The Swallow (16 page)

“We’ve got to help him,” I said. “We’ve got to help him, and Winnie too.”

Rose stared at me, and her mouth twisted a little in disapproval.

“She tried to kill you, Polly,” she said. “Why do you want to help her?”

I shrugged. “She’s not going anywhere. She’ll be back, haunting you and trying to keep me out of your house. If we can figure out what happened to her, maybe we can help her stop being so mad.”

Rose was silent, watching me. She looked like a ghost again, her face half lit by the glow from the flashlights, her hair fluffing out around her head.

“Don’t you want to help her?” I asked finally.

Rose shook her head. “She wants me to. They all want me to help. All the ghosts. They never leave me alone, Polly.”

“But your grandfather,” I said softly. “You want to help him, don’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

Another long silence. Despite the brighter light, the shadows of the attic seemed to close around us. I imagined the darkness full of Rose’s ghosts, clamoring for help, plucking at her hair. Plucking at my hair. I gave a little jump and then shook myself briefly, like a dog shaking off a drift of snowflakes.

“It must be awful,” I said. “All those ghosts. All wanting something. Have you never helped any of them?”

Rose leaned towards me and spoke in a quick, fierce voice that I’d never heard before.

“What am I supposed to do?” she hissed at me. “I can’t bring them back to life! I can’t make anything right for them! I can’t
DO
anything! But they still ask me. I just wish they’d all go away forever. I just wish I was normal, like you. With a normal family, like you. And no Door Jumpers and dead grandfathers and ghostly perfumes sighing in haunted rooms!”

Her face was twisted with fury, and she looked more like Winnifred than ever. I felt a cold shiver crawling up my spine. But I reached out and covered one of her shaking hands with mine.

“I’ll help you, Rose. It’ll be easier with two of us. We’ll find the key and get Winnifred sorted out somehow, and then maybe we can find a way to get the ghosts to leave you alone.”

She looked at me and started to laugh.

Rose

Polly looked so sweet as she reached out to me, blindly swearing to do the impossible. Even now, after being attacked by the Door Jumper and nearly dying, she still didn’t have a clue. You can’t just “fix” things. You can’t just change the way the world is because you want to. She was such a child compared to me.

But that’s why I liked her. She didn’t know what might be lurking in the dark but she jumped in anyway, and she actually believed she could make a difference. So I laughed.

“All right,” she said, dropping my hand and looking relieved that I wasn’t raving anymore. “So, how are we going to find this key? Is there anywhere you haven’t looked?”

“All kinds of places,” I responded. “My parents’ bedroom, the books in the living room, the dining room cupboards. The kitchen. Kendrick’s flat. But it would take me hours to search the whole house.”

“We have to use logic,” said Polly with a little frown. “It’s just a matter of elimination and logic. That’s how the detectives figure things out in murder mysteries.”

I rolled my eyes. Polly saw but chose to ignore it. She picked up the box and slowly turned it, examining each side.

“Okay,” she said, peering at the strip of carved wood. “Okay. So if it was your box, what would you do with the key?”

“Put it in a drawer, a jewelry box, an envelope …”

“Right. And you’ve looked in your grandmother’s dresser and her jewelry boxes?” asked Polly, shining her flashlight at the keyhole.

“Yes,” I said impatiently. “Yes, I looked everywhere in her room.”

“It must be a very small key,” said Polly slowly. “Do you think maybe it was put on a chain?”

“There were no keys on chains in her jewelry box,” I said impatiently. “I would have noticed.”

“I wonder …” said Polly. “Would you have noticed if it was on a bracelet? A charm bracelet? My mum has one, and it has a little golden key on it. A bit too small for this box, but—”

I stopped frowning. “She did have a charm bracelet! She used to take it off and let me play with it when I was little. There was a silver book, and a musical note, and a little man … I don’t remember a key.”

Polly met my eyes. “Was it in the jewelry box?”

“I … I don’t remember. There was a pile of chains and stuff, but no keys, so I didn’t go through them all.”

“Go!” said Polly.

THE CHRISTMAS PICTURE

Polly

There was no question of me going with Rose to look for the key. I didn’t want to risk another encounter with Winnie. I listened as Rose bumped along the passage. Then there was silence. I tried to picture her scooting down the ladder into her grandmother’s room, over to the dresser, opening the jewelry box. Either it was there or it wasn’t. She’d be back soon.

It was funny how you really couldn’t hear anything in the attic. Just that faraway hum, of traffic, maybe, or the city. It was soothing to lie back in the quiet and let my mind drift away.

“Got it!” said Rose, bursting through the little door. I must have fallen asleep for a minute because I hadn’t heard her coming.

She held out a clinky silver charm bracelet to me. Sure enough, there was a little silver key. Trembling, she fitted it into the box. With a couple of twists, the box was open.

