Chapter Eight
“Jackie is okay,” Marla told Lina and the rest of their table at dinner. “Her hip’s not broken. But she’ll be staying at the hospital for a couple days, and she told me she wants to move out after that.”
“Oh, what a shame!” Ethel said.
Marla shook her head and ate a forkful of green beans. “We got a waiting list for this place a mile long. Doesn’t she know that?”
“She had a personal history with the house,” Mrs. B said. “It must have all been too much in the end.”
“Yeah,” Marla said. “This house doesn’t happily let go of its past. I’ll grant you that.”
“She said someone pushed her,” Lina said, gaze fixed on her turkey meatloaf. “A ‘she.’”
“Really!” Betty Carter said.
“Probably her imagination,” Marla said.
Lina only shrugged and flicked bits of meatloaf apart with her fork.
“I bet it was the ghost,” Mrs. B said to Lina as they returned upstairs. “I bet it was her old friend Julia. Remember, it was partly Jackie’s fault, what happened to that houseboy. She said she helped Julia come up with the sleeping pill idea.”
“I’m sure they didn’t mean to kill him. At least, I hope not.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re right. But it could lead to a ghost being rather resentful, all the same.”
“I guess.”
“I wish that ghost would quit throwing things and pushing people, and just tell us what it wants,” Mrs. B said.
Lina agreed. She most definitely agreed.
When she returned to her own room, she walked to the desk, switched on the lamp, and examined the old photo from the basement. There sat girls in puffy white dresses and outdated hair, with Sean Reynolds turning away behind them—Sean, the slain boy, who had never even lived long enough to see World War II.
Sad now rather than scared, she slumped down into the chair. She rested her cheek on her hand, gazing at the lost youth. “Did you want me to find this? Is that what you wanted, for some reason?”
As usual, nobody answered.
* * *
The next day she took the journal to a copy shop and stood at a photocopier for half an hour, turning each page and pressing the open journal down against the glass, looking around furtively as if Ren would walk in and see what she was doing. Silly thing to worry about, considering he was not allowed to leave the house, but she still felt guilty. After paying for the copies and getting them tucked into a paper bag, she hurried home and put the original journal back into the desk drawer.
She sharpened a pencil, spread out a sheet of scratch paper, and stared at the first page. The groupings of code letters—the words, if such they were— seemed of ordinary length and variance for English. They ranged from one letter to ten or twelve long, suggesting he had simply transcribed regular words into their exact counterparts in a jumbled-up alphabet, and didn’t regroup them to encode them further.
English only has two common one-letter words: I and a . In Ren’s coded pages, she found two characters that repeatedly showed up as single-letter words: G and D. This suggested that either G = I and D = A, or vice-versa (G = A, D = I). She would have to try both options.
Lina rolled her shoulders, flexed her knuckles, and started hunting out G’s on the first page.
* * *
By dinnertime, two hours later, she was pretty sure that G = A, D = I, and furthermore that Q = S and T = E. One of the other tricks for solving cryptograms was to count frequency of characters. These pages sported a lot of T’s, and since E is the most frequently occurring letter in written English, T = E seemed a good bet. Her assumption that Q = S came from the apostrophe rule: Ren’s Q sometimes appeared after an apostrophe, at the end of a word, as the letter S in regular English often does.
With her guesses penciled in above the original text, the first few lines of the photocopy now read as an odd assortment of the letters E, A, I, and S:
_e_ __e___ __e. a____e_ _e__ ____ _a_ _e_e.
i __i__ e_e____e’s s_a__i__ __ _e_ __a_ __e _a_e_s
_a_e _ee_ _a__i__ seas__a_ a__e__i_e _is___e_.
Still not what you would call legible. She stuffed the papers into a drawer and went down to eat. At dinner, while listening to the others talk about Jackie Clairmont’s accident, Lina kept an eye on Ren, the walking enigma. Was he a criminal who had done horrible things? Was he a victim of circumstance, wrongly accused? Was he hiding here for his own safety? Was he merely a kid who enjoyed writing in code and lying? And what the hell was his actual age, anyway?
