Charlotte was right. Colorado wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t hers, either. The man could have been deluded, psychotic. He could have had some other mental problem I wasn’t qualified to diagnose. He could also have been tormented by something that waited until we left to start up again, and he only had one way to escape it. There are always several possible explanations, and that was one of them.
“What happened to you since Colorado?” I asked Charlotte.
“Did something happen?” she asked, not looking up.
“I can tell.”
She hesitated, but only briefly. “My dad died.” She stood up, brushing her skirt into place.
Charlotte had learned about parapsychology from her English grandparents on her father’s side, who had pursued famous ghost-hunting cases in the twenties before they retired to obscure country life. Her father had fought in World War Two, then moved to America with his wife and daughter. On one of those long, sleepless nights on vigil in Colorado, Charlotte told me that as a teenager she had lived with her grandparents back in England, before both grandparents died in the early seventies. I had inferred that she had some kind of problem with her parents. But her sadness now at her father’s death was different.
I’m sorrywas the accepted line I should say. AlsoThat’s too bad, He’s in a better place, Time heals all wounds,and depending on the kind of death, eitherAt least he didn’t sufferorAt least he isn’t suffering anymore.
“Did you hate him?” I asked her.
“Only sometimes,” she said.
“I hated mine all the time.”
She gestured to the writing. “This wasn’t aliens,” she said. “You know that. You have a ghost in your family home. What am I missing?”
It was hard to breathe, but the words came out anyway. “Ben was my little brother. He died twenty years ago, when he was six. He was playing hide-and-seek. We never found him. My sisters and I are here because our little brother is haunting this place.”
Were her eyes always this kind, this sad? I thought maybe they were. It was why I looked into them as rarely as I could. But our gazes caught now, and I let myself sink for just a second, let her dark lashes and inky pupils take me in.
“Oh, Vail,” she said, the two words soft and heartbroken.
There were too many thoughts in my skull, pressing over each other, trying to explode, one after another. There were always too many thoughts, so many that I never got any silence, so many that I could never speak quickly enough to catch one, so I didn’t try. I wanted to tell her everything in that moment, but I didn’t know where to start.
“I need help,” I said, my voice a rasp. The first time I had ever said those words.
Charlotte stepped forward and put a hand on my cheek. Her touch was cool and soft, her fingers slender. She smelled like clean clothes and something faintly flowery.
She leaned up and gently kissed my lips, then pulled away. My thoughts went quiet.
“Show me the rest,” she said.
I nodded. “The attic.”
“The attic,” she agreed. “Lead the way.”
31
Violet
“What are they doing up there?” Dodie asked.
We’d heard Vail lead Charlotte upstairs to the attic, then nothing. Dodie was standing in the kitchen doorway, leaning toward the stairs, trying to catch the vibration of a sound.
“Leave them alone,” I told her. “Let them work.”
“Are you sure they’re working?” She glanced back at me, then waggled her eyebrows. She was trying to annoy me, and she was succeeding. No one could annoy like Dodie could.
“Get your mind out of the gutter,” I said, even though I knew I should ignore her.
“My mind lives in the gutter,” Dodie shot back. She listened until a footstep sounded from the attic, and then she jumped away from the doorway. “They’re just talking,” she reported. “Boring.” She turned to the mess on the kitchen counter. “I’m going to finish this.”
I picked up my purse. The walls of the house were closing in on me. “I’m going out.”
