"Mary, honey, forgive me for saying this, but if your daddy isn't feeling well, that may be partially because of the smell that's coming from inside. Now, I'm not one to criticize another woman's housekeeping, but is it possible that somethin' may have crawled into your chimney? Somethin' sort of...biggish, maybe? Like a raccoon? Or a whole family of raccoons?"
"It smells dead, Mama, it smells like dead," complained Alice, her voice muffled by Fran's legs. Fran gave her head another pat and tried to force a smile.
"I don't smell anything, Mrs. Healy," said Mary. "Is it possible that your nose is just extra sensitive today?"
"I suppose that's possible," said Fran slowly, even though she knew it wasn't. Good manners said that she shouldn't press the issue. Good manners were an excellent way for people to get themselves killed. "Alice, sweetie, if you could let go of me for just one second, I can give Mary these cookies, and we can be on our way."
"Don't wanna go in the house, the house smells like dead," said Alice, letting go of her mother's legs and looking mistrustfully back toward the open doorway. Mary blinked, expression turning hurt. Alice was too young for such subtleties. She just ran behind Fran's legs, hiding her face once more.
"You don't have to go inside, honey, but if you don't want to get closer to the smell, you need to let me go. I have to go back to the porch to give Mary her cookies." And to get another whiff of that smell. It was bad even as far back as they had moved, but there were subtleties to it that Fran was sure she was missing. If something awful had taken up residence in the Dunlavys's attic, she needed to know what it was before she could work out how to kill it.
Alice, sniffling, let go of Fran's legs. Fran took a deep breath of the somewhat less rank air before walking back to the porch and holding out the plate of cookies to Mary.
"I hope your daddy feels better real soon," said Fran.
"Thank you," said Mary, and took the plate. She even held it for a second, before it passed through her semi-substantial fingers and shattered on the brick step. Mary jumped, clapping a hand over her mouth. Fran stared, first at the mess, and then at the girl standing in front of her.
"I think I ought to come inside now, Mary, if you don't mind," said Fran, in a still, calm voice. "I think I need to see your father."
Mary, mutely, nodded.
Alice had refused to come into the house, and in the end, Fran thought that very well might be for the best. She had settled the little girl in the cab of the truck with her crayons and some butcher paper. She'd get an earful about that later from Jonathan, who seemed to think that Alice should be under constant supervision to keep her from setting herself on fire or something ridiculous like that, but in the meanwhile, Alice would be safe, and whatever was causing that smell wouldn't haunt her dreams for the next few years.
Fran was grimly afraid that she knew what was causing that smell. She wasn't sure whether she hoped she was right or hoped she was wrong, but as she stepped over the shattered plate and broken cookies now littering the porch, she knew that one way or the other, things were going to change for good as soon as she had her answers.
The smell was even stronger inside the house. Fran pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth, trying to filter it just a little, just enough that she could keep breathing. Mary followed her as she walked deeper. The girl was wringing her hands like she was afraid of getting in trouble. What little coloring she possessed had drained out of her face, and for the first time in a long while, Fran found herself really looking at Alice's babysitter. Had Mary's hair always been so white? It seemed almost indecent on someone so young. And her eyes...hadn't they been blue, once? Now, looking into Mary's eyes was like looking at a hundred miles of empty highway, and the crossroads that stood at the end of every long road. There was something wrong with Mary's eyes. Something Fran didn't know how to define or to describe, but that she couldn't stop herself from seeing, now that she had finally started to look.
Mary didn't say anything, and so neither did Fran, and they walked deeper into the house, until they were standing outside a closed door, and the smell was so strong that it seemed to have a physical presence in the hall--a stronger presence than Mary did.
"Is this your father's door?" asked Fran, voice muffled by her shirt.
Mary nodded mutely.
Fran raised her free hand and knocked. She didn't really expect a response, and found that she was both relieved and disappointed when she didn't receive one. This would have been so much easier if Benjamin had still been alive.
The seconds crept by, moving slowly in the stagnant air. Fran knocked again. Still there was no reply.
