Chapter 17
Violet
The vase Vail had broken had been a wedding present for our parents.
At least I thought it was. I had a recollection of Mom telling me not to touch it when I was fascinated by the light refracting through the crystal.
“When you get married, you can get your own,” she’d said.
Hadn’t she? We were never supposed to touch anything in this house anyway.
I swept the shards into a corner and left them there.
We were all relatively sane in the morning, which was remarkable.
Vail had receded into silent brooding, slouched in a chair he’d pulled away from the kitchen table.
My thoughts were thin with lack of sleep, but my energy was powered by a red mist of rage.
Anger, for me, had never needed a specific target.
It was simply a constant of my entire adult life.
Dodie was oddly calm. She had always gone quiet after one of her outbursts of emotion, as if she’d been drained from a spigot, but this was different.
She rummaged eggs from the fridge and scrambled them, dumping plates in front of Vail and me.
She made toast and coffee. I had never seen my little sister cook before, though she lived solo so must be able to create some kind of sustenance.
She couldn’t live on cigarettes and Melba toast alone, like she did in my imagination.
None of us mentioned the words scrawled on the wall in the living room.
“All right,” Dodie said, pulling her chair up and picking up her fork.
She was wearing baggy cotton pants—possibly men’s—and a turquoise top with a bow tied on the top of each shoulder.
She had pulled her black hair into the messy twist on top of her head I’d seen before, and she had dabbed dark makeup around her eyes.
She didn’t look like the same Dodie who had curled up in her bed yesterday, refusing to talk to me, or the same Dodie who had collapsed, weeping and screaming, on the stairs.
“Tell me what’s in Ben’s file,” she said. “I’m ready.”
Vail glowered at her from beneath his dark cloud, his arms crossed over his chest. I let the red mist of anger swirl through my brain at the thought of Ben’s file. Then I looked down at my plate and realized I was starving, so I started eating.
“Well?” Dodie asked, picking up her fork.
“Why don’t you just read it?” Vail finally asked. He hadn’t started eating, but I’d seen his gaze flick down to the eggs and away again. He’d give in. We Esmie children had the habit of eating food whenever it was offered because we never knew when we could scavenge more.
“I don’t want to read it,” Dodie said. “I want you to tell me what’s in it.”
My mouth full, I aimed a glance at Vail. Dodie seemed calm, but she’d had a worse night than both of us. We didn’t want to upset her again. Vail held my gaze for a second, then shrugged. The message was Too bad.
“You might be angry,” I warned Dodie.
“I never get angry,” my little sister replied.
“You burned my dolls when you were six,” I shot back. “Lit them on fire right in the backyard.”
“Did I?” Dodie asked airily, though her gaze darted to Vail. “I don’t believe I recall.”
I didn’t miss that look. I turned a wrathful glare on my brother. “That was you?”
Vail rolled his eyes. “Why would I burn some stupid dolls?”
“It was your idea,” Dodie said, giving the lie away.
“It was a suggestion,” Vail argued back to her. “No one made you take it. You did it on your own.”
“Because Violet provoked me. I wouldn’t have burned her things if you hadn’t told me to.”
“I didn’t tell you to do anything. It was just an idea. I didn’t think you’d actually do it, you lunatic.”
“Well, well,” I said with dark calm, scraping up the last crumbs of egg with my fork. “I liked those dolls. I’ll have my revenge on both of you, have no fear.”
Dodie shot an accusing look at Vail. “Now look what you’ve done. She’ll put arsenic in our tea when we’re eighty. No one does revenge like Violet. You know full well she can wait that long.”
Vail picked up his fork and finally dug into his eggs. “I don’t plan to live to eighty, so that won’t be a problem.”
“You most definitely won’t live to eighty, dear brother,” I said with threatening sweetness. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Dodie slapped her palm lightly on the table. “Tell me what’s in the file, one of you. I hate reading.”
Vail was eating, the bastard, and he didn’t speak. So I took a drink of half-cold coffee and I told her.
It didn’t take long. The file was enraging, but it wasn’t very thick. Dodie listened, every part of her body going still.
“You’re right,” she said when I finished. “I’m angry. Do you have a plan?”
“Of course,” I replied. “I always have a plan.”
