Chapter 33
Vail
Charlotte took her time in the attic. In her briefcase, she carried the basic tools of her trade—a radio-wave scanner, a camera with flash, a portable tape recorder with microphone.
She told me to sit in the corner in silence while she worked, not to speak, not to tell her anything else about Ben or his connection to the house. It was best if she worked blind.
The toys had been rearranged again. The bag of marbles was gone—Violet had brought it down with her—and the crayons were still scattered in the kitchen and the living room, but the rest of Ben’s toys were here.
A teddy bear with black-button eyes sat on top of a Jack-in-the-box with its lid closed.
The balsam wood airplane with the upside-down wings was on the floor in the corner, as if briefly played with and discarded.
The board games and puzzles had been put back in their boxes, but the boxes lay on the floor.
A left rubber boot and a right sneaker lay side by side.
No matter how many times we reminded him to clean up, Ben was always a messy little boy.
I lowered myself to sit on the floor, my back to the wall, my knees bent, as Charlotte took items from her briefcase.
She made no comment on my little brother’s ghostly mess.
I closed my eyes and imagined I could hear Ben, breathlessly telling me something scattered that was very important to him in the moment. I pulled the teddy bear into my lap.
“Don’t touch anything,” Charlotte scolded me softly.
“Too late,” I replied.
We weren’t going to talk about the kiss.
She had never done that before, and I had never asked her to.
We didn’t have that kind of relationship.
I couldn’t have said why she did it. All I knew was that her lips had been cool and soft, and the memory of it soothed a small part of my jagged edges in this attic.
Maybe that was why she had done it. Maybe a kiss doesn’t need any other reason than that the person receiving it simply needs it.
“Do you recognize all of these things?” Charlotte asked after another moment. “Is there anything here that strikes you as strange or out of place?”
The bag of marbles from 1899 wasn’t familiar to me, but I didn’t tell Charlotte about those.
It was best if she wasn’t influenced by anything else that had already happened.
“I recognize everything,” I said without opening my eyes, talking to the darkness behind my lids.
“I know every piece in this attic. We had to box it up and put it up here when we started to understand that he wasn’t coming back. ”
“The mismatched shoes?” Her voice was gentle but businesslike. The voice of a doctor who knows you’re scared of the answers to her questions.
“Definitely Ben,” I said.
“Has anything been moved or rearranged since you were here last?”
“Everything,” I replied. “Everything has moved around.”
“But nothing is destroyed.” I heard the click of her camera as the flash hit my closed eyelids. I hadn’t taken photos up here because in those first upset moments, Dodie had asked me not to. I was glad I had called Charlotte. Someone needed to take over this investigation.
“Ben didn’t destroy his toys,” I told her. “He played with them, but he didn’t wreck them.”
“These are well used.” Another click, another flash. “Did he ever play up here before?”
Before he died, she meant. “No. No one came up here until we had to store his things. We got rid of his other things eventually, but not the toys.”
“His bed?” she asked. “His clothes? His furniture?”
I choked the word out. “Gone.”
A moment of silence behind my closed eyelids in the dark.
It had seemed like the best idea at the time, because none of us could inhabit the space with his things anymore.
Maybe it was wrong, but even now, I wasn’t sure of that.
Looking at Ben’s pillow or his soft, well-worn pajamas today would kill me.
When the unimaginable happens, you make the best decisions you can, and you never know if they were the right ones.
Charlotte spoke again. “So it isn’t the space that draws him but the toys. He followed his belongings up here. When you took the crayons downstairs, he followed them and used them. He loved these things, and he loves them still. You were right not to get rid of them. He didn’t want you to.”
Jesus, this was hard. I kept my eyes closed, kept breathing through the sharp pain in my chest. I stroked the soft head of the teddy bear, feeling the fur against my palm.
“Some of these things were ours first,” I said.
“We handed them down. The bear I’m holding was Dodie’s, and she passed it to Ben. Other things, we bought for him.”
“These toys were his life,” Charlotte said softly. “His favorite things. Where they go, he goes.”
My throat choked closed. When I could speak again, I said, “What are you getting at?”
