Chapter 26
Thora had to stop trying to guess what Lee’s life was like, because Cody had utterly warped her idea of the man. Prior to
the week they had spent at Juniper, Thora would have guessed Lee would live in a little cabin in the woods. Something dark
and rustic. She figured him for a mattress-on-the-floor kind of guy, though too savvy to invite women over. Before she saw
his fancy toiletries for herself, she would’ve bet money he only had one musty towel.
Instead she pulled up to a house that embodied the understated grandeur typical for New England architecture. A beautiful
two-story clapboard house with chimneys on either end, Lee’s home boasted a pale yellow exterior with navy blue shutters.
Georgian architecture, if a lifetime of reading Bryony Brooks served. He’d surely restored it himself.
She hadn’t even gotten to the door before he was there at the threshold, greeting her with a hug. She’d missed his body. It was both soft and strong, a reassuring presence. He smelled like his hair oil, herbal and fresh.
“Come in, come in,” he said.
If he restored this house, he did an incredible job. Each floorboard was impossibly wide with a beautiful patina. You could
practically park a car in the stone fireplace in the dining room. She’d never seen one so big. He was obviously still working
on furnishing the space. The furniture was Goodwill-mismatched and not old money–mismatched, but he’d get there.
“Lee, this house is amazing.”
“It’s my portfolio. It was in pretty rough shape when I bought it, but I made it happen. I have bittersweet feelings about
it now. I poured myself into the work wholeheartedly, which was how I had to do it. When I came up on something I didn’t know
how to do, I went and got whatever education, certification, or license I needed. And I was still painting houses, so that
I had money to live on. I knew it was a temporary lifestyle, but it kept me from visiting George for a few years. I thought
he had more time.”
“He would have told you to keep working. I’m sure he was proud of you for going into this line of work.”
“I did it in hopes of being able to properly restore Juniper one day.”
Thora already knew this in her heart. If he’d told her before she knew him better, she wouldn’t have reacted well. She had
possessive feelings about Juniper then. Feelings possessive enough to make her buy it and to make her resentful to Lee for
altering it at all.
“I’m sorry you’ll never have the chance to do it. Maybe some other great camp though.”
Lee sighed wistfully. “Maybe. It wouldn’t be the same, though.”
They were dancing around the terrible fact that they shared a house with a corpse for a week, but there was no obvious way into that part of the conversation.
Luckily for Thora, Lee decided not to shy away from the tough topics. “Have the authorities released George’s remains?”
“Yes. He was properly cremated, and for the time being, he’s in an urn at Woodhill House. I think next summer we will spread
the ashes under a tree. We’ll need to decide which one.”
“I would have always thought he should be at rest at Juniper, but that seems wrong now.”
“Exactly. Not a peaceful end, to say the least.”
Thora paused. She declined to give Amethyst’s theory for what happened at Juniper, wanting to hear Lee’s take. “Do you think
that’s why everything happened?”
“I’m going to make some coffee,” Lee said, getting up from the table.
Prior to recent events, Thora’s feelings about ghosts had been imbued with whimsy. Maybe ghosts were real, but if so, she
knew them as jolly pranksters, making a rickety old house exciting for kids. The sheer magnitude of what she’d witnessed at
Juniper—subarctic temperatures, downed trees, a cosmic conflagration—certainly popped that little party balloon.
Lee came back and placed a mug in front of her. Coffee made to her liking, in a hand-thrown ceramic mug. Lee’s mug had a different
glaze but a similar design. She didn’t want Limoges porcelain; she wanted beautiful hand-thrown mugs like these. And she didn’t
want any old coffee. She wanted it made by someone who knew how she liked it.
“I’ve been thinking about this since you told me you were coming,” Lee said. “Alexander Graham Bell designed the telephone
to talk to the dead. What if he succeeded?”
“Are you serious?”
“Maybe I really was talking to him from beyond the veil.”
“‘Beyond the quail,’ according to Mack.”
That laugh she so treasured rang out. Less a bell than a screeching tire perhaps, but she loved it all the same. “Oh, Mack,”
he said once he could talk again. “Anyway, he needed someone to find him. That much seems clear.”
“So he brought an owl back from the dead? He dropped a snake in the bathtub?”
Lee sipped from his coffee. “Ghost communication can’t be simple. I think his messages got garbled, and he was getting desperate.”
“You really think the ghost of George was doing all that?”
“Give me a better explanation.”
