Daniel Howard - or rather what was left of him - was sitting on the bed with his knees hunched up to his chest and his arms coiled around himself. To Edna he just looked like a boy, but on her tongue she could taste the presence of the other world. The bitterness of unfinished business on him like a pungent odor.
Well, at least Edna knew what happened to Daniel, now it was time to figure out the specifics. “Are you Daniel?” she prompted, noting the wary look in his eye as she sat on the bed next to him.
There was a barely perceptible nod of his head. Going on what she had seen in the photos held in gilt frames, Daniel was the captain of the football team, adorned with trophies and confidence just oozing from his very being.
His ghost on the other hand, resembled a waif, trembling just like his mother downstairs. He resembled her greatly in the shape of his eyes, his thin lips, and the sun kissed hair atop his head.
“How come you can see me?” he asked, his voice quavering.
“I'm a medium.”
His eyes widened. “A medium? But...it's all just crap, isn't it?”
Edna smiled and exhaled softly. “Mostly, yes. Everyone you see on the TV is a phony.”
“But you're not, is that right?”
Edna could almost see the cogs whirring in his head and nodded at him. “The only one discovered so far.”
He hunched his head back on his knees. “I don't know where my body is.”
She couldn't touch him, but elected to sit closer to his quavering form. “That's why I'm here. I'm with the FBI. Could you tell me what happened?”
His head shook in a resounding ‘no’. “When I realized what had happened to me, I was on the riverbank by the Vulcan bridge. I think my body was swept away by the current. I didn't really know what to do, I just wanted to come home. But when mom couldn't see me…” he trailed off, his shoulders shaking.
“I understand. I can have my colleagues dredge the river. I must ask you, Daniel though, what were you doing there in the first place? It's important you tell me everything you remember.”
He didn't answer. Edna had pushed him enough. “Come to HQ, my colleagues can help you settle into your new existence. I'll leave the address pinned to your noticeboard.”
With a pen on the desk, she scrawled the address on the back of a ripped envelope, with a bitter realization she saw it was Daniel's college acceptance letter. She pinned it up and looked to the ceiling as an overwhelming parental love bled out of her, threatening to show as tears which she quickly swallowed back.
“There are others like you. Others I've helped.” With that, and nodding at the poor ghost, she quietly shut the door and picked her way downstairs. Thomas was just finishing his coffee, and she nodded ever so slightly. Thomas caught her signal and stood, redoing the button on his jacket.
“We'll be in touch, Ms. Howard.”
“Please. I just need to know Daniel is alright.”
Edna looked up the stairs, and saw Daniel's form hunched on the stairs, sobbing. She used all her willpower to pretend she couldn't see him and gestured Thomas to follow her out the door.
Thomas turned to her in the car, his face no longer tightened into his usual sarcastic timbre. Thomas was excellent at reading subtle clues given off by his team, and he could read Edna like a book.
“He's dead, isn't he?”
She nodded. “He's up in his bedroom right now. God, I hate cases like this.”
“I know.” Thomas leaned back in his seat as the car pulled away. “It can't be easy.”
“You're damn right it's not.”
HQ was, as always, full of suits and grumpy men. Edna stuck out like a sore thumb, even in her pantsuit. Her barely combed hair and flabby roll around her hips looked unsightly besides all the young men and women with their trim figures and even trimmer suits. Try as she might, Edna was not a part of this world.
It was the FBI that so desperately needed her, not the other way around. As she flashed her badge and the door opened for her clearance, she mused on how the FBI had approached her when she'd caused something of a scene after she had humiliated a touring semi-famous medium who was mediocre at cold reading and not much else. Two days after she'd been escorted off those premises, she'd received a visit from two suits as she was loading the laundry. Thomas had been there of course but also a dear friend of hers, the regional chief Terry Galvin who had initially approached her two years ago. Such a kind and peaceful man, not exactly a person you'd imagine as a regional chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Edna missed him, but he was on long term sick leave.
