Molly got her first-ever call about her ghost column from a nervous-sounding teenaged girl who said she worked at a Barnes & Noble that had just opened in Woburn.  The store was haunted, everyone knew, and maybe she could come down and see?

“I’d love to come and see,” Molly said, her heart pounding with excitement.  “Would you like me to write it up?  Do you know the building’s history?”

“Um, no,” the girl said.  “I guess you’d better ask the manager about that.  He told me I should call you.”

Molly hoped they didn’t expect her to get rid of the ghost, assuming there was one.  She made an appointment to drop by the store on Wednesday evening, and was so excited about it that she allowed herself forty minutes to make a drive that was less than twenty miles.

The bookstore had been spread through three stories of an old apartment building.  It felt more like an old used bookstore than a chain, and Molly guessed that was the idea.

The girl who had called was named Rebecca, and her manager was Tim.  Neither of them was much over twenty, but they had clearly both seen Ghostbusters, judging by the way they looked at her when she arrived, armed with only a notepad.  Clearly disappointed by the lack of high-tech equipment, they nevertheless answered her questions with the deference normally shown to highly trained professionals.  Molly wondered if she should tell them that she didn’t have much of an idea what she was doing:  this was only the third allegedly haunted place she’d ever really visited, and the only ghosts she’d actually seen had been a smeary apparition while she was in junior high school, and then Marion Maddox’ ghost, at Lexi’s house.  And, for the record, she’d peed herself when she had seen it, on the night before Christmas, though this was not widely publicized trivia in light of the likelihood that Lexi and Cygnet would never let her live it down.  Rebecca and Tim didn’t need to know this, of course, and Molly tried to sound as if she did this all the time.  “What have you seen?” she asked.  It was as good a place as any to start.

“Mostly books on the floor,” Tim said.  “They fall off of the shelves.  In the morning there are always a lot of them scattered around, or stacked up.”

Molly was tempted to make a glib-sounding comment about the similarity to “Ghostbusters,” but she didn’t.  Rebecca added her own two cents about feeling like something was watching her.  And there was a guy named Greg who said he had seen something up there, but he had quit that same day.  Both of them looked at her as if they were watching a master craftsman at work.

“What about you?  Have you seen anything?  Felt anything strange?”  Even though she had no idea what she was doing, Molly felt very excited and professional.  This was much better than writing a de facto gossip column.  It was something different, it was all hers.  Yeah, she could do this forever.

Neither Tim nor Rebecca had felt anything strange.  “Seems like it’s always cold up there,” Rebecca offered half-heartedly.  “We sound pretty stupid, don’t we?”

Molly pursed her lips and shook her head.  She wasn’t a ghost hunter, so reliable reports didn’t much matter.  As she listened to them, she realized that writing stories about places that were reputed to be haunted but actually weren’t might be just as interesting as the ones that really were.  She could mix them up; some weeks she’d have real ghost stories, other weeks there would be hoaxes or local legends, from wherever she could find them.  All she had to do at this point was find out the building’s history; what it had been before, who had lived or worked there.  There was always some angle that suggested why a place might house a restless spirit.  Just like that, she’d practically finished a column.  She wanted to jump up and down and shout with glee.

Of course, while she was here it couldn’t hurt to take a look around.  “You said things happened on the third floor?”

Tim nodded.  “It’s the children’s section.  We closed it for the afternoon, so you could do tests or whatever without anyone else around.”

Jesus, they were taking her seriously.  Molly wished she’d brought a camera, or a fancy-looking computer, or some random piece of equipment.  Then she realized that she was thinking like a guy, and headed for the stairs.  She stopped at the foot of the steps, ducking under the tape they had put up.  “If you hear me screaming and running, move this tape so I don’t trip,” she said with a grin.  Tim and Rebecca looked at each other and nodded. 

They obviously weren’t going up with her, which was a good thing, since she didn’t have anything exciting to do.  Molly went up.

The top floor was even more preternaturally silent than the average bookstore, with no other patrons in it.  Neat old building aside, it was a fairly typical Barnes & Noble kids’ section; bright colors, a reading area, kid-sized shelves, and lots of places to sit.  Molly wandered aimlessly, looking up and down each of the rows.  There were no books on the floor.  The narrow-ish stairwell blocked the sounds from the lower floors , so the only noise was the hum of the heating system.

So where would a ghost go, on the third floor of a bookstore?  Molly investigated the restrooms and elevator, then walked along the front wall of the store, looking out the windows.  With the bricks of the outside wall exposed, she could see where the apartments that had once filled the building had been torn out.  The windows were still apartment-sized, and they had Barnes & Noble banners in them, sort of jaunty.

She made a complete circuit of the floor and then walked straight through the middle.  There was a classics section, and Molly found a hard-bound copy of Stuart Little.  It was one of the first books she’d read as a child, and she picked it up.  She’d had a whole collection of hardbound books.  What had happened to them, anyway?  She had a large book collection filling a nice mahogany shelf in the study, but not much fiction.  Hell, a third of the books were Richard’s, and he’d just never taken them away.  Maybe she’d buy this, for nostalgia’s sake.  There were no children, nor nieces and nephews in the pipe, but Katharine’s daughter was getting close to reading age, and it’d make a nice present.  Maybe Tim and Rebecca would give her a ghost-hunter’s discount.

