For the first time, Vail looked at me, and my brother’s gaze met mine. I swallowed. The last time I’d seen Vail was three years ago, when he’d briefly been in Long Island on one of his investigations. I met him at a café, where we’d had coffee together mostly in silence. I remembered thinking how he’d filled out since his diving days, how he looked nothing like a boy anymore because he was a man. It had struck me the way changes do when you haven’t seen someone in a while.
Later that day, long after he was gone again, it had also struck me that that one hour of near silence with Vail had felt more like a conversation than any real conversation I’d had in years.
I wondered if I looked different to him now than I had then. I probably did. My surviving little brother was all bone and muscle and healthy fat, beautiful. The trimmed beard made him look even more mature. He was in his prime physically, but he still had the shadowed gaze he’d had since he was a little boy.
We exchanged a wordless look, the kind I hadn’t known since the last time I saw him, and then he lifted the magazine he’d been reading to show me. He had picked it up from a pile on a table. It hadRichard Nixon on the front as the issue’s current news. “This is what we’re dealing with,” he said bluntly. “This house is fucked.”
I nodded, rubbing my damp palms on the thighs of my jeans. “I agree. Can we do this drunk, do you think?”
“Can we, please?” Dodie asked.
But Vail shook his head, and I knew he was right. I was done with my moping in wine. We were here, in this hell house, for Ben. We hadn’t spoken his name yet, but it echoed around the room anyway. We couldn’t disrespect our little brother by being drunk for whatever this was.
“We’re white-knuckling it,” my brother declared. “Let the fun begin.”
5
Vail
The first thing I did when I arrived at the house, alone, was take the dust cloths off the furniture. The second thing I did was get a phone line hooked up. This had required a trip downtown to the offices of the phone company to get our long-defunct line activated. I had leaned toward the woman behind the counter, held her gaze, and given her twenty dollars. Through a haze of blushes, she’d promised an express hookup, with the bill to come to our address. I didn’t even have to offer her a date. I thanked her and didn’t bother to tell her that the bills would go in the trash.
I didn’t need the phone line myself. I never talked to anyone. But Violet had a daughter, and she’d need to be able to reach her.
By the time Dodie arrived a day later—she’d apparently bailed on a photo shoot—I had already scouted the surrounding houses. My memories of this neighborhood weren’t good—long days of unsupervised boredom, my parents shouting at each other, Ben disappearing. It was as fun as growing up in a Siberian gulag, and my sisters and I were as well-adjusted as could be expected as a result. I didn’t have hopes that the place had improved.
To the left of our house, the old lady who had lived there when we were kids was gone, replaced by a family named Chatham, according to the mail I lifted from the mailbox next to their front door. No one was home, but from what I could see through the windows and based on the bike in front of the garage, there were two parents and a kid of about ten. This was surprising, because there hadn’t been any children in the neighborhood when we were kids, as if childhood fun was against the law here. Whoever this kid was, he or she was probably lonely. In other news, the Chathams subscribed toNewsweekand got the JCPenney catalog in the mail. Nothing interesting there.
I went across the street next. The house here had been empty for as long as I could remember. It was aging back then, the windows blank-eyed with dust and dirt, the weeds overgrown. A wooden front porch had rotted away year after year as I grew up, a marker of time going by.
A place like that would usually be a magnet for neighborhood mischief—but there were no kids in our neighborhood except for us three. My sisters could not have been less interested. I had probably thrown a bottle at the house once or twice, but the place looked like a corpse, and the game wasn’t much fun. I never asked why no one lived there. In Fell, people left their homes and never came back. Not much in this town had a tidy explanation.
But someone had been to this house in the last eighteen years. There was scaffolding on part of the deconstructed roof, and the lawn was churned into fossilized piles of soil, old rainwater filling the ruts left by construction vehicles. The rotted porch was torn out, and fresh lumber had been dropped on the lawn, then left to rot in turn. Three crushed, faded Coke cans sat in a pile of gravel. Someone had started a renovation—months, maybe years ago—and then abandoned it.
