I shook my head, though she couldn’t see me. “I don’t need a lawyer.” Lisette was fourteen, and the custody battle had been over long ago. I’d lost. Lisette visited me less and less lately, but whether that was her decision or Clay’s, I didn’t know.
“I’ll help you pay for it,” Tess said, because she was a good person, and we’d been friends for years. She also thought I needed money, which I didn’t.
“There’s no point,” I said. “He’d just use my past against me, like he always does. You’d waste your money. Lisette will be an adult in a few years anyway.”
“I don’t care what Clay says. She isn’t better off growing up away from you.”
That was debatable. Even I admitted that. But I said, “I appreciate the vote of confidence. I really do.”
“Find yourself another man, Vi. Get out there. A woman who looks like you—jeez. If I was single and had your legs, no man on Long Island would be safe.”
I ignored that. Any man who knew exactly how damaged I was would run screaming. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, a weird one. I got a call from a man who was looking foryou. He said he was from Daylight Landscaping, in Fell, and he was calling about the house.”
Shock sent heat up the back of my neck and made my vision blur.
“Violet?” Tess asked on the other end of the line.
I braced my palm against the Formica countertop and closed my eyes. The landscapers had been hired years ago, and there had never been a problem. Not once.
Something was very wrong.
“Violet?” Tess sounded alarmed.
“I’m here.” I cleared my throat, tried to sound even a little bit normal. “They called you?”
“He said you weren’t answering your home line, and the answering machine didn’t pick up, so he wasn’t sure he had the right number. You’d left him the office number in case of an emergency, so he called here.”
There couldn’t be an emergency, not a real one. There was no one living at the Fell house. Unless the place had burned down. The thought gave me a jolt of panic. “What did he want?”
“You have a house upstate?” Tess’s tone was curious, even a little suspicious. She’d seen me for years as a down-and-out former mental patient, not a person who owned property. Property big enough to need landscapers, no less.
“It’s…my parents’ old place,” I explained lamely. “No one lives there. The landscapers keep it up.”
“Huh.” There was an unpleasant tone in Tess’s voice. “You’re full of surprises, Violet.”
Her meaning was clear. Tess thought I had confided in her, told her everything, and she didn’t like that I hadn’t. Because she knew I’d spent time in a mental hospital, because I’d taken a job with her, she thought she knew the important things about me. But she didn’t, and now she was catching on.
There went another friendship. I’d add it to the pile.
I fumbled around next to the old woman’s phone and found a pen and a pad of paper for taking messages. “Give me the number,” I said.
She recited the number, which was long-distance. I scribbled on the pad, then hung up with Tess. I left the pad and pen where they were and walked out the door to the small back deck, trying to gather my scrambling thoughts.
I wasn’t going to call. The last thing I wanted to do was call. Whatever was on the other end of the line was bad—I already knew that. The landscaper wasn’t calling with an idle question or a problem with an unpaid bill. I felt a sinister tug, like on a long-slack fishing line. The house in Fell was waking up, pulling on its strings. I wasn’t going to answer.
My course of action decided, I went back into the house. I was annoyed that the call had come to me instead of to Dodie or Vail, that I was the one who had to deal with these things. Dodie was in New York, modeling for shampoo ads, and she was never home at her tiny apartment to take a phone call. And Vail? Our brother, the middle child, was in a cabin in the woods somewhere in Montana. He called me from a different number every year, and I’d had to track down one of his ex-girlfriends to get his latest number, which he might have changed again. Vail was extraordinarily good at disappearing when things got hard.
I would start on the kitchen of this dead woman’s house and forget about all of it. I picked up my rubber gloves from the kitchen counter, turned, and froze.
A woman stood on the stairs, her hand on the railing. She wore a plum-colored dress from the thirties, and her dark hair was pulled back from her face in a classic style. When our eyes met, a chill of cold air whispered over my skin.
She didn’t speak. In all the years I’d been seeing them, they’d never spoken.
“Okay,” I said to her when I had found my voice. “I understand.”
The woman turned and glanced behind her, up the stairs. Her free hand worried the fabric of her skirt, twisting it. She turned back to me.
