I know ghosts are real. I've met several over the years, some friendly, some not so much. They're easy to deal with; you just have to find out what they want.

Sometimes the first step is getting them to realize that they're actually dead.

I hadn't seen Todd McNulty in a while. He'd gone to college in Seattle, settled down out there, and had only moved back to town recently. I'd been meaning to call and invite him for dinner or something, when he called me.

On the business line.

"I didn't know who else to talk to about this," he began. "I mean, I tried the phone company, but they said there wasn't anything they could do about it. They did send someone to check the line, but he didn't find anything. I just hope I'm not crazy."

"Why don't we come over," I suggested, "and we can talk about this in person? Might be easier."

"Yeah, maybe you're right. I'll have Jenny take the kids over to my parents' place tonight so we'll have the house to ourselves. You're not gonna believe this. This is really weird."

"Weirder than hearing your dad's voice recorded backwards on a rock record?"

"Definitely."

"Sounds like we definitely need to check it out, then. We'll be over around seven."

We showed up with snacks, and drinks, though nothing alcoholic. We would need clear heads to deal with this problem, whatever it was.

Once the pleasantries had been exchanged, we got down to business.

"Ever since we moved back here," Todd began, "we've been getting these strange phone calls. The first time she called, I didn't recognize the number, so I let the machine pick it up. After the message, there was just silence, and then a click. I thought it was a wrong number, but then she called back. Every night."

"How do you know it's a she," I asked, "if there wasn't anything but silence?"

"Because," Todd said, "last night I was upstairs, near the only phone in the house that doesn't have Caller ID. I picked it up, and . . . she said hello. I said hello, and then she hung up."

"Wow," said Dash. "Fascinating conversation."

Simon and I glared at him.

Todd handed me a piece of paper. "I copied down the times and dates of all the calls. Most of them have been between seven and ten at night, although there were two before eight in the morning, and one at four o'clock in the morning."

"Who the heck calls someone at four in the morning?" Simon asked in amazement.

I looked pointedly at Dash.

"What?" he protested. "I did that once! I was drunk and they took my keys away! I needed a ride home!"

"The thing is," Todd said, "she sounded really young. Not like really young but, you know, a teenager."

"Did you recognize the voice?" I asked.

"No," Todd said, looking away. "I don't know who it is, but if it were a wrong number, she would have given up by now."

"Did you try looking up the number?" Simon asked.

"You can do that?"

"There are sites," said Dash, "that you can plug in someone's number and you have their whole life in front of you. They're not exactly legal, but they're out there. I can do it; I know how to cover my tracks."

"Fine," I said. "We'll look up the number and see what comes up. In the meantime, if she calls again, try to get her talking. Maybe she's just shy."

"Thanks, guys." Todd sounded relieved as he showed us out.

Dash glanced back at the closing door. "You know," he said to me, "when you asked him if he knew the voice on the phone?"

"Yeah?"

"He was lying."

Simon and I both stared at him.

"Why would he lie about something like that?" Simon asked.

Dash grinned. "Why do you think? Cause he's got something to hide. Oldest story in the world: he was having an affair, broke it off with the girl, moved here for a fresh start. Only she tracked him down, and she's been calling him to finish what they started, but every time she does, she loses her nerve. She can't leave a message cause the wife will find out. So she keeps trying in the hopes that she'll finally reach him. But when she does, she chickens out again."

"That makes no sense at all!" I stopped right behind the car and turned to look at him. "Todd would never have an affair! He's a nice guy, and he would have told us something like that!"

"Twenty bucks says the number belongs to his teenage-" Dash glanced down at the paper in my hand and went even paler than usual.

"Dana," he said at last. "That's Dana's number. I'd know it anywhere."

"Are you sure?"

He showed me his own phone. Under "Recent Calls Received" was the same number, with Dana's name after it. "How could she? How could she do this to me?"

"She hasn't done anything," I pointed out, "that we know of. Maybe you should have a talk with her. Meanwhile, we'll do some checking anyway, just in case this turns out to be a huge misunderstanding."

"Look at the times. Early in the morning or late in the evening. Nothing in the middle of the day. That's because she's at the school, and her phone is off. But when she's home, she keeps it on, in case she needs to call me over to plug up another of her drafts."

Simon made a face. "If that's some weird sexual euphemism," he said, "I don't wanna know about it!"

