“The Chathams, on the other side from the Thornhills,” Dodie said. “I wandered over there and knocked on their door to say hello. I gave them my most charming version of myself. There are two parents in their thirties and a daughter of around nine or ten. The daughter has an unflattering short haircut and is named Terri. The mother is a receptionist in a dentist’s office and the father is a lawyer. They moved here for his job. They’ve been in town for eight months. They don’t know where the Thornhills went. They weren’t very friendly. They seemed a little spooked.”
“If you’re not spooked in our neighborhood,” Vail said, “then there’s something wrong with you.”
We contemplated that for a moment. Maybe the neighbors had seen a little boy at our house, or lights, or something else. Maybe they knew the reason the Thornhills had left so quickly. Or maybe they had just looked around at our dead street and our weird town. Maybe they had opened a Fell newspaper, read about hanged priests and poltergeists and Cathy Caldwell, and wondered what they had done.
“What did you tell them about us?” Vail asked Dodie.
“That we grew up in this house and we’ve come back to clean out our parents’ things,” Dodie replied. “I told them we’re going to decide what to do with the house, whether to sell it or not.”
“That sounds so normal,” I said. “Maybe we should do that.”
Vail’s voice was icy. “We’re not selling that house.”
I nodded. Ben was in the house somewhere, so the house was ours forever. “But the clearing-out part. We don’t have to sell, but do we have to keep our parents’ bed? Would it kill us to get rid of the ugly wallpaper or our childhood furniture? I know we’re all psychologically damaged, but when I’m in that house, I can see justhowdamaged. Maybe we could throw out some furniture and lessen the damage a little.”
“Maybe,” Vail said, “but what about the attic?”
Dodie looked at me, her eyes soft for once. “Go into the attic, Violet. Please. Go see for yourself.”
I felt the muscles in my jaw tighten harder, felt my teeth try to grind. I’d given myself the tasks so far that had taken me out of the house. I could have sent Vail to the hospital to look for records. But deep down, even though I had come all this way to be in the house, all I wanted was to leave.
“I’ve been busy,” I snapped.
“So have we,” Vail shot back calmly, not buying it for a second. “Go into the attic, Violet. See it for yourself.”
“You have to,” Dodie said.
I bit my lips together, fighting it. It was too hard. I had come all this way to Fell—had given up my job, left Lisette, left everything—and now that I was here, I couldn’t face Ben. I couldn’t face my failure. I wasn’t soft like Dodie, and I wasn’t hard like Vail. I was just soft enough to feel gutted, just hard enough to be a bad big sister and a bad mother. I was the big sister, the mother, the one who was supposed to know the answers, the one who was supposed to be soft and hard at the right times. Instead of being competent, I walked a tightrope I had fallen off so many times that I was irreparably broken. I was cracked in half.
Still, I was here now. I was the big sister, the mother. I had no parents. There was no one to handle this for me. There never had been, and there never would be.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go.”
25
Dodie
The TV worked fine once Vail adjusted the rabbit ears until the picture was clear. We only got reception of two channels. One was showing an old Western, and the other hadMatlock.We pickedMatlock.
It was dim in the living room—there were no windows, and the kitchen was dark. I turned on a lamp in the corner, which gave off a familiar, sickly yellow glow. The lamps in our house growing up had been chosen for their decorative qualities, not their ability to give off proper light. Our parents weren’t readers. If you wanted to read in your bedroom, you did it best by flashlight.
I curled up on one end of the sofa, pulling the blanket sitting on the back over myself in the gloom. After I sneezed the emitted dust from my nose, it was quite comfortable. I lay my cheek on the arm of the sofa and watched Matlock drive around wherever he was, intending to solve a case.
Vail sat on the other end of the sofa, making it groan softly. He dropped his boots to the floor, then put his feet up, trying to get under my blanket. Our legs battled briefly, then found a truce.
We settled in. Upstairs, Violet had gone to the attic alone, but for once, I wasn’t worried. The house felt calm, as if the choke hold of fear had relaxed for a little while. Vail and I watched Matlock go to court, our faces lit by the twin glows of the old TV and the lamp. Behind us, the wordsWAKE UPwere still scrawled on the wall.
The woman on TV had definitely killed her husband, I thought, but no worry. Matlock would ferret out the truth. I rolled over and glanced at the words on the wall, studying them for a long moment, for the first time able to stare at them without flinching in fear.
“It was Ben,” Vail’s voice said softly. “He wrote them.”
I turned my gaze and saw that my big brother wasn’t watching the TV, either. He had turned to his back and was staring at the ceiling. He was thinking.
“What did he mean, do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t think,” Vail said. “I know.”
I frowned. “What do you know?”