"I'm going to open this door now, Mary," said Fran. She let her shirt fall away from her face. It wasn't really doing any good, and she was going to need both hands free for whatever was going to happen next. "Do you know anything about what I'm going to find on the other side?"
"Daddy's sleeping, that's all," said Mary. There was a pleading note in her voice, and an even stronger plea in her gray highway eyes. Please don't, it said. Please don't open that door.
"Honey, I don't think you can call what he's doing sleepin'," said Fran, and turned the knob, pushing it gently inward.
The room was dim, but there was enough light coming in through the curtains to let her see the bed, and what it contained. The smell barely registered in the face of her sorrow, which was brief and surprisingly powerful--and why shouldn't it be? She wasn't just mourning for the man. She was mourning, however belatedly, for the teenage girl in front of her, the one who should have worn a wedding veil long before she wore a burial shroud.
Fran shut the door, pulling until she felt the latch click home. "All right, Mary," she said. "Let's go outside."
Silently, Mary nodded.
Coaxing Alice out of the truck had proven easy, once Fran promised that they'd be going to the backyard, and not into the house. Mary had a sandbox, after all, built for her by her father when she was much younger. Alice had spent quite a few afternoons there, building herself crumbling castles and populating them with people made of grass and twigs. She threw herself into the sand as soon as she saw that the grownups were just planning to sit on the back porch and not have any fun at all. In short order, she was sunk in her private fantasy land, leaving Fran and Mary to talk in relative privacy.
Mary said nothing at first. She sat on the bottom step, her hands clasped together on her knees and her eyes cast downward, like she was afraid that looking at Fran would start something that she didn't know how to stop.
It was really a pity that whatever it was had been started a long time ago. "When did it happen?" asked Fran gently.
"I don't know what you mean," said Mary, to her hands.
"I think you do, or you'd be lookin' at me right now," said Fran. "Honey, I know this is hard, but I need to know. When did it happen?"
"What?" Mary finally raised her head and looked Fran in the eye. That old, empty highway was still there, and Fran cursed herself for a fool for not having seen it before. But then, to be fair, the questions you asked a babysitter were things like "Do you have a boyfriend?" and "How much do you charge per hour?"
"Are you dead?" had never occurred to any of them.
Fran sighed. "When did you die, Mary? How long ago?"
"Oh." Mary looked down again. "1939. A couple of months before I started sitting for Alice, actually. The flyer that I put up at the library, I'd made that before the accident. So when the phone rang, and it was Mr. Healy, I just sort of...I said yes because that's what you do. Someone offers you a babysitting job, you say yes, unless you've got a date you can't cancel. And I didn't go out with boys, not like that. Daddy needed me here. He always needed me to be here."
"Mary, honey. It's 1942 now. You're talking about three years."
"So?" Mary looked up again. This time, there was actual anger in her expression, and a thin, hard line had appeared between her eyebrows. "When my mother died, I promised my father that I'd take care of him. I sa
id I'd make sure he was fed, and keep the house just as neat as she did, and help him keep on living. I made a promise. I didn't get to break my word just because I went and--" She stopped, as suddenly as if she had inhaled a bug. In her lap, her hands clenched just a little more tightly, knuckles going white.
"You died," said Fran. "You died, and honey, that is a good enough reason to break a promise. The dead aren't required to keep promises to the living. If they were, nobody would ever get to go on to their eternal rest, and we'd have ghosts everywhere we looked. I think we'd run out of room before too long, with as many people as live and die every day. Your daddy would've understood."
"No, he wouldn't," said Mary. She gave a fierce little shake of her head. "Sometimes I think I didn't really die. Sometimes I think this is all just a...a really strange dream, you know? Because they never did find my body. If I hadn't come back, if I hadn't kept my word, he would never have known what happened to me. I would've just disappeared. How could I do that to him? He's my daddy. I love him."
"And honey, I'm sure he loved you, very much. But did you ever tell him?"
"Tell him what?" asked Mary. Her eyes were wide and guileless.
Fran's heart gave a lurch. The girl really didn't understand. "That you were dead. Did you ever tell him?"
