Chapter 45
Violet
Warren, Vermont
I hung up the phone on my office desk harder than necessary. God, my sister was annoying.
There was no one in the empty office to hear it.
I only had one employee, and I had sent her home at five.
I had stayed later, updating the schedule book and calling contractors, but now I was officially finished for the day.
I had turned on the answering machine. Tomorrow’s appointments were set. I could go home.
But there was no one at home in my small chilly apartment, so I had called Dodie about Christmas instead. Christmas, which was three months away.
I had become a worrier, a planner. When had that happened?
I sighed out a breath and stood up, listening to the pops in my shoulders and back as I stretched. Since I had moved, become a business owner, and become—as much as possible—an actual mother. That was probably when.
After we killed Sister—I still loved hearing that phrase, and repeated it often in my head—I had gone back to Long Island. I had assessed how much money I still had from Mom and Dad. Then I had made Tess, my old employer, an offer to buy her business.
She said no. She wasn’t ready to retire, she said. Also, she added, my plan was guaranteed to fail, because no one would hire “a company run by a former mental patient.”
So I left Long Island—I hated it there anyway—and moved to Vermont.
I started my own estate cleaning business there, one that was most certainly run by a former mental patient.
For good measure, I hired as cleaners other former mental patients, along with ex-cons and people out of rehab.
Because, apparently, that’s how petty I can be.
It worked just fine. Mental patients and ex-cons are glad to get work, and they don’t ask for much.
Some of them flaked, others tried to rob me or screw me over, but not as many as you might think.
People who aren’t mental patients screw each other over on a regular basis anyway, so why not give someone a chance?
It gave me some satisfaction to hire people no one else wanted.
The work wasn’t too hard, and the customers were dead, so they didn’t notice if you showed up late or hungover every once in a while.
They also didn’t notice if you pocketed a few things from their house. I didn’t ask.
As for customers, there were enough. People die everywhere.
It worked for me. I made money, and I didn’t have to clean the houses myself anymore. I didn’t have to find myself face-to-face with the dead quite as often. I’d had enough of the dead to last me a long time.
Why Vermont? There were a lot of reasons.
It was a fresh start. It was a few hours’ drive to Fell to visit Vail.
It was a long bus trip for Lisette to visit, but my adventurous daughter liked long bus trips.
The fallout with Clay after the Fell incident was nasty, but Lisette was fifteen and headstrong, and she wore Clay down to get more time with me.
I got her once a month and for three weeks in the summer, and in a few years, she’d be an adult.
She was already looking at colleges in Vermont.
Aside from all of that, it was nice here. Harsh winters were fine with me, as was the lack of population. I still had my ability to see the dead, but I didn’t think about it as often as I used to. I would never think that my ability had gone away, but it was calmer here, in the middle of nowhere.
The only exception was when I’d driven through a small town called Barrons on my way somewhere else.
In Barrons, I had gripped the wheel and accelerated past the limit as icy dread seized my bloodstream.
I didn’t look right or left, not wanting to know who—what—I might see out the window.
I didn’t calm down until Barrons had vanished behind me. I would never go back there.
Now I put on my flannel coat and picked up my desk phone again.
Dusk had settled outside the window of the two-room office I rented in downtown Warren.
An eye doctor rented the office next to me, and a psychic had the space downstairs, with an entrance to the street.
I truly hoped, for her own sake, that she was a phony.
I dialed the other reason for Warren, Vermont. He picked up right away.
“Yeah?”
“Bradley, do I ever have fun?”
There was a pause as he tried to figure out what I was getting at. He picked the dirty option. “Violet, I have the kids. We can’t do that tonight.”
“Not that kind of fun. Another kind. Any other kind.”
He sounded happy that he had an answer. “Oh. Sure you do. Remember when we took the kids to Tall Tale Gardens?”
We’d done that a few weeks ago, on the last weekend of summer.
Bradley had his kids, and we had taken them to Tall Tale Gardens, a local children’s park that had playgrounds, cheerful music piped over speakers, a high school kid in a Winnie the Pooh costume, and climbable statues of storybook figures like Humpty Dumpty and the Big Bad Wolf.
Lance was too old for it, but he’d had fun anyway, mostly because the younger kids had flocked to him and because we’d fed him junk food.
Amy had had so much fun that she’d cried when we finally pried her off Humpty Dumpty at dinnertime.
She’d fallen asleep sixty seconds later in the car. It had been a good day.
“I knew Dodie was wrong,” I said.
“Why,” Bradley asked with the logic that he was often capable of, “do you ever listen to Dodie?”
“I don’t know. Do you have the kids at Thanksgiving?”
“No. I’m going to see Dad in Fell.”
“Okay, I’ll go with Lisette to Vail’s.” I didn’t mind trips to the Fell house anymore.
Vail’s renovations were nice. The ghosts were gone.
On the last trip, I’d made time to visit Alice McMurtry’s grave and put flowers on it.
Then I’d visited Martin Peabody’s grave and done the same.
Finally, I’d located the grave of the unknown man Bradley and I had found in the storage unit.
He’d been cremated and given a small plaque by the city. I had put flowers there, too.
I didn’t know how Sister had wielded power over them, how she’d made them do her bidding. I would never know. But none of them had appeared to me again in my visits to Fell. I could only hope that with Sister gone, they were forever at rest.
“I’m glad you’ll be in Fell,” Bradley said. “I need someone to talk to besides Dad.”
“You can stay with us if you’d rather get away from Gus.”
“Vail hates me,” Bradley pointed out.
“He does,” I agreed.
“If we get married, he’ll be mad.”
“Good thing we don’t have to worry about his feelings because we’re not getting married.”
Bradley made a ha sound that said he didn’t believe it. “We’ll see.”
“Never,” I said.
“Next year,” he replied, confident.
This was how it was. I gave myself credit that I hadn’t given in right away.
I made Bradley wait months, but I had my reasons.
I needed to get my life together, and so did he.
While I wrapped up my life in Long Island, Bradley had moved out of Gus’s; rented an apartment half an hour from his kids in Vermont, where he’d lived before the divorce; and gotten a job as a supervisor at a wool factory.
Still, Lisette came first for me, and if she didn’t like Bradley, I would have been done with him.
But in a completely upside-down turn of events, Bradley Pine and my wild-child daughter got along just fine.
They liked the same soapy TV shows and bad action movies.
Bradley had taught her the basics of driving this summer, even though he wasn’t supposed to, and had let her practice in his car.
Bradley knew about the ghosts, about what happened with Sister—things Lisette hadn’t been able to tell her own father—and it didn’t spook him.
Lisette hadn’t spent much time with Bradley’s kids yet, but to them, Lisette was the coolest person on the planet. She’d probably warm up, since they fed her ego.
Still, I wasn’t going to marry Bradley Pine. The idea was insane.
“Forget about that,” I told him. “Let’s do something fun tonight. Let’s take the kids for a movie and ice cream.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” Bradley said loudly. “Did you say a movie and ice cream?”
A chorus of shouts behind him said that they’d heard him.
“A movie with popcorn,” I said, matching his loud tone.
“What did you say?” He gave a dramatic pause. “Did you say a movie with popcorn?”
More shouts.
This was going to be so, so good. I knew it.
“I’ll pick you up in ten,” I said. “Be ready.”