Maybe This Time

  “Alice, who is that woman over there?”

  “There’s nobody,” Alice said, and sat down with her book.

  Andie looked back at the woman, thick-waisted and clumsy as she moved closer to the edge of the trees. “Alice?”

  “I don’t see anybody.” Alice stared at her book, and for the next minute the pages didn’t turn while she stared down. Then she stole another look across the pond and closed her book. “Tell me the Princess Alice story again.”

  Andie looked back at the woman. Maybe just a neighbor. Alice wasn’t the neighborly sort, maybe she didn’t like people watching her. Andie didn’t like people watching her, either.

  “Princess Alice,” Alice said. “Tell me.”

  “Right.” Andie started the never-ending Princess Alice story again, beginning with how brave the princess was and how her brother was the best artist in the kingdom, and how the mean witch was defeated once again—

  “And Princess Alice got all the cookies she wanted,” Alice said, evidently still brooding on her lack of a fourth cookie.

  —and how the dancing princess danced through the halls with her curly hair flying—

  “And the Bad Uncle did not come because he was afraid of Princess Alice,” Alice said for the umpteenth time.

  “No, he didn’t come because he was busy working. The dancing princess has curly hair?”

  “She dances,” Alice said impatiently. “And Bad Uncle is so afraid—”

  “Bad Uncle isn’t afraid of anything. He just forgets people. Alice, who is the dancing princess?”

  “She dances. She has a glittery skirt like yours and she dances. And Princess Alice isn’t afraid of anything, either. Now tell me new stuff.”

  “Alice, did you know the dancing princess?”

  Alice looked at her warily. “It’s just a story, Andie.” She stole a glance across the pond.

  Andie looked, too. The woman was still there, watching. “Who is she, Alice?”

  “Princess Alice goes to the shopping center,” Alice said, “and she buys beautiful material and makes a beautiful cover for her bed, and then she goes to the bookstore and gets a book on butterflies because butterflies never die.” Alice stopped and looked back out over the pond quickly. “And then she comes home,” she said, jerking her face back to Andie. “To the Bad Witch. The Bad Witch is not so bad but she should let Princess Alice have many cookies.”

  “Are there neighbors back there?” Andie said, shading her eyes to see the woman better.

  “No,” Alice said. “And then what does Princess Alice do?”

  The woman stepped out of the trees onto the shore, clumsy in her long, heavy clothes. She was wearing a long three-tiered skirt, and her hair was pulled back tightly in a bun. She moved stiffly, no grace at all, and she looked oddly old-fashioned, almost sepia toned.

  Andie said, “There, do you see her now?”

  “No. I want my story!”

  “Okay,” Andie said, still watching across the pond. “After Princess Alice went shopping, she went to the Dairy Queen and she met a friend there.”

  “Okay,” Alice said, keeping her head turned away from the pond.

  There was something very wrong about that woman, wrong enough that Alice had forgotten her dead frog to pretend she wanted a story instead of yelling her head off at being thwarted. “Are you afraid of her, Alice?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman on the other side of the pond.”

  “I don’t see anybody.”

  “Alice,” Andie said, staring at her. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “I don’t see anybody. I want my STORY!”

  Alice stared back, wild-eyed and, Andie realized, afraid. “Okay,” she said soothingly. “The friend told Princess Alice about the school she went to, and Princess Alice said she wanted to go to that school, too, even though she’d have to leave the castle and go to Columbus—”

  “I’m tired of that story,” Alice said, and picked up her headphones again.

  Andie looked back at the woman who still stood there staring at them. Whoever she was, she was creepy. “Let’s go in.”

  Alice shoved her book into Andie’s hands without a word of protest, stood up, and headed for the house at a good clip even for her. Andie got up and shook the quilt out, and then picked up their things and turned to go and caught sight of somebody up on the tower of the house. She shaded her eyes again but the sun was behind him so all she could see was a tall man up there, his shoulders oddly boxlike, as if he were wearing an old-fashioned coat, standing very straight, both hands on the ledge as if he owned the place.

