Chapter Thirty-Seven Ashley
THIRTY-SEVEN ASHLEY
We’re all the knackerman.
Ashley replayed Sad Willy’s words as she followed the path back to town and came out near the bridge by the factory.
She couldn’t shake the sense that she was being followed.
She was sure she heard footsteps behind her, twigs snapping, leaves crunching.
But when she stopped and turned, there was nothing there.
She was happy to be out of the woods, back in civilization, such as it was.
She felt a little tipsy from drinking bourbon on an empty stomach and told herself that it was affecting her judgment, making her imagine things, turn normal forest sounds into menacing footsteps. But nothing about this town felt normal.
She made her way up Main Street along the sidewalk and crossed it when she saw the Boone’s Ferry Public Library sign on a low brick building with a lot of windows. She got to the front door to find it chained and padlocked with a hand-painted sign that said: CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE.
“You have to be kidding,” Ashley mumbled. So much for doing research and getting online.
She peered into the dark windows, sure she saw movement.
But the movement wasn’t coming from inside.
It was the reflection of someone standing behind her, across the street: a figure she recognized.
Her mother in her long camel-hair coat.
It struck her then: her mother wasn’t gone at all; she had been here, hiding in Boone’s Ferry the whole time, waiting for Ashley to come find her.
Listen.
Ashley knew it was impossible, a bourbon-induced fantasy, but she couldn’t shake the thought as she stood frozen, facing the library, watching her mother’s reflection in the glass.
She was watching Ashley, her head cocked to the side ever so slightly, just the way she always did when she was thinking hard about something.
Ashley hadn’t been imagining things: it wasn’t mice and squirrels she’d heard in the woods—her mother had been following her all morning. It was her mother snapping twigs and crunching leaves under her feet.
Could ghosts make a sound?
Did they have weight?
Ashley spun around, bracing herself for the possibility that there would be no one there. But the woman was there. Before Ashley could get a good look at her face, she turned abruptly and began hurrying down the street.
“Wait!” Ashley called after her. “Please!”
The woman walked faster, head down, pretending not to hear Ashley calling her.
Ashley rushed across the street to follow. Down the block, she saw the woman slip through the door of Loon’s Call. A moment later, Ashley was opening the door to the pub, heart hammering as she scanned the dim bar for the woman—or was she a hallucination, a ghost, a wish?
Maybe they don’t ever really leave us, Sad Willy had said.
Ashley blinked stupidly in the darkness of the bar, taking in the smells of beer and greasy food, the country music playing low. The taxidermied creatures and the little clothespin dolls lined up on a shelf behind the bar were watching.
Ashley nearly cried out when she saw the figure, sitting at a table near the end of the bar, her back to the door.
Ashley approached her from behind, reached out, laid a hand on her shoulder.
She was real. An actual solid person.
Only this wasn’t a camel-hair coat, but a worn canvas barn jacket.
The woman turned, looked at Ashley.
Her heart sank.
This was not her mother.
Idiot.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” Ashley stammered. “I thought you were someone else.”
But she couldn’t turn away, couldn’t take her eyes off this woman’s face.
The resemblance was striking. The woman had the same nose, same shape eyes as her mother and Ashley herself.
She looked, Ash realized, very similar to the photo she’d seen this morning of her great-grandmother, Margaret Endicott.
A relative. Ash was sure of it.
“I’m Ashley Flanders,” Ash said. “My great-grandparents were Thomas and Margaret Endicott.”
The woman looked at Ashley, expression unchanging. “I know who you are.”
“Are you an Endicott?” Ashley asked.
The woman blinked at her. She looked around the pub, which was empty except for the woman behind the bar polishing glasses, who was watching them but pretending not to. Ashley recognized her from yesterday—the unfriendly waitress with the dyed red hair.
Her mother’s doppelganger sighed, resigned. “My name is Cheryl Banks. Josephine’s my mother.”
Ashley’s mind spun. She thought of Frankie’s diary, of how Margaret was sent off with her brother and his family. Their last name had been Banks.
Without being invited, Ash sat down at the table across from Cheryl.
It was like she was sitting across from her mother’s sister—the resemblance was that strong.
She guessed Cheryl was about her mother’s age.
Her eyes were green, and her hair was dyed a dark chestnut, but Ash could see light roots at the base.
She had the same crow’s feet as her mother, the same lines at the corners of her mouth.
“The usual, Cheryl?” the waitress called from behind the bar.
Cheryl nodded.
“What about your friend?”
“She’s not my friend,” Cheryl said. “I don’t know her at all.”
