If you had ever told me that I would spend summer vacation in Fell, of all places, I would have thought you were crazy. But Vail had worked hard fixing the house up. He’d gotten rid of most of the old furniture, and he’d finally stripped the ugly wallpaper in the kitchen. It was almost nice there now. It helped that the ghosts seemed to be finally gone.
I had told Ethan about Ben, about the Whitten children. What we’d done. Ethan had paled, but he said he understood. For weeks after that, I expected to get no answer when I called him. I expected us to be over. Who would put up with that kind of madness?
But incredibly, he’d kept answering my calls and going on dates with me. He’d come to the house in the summer and seen it for himself. He said he understood me a lot better after he spent time in Fell.
He also said he had a cousin who was in an expensive rehab and an uncle with a gambling problem, so ours wasn’t the only family with secrets.
“Are we done?” I asked Violet. “I have to go see my boyfriend and have some actual fun. You should try it sometime.”
“I have fun,” Violet said.
“No one in Vermont,” I declared, “has fun.”
“God, you’re such a snob,” my sister shot back. “Goodbye, Dodie.”
I grabbed my bag and ducked into the ladies’ room. I changed into jeans, sneakers, and a thrifted sweater with a pattern of Queen ofHearts playing cards. I believed it was incredibly fashionable, and no one could tell me otherwise.
I rubbed off my red lipstick and tied back my hair. I was in a hurry now. Ethan was waiting. New York was waiting.
By the time I walked out the front door and onto the street, I was smiling.
45
Violet
Warren, Vermont
I hung up the phone on my office desk harder than necessary. God, my sister was annoying.
There was no one in the empty office to hear it. I only had one employee, and I had sent her home at five. I had stayed later, updating the schedule book and calling contractors, but now I was officially finished for the day. I had turned on the answering machine. Tomorrow’s appointments were set. I could go home.
But there was no one at home in my small chilly apartment, so I had called Dodie about Christmas instead. Christmas, which was three months away.
I had become a worrier, a planner. When had that happened?
I sighed out a breath and stood up, listening to the pops in my shoulders and back as I stretched. Since I had moved, become a business owner, and become—as much as possible—an actual mother. That was probably when.
After we killed Sister—I still loved hearing that phrase, andrepeated it often in my head—I had gone back to Long Island. I had assessed how much money I still had from Mom and Dad. Then I had made Tess, my old employer, an offer to buy her business.
She said no. She wasn’t ready to retire, she said. Also, she added, my plan was guaranteed to fail, because no one would hire “a company run by a former mental patient.”
So I left Long Island—I hated it there anyway—and moved to Vermont. I started my own estate cleaning business there, one that was most certainly run by a former mental patient. For good measure, I hired as cleaners other former mental patients, along with ex-cons and people out of rehab. Because, apparently, that’s how petty I can be.
It worked just fine. Mental patients and ex-cons are glad to get work, and they don’t ask for much. Some of them flaked, others tried to rob me or screw me over, but not as many as you might think. People who aren’t mental patients screw each other over on a regular basis anyway, so why not give someone a chance? It gave me some satisfaction to hire people no one else wanted. The work wasn’t too hard, and the customers were dead, so they didn’t notice if you showed up late or hungover every once in a while. They also didn’t notice if you pocketed a few things from their house. I didn’t ask.
As for customers, there were enough. People die everywhere.
It worked for me. I made money, and I didn’t have to clean the houses myself anymore. I didn’t have to find myself face-to-face with the dead quite as often. I’d had enough of the dead to last me a long time.
Why Vermont? There were a lot of reasons. It was a fresh start. It was a few hours’ drive to Fell to visit Vail. It was a long bus trip for Lisette to visit, but my adventurous daughter liked long bus trips. The fallout with Clay after the Fell incident was nasty, but Lisette was fifteen and headstrong, and she wore Clay down to get moretime with me. I got her once a month and for three weeks in the summer, and in a few years, she’d be an adult. She was already looking at colleges in Vermont.
Aside from all of that, it was nice here. Harsh winters were fine with me, as was the lack of population. I still had my ability to see the dead, but I didn’t think about it as often as I used to. I would never think that my ability had gone away, but it was calmer here, in the middle of nowhere.
The only exception was when I’d driven through a small town called Barrons on my way somewhere else. In Barrons, I had gripped the wheel and accelerated past the limit as icy dread seized my bloodstream. I didn’t look right or left, not wanting to know who—what—I might see out the window. I didn’t calm down until Barrons had vanished behind me. I would never go back there.
Now I put on my flannel coat and picked up my desk phone again. Dusk had settled outside the window of the two-room office I rented in downtown Warren. An eye doctor rented the office next to me, and a psychic had the space downstairs, with an entrance to the street. I truly hoped, for her own sake, that she was a phony.
I dialed the other reason for Warren, Vermont. He picked up right away.
