Chapter 5
Vail
The first thing I did when I arrived at the house, alone, was take the dust cloths off the furniture.
The second thing I did was get a phone line hooked up.
This had required a trip downtown to the offices of the phone company to get our long-defunct line activated.
I had leaned toward the woman behind the counter, held her gaze, and given her twenty dollars.
Through a haze of blushes, she’d promised an express hookup, with the bill to come to our address.
I didn’t even have to offer her a date. I thanked her and didn’t bother to tell her that the bills would go in the trash.
I didn’t need the phone line myself. I never talked to anyone. But Violet had a daughter, and she’d need to be able to reach her.
By the time Dodie arrived a day later—she’d apparently bailed on a photo shoot—I had already scouted the surrounding houses.
My memories of this neighborhood weren’t good—long days of unsupervised boredom, my parents shouting at each other, Ben disappearing.
It was as fun as growing up in a Siberian gulag, and my sisters and I were as well-adjusted as could be expected as a result.
I didn’t have hopes that the place had improved.
To the left of our house, the old lady who had lived there when we were kids was gone, replaced by a family named Chatham, according to the mail I lifted from the mailbox next to their front door.
No one was home, but from what I could see through the windows and based on the bike in front of the garage, there were two parents and a kid of about ten.
This was surprising, because there hadn’t been any children in the neighborhood when we were kids, as if childhood fun was against the law here.
Whoever this kid was, he or she was probably lonely.
In other news, the Chathams subscribed to Newsweek and got the JCPenney catalog in the mail. Nothing interesting there.
I went across the street next. The house here had been empty for as long as I could remember. It was aging back then, the windows blank-eyed with dust and dirt, the weeds overgrown. A wooden front porch had rotted away year after year as I grew up, a marker of time going by.
A place like that would usually be a magnet for neighborhood mischief—but there were no kids in our neighborhood except for us three.
My sisters could not have been less interested.
I had probably thrown a bottle at the house once or twice, but the place looked like a corpse, and the game wasn’t much fun.
I never asked why no one lived there. In Fell, people left their homes and never came back.
Not much in this town had a tidy explanation.
But someone had been to this house in the last eighteen years.
There was scaffolding on part of the deconstructed roof, and the lawn was churned into fossilized piles of soil, old rainwater filling the ruts left by construction vehicles.
The rotted porch was torn out, and fresh lumber had been dropped on the lawn, then left to rot in turn.
Three crushed, faded Coke cans sat in a pile of gravel.
Someone had started a renovation—months, maybe years ago—and then abandoned it.
As I stared at the scene, I felt awake, alert, as if the phone call about Ben had pulled me out of darkness and thrust me under a bright light.
Had someone bought the old, abandoned house from my childhood?
Who was it? Why had they stopped their renovation so suddenly that they hadn’t cleaned up their garbage or carted the lumber away?
I’d find those answers, and soon. I’d done dozens of investigations for VUFOS, and I hadn’t always followed their rule book.
When it came to Ben, there was no rule book.
The house to the right of ours had belonged to the Thornhills when we were growing up, and apparently it still did.
In my memory, they were a couple in their forties with no kids, who traveled a lot because Mr. Thornhill was some kind of—what—traveling speaker?
Lecturer? The memory wouldn’t come. I could only remember that Mr. Thornhill had round-framed glasses, and Mom had always felt sorry for them because they had no children, even though Mom didn’t care about her own. Nothing else surfaced in my mind.
The Thornhills would be in their sixties now, and not only were they not home, their mail was piled on their doorstep.
The geraniums in the pot next to the front door were black and sodden.
I picked up the mail and flipped through it, then got distracted when I noticed the welcome mat.
On impulse I lifted the mat, looking for a key.
There wasn’t one. But a hunch trickled down my spine, and I turned to the long-dead geranium, lifting the rotting pot. Beneath it was a house key, sitting tarnished on the cement.
I put the key in my pocket and put the pot back down.
Then I picked up the stack of mail and went home.
The wind had picked up, and clouds were chuffing high in the sky, crisscrossing the sun.
No cars drove by, and nothing moved. As I approached our house, a raven alighted on the roof, flapping its dark wings and making a throaty sound. Then it went silent.
—
It was habit that we’d take our childhood rooms, so I climbed the stairs and headed toward mine.
My boots were loud on the floorboards. Dodie had graciously allowed me to carry her luggage upstairs, but when I offered, Violet told me to go fuck myself.
I heard her banging her suitcase through the front door, cursing.
Dodie said something I couldn’t hear that was probably scathing, and Violet sighed heavily.
The upstairs hall was dim and stuffy. The walls were blank—bare of photos, framed memories, or art.
We’d always lived as if we rented this place, even though we owned it.
My bedroom door was the first at the top of the landing.
