?"

Maribel lifted a hand. The collar tightened, and her face folded with pain.

Nina reached for her. Their fingers passed through one another above the threshold.

"You said they took her away," Mae whispered to Maribel.

"They did. I made them promise she'd always have a home to come back to."

Elias stepped closer to the lintel. Tiny stitches of silver wire ran from the doorframe into the cracked masonry.

The promise was holding the building together.

Nina turned to Mae, one hand still hanging in the empty place where her mother's had been.

"Tell me you can free her without breaking that."

Mae looked at the patched walls, the pipes, the rows of shoes outside the flats. She thought of the dead woman at the window holding a child's photograph.

"I need to find out," she said.

For the first time since meeting her, Nina stepped away.