What the Dead Want (9 page)

G
RETCHEN WOKE FROM A TROUBLED SLEEP
STARTLED BY
her surroundings, dreams of her mother just beyond her mind's grasp. Hope was curled up at the other end of the couch breathing easily. Hawk was asleep reclining in the big comfy chair, guitar by his side.

As she lay there in the pale light of morning, the events of the night before rose up, a jumble of images and emotions. Hope had fallen asleep first, and she and Hawk had stayed up. Sometime before she'd dropped off to sleep herself, Hawk had told her about going to Shadow Grove when he was a child. Or maybe she had dreamed that. They had both been drowsy and she'd felt like they were
babbling in the end. Maybe she was just remembering Esther talking about Shadow Grove.

He'd said something about learning to see a person's spirit radiating out around them, and a class he took in clairaudience?
Hearing
spirits? Could that be true? It was like the things her mother's friends from the East Village used to talk about, but something in Hawk seemed so stable and put together. He did not strike her as someone who believed in the supernatural simply because he wanted to. He'd had no choice. And now, Gretchen realized, neither did she.

Her mother, her aunt, the journal she'd found from her great-great-great-great-grandmother. How many generations of women in her family had been grappling with the land's history, trying to excise its ghosts? And now she was the last one. There was no way she was leaving here. Not until she knew what had really happened.

She got up and opened her suitcase and looked for something suitable to wear. What had she been thinking, to pack so many vintage slips and cocktail dresses? While sifting through her clothes she found something she knew she hadn't packed; she shuddered at the feel of it and thrust it away. It was a filthy graying length of rope, the color of dust. She started trembling, trying to think of any way a ratty rope could have fallen into her suitcase, but as she was
looking at it, it disintegrated like a cobweb.

She clamped a hand over her mouth and shut her eyes. The rope felt like a threat, like someone had been following her. She shook her head, hoping to get rid of the image. There was no way she had just seen what she had seen. She must be overtired, her eyes playing tricks on her.

Thoughts that didn't feel quite like her own drifted into her head, and she suddenly felt like she had a million things to get done at once.
That's nothing, that rope
, she thought, laughing bitterly to herself, feeling her nerves fraying.
Nothing
.

Gretchen picked out a pair of black leggings and a thin tank top and stood in a corner of the living room changing into them. Then she put her Doc Martens back on and headed quietly out the door.

The meadow was calm and beautiful, insects buzzing above the heads of goldenrod and chicory. There was no hint of the rushing crowds of last night, not a blade of grass was trampled or scorched. The Axton mansion, listing slightly to the side in its dilapidated grace, seemed to hunch behind the massive tangle of roses that crawled up its face.

In the late morning light, the house seemed old and abandoned, but not dangerous. The air smelled of roses
and Gretchen walked back up the creaking porch stairs. She had the sense of the entire house taking a breath as she walked into the parlor. Inside she could hear the hum of insects, but no scamper of feet or clomping of hooves.

She walked directly upstairs to the library. The sound of her boots on the old wood echoed loudly, and then suddenly she felt something sharp and hard strike her shoulder, then a crash and glass splintering all around at her feet. One of the old portraits had come loose and fallen. The pain seared and throbbed where the pointed wooden edge had gouged her skin. She put her hand on her shoulder and felt the warm trickle of blood. Another few inches and the corner would have struck the center of her head. She rushed up the stairs, kicking the glass aside and crunching over it.

The library door was open and the great mottled mirror stood across from it, the reflection creating the illusion of another hallway that led to another room; she glanced at it and saw the reflection of the cat as it walked out of the library—but when she turned away from the mirror and looked down, there was no cat.

Gretchen steeled herself and went into the library, shutting the door. The same smell of vintage shops and mold greeted her. She went to work right away, opening the closet, crouching beneath the dresses, and pulling out
stacks of leather-bound journals, not bothering to look at each of them but setting them aside to take with her. She did not want to stay long in the house, but found herself frozen in front of the portrait of Fidelia, studying her face. The journal she had read—and now the few letters she'd read since arriving—revealed someone brave and trapped. Gretchen had never considered how women lived before—always took it for granted, like they were so stupid to have wanted to have kids so young, or they were so stupid to always wait on their husbands, to spend their lives doing crafts. Fidelia's writing was the first she realized those kinds of lives were not chosen. The first she fully felt how trapped women had been.

Next she looked beneath the bed, sliding out several ancient hatboxes and shoe boxes. One was filled with onion-skin paper cut into patterns for dresses—doll dresses, or maybe for little children. She shoved it aside and opened another. In this she found a collection of drawings on stiff white paper, and what looked like saved school lessons. Judging by the handwriting the artists and authors of these works couldn't have been more than seven years old. The drawing was of a house, the Axton mansion, and people riding horses, carrying torches.

There was also a square of fabric on which someone was practicing needlepoint. A circle of roses in colored
thread, and inside the circle it read:
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

A drawer in the side table was full of old bone and shell hair clips, and one of them, which looked like it was made of ivory, she recognized from the portrait of Fidelia. She held it, cool and smooth in her hand like something natural and precious, and brutally obtained.

A cedar chest in a corner of the room held handmade quilts and more needlepoint. So many traditional women's crafts, Gretchen thought. She hadn't the slightest idea how to sew or quilt or make lace or needlepoint. With the volume of these beautiful handworks it seemed her ancestors must have busied themselves day and night with it. The number of stitches in each quilt seemed like the work of someone obsessively occupying themselves, almost like a nervous habit. And for the first time she didn't see it as magnificent handwork—but as the work of someone denied a life outside the home, and slowly losing her mind.