Thora certainly couldn’t. Before the skeleton’s identity was established, she tried to figure out how a stranger in the house
could have wreaked all that havoc, and it simply didn’t square. The hallway floorboards were creaky. She and Mack had tried
to sneak out at night as kids and always managed to wake up an adult. It seemed impossible to, for example, ring a bell in
the Bell Room and not make any other noise.
Not to mention, how did the temperature in the Blue Room plummet to arctic levels? The house didn’t have air-conditioning,
and the air outside had been warmer than the room. It defied the laws of thermodynamics.
You know what else defied the laws of thermodynamics? Ghosts.
“I don’t have one.” She tested him with her most urgent question. “But why did he burn the house down? Alive George would
have never wanted that.”
“I certainly can’t say. Maybe Ghost George lost his temper. Or maybe the wires got crossed and it was some kind of cosmic
mistake.”
It was a cosmic mistake all right. “I never saw Alive George lose his temper, not once. He froze his brother out instead of ever blowing up. Could you believe Ghost George was losing his human essence, so desperate for peace that he self-immolated?”
“You always know how to spin something into a story.”
“For better or worse,” Thora said. “It’s mostly my neighbor’s theory, though.”
Lee smiled, and it cracked her heart in two. She could have had this, easygoing chats over coffee, if she hadn’t created a
version of him that had divided loyalties. If she hadn’t believed the story about herself as someone who gave up easily.
“I don’t think it’s an excuse, exactly,” Thora continued, “but I think the presence of a confused and desperate spirit in
the house might have meant we were under a little duress. Not on our best behavior.”
“What are you trying to say?”
Thora wrapped both of her hands around the coffee mug. She needed the warmth of the coffee to steady her. “I loved spending
time with you at Juniper. I loved getting to know you, and I think there’s still a chance we could build something beautiful
together. But I’m worried about how trying to correct for a past failure can make everything worse.”
“How do you mean?” Lee asked gently.
“I don’t want to keep rehashing our respective approaches to caring for George. But I realized, thanks to Mack, that the guilt
I was feeling for not coming through in George’s hour of need prompted me to step up for Bryony.”
“And you feel like that made everything worse?”
Thora sighed. “Cody did not deserve to be abandoned by me, even if our marriage was bound to fail eventually. It’s too soon
to say how that failed marriage is going to cause me to act up in the future.”
“I understand,” Lee said. “I’ve been talking with Denise and she helped me realize how for me, George’s care tied directly to my own grandfather’s death.
He didn’t get to live out his life in the way he wanted, and I felt powerless to help him.
So I overcorrected, too. I took it on myself to give George the end I thought he would want without consulting anyone. ”
Thora had not put that all together herself. She and Lee had more in common than she’d ever realized. Big hearts that sometimes
pushed them in the wrong directions. Thora had flattened him into a villain instead of seeking understanding. And Lee? Well,
he never gave up on her.
“I’m worried about how I gave up on you.”
A ghost of a smile passed over Lee’s face. “You’re regretting that now?”
“Ugh. I’m plagued with regrets, and most of them I can’t do anything about. Maybe I can’t be trusted. But I don’t want you
to give up on me.”
“When have I ever?”
Somehow, Lee had picked her. He’d decided, that one, and remained steadfast all these years, despite everything. It made her want to live up to his loyalty. But she had to have
a wobble about it first.
“How would it even work if we were to try to be together? I can see it. Cody’s coming to Harvard to give some talk about his
latest dinosaur discovery, and you invite him over to this house, and I’m there. And now everyone is uncomfortable. I say
something nice about how you make great coffee and it sends Cody into a tailspin because it implies he never made me coffee.
Which he didn’t. And I never asked him to, so I never gave him the chance to make me great coffee. And then he never wants
to talk to you again, and then you’ve lost your camping buddy and oldest friend.”
Lee shook his head. “Who’s in the tailspin?”
“It’s me, Lee. I’m in the tailspin.”
“What if we try honesty and straightforwardness? I can talk to Cody. I can tell him that you and I want to give a relationship
a try. I will understand if that makes him uncomfortable, but I think if we give each other some time, and we take it on good
faith that no one is out to hurt anyone else, that we can all three be friends.”
Thora was still working out her feelings about her relationship with Cody. Underneath it all, she didn’t dislike him and thought
he was mostly a stand-up character even if he did treat Lee like a fuckup little brother. She sincerely liked spending time