  It might be Bruce the contractor. If Bruce had started dressing funny and dyed his hair red and grown a beard and started showing up for work.

  “I want a snack now,” Alice said from twenty feet away, and Andie pointed up to the tower.

  “Who’s that?” she said, and Alice jerked her head up to the tower.

  “I don’t see anybody,” she said, and kept moving toward the door, yelling back, “We have to mulch the butterfly garden today!” and Andie watched the figure on the tower watching her, and then looked back to see the woman in the trees, also watching her.

  Okay, now I’m getting some answers, she thought, and followed Alice in to find Mrs. Crumb.

  When Alice was curled up in the library with her book on butterflies, her Jessica doll, a cup of milk, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and two cookies, Andie went back to the kitchen to find Mrs. Crumb sitting at the table in another of her faded flowered aprons, hunched over a cup of heavily pepperminted tea, holding a hand of cards and facing the card rack across the table.

  “There was a woman out by the pond,” Andie said to her.

  “Woman?” Mrs. Crumb said, suddenly cautious.

  “In a long, old-fashioned dress. Alice saw her. I think she knew her.”

  Crumb looked startled. “Alice told you that?”

  “No. She pretended not to see her, but Alice is not that good an actress.”

  “On the other side of the pond?”

  “Are there neighbors over there?”

  Mrs. Crumb shrugged and went back to studying her gin hand.

  Andie sat down across from her and shoved the card holder to one side, and Mrs. Crumb looked up, startled.

  “You know, I’m getting really tired of mysteries,” Andie said. “Is there some weird-ass neighbor wandering around?”

  “Language.” Mrs. Crumb looked more offended by the “weird-ass” than she was alarmed at the idea of a stranger wandering the grounds.

  “Who was that woman? Because Alice doesn’t want me to know so it’s no good asking her.”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  Crumb hesitated and then put down her cards and leaned closer. “It’s her. She watches Alice. She wants a child to look after. She won’t hurt Alice. She protects her.”

  “Tell me you’re talking about a fired nanny. I’ll get a restraining order—”

  “She was the governess in this house once,” Crumb said, warming to her tale. “A long time ago. A hundred years ago. More. In England. Miss J, Alice calls her. She was a lady, but a bad man dragged her down. Peter. She died. And now she walks.”

  Andie looked at the light in the old woman’s eyes and thought, She really believes that. Or maybe she just wanted Andie to believe so she’d run away screaming. Maybe she’d hired somebody to stand on the other side of the pond. The woman in the dream would be harder to fake, but—

  “It was that Peter’s fault.” Mrs. Crumb was positively animated now. “He was a hound, an evil man. There were lots of women. She was just the last. And the poor woman paid for it!”

  “Mrs. Crumb—”

  “Pregnant, you know.” Crumb shook her head sadly, playing to the balcony. “I’m not sure how she died. She doesn’t speak of it.”

  “She talks to you.”

  “No, but she’d sit with me. Before Alice came. Alice’s m
other died when she was born, so they brought the poor babe here and that’s when she stopped sitting with me. She just takes care of Alice now. That’s all she wants, to look after Alice. She thinks Alice is her baby. Now Peter, he wants the house. Peter and Carter, they’re close.” She said the last with contempt.

  Oh, dear God, Andie thought. Either Mrs. Crumb was completely nuts or there were ghosts stalking Alice and Carter. Andie wasn’t sure at this point which she’d prefer. “How do you know all this?”

  “I know things,” Mrs. Crumb said, her eyes shifting away.

  “Who told you this?”

  Mrs. Crumb got up. “It you don’t want to believe me, fine.”

  “Look.” Andie regrouped. “You believe this ghost exists. That . . . disturbs me.”

  “You’ve seen them.” Crumb looked arch. “And Alice likes Miss J!”

  “I think even Alice would draw the line at the undead.”

  “That little girl has seen a lot of death. She knows there’s Something Else out there.”

