Chapter Six
“What did he do?” Lina sat in a squishy armchair in the small room adjoining the Drakes’ bedroom. She hadn’t been in here since her interview. It added to the strangeness of the situation, being called into a part of the house she rarely saw, to discuss something she never imagined possible.
But at least now she understood what Ren had meant by disappointing her.
Marla dropped into a matching chair across from her. “Same old story. Got mixed up with the wrong kids.”
“Did they steal cars? Run drugs?”
“He’s not dangerous. He won’t hurt you, or the residents, or anyone. You don’t have to worry.”
“But what did he do?”
Marla’s glance slid to a bookcase against the wall. “It had to do with drugs.”
Lina, sickened, let her gaze fall to the carpet. Was she ever going to escape from chemical complications? “Did he take them, or just carry them, or…”
“He did enough to get in trouble.”
“I never even guessed.” Lina chose her words to reproach Marla, albeit obliquely, for not telling her.
“Well, he’s not dangerous, like I said. And as you can imagine, he doesn’t really want people to know.”
“Do the seniors know?”
“Nope.”
“How long ago was all this?” Lina asked.
“Oh, years. It’s been a while.”
“Then how long is his sentence? When can he leave?”
“It’s kind of indefinite.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. They give you a sentence when you’re tried. You get to know how long you’re in for. Don’t you?”
Marla got up from her chair and paced between Lina and the bookcase. “His case is weird. I don’t know the details, or why it ended up the way it did.”
“Aren’t there lawyers he can talk to?”
“Lina.” Marla stopped in front of her. “He doesn’t want us meddling. He wants to suffer it out and pretend he’s got a normal life. All right?”
“Does he know we’re having this conversation?”
“Sure, yeah. Whenever anyone gets too close, I’ve had to tell them.”
Lina squeezed her fingers between her knees. She hated it, the idea that Ren showed her such favor only because he couldn’t go outside the house for women his own age. She also hated thinking of the others, probably more attractive, before her. And of course it disturbed her that he was a criminal. Granted, so was she, in a sense, but she didn’t appreciate the reminder. “How many have you had to tell?”
“Not many,” Marla said. “He usually keeps to himself. He decided to be stupid and make friends with you, I guess.” When Lina looked up in disbelief, Marla’s mouth fell open and she thrust a hand toward Lina. “I didn’t mean it like that! Gosh, I can’t keep my foot out of my mouth some days.”
Lina forgave it with a limp lift of her fingers and slumped back in the chair. “I assume I shouldn’t tell anyone.”
“If you care about him, you won’t.”
“I don’t really know him,” Lina said, feeling with despair the truth of that statement, “but I’ll respect his wishes.”
“Good. You’re a good kid.”
“Can I ask how he ended up here?”
“We knew him through the family. He asked if he could stay here when the trouble all came down. We said yes. It’s a big house and we could use the help. And we figured he’d be more comfortable here than…” Marla looked out the window. Pale winter light fell across her coarse features. “Somewhere out there.”
Lina got up and walked toward the door. Then she looked back, in a flash of insight. “Did Mrs. Clairmont really recognize him, then?”
Marla shot her a glance, eyes sharp. “What?”
“Maybe she lived in the neighborhood where he and his ‘bad crowd’ used to hang out, and saw him doing…I don’t know, illegal things.”
“Oh. I don’t remember where she lived, so…”
“And then she got the memories mixed up,” Lina said. “Being in this house. She saw a guy she associated with some sort of trouble, and mixed him up with the murdered houseboy—Sean Reynolds, right?—because she was back in the sorority where it happened.” Lina stopped, seeing the way Marla was staring across the floor and chewing on her lip. “It’s just a theory. It doesn’t matter.”
Marla released her lip from her teeth. “Guess it’s as good a theory as any.”
“I won’t bother Mrs. Clairmont about it. I won’t tell anyone. I just thought…well, I hoped something finally made sense.”
“Honey, very little in this world makes sense. And even less in this house.”
