What the Dead Want (12 page)

I love you, he wrote. I love you. I love you. I love you.

O
UT IN THE LOOPING DRIVEWAY
H
OPE LOOKED
URGENTLY
at Gretchen and Hawk, motioning for them to throw the box of photographs in the back. Hawk jumped in the car with the box and Gretchen leaped into the front seat just as Hope peeled out.

Once in the safety of the car speeding away, Hawk reached forward to touch her shoulder and Gretchen reached back to squeeze his hand. Dust kicked up around the windows as Hope drove down the dirt road. She flipped the sun visor down.

“Why are we heading away from our house?” Hawk asked.

“We're going into town,” she said matter-of-factly. “The funeral home called. Esther's ashes are ready to pick up.”

Suddenly the mood turned grave.

“It's all so crazy,” Gretchen whispered.

Hope said, “I don't know what the two of you saw in that house. But you're not crazy. People all over the world think they're crazy when something bad goes down. Think how people felt when strangers with different skin and odd language came and threw them onto a ship and took them far away. They felt like they were going crazy. One day eating lunch with their family—the next being beaten and sold and then beaten again. There was crazy shit going on—but it wasn't in their heads. That crazy lasted so long we're still feeling the ripples of it.”

“You sound like Mom,” Hawk said.

“I
am
like Mom,” she said. “We learn history so we can break with the past, not repeat it.”

Gretchen had never heard a kid talk like this in her life. Besides Janine, Hope was the most level-headed person she'd ever known.

“Amen to that,” Hawk said.

Hope looked back at the house through the rearview mirror. “Let's just hope we get the chance,” she said.

They drove on in silence. Forest gave way to town via a poorly paved country road, which in turn widened into the smooth black asphalt of Main Street. There were large, pastel-painted mansions on both sides. Bric-a-brac and wind chimes dangled from porches; leafy potted ferns hanging from eaves troughs. A Saint Bernard lay sprawled in a patch of sun on a neatly mowed front lawn. American flags flapped gently from flagpoles. After where they had been, it was a blank, strange shock, a postcard of peace and prettiness and prosperity: brick storefronts and slickly painted green benches, a bright-red fire truck parked in the driveway of the Mayville fire station, looking so clean that Gretchen wondered if it had ever been used. There was a gazebo, and in it, a mother reading a storybook to four blond children. Even the funeral home looked pleasant. The hearse outside somber but perfectly polished.

When they pulled into the parking lot, Gretchen took a deep breath. She shook off the image of ghostly children painting the walls with blood, and then opened the car door and planted her Doc Martens firmly on the ground.

The second she did this she started to laugh. Something about the whole thing was comical. Her haunted ancestral home, this weird town that seemed like a stage set, almost everyone already hiding in their homes to avoid being the victim of a random anniversary accident. Hawk
seeing ghosts and Hope driving them around in her vintage car, giving history lectures. It had not even been two days since she left the city and yet everything in her world had changed. No, not just everything in her world, but her whole understanding of the world had changed. She wished Simon were there.

“I'll come in with you,” Hawk said, breaking her from her reverie.

The funeral director was not what she expected, given the quaint and buttoned-up nature of the town. He was wearing a dark suit, but he had wavy shoulder-length hair shot through with strands of gray and a not-so-perfectly trimmed beard. He was wearing glasses and on his wrist was a macrame bracelet with a little pale-blue bead on it. She half expected him to be wearing Birkenstocks.

“My daughter made it,” he said, catching Gretchen looking at his bracelet. “Meant to ward off the evil eye.” He had kind, pale-blue eyes himself.

“Does it work?” she asked.

“So far,” he said, giving her a nervous look.

When they sat down at the desk he said, “I'm so sorry for your loss. Everyone's loss, really, I remember seeing Esther Axton's work in the paper and in magazines the whole time I was in school. She was an amazing woman.”

“Thank you,” Gretchen said.