He slipped her a glance from two tables away as he set down a basket of bread. Though the glance lasted less than a second, she felt a shock through all her limbs. She gulped some water and stared at the crochet-work of the tablecloth. She hoped he hadn’t noticed the missing volume, hoped his glance hadn’t carried suspicion or accusation. Now it was she who was hiding things from him. Did this make them even?
After dinner, Lina sat down with a bag of Valentine candies and sharpened the pencil again. She took a yellow heart from the bag and read the message on it: U R SWEET.
HOW OLD R U?, she thought, smiling, and popped it into her mouth. She spread her makeshift alphabet legend beside the photocopy and gazed at Ren’s handwriting again, waiting for inspiration to strike.
That word ctpt, for which she had replaced E for T and gotten _E_E, snagged her eye. Words ending in that pattern often had an R between the E’s—“here,” “were,” “mere.” Worth a try. On her alphabet legend, she penciled in “P” beside “R,” and tried it out in the first paragraph.
_e_ __e___ __e. a____er _er_ ____ _a_ _ere.
i __i__ e_er___e’s s_ar_i__ __ _e_ __a_ __e _a_ers
_a_e _ee_ _a__i__ seas__a_ a__e__i_e _is_r_er.
So far, so good. The substitution hadn’t created any impossible clusters of letters. She then tried H for C, to turn “CTPT” into “here.” Again, nothing impossible. C = H could stay. She zeroed in on the word “RCT,” which she had turned into “_he.” She had already assigned S to another letter, so this word couldn’t be “she.” That left “the” as the likeliest contender. To the legend she added the formula “R = T”, and added T’s above all the R’s on the first paragraph.
Excited, she grabbed another candy heart and crunched it between her molars. This was definitely starting to resemble English. Speaking of “starting,” that was a good bet for the word in the middle of the second line. She filled in phrases here and there: “I think,” “starting to get what the,” “have been.” F = K, L = O, X = W, Y = V, H = B.
_eb twent_ one. another ver_ _o__ _a_ here. i think ever_one’s starting to get what the _a_ers have been _a__ing seas_na_ a__e_tive _isor_er.
She stared at the last three words of the paragraph, then got it: “seasonal affective disorder.” She penciled those in, filled in the same letters elsewhere, made a few more educated guesses, and soon had the whole paragraph decoded. Heart beating in triumph and excitement, she sat back and read:
Feb twenty-one. Another very cold day here.
I think everyone’s starting to get what the papers
have been calling Seasonal Affective Disorder.
“Oh, Ren, I have you now,” she whispered.
* * *
After working through the first three pages she had the entire alphabet decoded. She focused on the text as it emerged, and therefore didn’t notice right away what the key itself had spelled. But in the middle of a sentence, Lina glanced aside at the alphabet key on her scratch paper, and experienced a shock at seeing a hidden word there. The code began:
A = G
B = H
C = O
D = S
E = T
The left-hand column represented ordinary English, and the right-hand column represented Ren’s code. When Ren wrote the journal, every time he needed an “A” he substituted a “G,” and so on. However, only now did Lina see what the first five letters of the right-hand column spelled. GHOST .
Why had it frightened her? In a house like this, “ghost” was a logical word to build a code around. (It looked as if he had just used the rest of the alphabet in its normal order after that, reversing the last six letters so they wouldn’t correspond to their twins.) After a few seconds she returned to the decoding. No use letting one word disturb her.
But her gaze kept drifting to the photo pushed to the corner of her desk, the shot of the Depression-era houseboy who still looked like Ren no matter how often she studied it in search of a difference. Was Sean Reynolds the ghost in this house? And did Ren feel an affinity with him? Were they in some kind of communion? Now that would be creepy.
Well, she decided, if such was the case, then he probably mentioned it somewhere in the 150 pages of this journal. She had best keep decoding.
* * *
Ren in late winter and early spring of 1994 shared many qualities with Ren in 2004, she decided the next morning, having deciphered the first ten pages of the journal. When she had stolen it, she had considered the idea that maybe Ren didn’t write it; maybe some of the journals were written by other people. She couldn’t imagine who, but the older ones from the 1980s, at least, had to be someone else’s work. Houseboy chronicles through the ages?
