LITMIR.BIZ

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all of it—that would spoil the surprise—but let’s just say I have unfinished business.”

      Lynn shook her head as she picked up a brush. “I refuse to be your unfinished business.”

      Delphine shrugged. “Sorry, kiddo. Not your decision.”

      “Oh, God!”

      “Precisely.”

      Lynn headed for the kitchen and her prized espresso maker. How many shots? Two? Four? Twelve? How many would it take to wrap her brain around Delphine’s intrusion into her life? And why didn’t they have a Starbucks on this island yet?

      Four shots, she decided. An Americano over ice with just enough cream to take the bitter edge off. She needed to be buzzing high on caffeine to deal with this.

      “I do miss Starbucks,” Delphine sighed behind her.

      “What? They don’t have them in heaven?”

      “Don’t blaspheme, dear.” Then, “Hmmm. Ahh! That’s much better!”

      In spite of herself, Lynn whirled around to look. Her aunt was now seated at the dinette with an iced latte in her hand.

      “It’s so hot in the tropics,” Delphine remarked.

      This was too much. “Where did you get that from?”

      “I thought about it and there it was.” Delphine smiled beatifically, then sucked delicately from the straw. “Oh, that’s the best I’ve ever had.”

      “It’s not fair.”

      “What isn’t?”

      “That you get to think one into existence, but I have to make mine.” Petulance, Lynn thought. Now she was being petulant with a ghost.

      “Well, Lynn, you live in a cause-and-effect world. You have to effect the cause to cause the effect. So start brewing so we can chat before you leave for school.”

      She didn’t want to spend her usual quiet coffee time with a dead aunt. This was her time in the mornings, time to sit on her back porch and sip her coffee, taking in the fragrance of bougainvillea and dew before they evaporated and left behind only the tang of salt air. However, she had no choice in the matter, so reluctantly she walked out to the porch and sat with Delphine. Besides, she didn’t really want Delphine to go.

      “That’s so much better,” Delphine said approvingly.

      “So are you going to tell me the mysteries of the universe?”

      “Don’t be silly. You have to find them out for yourself.”

      “Then why are you here?”

      “I can’t tell you that,” Delphine said. “I just have to finish something.”

      “Oh, lovely.” Lynn put her chin in her hand, her elbow on the table, and stared at her favorite aunt. “You know you could cost me my job.”

      Delphine appeared appalled. “I wouldn’t do that!”

      “You will if I keep talking to empty air.”

      Delphine pursed her lips. “I hadn’t considered that. I was only thinking of my mission.”

      “I’d appreciate it if you would keep that in mind.”

      “Of course I will.”

      “Thank you.” Bargaining with the dead. Lynn closed her eyes, surrendering briefly to a sense of surrealism that Dali and Kafka might have conspired to create.

      She lifted her coffee and sipped, considering how bizarre it felt to look across at a dead person. Common sense said this could not be happening, but then again what was reality? When she considered her former colleagues at Princeton investigating the effect of consciousness on the underlying quantum field of the universe, reality became a tenuous thing.

      But there was nothing at all tenuous about Delphine’s appearance. She looked solid enough to touch. A thought occurred to her. “You’re not cold.”

      Delphine arched a brow. “Why would I be cold?”

      “Ghosts are supposed to create cold spots. You draw energy from the matter around me in order to materialize. I should experience that energy drop as coldness.”

      Delphine laughed. “That old tale. Well, I suppose some do. But I’m not exactly a ghost.”

      “Then what are you?”

      “A non-physical manifestation of my consciousness.”

      “A ghost.”

      “Not the same thing at all, Lynn. Not at all. A ghost is merely an imprint left on the quantum field. Like a footprint left in the dirt. The footprint is there, but the person who left that footprint has passed on.”

      “Really.”

      “Don’t sound so dubious. Remember, I’ve graduated ahead of you.”

      Lynn had the worst urge to roll her eyes. “Graduated what ahead of me? Death? Yes, I’ll give you that much. But physics? Oh Auntie, let me assure you that physicists are working on things you only imagined when you were still teaching.”

      “You think I don’t know that? My point is—I have the answers now. You don’t.” Delphine sipped her latte then frowned. “Which reminds me. Why in the world did you leave Princeton and your research to come to this place and teach youngsters, of all things?”

      “Do you really want an answer?”

      “Yes.”

      “Because I got sick of the underhanded competition,” Lynn said. “Not with my peers, but with my students. I’m sure you heard about it. Students were stealing books and papers from the library to prevent other students from reading them. Buying their term papers on the Internet. Fudging their experimental results. I felt as if I were teaching a generation of cheats. Not that I should have been surprised, given how some of my colleagues behaved.”

      “Your work was stolen.”

      “Yes.” Lynn scowled. “And I hope Donald Farthing enjoys his new-found fame.”

      “He was that professor you were dating, right?”

      “Unfortunately.”

      “And he’s the one who stole your work?”

      “Two years of research on 11-dimensional Calabi-Yau shapes, trying to prove my theory of quantum space-time. I had to develop a new mathematic to solve it, Auntie, just as Newton had to develop calculus to fashion the equations of classical mechanics. Then one morning I wake up and find he’s published my research on the Internet, under his name. He’d copied my files to his computer and even backdated them. And since he was a tenured professor and I was just a Ph.D candidate…”

      Delphine nodded and took another sip of her drink. She sucked loudly at the straw just as she sometimes had in life. “I never really cared for Donald,” she said finally. “I’m so sorry he proved me right.”

      “You’re not the only one.”

      “Well,” Delphine said, suddenly brisk, “this is a nice spot for a change of pace. Almost like a vacation. Is that why you chose this place?”

      “Yes, it is. Just let me get on with it, will you?” But a vacation was not the reason she had chosen this island. A vacation had been the last thing on her mind. She’d needed to escape, yes—especially from the academic world that was looking at her like a bug under the microscope—but Treasure Island had been an accidental discovery on the Internet.

      She’d been browsing around, looking for various teaching jobs, when this one had popped up. She might have passed it by, except that her mathematical mind had immediately calculated the thousands of miles this job would put between her and Donald.

      The lure had been irresistible.

      “But

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