Amber House (25 page)

“We’ll make it happen.”

“I’ve got to find some time to take Sammy down into the secret tunnel too. I promised him last night, in exchange for him covering for me.”

Amusement filled his eyes. “You going to face those crickets all by yourself?”

“Well, unless you wanted to come with us?” I said hopefully.

He nodded. “More than anything.”

I smiled. “Liar.”

“Not me,” he said. “I may keep a few secrets, but I always tell the truth. Can you stick your head into the conservatory? I have something I was supposed to give you.”

He opened the glass-and-iron door. I stepped inside and he followed. “Ida wanted you to have this. She wanted you to know she thought about you even when you weren’t around.” He reached behind a couple of potted ferns on the nearest shelf.

He pulled out a fantastic silver and gold mask. Small, edged around with gold feathers tipped in gold dust. It was attached to a handle, but looked like it could be detached and tied on as well.

“It’s perfect with my dress for the party,” I said. “I wonder how she knew.”

“I never wonder how any of the women of Amber House know the things they know. You just do.”

I smiled. He had just made me a member of a long, exclusive, and completely nutty sisterhood. A woman of Amber House.

“See you tomorrow,” he said, and departed.

I headed up the conservatory staircase to the second floor — easier to avoid my mother by that route. My legs complained every step of the way. I was going to be stiff in the morning.

At a mirror in the hall, I stopped to see how the mask looked on.

And heard a snatch of laughter. I sucked up my nerve and opened the closest door.

A woman in a gauzy dress, wearing my mask, stood facing the fireplace, holding a champagne flute. She drained her glass, then held it out for a refill. A man scooped up a bottle from a bucket on a stand and poured.

He set the empty bottle on the mantel, slid in behind her, and untied the mask, letting it fall to the floor. Then he started
kissing the back of her neck. She turned to face him — it was Fiona. He took her hands and maneuvered her around, easing her down onto the small sofa. I could see his face now, smiling that same square smile that I’d seen on the senator, and on Richard.

Fiona leaned back against the arm of the sofa, and the man bent over her to resume kissing her neck. Her head tipped back. She looked toward the door. Toward me.

“I know you’re there,” she whispered.

The air left me. I felt impaled. A moth on a pin.

“You’re watching, aren’t you?” she said.

“What, honey?” the man said, not stopping, slipping the shoulder of Fiona’s dress down to reveal bare skin.

“It’s all right,” she said to the door — to
me
. “Sometimes I watch too.”

I gasped. And backed up. And slammed the door shut.

Could she see me? Was she just talking to
me?

What was going on here? I’d been able to cope with the whole echo thing — just barely. But if the past wasn’t going to
stay
in the past … First the little girl, now this lunatic woman
talking to me
.

I forced my feet to move, down the hall, down toward my room. Only, I acknowledged to myself, it wasn’t my room. It would never be
my
room. It belonged to the others. All those others. There was no safe place in Amber House.

My face — my head — was hot. I was ashamed and embarrassed, by someone who had been dead for decades. Who was that man who looked so much like Richard? Was that why I had watched? To see what it would be like to let Richard kiss me like that?

And for the first time it occurred to me — would someone be watching me someday, here in Amber House? Would someone see me mooning over Richard? See me arguing with my
mother? See me licking the traces of whipped cream off my pie plate?

Maybe that’s why Mom wanted to sell the house. Maybe she knew all about the echoes. Maybe she didn’t want to be one. Maybe I didn’t either.

I switched the light on, took out the old tintype Jackson had found in Heart House, and looked at it again. I pulled out Fiona’s book and flipped to the late 1800s. I found the two clear figures, in an almost identical photo, identified as Maeve Webster and her adopted daughter, Amber. The text said Amber had died when she was seven. My sweet-faced ghost.

I touched the blurry figure in the tintype. Perhaps that
was
me in the photo. I hadn’t ever experienced an echo of Amber and her mother, but perhaps sometime in my future, I would find a way back to that past, and the camera would capture me then — my spirit caught on film, the way they say ghosts sometimes are, the light-sensitive chemicals reacting to the spirit’s energy. And if a camera from the past could sense the presence of my energy, perhaps a person — like Fiona — could sense it too.

I didn’t understand the way it worked. When I saw an echo, was the past here with me? Or was some part of me in the past? Or both? Or neither?

The nun who taught my First Holy Communion class used to tell us that God existed outside of time, that time was just our way of perceiving things. That if you could see the way God sees, you would know that everything existed all at once. There was no past or future.