"No, no, they're actual drafts. You know that house is a hundred years old. It'd be easier just to knock the whole thing down and rebuild it from the ground up, but the Historical Society wants to preserve as much as possible. Every time I fix one of the drafty spots, another one pops up."

"Well," I said, "at least it's keeping you busy. And you're getting paid for it, right?"

"Well, yeah-"

"And the two of you get to spend a lot of time together."

"Yeah, but it doesn't count if I'm working! It's not like we really get to talk or anything."

"Just don't do anything rash," I cautioned him. "We don't know what's going on yet. All we know is that Todd's been getting weird phone calls, and for some reason they seem to be coming from Dana's phone. I don't think she's even met Todd, anyway. She moved here from Virginia. That's as far from Seattle as you can get."

"So maybe they never met face to face. Maybe they hooked up online. Happens all the time. She finds out he's moving here, follows him-"

"I think it's just coincidence that they happened to move here at the same time. Anyway, she doesn't seem to me the type who'd have an affair with a married man, cyber or otherwise. She likes you. Otherwise she wouldn't keep calling you to plug her drafts."

"She loves the way I plug her drafts."

'You know what we need?" Simon suddenly interjected. "A Star Trek movie. One of the really bad ones that we can sit and make fun of."

"Or one of the really good ones," I suggested.

In the end, we went with both. It was just what we needed to lift our spirits, and more importantly, take Dash's mind off Dana and how her number mysteriously turned up on Todd's phone.

But it wasn't to last. The very next night, Todd called me.

"She called again," he said. "Just a few minutes ago."

"Did you get to talk to her?"

"I have it recorded on the answering machine. It came on just as I picked up."

"Great! We'll be right over." I grabbed my keys and headed out the door, calling the guys on the way.

This time Todd's wife was there. "Hi," I said. "You look different without your red apron."

Simon looked at me questioningly. I explained, "Jenny works in the grocery store as a checker. She's the fastest one in the store. Everyone likes her."

"Does she know what's been going on?" asked Dash.

Jenny herself answered. "I do. I don't know who this girl is, but she'd better stop calling, or I'll find her, and I'll take her phone away. Who does she think she is?"

"Let's hear the tape," I suggested.

It wasn't exactly a tape. Answering machines haven't used tapes in years, not since they came out with digital recorders. Todd had saved the file on his computer, and he played it back for us.

There was a beep, and then a breathy voice said, "Hello?"

A click as Todd picked it up. "Hello, who's this?"

"Hello? Todd?"

"Yes, hello?"

"Hello . . ." Then a click, and silence. The entire conversation was no more than twenty seconds long, but it was so creepy that we all stood around staring at each other after it was over.

Dash broke the uncomfortable silence. "That's not Dana's voice," he said. "It's Dana's number, but it's not Dana's voice."

"Maybe someone's faking it out," I suggested. "Isn't there software you can use to make it look like you're calling from a different number?"

Simon was shaking his head. "It wouldn't be the same number every time. The software switches it up between several different numbers, most of them fake. Maybe once or twice it would select a real number randomly, but not eighteen times in a row. Something else is going on here."

"Who else has access to Dana's phone?" I asked.

"No one, as far as I know," said Dash. "She lives alone." Just as he was saying that, his phone rang. "Sorry, I'll just be a minute." He stepped out of the room to take the call.

"Who's this Dana?" Todd asked.

"She's the school librarian at North Side Elementary," I explained. "Dash started doing some restoration work on her house a couple of months ago, and I guess they've kind of been seeing each other."

"Oh. Our kids go to South Side."

"So you don't know her?"

"No. Why would she be calling me?"

I took a deep breath. This next part wasn't going to be easy. "Todd, I need you to be straight with us. The woman on the phone knew your name. The other night, when I asked you if you recognized her voice, you didn't exactly give us an honest answer. We need to know what's going on."

Jenny gave him an incredulous look. "You know who this is?"

"It's not what you think! Okay, I recognized her voice. But I didn't tell you about it because . . . it couldn't have been her. It had to be one of those weird coincidences. There's no way it could have been her."

"Why not?"

"Because she's dead!"

Simon and I looked at each other. This was one of those cases.

Dash came back and immediately sensed the tension in the air. "Everything all right?"

"I think I know what's going on now," I said. "Tell me something. That was Dana, right?"

"Yeah."

"She needs you to fix another draft?"