But this particular journal sure sounded like Ren. For instance, she found occasional references to going “outside the lines,” slipping out of the bounds of his house arrest for a breath of freedom. He hadn’t called it “house arrest,” though, nor had he referred to any particular crime. When writing for oneself, of course, there was no need to be specific about major events of the past. You already knew what you’d done.
The strange thing was that he did seem to go outside the boundaries of the house, miles beyond the alley. In one entry he wrote of walking around downtown. In another he mentioned exploring Discovery Park in the Magnolia neighborhood. All right, people on parole did get permission to go out now and then. So why did Marla and Ren make it sound like he couldn’t leave the house at all? Had he done something worse since 1994 to confine him more strictly?
She put away the cryptogram and went to the window, pressing her hands to her lower back to stretch her spine. Below in the cool winter sun, Ren knelt in the garden, clearing fallen twigs and leaves from the flowerbeds to let the crocuses and daffodils come up.
Tending to crocus sprouts—not really the activity you’d expect to find a drug-runner doing. But considering he was in the front garden in full view of passers-by, it wasn’t really the kind of behavior you’d expect in someone who was hiding from the law, either. Puzzling guy, truly.
A clatter made her spin around. Her cup of pens and pencils had fallen over on the desk. She looked around, muscles tensed, though of course no one was there. No one was ever there.
* * *
The mystery did not become any clearer, the farther she went into her decoding. He still wrote of leaving the house, even going so far as to catch a ferry to Bainbridge Island once. He always seemed to be alone on these expeditions, and there was no explanation as to how he got permission to leave.
Not until an entry from June 27, 1994, did she get the first mention of Annette. We have a live-in summer temp from the U helping us out in the kitchen, name of Annette , he wrote. Nice-looking, with an abundance of natural curls and, it seems, already an interest in getting to know me. Sometimes I wonder what the hell Marla is thinking.
He changed the topic then, leaving Lina curious. Most likely he referred to the bad idea of bringing attractive single girls into his vicinity when he was under house arrest and forbidden to date them. However, it also revived the chance of a romantic involvement between Marla and Ren. Lina sharpened her attention to look for clues along those lines, much as she dreaded finding any.
In the next entry, written a few days later (he was not very regular in his updates), he turned melancholy over an obituary he had read for an elderly man from Port Townsend. He described him as “my old buddy Dan,” and went on to write, A beautiful wife, three kids, eight grandchildren, travel to Europe every couple years, a big old house on the peninsula. The life I should have had. Well, I suppose I have a big old house, but no one ever asked me if I might like a different big old house, one that wasn’t a thing of total and complete evil.
That was the closest he had come so far to mentioning the hauntings, and it chilled Lina. Maybe he wrote the phrase facetiously, but it didn’t strike her that way.
She hadn’t wanted to think of the house or its ghosts as evil. She had wanted to believe any existing spirits here were benign, even if they were unsettling. It disturbed her to hear a darker take on it from someone who had lived here longer.
On an afternoon when night fell early due to the heavy clouds and lashing rain, Lina finally decrypted and unraveled the full tale of Ren and Annette. To hear him tell it, he underwent two weeks of interest, conversation, probing, and teasing from the fetching Annette while working alongside her in the kitchen, and fended her off only half-heartedly, since, in his words, I’m enjoying the attention, though I know I shouldn’t. Let’s not kid ourselves; these little crushes are what keep me going.
One July night, Ren was lounging on the roof and saw Annette walking back to the house. She looked up and asked how he had gotten up there. He told her he’d meet her on the third floor and show her. Long story short, they ended up kissing under the stars, up on the shingles.
The pang of jealousy this delivered to Lina was brutal. Even her bitterness over Brent hadn’t agonized her so much. She took a few minutes away from the journal, doing yoga stretches on the floor with her breath blowing hot against her legs, before she felt calm enough to return to his account.
His description of the rendezvous was, at least, sensible and not dreamy: She kissed me. Quite a few times actually. It was nice and I think I can say we’ll do it again. I’ve told her Marla will have my hide if I’m found to be romancing a coworker, and therefore we should not be too public about it. She seems content with this. It won’t last, of course. How long before she wants to leave the house with me? How to handle it this time? It’s never a good idea. I always know it.
