“Uh-huh,” she nodded. She didn’t look away from the mirror. She couldn’t do it if she’d wanted to. “Go on, I’m right behind you.”
When Gabe was gone, she swallowed, and counted, and breathed. She looked into the mirror, then quickly away. It was shadowed by weird gleams and angles thrown by the flashlight in her lap. She felt a breath on her neck, a cotton-soft gust that wouldn’t blow out a candle—and she threw up her hands without even meaning to. She closed her eyes. It was easier that way. “Who are you?”
Open the left-hand drawer.
With quivering hands, she did what she was told, looking away from the glass. She blinked down into the drawer and saw a metal pendulum on a string and a series of cards. One card had a circle with numbers around its edge, like a clock. One had letters. Below the cards, she turned up a dog-eared paperback on astrology, and another one regarding communication with the dead.
“Are you … are you Augusta’s aunt, Hazel?” Dahlia guessed. Suddenly, she didn’t want the lady to leave. “Was this your room?”
Down in the drawer, a scratching noise—like a large bug, or a small mouse. The pendulum wiggled. Dahlia picked it up; it vibrated in her palm. “Hazel?”
No one answered, and Gabe was on his way back. He was on the attic steps, descending swiftly toward the hallway, and toward the door that shouldn’t have been open—but was all the same. “Dahlia? Dahlia, I found something. Come on. Come and see.”
She tucked the pendulum and the cards into her pocket. Rising to her feet, she checked the mirror one last time. She saw nothing and no one except herself, her image bleached out by the yellow-white circles cast from her lantern.
“Coming, Gabe. I’m coming.”
She climbed over the trunk and into the hall, slipping in her sock-feet and catching herself on the carpet runner—which disintegrated as she tripped through it, yanking it from whatever tacks had held it into place. It came apart in decaying rags. “Ew,” she complained, shaking the gray fluffy dust off her toes and smacking at her sock to clean it further.
“Ew what?”
“Moths and old fabric. What’d you find upstairs?”
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
She fell in line behind him. “Why didn’t you just bring it down?”
“Because I can’t,” he said, holding the lantern up and forward to illuminate the entrance to the narrow set of attic stairs.
“What is it?” she pressed. “Give me a hint.”
“It’s a message. It wasn’t there yesterday, or the day before.”
The walls were close around them as they scaled the creaking steps single file. Wallpaper hung in strips, dangling over the holes where fixtures used to brighten the cramped nook. Dahlia and Gabe’s two bouncing lights made the space look and feel like a funhouse that was no damn fun at all.
Dahlia was relieved when they reached the top of the stairs and Gabe lifted the hatch. He climbed through it ahead of her. For an awkward moment, his ass was fully in her face; but she crawled behind him. She was about to ask what she was looking for when she saw the message carved into the floor. You couldn’t miss it: The letters were a foot long each. They were roughly scrawled like they’d been cut with a huge fingernail, or a carving knife.
YOUR FAULT
“My fault?” She crooked her neck and stepped closer. “Somebody else’s fault? For what?”
“Who do you think wrote it?”
“Abigail,” she replied, with an unsettling degree of confidence. The devil had taken her, Augusta’d said, but he’d taken his own sweet time, and maybe he didn’t take her very far. “But I don’t know why she’d accuse us of anything. We just got here.”
In one of the dark corners where the roof sloped low toward the floor, something moved. Dahlia chased it with her light, but caught only the impression of someone small, and then no one. Nothing. Not even a rat or a bat. But there was a scrambling noise in its wake, and the image reappeared—flickering swiftly in another corner, beneath another web of batshit-covered support beams. It looked away. It vanished.
“Gabe…”
“It’s him. You saw him.”
“I saw something.”
She could still see something, but just an outline of darkness—a cutout silhouette, snipped from the same paper as the photo album. It moved, but it did not breathe. It hunkered. She pointed her light, trying to pin the shade into place so she could see it better, but the specter only absorbed the beam, swallowing it up. It drank the light down, and snuffed it out.
