Chapter Fifty-One Ashley
FIFTY-ONE ASHLEY
Still clutching her mother’s bag, Ashley barreled up the steps, tried the doorknob, shoved her shoulder against the door. It was locked tight.
She pounded on the cellar door with her fists. “Josephine! Unlock the damn door!”
She could hear footsteps moving away from the kitchen—Josephine was going to answer the front door. Whoever was outside was still banging on it. “Hold your horses!” she called.
Ashley pressed her ear against the door. She could hear voices: Josephine and a man whose voice she didn’t recognize. It sounded like several people were walking into the house.
“It’s the only way.” Josephine’s voice was muffled. “They’ve left us no choice.” The man mumbled something.
“They’re just like their mother,” said another man whose voice Ashley was sure she’d heard in Loon’s Call. “We tried to warn them, to send them away, but they just kept digging.”
The voices grew dimmer—they’d moved into the front parlor. Ashley imagined them there, a handful of people surrounded by the terrible little dolls, plotting something awful.
Her mother’s bag in hand, Ashley descended the steps and crossed the dirt floor.
The basement seemed huge, the edges of it disappearing into the darkness beyond the light cast by the single bulb near the foot of the stairs.
She ducked to avoid the low hand-hewn beams, breathing in the odor of musty earth and moist stone. It smelled like a forgotten place.
She called to her brother, who had moved on to one of the dark recesses: “That crazy bitch locked us down here!”
As she moved away from the stairs, the shadows got thicker, the air damper.
The walls of the basement were made from stones cemented together, rough and uneven, bulging in places, the cement crumbling from years of freezing and thawing, constant shifting.
She could make out Malcolm in the far right corner, shining his phone on a pile of junk and boxes.
There was an old bed frame, some kitchen chairs, a wheelbarrow with a broken handle, a baby crib.
Ashley squinted, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim light as she scanned the old cellar. To her left was an old boiler, directly in front of her a tool bench with an assortment of rusty, forgotten tools and stacked boxes full of clothespins labeled with STODDARD FACTORY, BOONE’S FERRY, VT.
There, resting on the dirt floor beside the tool bench, was the chest that had been taken from Mal’s motel room.
“Did you see this? She’s got Gram’s trunk down here.”
“Yeah, I saw,” he called. He was moving some of the junk around. “I’m looking for a way out of here. Maybe there’s a bulkhead door or something? Do you see a light switch? It’s dark as hell back here.”
“No. Just the one at the top of the stairs that turned this light on.”
Ashley stood under the hanging lightbulb and opened her mother’s bag.
Louise’s laptop was there, but she didn’t see a charging cord.
Ash pulled out a file folder with printouts of the research Mom had been doing, including a family tree she’d been filling in.
But when Ash traced it up, found her way to Gram’s parents, she saw that her mother had scribbled Thomas Endicottt’s name out.
Ash pulled out a slim hardbound book, the kind that her mother had long used as a journal. Hurriedly, she flipped toward the end, her eye catching on a few sections:
October 10, 2014
She doesn’t believe the DNA test I took is accurate. “Of course Thomas Endicott was my father and he’s your grandfather. Now, leave it alone.” If she wants to live in denial that’s her business, but I refuse. Heading to Boone’s Ferry tomorrow.
October 14, 2014
HOLY SHIT, Anna and I learned things today in the archives.
It wasn’t the flu at all, it was some kind of disease I’ve never heard of.
The town panicked, started shooting anyone who was sick.
They blamed this hermit that they called the knackerman, and burned him alive.
There’s more, which I need time to process. So many levels of fucked-up.
Ash flipped to the next page, her fingers tracing her mother’s hurried scrawl in the last entry:
October 15, 2014
I just found the mark on my motel room door. There was knocking a little after midnight, but I didn’t dare answer, didn’t open the door until the sun had come up. I never knew what “her blood ran cold” really meant. I do now.
All packed up, leaving now. I’ve got to get help. Bring the police back.
“Uh, Ash?” Malcolm called from somewhere out of sight behind her. His voice sounded strained, far away. “I think you’re gonna want to come see this.”
“Did you find a way out?” she called.
He didn’t answer.
She began to pick her way toward Malcolm, using her phone to light the way over to a stone-lined doorway that led to a small room off the main basement.
It was a root cellar, shelves stuffed with home-canned goods in glass jars: applesauce, pickles, tomatoes, each carefully labeled and dated.
Ash thought of her great-grandmother Margaret filling the shelves each summer and fall, of Thomas and Frankie coming down here to get provisions.
When Gram was a girl learning to can from Margaret, her first attempts must have lined these very shelves.
Ash reached out and touched a jar of pickled beets, tears pricking her eyes.
“Ash?” Mal’s voice sounded small, frightened. A little boy’s voice. She turned from the glass jars. Mal was standing in the center of the room, using his phone to light up a table in front of him. Ashley moved closer.
She saw immediately that it was the worktable where Josephine created the dolls.
There was a box of blank clothespins, along with little plastic bottles of acrylic craft paints, spools of wire and thread, and a small basket of scrap fabric, all neatly arranged along the edges of the table.
Ashley spotted a work light clamped to a shelf nearby, its cord snaking off through the doorway to the main basement.
She flicked the switch and the scene was bathed in bright light.
In the center of the table were two new dolls. A man with dark hair and a beard, a red T-shirt, and jeans, and a woman with short dark hair dressed in jeans and a blue chambray shirt.
“It’s us,” she said.