What the Dead Want (4 page)

M
ONA BELIEVED IN SPIRITS, HAUNTINGS, HAD MADE A BUSINESS OF
it. Gretchen spent her childhood sitting by Mona's side—looking at photographs, going to the gallery after school, meeting artists and empaths and psychics and channelers. Gretchen knew her mother's interest in ghosts went back further than her friends' deaths; it was a part of her character. After her mother's disappearance, she and her father were contacted by dozens of people who believed they could help, supernatural believers of all stripes.

For months Gretchen would actually see Mona out walking. And every time she did, her heart raced and she felt
dizzy. She went looking for her mother in all her old haunts, went to the playground at Tompkins Square where they used to play when she was small. There were always women who looked just like Mona until they turned at a certain angle, or until Gretchen ran up close.

She never told anyone. Certainly not her father or the therapist her father arranged for her, but there were times when she clearly saw her mother in the apartment, sitting at the kitchen table looking through photographs.

Once or twice, she was almost sure she'd seen her father kissing her mother on the Eighth Avenue L subway platform. Or rather, her mother kissing her father—who seemed distracted and not to notice. The whole thing seemed crazy but true. One of those mysteries her mother would have been researching to prove or disprove. Maybe she was living in the city, right under everyone's nose. Maybe she was living between worlds. Either way, these Mona sightings needed to be accounted for.

And then one Saturday, Gretchen understood what she needed to do: take her mother's photograph. She needed proof. It was what her mother would want her to do. To prove that she was alive or to prove that she was a ghost walking the city. Either way, it was up to Gretchen now to carry on this kind of work.

It was October, her mother's favorite month. Gretchen
had her Leica X2 and she was in a fine mood to go shooting. That morning the sky was so astonishingly blue, the leaves on the trees so vibrant, it seemed they were painted with liquid neon. The air was crisp and she was wearing a long cashmere sweater of her mother's that she hadn't taken off since the first chilly day of fall because it still smelled like her mother. It was too big, flopping around her, slipping down her shoulders, almost dragging on the ground, but Gretchen wore it everywhere. She felt reassured by the thump of her camera against her chest as she headed to her mother's gallery.

The gallery had always been a place of excitement, intense study, and speculation. The space was only really the size of a small shop, but there was always a new opening to plan for, or an artist coming into town from Amsterdam or Rio. Every day Gretchen had gone straight to the gallery after school, where her mother would be immersed in her work. She knew the place like the back of her hand.

Getting there was routine. She smelled the bus exhaust and felt the subway rumbling and thundering beneath her feet as she walked. She had fallen asleep every night of her life to sounds like these, so why, today, did the island of Manhattan seem to be rocking all around her—louder, stranger, more unstable than it ever had seemed before? It must be a sign of how alive everything was—how her
mother was just around the corner.

And then she saw, across the street, with a clear purposeful expression, obviously headed to the gallery, her mother.

Mona wore a new black dress that morning, and it fit her perfectly. It was slim, a little clingy, maybe jersey material. A red purse dangled from her elbow, also new. She was carrying a large white box in her arms, and her wildly curly dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Gretchen knew the way that hair would smell—tea tree oil shampoo and chai tea—and she wanted to bury her face in it. To feel her mother's arms around her.

Suddenly she felt dizzy and frantic, wanted to run to Mona and see her smile, hear her laugh. This was the closest Gretchen had gotten to her in months. Gretchen raised her camera to her eye with her trembling hands, found her mother in the viewfinder, aimed, and snapped the image. Her mother had kept walking, of course—she hadn't noticed Gretchen—but that didn't matter, because Gretchen had set her shutter speed at 1/900, and there was no way her mother could be blurred or lost with that setting. Through that viewfinder, her mother was brought so close to Gretchen's eye that she even recognized the little gold charm bracelet her father had given her one year.

Gretchen continued to follow her mother with the
camera, snapping and snapping. She was getting proof. Her mother was not dead. She was interacting with people, people who could obviously see her. For one instant her mother even glanced in Gretchen's direction and seemed to return her gaze.

The street was suddenly more crowded with vehicles and pedestrians, and several times Gretchen lost sight of her mother when a bus passed between them or a sea of businessmen blocked her view. And then, suddenly, she was being jostled on every side by other people on the sidewalk, who elbowed her and scowled. Groups of people refused to part to let her through.