“Does it involve arsenic?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Not at the moment. But if I need to use it, I will. Think about where we can find some, just in case.”
—
I made the phone call from the kitchen. It was the only phone in the house, which was unfortunate because it was placed in the middle of the wall with nowhere to sit next to it.
To make a phone call—which was rare for us—one had to stand awkwardly like a soldier on parade, posture upright, legs apart. No leaning or sitting allowed.
Dodie had wandered off, but Vail stayed in the kitchen, washing the dishes in the sink and listening in.
I’d had to pull a phone book—turned nearly to dust—from under the counter to get the number.
Luckily, former detective Gus Pine had lived in Fell with the same phone number since roughly the fall of the Roman Empire.
“Hello?” came his gruff voice when he picked up.
My voice was calm. “You bastard,” I said. “Now I know why you didn’t want me to read that fucking file.”
“Ah, the Esmie girl,” he said. “Such ladylike language. I guess I didn’t get rid of you.”
Get rid of me? “Never,” I replied. “I’m still here.”
“I told you not to read it. Family shouldn’t read those things. It never solves anything, and it never goes well.”
“I’m not just family,” I said as Vail clanked dishes louder than needed in the sink, his controlled anger matching mine. “Apparently, I’m your suspect. All of us were.”
It had been typed into the file by Gus himself.
Interviewed the three remaining children. All are teenagers. Hard to pin down, but something seems off.
A few lines down:
The oldest daughter, Violet, is rumored to be sick in the head somehow.
Note to speak to any local doctor who has seen her.
Mrs. Lydia Thornhill, neighbor, said that Violet sees things that aren’t there.
Mrs. Thornhill says she has never seen Ben Esmie in person.
Follow up on possibility that the oldest daughter harmed her brother and the others are covering it up.
“I was just doing my job,” Gus argued. “No one else was home when he disappeared except for the three of you. What was I supposed to think?”
I remembered being numb that day, thinking, This isn’t happening, it can’t be happening. The days, then weeks, then years of guilty agony over my baby brother. “I don’t care what you think. I didn’t murder my brother, and neither did Dodie or Vail.”
“If I still thought you killed him, would I have let you read the file?”
“Yes, because you hoped I’d give something away.” What I couldn’t figure out was why he’d insisted on sending Bradley with me instead of observing me himself. Bradley was hardly a Sherlockian detective genius.
“Have you found anything?” Gus asked. He’d dropped his world-weary attitude and sounded curious.
“You think I would tell you if I had? I’d rather eat glass.”
“You said your brother’s ghost is in the house. Have you—”
“I’m asking the questions,” I said. Behind me, Vail had finished the dishes and was standing in the edge of my line of sight, vigorously drying his hands.
I wasn’t going to tell Gus Pine about Ben crawling into bed with Dodie, about lights that only Vail saw, about the words scrawled on the living room wall.
Words that meant nothing to us. Unless one of us was lying.
On the phone, Gus turned cranky again. “Well, if you’re not going to tell me anything, then I don’t have all day. What do you want?”
“I’m not finished with my investigation. I’m just getting started. I want information, and you’re going to help me get it.”
“You saw the records I have. I told you—”
“I don’t want police records,” I interrupted. “I can see that not only were you incompetent, but your theories were insulting. What I want today is hospital records.”
“We checked for your brother’s medical records at the time. He didn’t have any. At least, not that we could find.”
Heavy lead threatened to settle in my stomach. He’d just given me a big piece of the information I wanted, and it wasn’t good. “Did you check Fell Hospital?” I asked.
“Of course we did.” He paused. “Let me guess. You want to double-check my work?”
“It seems reasonable,” I shot back. “But if Ben has no records, then I want my parents’ records.”
“I can’t get you that.”
“They’re dead, so yes, you can.”
“You think I run the hospital?”
God, he was being a pain in the ass. “I think you’re as old as God, and you know everyone in town, so you can call someone and get those records for me, yes.”
“You’re crazy,” he grumbled, his tone telling me that my assumption was absolutely right.
“Yes, crazy. Just as your insightful investigation file says,” I replied.
“Did they give you a psychology degree along with your Deputy Dawg badge? ‘Something seems off’ is going to crack the case wide open, I’m sure.
Any day now. It’s only been twenty years.
