I nodded at her, reassuring her again. “It’s all right.”
She was afraid of something. They sometimes were, especially when it came to the bedroom. She didn’t want me to go upstairs and look. Sometimes, they were afraid of what I’d see.
It might be the birth certificate that revealed she wasn’t who she said she was.
Or the divorce decree from the abusive husband she’d fled at eighteen and never told her children—or her second husband—about.
It wasn’t just the women. The men had secrets, too. The letter from an old lover, dated twenty years after they swore they’d never see each other again. I’d once found an old photo, lovingly framed and hidden, of two men in the army, their arms flung over each other’s shoulders as they posed for the camera, both of them smiling and happy. Whatever that photo meant had died with both of them.
The sight of this woman on the stairs wasn’t a shock to me. All I felt was a weary kind of familiarity, the exhale of taking on another burden. I would remember this one, just as I remembered all the others I’d seen since childhood, the people no one else saw. Whatever secret this woman didn’t want spoken would stay unspoken with me. It was part of doing this job, of being here to see the dead when there were no other living people left to do so. It was what made me who I was, and I had paid the price for it.
“I won’t tell,” I told the woman.
She didn’t move. Maybe she didn’t believe me. I felt my pulse heavy in my neck, my temples, a blood rush. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again, she was gone.
—
It didn’t take me long to find the item the woman was worried about. It was in her dresser drawer, half-hidden beneath her jewelry. She had lived alone, not worried that someone she lived with would see her secrets. And she had wanted the photograph in easy reach.
It was of a baby, a few months old, fat and smiling, lying on a blanket. On the back of the black-and-white photo the wordThomaswas written in careful pencil. No last name, no date. No indication of who Thomas belonged to or what had happened to him.
I ran a finger over his little face and decided the woman had given him up for adoption. She was too young, and she’d given him away, said the story in my head. Thomas had been adopted by a nice young couple and had a great life now, with kids of his own. I couldn’t bear to think of any other story for him, so I didn’t.
I slid the photo into the back pocket of my jeans. When I turned around, I saw sitting in the middle of the bed, stark in the sunlight from the curtained window, the note with the phone number I’d left next to the old woman’s phone.
I hadn’t brought it upstairs, and I felt a surge of irritated anger instead of fear. The people I saw didn’t move things around, didn’t give me their bossy directives about my choices. What gave this woman the right? Who the hell did she think she was?
“I’m not going to do it,” I said aloud, my voice a rasp in the chilly silence.
But I did. As if the woman in the plum dress had scolded me, I crossed the room and snatched the note from the bedspread, picking up the bedside phone. “You can pay the long-distance charges, then,” I snapped, jabbing my finger into the rotary dial. “Serves you right.”
“Daylight Landscaping, can I help you?” A man’s deep voice answered the phone. “Henry speaking.”
“My name is Violet Esmie,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “I’m returning your call.”
“Right. Thanks for calling me back, Mrs. Esmie.”
Esmie was my birth name. I’d never taken Clay’s name when we married. I didn’t bother to correct him.
“What can I help you with?” I asked.
“Mrs. Esmie, I’m sorry to say this, but I have to terminate our contract.”
My throat constricted. “What? Why? I’ve been using your company for years.”
“Yes, and we appreciate your business. But unfortunately we won’t be going back to your property. We will refund a portion of your last payment and—”
“I don’t care about that. I care about why. Why are you doing this after all this time?”
Henry cleared his throat. “Mrs. Esmie, I’m going to assume you haven’t visited the property recently?”
I could have laughed at that, but it would have had no humor in it. None of us—not Dodie, Vail, myself, or our parents, who were now dead—had been to the Fell house in eighteen years. We wouldn’t sell it, we wouldn’t demolish it, and we wouldn’t go back. We’d just live with it weighing us down forever.
“No,” I managed. “Not recently.”
“My employees have concerns. They tell me…Well, they said they’ve seen some strange things. I wrote it off at first, because it was crazy, but then some of my guys threatened to quit if I sent them back, and I can’t afford that. So I went to the property myself, and I can’t write it off anymore.”
He sounded embarrassed. He’d assumed I’d scoff at him or disbelieve him. Instead, I said, “What did you see?”