She stopped, and then started again, walked quickly across the street, and then turned back a block later. Everything was familiar, but rearranged. She turned all the way around in a circle, bumping into a teenage boy in a baseball cap, who gave her a little shove but said nothing. With rising panic, Gretchen began to walk back in the direction she'd come from, and then she found herself crossing another street, and then another. And then she turned around yet again and began to run, glancing desperately at the doors and windows of every storefront she passed, camera slamming against her ribs, searching, frantically by then, but not one of these doors had, painted on it in the bright-orange letters she knew so well,
Mona Axton Gallery.
It was as if the
buildings on this block had been picked up and shuffled around. She had absolutely no idea where she was.

The gallery was not there. Gretchen stood where she knew it should have been and, almost in one last desperate attempt to find it, looked up at the sky. Blue, and empty. She was standing in front of a door printed with the words
GREEN CLEAN
. Below that, a faded sign was taped to the glass. It said,
Grand Opening! Eco-Friendly Dry Cleaning.

She stepped closer to the door, put her hands to her face, and peered inside. There was a woman shoving what appeared to be wadded-up shirts into a cloth bag. She kept glancing at Gretchen blankly, and then back down at her work.

Gretchen looked into the woman's face. She had dark hair, pulled back in a ponytail. She was skinny—smoker skinny, caffeine skinny, wearing a black dress that clung to her skeleton.

It was the dress Gretchen's mother had been wearing only moments ago on the street. And in front of the woman was a red purse, lying on the counter.

Gretchen turned and ran. And ran. And ran. Dodging the pedestrians and the little dogs and trash cans and cabs.

Later, in her bedroom with the door closed, sitting at her desk, she looked at the proof she collected that day.

She opened iPhoto, double-clicked, and an image began to slowly spread itself across her laptop screen in all of its
digital brilliance, and when it was finally complete Gretchen saw in the arrangements of those pixels . . . a complete stranger crossing the street. Carrying a red purse. Holding a package. Wearing a black jersey dress. Glaring in Gretchen's direction—that angry expression having been what Gretchen had mistaken for her mother's smile. A stranger.

It was the pain of this that stopped Gretchen's curiosity about where Mona might be. Whether she was wandering the city or wandering the afterlife, Mona had no plans to come back to her, even in pictures. If she was alive it seemed that she didn't want to be found, and if she was dead she was dead. Dead people don't walk the streets or go to work or kiss their husbands good-bye on the subway platform. They do not tuck you in bed anymore, or take you out to brunch, or show you secret pictures from their fabulous pasts.

Her mother had been playing her whole life at communing with the spirit world. It had been an aesthetic fascination. But Gretchen was left behind to contend with the reality of her absence. With the reality of her nonexistence. Every day. From now on.

Mona was gone. And she needed to accept it. Her camera had provided all the proof she needed. After that she stopped looking for signs.

MONA
AXTON
GALLERY

455 W. 26
TH
S
T.

N
EW
Y
ORK,
NY

A
UGUST
18

Dearest Auntie Esther,

My plan is to arrive at the Axton mansion in the last week of September. The gallery will be closed for one week with a new installation being prepared then. I considered bringing Gretchen with me this time, but Bill and I discussed it and have decided that eleven years old is too young to be introduced to these kinds of things. Next year you'll meet your great
-niece, I promise, and this year I'll bring photos!

Until then I wanted to tell you that I have been doing extensive research on the area you have pinpointed here. I'm not sure if you would be familiar with Google Earth. I know you don't have internet out there. But with this, one can download satellite views of any area on the earth—close up, or far away. I am sending you a print of the eight square miles above the mansion. I think this will make an excellent tool for us in isolating the triangle that you have speculated so long about.

I only wanted to let you know that I am with you in spirit,
and that I, too, am anxiously awaiting our reunion, and the continuation of our search for the answers to these mysteries, and a chance to bring peace to those souls.

Your loving niece,

Mona

T
HE DARK MIRROR WAS ELEGANT, EXTRAVA
GANT.
O
NCE
Gretchen got close she could see that the frame was composed of wood carved into gilt vines and leaves, and also faces—cherubs, demons, little girls. Some of them were smiling happily, some of them weeping. Gretchen stared, awed by its intricacies. But on closer inspection, she could see the mirror was badly damaged. The frame had looked painted black, but really it seemed to have been charred in a fire. When she looked into the glass, the reflection that stared back seemed to have a double. Her own image haloed in another image of a girl. Or like there was a face behind her face. There were clear patches in the glass that
weren't reflective at all. It reminded her of looking into water—not looking at something solid, but looking at things submerged in water. For one irrational second she thought it was not a mirror but like a pond teeming with life that couldn't be seen until it surfaced.

“Be careful,” her aunt said sharply, then seeming to catch herself, mumbled, “it's very old.”