I turned out the light and dressed for bed in the dark. I felt safer in the darkness. Invisible. I fell asleep still thinking about people watching me, thinking that the eyes in Amber House were kind of like the eyes of God, knowing every failing.

Except God could forgive.

I sat in the center of the web, spinning my hair into silk, attaching my thoughts to each thread and casting them out from me, bait to catch hungry crabs. A thousand tiny spiders attended me, drifting their filaments over me, a blanket of soft, warm snow, weaving me a silken dress. I looked in the mirror. My face was the face of the child in white. And I thought,
I always get the creepy fortunes.

Then the spiders made me a veil of white, thicker and thicker, so that I could forget my face. So that I could stay forever.

I woke up making that groaning noise you make when you’re trying to scream in a dream. My hand was reaching for my blinded eyes. I opened them to daylight.
Thank God.
I shuddered, my body rejecting the feel of all those spider feet.

I’d never had dreams like that before, not till we’d come to Amber House. It seemed like I couldn’t escape the voices, the eyes of this place, even in my sleep.

I took my clothes and went into the bathroom to change. Because I’d never had a vision in the bathroom. I was hoping it was, like, against the house’s rules.

I went downstairs, moving like an old woman with arthritis, courtesy of my horse encounter the day before. I hobbled into the kitchen for some breakfast and some aspirin.

Sammy was at the table, munching a strip of bacon. Rose was watching him eat. “Like a couple of fried eggs?” she asked me.

“Just gonna have some melon,” I said, “but thank you.”

“Your mama went into town to get party supplies,” Rose said, standing. “You two stay out of trouble while she’s gone.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Um, Rose?”

She turned back, halfway through the door to the dining room. I looked at that no-nonsense face and could hardly pull together a coherent thought. I finally stammered: “Did you know Maggie?”

She cocked her head, as if she could sense the confusion behind that question. “Yes, child, of course I knew Maggie.”

“Well” — I plunged on, knowing that this was probably not something my mother would approve or appreciate, but determined to get the information — “what happened to her? Where is she?”

The look on Rose’s face was impossible to describe — a kind of outrage mingled with disbelief, overlaid with a surprising compassion. She walked up, took my hand, and leaned in to tell me, “She’s dead, honey. Your mama never told you about her?”

I shook my head.

She nodded appraisingly. “Well, maybe you ought to ask her directly. Don’t you think?”

I didn’t think so, didn’t think so at all, but I nodded. Rose gave my hand a little pat and turned back for the door. “Have a good day,” I said lamely.

She smiled —
An actual smile!
I thought — and left. I was still sitting there, contemplating the aunt I could never know, when Jackson poked his head in through the rear door from the gallery. “She gone?”

“I think so. Aren’t
you
supposed to be in school?”

“I was called to a higher duty.” He stepped in and pulled an umbrella from behind his back. “Cricket protection.”

I laughed. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“That’s what you got me for,” he said, smiling.

“You have breakfast yet?” I asked. “You want something to eat?”

He held his hands up in a
what-can-I-say?
gesture. “I’m a growing boy.” He helped himself to an enormous bowl of cereal and started shoveling it in.

I considered the two topics weighing on me. I still wasn’t ready to tell him about Maggie. But that thing with Fiona —

“Did Gramma ever say anything to you about people in the echoes being able to see or talk to her?”

“Nope,” he said. His chewing stopped. He studied me. “Did something happen?”

I realized he was going to want to know all the particulars. What
exactly
did Fiona say? What
exactly
was Fiona doing? How could I explain to him why I had been standing there, watching? Maybe if I cleaned it up a little —

I wasn’t that good a liar. “Nothing happened.”

I could see him choose not to push the point. He scooped up the dishes and carried them to the sink. “How about it, Sammy? Time to get moving? Want to see the secret passage?”

“Uh-huh.” Sam nodded emphatically.

I got my boots from beside the back door and put on my zippered hoodie. Jackson laughed. “Looking good.”

“Shut up,” I told him, smiling.

Jackson started into the maze ahead of us, but I stopped him. “Let me see if I can do it,” I said.

I found it easier to manage in the daylight, when I didn’t have to worry about tripping over roots or missing a turn.
Right, skip, right
, I counted,
left, skip, left. Right, skip.

“This is great,” Sammy said, trotting along beside me.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet, bud,” I promised him.

We got to the gazebo, and Sam went straight for the stairs. His eyes grew wide as he gazed out over the maze. “I love this, Sarah.”

Then Sam and I hunted for the loose tiles. Jackson had hidden them almost perfectly with a filler of white sand. “Look,” Sam exclaimed, “I found it, Sarah.” His voice dropped to a reverent hush. “The secret door.”