“Coffee, please,” Ash said, feeling the caffeine might help clear her head.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Cheryl said flatly.
“Have you been following me? Watching me?”
Cheryl didn’t answer.
“I saw you yesterday when we were heading into your mother’s house, just down the street. And today you were in the woods, weren’t you, following me?”
“Listen. You need to leave town,” Cheryl said in a fierce whisper, in a voice that sounded so much like her mother’s from her dreams that a chill passed through Ashley.
“You mean because of the mark painted on my motel room door?”
“Because of this fucking place!” Cheryl snapped. “It’s like a poison that seeps into your skin. It’s… evil.”
Ashley chuffed out a nervous laugh. “If you hate it so much, why do you stay?”
Now it was Cheryl who laughed, but with bitterness. “You think I have a choice?”
Ashley opened her mouth to ask what she meant, but the waitress was approaching and Cheryl said in a loud voice, “I don’t know why you’re bothering me. I can’t help you.”
The waitress set down a coffee for Ashley and a drink for Cheryl. “Rum and Coke,” she said.
The waitress looked at Ashley. “You want any food?”
“She’s fine, Denise. She’ll just have the coffee—put it on my tab,” Cheryl said.
She took a long sip of her drink. “Can hardly taste the rum,” she announced loudly. Denise rolled her eyes, went back into the kitchen.
“I’m allotted one drink a day,” Cheryl said. “You’d think the least they could do would be to make it a good one. But they’re always weaker than hell.”
“What do you mean, you’re ‘allotted’ one drink?” Ashley asked.
“Mother’s orders. It wouldn’t do to have me making a spectacle of myself. To have me speaking out of turn.” She spat the last words out, took another gulp of her weak drink, then sighed again. “You’ve got about five minutes, go ahead and ask what you wanna ask.”
“I’m trying to make sense of all this: Your mother, Josephine, she married a Banks?”
“Uh-uh. She was born a Banks. Youngest child of David and Mercy.”
“But she was married. She didn’t take his name?”
“She did, but right after my father died, she went back to calling herself a Banks. Being a Banks, it means something here.”
“So if she’s the daughter of David and Mercy, that means she’s my grandmother’s—”
“First cousin,” Cheryl filled in. “And best friend. They grew up like sisters, the two of them, in that house. It broke my mother’s heart when Charlie—Charlotte took off.”
“Wait, they… what?”
Cheryl nodded surely. “They lived there, in the Endicott house. The Banks family, plus Margaret and Charlotte. Chauncey had moved out by that time, but the two younger boys, Josephine, and Charlotte grew up there.”
Ashley shook her head. “No. You’re… mistaken. My grandmother grew up in Boston. She never even visited Boone’s Ferry.”
Cheryl chuckled. “Is that what she told you?”
Cheryl gestured to the picture on the wall above them. It was the one Malcolm had noticed yesterday of the two girls, the one he’d pointed out, saying the older girl reminded him of Ashley.
“There they are. My mother and your grandmother. And look where they’re standing.”
Ash looked at the face of the taller girl. It really did look like it could be Gram. She studied the familiar house in the background of the photo. There was a sign by the front door, and she could just make it out: DR. THOMAS ENDICOTT.
“Charlotte lived here in town until she was fifteen or sixteen,” Cheryl continued. “You can go to the church and look it up—they’ve kept track of every birth, marriage, baptism, and death here in Boone’s Ferry since sometime in the eighteen hundreds.”
Lorelei Prentice had specifically said all the town’s vital records were destroyed in the town hall fire—what reason would she have to lie like that?
“Wait a second.” Ashley held up her hand. “Josephine said herself she wasn’t close to my grandmother; she made it sound like they were only connected because their mothers had been friends. Why would she try to hide that?”
Cheryl smiled an unhappy little smile. “That’s an important question. But an even better one is: What else is she keeping from you?”
Ashley stared at her, her skin prickling, every hair standing on end.
Cheryl drained the last of her rum and Coke in one long swig, slapped the table with an open palm.
Outside, the factory whistle blew.
“Time’s up,” she said. “This place will fill up in a minute. It’s bad enough that Denise saw us. She’s probably been on the phone back in the kitchen.”
“But why would she—”
“Leave town while you still can,” Cheryl interrupted, standing, just as people in work clothes began flowing in, talking loudly. “I tried to warn your mother,” Cheryl said, voice low. “But she didn’t listen.”
She turned and was gone, slipping through the crowd and out the door, like the ghost Ash had once believed she was.