"The Brady Bunch is over, Daddy," said Paul. "Can we go out on Alien Patrol now?"
Currently, Paul is obsessed with two things: The Brady Bunch and quality time with me. I said,"Get your sneakers on. We have time for an Alien Patrol before bed."
Last summer, we'd begun going on walks at night to check the skies for UFOs. We'd actually seen a couple, given the caveat that "UFO" means "unexplained light in the sky" and not "little green men." It had become something of a nightly ritual for us, going for a walk in the dark. Paul had seen and learned about constellations and other planets, bats and slugs, global directions, and some of the local buildings.
We'd started just walking up and down Fairview, our street, but lately we'd branched out. Mostly these days our route went up and around on Highland Street, around the block and returning home.
"Look, Paul, there's the Big Dipper," I said. "It's a clear night out; we can find the North Star."
"And that points north," said Paul.
"Right." During the quarantine, he'd learned a lot of survival skills, and retained most of it. "Look, up by the moon---I think those two lights are planets. Jupiter and Saturn, I think."
"Jupiter's back?" Paul said excitedly. We'd seen Jupiter last year, and he'd gotten fond of the concept.
"I believe so. I think I remember hearing that we might see Mars this summer, too. Could spot some Martians."
"Martian, Martian, Martian," said Paul.
We turned the corner and walked down Fairview. Paul pointed and said,"Dad! A UFO!"
I looked up. It was a bright white light, unblinking, appearing very high up, moving east at a fast pace. Not a commercial airline. Not atmospheric. No sound.
I said,"I'll be damned. What is that?"
"Let's chase it!"
The thing was already moving rapidly toward the mountains. "We'll never catch that thing, little man. It's going too fast."
"What is it?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Oh, yeah? What happened?"
"We heard the door open, but nobody was there."
"Yeah, that sounds about right," I said. "She does that." Ida is the ghost in our home. She committed suicide at seventeen in 1905 by drinking acid on the back porch. I leaned down and picked up a cardboard box. "I suppose I better clean up this porch so we can do some investigating sometime."
I picked up a few things, and about ten bees flew up into the air. Before I could react, one of them had already stung me on the wrist. "Ow! Shit!"
"What happened, Daddy?"
"Off the porch. Now."
We rushed in through the kitchen door, and I held ice on the sting. I said,"Got stung by a bee, little man, and I'm mildly allergic. Gotta treat this."
"I'm getting a stick!" Paul declared, and ran out the front door.
He was back in two minutes, carrying a stick and two of my bandannas. I didn't know where this was going until he began wrapping them around my arm, making a splint. I'd taught him that a while back, during the quarantine.
"There," he said.
I laughed. "Okay, that'll help. Thanks, little man."
"I think you should wear it to work," he said.
We were outside on the sidewalk when Tif showed up, half an hour later. Me, still holding the ice pack on my wrist, Paul wearing his black dress, and Kasper the Schnauzer.
"Daddy got stung by a bee," Paul announced.
Tif looked at me. "You're not gonna pass out or anything, are you?"
"If I made it this far, I'll be fine. Stay away from the back porch for a while."
"Well, I'm not allergic. If I get stung, it's no big deal."
"I don't want either of you to get stung. Not so hot on myself getting stung, either, but here we are. Paul mentions you guys encountered Ida yesterday."
"Might have, yeah. We heard someone come in the back door, and nobody was there."
"That's the door her father carried her in through when he found her dying on the porch. It makes sense; we're coming up on the anniversary of her death. This month it's a hundred and fifteen years."
"And you're celebrating by getting stung by bees."
"I was cleaning the porch in anticipation of investigating. I think the takeaway here is to never clean the porch."
Years ago, when we'd moved into the house, I'd done the research on the property and come up with Ida's story. As time went by, I'd filled in bits and pieces, gathering old documents. I'd learned where she was buried, how her father had been charged with neglect, who her relatives were.
Some parts of this had always been unknown to me. I had very little information on her mother, Lydia. She'd died four years before Ida had, but I'd never learned the details. Fortunately, things had been a little slow lately. Even as the county went Green, the library wasn't working to capacity.
I picked up the genealogies from the Pennsylvania Room before my lobby shift. There were two genealogy books that covered Ida's family. It had been a while since I'd taken a look. I went out to the lobby.
"Hey, Jim," I said. "I'm your relief. Any more ghost sightings?"
"Nope, not today," said Jim.
"I'll check back. Paul and I saw a UFO the other night."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Nothing like, you know, actual aliens, but we saw a bright light we couldn't explain. It was really high up, and going really fast."
Jim considered it a moment. "Could have been the International Space Station."
"I never thought of that."