* * *
All day Lina kneaded the new development in her mind, pinching it like a fretful child poking at a bruise. So many things he had said sounded different now, took on whole new shades of meaning. It was finally clear why his sister was under the care of other people, instead of his own. She now understood why he had crawled into every corner of this house, right to the very crest of the roof. He had nowhere else to go.
Things she had said to him also returned to torment her. If she had known, she would have been more tactful. You’re young and hip. You must have places to be. And, of course, she would not have grilled him on whether or not he had stepped out into the alley one December night.
From what she knew of house arrest, he wore some sort of device—an ankle band, most likely—that would set off an alarm if he stepped outside the perimeter of the property. But maybe if he ducked into the alley and stayed right up against the fence, he would not set it off. He would have learned, over the years, the exact boundaries of his prison. The Drakes probably wouldn’t like him doing it, nor would his parole officer, so if he did slip out for a taste of freedom, he would dive straight into the shadows the second he escaped. Therefore it had looked, from her vantage point, like he had disappeared. After that, he must have heard her calling him, and dashed back inside while she was running down the stairs, and then pretended he had never been out at all.
And he had let her think it was the ghost.
The ghost! Poor Ren. All this time Lina had wondered how he could stand to live in the basement of a haunted house, when the truth was he had no options. When he had asked to stay with Marla and Alan, had he known about the manslaughter-suicide and the subsequent poltergeist? Would it have stopped him? Possibly not. It wouldn’t have stopped her, because she wouldn’t have believed it. You had to live with these things and see them with your own eyes before you really began to believe that ghosts and poltergeists existed.
A sudden sick feeling washed through her. She might have fallen to her knees, if she hadn’t been on her knees already, writing down numbers on Gertrude Brown’s medical chart during a routine checkup.
What if there wasn’t a poltergeist? What if Ren had been doing it all along? It was irrational behavior, yes, but he had reason to be frustrated and bored. He could have rearranged her books and blankets. He could have dumped magazines on Mrs. B’s bed and escaped into the hallway before Lina got there. True, Mrs. B didn’t think anyone opened the door, but her eyesight couldn’t be trusted.
He wouldn’t do those things, though. Would he? Risk hurting an innocent old lady just to make Lina and the others believe in the ghost? Was he that strapped for excitement? Besides, Lina’s lamp had gone out by itself with no one else in the room. The laundry room door had slammed shut, and the laundry basket flipped over, while he was all the way up in the kitchen. She had felt that shove and that cold breath on the stairs. Ren himself had said a magazine had flown at him.
So what.
She told Mrs. Brown that everything looked normal and began packing up her supplies.
Maybe he had lied. Maybe she had imagined the assaults on the stairs. Her lamp and the laundry room incident proved nothing; old houses had drafts and electricity fizzles. There was always a better explanation than the supernatural. What if Ren devised some of the pranks? Would he admit to it if she asked him, as a friend? Maybe if she admitted to her own horrible mistake?
She put away the last supplies and creaked to her feet. Her knees ached from the cramped position. “Well, you’re my last patient today, Mrs. Brown. Think I’ll go rest a while before dinner.”
“Thank you, Lina. Don’t forget our party tonight.”
Oh, yes. It was New Year’s Eve. “I won’t forget,” Lina said.
* * *
Before dinner she knocked on Ren’s door in the basement. Her heart hammered. I just want to talk , she would say when he opened it. I want you to know I understand. It’s okay. I still want to be friends with you.
He didn’t answer. Lacking the nerve to call out to him through the door, she slunk back upstairs.
At dinner he did not come out to serve. He stayed in the kitchen and left the table-waiting to the two girls. She decided he needed time before facing her. All right. She could wait.
The “party” Mrs. Brown referred to consisted of sipping sparkling cider and watching the Space Needle fireworks on TV. Lina sat with the four sleepy seniors staying up till midnight, and considered going up to the roof to see those fireworks directly, but didn’t, because Ren might be up there.
Lina felt sorry for him, for his humiliation, but she also still felt uneasy, unsure what to say to him next. To think, she had imagined being next to him at this moment, as the calendar year turned, giving them another excuse to kiss. She twisted in her seat, sipped her cider, forced a smile at the confetti Mrs. B flung, and wished the world were different.