“Your revenant is a little boy,” she replied. “He has always been a little boy. That’s why the toys are so central to what’s happening. He has never been a man.”
I opened my eyes and looked at her. “What do you mean?”
Charlotte was putting her instruments back into her briefcase. Her businesslike motions calmed me a little. “When did your parents buy this house?” she asked. “Or is it an ancestral home?”
I shook my head. “They moved here after they married and before Violet was born.” I did the math in my head. “Around 1954. Why?”
“I’d like to go downstairs, please. I’m finished here. I’d like to see the bedrooms, since the manifestation appeared there as well.”
“Charlotte.”
Her look was all cool English imperiousness. “Vail. You called me all the way here. Do you want my assistance, or don’t you?”
I bit back my retort and stood.
“Which bedroom do you want to see?” I asked when we had descended the attic stairs.
“Dodie’s, since your brother appeared to her there.”
I had been trained from childhood not to enter my sisters’ bedrooms or face immediate execution, so I opened Dodie’s door for Charlotte and stood back. “Be my guest.” I didn’t hear either sister in the kitchen downstairs. I wondered where they had gone.
Charlotte took out her spectrometer and went into Dodie’s room.
We went down the hall like that—Dodie’s room, then our parents’ abandoned bedroom, then Violet’s room.
Ben’s empty bedroom. Charlotte used the spectrometer in each room but didn’t take any more photos, even in Ben’s room. She also didn’t take notes.
When we got to my room, I leaned against the doorframe and watched her. Charlotte took silent note of my VUFOS file boxes, the few clothes in the open closet, the slanted ceiling, the messy twin bed. If she had any comment about being in my bedroom, she didn’t say it aloud.
Instead, she turned a dial on her spectrometer and rotated in a slow circle, staring at the output screen.
“Does that thing actually tell you anything?” I asked her, unable to bear the silence any longer.
“A little,” she said without looking up.
“I always wondered if it was just a prop.”
“It isn’t a prop,” she replied icily. “It measures electromagnetic waves.”
“And?” I didn’t want to admit I was curious, but I couldn’t help it.
“There are peaks and valleys on this floor,” Charlotte said.
“The readings are all over the place. Very low in the master bedroom, and high in your sisters’ bedrooms. It’s rather unusual.
I haven’t seen readings quite like this since a case I worked in Vermont—an abandoned girls’ boarding school.
I don’t know what haunted that place, and honestly, I hope never to know.
I was happy to get out of there as soon as I could. ”
I crossed my arms. “So my house is haunted.”
“You already knew that,” was the irritated reply. “Have you seen any manifestations in this room?”
I scratched an eyebrow with one finger, letting my gaze drift to the wall. “I saw lights over my bed when I was a kid. Figures standing over me. The words ‘wake up.’ It hasn’t happened since I’ve been back.”
“The same words written on the wall downstairs.”
“Yes.”
There wasn’t a flicker of disbelief in Charlotte’s voice. “Such riveting psychological insight into your character,” she said. “I suddenly understand you better.”
“Don’t get used to it,” I shot back.
She almost smiled. Almost. “Dodie saw water. You have seen lights. Has Violet seen anything?”
The words stopped in my throat. I wasn’t ashamed of Violet, and I didn’t think she was crazy. But her story was hers to tell, not mine. “Violet sees things sometimes,” I settled on saying. “But not in this house.”
“Are you sure about that?”
I frowned, because I wasn’t sure. At all. We had never talked about our nightmares in detail growing up. What had Violet seen that she hadn’t told us? If she’d kept silent, how bad must it have been?
“You’re getting at something, Charlotte,” I said. “You’ve seen everything you need. Just tell me what you’re thinking.”
Charlotte looked pensive. She really was pretty, with her elegant jawline and her tilted-up chin.
If you liked that sort of woman. “I am reminded of a case I consulted on some time ago,” she said in her best English lecturer’s voice.
“A family bought a house in Tennessee that they came to believe was haunted. The children saw figures in the shadows, and the littlest child—she was only three—claimed that something came in her window at night.”
I nodded. “Go on.”