Rose

It was weird, the way Polly figured out where the key would be. Sometimes I wondered if she was psychic, after all. Even if she didn’t see ghosts the way I did. Or maybe she was right and it is possible to live life as if it were all a game, or a story in a book. Whatever the reason, she knew exactly where to find that key.

As I lifted the lid of the box, a breath of my grandmother’s rose perfume wafted out, and then it was gone. Polly and I leaned over the box, shining our flashlights on the contents.

The first thing we saw was a picture of me.

I picked it up. It was taken last Christmas, I thought. I was wearing a black velvet dress with buttons down the front and I was staring at the camera, unsmiling, my hair a dark cloud around my face. I was standing in front of my grandmother’s sitting-room mantel, which was decorated with pine boughs and candles. The date printed on the bottom of the photograph read “December 1962.”

The next thing in the box was a picture of Winnifred. It, too, was taken at Christmas, and she was wearing a black velvet dress much like mine, standing in front of the same decorated mantel. This photograph was undated, but she looked about my age.

“Wow,” said Polly. “You two look like twins!”

She was right. I stared at the picture. I knew it wasn’t me, because the dress was more old-fashioned and the photograph was yellow and faded with age, but otherwise we looked exactly the same. Our faces were the same shape and our noses, mouths
and eyes were identical. Even our hair looked the same: wild and curly. But Winnie had a strange, haunted expression in her eyes.

“Polly, do my eyes look like that?” I whispered.

“Uh … sometimes,” she said.

“Can you tell us apart?” I asked.

“Hmmm,” she said, looking at the photographs again. “Not really. Except she looks kind of angry.”

There were more pictures of Winnie and me at different ages, all taken at Christmas in front of that mantelpiece that never seemed to change.

“These are so weird,” said Polly. “Do you remember your grandmother taking them?”

The Christmas photograph. Grandmother always made a big deal about it, after we opened our presents. I had to put on the new Christmas dress she gave me every year and stand in front of the fireplace. She tottered a bit the last few years, when it was hard for her to stand without support, but she still took the picture.

Afterwards she would smile gently at me and say, “Thank you, Rose. You look just lovely.”

They were all here, matched up with identical photographs of Winnifred. I felt sick.

LOCK HER UP

Polly

“Why do you think she took them?” I asked Rose.

Rose sat very still, staring at the photographs.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “Maybe to show how much we were alike? But she never said anything, not a word. I didn’t even know I had an aunt.”

“Do you think maybe she thought you
WERE
Winnifred, that you were reincarnated?”

Rose slapped the photos down on the floor and turned back to the box.

“Don’t start that weird stuff again, Polly. I’m not Winnifred, all right? I’m me.” She fished some papers out of the box and started going through them.

“Winnifred’s birth certificate, birth notice in the paper …” she said.

“But what if your grandmother thought you were?” I insisted. “Winnifred, I mean. Since you looked so much alike?”

“My grandmother was a Presbyterian,” Rose retorted. “They don’t believe in reincarnation. Hey, look at this.”

She handed me a scrap of paper that had been cut out of a newspaper. It was a death notice. We read it together.

“That doesn’t say much,” I began, but Rose had turned back to the box and pulled out a letter typed on paper that was so thin you could almost see through it. We bent over it together.

“They were sending her away,” I breathed. “To a mental hospital in Montreal.”

Beside me Rose was very, very still.

I fumbled for the death certificate.

“She died on January 8, the day before she was supposed to go. Rose, what do you think happened? Why did she die?”

Rose

So that was it then. They thought Winnie was crazy. She saw ghosts, just like me. And they found out. And they were going to lock her up. But she died first.

“Something awful,” I whispered. “Something terrible must have happened. That’s why nobody talks about her. It’s too horrible to even say.”

“What could be too horrible to even say?” asked Polly.

“I don’t know. I—I don’t want to know.” I started stuffing everything back in the box and closed it.

“I’ve got to go, Polly, I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t breathe, it’s too dark, it’s—”

Polly grabbed my arm.

“Rose, it’s okay, we can figure it out. Rose, don’t go. Please. Calm down.”

“Calm down?” I shouted. “I can’t calm down, Polly. Don’t you see? It’s all happening again. Kendrick said she was just the same as me. My grandmother saw it. Winnie and me, we’re the same. It’s like we’re the same person. We’re both cursed. They tried to erase her, they tried to pretend she never existed, and then I was born and I’m just as crazy as she was and they leave me alone and no one ever pays attention to me and eventually, when they find out about the ghosts I see, they’ll lock me up, but maybe something terrible will happen to me first and I’ll die and then—”

I threw myself into the passageway, leaving Polly bleating behind me.

“Rose! Rose! Come back!”

THE BRIDGE