* * *
On Tuesday, January 6, Lina woke up to falling snow. Seattle’s temperatures had been in the twenties for days, and the snowflakes were feathery and dry like the snow in the Canadian Rockies, not wet and slushy like Puget Sound usually got. Lina watched from her bedroom window, smiling at the beauty of the flakes accumulating on the frozen ground and parked cars.
Ren trudged out with a wheelbarrow full of sand to scatter on the front walk. Remembering a different snowy morning not so long ago, Lina felt her smile wilt. She watched him a while, but he failed to turn and look up at her like last time. He had dodged her like a venereal disease for the past week, in fact. Saddened, she turned away.
She performed her morning rounds of checkups and visits, and spent her free afternoon in the living room with a sandwich and a crossword puzzle, frequently glancing out to admire the wintry landscape. Toward the dinner hour, the doorbell rang. Sensing no one else nearby, Lina dusted crumbs off her hands and got up to answer it.
The man on the doorstep smiled and waved a glove-clad hand at her. He was about Lina’s age and had a broad, symmetrical face, with glasses and dark-blond hair that flopped onto his forehead. “Hi, Drake House! Are Marla and Alan around?”
“I think Marla might be. Can I tell her who…”
“Tell her it’s her long-lost nephew Gary.”
“Oh!” Lina stepped back, opening the door further. “I’ve—yes, of course. I’ve heard of you. Come in.”
“Thanks.” He stepped inside and stomped his hiking boots against the mat. Chunks of snow fell off the soles. “I picked a stupid day to drive across town and visit, but I needed to turn in some forms at the U, so I was in the neighborhood.” He unzipped his ski coat.
“Right.” Flustered at being confronted with her blind date, Lina turned and flagged down Consuela, the serving girl, who had come out to see if the door had been answered. “Consuela? Um, could you get Marla, please? Tell her Gary’s here.”
“She’s in the kitchen,” Consuela said. “I’ll tell her.” She turned and bustled off.
“Come sit down,” Lina said.
They went into the living room, where Lina hastily knelt and folded up her scattered newspaper.
“So. You seem a little young to live here,” Gary said.
Lina looked up. He sat in an armchair, flipping the end of his striped scarf back and forth, grinning. She touched her forehead, remembering she hadn’t introduced herself yet. “Sorry—yes. I’m Lina. The nurse.”
“I thought so. Marla’s mentioned you. She’s been talking about having us all go to dinner.”
“Right.” Lina sat on the sofa and arranged the newspaper on the coffee table, avoiding his gaze.
“Hope my girlfriend’s in town by then. She’d get a kick out of Marla.”
“Oh. Your…girlfriend’s moving to Seattle too?”
“Yep. Just had to wrap up her job over in Pullman.”
“I see. Good.” Lina leaned back on the sofa cushions, relieved. He already had a girlfriend. Thank God. Gary was attractive, but she was still stinging from the whole Ren catastrophe, and dating someone else simply wasn’t a possibility right now. “Does, um, Marla know you’re seeing someone?”
“I told her, but I bet she didn’t believe me. Probably thought it was an excuse so I wouldn’t get set up with her latest employee.” He winked at Lina.
Lina smiled. “Does she try to set you up a lot?”
“Only every chance she gets. It actually worked one year, when I had a summer job in Seattle. Nice girl. She was helping out in the kitchen.”
“The kitchen?” Lina studied her nails. “How long ago was that?”
“About ten years. Yeah—it was ’94. Just after I’d graduated from Wazzu.” Pullman’s WSU, like UW, had its own special pronunciation among the initiated.
Ten years ago, Ren would have been twelve. Probably hadn’t started working at the house yet. Perhaps hadn’t even started on his criminal career yet. No possible connection there. “Nice house to work in,” she said. “By the way, did she—the girl you dated—ever think it might be haunted? I hear stories, is all.”
“Oh, yeah.” Gary laughed. “This place scared her half to death.”
A chill invaded Lina’s limbs. “What happened?”
