Chapter 42
Violet
The Chathams’ house was dark and empty. There was no car in the driveway.
Dodie told us that she’d urged Mr. Chatham to take his ten-year-old daughter out of the neighborhood, at least for the night.
Apparently, he’d taken her advice. He’d probably lived in this neighborhood long enough to want to leave anyway.
He’d also, at Dodie’s request, left his garage door unlocked. The sound of Vail pulling it up was loud in the silent night, but no one was around to be awakened. The rain had stopped, leaving the ground mushy under my sneakers. The air was still wet, like a hanging blanket.
The garage at our house had nothing in it—no toys, bikes, tools, or old junk.
Our parents had parked their nice cars in there to get them out of the weather, and that was all.
We didn’t have a childhood with a dad tinkering with his car on Sunday afternoons while our mom got messy in the garden.
We didn’t even clear our own driveway in winter—hired landscapers did.
The landscapers hadn’t come on the day Ben disappeared, and the driveway had been thick with untouched snow.
The Chathams were different. Their garage wasn’t a museum, it was a jumble.
There was a rough workbench with a toolbox on it, some sports equipment, two gas cans, and several boxes labeled Christmas and Old Toys.
Vail found the overhead light bulb and pulled the string, and the space was illuminated with harsh yellow light.
I glanced at Lisette. She had cleaned the blood on her cheek where a fragment of the smashed light bulb had grazed her.
It was a minor scratch, but it made her look different, less like a little girl.
She was coming with us on this nasty errand.
I wasn’t leaving her alone in the house.
She wouldn’t agree to it, and she wasn’t safer there anyway. She was safer with me.
Still. “Stay close to me,” I couldn’t help but say. “Don’t stray, and if I tell you to do something, do it. Okay?”
She nodded. Her expression was carefully composed not to show fear, but she had just seen Sister full in the flesh, and her hands hadn’t fully stopped shaking. “This is crazy,” she said, aiming the comment at all three of us.
“It was either this or school,” Dodie shot back, giving her a raised eyebrow. How Dodie was the most composed of us, I had no idea.
Vail picked up a baseball bat and gave it an experimental swing.
Since he was wearing a baseball shirt, it made him look oddly boyish, except for the fact that he was over six feet tall and his shoulders flexed gracefully under the cotton.
He hadn’t told us exactly what had happened to him before the dreams woke us all up, but something new was etched in his features, even though otherwise he was the old Vail again.
“When I hit her with the vase, I felt impact,” he said, his gaze on the bat as he hefted it.
“She kicked me,” I said. “And she can grab. Her grip is hard.”
Vail nodded. “She’s sturdy for a ghost. If I hit her once, I can hit her again.”
Dodie wandered into a dark corner, and I heard clinking. “I’m only planning on self-defense, if needed,” she said. “I’ll stay behind you, Vail.” When she turned around, she had one of Mr. Chatham’s golf clubs in her hand, a relic of an abandoned hobby. “This will do.”
“What if she isn’t there?” Lisette asked.
Vail swung his bat again. “Then we look for her in the other houses, or in the woods. If we have to, we’ll go back to our house and wait. She has to turn up sometime.”
I found a dirt-crusted garden shovel and felt immediately better when I had it in my hands. When I looked at Lisette again, she had picked up a hand-sized hatchet that someone had used to cut down dead tree branches.
“There’s one more thing,” I told them. “I don’t think Anne was Edward’s sister. I think she was his mother.”
They all turned to me.
I swallowed. “I saw Ben. Just—just for a moment. He said that Anne was angry that she couldn’t get married because of him.”
Vail lowered the bat. Dodie made a small sound of distress.
“He said he was sorry,” I added. “He said I’m his sister. I thought it was just an endearment, but now I think he was telling me that I’m his sister as opposed to Anne, who isn’t.”
“She had an illegitimate baby as a teenager,” Vail said. “It would have been shameful for Anne back then. Shameful enough that her parents would pass the baby off as her little brother.”
I nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it. Anne was the sole heir. Then she had a son, who would have been the heir after her, if he was legitimate. But he wasn’t, so he was passed off as her brother. When that happened, Edward became the family’s male heir.”
