Chapter 26
twenty-six
AUTUMN
Autumn: Hey.
Zeke: Sup
Autumn: Sorry about Patrick. He’s a dick.
Zeke: Lol no prob
I’m absolutely mortified about what went down at my store today.
And the thing is, I don’t know what mortified me most: Zeke’s little comment to Patrick about me ‘coming’ or the fact that he walked in and heard what we were saying about him.
I don’t know how long he was there or what he heard—and I didn’t dare ask him when I texted to apologize—but the whole thing definitely sucked.
There was also the part where Patrick threatened to evict me from the building if I don’t ‘clean up my act’—whatever that means.
And that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it?
That kind of vague condition could extend to all manner of things that Patrick deems inappropriate—which is the kind of control I was trying to get away from when I divorced him.
God fucking dammit.
The doorbell rings, and I go to open it, already knowing it’s going to be Zeke. He flashes me that same gorgeous grin—the one that still does things to me even though I know it’s the one he gives everyone—and steps inside.
“Hey,” he says, walking past me into the living room. He drops his bag on the floor in a heap, slides the tripod case he’s carrying off his shoulder.
“Hey.” I’ve already promised myself I’m not going to bring up this afternoon unless he does, so I put on my best chipper voice. There’s nothing wrong, Autumn. Nothing at all. “Feel free to set up wherever. Do you want me in the footage tonight?”
He’s screwing the tripod in place, but looks up at that. One brow raises, his lips forming a thin smile. “Well, you tell me. You could always, you know, keep things below waist-level.”
I give him a swat. “You know that’s not what I meant. I mean do you want me to be—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Zeke says, waving a hand, the smile gone. “Of course I do. You want to find out about Lena, right? If our suspicions about her spelling out ‘murder’ are correct, then she started telling you about it first—which seems to mean she’ll want you there.”
“Okay...”
“Aw, don’t get cold feet now, hot stuff,” Zeke says, another grin flashing on his face. He fits his camcorder onto the tripod and fishes around in his pocket for a lighter.
“I’m not. I just…” I trail off. Because how do I tell Zeke that the only thing I’m getting cold feet about is spending another evening alone in the dark with him?
Whatever this is between us, whatever the hell we’ve been playing at, has to end.
I need to get serious. And this is going to be my first test.
Zeke scoffs. “You’re thinking again, babe. I told you not to do that. That shit with your ex today? Water under the bridge. Let it go.”
He stoops to light the candles on the coffee table and spreads out the spirit board again, which gives me an eerie feeling. The last time I saw that board unfolded, it had just spelled murder and scared the living bejeezus out of me.
But this time’s not like that time. This time, I remind myself, I’m with Zeke. He’ll work his magic and keep things under control—although Zeke and ‘under control’ are not two things I ever thought would go in a sentence together.
Zeke props up his phone against a stack of books on the coffee table again and plops down on his ass in front of the spirit board. He gestures at me to hit the lights, and the room is immediately flooded with darkness. This time, not even the moon streams through the windows. All is quiet.
As I take a seat next to Zeke on the floor, he leans into the frame of his phone camera and starts his narration.
“Okay, so I’m here at Autumn’s house again—there she is, say hey, Autumn—and we’re hoping to get a little more communication going with the spirit who lives here.
Earlier this week, Autumn had the wonderful idea to use the spirit board without me—which, spoiler alert, trash idea—but anyway, she made contact with our ghost, who spelled out that her name is Lena.
What she then spelled out shocked Autumn to her pretty little core: M-U-R-D-E-R. What’s that spell, Autumn?”
He pans the phone cam to include me in the frame and gives me a wide-eyed, faux-shocked look. He’s clearly making fun of me, so I just roll my eyes and go along with it. At least he’s not saying what happened after that. “Last I checked, it spells ‘murder’.”
“Right. You hear that, kids? Murder. Now, at the time, Autumn thought that meant Lena was planning to murder her—which, that shit’s fucking scary, dude—but since then we did a little digging on our own, and it turns out that—” He leans into the camera, raises his eyebrows, and lets his lips curl up into a smile.
“—there was a Lena Reeves who used to work in this very home as a member of the household staff, who up and vanished in June 1937.”
Zeke allows a silence to fall over the room. He’s still looking into the camera, but he’s breathing heavily, like he’s trying to wrap his mind around the enormity of what he’s saying. He’s ridiculous, for sure, but I’ve got to hand it to him: he puts on one hell of a good show.
