When the café emptied out one sleepy afternoon, I realized why the owner was always talking about ghosts. From behind the counter I heard two souls in conversation at an empty table by the window. Each talked about his own murder decades earlier.

“Stabbed,” the first voice said, “in a train station bathroom in 1922 for my ticket to Toulouse. Took my wallet too, which held only my daughter Bitsy’s tooth. We had wiggled it out that morning.”     

“What was in Toulouse?” the second voice asked.

“Two days work for two weeks pay. Perhaps a gift for my Bitsy. What about you?”

“I woke one morning to find two bullets in my head, but it took me all day to die. Had I passed immediately, I could have seen who did it as I left my body. I suspect my still-living twin may have an idea of who did it by way of intuition or dreams.”

“How about that?” said the first voice. “You are a twin, and I was murdered by a twin. They arrested the wrong twin for my murder, you know. He was hung in the square before the mistake was realized.”

“Even so,” said the second voice, “I’ll bet the first twin got it worse.”

“How’d you know?” said the first voice. “He pulled a sack over his own head and threw himself into the canal. They found him in 12 feet of sewage, tangled in the remains of a horse.”

“Because It never quite works out for twins, is how I know,” said the second voice. Cain killed Abel. Romulus killed Remus. Jacob and Esau came out already fighting.”

“Shall I order us whisky?”

“Yes. What shall we drink to?”

“Drink to me and my wife,” I said aloud, in the direction of the voices, hoping they would leave. “We just found out she is pregnant,” I added. There was a long pause.        

“You are right,” the first voice finally answered back, “She is expecting. Drinks all around!”

“But oh,” the second voice chimed in with a hint of reticence. “We are going to need to make that drink a double. Your wife is carrying twins.”