“He usurped the inheritance,” Dodie said. She held the golf club at a jaunty angle, as if she was a woman without a care on her way to a round of golf. “The secret was bad enough, but the cover-up disinherited her for her brother.”
“She would have lived the rest of her life a spinster, financially dependent on her family,” I said.
“Her parents were ashamed of her. Her home life was probably terrible. When she was pregnant, there was nothing she could do about it. She was trapped. She hated Edward, and getting rid of him would solve all of her problems.”
“Jesus,” Vail said softly.
She had killed her son, and a year later, she had hanged herself. Was it remorse, I wondered? Maybe she was just crazy. But I had been called crazy enough times in my life. I had believed it myself. I, of all people, knew that crazy was more complicated than it seemed.
“I wonder who Edward’s father was,” Dodie added. “She was only fourteen when he was born.”
I shook my head. “We’ll never know. They kept it secret, and now they’re all dead.” The knowledge of Edward’s parentage, of Ben’s original father, had died with the Whittens. Ben himself had never known. His father’s identity was vibrating brain cells, like Dodie had said. Ashes at Pompeii.
Lisette spoke up. “I hope he died horribly.” Her cheeks were flushed with anger. “The father. I hope he died in really bad pain.” She was thinking about having a baby at her age, I knew. So was I.
—
Someone, as Vail said, had tried to rebuild the house in the lot across the street.
When we were kids, the house’s cracked windows were shrouded in dirt, the weeds were waist-high, and there were missing shingles on the roof like punched-out teeth.
In a normal neighborhood, an abandoned house like that would be a magnet for kids and teens, daring each other to break in and commit acts of vandalism.
None of us Esmies had ever set foot on the property.
In the years we’d been gone, the house had begun to fall down.
The roof had caved halfway when a tree had fallen in a storm.
In the brief burst of construction, the tree had been cut down, its roots dug up.
The long-ago lawn had been dug up, too, and most of the lot was now deep ruts of dirt, softened to mud by the rain and cradling thick puddles.
Weeds had taken over. They had probably planned to tear down the old house and build a shiny new one, but early on they had given up and driven their construction machines away, leaving overturned earth, a half-ruined building, and a single torn tarp, flapping in the remains of the wind.
Comically, the front door was locked. None of us wanted to risk climbing through the jagged glass of the windows, so we circled to the back, our feet squishing in the mud, in search of the back door.
This was locked, too, but the wood was soft and black with mold.
Vail kicked it hard with the sole of his boot, and the wood cracked.
A second kick, and a third, and the frame gave way and the door groaned open.
It was still dark, so there was no light coming in through the half-destroyed roof. I switched on the flashlight I’d taken from Mr. Chatham’s toolbox, gripping my shovel in my other hand. We filed into the house.
We were in the kitchen. Rain had collected under the peeled linoleum floor, which gave spongily under my feet.
Something smelled bad. There was furtive scurrying in the walls and the corners, and the wiring from the old stove was exposed, frayed and eaten through.
The door of one cupboard had rotted off, and there was an abandoned nest inside.
Our house should look like this, I thought, or close to it.
We’d had landscapers, but no caretaker or maids.
That was my decision. I could have hired someone, but I couldn’t bear the thought of strangers in our house, of strangers possibly finding Ben or what was left of him, in whatever state he was in.
The house was Ben’s grave, which made it sacred ground.
So we didn’t sell it, we didn’t tear it down, and we didn’t hire strangers to clean it out. Yet I hadn’t seen evidence of a single rodent, even in the attic.
Maybe Sister scared even the rodents away. Yet still, a window should have broken, or the roof should have leaked rain. Something in all those years.
“It’s cold,” Lisette said.
I raised the flashlight beam to see that she was right. The air was frosting gently with our breaths.
Dodie poked at the nest in the cupboard with her golf club.
“What a mess,” she commented. “They didn’t even get as far as to tear this heap down.
” The tarp flapped on the roof with a sharp sound, making her jump.
“Hurry up, would you, Vail? I’d like to get out of here.
Preferably before this demon house eats us all alive. ”
Vail was out of range of my flashlight beam. He had walked through the kitchen as if he lived here every day. I heard something thump in the next room, then a doorknob rattling. The tinkle of glass.
