“Yeah,” Bradley said. “This is definitely Fell.”
He pointed. Along the edge of the map was a line I knew was Number Six Road, near where the Sun Down Motel now stood. Off the edge of Number Six—the road wasn’t named on the old map—was a square labeledGraves—Unknown. It was marked with smallxmarks in careful handwriting.
“There are a lot of cemeteries,” I said. “For such a small town at the time, Fell had a lot of dead people.”
“Like I said,” Bradley agreed. “It’s definitely Fell.”
My eye moved to the spot where my neighborhood should be, where our house should be. I saw only open land on the map, with a tidy label written on it:Whitten Estate.
I felt a chill up my back, one that—for once—had nothing to dowith ghosts. It was those two words,Whitten Estate.The name sounded right somehow, familiar, as if I’d overheard it years ago and had forgotten it until now. Like I’d known a Whitten at some point and couldn’t remember from where.
“Whitten,” I said to Bradley, taking the map from his hands. “They might have built our house, or part of it. The house is old enough. It’s a start.”
“Looks like they own your whole neighborhood,” Bradley said. “At least, they used to. The whole thing was one lot.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “They sold it off?”
Bradley shrugged, then sat back in his chair. I squinted at the map in the harsh light. On the Whitten Estate, near the edge of the grounds, were more small, carefulx’s, though these were unlabeled. Graves unknown?
I refolded the map and looked through the rest of the shelves, hoping to find something that contained the name. If the Whittens had an estate in Fell in 1900, then they were a rich, important family at the time. Someone must have mentioned them, or some Whitten must have felt himself important enough to write papers or memoirs. Then, it seemed, they’d had some kind of downfall, which led to the estate being broken up. Someone must have noticed that, too.
Where were the descendants of the Whittens now? If the family left Fell, where had they gone? Was there any way I could track down their descendants? If so, would any of them have any old documents from their ancestors?
It was a start. I glanced at Bradley. He had picked up the memoir of Robert R. McCannon and was leafing through it. “This guy was a dick,” he remarked.
“Remind you of anyone?” I asked, but the insult didn’t have much venom in it. Harping on Bradley was becoming more of a habit than a passion at this point.
“Ha ha,” Bradley said, deadpan. “This guy keeps mentioning ‘thehoney-sweet, innocent countenances’ of his teenage daughter and her friends. I’m not sure what a countenance is, but I think this old guy might have been a piece of shit.”
“You’re likely right.” I picked up another book, but it was written in 1968. We were already living in the Whittens’ house by then. Still, I leafed quickly through the pages in case the book mentioned the name.
“The map said Whitten, right?” Bradley turned another page. “This guy didn’t like them, either. He dishes the dirt right here.”
“What?” I put down the book I was holding and held out my hand. “Give it here.”
My gaze quickly scanned the page. Robert R. McCannon was talking about the prominent families of Fell, and how he—according to himself—played the part of trusted confidant and adviser to all of them, beaming his wisdom on them (and, presumably, on their teenage daughters).
I spent many evenings with the Whitten family, one of the founding families of Fell, now much diminished in size as well as in prominence. Successive generations of Whittens had suffered misfortunes, such as death by shipwreck, fire, and wasting disease. Many of their children did not live to see the age of five. Some said that the misfortune was earned by the family’s coldness and pride, and I could not disagree.
I tried to give counsel to the family in the hopes of turning their fortunes around, but Henry Whitten refused to listen. When his daughter, Anne Whitten, died by her own hand in 1907 at the age of twenty-one, it was a truly sad day, as she was the final heir. Her younger brother, Edward, had died in a childhood accident a year earlier.
My hands were ice. My stomach turned.
A little boy dead in an accident. His older sister.
Sister.
I found you, Sister,I thought, my terror mixing with my inescapable triumph.I found you at last.
“Violet?” Bradley stood behind my shoulder. His voice was tight with concern.
“I’m fine.” And, though my heart was beating hard and cold sweat was beading on my neck, I was. Sister wasn’t here, and neither were any of her emissaries. For once, she wasn’t breathing down my neck, waiting for her chance. She was gone somewhere else, she didn’t know what I was doing, and while her back was turned, I had finally found her.
Maybe Sister didn’t win everything. Not every time.
The doorknob rattled, and an alarmed knock sounded. “What are you doing in there?” Farley’s voice called out. “Your time’s up. What are you doing?”
I unlocked the door and opened it. Farley’s face was flushed, and he looked past me, directly at Bradley. “You weren’t supposed to lock the door,” he said.