  Andie rubbed her forehead. “Okay. Forget Miss J and . . . uh, Peter. Did a nineteen-year-old girl ever die here? Beautiful, curly hair, liked to dance?”

  Mrs. Crumb shivered for a moment and then leaned back looking calmer, saner. “A lot of people have died here. This house is over four hundred years old.”

  “I keep dreaming about a nineteen-year-old-girl. At least she says she’s nineteen. She talked to me last night in a dream. I know she’s not real. Look, there’s something going on here, and I’m going to find out what it is, and if it turns out that this is some scam you’ve cooked up—”

  Mrs. Crumb laughed, a much gayer sound than Andie had expected. “How would I give you bad dreams? Or make you see a woman at the pond?”

  “Or the guy on the tower?” Andie said. “I thought it might be Bruce finally come to start work, but he was dressed funny.”

  Mrs. Crumb smiled, the curve of her lips almost youthful. “Tower? Oh, that’s Peter. He thinks the house is his. He’s just looking out for his property—”

  A loud screeching sound made Andie jump, and she looked around to see a teakettle on the stove, blowing steam.

  Get a grip on yourself. The damn house is getting to you. “Mrs. Crumb, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Well, you’re the one who’s seeing them,” Mrs. Crumb said, and got up to take the kettle off the stove, moving with an oddly youthful grace. “You should have Mr. Archer come down here.” Mrs. Crumb took down a teacup and saucer. “He should be here if you’re worried. Can I make you some tea?”

  “No, thank you,” Andie said, and thought, I need real information. The Grandville library wasn’t that far away. They might have a history of the house. Or a book on faking hauntings. Or exorcisms.

  She left Mrs. Crumb smiling to herself and stirring her Earl-Grey-with-schnapps in the kitchen and went to get the kids.

  They were talking in the library when she opened the door, their heads close together, both of them open and unguarded until they saw her. Then their faces shut down again.

  “Come on. We’re going to spread the mulch on Alice’s butterfly garden and then go to the Grandville library,” she told them, and they looked at each other and then got up without argument and went to get their coats.

  Alice’s Jessica doll had fallen when she’d stood up, and Andie went to pick it up and put it on the window seat. Its hair was disarranged as usual, and Andie tried to pat it back into its bun, straightening the three-tiered skirt gathered into the ribbon band—

  Three tiers. The woman on the other side of the lake had been wearing a dress like that. And her hair had been like the doll’s, too.

  I’m hallucinating, she thought. There wasn’t a woman over there, I hallucinated Alice’s doll. Alice was acting weird because I was trying to make her see a hallucination.

  Except Alice had seen it first.

  There are no such things as ghosts, she told herself, put the doll on the window seat, and went to help with the mulch.

  Two hours in the Grandville library looking for “Archer House,” “Faked Hauntings,” and “Parapsychologists, Ohio” gave Andie nothing except a book called Ghostbusting: The Story of One Man’s Battle Against the Undead and a very old newspaper article about the insane Archer who’d brought the house back from England. She copied the article and checked out the book, and then took the kids home. She tried asking them a few general questions—“So, ghosts. What do you think?”—and they ignored her, so she tucked them into bed and then went to bed herself with the book. The author’s name was Boston Ulrich and he was from Cincinnati, which meant he was in the general vicinity, which was a plus, but two chapters in, she knew it was going to be no help because it was more about how smart Boston Ulrich was than it was about ghosts.

  That made sense, she decided, because there were no such things as ghosts, so he hadn’t had anything else to write about. The woman across the lake was probably just looking at the house, and the man in the tower was probably checking the cable, and Mrs. Crumb hadn’t told her he was there so she could push the whole this-house-is-haunted bit. Or something. There were no ghosts. She put the book away and turned out the light and let herself drift to sleep. Maybe she’d dream about Will tonight. That would alleviate some guilt about all the hot North dreams. C’mon, Will, she thought but it was the ghost girl who showed up, smiling at her from the foot of the bed.