The office she frequented at every visit looked exactly the same as it did last time: still the same awful green paint on the walls, dusty stacks of paper piled onto the bookshelves and the awful ornate horse rearing up on the disused desk. She loathed that damn horse.
“Take a seat, Edna. You know the drill. Gary will be in shortly.”
“I know. Thanks.” Edna pulled up her sleeve and sat, relaxing as best she could in the stiff, wooden and creaky chair. Within the next five minutes Gary Jack would come in full of high tech looking equipment, always unable to carry it. Edna closed her eyes, listening for any new presences, and, to her sadness, there was none. She had almost hoped Daniel had made his way over here but he was such a young ghost of a young person. The last thing she wanted to do was scare him. To distract herself, she took his case file off the top of the pile and began to read.
Daniel Howard. Caucasian, seventeen years old, straight A student. Edna sighed and added a note by the margin: dredge river by Penny bridge. Body likely downstream.
She couldn't shake how he had ended up in the river. She was reasonably confident he wasn't a suicide case - although she was not ruling it out - but her field teams of forensics were yet to send her evidence, if any, they found at the bridge.
A bustling and ruffling of papers caught her attention, and she placed the paper back on the pile and looked up at Gary, smiling at the glasses always seemed fixed with tape. He also did not fit the trope of sharp suit so often used by the Bureau, and she felt a sense of kinship with the middle aged goon.
“Hello Agent Howard.”
“Gary I've told you a million times. Call me Edna. I'm only part time, after all.”
“O, of course. Edna.” Next time they would meet, Edna would correct him again. He sat in an aura of noise he just seemed to radiate and fussed and fiddled with the various pieces of equipment he seemed to pulling right from his pockets.
“Won't be a minute, Edna.” Gary began connecting her to the machine: various electrodes, wires and bits of tape began to decorate her.
“How's the kids?” he asked her, seemingly to fill the dead air.
“The usual: Ethan is still a little shit. Harry is still on board to inherit most of the will.”
Gary looked over his glasses at her until he could see by her expression she was joking. She laughed. “Is Ethan still a pain to wake up then?”
“Don't remind me. Just this morning I was threatening him with a jug of cold water. I don't know how I can top that if he calls my bluff.”
Various blips and beeps confirmed the machine was working, and Gary watched the monitor with interest. “Okay, work time. Can you just confirm there are no presences in this room. Usual protocol, please.”
Edna shut her eyes, listening, and sensing the immediate area around her. It was devoid. “Clea..wait. someone just entered the premises. Front door.”
The beeping got louder. Gary watched with a quirked brow at the workings of her insides. “Can you zone in on them? Work out its aura?”
“It's a ghost. Benevolent. It’s...It's Daniel. The boy I saw today! Gary I need to guide him up here.”
She stripped off the wires and pulled off the tape, much to Gary's weak protesting and scuttled off towards the main entrance. She could taste his aura very strongly. No doubt he was expelling a tonne of energy after Edna had spoken to him earlier that day. She could still hear his wracked sobs rattling in her head. She flashed her badge and looked around the clear and pristine floor, ignoring the sharp, snappy and annoyingly younger people clicking their polished heels and echoing off the opulent walls adorned with far too many gilded portraits of people she'd never be able to pick out in a crowd.
Daniel was hanging around by the entrance, his arms folded about him and kicking at invisible rocks by his feet. Looking at him, he just appeared to be a normal boy, and Edna thanked the relief currently filling her system than she could hone in on specific ghosts rather than having a bunch of angry spirits harping at her. To ones she wasn't paying attention to, they were just as invisible as any ghost was to the public. Edna walked through the automatic door and called to him.
He jumped a bit, looking around before finding her and looking visibly relieved. “You're the FBI lady, right?” he asked.
She nodded. “Edna.”
“I want to find my body, for my mom's sake. I'll help you any way I can.”
Edna couldn't help but embrace the tightening in her gut as she regarded him, that motherly pull. He was the same age as Harry, after all, who was expecting his college acceptance letter any day now. Writing her details on that letter made Edna feel awfully guilty for some reason, but she shook it away.
“Follow me.”
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