“This is never an easy time,” he said, pulling out a leather-bound binder. “I'm sorry to rush you through this, but we'll be closed for the anni . . . for tomorrow, and I'm sure you'll want to get this taken care of sooner rather than later.”

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “Thank you.”

The binder was filled with pictures of ornate boxes and urns. She and Hawk sat together flipping through it. Her eyes glazed over.

After a while the funeral director asked, “Were you planning a service?”

“Uh . . .” Gretchen shrugged. “Not for anytime soon.” Hawk squeezed her hand.

“Very well,” he said. “Any of these beautiful urns would honor your aunt's remains.”

Gretchen thought about what a strange idea it was to honor the remains of someone. Esther was reduced to a pile of ash and bone. All that truly remained of her were her photographs; whatever could be put in an urn had nothing to do with who she was. There was no need to be sentimental. Esther had left her mark on the world and now was gone, like she would be one day, like everything would be. Gretchen looked around the room and was again dying for a cigarette.

“What is she being kept in now?” Gretchen asked, and
her voice sounding strangely raspy in her ears.

“Well . . . ,” he said.

“We'll take her in whatever she's in now,” Gretchen said. She took out her wallet. And he went into the back room to get Esther.

Back on the sidewalk holding yet another cardboard box, this one containing a clear plastic bag full of chunky gray dust, Gretchen and Hawk walked somberly to the car.

Hope looked at the box in surprise, then shook her head and started the car.

“He said they're closed tomorrow for the anniversary,” Hawk told his sister.

“They all act like it's not real and they all believe in it,” Hope said. “Just keeping up appearances. The whole town puts up those signs saying closed for renovations or be back in fifteen minutes, but they won't be back until it's over.”

“If the ghosts are just out wandering around the Axton place, why would anyone here be worried about it?”

They sat in silence for a long time while Hope drove. The car felt weighted down. Journals and books in the trunk, the box of Esther's war photographs in the back—and this brown cardboard box in Gretchen's lap.

“They're not just wandering the Axton property,” Hope said. “The day after tomorrow we'll be reading about
people accidentally falling out of windows while washing them, house fires because of irons left on, bricks falling from construction sites. The anniversary has become a day where people sit at home, even afraid of a slip in the shower or a drive to the grocery store.”

“It used to be the anniversary of the fire,” Hawk said. “Now it's the anniversary of more deaths than people want to count.”

“Like our parents' death,” Hope said. “And maybe your mother's too.”

W
HEN
G
RETCHEN GOT BACK TO THE
G
REENS
'
HOUSE
her cell phone, which had been plugged in and charging near the television, was ringing. She quickly grabbed it, saw Simon's face, swiped the screen, and heard his exasperated tone.

“Thank
GOD
, I have only been calling you like
every three hours for a million years
!”

“Simon!” she shouted, relieved to hear his voice.

“How's the life of the heiress?” he asked.

“Uh . . .”

“How's your aunt? Tell me everything!”

“She's . . .”

“Weird? Does she drive around in a Rolls Royce smoking with a gold cigarette holder? Does she have an expensive little dog that wears a bow and goes everywhere with her?”

“She's . . . she's dead,” Gretchen said quietly. “She killed herself.”

Simon didn't say anything for a full ten seconds. Then he said, “I'm coming there. Give me the address.”

“No, Simon. It's crazy here right now . . . there's no bus and there's . . . I think my mother . . . there's some kind of thing with accidents happening. . . .”

“Give me the
address
,” he said again, and with great relief she did.

They were a team. If anyone was going to help them get that mirror out of the house, if anyone was going to help them figure out what was going on, it was Simon.

She could hear him already scrolling through car services on his phone. “I'll be there by tonight,” he said and hung up.