“The carpet’s soaked in the living room,” he called back to us from the dark. “It isn’t just the rain.”
I bent my knees, doing an experimental flex, and I felt the kitchen floor give alarmingly beneath my feet. The wood was rotten. “There’s water below,” I called back. “Under the foundation.”
“It’s why they couldn’t build.” Vail sounded calm.
“Why they gave up. They thought they could fix the problem of the water under the house because it makes no sense. We’re not on a high water table in this neighborhood.
But it’s as wet in here as if we’re on an underground lake.
They likely had a plan to fix the drainage, but had to abandon it. ”
“The water problem was here when they originally tried to build the cellar,” I called out to Vail’s disembodied voice. “Why do you—”
“Jackpot.” Vail ignored me. “I found the basement door.” A thump. “It’s locked.”
“There’s a basement?” Lisette said. “It must be soaked.”
Who locked it? I thought but didn’t ask.
There was a crack as Vail hit something with his baseball bat. “I can’t break it,” he called out. “Dodie and Violet, come here.”
We found him around the corner, aiming one of his powerful kicks at the basement door. I handed the flashlight to Lisette and hefted my shovel with both hands. “Vail, get out of the way.”
We took turns—me with the shovel, Dodie with the golf club, and Vail with his boots and Lisette’s hatchet.
It took much longer to break than the back door had.
The basement door seemed to be made of something stronger, and the lock was tight.
I stared at it and felt sudden cold certainty.
Sister, I’ve found you. My ribs and kidneys still throbbed with pain where she’d kicked me.
“Should we have called a priest or something?” Lisette asked.
As if in reply, there was a thump in the basement, the sound deep below the house, on the other side of the door. Lisette’s hand grabbed my arm, her fingers digging in.
“No priests,” I said.
“No priests,” Vail agreed. “Some things you have to do yourself if you want to get them right.”
“If she’s going to kill me, could she please get on with it?” Dodie complained. “It would be easier getting into a bank vault.” She gave the door another hard swing with the club.
Finally, the wood frame gave enough for the lock to splinter. Vail kicked the door in. Lisette aimed the flashlight beam into pure, inky darkness. The only thing we could see was a set of rotten wooden stairs descending into blankness, as if the world ended here.
Lisette lowered the beam, and I could see that the stairs didn’t end in a black hole. They were sunk into water at least several feet deep, the surface glassy and still in the beam of light.
My breath fogged as it left my lips.
For the first time in this wild expedition, I hesitated. I did not want to go down there. I didn’t want Vail and Dodie to go down there. And I definitely didn’t want my daughter going anywhere near that water.
Vail swore, his voice a rasp. He turned to Lisette and handed her the hatchet. “Keep this,” he told her. “I’ll take the bat.”
“You’re going down?” Dodie’s voice sounded as panicked as I felt.
Vail didn’t even flinch. “It’s what we’re here for.” He picked up the bat. “I’ll go first.”
I grabbed his arm. “Wait.”
Vail stopped, turning.
“Do you remember Ben’s fourth birthday?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Yeah, I do.”
“We baked him a cake.” I blinked down at the black water at the bottom of the stairs.
The cake had been chocolate, the kind from a mix in a box.
We’d baked it together in the kitchen. Where were our parents that day?
I didn’t remember, and it didn’t matter.
The best memories of my life didn’t include our parents.
Had that really been us? Had we been kids, cracking jokes and insults as we baked a cake for our little brother? Kids who weren’t thinking about their nightmares? Kids who didn’t know they would someday end up here, riding waves of anger and grief into the dark?
I didn’t know what I wanted. I tore my gaze away from the water and looked into Vail’s eyes.
“It wasn’t all bad,” Vail said, his voice soft.
I nodded. The cake had been really good in the end. We’d baked it perfectly. Then we’d all devoured it.
“Can we do this?” I asked Vail.
He raised his gaze to the ceiling as he gave my question a moment of serious thought. He let out a slow breath, rolled his shoulders, and tensed his jaw.
“Yeah,” he said, looking at me again. “We can.”
Then he started down the stairs.