Dahlia crouched down. Her knees popped, so she stood again—not straight, not certain. She kept her back bowed so she could leave the center where the ceiling was high and the way was clear and go towards the lower corners where the walls met the roof. She ducked slowly, dodging the supports as she pushed onward, a small, terrified step at a time, toward the little shadow that curled up tight with its arms around its knees and its head tucked down against its chest.
“Buddy?” The word came out cracked. She said it again. “Buddy? Is that you?”
The huddled shape gave no response, only the impression that as she approached it … it grew smaller before her eyes. When Dahlia reached it, leaning the light around a support post covered in nails, she saw nothing there at all.
No child-shaped ghost of a man long dead gazed up at her. No phantom with charred-out holes for eyes. No sad-faced soldier giving a longing or threatening salute, and no poltergeist girl in a yellow dress or covered in mud and blood offering screams or warnings or threats.
There was no one. Nothing.
“What is it? Do you see it?” Gabe asked. The white gleam from his lantern went wobbly as he passed it to his other hand and wrestled with the idea of joining Dahlia.
“He’s gone. But there’s something else back here. Not a ghost,” she was quick to clarify. “It’s a box. Maybe a suitcase. Or a briefcase. Something like that.”
She wished she’d found her sneakers before embarking on this adventure; there was rat shit, bat shit, and probably possum shit and snake shit up there, never mind all the nails and splinters. She stuck the lantern’s handle between her teeth and braced herself anyway, hanging on to a nail-free spot on the support post with one hand while she reached for the object with her other one.
Her fingers brushed against dry, brittle leather. She found a handle, and pulled. The container came free. She teetered on the balls of her feet, but held steady, adjusting her balance.
She let go of the wood and retrieved the lantern from her mouth.
There wasn’t any clean space to sit, but she sat down with the case anyway, fiddling with the latches on top. The briefcase, or satchel, or whatever it was had had a combination lock years ago. Now it’d rusted to the point of being useless, and the elements had shrunk the leather back away from the hinges. With a twist of her hand, the contraption broke and the bag opened wide.
Gabe sat down cross-legged beside her. “What’s in it?” he asked before she had a chance to see for herself. “Just dump it all out.”
“No way. There could be rats. Spiders.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “But hurry up.”
Gingerly, all the while wishing she had her work gloves handy, she withdrew the contents in clumps and spread them out in the light of their lanterns. “Gabe … these are … they look like medical records.”
“Whose?”
She read a few lines, turned the page, and scanned a bit further. “Oh, God…”
“Dahl?”
“The water,” she said, which didn’t really answer him. “I knew it had something to do with the water. This is a report on patient care from a sanitarium in Michigan.”
“Was Abigail there?”
“Looks like it. I wonder if they sent her away to have the baby? No, that can’t be right—if no one but Buddy knew about it. Maybe she left it somewhere, or gave it away. Maybe it died.”
“Maybe she killed it.”
Dahlia didn’t know how to respond. She didn’t want to th
ink it, and she hadn’t planned to say it out loud. “If it died, one way or another, I wonder if anyone ever found its remains. You’d think Buddy would’ve known where to look.”
Gabe frowned, and poked at the nearest folder with his finger. “Why didn’t he show them?”
“Maybe he kept his mouth shut so he wouldn’t make things any worse. He was only a kid,” she reminded him. “The message might be for him. Everything after that wedding party … everything that happened to Abigail was his fault. These records here…” She scanned them quickly. “At this sanitarium, they were treating Abigail for hysteria—like it was still the nineteenth century, or something. They used hydrotherapy on her.”
“That’s what she blames him for? Water? Come on. It could’ve been worse.” He wiggled his fingers like he was trying to zap her. “It could’ve been shock treatments.”