"Always."

"And how long has she been having these drafts? When did she notice the first one?"

He thought about it. "Three or four weeks ago."

"Right around the time the phone calls started."

"What are you getting at?"

"Those aren't drafts," I said. "They're cold spots. There's a ghost in Dana's house. And it's somebody Todd knows, who's been trying to get in touch with him."

It all made sense now. The ghost lived in Dana's house because it was an old house, and ghosts are attracted to old houses. She was using Dana's phone to call Todd when it was available-before Dana went to work, or after she got home and was absorbed in other things.

What we still didn't know was who she was or what she wanted. We were hoping Todd could fill us in on that part of the story.

"Her name is Missy Wright," Todd began. "She was my girlfriend in college, and I thought she was the one. I was really into her, and I thought she was really into me, but . . . there were problems."

"What kind of problems?"

"Her family didn't like me. They were upper-class African-Americans, and they thought my family were white trash. We all got together once, and . . . well, you know my dad. He got in a screaming match with Mr. Wright, and my mom was trying to separate them, and then Mrs. Wright accused her of being a racist, and things went downhill from there. It ended with Mr. Wright declaring that he'd see me dead before he'd see me married to his daughter."

I started to get a sinking feeling about this. No wonder he hadn't wanted to talk about it. "So what happened next?"

"We started seeing each other secretly. As soon as we finished college, we would go far away together, where no one could tear us apart. But somehow her father found out. One night he showed up at my door demanding to know where his daughter was. I told him the truth, that I'd heard from her earlier in the evening but that had been hours ago. She wasn't with me. He said if she wasn't there, where was she? I was trying to stay calm, and to keep him calm, when a state trooper pulled up and Mrs. Wright got out of the car. She was crying.

"Missy had left at the time she had told me, but coming down that highway in the dark, she was hit by a drunk driver and run off the road. The car had rolled six times and then burst into flame. She probably hadn't even felt anything after the initial impact."

"God, that's horrible!" Simon said.

"I wasn't allowed to come to the funeral. The Wrights blamed me for her death; if we hadn't been sneaking around, she wouldn't have been on that road that night. I grieved on my own for a few weeks, and then one of my friends dragged me to a party where I met Jenny. And now you know the rest of the story."

"What I want to know is," I said, "have you gotten any other weird phone calls before you moved here? Anything where you picked it up and there was nobody there?"

Todd shook his head. "No, never."

"I wonder why it took her so many years to find you."

"Time isn't the same on the other side," said Dash. "Some ghosts come back right away. Some, not for years. Sometimes they're not even aware that so much time has passed. Sometimes they don't even know they're actually dead."

"Ghosts are usually tied to specific objects," Simon told us. "Like Grungy Bill and his gun."

"Till I broke it," Dash recalled, "and he decided he'd rather live in a toaster instead."

Todd looked at us in confusion. "What are you talking about?"

"Our first case," I said. "Funny that a ghost brought us together all those years ago. Do you have something that Missy gave you, that you maybe found in a box when you were unpacking? You hadn't given a thought to it in years, but you took it out because you couldn't remember whose it was. Or maybe you did remember, and you wanted to hang onto it."

Todd looked like he was starting to say no, but Jenny spoke up. "That little bear that I put up on the mantel. The one that you said was nothing. Was that hers?"

He nodded. "She gave it to me for Christmas. I'd forgotten all about it until you brought it out. I meant to tell you, but I . . . didn't know how."

"I don't understand why you didn't feel you could talk to me about this. Did you think I'd be angry?"

"I don't know," he mumbled.

"Sweetie, look at me."

He dared to raise his eyes towards her.

"There is nothing you could do that is so terrible that it would make me stop loving you. Nothing. You shouldn't be afraid to share something like this with me. Okay?"

He nodded, and she reached out and put her arms around him. I started to feel like I was intruding on a very private moment.

"Guess we should go, guys," I said.

"Wait." Todd broke away from his wife's embrace and left the room for a second. He came back carrying a ceramic teddy bear dressed in a Santa suit. "You're going to that Dana woman's house, aren't you? To get rid of Missy."

"To help her cross over," I said.

"Then you'll need this. If her spirit is trapped in here, you'll need to break it to release her." At our astonished looks, he said, "I read stuff. And I watch Ghost Hunters on TV."

