“Candace here thinks my mother has some of the missing diary pages of Sara Harrison Shea,” Ruthie said. “The written instructions for how to bring the dead back to life.”
Katherine replaced the charged batteries and turned the camera on. The others gathered around as she navigated the menu and pulled up photos onto the camera’s display screen.
“We’re in luck,” she said. “No one’s deleted them.”
She clicked quickly through the saved photos. There were a series of her sitting on Gary’s motorcycle, ones taken on their weekend trip to the Adirondacks two weeks before he was killed. She had on jeans and a leather jacket, her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and she looked so happy, smiling at Gary and his camera. She’d held on to the handlebars and pretended to be riding with the wind in her face, singing “Born to Be Wild.” Gary had laughed and said, “Be careful. You know I have a thing for biker chicks.”
There was one of her in front of the cabin they’d stayed in, and another beside a little roadside shop they’d stopped at, where Gary had bought the box of photos and papers—and the little bone ringhe’d given her—for seven dollars.ANTIQUES AND ODDITIES, said the sign.
To new beginnings.
Katherine arrowed through to the next pictures: shadowy photos of pages of tiny, neat cursive.
“What’s this?” she asked out loud.
Ruthie squinted down at the camera. “It’s a diary entry, I think. Wait, I can zoom in. Look, there’s a date: January 31, 1908.”
Katherine scanned the first page:
There are doorways, gates, between this world and the world of the spirits. One of these doorways is right here in West Hall.
“Oh my God,” Ruthie said, leaning in for a closer look. “I think it’s one of the missing diary pages!”
Katherine arrowed through to the next photo. “It’s a map of some kind,” she said. Crudely drawn, it showed a house, fields, and a path through the woods that wound up a hill and to the Devil’s Hand. All around the Devil’s Hand was tiny, illegible script. Below, taking up the bottom half of the paper, was another drawing: a network of lines and circles that could have depicted anything—a waterway or paths, perhaps? This, too, was marked with small, impossible-to-read notations.
“Let me see,” Candace said, grabbing the camera from her. “It’s the map showing the way to the portal! It has to be. Can you make it bigger?”
Katherine shook her head. “That’s as big as it gets on the camera. If you have a computer, we could enlarge it, even print things out.”
“We don’t have a computer,” Fawn reported. “Mom doesn’t believe in them.”
“JesusChrist. Of course she doesn’t,” Candace muttered. She squinted at the display. “I can’t make out the writing,” Candace said, “but it looks like the portal is up at the Devil’s Hand. But what’s this at the bottom?”
“Some kind of blowup or detail of where the actual portal is, maybe?” Ruthie suggested.
“What other pictures are on here?”
Katherine showed her the button that advanced the pictures.
“Looks like more diary pages,” Candace said, squinting down at the screen. “Look at this! There’s even a picture of the original letter Auntie wrote Sara about the sleepers. But where’d Gary find them?”
“May I?” Katherine asked, taking the camera back. She scanned through the photos. The little black metal box and tintypes were in the background of some of the pictures Gary had taken of the journal entries.
“Two weeks before he was killed, Gary bought a box of old papers and photos at an antique store in the Adirondacks. He collected old photos—he was kind of obsessed with them. I guess it just so happened that pages of the diary were mixed in with the photos he bought that weekend.”
“And you never saw them? He never mentioned it?” Ruthie asked.
“No,” Katherine said, her mind spinning. “But he started to act odd. Like he was keeping some kind of secret. He was out of the house a lot and had lame excuses for where he’d been. I think…” Her voice broke off. “We had a son. Austin. He died two years ago. He was six.”
Her hands shook. She held the camera, Gary’s camera, tighter.
She remembered Gary holding her while she wept one night, saying, “I’d do anything to have him back. Sell my soul, make a deal with the Devil, but we aren’t given chances like that, Katherine. It’s not the way the world works.”
But what if he was wrong?
Katherine imagined it, Gary discovering these pages, probably thinking they were pure bullshit at first. But then, as he got more deeply into it and did research on Sara Harrison Shea, maybe he started to wonder,What if…?
That’s what brought him to Vermont. The idea, the hope, that maybe, just maybe, there was a way to bring Austin back.