Okay, so he couldn’t leave the house? How did that work, when he was constantly writing about leaving the house?
In any case, the way he dealt with Annette was, as he put it, “the route of cowardice.” When she came to the inevitable point of trying to lure him out for a walk, he made excuses and finally balked. When she asked him to explain, he said she should ask Marla for details.
The old house arrest tale . Isn’t it great? Nothing like being labeled a criminal for my own good. Annette is a rather prim thing when it comes to the law and drugs, so naturally she pretty much stopped speaking to me, though of course there was the usual mumble of “You could have told me.” No, my girl, I couldn’t have. Believe me.
Lina reread this section, squashing the pencil eraser against her lower lip. The “house arrest tale”? Being “labeled” a criminal? So he wasn’t under house arrest? Then why was he collaborating with the Drakes to make people think he was? Why wouldn’t he leave the house with anyone else, when apparently he could and wanted to?
She pushed away the pages and picked up the photo of Sean Reynolds without knowing why, except that he looked like Ren. She cast back in her memory for any time she had actually seen Ren leave the property. All she recalled was the night he had gone out into the alley and vanished like a…
Her gaze flew from Sean’s photograph to the word “ghost” embedded in the code alphabet. She dropped the photo onto the desk as if it were contaminated and stared at it. The idea was ridiculous. She had heard too many ghost stories. They had warped her brain.
But then it was also ridiculous that a phone book would dance in the air, or her clothes would throw themselves around the laundry room, or invisible hands would shove her on the stairs, or magazines would pile themselves on a sleeping old woman.
Did they tell you about the ghost?
I have an old soul, as they say.
You! What are you doing here? What did you do with Julia?
Reynolds; Ren. Sean; Schultz. Even the names were similar; he just transposed the order. For the first time in her life, Lina Zuendel hoped she was out of her mind, hoped none of this was true, because if it was true, it would be reason enough to go insane.
* * *
How could she approach him with such a question? How could she ask “What are you?” when all she had originally wanted to know was “Who are you?” Would he even tell the truth if she did ask?
In the unusually mild weather during the last weekend of February, Lina took the photocopied pages onto the third-floor fire escape, where she sat wrapped in her coat, and continued decoding on her lap. She stayed alert for any movement below, hoping Ren would come out and step beyond the fence in broad daylight. The journal suggested there was something forbidding and important about leaving the property.
As she translated further, she became convinced of it. On one occasion in August, he wrote of the nuisance when the bakery truck arrived in the alley for delivery, and the driver wanted Ren to help unload the bread. But of course I couldn’t go past the gate , he wrote. To get out of it, he invented a malady for himself—a hurt back—and sent Alan out instead. He added, Not as bad as when that paper boy saw me disappear last October, though , and changed the subject.
As she reread that passage she heard a door open below her and looked down. Ren walked out, rolling his shoulders up and backward as if they ached. He reached the fence, glanced back at the house (though he didn’t look upward), and, apparently satisfied that no one was watching, unlatched the gate and stepped out into the alley.
This time she possessed a clear view. This time the sun shone on his white shirt as it flashed past the fence and winked out of existence. Trap door? Secret passageway? Illusion? Maybe. But for whose benefit, if he thought he was alone?
She stayed where she was, not daring to move, merely waiting for him to return. A few seconds later he rematerialized in the space between gate and fence, pushed through the gate, and closed it. As he walked to the house, he swung his arms freely as if they no longer pained him. He went back inside, and she was left alone.
Lina sat for a long while on the fire escape, not trying to decode the journal anymore. She listened to its pages flutter in the breeze; gazed at the evergreens, roofs, and bell towers of the U District; and wondered how long this miracle had been going on right under everyone’s noses.
* * *
At dinner she looked up at him when he filled her coffee mug. An entreaty pulsed in her throat, something begging to be said and answered.
He looked at her. “Anything else for you?”
She lowered her face and stared at the pepper grinder. She shook her head.