“Spies get days off?” I asked.
“No one can work all the time.”
“I see. So now that you’ve told me, do you have to kill me?”
“That depends. How many CIA operatives do you know?”
“None, since apparently you aren’t one.”
“Then you’re safe for now. How is the search for your little brother going?”
I leaned my shoulder against the wall, feeling tired. “Ethan, you’re going to think I’m crazy. That we’re all crazy.”
“Dodie,” he replied, his voice oddly gentle, “if I was going to judge you, I would have done it by now.”
“I don’t understand why you’re asking. Why you even want to know.”
“Because you seem sad.”
I stared at my feet.
“That’s the only reason,” Ethan said into the silence.
I thought about Ben in my bed the other night, his warm body against mine, and then…“I think he died a long time ago,” I said. “Even longer than we think, do you understand? Further back in the past.”
There was a beat of silence. “How long ago?” Ethan asked.
I bit my lip. “It depends how old this house is.” The logic rotated slowly through my brain, like an old clock being wound. “He lived in this house—I’m sure of that. He died here. But he didn’t die the day we played hide-and-seek.” I shook my head. “Or maybe he did, but I mean—”
“I understand.”
I laughed softly. “Are you sure about that?”
“Okay, it’s confusing. But I understand what you’re getting at. You think that your life with Ben wasn’t his first life. That he lived another time, before he lived with you.”
I lifted my gaze from my feet as my eyes watered. Never mind how crazy it was—something about that sounded so inexpressibly beautiful. To be given more than one life, to never truly die—there was a reason some religions believed it. Because thinking of it any other way was too hard. “There’s a bag of marbles in the attic from 1899,” I said, “so it would have been sometime after that. But I don’t know when.”
“And you don’t know how old the house is?”
“No. If there was something in our mother’s papers about the house, Violet would have seen it. And there are no papers left in our parents’ bedroom.”
“Maybe there are municipal records.”
“Violet went out. She’ll probably find out.” Violet was out investigating, and Vail was in the attic with the ghost hunter. My big brother and big sister were taking care of everything, as usual, leaving me to be the useless one. I had no experience with this like Vail did, no brains like Violet. All I’d ever had to do in life was look pretty and bite my tongue in public in my best attempt to be charming. No one expected anything much of me at all.
I ran my palm down the wall, looking at the ugly wallpaper.
“You don’t have to have all the answers right now,” Ethan said, as if reading my mind. “I don’t think that’s what Ben wanted when he called you home.”
“He asked for us to make it right.”
“No, he didn’t. He said,Come home. That isn’t the same thing. Maybe he just wanted you there, Dodie. Maybe he just missed you like you missed him.”
I pressed my palm to the kitchen wall and closed my eyes. “He told me to find him when he was in bed with me.” I could still hear those words in his familiar little voice.Dodie. Find me.“What does that mean, then? Something was done wrong, and it has to be made right. That’s the only way this makes any sense.”
“No,” Ethan said. “It isn’t.”
Ben’s warm body in the bed with me. It was the water that interrupted us, that chased us out of the room. Then, downstairs, something vicious and cold had grabbed Vail and whispered in his ear.