She set all these things aside apart from the journals, a box of photographs, and a box of letters, which she put into a canvas bag she found hanging off the bedpost. She slipped the hair clip in as well and then slung it over her shoulder, took a deep breath, and opened the door, hoping nothing was about to smash down upon her.

A cool wind began to blow through the curtains and
she actually heard the entire house creak, like something that was about to break. She looked up at her reflection. It was worse than she'd thought. Her face was slightly swollen from crying the night before, her hair a tangled mass; she was caught off guard by her own expression—determined but on edge. She looked older, taller even, more like her mother than ever before.

Setting the bag down for a moment, she took out the hair clip and then pulled her hair back away from her face, slid the ivory clip in to hold her mass of wavy hair tight, and felt herself slipping though time. A whole world of Axton women were smiling with her. And she felt stronger than she ever had. Fidelia lost her life and her daughter before she ever gained an education. But she had known what was right, and had worked for it. Gretchen was the living daughter of a professional, well-educated, and respected woman. Fidelia's bravery had started all that.

She bounded down the stairs, through the house, and out into the fresh air. There was no breeze outside. Tiny insects hovering above the overgrown lawn, the haze of heat and the smell of sweet grass. She kept her back to the house as she walked and remembered what Esther had said about staying there, about how “they” would take over the house once they realized she was gone.

Back at the Greens' house Hawk was sitting on the
porch drinking a cup of coffee and eating toast.

“What happened to your arm?” he asked.

“A picture fell off the wall over at Esther's house. The corner hit me.”

“Let's get it cleaned up.”

“I'm fine,” she said, then set the bag of journals and artifacts down, and sat beside him. He handed her a piece of toast, then went inside and came back out with another cup of coffee and gave it to her. He was still wearing his pajama pants but had put on a shirt. The fact that he seemed unaware of how beautiful he was amazed Gretchen.

At Gramercy Arts she was used to being around kids who wanted to be models or actors or rock stars. And they had a way of carrying themselves—like they knew someone was always looking at them. A kind of self-consciousness that made them somehow ugly even though they had perfect skin and teeth and hair and beautiful bodies beneath beautiful clothes. They expected the world to provide everything for them. Hawk was just himself, not trying to have an effect on anyone. Both he and his sister seemed to be looking out at the world, not concerned with what people might be thinking of them.

“We thought you left,” Hawk said.

“I'm not leaving,” she said. “I can't.”

He looked at her shoulder again. “You really should
put something on that, don't want it to get infected.”

“In a minute,” she said. She took out one of Fidelia's journals and leafed through it.

“If there's anything else we need from the house we can go get it in the car,” he said “We should probably do that soon.”

“What car?” she asked.

“
Your
car now, I guess,” he said sadly. “I'm assuming Esther was planning on giving it to you along with the house, because she had Hope tune it up.”

“Hope fixes cars?” She had thought of Hope as more of a brainy type.

“Well, all kinds of engines, but yeah, cars too. Our dad loved big projects and they used to rebuild cars together. Esther wanted to make sure the thing was in good shape for when you got here, so I'm assuming it's yours now. Do you know how to drive?”

“I grew up in Manhattan,” she said.

“Oh, I didn't mean to imply that you di—”

“Of
course
I can't
drive,” she said, and they started laughing. “Who drives cars?”

“Me,” Hope said from behind the screen door, where she'd been standing. “I'm headed out to the barn now, you wanna come?”

“Soon as I put this somewhere safe,” Gretchen said.

She took her bag of letters and journals and photographs inside and set them on the dining room table. She was eager to see the car she'd inherited, though after inheriting a “mansion” her expectations for these kinds of things had taken a turn for the depressingly realistic.

She set the materials out in separate piles for them to look at later, but stopped when she saw another letter from Fidelia Moore, addressed to James Axton. She paused to open it.

Dear James,

George is a fantastic courier! He brought your letter, the books, and also a gallon of maple syrup that he picked up at Ellis's on the way.

We sat on the porch for a good hour talking—under the reluctantly approving eye of my mother. Afterward of course she had to remind me that George Axton will be inheriting all the land from the river to the wood, as well as Axton Cotton, and that you—James Axton—will be taking a vow of poverty. They are so eager, my family, to escape our history and unlucky lot in life, as if it is not written all over us. Again my mother told me to stay away from the Greens, can you believe this? Each time they say it I wonder how ignorant she thinks I am, and what she thinks I'll find that I can't already see.

Gretchen raised her eyebrows reading this. She wanted to call Hawk and Hope into the house and show it to them, ask them if they could tell her what it all meant, but she kept reading.

They think only about who I will marry. Not who I will be.

Thank you for your sympathy and advice concerning my (now thwarted) education. I have taken on some sewing work for pay, as that seems to be the only thing my parents will allow, and have begun a secret savings. Within a year I may well be able to afford the first tuition payment on my own. And thank you for sending the latest issue of the N
ORTH
S
TAR
. I take so much inspiration from the news and essays therein, but I have found another forbidden source. Valerie Green—whose family receives the paper weekly. She also does sewing work, and cares for children—though she has far less free time than I. She is quite interesting and very dedicated to reading. He father is a musician and her mother a seamstress. The idea that my parents would tell me to stay away from them makes my blood boil, she and I have more in common than anyone I've ever known in town.