“I don’t think they used shock treatments back then, but water therapy wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. It involved a lot of unwanted baths. Ice water, high-pressure hoses, that kind of thing. No wonder the poor ghost has a hate-on for plumbing.” She pushed some of the pages around, ignoring the things that looked redundant and discarding the paper that was too deteriorated to read. “It looks like she was discharged in 1924. They sent her home, and … and then what? There are no more pictures of her, no further mention of her anyplace in the family record, as far as I know.”
“What did Miss Withrow tell you?”
“Not everything, apparently. She said Abigail disappeared after the wedding fell through, but it’s more like she was banished.”
Gabe eyed the attic with a wary expression. “Maybe they locked her in the attic. I bet she went crazy up here and died.”
Dahlia whapped him with her light. “And you gave me crap about the gothic romances.”
“She must’ve died somewhere!”
“Yeah, but not up here. This attic was never finished out—there’s no Sheetrock or plaster, no insulation. Just subflooring and exposed beadboard. This was never a living space. I can’t imagine why you wanted to stay here the other night.”
“It’s kind of cool, until the ghosts show up.”
She sat back and fiddled with the light, aiming it from page to page. “Whatever, man. Tomorrow,” she said suddenly, pointing the light at Gabe—then away from his face. “Sorry. But tomorrow … or this morning—God. I don’t know what time it is, but it must be so late that it’s early. When the sun comes up, at any rate, I’ll start looking for the real Withrow plot, and see if she’s buried there. I bet it’s close by, and if we find her grave, we’ll know when she died. Maybe even how she died. Sometimes they would put that stuff right there on the tombstone.”
“Good idea.”
“I’m full of them. Now, what else is in here?” she asked herself. The rest was mostly receipts, church bulletins, and two old issues of National Geographic. The folders with Abigail’s sanitarium records were the only thing of interest. She pushed everything back inside the weather-ruined satchel, then picked it up. “Let’s put this downstairs in Hazel’s room. That seems like a safe place.”
“Who’s Hazel?”
“Augusta Withrow’s aunt. I found her name in a book, after you left,” she lied. It was easier than telling the truth. “After that, you and me, kid—we’re going to get some more sleep.”
“I don’t know, Dahl. I’m pretty worked up. I don’t know if I can go back to sleep now.”
She stepped around the thin sheets of subflooring and tried not to look at the accusation carved there. It wasn’t meant for her. “Me either, but we’ve got a lot of work to do over the next couple of days. We need all the rest we can get.”
He fussed along behind her. “I don’t know how anyone’s supposed to sleep with that storm going on out there. And in here, we’ve got more ghosts than rats.”
“There’s nothing to be done about the ghosts, but storms are great for sleeping through.”
“Not when the house is full of holes.” He descended the stairs, letting the trapdoor fall down quietly behind him. Now that they were headed for the main part of the house, he lowered his voice. “The wind makes all these whistling noises, and the house sounds like it’s going to fall apart.”
“This house has been here for a century and a half. What are the odds it’ll fall down now, the week before it’s torn down? You worry too much, kid. Leave that to me.”
At the hallway landing, they saw that Hazel’s room was still propped open by the trunk full of books. Dahlia added the satchel and paperwork to the stash of romances and travelogues, and closed the lid. She pushed it inside, but didn’t shut the door. “If Hazel wants it shut, she can do it herself. I don’t want to accidentally lock us out. Now, go on downstairs, and try to get some sleep.”
“Aren’t you coming, too?”
“Yes, but now I need to pee. And I’m leaving the door open, so I want you to go down ahead of me. Give a girl some privacy. And, hey…” She stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Your daddy and Brad … they don’t need to hear about that message in the attic. It’ll only spook them.”
He half shrugged, half nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“I usually am. So go on, and settle in. Let me piss in peace.”
When she was done, she flushed, and the pipes rattled from floor to floor; but by the time Dahlia was back inside her own sleeping bag, Gabe was snoring again anyway. She was happy for him and his dudelike gift for tumbling back into his dreams. She was jealous of him, too.