Jackson lifted the tiles out and opened the trapdoor. Sam breathed in the gust of air from below. Jackson held out a flashlight. “You want to go first, Sam?”

“Yep,” he answered. He took the light, swung his little legs into the hole, and went down without a second thought. Jackson followed. I pulled my zipper tighter, grabbed the umbrella, and made myself join them.

Sam was already trotting after his flashlight beam down the passage, as if he knew the way. Jackson and I hurried to keep up. “A hidden house,” he said, as he opened the door and went in. “A whole hidden house.” He turned to me and said in a whisper, “No one has been here.”

“Not for a long time, bud.”

He ran everywhere, opening everything. He pushed back the lid of the trunk in the smaller room. “Oh, look,” he said, lifting out a carved-wood toy. “The tiger — but he got old and lost his stripes.” He even shined his little flashlight up the fireplace. “I can see stars, Sarah.”

Jackson smiled at me. Sam’s enthusiasms were infectious.

“Why did they bury this good little house?” he asked finally.

“To hide it from other people,” I said, “so they could use it for secret things.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding, “secret things.”

I was glad to leave, glad to step out into the sunlight once more. I didn’t ever want to go back to Heart House again. There was no treasure there. Nothing but the past.

Jackson closed the trap and replaced the tiles. “We better get moving on that tree-house ladder, if you want to be done before your mom gets back.”

“Me first,” Sam cried and took off running into the maze.

“Wait, Sam! You might get lost,” I said. But he didn’t even hesitate. He made every turn perfectly as I jogged to keep up with him. The little bugger was smart. Smarter than me.

Jackson had stashed some supplies inside the conservatory door: his toolbox, a handsaw, and a stack of two-by-four pieces. We loaded up and headed around to the oak tree in front.

The two guys set to work. For the bottom three rungs of the ladder, Jackson set the nails and let Sam pound them in. “Swing your whole forearm, buddy. That’s the way.”

Jackson tacked up the next five rungs and had to climb the new steps to fill in the last four feet of missing ladder. Then he climbed back down. “You want to go up first, Sarah?” I nodded. “Make sure you test the old rungs to see if they’re still sturdy, before you put your full weight on them.” I started up. “You next, Sam. I’ll follow you, okay?”

“Okay.”

Halfway up the tree, I saw the girls again. My preadolescent mother, and her younger sister, Maggie.

“You okay, Mag?” my mom called down to the little girl climbing just ahead of me.

“I’m okay.”

My mother gave her sister a hand up over the edge into the tree house. I climbed up after them. It was a simple structure, not much more than a floor on two levels, a partial roof, and a rail. Not something I would want Sammy to come to by himself.

My aunt took a backpack off and dumped it on the floorboards. Heavy Bear tumbled out.

“Let’s go through the rules again, Mag,” Mom said. “This is our secret spot.”

“Our
secret
spot.”

“We only come up here when we’re together.”

“Only come up together.”

“No telling Mommy or Daddy about what we hide up here, ever.”

“No telling.”

My mother made an X across her chest; Maggie did the same. Mom finished, “Cross our hearts, hope to die.”

“Hope to die,” Maggie said.

Mom turned to get something from the backpack on the floor behind her. It was the wooden box Matthew Foster had made a century and a half before.

She set it carefully between her sister and herself. “Did you put it in there, Mag? Like the Old One said?”

“I put it in, Annie. Like she said.”

My young mother pulled a butter knife out of a metal bucket of junk tucked under a bench. She stuck the blade under a short board and pried it up. Maggie wrapped Matthew’s box in a cloth and Mom set it down in the hole under the board. They fitted the board back in place again. “Say it with me,” Mom directed.

“Sister Tree, Sister Tree,” the two girls recited, holding hands, “keep our secrets safe.”

“This is our secret, now,” my mother told her little sister. “Nobody must know.”

“Nobody must know,” Maggie repeated.

“Will you ever tell Mommy or Daddy?”

Maggie shook her head. “Nope,” she said, hugging Heavy Bear to her chest.

And that’s when I knew. Why she’d sounded so familiar to me. Why she’d been speaking in echoes the whole time.

I snapped out of it, my arms waving wildly, looking for something to hold on to against a sudden wave of vertigo. Jackson caught my hand. He and Sam had both slipped up onto the platform quietly, without breaking me loose from my vision.

“What did you see?”

“My mother and —” I still could hardly say it. I shook my head. “Her sister,” I said.

Jackson looked confused. “You have an aunt?”