"We can check that on the NASA website," said Jim. He picked up the tablet---We were supposed to be using it for library business, but we all surfed the internet during lobby shifts. He brought up the website awfully fast; I suspect he had it bookmarked. "Would have been visible around nine-thirty, and been heading roughly northwest."
"....Yeah. It was. That's a pretty good possibility."
"Mel said she was going to go out and see it."
"Mel said she was going to go out and see it."
"Well, we didn't mean to, but Paul was really pleased when he saw Saturn and Jupiter," I said. "He's going to be thrilled."
I sat down and began looking through the genealogy. There was a photo of Ida, sitting with her sisters. It had been a while since I'd looked at it. I spent a couple of minutes looking at her, this young girl who'd come to be part of my home.
Then I backtracked, working my way back to her mother and grandparents. I found a little bit of history for Lydia, and the will of both of the grandparents---All reprinted in the book. I'd never really gone that far back before. There was some interesting stuff.
When I got home that afternoon, the kids were out back. Paul and his little best friend from next door were splashing in the pool, and Tif was sitting in her wheelchair nearby and watching. I pulled up a lawn chair and sat down next to Tif.
"You notice no matter where you sit, you get splashed?" I asked. "I could be indoors; the water would hit me."
"I have noticed that." said Tif.
"You think I'd look good in ripped jeans?" I asked her.
"You have this way of starting a conversation in the middle, did you know? Most of your jeans are ripped at the knee anyway."
""They're not, actually," I said. "I guess I just look like the kind of guy who wears ripped jeans."
"Really? Huh. Well, I guess it would work for you, then. You thinking of a style change?"
"To my professional ghost-hunting outfit, yeah. You know the one---Black shirt with the LHPS symbol, black jeans, tactical vest. It works for me, except I've seen my photo in magazines and newspapers. I look like an action figure. It has a sort of cop, military look. And in the current political climate...."
Tif nodded. "With people protesting the police, that's bad."
"Yeah. I look like a Portland Homeland Security officer. Gonna get shot reaching for my thermometer. So I'm thinking of going as hippie-like as I can. I considered growing a beard, except...."
"You can't grow facial hair."
"Yeah. I can't grow a beard by the time Trump leaves office. If he gets re-elected, I still can't grow a beard by the time he leaves office."
"Get a motorcycle jacket."
"You know Ida's mom died here, too?"
"You just did it again, you know."
"I did some research today. Ida's mother, Lydia Yost, lived here. Turns out her father died in 1890, and left his money to his wife, to be dispersed equally among the kids on her death. But she changed the terms---Left the money to only one of her kids, and it wasn't Lydia."
"Holy shit. That's low."
"For nine years, Lydia lived here with that abusive asshole, George, in the hopes of getting enough money to maybe make things better. Then her mother died, and she got nothing, and was stuck. Lydia died here two years after, at age forty."
"And Ida committed suicide, what, four years later?"
I glanced at the porch where Ida had died. "Yeah. Lydia died young, too. I think we may have more than one ghost in here."
"Too bad there's no way to find out."
I looked up at the house.
"Maybe there is."
"Hey, I got one for you, Dad," said Biz, looking at her cell phone. "You ever hear of the Squonk?"
I laughed. "I love the Squonk. Creature only found on Pennsylvania."
"Oh, you know it!"
"Oh yeah. The Squonk is in my Field Guide to North American Monsters, which I use more than most of my college textbooks."
Tif looked up from her dinner. "What's the Squonk?"
"A forest creature in Pennsylvania so ugly that it cries all the time," said Biz. "If you see one, it'll cry so hard it dehydrates. Look, here's a picture."
"There are stories of lumbermen catching one in a bag, and bringing it home to find the bag just filled with Squonk tears," I said. "Now that you mention it, I need a Squonk T-shirt. Why do I not already have like six of them?"
Biz did a quick search on her phone. "They make them," she reported.
I laughed. "I'm gonna have to order some of them. Yes, we can go on a Squonk hunt sometime."
"Oh, yes," said Biz.
"Bedtime," declared Michelle. I gathered Paul up off the couch, and we started up the stairs.She was ahead, and she turned into the hallway. And then she screamed and ducked into a crouch.
"What the hell---"
"Bat!" Michelle shouted, turning and running back downstairs. "There's a bat!"
I could see it, flitting back and forth in the hallway. Michelle and Paul ran downstairs. I walked up, staying low. It flew into my office, and I followed it, closing the door.
Okay. Now I was trapped in my office with the bat. I stayed in a crouch and crawled across the floor. The north corner of the house had two windows, and I opened them both, letting the cool night air in.
I turned around. The bat was hanging on the curtain, between me and the exit. I picked up one of my Bigfoot slippers and threw it in the general direction of the bat, which disturbed it enough to start flying around the room again. I ducked under it and moved out the door, closing it firmly behind me.
