“Jesus Christ,” he said, and the front door slammed behind him.
But he was going to do it.
The rain was spitting harder now. I turned on my heel to go home.
36
Violet
Vail was in the living room when I got back to the Fell house, sitting on the sofa with his booted feet on the cushions. He was reading aLifemagazine with Frank Sinatra on the front. He gave me a glance and went back to his reading.
“She isn’t here,” he said.
“I didn’t know you like baseball,” I said. He was wearing a long-sleeved baseball-style shirt, white with navy blue sleeves, with the number 22 on the front.
“I don’t,” my brother replied, his eyes still on his magazine. “It’s just a shirt.”
“You weren’t wearing it when I left.”
“I changed my shirt.”
“Why?”
“I felt like it.”
“Why do you have that shirt if you don’t like baseball?”
He finally looked up at me, his annoyance prodding him away from the magazine. “Violet. It’s just a shirt.”
I shrugged, the gesture feeling hard, tight in my shoulders and myback. I had been so brave when I left Fell College, but now I was afraid again. Afraid and angry. If Sister ever hurt Vail, if she touched a hair on his stupid head, I would kill her. I didn’t care that she was already dead. I’d dig her up from hell and kill her with my bare hands.
Vail was either unaware of or uninterested in my turmoil, because he looked at his boring magazine again. “She’s not here,” he repeated.
“Who? Your ghost hunter?” She obviously wasn’t here, and her car was gone from the driveway. “Dodie?” Dodie’s car was here, but it was possible she was sulking in her room.
“No.” Vail turned a page, the sound loud in the silence. “Anne Whitten.”
A noise left my throat, or maybe it was just a breath. Vail looked up at me again and our gazes locked, for real this time.
“You know who she is?” I asked.
Vail dropped the magazine and sat up. He picked something up from the coffee table and held it out to me without a word.
It was a children’s book. Small, slender, and old, with a rabbit on the cover. I flipped it open and read the inscription.To Edward Whitten, from his sister Anne. On his fifth birthday. August 3, 1905.
Her handwriting, faded and neat. Sister’s handwriting. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did.
The marbles in the attic from 1899, the year before Edward Whitten was born. They were new when he was a child, and he’d played with them.
Her younger brother, Edward, had died in a childhood accident a year earlier.
I dropped the book back on the table, unable to touch it anymore. Vail didn’t pick it up again, either. “She died in 1907,” I said, unable to speak Anne’s name. “She committed suicide. The year after he died, age six.”
Vail’s jaw worked, and he nodded.
“She was older than him,” I went on. Everything made so much sense now. A crazy kind of sense, but still sense. “She was a teenager when he was born.”
“Like us.” His voice was low.