“So,” he says, lowering his voice and turning to gaze at me.
“Autumn and I are going to attempt to make contact again tonight—to ask Lena about the stuff we learned about her. And maybe—just maybe—to find out what happened to her. Because if we want to know the truth, who better to tell it… than Lena?”
He gives me a look, and we place our fingers on the planchette together. Zeke closes his eyes, and I watch as he takes a few deep breaths, then opens them again, asking in a loud, even voice, “Lena Reeves, we ask that you join us now. If you’re here, please make yourself known to us.”
The candles flicker. I’m about to ask Zeke if Lena’s in the room with us, but then, slowly, slowly, I start to feel the planchette sliding beneath my fingers, tugging my hand and Zeke’s along with it across the board.
H.
I.
It stops.
“Hey. Hi to you, too,” Zeke says, his grin bashful as he looks up at something near the coffee table. Question answered.
God, even in this half dark room he’s gorgeous. I need to focus. I heard Patrick—heard him loud and clear. And honestly, I agree. My fun little fling is over, and soon this pilot thing and my fashion show will be, too. Everything will go back to normal.
“Lena,” Zeke continues, drawling out the name in a way I know is meant to butter her up. “We found some stuff out about you. But we want to know more. We want to know how you… passed on. We know you went missing, but I’m going to ask this straight out—were you murdered?”
Silence.
Zeke shivers, and I see his shoulders twitch. If I had to guess, Lena’s running a hand along his upper back, caressing his neck.
He looks up at me. “She’s tracing letters on my back. She says yes.”
“Lena,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “I understand you just spelled out ‘yes’ for Zeke. Can you use the spirit board to show the rest of us?”
There’s a pause, and for a second I’m afraid I might’ve pissed her off.
The last thing I need is to upset the ghost so that she clams up and Zeke has to come back and film again—hey, I made a deal after all.
But then the planchette jerks beneath my fingers and sails toward the YES spot on the board.
“Goddamn,” Zeke breathes. “Okay. Lena. Can you tell us what happened? Like, who killed you? What went down?”
There’s another brief pause, but then the planchette starts moving again, and this time I swear I feel a cold sort of breeze sweep through me. I glance at Zeke, but he’s staring at the board, eyes fixed on what Lena’s spelling out.
“M,” he says aloud, as though to encourage her along. “A.”
I join in, and we both say the letters aloud:
N.
T.
E.
L.
“Mantel?” Zeke asks. “What the fuck’s a mantel?”
I stifle a snort for the sake of the cameras, hoping he can edit that part out. Then again—his mistake is kind of endearing. Zeke is always very much himself.
“Mantel,” I repeat correctly. “It’s above the fireplace—that shelf thing. Do you think there’s… something hidden there?”
Zeke’s already on his feet. “She’s leading me over there.”
“Well, follow her!”
He grabs my phone off the couch, turns on the flashlight, and strides across the living room to slide his fingers across the surface of the mantel. I really hope I dusted recently. Although Zeke probably won’t even notice.
“I don’t see—well, feel...” He trails off. All I can hear is my heart pounding in my chest and the sound of Zeke moving picture frames around on the mantel.
“It wouldn’t be anything to do with the stuff I put up there,” I say. “I definitely would’ve noticed something weird that didn’t belong to me. And, like, I’ve lived in this house for close to five years now—so if Lena means there’s something there, it’s got to be kind of obscured.”
Zeke doesn’t reply, just shines the beam of my phone flashlight across the contours of the brick wall. Shadows flicker across the living room.
“Well, I’ll be fucking damned,” he announces. “There’s a tiny-ass, little nook here, between the mantel and one of the bricks.”
That’s all it takes for me to jump up and see what the hell he’s talking about. “What?! What do you mean? I’ve decorated that mantel so many times, there’s no way I would’ve missed a damn nook.”
Zeke shakes his head, and I stand on my tiptoes to peer at the place he’s gesturing.
“Nah, you’d really have to be looking for it,” he says. “I almost didn’t see it, and I’m over here with a damn flashlight. But I think… I think there’s some kind of paper in there. You’ve got nails, hot stuff. Can you get that out?”
Now that I’m looking, I do see the nook he’s talking about—although it’s more like a crack, a sliver of space between the mantel and one of the bricks. And it does look like there’s something wedged inside, although it’d be super easily missed if I didn’t know it was there.