I walked downstairs.
"Bat's sealed off in my office," I said. "The windows are open. Chances are he'll fly out on his own by morning."
"Should we sleep downstairs?" Paul asked somewhat hopefully.
"Nah, it's okay," I said. "The bat can't get out. He'll leave; he doesn't want to be in here either."
It was the first thing Paul wanted to do the next morning. "Dad, can we check and see if the bat's still there?"
"Jesus, Paul, I haven't had my coffee yet." I considered it, and relented. "Okay. Give me a minute, and we'll check."
I threw on some clothes, and we carefully opened the door. The room was cool and breezy; the windows had been opened all night. We stepped in, looking all around. No bats.
"Looks like it worked," I said. "The bat took off overnight. He's outside now, and probably a lot happier."
"Will he come back?"
"Probably not. That's only the second bat we've had in this house, and we've lived here since 2003. I gotta get dressed for work."
I walked into the library in my new outfit. I took my temperature and checked the box---New post-COVID procedures---and then dropped my stuff off at my desk.
Zach looked up, and looked me over.
"I like it!" he said.
I was wearing the new professional outfit. Ripped jeans, tie-dyed bandanna, my new Squonk shirt, and a new jacket with all sort of buckles, zippers, and metal decorative pieces. I said,"I'm making a few style changes to my ghost-hunting outfits. Glad this one passed the Zach test."
"Are those real metal, or just plastic?" he said, looking at the bits on my shoulders.
"They're real metal," I said. "This thing weighs like twenty pounds."
"It looks good," Zach declared.
I went to work. I had some publicity work to do, and obits to look up, and I was working on cleaning out my desk. But I pushed all that aside and went back to the Yost genealogy.
I flipped through, starting with Ida and working my way back, the way I had before. There was a photo of Lydia I hadn't seen before, standing in a group shot. She looked just like her daughter. I made a photocopy.
I checked the index file for Lydia's obit. It was in a September issue of the Clinton Republican, which we did not have on microfilm. God is my co-pilot. I got on Findagrave, which I despise, but you gotta go with what you have. Someone had found an obit from a different paper, and listed it.
It showed her as dying from "a short illness," which wasn't very specific. She was buried in Highland Cemetery, which I knew.
Looked like I had everything I was going to get this time.
Dinner was Cuban food that my wife brought home from a restaurant near work. Afterward, I went up to my office and gathered a few things. On the advice of SaraLee, I picked up an old copy of Black Beauty that had once belonged to Ida. I strapped on my leg rig, which didn't look too military---Mostly that looked like a middle-aged guy trying to be cool, which was accurate enough. And I gathered up all my equipment to take my son and search for the girl who'd killed herself in my house. You know, wholesome family shit.
Paul was putting on pajamas in his room.
"You ready?" I asked him.
He nodded. "Yeah."
We set out a couple of trigger objects, little dogs I'd gotten out of a gumball machine. Gumball machines are a great source of trigger objects. You set them on a piece of paper, trace around them, and see if anything moves them. Then we went out to the porch....The porch where Ida had killed herself.
I set my recorder on the railing and turned it on.
"Start recording, nine-thirteen PM on South Fairview Street, August 19, 2020. It's been a hundred and fifteen years since Ida Yost died on this porch. Lou."
"Paul."
"Is anyone here? Ida? Lydia?"
"Any ghosts here?" asked Paul.
"Check the EMFs," I said. We each pulled out a detector and checked around....Nothing yet.
"Thermometers," I said.
We got out our laser thermometers, and checked around. Paul reported,"Seventy-one, sixty-eight...."
I said,"Paul. Look at this."
He leaned over and looked at my little screen. He said,"Twenty-two."
"Yeah, Twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit."
"That's like winter."
"Yeah. It is; it's cold like winter. That's way too low. There's something going on here."
Later, after everyone had gone to bed, I had a moment to myself.
I went upstairs and set my leg rig on the desk. I let the recorder run, which was something of a tradition on the anniversary. Back downstairs, I got a beer out of the fridge. On a team investigation, that was a big violation of the rules---No drinking. But in my own home, alone, I figure it was forgivable.
I sat down on the couch. On the stairs, I heard it---The sound of soft footsteps. I stood up and looked.
There was nobody there.
"Hi, Ida," I said. "You're a hundred and thirty-two now. You want to have a beer with me?"
The next morning, I woke up and opened my eyes. I crawled out of bed, trying not to wake up the pugs. I was wearing my Justice League pajamas.
I walked down the hall, and glanced it the door to my office. The leg rig was lying on the floor, where I hadn't put it. It had been moved overnight.
I smiled.
"Well, Ida," I said. "Good morning."