"You should come," I said. "She's waited a long time to say something to you. We shouldn't keep her waiting any longer."

Todd looked back at Jenny. She nodded. "Okay, then."

Dana was surprised to find a delegation on her doorstep. "Are we having a party?"

"Yeah," said Dash, stepping inside. "A ghost-busting party. Where's the draft?"

"Upstairs. In the bedroom. What's going on?"

"You don't have drafts," I said quickly. "You have a ghost. But we can get rid of her for you."

"A ghost?" She looked skeptical.

"I'll prove it to you. Where's your phone?"

"In the bedroom. What's this all-"

"C'mon, guys!" I started up the stairs, and the others followed.

"Hey, wait a minute!" Dana called after us. "You can't just barge into my bedroom!"

"I'll explain later!" Dash called back. "Rest assured that when we're done here, you will never have a draft in any room of this house ever again!"

We reached Dana's bedroom and found the phone on her bed, still warm. There was definitely a chill in the air.

"Say something," I said to Todd. "Let her know you're here."

He cleared his throat. "Um, Missy? You wanted to talk? Let's talk."

We waited for a reply, but there wasn't one.

"Missy, are you here? You're not mad at me, are you? For marrying someone else? I'll always love you, but . . . I love her, too. Please talk to me."

Still nothing, for a long time.

"Well, she's not here. Let's get out of-whoa, what's this? Hello, underwear drawer!" Dash started to open the top drawer of the dresser, but I stopped him.

"Get out of there! Just sit and be quiet, okay? No wonder Missy doesn't want to show herself!"

"Oh, sure, blame me." He sat back down and pouted.

"You're such a drama llama," Simon teased him.

"Bite me, shrimp."

"Guys! Not helping! You're gonna scare her away!"

Todd was looking at something on the night stand. "I think I know why she picked this house," he said, holding up a book. I recognized it immediately; it was my fourth book, Bad Vibrations, featuring a boy on the cover who looked an awful lot like Todd. "Is this what I think it is?"

I sighed. It was a familiar question, asked in almost all of my interviews. "I've fictionalized a lot of our . . . more interesting cases. If you read it, you'll notice that it's Tim's mom who takes offense at his record collection . . . and it ends a little differently, too."

"So Missy saw this, recognized me, and thought Dana knew me? Is that what happened?" he asked the room in general.

"What are you guys doing up there?" Dana came in and saw the book in Todd's hand. She stopped short in front of us.

"It was right out on the table," he said. "I didn't go looking through drawers or anything."

"I didn't leave it out," she said. "It was on the shelf with the others."

"Others?" I went and looked at the bookshelf across the room. Sure enough, the top shelf was full of my books, including the one adult novel I'd self-published, Life Among the Zombies. "You read my books?"

"I'm a children's librarian. Of course I've read them. They're very popular, especially in this town. This one is my favorite." She pulled out book 10, The Ghost of the Old Mill.

"I'm guessing," said Dash, "it's because of the handsome guy on the cover."

"I had noticed a certain resemblance," she admitted. "Funny thing is, I bought this book a year before I even met you."

"Guys!" Simon interjected, but neither of them was listening, wrapped up in their own little world.

"So did you come here because of the books?"

"Sort of. I fell in love with the town I read about in the books, and then when I found out that Eerie was a real place, I wanted to move here. And then when I learned there was a vacancy in the library in one of the elementary schools-"

"Hey guys! Look over there!" Simon pointed to the far corner by the closet, where something was coalescing.

"Whoa!" I had never seen a spirit take form before. Well, okay, there was Grungy Bill, but I had my head down at the moment he appeared, so I didn't actually see anything.

"It's her, isn't it?" Todd was staring at the mist which was slowly taking shape.

"We'll know in a minute."

"It's only an artist's reproduction, you know," Dash said, and it took me a moment to realize that he and Dana were still talking about the book. "The guy never met me, never even knew that the kid in the book was based on a real person. But somehow he got it pretty darn close, don't you think?"

"So did this really happen to you?" Dana asked him.

I tried to tune them out. "Missy? If that's you, don't mind those two. Todd is here. He's ready to talk to you. Don't be afraid."

Gradually the mist solidified into the image of a pretty young girl with coffee-colored skin and a purple ribbon in her long black hair. She stared at me with wide dark eyes.

"My name's Marshall," I said. "I'm a friend of Todd's. We won't hurt you."