He shrugged. “She said stuff moved around by itself. Like maybe someone was playing tricks on her, but she couldn’t figure out how. One night she woke up because the blanket was being pulled off her. Said she watched it haul itself right out into the middle of the room and fall to the floor.”
Lina tried to smile. “Wow. Strange.”
“Oh, and actually, there was one thing I saw too. We were moving her desk across the room, and we had put the phone on the floor. Well, it began to ring. We were carrying drawers, so we couldn’t get to it right away. It rang a few times. When she finally picked it up, no one was there. Must have hung up. No big deal, right? Then we remembered. We unplugged the phone .”
Lina’s breath stopped for a moment.
“She held up the end of the cord and showed me,” he said. “Definitely unplugged. To this day I’m not sure how that happened. Of course, I never did understand electronics.”
Lina managed to laugh. “Scary.”
“Yeah. So, has anything like that happened to you?” He looked at her with cheerful expectation, as if they were telling each other jokes.
She looked out the window. “No. Not really.”
Marla strolled into the living room, hugged her nephew, and started lecturing him about how he shouldn’t drive in this weather. She herded them into the dining room, where dinner was being served. Gary met Mrs. B, who immediately started flirting with him. The Drakes, Mrs. B, Gary, and Lina all sat at a table together, where Marla was finally made to understand that Gary did in fact have a real, live girlfriend.
“Oh!” she said in dismay. “And here I was trying to hook you up with Lina!”
Lina shook her head, enduring the torture. Gary grinned at her.
Ren came out, a pale sculpted Narcissus in comparison to the warm, wool-vested Gary. “Coffee? Tea?” he offered, as always.
Lina scooted her cup forward for coffee, and glanced up at him. He didn’t look at her, just filled her cup.
“Tea, please, Ren dear,” Mrs. B said. He leaned over to comply.
“I hope you’re still coming out to dinner with us,” Gary said to Lina.
“I will,” Lina said.
“Good!” Alan said. “We’ll have fun.”
Ren snapped upright as if his spine had been smacked with a ruler. He shot a final glance around the table. No one else wanted tea or coffee, so he stalked away. Lina’s stomach knotted up. Was Ren actually jealous over her? Battling pity and fondness, she pulled apart a dinner roll and listened to her tablemates’ conversation.
“Still have a houseboy, huh?” Gary said to Marla.
“Yep. Can always use the help around here.”
“Wasn’t Annette seeing a houseboy of yours?” He turned to Lina and added, “Annette’s the girl I told you about, who used to work here.”
“I don’t remember,” Marla said, tugging at a lock of her hair.
“I’m sure she was. That’s why you set me up with her, remember?” Gary laughed. “You thought he was bad for her or something. In fact, wasn’t he under house arrest?”
Lina’s fingers fumbled. A piece of dinner roll went flying and disappeared under Mrs. Brown’s chair across the aisle.
“Aw, water under the bridge,” Alan said.
“Let’s not go there,” Marla told her nephew in a stage whisper, and scrunched her nose with a smile. Her gaze then moved to Lina. Marla patted the air in a gesture she presumably meant to be reassuring, while she mouthed something like, “We’ll talk later.”
Lina shut her own mouth, which had fallen open. What in God’s name was going on here?
She didn’t get to confront Marla until after dinner, once Gary had driven away on the packed snow. Then Lina stopped Marla at the dining room entrance and asked, “Has Ren lived in this house for ten years? Or was Gary talking about someone else who was also under house arrest?”
“Huh. Guess maybe it has been ten years.” Marla’s gaze strayed across the room, as if she was thinking it over.
“Then he’s not twenty-two. Unless he was under arrest and dating some college girl here when he was twelve.”
“I’m not sure how old he is.” Marla frowned, continuing to study the far wall. “Did he say he was twenty-two?”
“He let me believe he was.”
“Doesn’t quite add up, does it?” Marla laughed, as if it were funny.
“So, he’s twenty-six? Twenty-eight?”
“I told you, kid, I’m not sure, and I’m not sure it matters.”
Lina slid her hand up her right arm, fingering the scar tissue under her sleeve. “I’m confused. I don’t know what to believe. That’s all.”