“It's incredible,” Gretchen said, still uneasy about what she'd seen or not seen in it, and the obvious strangeness of the mirror having been pulled from some kind of wreckage.

“It will be hard to move,” her aunt said. “But you must take it with you. It can't be left behind. I'm sure Hawk Green can help you lift it. You know Hawk? Course you don't—you just got here, what am I thinking? He lives up the road . . .”

“I can't possibly take this anywhere,” Gretchen said. “Why don't you sell some of this stuff, Aunt Esther? I can help you list it on eBay or we can contact a collector.”

“You can do what you think is best,” Esther said. “I'm out of here.”

If Esther's tone hadn't been so easy and forthright she might have thought the woman was scared of something, or that she only had a few weeks to live.

“Don't worry,” Esther said, as if reading Gretchen's
mind. “I don't have a disease or anything like that. I'm not contagious.”

Gretchen turned back to the mirror, touched it, and then drew her hand away quickly. It was freezing, as if it were made of ice.

She looked more closely at the ornate faces of little girls carved into the frame; some of them were smiling, but some of them seemed, indeed, to be screaming or to be devils and not little girls at all. The vines were wrapped around their necks, tangled in their hair. Gretchen thought the mirror must be from the Victorian era. Her mother had taught her all about the Victorians. Back then, women wore necklaces woven from the hair of their dead loved ones. People displayed photographs of the bodies of their recently dead relatives—sometimes sitting up in chairs with their eyes wide open—on their mantels. They held séances and played with Ouija boards as commonly and casually as people watched
Fresh Prince
reruns and played Scrabble today.

She peered into it again, looking for what she might have seen. Then she stepped back, looked at her own mottled reflection. Her hair was a mess from having the window down on the drive and it looked very punk-chic, coming out of the topknot. She leaned in closer and it seemed another face was rising to the surface of the glass,
just as she had imagined. Like it was rising from deep within a well, she watched the face open its mouth as if to scream.

Startled, Gretchen stepped back quickly; she had not opened her mouth or spoken a word. She whipped her head around to see what the mirror might be reflecting. Nothing there.

“See something?” Esther asked, squinting. “That's a funny old mirror, isn't it?”

Gretchen told herself she was just tired. It had been a long trip and she needed to eat something and then call Simon, maybe take some of the money Janine had given her and go book herself into a hotel. She'd yawned, was all, had opened her mouth without realizing it. She'd been scared of nothing but her own tired reflection.

Esther pointed through the door across from the mirror.

“Here's your room,” she said. “The others are more . . . cluttered. This used to be the library.”

A new moldering smell—this time more bookshop than thrift store. The room was astonishing. Bookcases from floor to ceiling on three walls held thousands of books, old hardcovers, but contemporary-looking titles too—bright covers and paperbacks and dusty leather-bound tomes, a heavy oak table covered with papers and books and boxes of
old photographs. Surrounded by three chairs, all carved in the same manner as the mirror. In the corner by the window there was an ornate four-poster bed with a quilt made of red and pale-blue triangles. A mosquito net hung delicately down over it and an old Persian rug sat at the foot.

“For the wasps, not mosquitos,” Esther said.

“I thought you said they didn't sting.”

“I said
I
never got stung,” Esther said. “There's a difference.”

Dingy moth-eaten lace curtains hung before leaded glass windows, facing the west, and sunlight was pouring through—maybe the door had been open a crack and the orange sunlight had reflected in the mirror and caused some trick of the light in the mirror. Gretchen was embarrassed she'd been scared by the mirror, embarrassed that she still felt scared, could feel the chill of the glass as if it had penetrated into her bones.

“I hope you'll be happy here,” her aunt said. She stepped over to the wall, and pointed to two sepia-tinted portraits framed in black. “These are your great-great-great-great-grandparents, Fidelia and George Axton.”

In the portraits they were very young. Fidelia had dark eyes like Gretchen's mother and the same shape face; it was uncanny how similar the expression was, amused but reserved, thoughtful. But her hair was certainly not the
same as Mona's wild curly mane. She'd had it combed down painfully straight and pulled back.

“Fidelia,” Gretchen said. “Was that a popular name?”

“I don't know,” Esther said.

“My mother gave me an old journal by someone named Fidelia Moore, when I was a kid.”

Esther laughed. “What a coincidence,” she said playfully, looking at Gretchen like she was a little slow. “That happens to be your great-great-great-great-grandmother's maiden name. And she kept plenty of journals. Years' worth.”

