Vail
Dad left first. Of course he did. After Ben disappeared, Dad disengaged from us—as if he’d ever been much engaged in the first place—and one day, barely three months later, he was gone. If there was a note or a goodbye, I didn’t remember it. I didn’t remember any of us grieving him, even Mom. We were too busy grieving Ben.
Eventually, we got a postcard from Spain. I remembered that. That fucker. I’d hate him forever, and I’d die proud of it. There are times when blood bonds are meaningless, when holding on to your hate is an achievement to boast of. To my last breath, I’d never forgive him for being so shallow, so selfish, for walking away from us. I was utterly incurious about what his own pain or struggle might have been. It didn’t matter. Long before he was dead—dissipated into noxious vapor somewhere in Europe—my father was dead to me.
I’m very good at holding on to things. It’s one of my talents.
My throat tried to close as I looked at my little sister, standing here in this dusty attic with me. Tendrils of her dark hair had escaped from her ponytail and trailed around her delicate face. She looked fragile in the beams of light from the grimy window. The sightmade me angry at our father all over again, made me want to spit in his grave, if he had one. It was one of those random, unreasoning bubbles of rage that surfaced at unlikely moments, aimed at someone so long dead that they would never know. If Dad had failed me, he had also failed Dodie, who needed a father more than I did and should have had one. He had failed all of us.
Dodie blew out a breath, aiming it upward to blow the hair from her eyes.
“Bloody ’ell,” she said in a terrible affected English accent. “It’s a mess, guvnah. Ain’t it?”
Dodie only made jokes like that when she was wearing thin. Goofy jokes and silly accents were her tornado warning. When she was a girl, this kind of thing preceded tears or a sinking into dark apathy. Sometimes one after the other. Dodie was the moodiest of us, which was saying something, and this day—this entire task—was draining her faster than it was draining me. Especially with what we were looking at now, in the attic.
My hands opened and closed at my sides, and I took a breath. Who had been looking after Dodie all this time? No one.
I’d pulled down the attic door, unfolding the steps attached to it. Dodie had changed into jeans and a T-shirt, the hem of which she’d tied at the waist. We’d climbed up, and now all I wanted was to somehow get Dodie back down those steps before she became untethered and floated away.
“I forgot,” Dodie said softly, using her normal voice now. “I forgot that we put all of his toys up here.”
I’d forgotten, too, and even now, the memory was too hard to fully recall. Ben was a playful kid, and he’d loved games—he had puzzles, board games he made up the rules to, blocks, toy soldiers, coloring books, watercolor painting kits. In theory, he was supposed to keep all of his toys in his room, but in reality, he’d left them everywhere in the house. You’d wake up haunted by harrowing dreams, and thenyou’d nearly trip over a paint-by-numbers set and a drawing in which Ben had swapped all the colors around.
After he disappeared, his toys were still everywhere.Everywhere. As the days dragged on, turning into weeks, it became agony. Cleaning up Ben’s toys meant we knew he was truly gone. Not cleaning them up meant we believed he would be back to play with them again. Both options were torture.
Eventually, we’d boxed them up and put them in the attic. Whose idea was it? Was our father gone by then? I had a numb memory of dismantling a wooden train set and putting it in a box. We’d disposed of Ben’s other belongings—the small bed from his bedroom, his clothes. But we hadn’t had the heart to get rid of his toys, so we had moved them up here.
The train set was here in the attic, out of the box now and set up in a tidy oval. The train sat on its track, waiting. Everything else was out of the boxes, too—puzzles and stuffed animals and coloring books. Even the old dolls passed down from Violet’s and Dodie’s childhoods, which Ben had played with. Everything was scattered and set up, as if a child played up here every day.
The thought that crossed my mind at the sight was,Maybe someone is playing a trick on us.I’d seen deception in VUFOS. Someone could have broken into this house, set everything up to make it look like Ben was here. There was plenty of time to do it and no one to catch them.
None of us had seen our brother. The landscapers could either be in on it or paid off. One phone call, and the three Esmie siblings showed up, no questions asked.
I’d noticed myself that the house wasn’t dusty enough. But why would someone call us back here like this?
The people who faked abductions for VUFOS usually wanted attention, which was tied to money. Some wanted one more than the other; some wanted both equally. Some people just wanted to feel important aboutsomething, even if it was for a crazy thing that notmany people cared about. Getting the attention of a handful of UFO investigators was more attention than they’d ever had in their life.
There was no one at our old house looking for our attention or our money, at least not yet. My mind went over the angles, and then I looked at Dodie again. Her breathing had gone shallow. Maybe someone just wanted us to feel that deep, bloody slice of pain.
“Go back downstairs,” I said, my voice calm.
“He was here,” she said in reply, her gaze fixed on something. I followed it and saw that a small rubber ball was lazily rolling into the corner, losing momentum as if someone had abandoned it a moment ago. It made no sound.
A trick,I thought. There had to be a way. If someone had years without interruption, they could use magnets, strings, traps to fool us. I hadn’t heard noises from the attic since I’d been here, and you couldn’t lower the steps and leave without making a lot of noise. My gaze shot to the window, which was dusty and shut, the only view out of it of the trees that Dodie and I had walked through this morning. Had this been set up while we were out of the house, searching the back property? Or before we arrived?
Why do it at all?
We had money, all three of us—plenty of it now. Mom came from money, and Dad hadn’t had enough access to it to waste it all away. Mom’s money had bought this house when they first married. Mom’s money had gone into a trust fund for each of us that we got when we turned eighteen. It was enough that I could do unpaid work for VUFOS and Dodie could get occasional modeling gigs and Violet could clean houses, and we didn’t have to worry where the rent came from. We’d lived frugally for the first years, making the trust funds last until Mom finally died, when we got the rest of it.
Money could motivate most people to do just about anything. But if this was a trick to get money, it was an elaborate one. I couldn’t see the point of it, at least not yet.
I looked at Dodie again. There was no part of my little sister that believed this was a trick. No part at all.
“Go back downstairs,” I said again, more gently.
She shook her head. “Don’t clean it up, Vail.” Her tone was arguing, as if I’d suggested it. “Don’t take pictures. We’ll wait for Violet to get back. She’ll know what to do. She’ll—”
“Shh.” I pressed my fingertips to her elbow. “Go downstairs.”
