“Yeah,” he said again. I thought he wasn’t listening, but then he said, “Do you want to go now?”
“Where? The wallpaper store?”
Vail looked at me, and we had the same thought, which passed between us. We were the grown-ups now. If we didn’t like the wallpaper, we could just change it. This was our house. We had money, a car. There was no one to stop us. The freedom was heady.
“Let’s go,” I said.
He was reaching for his keys when we heard a car in the drive. “That isn’t Violet,” I said. It didn’t sound right, and she hadn’t been gone long enough.
The car that had parked in front of our house was an unfamiliar Cutlass. As I stood on the porch, watching, the driver’s door opened and a woman got out. She was fortyish, with glasses and dark blond hair tied in a bun. She wore a neat skirt and blouse. She opened the trunk to retrieve something, but she paused when she saw me.
“Good afternoon,” she said, surprising me with her crisp English accent. “You’re one of the sisters, I suppose.”
I felt myself scowling at her. What sisters?
“I’m going to guess that you’re Dodie,” the woman said, as if I’d spoken. She bent into the trunk and took out a heavy briefcase. “Based on your clothes.”
I glanced down at myself. I was wearing bell-bottom jeans—very old and thrifted—and a T-shirt I’d tied in a knot at the waist. The shirt, also thrifted, was red and had the name and logo of a tire shop in Rochester, New York, on the front. I had bought it because it was comfortable and cost twenty-five cents. Was she insulting me or paying me a compliment?
I was going to tell her to go away—I was in no mood for strangers—when Vail came onto the front porch behind me. “You said you weren’t coming,” he said to the woman.
The Englishwoman slammed her trunk. She turned to us, the briefcase in her hand, her feet in their practical flats braced on thedriveway. “No. I said it would take some time, Vail,” she replied calmly. “Not that I wasn’t coming. I was busy.”
“Not that busy, obviously,” he argued.
“My plans changed. Are you going to introduce me?”
“Vail,” I said, “what is going on?”
He glanced at me, as if he’d forgotten I was there. “This is Charlotte Ryder,” he said, as if I should know that name. “I’ve met her in my line of work.”
I glared at him. “You mean the aliens?”
“Aliens are Vail’s specialty, not mine.” The Englishwoman—Charlotte—stepped onto the porch. “Vail,” she chided, “you didn’t tell your sisters?”
“Well, now they know,” he said, his tone annoyed. Without another word, he turned and went back into the house.
I narrowed my gaze at Charlotte. She looked back with calm regard.
“I see his social skills haven’t improved since I saw him last,” she commented in her crisp accent.
“What do you want?” I asked her.
“He called me,” she explained. “He asked me to come. He said there’s a manifestation in this house that he can’t identify. I’m a parapsychologist.”
“What’s that?”
“I study psychic phenomena.” She sounded like an English nanny explaining to a dense child. “For a living. I have degrees in science and psychology. I also teach parapsychology. If you would like a copy of my résumé, I’m sure I can produce one.”
I crossed my arms. “So you’re a ghost hunter?”
She looked at me with curiosity. “Do you believe there’s a ghost in this house?”
I bit back a laugh at that. “If you want to catalog everything that’s wrong with this house, you’ll be here for a decade.”
“I don’t have quite that long to spare,” she replied with cool politeness. “But as I’ve checked in at the local motel—horrid as it is—and I’ve already paid for the night, I may as well make use of my time and look around as Vail asked me to do, don’t you think?”
I hesitated. There was nothing wrong with her that I could put my finger on, but I had the instinct to turn her away. In all of my memories, I couldn’t recall a stranger ever coming into our house.