” Next to my shoulder, Vail laughed softly, darkly.
“Something is off, since you’re home because you think there’s a ghost,” Gus snapped, but there was no bite in it.
This was Fell, the town of graves where they shouldn’t be and a missing girl’s shoes placed neatly outside her dorm room door.
Fell, which had swallowed my little brother whole like a ravenous monster, like a great white whale.
Fell, where twelve-year-old girls fell dead next to the train tracks, where I’d found a book about how to draw pentagrams to summon demons tucked neatly on the back of a shelf in my middle school library, where there was that tree that everyone knew not to go near and that bus stop that seemed to go nowhere, where the pool at the local motel never had water in it.
Fell was where your childhood night terrors had a taste and a smell.
“You owe me,” I said to Gus, thinking of that file. Those words: the oldest daughter harmed her brother and the others are covering it up. He should pay for writing those words, even in a file that was locked in a haunted storage unit for no one to see.
“I’ll make the call,” Gus said.
“Thank you. And I want one more thing.”
His tone was sarcastic. “Yes, Your Majesty?”
“I want Bradley to come with me.” The words surprised me as they left my mouth. I hadn’t planned to say them. “Have him meet me at the hospital in half an hour.”
“You can have him.” Gus agreed to this one quickly, probably because he wanted Bradley out of his hair and was counting on Bradley to report back to him as a spy. “He’s eating cereal in his Jockeys right now, but I’ll make him get dressed.”
“For the love of God, please do,” I said, and hung up.
Vail watched me with his arms crossed, his look thoughtful. “Remind me,” he said softly, “never to cross you.” It was halfway between an insult and a compliment.
“Don’t ever cross me, Vail,” I said, but I just felt tired. My shoulders sagged.
“Mom’s and Dad’s hospital records,” Vail said. “You distracted him with all of that business about you being a suspect, you being angry about it.”
“I am angry about it.”
“But that doesn’t have any bearing on what you wanted,” Vail said.
I hesitated, and then I shrugged. “You read the file.” Our gazes met.
Mrs. Thornhill says she has never seen Ben Esmie in person.
Further down on the page, Gus had written more notes:
Parents can’t supply a photo of the missing boy.
After much questioning, no photo of him seems to exist. At the age of six, the boy was not enrolled in school.
There are no family photos in the house, no pictures of either parent or any of the children.
We can find no one outside the family who can supply a detailed description, no teacher, doctor, dentist, or babysitter.
We can find no one to describe Ben Esmie except for his parents and the three siblings who were present when he disappeared.
I knew what Ben looked like. He had brown eyes and light brown hair.
When he disappeared, he was wearing a blue T-shirt, navy blue pants, and white socks.
I knew because I’d helped dress him that morning.
I’d tried to get him to wear shoes, but he’d refused.
He didn’t like wearing shoes in the house, because they made too much noise and because he liked to play the game of sliding along the polished hardwood floors.
I worried that he’d get splinters in his feet or step on a wayward nail.
When he hid from us that last time, he’d been so quiet I hadn’t even known in which direction he’d gone.
So we didn’t have pictures of him. So what? We weren’t a picture-taking family. None of us had owned a camera growing up. There were no family portraits on the wall, like normal families had, and if there had ever been a photo from their wedding, my parents would have thrown it in the garbage.
We can find no one to describe Ben Esmie.
Gus had said there was no hospital record for Ben. And he was right—Ben had never gone to school.
Why? Why hadn’t any of us questioned it?
I must have known he was old enough to be enrolled.
It must have crossed my mind—crossed all of our minds.
Why hadn’t Mom and Dad sent him to school?
Why hadn’t my siblings and I asked about that or enrolled him ourselves?
Had we wanted him to ourselves so badly?
Had we worried that if he left the house for the real world, he’d never come back again?
The thing about doctors, dentists—that had to be wrong. Had Ben never seen a doctor? Had he never gotten his smallpox shot? I had the scar on my arm, and so did Dodie and Vail. Ben had never broken a bone or gotten an infection, but he was a rambunctious little boy. He had to have seen someone.
My parents were selfish and secretive. They hadn’t told the police about Ben’s medical records for some reason that had died with them. But everyone had one record, so I would start there.
I wanted the record of the day Ben was born.