Her eyes went to the bear in my hand. "That's Cinnamon Bear," she said.

"You named it?" Simon asked her.

"I name everything. I believe all things should have names. Giving it a name shows respect."

"And your name is Missy," I said. "Is that short for Melissa?"

She ducked her head. "It's Missouri," she said, barely above a whisper. "That's where my mother's mother came from."

"I think it's nice." I nudged Todd forward slightly. "You've come all this way and tried so hard to make contact. Now's your chance. What is it you need from us?"

She couldn't speak, freezing like she had on the phone, except in person she couldn't just press a button and go away. I was worried we might lose her. Either that, or she'd turn dark. Some spirits did, if they were denied what they wanted long enough.

It was Todd who broke the silence. "I'm sorry I didn't say a proper goodbye to you," he said. "Your parents didn't think it was . . . appropriate."

"It's okay," she said. Then her glance dropped to his left hand. "You're married now?"

"Missy . . . it's been fifteen years. I'll always love you, but . . . I didn't want to be alone."

"Does she make you happy?"

"Yes," he said without hesitation. "Yes, she does."

Missy smiled for the first time. "Then I'm glad. Tell her I'm sorry I kept calling and bothering her. I just needed to talk to you."

"We didn't get a proper ending."

She drifted over to him and reached out for the bear. As soon as her hand touched it, she became as solid as a living person. She tilted her head up and kissed him goodbye.

"I only wanted to love you," she said. "I never meant to hurt so many people."

"We can't help hurting someone," I told her. "It's part of being human. But you have to balance out the hurt with the love."

"You were loved by so many people," Todd said. "I heard that the whole church was packed on the day of your funeral. All people who loved you and wanted to say goodbye. I should have been there."

"It doesn't matter to me that you weren't there," she said. "I know you loved me."

Still holding the bear, she put her arms around him. He held her for a long, long moment, while the rest of us stood around awkwardly, not knowing what to do.

When she finally released him, Missy handed me the bear. "You know what you have to do," she said.

"I'm sorry. It's a very nice bear."

"We all have to let go now." She was becoming mist again, freezing the room with an Arctic chill. "Go on, do it."

"Missouri Wright," I intoned solemnly, "I hereby release your spirit into whatever afterlife you personally believe in. Go in peace to your just reward." I threw the bear to the floor, but it didn't break against the thick carpet. So I stamped on it, as hard as I could.

The sound of crunching ceramics finally attracted Dash and Dana's attention from their book discussion. "What was that?" she asked.

"Nothing of yours," I said. I stepped on it again and again, grinding it into the rug.

Missy began to glow with a shimmering light. The light grew brighter and brighter until there was a blinding white flash, and then she was gone.

The room gradually warmed back up to its normal seventy-two degrees.

"What do we do with the, um . . .?" Todd looked down at the fragments of Cinnamon Bear scattered on the rug.

"Did you want the pieces?"

"No, I don't need it anymore."

"We'll vacuum them up," I said, "and put them at the bottom of the trash. They have no power anymore."

Simon looked on in admiration. "You gotta teach me to do that," he said to me.

"It's not that hard. Break the spirit anchor-that's what we call the object that holds a ghost earthbound-and say the words. That's it."

"Can I do it next time?"

"Sure. It's just being nice to them. You're good at that."

"I guess this means I won't be seeing you so much now," Dana said to Dash.

"Oh, I don't know about that," he replied. "I'm still not done with the restoration. Now that I don't have to worry about plugging up drafts, I can get on with the important stuff."

"Will you two keep your sex life to yourselves?" Simon moaned, his hands over his ears. "TMI! TMI!"

We all had a good laugh over that.

It was a few days later that Todd called me, on the regular house phone this time.

"I thought you should know," he said, "I've had a very interesting call just now."

"Not another ghost, I hope."

"No, it was Missy's mother. I haven't heard from her in fifteen years, and all of a sudden she calls me out of the blue."

"Is she okay? She's not trying to make amends before she dies, is she?"

"I don't think so. She said she'd had a-a vision or something, of Missy, asking her to let go and make peace. So she called me."

"How did she get your number?"

"Googled it. I didn't think you could do that."

"I guess so. So everything's okay now?"

"Yeah. Thanks for all your help."

"Any time, man. Any time."

Never be afraid to reach out to someone. Chances are, they've been reaching for you, too.