As I stared at the scene, I felt awake, alert, as if the phone call about Ben had pulled me out of darkness and thrust me under abright light. Had someone bought the old, abandoned house from my childhood? Who was it? Why had they stopped their renovation so suddenly that they hadn’t cleaned up their garbage or carted the lumber away? I’d find those answers, and soon. I’d done dozens of investigations for VUFOS, and I hadn’t always followed their rule book. When it came to Ben, there was no rule book.
The house to the right of ours had belonged to the Thornhills when we were growing up, and apparently it still did. In my memory, they were a couple in their forties with no kids, who traveled a lot because Mr. Thornhill was some kind of—what—traveling speaker? Lecturer? The memory wouldn’t come. I could only remember that Mr. Thornhill had round-framed glasses, and Mom had always felt sorry for them because they had no children, even though Mom didn’t care about her own. Nothing else surfaced in my mind.
The Thornhills would be in their sixties now, and not only were they not home, their mail was piled on their doorstep. The geraniums in the pot next to the front door were black and sodden. I picked up the mail and flipped through it, then got distracted when I noticed the welcome mat. On impulse I lifted the mat, looking for a key.
There wasn’t one. But a hunch trickled down my spine, and I turned to the long-dead geranium, lifting the rotting pot. Beneath it was a house key, sitting tarnished on the cement.
I put the key in my pocket and put the pot back down. Then I picked up the stack of mail and went home. The wind had picked up, and clouds were chuffing high in the sky, crisscrossing the sun. No cars drove by, and nothing moved. As I approached our house, a raven alighted on the roof, flapping its dark wings and making a throaty sound. Then it went silent.
—
It was habit that we’d take our childhood rooms, so I climbed the stairs and headed toward mine. My boots were loud on the floorboards.Dodie had graciously allowed me to carry her luggage upstairs, but when I offered, Violet told me to go fuck myself. I heard her banging her suitcase through the front door, cursing. Dodie said something I couldn’t hear that was probably scathing, and Violet sighed heavily.
The upstairs hall was dim and stuffy. The walls were blank—bare of photos, framed memories, or art. We’d always lived as if we rented this place, even though we owned it. My bedroom door was the first at the top of the landing. Next to me was Ben’s bedroom, which had been an “office” for our father—who never did any work—and a storage space. We’d cleaned it out when Ben came, and after he’d gone, the room had become disused again. Beyond Ben’s room were Violet’s, then Dodie’s, and our parents’ master bedroom at the end of the hall.
I opened the door of my childhood room. In here was a twin bed with a faded red blanket—my feet hung off the edge when I slept in it—and a dresser with chipped navy blue paint. Next to the window was a bookshelf, empty of books, that was leaning distinctly to the left after all this time. My suitcase was against the other wall, next to the stacked file boxes that contained my VUFOS files, taped shut for the trip from Montana.
The room was shoved in the back corner of the second floor, which gave it an odd shape and a slanted ceiling. When I was ten years old and five feet tall, I’d continually banged my head on that ceiling. Now I was thirty-four, over six feet, and eighty pounds heavier. I had no hope of getting out of this without a concussion.
I dropped onto the bed, making it creak. My boots left tracks in the dust on the floorboards. We’d never had a maid service clean the inside of the house, so there was dust everywhere, settled into the fabric of the dust cloths I’d pulled from the furniture. But as I sat with my hands dangling between my knees, I stared at the disturbed dust on the floor, thinking.
Downstairs, Violet was saying something about the phone line.Dodie waited too long, then asked in a stilted tone, “How is Lisette?” She obviously had no interest in the answer. She might have needed to recall Lisette’s name. We Esmies were bad with children. Violet was a bad mother, and Dodie and I would never have children at all. We’d used up all our skill with children on Ben.
I looked down at the scuffs on the floor. When I’d walked into this house alone two days ago, my first thought had been:It isn’t as dusty as I thought it would be.