Gretchen took a breath. “This is
that
Fidelia?” Seeing a photograph of the woman whose personal thoughts she'd read (and often mocked), while standing in the ruin that had been the woman's home, was unsettling. Especially because there was such a strong family resemblance—she could recognize the slope of her own nose on Fidelia's face. Why hadn't her mother told her the journal had come from their family? The entries she'd read were from when the woman was in her teens. In the picture she didn't look much older than that, but was already married.

“And this is her husband?” Gretchen asked.

“It is.” Esther raised her eyebrows. “Charming-looking chap, eh?” she said sarcastically. Where Fidelia looked thoughtful and alive, George looked blank, a wealthy
man with fancy clothes and no personality. Based on the photos, no one would have said they were well matched.

“Listen,” Esther said. “All the family history has been collected in this room—most of the documents, anyway, journals, schoolwork, newspapers, letters; I haven't had a chance to go through it all. But everything's here . . . somewhere. More or less . . .” She opened a drawer in a side table and pulled out a small bundle, handed it to Gretchen. It was a pile of letters with ornate script, the envelopes of which Gretchen could barely read. They were tied up in a black ribbon.

“These were written by Fidelia.”

Gretchen was fascinated. Here at her fingertips was the entire history of her family. She touched the faded ink on the front of the first letter, then stared up at the picture of Fidelia.

“Thank you,” she said to Esther, and as if she were offering the woman a gift in exchange, she picked up her camera and took a picture of Esther sitting there beneath the portrait of Fidelia. That made Esther smile.

The house itself was one of the best subjects for a photo essay she could imagine. She leaned out the window near the monstrous rose thicket that grew alongside the house, and aimed her camera up the road at a little white house that looked like something from a fairy tale. Framed by
the window and accented by the rosebush, it would be a lovely picture.

“Who lives there?” Gretchen asked.

“Hawk,” she said, as if it were obvious and Gretchen already knew. “And his sister. I think you'll like them. Listen, sweets. I don't mean to rush you, but we have to get down to business here. For a long time your mother had been planning to go through this entire archive. She started some years ago but left abruptly before finishing it,” Esther said. “And frankly someone has to do it, and it might as well be the heiress apparent. We're hoping for some clues, for anything that could help.”

“She was
here
?” Gretchen asked. “She was . . . clues for what?” Things were beginning to seem even more surreal.

“Mona came here every year,” Esther said. “She was looking for—”

“When was the last time she came out here?” Gretchen interrupted.

Esther thought about it. “Five, six years ago maybe. She was taking pictures of the land. She must have told you about what happened here, right? What she was doing?”

“No.”

“
No?
” Now it was Esther's turn to look shocked, then simply exhausted. Her chin crumpled and she turned away.

“I know this is where she started thinking about
spirits,” Gretchen said quickly, not wanting the old woman to shut down. But honestly, what did Esther expect? Until yesterday Gretchen had only the vaguest notion that Esther even existed, or that the house was still in their family.

“She showed me a picture she thought had a ghost in it when I was a little kid,” Gretchen said. “Her brother's ghost, she said. Now that I've been shooting for a while I think it was probably a double exposure, or a mix-up at the processing place—it was from the seventies. . . .”

“Yes, yes, Piper,” Esther said. “He died in an accident. Accidents seem to be the number-one cause of death here, especially this time of year. This was something your mother was very keen on studying, and documenting.”

“Why?”

“Now listen to me, sweets,” Esther said. “We don't have too much time, and you have a lot to learn. Did your mom mention anything else about the house?”

Gretchen shook her head. “Just that her parents left it and never went back.” She was dying for Esther to go on—to find out anything that might give her the slightest hint of what could have happened to her mother or where she could be.

“Well, before all of that,” Esther said, “our relatives were abolitionists.”

“Wow, really?” Gretchen walked across the creaking
floor and sat in one of the old carved chairs. “I had no idea.”

Esther smiled, but there was something sad underneath it. “Your great-great-great-great-uncle James was a pastor of a church he built on this property. His brother was your great-great-great-great-grandfather—George—the guy in the picture. The church was a safe house on the Underground Railroad. Fidelia and James and George would hide people there and then help them settle in the north or get to Canada safely. James preached liberation theology—how Jesus wanted all men to be free and have no masters. He had one of the first fully integrated congregations in the country.”

All of this was very interesting, but Gretchen was impatient. She didn't see what it had to do with accidents or Mona going missing. And then that feeling she thought was gone came surging back. The feeling that maybe she would stumble upon the truth hidden in some everyday moment or conversation and be able to find her mother herself. Mona had stood in that very room, digging through these archives. Why, she wondered, had neither of her parents ever mentioned the extent of the Axton family's history in Mayville? Especially when it was so important to her mother—important enough to go there every year without telling a soul. As far as she knew it was a secret even from her father.