Ghosts

Ghosts are the novel’s recurring image of the dead remaining present in the lives of the living, most powerfully through Mike Hoolihan’s visions of Jennifer Rockwell. They appear beside beds, return in altered forms, and seem at once like visitations and like the pressure of grief and memory. The narrative never supplies a definitive explanation; instead, the apparitions become part of Mike’s effort to face what he does not yet understand about Jennifer’s death.

Nature and Recurrence

Mike imagines that a dead person’s ghost must divide itself into many ghosts, at least at first, because so many bedrooms and sleeping people need to be visited. The image turns haunting into labor: the dead are not simply an isolated presence but something dispersed across the private rooms of the living. Yet the division may not be endless. Some sleepers, perhaps only two or three, are people the dead will never leave. The possibility of permanent attachment gives the apparition a relational logic without explaining whether it is supernatural or imagined.

The recurring setting is the bedside. On the morning after Jennifer’s death, Mike wakes to find her standing at the end of his bed, waiting for his eyes to open; when he looks, she is gone. The scene makes seeing itself conditional: she is present until the instant of recognition, then vanishes. Its ordinary, close domestic setting contrasts with the impossibility of the visitation, and the abrupt disappearance leaves Mike with an experience rather than proof.

Mike Hoolihan’s Earlier Encounters

The apparitions are not new to Mike. At the end of his Homicide career, he arrived at work drunk and visibly ill. Colonel Tom took him by the arm and drove him to Lex General; after he was dried out, Mike convalesced for a week at the Rockwells’ home, then far out in Whitefield. During that period, people came to stand at the foot of his bed, including Colonel Tom, Miriam Rockwell, and the family physician. Others came too: figures Mike could not readily distinguish from the people around him.

Jennifer, then nineteen, visited in the evenings to read to him. Mike tried to listen to her clear voice while wondering whether she was real or another of the ghosts who stopped by. Those other figures seemed cool, self-sufficient, and unreproachful, their faces carved and blue. Jennifer’s presence belongs to this earlier pattern of uncertain perception, but it also differs from the other visitors: Mike never felt judged by her. He understood that she had troubles of her own, and that being the daughter of a police officer had not made her judgmental. Their bond is thus associated not only with death and mystery, but also with a form of companionship that had already mattered during his recovery.

Jennifer’s Return After Her Death

After the March 4 death, Jennifer first appears to Mike at the foot of his bed. She returns on the following day, then again, each time fainter. Later, however, she is back with what Mike experiences as her original power. The pattern resists a simple account of a ghost fading away: her presence diminishes, then intensifies, as though the haunting follows the unsettled movement of Mike’s attention and grief rather than a steady supernatural timetable.

The renewed apparition is not still. Jennifer paces for hours, moving swiftly, bent and lurching. Mike feels that she is trying to vomit. The physical, distressed quality of this vision is distinct from the earlier bedside appearances, in which she waits for him to wake. It gives the ghost a bodily urgency while leaving its meaning uncertain: Mike perceives an action and a suffering, but cannot establish what the apparition objectively is or what it can communicate.

The Ghost and the Investigation

The ghost becomes inseparable from Mike’s psychological autopsy of Jennifer. He describes her as inside him, like an intruder whose flashlight is playing over what he does not want to see. The image makes investigation feel less like a detached reconstruction than an intimate disturbance: the person Mike is trying to understand seems to occupy the very mind doing the questioning. His notes, tape recorder, and computer are his tools, but the ghost gives the work the force of an encounter.

The evidence Mike gathers includes the history preserved in Jennifer’s blue trunk: nine photo albums and nine ribboned bundles of letters from Trader Faulkner, documenting their relationship from its beginning. It also includes Jennifer’s account of a concealed mental-health crisis, recorded in a farewell message. She says that she had begun to feel that she was losing control of her thoughts, had sought help and read about her condition, and had taken varying doses of medication that had stopped helping. These concrete discoveries change what Mike can know about her life; they do not prove that a ghost supplied the information. The distinction matters: Jennifer’s apparent return gives the investigation an uncanny shape, while letters and testimony supply evidence that can be examined.

Ghosts therefore hold together two kinds of uncertainty. They make bereavement visible as a continuing bond—Jennifer is gone, yet still appears in Mike’s room and remains central to his thinking—and they preserve the gap between a felt presence and an explanation. Mike’s earlier visions during recovery make the supernatural reading harder to settle, while his inquiry into Jennifer’s private history gives the visions psychological weight. The dead may seem to return, but the novel leaves the reader, like Mike, to reckon with what the return reveals and what it cannot establish.