“I don’t know, honey,” I said. “But Ben is buried in the old family plot behind the house. I found his grave there today. His name was Edward. His sister, Anne, is buried farther away.”
“She died by her own hand.” This was Violet, her voice low. “That’s what it said in the book I found.”
I remembered Terri’s dreams of someone hanging in her room. But that wasn’t in this house. Was Anne haunting other houses? How many?
“The Whittens owned the land around here,” I said. “This house, the family plot, the land the Thornhills’ house is on, the land the Chathams’ house is on—”
“The lot across the street,” Vail said. He had straightened againand regained his composure, though he still looked like he might be sick. Our gazes locked, and then he looked at Violet.
“What lot across the street?” Lisette cried. “Could someone just tell me? You three never sayanything.”
Find me,Ben had said to me.
I thought of the Thornhills’ long-lost son, who had run away from home.I couldn’t live in our home any longer. I had to go.
I thought of Terri, having nightmares alone in her room.
The Whittens had owned all of it. They’d poisoned all of it. Then they had all died, and when none of them were left, their precious land was parceled off, and the rest of us lived on their haunted ground.
My siblings and I finished our silent conversation. Then Vail spoke.
“Violet,” he said, “is Sister in this house right now?”
Violet paused, then shook her head. “No. I would feel if she was.”
“Right.” Vail sounded a little like his old self. “She comes and goes from here. I’ve noticed that she wanders, and if the Whittens owned all of the neighborhood, then she likely goes wherever she wants. No one has ever lived in the lot across the street. Someone tried rebuilding it and abandoned the project. So now I’m wondering, what are the odds that the house across the street has a cellar under it?”
Something tugged behind my rib cage—fear, but the feeling of a long-lost memory, the same feeling I’d had when I saw Anne’s name on her gravestone. I had told Terri’s father that we would end this, and I had meant it. “I’d love to know,” I said. “Let’s go look.”
“I’ll get dressed,” Violet said.
“Oh my God.” Lisette looked around at us again. “You’re going to an abandoned house in the middle of the night when there’s a ghost walking around? You’re doing this?”
“Yes, sweetheart,” I answered her. “We are.”
42
Violet
The Chathams’ house was dark and empty. There was no car in the driveway. Dodie told us that she’d urged Mr. Chatham to take his ten-year-old daughter out of the neighborhood, at least for the night. Apparently, he’d taken her advice. He’d probably lived in this neighborhood long enough to want to leave anyway.
He’d also, at Dodie’s request, left his garage door unlocked. The sound of Vail pulling it up was loud in the silent night, but no one was around to be awakened. The rain had stopped, leaving the ground mushy under my sneakers. The air was still wet, like a hanging blanket.
The garage at our house had nothing in it—no toys, bikes, tools, or old junk. Our parents had parked their nice cars in there to get them out of the weather, and that was all. We didn’t have a childhood with a dad tinkering with his car on Sunday afternoons while our mom got messy in the garden. We didn’t even clear our own driveway in winter—hired landscapers did. The landscapers hadn’t come on the day Ben disappeared, and the driveway had been thick with untouched snow.
The Chathams were different. Their garage wasn’t a museum, it was a jumble. There was a rough workbench with a toolbox on it, some sports equipment, two gas cans, and several boxes labeledChristmasandOld Toys.Vail found the overhead light bulb and pulled the string, and the space was illuminated with harsh yellow light.
I glanced at Lisette. She had cleaned the blood on her cheek where a fragment of the smashed light bulb had grazed her. It was a minor scratch, but it made her look different, less like a little girl. She was coming with us on this nasty errand. I wasn’t leaving her alone in the house. She wouldn’t agree to it, and she wasn’t safer there anyway. She was safer with me.
Still. “Stay close to me,” I couldn’t help but say. “Don’t stray, and if I tell you to do something, do it. Okay?”
She nodded. Her expression was carefully composed not to show fear, but she had just seen Sister full in the flesh, and her hands hadn’t fully stopped shaking. “This is crazy,” she said, aiming the comment at all three of us.
“It was either this or school,” Dodie shot back, giving her a raised eyebrow. How Dodie was the most composed of us, I had no idea.
Vail picked up a baseball bat and gave it an experimental swing. Since he was wearing a baseball shirt, it made him look oddly boyish, except for the fact that he was over six feet tall and his shoulders flexed gracefully under the cotton. He hadn’t told us exactly what had happened to him before the dreams woke us all up, but something new was etched in his features, even though otherwise he was the old Vail again. “When I hit her with the vase, I felt impact,” he said, his gaze on the bat as he hefted it.
“She kicked me,” I said. “And she can grab. Her grip is hard.”