She wriggled down into her bag, this time propping herself up on her pillows against the fireplace surround. The stone was cold through the feathers and foam, and she didn’t care. It was cold everywhere, and everything felt damp because of the broken windows upstairs and the water drumming down hard on the roof, on the gutters, and on the porch. By the sound of it, the wind was blowing in every direction at once. It must be some drafty trick of the mountain behind them, twisting the air around as it blustered over the ridge. That must be why the house felt like the center of something, a storm’s eye that wasn’t calm now, and probably never would be.
Dahlia wasn’t getting any more sleep, not anytime soon.
She briefly considered going upstairs and rummaging in Hazel’s trunk some more, then discarded the idea. She didn’t want to go back and see the door shut, or get another glimpse of a dead boy who used to be a man. She didn’t even want to talk to Hazel, who seemed to mean no harm—and might even want to help. And she definitely did not want to catch Abigail, full of rage, with razor-blade fingernails or the strength to wield and carve with a knife. If she could do that to the exposed subflooring, what would she do to flesh and blood?
No more upstairs investigation. Certainly not in the middle of the night.
She pulled out her phone. It offered the only Internet available, and what else was she going to do while everyone else slept? With a flick of her thumb, she turned off the sound, then called up the Web.
She started with a couple of searches on the Withrow family in general, then narrowed it down. There was plenty about the Withrow Monument Company and Judson himself, and a few local history stories about his wife’s philanthropy. Dahlia found the birth announcements for all three children, a marriage announcement for Buddy, and even the announcement for Abigail’s wedding that never happened. “Tate Arthur Hurley,” she read softly. “So that’s who you almost married, the second time around.”
It must’ve been the second time around, given the date. There was no mention of the first engagement to be found, so Augusta was probably right about the attempted elopement. If it had ever happened at all, there was no official commentary. Just family gossip.
On an image search, she found black-and-white photos of the Withrow house in brighter days—including a bit about the annual Halloween parties. Apparently the whole neighborhood came out for them, with small trick-or-treaters climbing all the way up to the mansion to collect treats, drink apple cider, and play ghostly games
in the pretend cemetery.
She found only one mention of the cemetery specifically, only a brief note in a self-published book regarding the neighborhood’s enthusiasm for holiday fun.
It wasn’t terribly useful, except that it verified Augusta’s version of the cemetery story, which was … neither here, nor there. That’s what Dahlia decided. Augusta had every reason to believe she’d told the truth; but there was at least one body there now, and he’d been there for quite some time. Even if he was a murder victim, it made no difference to the Music City Salvage plan.
The police report could wait. Besides, what if the cops came out in the rain and tried to investigate? It’d be one big mess for everybody, all they’d find was a ninety-year-old corpse. Who gave a damn about a murder that old, anyway? Everyone who’d ever cared was dead.
She glanced over at the other sleeping bags. Gabe was hanging half out of his. Bobby was flat on his back, snoring at the ceiling. Brad was balled up inside of his, breathing slowly, and snorting.
Maybe she ought to call her dad.
Not right that moment, but tomorrow, in the morning, whenever. She could give him a progress report, and tell him everything was all right. He’d like that.
Her mind was wandering. Maybe another hour or two of sleep wasn’t completely out of the question after all. The phone’s screen darkened like a hint, but she tapped it again and tried one more round of queries.
It took less than thirty seconds to learn that the Withrow family members of yesteryear were all buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery, barely a mile away. The rest was good news/bad news.
The cemetery was active and open, with over a hundred thousand people buried there—many of which were unmarked and unknown. That was the bad news. But the Withrows were rich, well connected, and they’d had their own monument company. Their graves were listed right alongside those of the city founders, Civil War officers, and noted politicians of the previous century or two. That was the good news.
Dahlia checked the search records and found the plot numbers for the Withrow clan, but there were no handy-dandy photos of tombstones to click on, so the information didn’t do her much good from where she was sitting. She could wander over there tomorrow at lunchtime. According to the map, it was a two-minute walk from “downtown” Saint Elmo. She might not even need to excavate the trucks from the mud; she could hike down there, if the weather let up.