Vail nodded. “She’s sturdy for a ghost. If I hit her once, I can hit her again.”
Dodie wandered into a dark corner, and I heard clinking. “I’m onlyplanning on self-defense, if needed,” she said. “I’ll stay behind you, Vail.” When she turned around, she had one of Mr. Chatham’s golf clubs in her hand, a relic of an abandoned hobby. “This will do.”
“What if she isn’t there?” Lisette asked.
Vail swung his bat again. “Then we look for her in the other houses, or in the woods. If we have to, we’ll go back to our house and wait. She has to turn up sometime.”
I found a dirt-crusted garden shovel and felt immediately better when I had it in my hands. When I looked at Lisette again, she had picked up a hand-sized hatchet that someone had used to cut down dead tree branches.
“There’s one more thing,” I told them. “I don’t think Anne was Edward’s sister. I think she was his mother.”
They all turned to me.
I swallowed. “I saw Ben. Just—just for a moment. He said that Anne was angry that she couldn’t get married because of him.”
Vail lowered the bat. Dodie made a small sound of distress.
“He said he was sorry,” I added. “He said I’m his sister. I thought it was just an endearment, but now I think he was telling me that I’m his sister as opposed to Anne, who isn’t.”
“She had an illegitimate baby as a teenager,” Vail said. “It would have been shameful for Anne back then. Shameful enough that her parents would pass the baby off as her little brother.”
I nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it. Anne was the sole heir. Then she had a son, who would have been the heir after her, if he was legitimate. But he wasn’t, so he was passed off as her brother. When that happened, Edward became the family’s male heir.”
“He usurped the inheritance,” Dodie said. She held the golf club at a jaunty angle, as if she was a woman without a care on her way to a round of golf. “The secret was bad enough, but the cover-up disinherited her for her brother.”
“She would have lived the rest of her life a spinster, financiallydependent on her family,” I said. “Her parents were ashamed of her. Her home life was probably terrible. When she was pregnant, there was nothing she could do about it. She was trapped. She hated Edward, and getting rid of him would solve all of her problems.”
“Jesus,” Vail said softly.
She had killed her son, and a year later, she had hanged herself. Was it remorse, I wondered? Maybe she was just crazy. But I had been called crazy enough times in my life. I had believed it myself. I, of all people, knew that crazy was more complicated than it seemed.
“I wonder who Edward’s father was,” Dodie added. “She was only fourteen when he was born.”
I shook my head. “We’ll never know. They kept it secret, and now they’re all dead.” The knowledge of Edward’s parentage, of Ben’s original father, had died with the Whittens. Ben himself had never known. His father’s identity was vibrating brain cells, like Dodie had said. Ashes at Pompeii.
Lisette spoke up. “I hope he died horribly.” Her cheeks were flushed with anger. “The father. I hope he died in really bad pain.” She was thinking about having a baby at her age, I knew. So was I.
—
Someone, as Vail said, had tried to rebuild the house in the lot across the street. When we were kids, the house’s cracked windows were shrouded in dirt, the weeds were waist-high, and there were missing shingles on the roof like punched-out teeth. In a normal neighborhood, an abandoned house like that would be a magnet for kids and teens, daring each other to break in and commit acts of vandalism. None of us Esmies had ever set foot on the property.
In the years we’d been gone, the house had begun to fall down. The roof had caved halfway when a tree had fallen in a storm. In the brief burst of construction, the tree had been cut down, its roots dug up. The long-ago lawn had been dug up, too, and most of the lot wasnow deep ruts of dirt, softened to mud by the rain and cradling thick puddles. Weeds had taken over. They had probably planned to tear down the old house and build a shiny new one, but early on they had given up and driven their construction machines away, leaving overturned earth, a half-ruined building, and a single torn tarp, flapping in the remains of the wind.
Comically, the front door was locked. None of us wanted to risk climbing through the jagged glass of the windows, so we circled to the back, our feet squishing in the mud, in search of the back door. This was locked, too, but the wood was soft and black with mold. Vail kicked it hard with the sole of his boot, and the wood cracked. A second kick, and a third, and the frame gave way and the door groaned open.
It was still dark, so there was no light coming in through the half-destroyed roof. I switched on the flashlight I’d taken from Mr. Chatham’s toolbox, gripping my shovel in my other hand. We filed into the house.
We were in the kitchen. Rain had collected under the peeled linoleum floor, which gave spongily under my feet. Something smelled bad. There was furtive scurrying in the walls and the corners, and the wiring from the old stove was exposed, frayed and eaten through. The door of one cupboard had rotted off, and there was an abandoned nest inside.
Our house should look like this,I thought,or close to it.We’d had landscapers, but no caretaker or maids. That was my decision. I could have hired someone, but I couldn’t bear the thought of strangers in our house, of strangers possibly finding Ben or what was left of him, in whatever state he was in. The house was Ben’s grave, which made it sacred ground.
So we didn’t sell it, we didn’t tear it down, and we didn’t hire strangers to clean it out. Yet I hadn’t seen evidence of a single rodent, even in the attic.
Maybe Sister scared even the rodents away. Yet still, a window should have broken, or the roof should have leaked rain. Something in all those years.
“It’s cold,” Lisette said.
I raised the flashlight beam to see that she was right. The air was frosting gently with our breaths.
