Page 41 of Beneath the Poet's House

“Almost.” She places the food on the floor beside the water bowl, and Pluto brushes against her legs. “I’ll see you in just a few hours,” she says to the purring cat. She goes to the sink and rinses out the cat food can.

“Serrr-shaaah!” Emmit calls.

“Just need to wash my hands.”

As she grabs for a dish towel, she catches sight of her myriad heart medications and antidepressant in the crack of an open cabinet.I didn’t take any of my meds!She reaches for the bottles, opens them quickly, and counts out the pills—oval white and sky-blue ones, yellow-and-orange capsules.When’s the last time I missed a dose?She can’t remember, but she certainly doesn’t want to start now. It could be disastrous. She throws the pills into her mouth and sips water directly from the faucet to wash them down.

Emmit sticks his head through the doorway into the kitchen, and Saoirse steps in front of the dish drainer, not wanting him to see the telltale orange bottles. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

“We only have ten minutes to walk there,” he says.

“I’m ready,” she insists and smiles. When Emmit turns back toward the foyer, she returns the bottles to the shelf and closes the cabinet. Giving Pluto a final pat, she steps out into the coming twilight of the clear October night.

Chapter 23

Emmit stops at his Mercedes before they leave, riffling through the glove compartment. The walk to the park at Prospect Terrace on Congdon Street takes a little over five minutes. They arrive in time for introductions and directives from their tour guide, Stacy.

After checking her phone to make sure everyone’s arrived, Stacy turns in the opposite direction from which Saoirse and Emmit have come. “All right, everyone. Our tour has officially started. Onward, to what we in the biz still refer to as the Biltmore Hotel.”

Saoirse and Emmit match their strides to the half dozen or so other participants on the ghost walk. Saoirse wishes she’d thought to bring a pair of gloves. It’s much colder than when she had initially planned to be out with Emmit, nine hours earlier.

“Are you excited?” Emmit asks.

“Sure,” Saoirse replies. “This is cool.”

“Are you scared?” He grins.

Saoirse feels her mouth lift into a half smile that mirrors the one Emmit so often wears. “It takes an awful lot to scare me these days.”

“Fair enough,” Emmit says, “though, just in case, I packed us a little liquid courage.” He’s staring at her, gauging her reaction. When she raises an eyebrow, Emmit slips a hand into his jacket pocket and pulls out a flask. Saoirse feels a little drop in her stomach. Emmit unscrews the top and drinks, then holds it out to her, the cleft in his chin deepening.

The drop in her stomach rollercoasters into a rise of anger, but she derails it. She can’t be upset; Emmit doesn’t know about her heart condition. He doesn’t know because she hasn’t told him. She meant what she said the other night at the restaurant: she was a “sort of” drinker in that she’d never had a problem with it. Not like Jonathan had. And because she’d had a conservative approach toward drinking before her diagnosis, not overdrinking with her heart condition hadn’t required much of a transition.

Emmit is still holding the flask in her direction, and she takes it from his hand. She’s always so careful with her health; a few sips of whatever is in the flask isn’t going to kill her. She sips, wincing at the burn in her throat, and sputters as she hands it back.

“What is that? Gasoline?”

“Brandy.” He takes another sip. “Itisa little strong. Next time, I’ll mix it with eggnog.”

“Next time?” Saoirse scrunches her face. “Do ghost tours whip you into a partying frenzy or something?”

“Eggnog is criminally underrated,” Emmit says. “We’re embracing Providence’s past tonight, aren’t we? Eggnog was the drink of gentlemen and women throughout the nineteenth century.”

Saoirse forces a little laugh, but already her heart rate is increasing, and she feels the alcohol traveling through her, heating up her muscles, her skin, her veins. Emmit returns the flask to his pocket and grabs her hand, and she relaxes slightly and smiles. With his fingers entwined in hers, she can forget about eggnog and brandy.

Their first stop is the Graduate Hotel, built in 1922 and formerly known as the Biltmore. Saoirse listens to Stacy’s anecdotes about the hotel’s famous guests and unexplained deaths, a flood in 1954, a plague of lawsuits, unpaid debt, and an eleventh-hour rescue from demolition. Stacy is delving into how these events resulted in the hotel’s various unquiet spirits, when Emmit slips the flask out of his pocket again.

Jonathan speaks up instantly:So much for Emmit not being a big drinker. Looks like you picked another winner, huh?

Before Saoirse can decline the flask, Emmit thrusts it into her hand. Her heart rate ratchets up another notch, though whether from the brandy she’s already consumed or her rising unease, she can’t be certain. Emmit is staring at her expectantly, and a dozen excuses, explanations, and retorts spring to her mind. Rather than utter any one of them, she takes another swig, the large letters—B.I.L.T.M.O.R.E.—atop the eighteen-story hotel glowing red in her periphery.

He takes the flask back and glances at the other tour patrons. Stacy is explaining to a young woman how the hotel’s famous glass elevator is now—according to a plaque on its brass door—for time travel only. Emmit flashes her a grin, but his eyes look a little clouded. Saoirse feels her own eyes drooping a little, and the traveling warmth of the alcohol moves to her stomach. There’s a fuzziness around the edges of her vision and a looseness to her shoulders. She shakes her head, trying to clear her thoughts, and they follow Stacy and the rest of the tour-goers down the sidewalk.

A half mile later, they’re on Brown’s campus, with Stacy introducing the building before them as University Hall. The tour guide gestures animatedly as she says, “It’s haunted by the ghosts of the American soldiers treated here when the building was used as a hospital during the Revolutionary War.”

“I remember this,” Saoirse says to Emmit, trying to get their date back on track. “We used to scare each other with stories of ghostly soldiers roaming the halls.”

Stacy is fielding questions from the group when Emmit jams his hand in his pocket yet again. Saoirse’s stomach sinks at the same moment her heart rate rises. But this time, Emmit doesn’t come out with the flask. He’s clutching something obscured by his closed fist. He leans in close, breath hot against her ear.

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