Gretchen checked her other messages—apart from the dozen from Simon, there were two from Janine and one from her dad. Her father was calling from a café near the village where he was working; the connection was fuzzy and she could hear people talking in the background and loud music playing. He said he hoped she was having fun
and would call again in three weeks. Gretchen's heart sank at having missed his call. She knew that he would be so absorbed in his work she'd be lucky if he really did call back in three weeks. Last she knew he was on assignment in South America. There was no Wi-Fi where he was working, and he couldn't just take trips into the village whenever he wanted. Sometimes, if he was on a very tough assignment, treating dengue fever or Rotavirus, she went months without hearing from him. He said “I love you” twice. And she whispered it back into the silent phone.

Janine's message made her smile; she could tell she was eating ice cream and the TV was on in the background. “How's life in the big country?” she'd asked. How could Gretchen possibly explain how much her life had changed in just a matter of days? It was a question she couldn't have answered if she tried. And when she called back no one answered.

The box of Esther was sitting on top of the TV. Hope and Hawk had brought all the journals and other boxes in from the car and were carrying them down to the basement.

“My friend is coming from the city,” Gretchen said.

“She's picked a bad time to visit.”

“He,” Gretchen said.

“Oh,” Hawk said, looking away for a minute.

“Where are you taking those?” Gretchen asked, gesturing toward the boxes.

“C'mon,” Hawk said.

She followed them downstairs to a long table that was piled with books. Beside it stood a tall gray filing cabinet.

“Our mother's research,” Hope said. “She'd been working with Esther for a while—”

Gretchen looked around. The place was neat and orderly, like the upstairs. The archival materials had been put into plastic sleeves or files and set out in piles on the table. The way everything had been handled, it was almost like these old papers and photographs were volatile material. It reminded Gretchen of a crime lab from some old TV show.

“The folks at Shadow Grove would pay a lot of money for these kinds of things,” Hawk went on. “They have another library—but it's less historical.”

“And more hysterical,” Hope said, looking up from the document she was cataloging.

Hawk smirked at his sister. They busied themselves unpacking boxes and setting more journals and photographs out on the table.

Hawk pulled out a brown folder thick with papers and hand-scrawled notes on yellow legal paper, tossed it on the top of the pile. Gretchen picked it up and leafed through it.

It was Esther's will. A long rambling heavily annotated form that established a bank account specifically designated for “funds to fight the gas company.” It also had whole paragraphs about destroying the house. The only thing she left Gretchen was the mirror and the camera. The car she left to Hope.

“C'mon, we've really got to get to work on this stuff,” Hawk said, dusting off more of the papers and setting them aside. “We've got just over twenty-four hours before the anniversary and the Shadow Grove people start coming out here.”

“So? What do they do?” Gretchen asked.

“A bunch of loony shit,” Hope said, “in hopes of not getting killed themselves by a hunter's stray bullet or a lightning strike. Or they honor the spirits of those who passed and try to communicate with them—depending on how you look at it.”

“It's more than that,” Hawk said. “The anniversary is the only time those who have passed can really interact with us.”

“Celia and Rebecca were interacting with me just fine and there was no anniversary,” Gretchen said, putting her hand up to where she had been scratched; it was sore and the skin was raised, beginning to scab. She lifted her shirt to look at her side where she had been bitten, and there
was an ugly round welt, teeth marks visible. Her forehead and part of her eye was swollen from the wasp sting, her shoulder was terribly sore, and she remembered she hadn't taken the time to disinfect the wound. “They're already biting and scratching and tripping people. Knocking over the wasp nest.”

“All of that is new,” Hope said. “It used to be only on the anniversary, and it used to be only one person got hurt. Things have been changing over the years, escalating.”

Gretchen thought of her mother's image behind the charred and ornate mirror. How Celia and Rebecca were always playing next to it, as if they were guarding it. How Hawk couldn't see what she had seen. She needed to get back to the house soon, maybe hire a moving company to get the mirror out. She reached in her pocket for her cigarettes, then remembered she didn't smoke.

“Did Esther talk to you guys about a triangle?” Gretchen asked.