I slide my acrylic nail into the crack—thank god for my manicurist—and manage to wedge the paper between my nail and the brick. I’m surprised when, as I draw the paper toward me, it actually moves, sliding slowly out of its hiding space and into the beam of the flashlight.
“Holy hell,” I breathe. I pass the folded paper to Zeke, and he takes it back to the coffee table, into the frame of his phone camera.
He probably wants both his tripod camera and the phone to be picking this up—because this is crazy.
There’s writing on the outside of the folded paper, and although I can’t see what it says from here, my heart is pounding.
I kneel down at the table next to Zeke, and he unfolds the paper and sucks in a sharp breath. Then, laying the paper down on the coffee table, he smooths the edges and says, “Damn, dude. That’s her.”
Shit. I don’t know what I expected would be on the page, but it definitely wasn’t this.
Instead of the letter or news article I thought we’d find, there’s a charcoal drawing of a naked woman, lying on her side in a super sensuous pose, her long luscious hair draped like a gauzy curtain across the sofa she’s lying on.
In my fucking guest room. I can tell from the slant of the ceilings, the crown molding that used to be up there before they remodeled.
I can also tell from a glance that the woman is Lena, the same woman in the maid’s uniform in the photos I found in the attic. The same woman from the article Lydia found in the archives.
And then—the thing that makes me suck in my breath just like Zeke did… There's a pendant hanging from her neck, nestled between her ample breasts. A pendant that has the same scalloped edged setting as mine, the same delicate filigree chain. Even in the drawing, the similarities are obvious.
“Look at the signature,” Zeke whispers. He points to a scrawl in the bottom right corner, and I swear to god I feel like I’m going to faint.
Because there’s no doubt about it. The signature on the drawing reads: CALVIN F. CARROWAY. Patrick’s great-grandfather.
“What’s the writing on the back?” I tap impatiently at Zeke’s wrist, wanting him to turn the page over.
When he does, he groans. “Shit. It’s all old-timey.”
I suppress an eye roll and instead start reading aloud. The handwriting is clearly different from the signature on the front.
Hello.
I’m Lena Reeves. The date is June 16, 1937.
I can’t keep on like this any longer. Two days ago, I insisted of Cal that he inform his wife of our love affair. He promised me we’d be together—that he’d sort it all out— but it’s been six whole months, and my heart is aching.
The meeting went poorly, however. Cal took my insistence as insolence and struck me. I’m ashamed to say it isn’t the first time—but it was the worst time. There was something crazed about his demeanor, and I no longer trust Cal.
And so although it feels preposterous, if anything were to happen to me, I hope someone will find this.
Here is my proof, both of our love affair and of Cal’s changing demeanor.
When I finish reading, Zeke looks at me. His eyes are wide, and there’s no trace of his usual irreverent smile.
“Holy fuck,” he says. “This is… damning.”
I don’t answer. I’m still holding the drawing, staring at the handwritten words scrawled across the back.
This is Lena’s handwriting. Lena Reeves, who I’d never even heard of before Zeke stepped through my doorway, who lived in this very house so many years ago.
Lena, who—just like I did—found herself entangled with a Carroway man.
And, again like me, Lena also found out the hard way what that man was really like.
Except Lena didn’t get as lucky as I did.
Forget the lake house. Lena didn’t even make it out of her relationship alive.
I swallow hard, trying to blink back the tears that are already gathering in my eyes. I flip the drawing over, gazing tenderly at Lena’s face. She’s really pretty, with luscious dark hair and soft, round curves. My hand reaches up to finger the pendant that hangs around my neck.
I glance up at Zeke. “This pendant… where’d you get it? It looks just like hers.”
Zeke runs a hand through his hair, looking slightly embarrassed. “Honestly? The thrift store. I was walking past, and I saw it in the window… and it was, like, calling to me. I told you that—that it had some kind of vibration going on. I could tell it was supposed to be with you.”
Suddenly, it hits me. Lena knew.
That night Zeke came to the doorway, Lena seized her chance.
She knew she could get through to Zeke. She knew she could get through to me through him.
Because she knows I know what it’s like.
Not to be physically abused or fucking murdered, of course—but to be treated as utterly disposable by a Carroway man.
Lena knew I could be trusted with her story.
Lena knows I know what it’s like to feel absolutely powerless.
And that’s when I start to cry.