Next to me was Ben’s bedroom, which had been an “office” for our father—who never did any work—and a storage space.
We’d cleaned it out when Ben came, and after he’d gone, the room had become disused again.
Beyond Ben’s room were Violet’s, then Dodie’s, and our parents’ master bedroom at the end of the hall.
I opened the door of my childhood room. In here was a twin bed with a faded red blanket—my feet hung off the edge when I slept in it—and a dresser with chipped navy blue paint.
Next to the window was a bookshelf, empty of books, that was leaning distinctly to the left after all this time.
My suitcase was against the other wall, next to the stacked file boxes that contained my VUFOS files, taped shut for the trip from Montana.
The room was shoved in the back corner of the second floor, which gave it an odd shape and a slanted ceiling.
When I was ten years old and five feet tall, I’d continually banged my head on that ceiling.
Now I was thirty-four, over six feet, and eighty pounds heavier.
I had no hope of getting out of this without a concussion.
I dropped onto the bed, making it creak.
My boots left tracks in the dust on the floorboards.
We’d never had a maid service clean the inside of the house, so there was dust everywhere, settled into the fabric of the dust cloths I’d pulled from the furniture.
But as I sat with my hands dangling between my knees, I stared at the disturbed dust on the floor, thinking.
Downstairs, Violet was saying something about the phone line.
Dodie waited too long, then asked in a stilted tone, “How is Lisette?” She obviously had no interest in the answer.
She might have needed to recall Lisette’s name.
We Esmies were bad with children. Violet was a bad mother, and Dodie and I would never have children at all.
We’d used up all our skill with children on Ben.
I looked down at the scuffs on the floor. When I’d walked into this house alone two days ago, my first thought had been: It isn’t as dusty as I thought it would be.
It was dusty, yes. But for a house that hadn’t been occupied—or entered—in eighteen years, it wasn’t dirty enough.
There were no mouse droppings or ceiling leaks.
No nests or dead rodents. No burst pipes.
No mold. The electricity was on—Violet must have been paying the bill—and the fridge hummed in the kitchen.
The furnace was still in its place in the cellar, silent but functional.
When I turned on the kitchen tap, a burst of brown water had come out, and then it had run just fine.
I’d watched the water and thought, Eighteen years?
The air hummed in this house, a low-level vibration I felt at the back of my neck. Had it always been like this? Was that why I’d had such strange, vivid dreams when I lived here?
The figures standing over my bed. The light shining in my eyes.
After Ben arrived, he’d sometimes come into my room at night, and I’d awaken to find him curled next to me, his little body like a furnace against my skin as he slept. I’d brush my hand over his soft brown hair, and he wouldn’t wake.
I exhaled, because for a moment I could almost feel it again, Ben pressed next to me. My gaze fixed on the closed door of the closet.
Had I looked in this closet after he disappeared?
I thought I had, but I couldn’t exactly remember it.
I must have looked here, because it was one of Ben’s go-to hiding places.
He’d slide into the back corner, his arms around his knees, laughing breathily and not very quietly into his hands.
There were so many games he liked to play.
We’d looked everywhere for him that day and in the days that followed—from the attic, accessed only by pull-down stairs that Ben couldn’t have reached, all the way down to the cellar, which was really a crawl space just big enough for the furnace.
In all of that searching, I would have looked in the closet.
I stared at the door, my skin prickling. I thought I heard— Was that a sound?
I stood, strode across the room, and flung the closet open.
There was a box of old junk, a hanging coat that had fit fifteen-year-old me. Untouched dust on the floor. Nothing else.
I peered into the gloom, searching for a trapdoor or a hidden passage. A wardrobe that led to Narnia. Somewhere my little brother could have gone.
We’d been so frantic—Violet, Dodie, and me. Hide-and-seek was Ben’s favorite game, and we liked to humor him. They’d hidden, and I was It. It was my job to find them. I’d found Dodie and Violet, and then we’d all looked for Ben.
We never found him.
The snow coming down soundlessly out the window, the silence. The heavy air. The panic as we searched and searched.
It hit me all over again, square in the chest. He’d been so excited.
I’d failed him—I was supposed to find him, and I hadn’t.
I still hadn’t. I was still staring into this closet, looking for his hiding place.
Where the hell had he gone? Why hadn’t he been able to come out? Where did you go, little brother?
When they came home, our parents had looked, too.
And then the police looked. The house had been searched, every corner and nook, for the little boy who had disappeared.
He’d gone on a winter day with fresh snow on the ground, and there were no tracks leading to or from the house, no car tracks.
Wherever Ben went, logic dictated, had to be somewhere in this house.
Come home.
“I’m here,” I said out loud to the empty closet, the silence, the dusty floor. “It’s me, Ben. I came. We all came.”
No one answered me.
I closed the door.