There was a closed checkout counter in the center of the room, and Molly walked past it.  Still looking at the Stuart Little book in her hands with an oblique smile, Molly turned around to go and put it back, and came face to face with the clearest, most distinct ghost she’d seen to date.

It was a little girl, of eight or nine.  She had pale skin with a dusting of freckles, and auburn hair.  She wore a crisp white blouse with a necktie, and a dark blue velvet skirt.  Molly could see the pile of the velvet, and a small embroidered flower at the hem.  The girl wore glasses.

She fought the equally powerful urges to run screaming and to rush the little girl with the book upraised to scare her off.  Molly turned so she wasn’t looking directly at the child any more, and pretended to look at the closest shelf, which held an elaborate Madeline display.  The ghost did the same, her hands passing through some of the books stacked on the counter.  The topmost book on the stack tilted and flipped onto the floor.

When the ghost moved around one side of the counter, Molly went to the corner where it had been.  The air temperature dropped fifteen degrees as she passed into the area.  Jeezus, she thought.  This is really happening.  Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her neck.

“Have you ever read the other Stuart Little stories?” the girl asked.

Molly nearly jumped and screamed.  Still not looking at the ghost except out of the corner of her eye, she said, “No.  But I liked this one when I was a little girl.”

“I like it too,” the ghost said with a child’s absent half-interest, moving toward the curtained front windows.

Molly racked her brain, trying to think of something else to say.  “How about Charlotte’s Web?” she asked, thinking of the other books she’d read as a child.

“That one made me sad,” the girl said.

“Me, too.  But it had a happy ending.  What…what else do you like to read?”

“I don’t know.”  The ghost had disappeared behind a shelf so Molly couldn’t see her any more.  One of the front curtains twitched, as if someone was looking furtively out.

“I read a lot of grown-up books when I was your age,” Molly said.  Her throat was dry, and she swallowed with a click.  “I read Call of the Wild, and Frankenstein.  Scary books.”  There was no answer.  “Do you like scary books?”  Jeezus, that’s a great thing to ask a frickin’ ghost, Molly thought.  It’s your first communication with the dead, couldn’t you come up with an intelligent question?

The girl didn’t answer, though.  Molly went around the shelf that had hidden her from view and saw that she was gone.  The air was frigid; her nose and toes where chilled, not to mention the trembling that wasn’t climate-related.  The little girl was gone.

“Are you still here?” she called, walking quickly toward the stairs.  There was a chance that it was just a customer, a kid who’d come upstairs in spite of the tape.  And who just happened to make the temperature drop in a sharply defined section of a centrally-heated room. Molly told herself she was just making sure, even though her gut feeling was that there was no need, she knew what she’d just seen.  She practically ran back down the stairs, and made an effort to compose herself before Tim and Rebecca saw her again.

She didn’t even need to tell them, though.  They could tell by the look on her face (God knew what it was) when she got back downstairs to tell them they could open the third floor again, if they wanted to.

“Did you see anything?”

Molly nodded, her mind elsewhere.  She needed to write all of this down, and Tim and Rebecca were standing between her and the couches.

“Did the ghost move that book?  Is it evidence?”

She was still holding Stuart Little.  She considered telling them that it was, to see if they’d let her take it gratis, but shook her head.  “No, I just want to buy it.  Your ghost is a little girl of about eight years old, with red hair and glasses, by the way.  If I can find out who she was, I’ll let you know.”  She headed for the couches.

“Wow!  So there’s really a ghost?”

“There is really a ghost,” Molly said, sitting down and taking her notepad out of her purse.  She spent the next twenty minutes writing every detail of the encounter, and then she made a very poor sketch of the store’s layout.  A camera was definitely a must-have, next time.

Molly left Woburn on a cloud.  She didn’t feel like keeping the news to herself that this ghost-story thing was going to work, it was really going to work out.  She called Katharine and left a cheerful message on the machine, and did the same at Lexi’s.  Hellfire, why couldn’t anyone ever be home when you had big news?

Her plan for a celebratory dinner was cut short.  When Molly got home, there was a message in her e-mail telling her that she was losing her job at the newspaper.  So much for new journalistic beginnings.  Following that was a message from Dobie Cassarell.  Having messages left on her machine by multi-billionaires took some of the sting out of the job loss thing, at least.  “I’ll be in Boston tomorrow on business,” Dobie’s elegantly accented voice said, “and thought I might treat you to lunch, if you’re available.”  He gave a time and a place to meet him instead of asking her to call back, so clearly he was assuming she was available.  She got the feeling that people were rarely not available for Dobie Cassarell.

He was almost certainly wanting to talk about Lexi, considering that he’d been staying at her house since Christmas.  Lexi had said that nothing untoward (or interesting) was going on, but if Dobie was going around behind her back for information maybe there was something beneath the surface.  He was delusional if he thought she’d give up dirt on her best friend over a nice lunch, but that was his problem.

“I ought to ask you for a job,” Molly said, switching the answering machine off.