When Ghosts Speak - Mary Ann Winkowski [62]
“Pete and I really clung together in our grief,” Ellen said. “And after a few months, I came to appreciate how steady and supportive he’d been. When he asked me to marry him, I felt like it was the right thing to do, to keep the three of us together somehow.”
But Ellen hadn’t been happy in her marriage to Pete and had sought help from a counselor to deal with the constant bickering and tension in their household. She was deeply depressed and suffering from physical ailments. She told the counselor that she worried she’d done the wrong thing. That she wanted to be sure that Alex would have wanted her to marry Pete. Along the way she’d been given my card. When she finally called, she admitted that she was hoping I’d be able to tell her if her first husband’s ghost was still around her. She felt she needed some answers from him to get her life back on track.
As I spoke with her, I could see the ghost of a handsome, dark-haired man with bright blue eyes. I described him to her, and she was certain it was Alex. We made an appointment for me to visit her house and talk to him. Before she hung up, she asked if it would be okay to have Pete, her current husband, present as well. “I think it would mean a lot to Pete, to have Alex’s blessing,” she told me. I agreed and we set a date.
It was about two weeks before I was scheduled to visit her home when I got a phone message from Pete. He said he was sorry, but he and Ellen needed to cancel their appointment; they’d call back when they were able to reschedule. To me, the message had a don’t call us, we’ll call you subtext, so I crossed their appointment off my Saturday list and that was that. Or so I thought.
About three weeks later, I ran into the woman who had given Ellen my card. “Oh, I’m glad you’re out of the hospital,” she exclaimed. “We were so worried about you.”
I had no idea what she was talking about and told her so. “Ellen told me that you had to cancel your appointment with her because you’d been rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery,” she explained. “I hope you’re feeling better.”
I corrected the woman, telling her that I was in fine health; that, in fact, it had been Ellen’s husband who’d canceled our appointment. Now it was her turn to be puzzled. She said she’d let Ellen know about the miscommunication and hoped that we’d be able to get together.
Obviously I was intrigued when I got a call from Ellen a few days later. She was calling from her office, apologetic about the mix-up. She had no idea why Pete would have left such a message, she told me. In fact, they’d recently been at a party where someone had told them how accurate my information about one of their relatives had been, and both she and Pete were eager to reschedule.
By now, my radar was up. I suggested that maybe Ellen invite Alex’s siblings to join us as well. If there was something weird going on with Pete—whether he had decided I was a fraud or whatever—I felt I would be more comfortable with a few other people around. We made an appointment for a week later.
No one called to cancel this appointment. When I showed up at the house, Ellen, Pete, and Alex’s two brothers and sister were all waiting. Alex’s ghost was there, too, and it didn’t take him long to fill me in on what he so desperately wanted someone to know. When he told me what he knew about his death, I could feel the chills march up my spine. I knew—without anyone saying anything specific—that I was sitting in the kitchen with the person who had killed Alex. And I had no idea what the heck I should do about it.
Ellen was asking me to ask her dead husband all sorts of questions: “Why did you get behind the wheel when you were so drunk? Why didn’t you let Pete drive?” And the ghost was shaking his head at each one as if to say No, no, no . . . Everyone was staring at me, waiting to hear what he had to say.
Finally Pete spoke up. “Maybe he’s saying something that we should hear in private. Maybe you and I should go into the other room. You can