“All the time,” Hawk said. “And she's not the only one. Folks at Shadow Grove have this idea that there's a zone where spirits are suffering. It's the same theory Esther and your mother had.”

“Is it true?” Gretchen asked. “Can you see them?”

He shrugged. “I see things all over,” he said. “You may have thought we were the only people in the funeral
home—but to me it was full of mourners, walking through the rooms. And the woods are full of spirits trying to find the church. I try to believe in their triangle idea, but there are so many wandering souls in the world. . . . It's more like an ever-expanding circle with the house at the center.”

“What do you mean, the center?” asked Gretchen.

“Like an aperture,” he said. “Like . . . they always come from the attic down into the house and then outward from there. To me it feels like the house is a rift between worlds.”

“Our mother, your mother, and Esther thought they could release the spirits,” Hope said. “That was before Celia and Rebecca became as strong as they are now. Hawk says they used to be confined to one little place; now they roam around the whole house and he's seen them out here too and once in the woods.”

“There's got to be something that's making them stronger,” Gretchen said. She racked her brain. Esther's death? The presence of another Axton at the house? How were they supposed to rationally figure out something so irrational? She set out Esther's photographs, the ones from Poland and Japan and Vietnam. Like a whole world on fire. She peered over them, thinking of Esther's ashes in the box upstairs.

“We could ask them,” she said finally. “We could ask the girls.”

“There's only one other person who's talked to them,” said Hawk. “And she also talked to Fidelia. This lady named Annie at Shadow Grove. Says she can channel Fidelia and other people in the Axton family.”

“They talked to me,” Gretchen said. “They told me they were going to ‘fix the house.' Then they looked frightened and ran away—some disgusting white creature with hooves was coming.”

A silence fell over the room. Hope opened the filing cabinet and riffled through some folders. She pulled out a photograph and laid it on the table.

“Did it look like that?”

Gretchen expected to see something like one of her mother's spirit photographs. Instead she was looking at a picture of a WCP member in a mask riding a horse. And yes, because of the light or the composition of the photograph, it did look just like the creature.

Gretchen gasped and put her hand over her mouth. The sheet the WCP man was wearing was tattered and a little singed, as if he had just come from a fire. It resembled what she had thought were feathers on the creature. But the holes in the mask were the most frightening—as if she was looking straight into insatiable black holes of hatred.
She was repulsed. It was the same with all of Esther's pictures—Nazis, American soldiers burning huts, cowards in planes dropping bombs on cities. The blunt, ignorant hatred was the same.

Seeing the picture made her want to work harder than ever to figure out what was going on, and to get that mirror—get her mother—out of that ancestral trap.

Gretchen handed the photograph back to Hope. “Simon should be here later tonight,” she said. “You stay here and go through the archive. Hawk and I will go up to Shadow Grove now.”

“What we need here isn't a spiritualist to make it all better,” Hope said. “We need a historian to let everyone know the facts.”

“Nothing's going to make what happened here better,” Gretchen said. “But folks keep paying for the things these people did centuries ago.”

“Yeah,” Hawk said. “And it's the same people. Look at Esther's photographs, Vietnam, Hiroshima . . .”

“Fidelia's journal,” Gretchen said, “where she's barely allowed to even work outside the home, can't go to school. The faces of the people who are downtrodden are different. The faces of the people keeping them down are the same. Men with money, white men with money, who believe the world belongs to them and will do anything to
protect their power.”

“We need to get over there and talk to Annie,” Hawk said. “See if she can get us some information from someone who was a witness at the time. You didn't get very far talking with Celia and Rebecca—they're children, even if they're more than one hundred years old. I don't think they're reliable sources.”

“How you gonna
get
there?” She looked at them warily. “You're not taking the car.” She set her papers aside and got out her keys. “I'll go with you, Gretchen. Hawk, you stay here. We'll be back as soon as we can.”

“You better be,” he said. “Or you might not be back at all.”