Read Online Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore - Free Book Online Page A

“Wha, wha, wha.” He whipped his head around so quickly, looking for his coworker that his hard hat nearly came off.
    The radio: “I’m on the lower north tower, about a hundred feet below you. Seven o’clock.”
    Mike spotted him. Bernitelli, wiry little Italian guy. Berni , they called him, working in a window washer’s lift, suspended from cables a hundred feet over the bay.
    “I’m okay,” Mike said into the radio. “Just shooing some gulls that were getting in fresh paint.”
    “You hooked in?”
    “Of course.”
    “Then stop waving your arms around and hang on. I thought you were going to take the big dive.”
    “Roger that,” Mike said. “Sorry.”
    Concepción stood right beside him, now, as solid as the bridge itself, the wind whipping her dress around her legs. Strands of her dark hair blew across her face and she wiped them back behind her ear, then reached out to touch the stream on his cheek left by a tear. He couldn’t feel her hand, but at the gesture he felt a pain rise in his chest, an emptiness, and he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, then opened them. She was still there, but smiling now.
    “So you never knew—you don’t know what happened to him?”
    She shook her head. “Perhaps he found someone else. Perhaps the Czar kept him in Russia? We would ask after him whenever a Russian ship anchored in the bay, but no one had heard of his fate. Had I been a fool, a young girl who clung forever to a broken promise? Perhaps he was pretending all along, playing on my affections to get my father to release supplies for his colonies. This is why I have come to you: to find out.”
    “You waited two hundred years?” He realized, even as he asked, that if you were chatting with a ghost, two hundred feet above the San Francisco Bay, you really had no right to question anyone’s judgment.
    “You are the first person who could hear us. Sometimes, when someone is about to jump, they can hear us, but they do not answer, and soon they are here with us. By that time, it is too late for answers.”
    “Then everyone who has ever jumped—they are all here? They, like you, they—”
    “Not all of them, but most.”
    Mike tried to count in his head, about one jumper a week, since the bridge was opened, nearly eighty years ago—it was many. “That’s—”
    “Many,” she said. “And there are others. Not only those who jump. Many others.”
    “Many,” he repeated.
    “A bridge is a place between, we are souls that are between.”
    “So if I can find out what happened to your count, then what, you move on?”
    “One hopes,” said the ghost. “One always hopes.”
    “One moment, please.” Mike spidered his way back into a matrix of beams so he was out of sight of Bernitelli, then reached in his coveralls for his smartphone, but paused. It couldn’t be this sudden: two hundred years and he simply looks something up on a search engine and resolves her mission, puts her to rest? What if her count had married another woman? What if he had used her, lied to her?
    “Concepción, you have a modern way of speaking, do you know about the Internet?”
    “Please, call me Conchita. Yes, I have heard. We hear the radios in the cars as they pass, listen to the people walking on the bridge. I think the Internet is new way people have found to be unpleasant to one an-other, no?”
    “Something like that.” He typed the count’s name into a search engine, then, when it suggested he’d spelled it wrong, he hit search. In seconds, the result was back and he tried not to react as he read what the count had done, so many years ago. When she had first appeared, while he was still in shock over the sweater guy going over the rail, she had shown him pity, given him a week to prepare for her reappearance. She had warned him she was coming the second time and had only appeared to him after he was safely hooked to the bridge. She had shown him consideration. He owed her the same.
    He shook his head at the phone