"Charles Coleman Finlay - Passing Through" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finley Charles Coleman)

"Do you have any questions?" she asked, and was annoyed when the couple laughed.

"So is it true that the mansion was a stop on the underground railroad?" the man asked.

"Yes, they would hang a light down on the dock," she said, with a vague wave of her hand toward the
aged boathouse across the road from the front door, "if it was safe to cross over. Then the runaways
would be taken north across the lake to Pelee Island in Canada."

"Are there any stories about those runaways?" the man asked, and the woman chipped in with, "Are
there any ghost stories?"

"She likes ghost stories," the man explained.

"No," Roberta said brusquely. "The runaways didn't leave any stories behind. And there are no ghost
stories." She clapped her hands and held them to her chest. "So. What about the two of you? Where are
you from?"

Their names were William and Carol Hughes, "Like Langston Hughes," William said, as though that
should mean something to Roberta, "only we're not related, as far as I can tell." They were from
Columbus. He was an engineer. She was a kindergarten teacher. They were celebrating their anniversary
with a weekend getaway. There was something so perfectly ordinary about them that Roberta almost
began to like them.

"And what brought you here?" she asked.

"Oh, we were just passing through," William said.

Roberta's second-best smile flipped instantly into her best frown, and she checked her watch impatiently.
Regrets were offered, apologies exchanged, and she showed them out the door and locked up.

From the back door, she watched them stroll hand-in-hand down the street toward the restaurants
downtown. She wondered what they were trying to hide from her. As if anyone since the runaway slaves
passed through Limestone Island! It was a cul-de-sac, a crawdad trap, someplace people found
themselves stuck in. A place people ran away to, to hide from something. Even time didn't reach the
island as fast as it did other places. When she came there in the 1950s, it was still like the 1920s. The
'50s didn't arrive until the '70s, and there was still some bit of the '70s clinging around yet.

"Passing through," she said to herself. "That's just a bunch of damned foolishness."

If she weren't already wearing her best frown, it would have shown up then, as an expression of her
sharp disapproval of herself. She wasn't the sort of lady who swore. Not much, anyway.
****
The ghost was waiting for her when she drove up the short driveway and parked outside the too-small
garage attached to her house.

The Sullivan mansion, with its Confederate deaths, stillborn babies (to Colonel Sullivan's second wife,
after the war), and the hotel guest who committed suicide, didn't have a single ghost; but Roberta's
house, a two-bedroom ranch that she and her husband Walter built in 1981, did. The ghost wasn't there
when they built it, but showed up a year or two before Walter's mother died, about the time all their
friends' parents were passing on, about the time that Walter and Roberta noticed they were now the