  “Who are you?” Andie said, and the girl said, I’m you, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  She seemed more solid this time, as if she’d been eating better, whatever ghosts ate. More fleshed out and, although she still had a disconcerting translucency, the vertigo wasn’t nearly as bad. Andie frowned at her, trying to place what buried memory she’d dredged her up from.

  Oh, stop it, the girl said, and settled in at the foot of the bed. Can’t you accept that I’m you? Everybody’s prettier and more interesting when they’re younger.

  “Thank you. But no. You’re some weird memory. After my divorce, I used to dream about my husband all the time. One of my therapists said it was because I was trying to say a better good-bye. But I have absolutely no recollection of anybody like you.”

  That’s because there’s nobody like me.

  They need somebody like you, North had said. And there’s nobody else like you.

  Tell me about the guy we marry, the girl said. North Archer.

  “He’s a good man,” Andie said. “Just distant. The thing is, if you’re some buried memory, why would you be haunting my dreams now?” She stopped. “Haunting. Are you somebody else’s memory?”

  Tell me three things about North Archer, and I’ll go away.

  “I’ll trade,” Andie said. “Tell me three things about you, and I will.”

  You go first.

  “Okay.” Andie took the first thought that came to mind. “The one Valentine’s Day we were together, he brought me a heart-shaped Valentine’s Day box full of potstickers because he knew I liked those better than candy.” She remembered him handing her roses and the box with a completely straight face and then breaking into one of his rare smiles when she opened the box and said, “Potstickers!”, delighted beyond measure. And they’d finished them off that night in bed, and she’d licked some spilled dipping sauce off his chest and—

  Potstickers?

  “Chinese dumplings.” Okay, they’d had some good moments, but it was over and done with. “Your turn.”

  I’ve never had Chinese dumplings.

  “That’s too bad, they’re great. It’s your turn.”

  I took my turn. I’ve never had Chinese dumplings. The girl slid off the bed and did a pirouette in front of the window, her skirt moving in multiple dimensions, but not bothering Andie nearly as much this time.

  “Fine,” Andie said. “I’ve never had squid.”

  The girl stopped twirling. That’s not fair. Three things about North Archer.

  “Okay. I’m fairly sure he has had squid.” No
rth tried everything. He’d certainly tried everything with her anyway.

  The girl put her hands on her hips. I want to know things about him, real things.

  “Well, I want to know those about you, too.”

  Okay, the girl said, not happy at all. Your turn.

  “I took my turn. The second one is that he’s had squid. Your turn.”

  We could not count that one.

  She sounded like Alice, bargaining for more cookies.

  “Then we’re back to you. I gave you a Valentine’s Day memory.”

  Okay. The girl chewed on her lip. My favorite Valentine’s Day gift was a heart-shaped necklace set with little diamond chips that my boyfriend gave me.

  “Boyfriend,” Andie said. “I do not remember this necklace, so again, you’re not me. Anybody I know?”

  Your turn. She swished her skirt again, impatient.

  “You’re not me.”

  The girl pouted and somehow was even lovelier pouting, even transparent.

  “Who are you?”

  It’s your turn to tell me something.

  “Okay.” Andie watched her move in the moonlight, seeing her skirt swish with her. “Is that a prom dress?”

  Your turn.

  “Okay.” Andie sat back a little to think. “We had to go to this big fancy party and I didn’t want to go because I was going to have to get dressed up in this little black dress his mother had bought for me and act like a wife, and the day of the party he came home and said, “Here’s your dress,” and when I opened the bag it was a long greeny-blue chiffon skirt with sequins on it and a turquoise sequined stretchy tank top. He said he saw it in a window on his way to a meeting and stopped to get it because it looked like me. And then I found out he was late to the meeting because of it. That was a big deal.” And she’d been really grateful, and they’d been late to the party—

  I don’t get it. What’s wrong with a black dress? I think they’re sexy.

  “North understood it. Is that a prom dress you’re wearing?”

  Yes. The girl swished the skirt again. I was trying it on again when . . .

  “When?” Andie prompted.