“Honey, it’s a sticky situation. No one wants to hurt you or upset you. Look, I didn’t know he claimed to be twenty-two. If I’d known, maybe I would’ve straightened you out.”
“All right.” Lina sighed. “I’ve been stressed out, I guess.”
“No problem. You get some rest.” Marla squeezed her shoulder, then turned her attention to Consuela, who was balancing a stack of plates. “Consuela! Heaven’s sake, let me help you.” She hustled away.
* * *
But even after a good night’s sleep the situation still did not look normal—far from it. Lina no longer thought it useful to press Marla for information. Marla was acting as suspicious as Ren. Alan probably wouldn’t be any better. And even if she managed to corner Ren and threaten him with a kitchen knife, she figured he still wouldn’t tell her the truth.
She didn’t wish to pull Mrs. B or the other seniors into it, and had promised not to tell them anyway. That left her more or less on her own.
But something here was definitely off. Ren had been under arrest for over ten years, an absurdly long time for juvenile drug possession. She looked for the ankle band but had never actually seen it. Were criminals allowed to keep them hidden? Also, she never saw a parole officer come to meet with him, though possibly they kept those meetings secret to avoid alarming the seniors.
But why had he lied about his age? Maybe his name wasn’t real either. Then who was he? Did he and the Drakes have some kind of conspiracy cooked up? Maybe they were all criminals.
Trouble was, none of them seemed like it. Sure, she hadn’t known many criminals, but those three had never acted violently, cruelly, or unscrupulously, as far as she had seen. They were all nice .
She returned to her room after a blood-draw visit to George Lambert and thumped her supply kit onto her desk next to the phone. Seeing the phone reminded her of Gary’s story, of the girl, Annette, who had suffered the same miseries as Lina: attachment to the unattainable Ren, and torment by a malicious poltergeist. That assumed the ghost existed, which she had to admit seemed likelier after hearing Gary’s memories.
“I don’t know,” she murmured, running her fingers over the phone’s buttons. “Are you real after all, ghosties?”
She didn’t expect an answer, and in any case, it was time to go down for lunch. But as she turned to the door, she caught something yellow quivering in the corner of her vision. She looked over her shoulder and blinked in astonishment. The Seattle phone book, the volume with the yellow pages, hovered in the air above her desk, turning as if suspended on invisible strings. Lina’s heart rate took off at a flying gallop. Her skin went cold—or was the room itself cold?
The book fell to the desk with a clap, knocking a notepad and two pens onto the floor. Hand flying to her chest, Lina skittered backward, staring at the phone book like it was a rabid animal. After a moment she dove forward and grabbed it, poring over the cover for bits of tape or string or anything else that would have held it up. Nothing. She looked up at the ceiling for the same thing, and palmed the nearest wall. Again, nothing.
With a whimper, she dropped the phone book onto the desk, wheeled around, and ran out of her room.
* * *
She picked at her lunch, jumping whenever someone moved behind her. She didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened, because she didn’t want to be made fun of, or to hear there were some things you simply had to live with, such as ghosts in your room.
After lunch she crept back into her room, peering around the door, half expecting to see writing in blood on the walls. But everything was as she had left it. Phone book on the desk, notepad and pens on the floor. She put everything back on the desk and settled in for a web search on what to do if your house is haunted.
Two hours later, after frightening herself further by reading tales of what other people claimed to have seen, including but not limited to a tall man flying around a chandelier, a bone-white figure sitting in an armchair and watching television, and children with eerie black eyes, Lina shut off her computer and turned on the radio for music. All she learned in the way of combating her problem was what folk wisdom had already taught her: talk to your ghosts. Ask them to go away. It usually worked.
Lina positioned herself in the center of the room and looked at the ceiling. “Please go away.” Her voice sounded thin and high. “Please stop bothering us. You’re scaring us. I know you’ve been here a long time, but please, please move on now.”
Nothing happened, of course. The radio went on playing, the lights stayed on, the afternoon winter sun did not duck behind a cloud. But the silence felt like disdainful indifference. The ghost was there, Lina was sure. It just didn’t want to move.