"No." Mary looked back down at her hands. "I figured it would just have upset him, and it didn't seem to matter any. I ate less, was all. That was a good thing. Money was always pretty tight, and he didn't seem to notice that I was just pushing food around my plate and then putting it away for his lunch the next day."
"I see." Fran paused. "Honey, I have to ask. Please understand that I don't mean nothin' by it, it's just...some ghosts, they gotta eat things if they want to stay on this plane of existence. Breath, or time, or blood. Did you...are you the kind of ghost who...?"
"What?" Mary's head snapped back up. "No! I never hurt my daddy, and I never hurt Alice, either! I loved that baby as much as anyone's ever loved a little girl, I swear. You can ask her. She'll tell you I didn't lay one finger on her, not ever."
"I believe you." Fran glanced past Mary to the sandbox where Alice was constructing her castle. She smiled a little. She couldn't help it. Something about the serious set of Alice's shoulders, the way she addressed her construction, like it was the most important thing in the world, it just brought joy to a mother's heart. "I don't think Alice would've been so glad to come and see you if you'd been doing anything to cause her harm. But you understand why I had to ask."
"I do," admitted Mary. "I'd be worried too, if it were my little girl."
She went quiet then, and Fran was quiet as well, both of them considering the enormity of all the things that Mary would never have for her own. There would be no little girls for Mary Dunlavy; no little boys either, no babies in bassinets or bellies filled with lives yet to be. She had already missed her high school graduation--and worse, somehow, her own funeral. No funeral without a body. She'd miss her wedding, and her old age, and everything else she should have had. Everything else she'd been promised.
"It's not fair," said Fran.
Mary, who agreed with her, didn't say anything. It seemed like there was nothing she could say.
"Are you sure about this?" asked Mary, for the eleventh time. She had fuzzed out three times during the drive to the Healy house, turning translucent, and once passing all the way through the cab of the truck, so that Fran had been forced to back up and stop to let Mary climb back in. Alice had just laughed at the sight of her babysitter sliding through metal like breeze blowing through a screen. If there'd been any question left in Mary's mind about what kind of family she'd been sitting for all this time, it would have been answered by Alice's laughter.
"Yes, I'm sure," said Fran. She pulled the truck into the driveway and turned off the engine. "I need someone to watch over Alice if I'm going to take you off to find your body, and I need to tell Alexander to drop by your place and discover that your daddy's..." She stopped herself, seeing the look on Mary's face. "He needs to go by your place and start the process of making things right, is all."
"Will people think I hurt him?"
"No, honey. They won't think that at all. They may think he got real sad after you ran off, and that the sadness made him more susceptible to passing on quietly in his sleep, but they won't think you killed your father. There's nothing about his body to make them think that."
"I didn't run off," protested Mary.
"I know you didn't. But you haven't been living there in a long time, and when the police go over the place, they'll see that." Dusty shelves in Mary's closet; dust on the yearbooks on her dresser. She'd been scrupulous about keeping the rest of the house in shape, but her own room had been neglected as unimportant. What need did a ghost have for sweet-smelling sheets, or for clean towels? All she'd needed was someone to haunt, and she'd haunted him with the very best of intentions, and with love.
Everyone who earned a haunting should be so lucky.
Mary continued to look uncertain as Fran opened her door, climbed out, and reached back in for Alice, who willingly let herself be gathered into her mother's arms. "Come on, girl. No one here's going to bite you, not even a little bit."
"That's not what I was worried about," said Mary, and finally climbed down out of the truck. She opened the door, Fran noted, and closed it behind her. It was going to take that girl a while to get used to the realities of her condition. Fran found herself wondering whether there were classes on ghosting that Mary could take, phantom schoolrooms filled with poltergeists and specters who would teach her the finer points of the disembodied state.
"What then, exorcism? We're not that kind of family." Fran turned to walk toward the house, leaving Mary staring uncertainly after her. Finally, lacking anything else to do, she followed.
The Healy house was the stuff of legend around town. Big, solid, well-maintained, and yet no one in Buckley could rightly say that they'd ever been inside. Even on Halloween, the Healys set up at the end of their driveway, handing out candy from what was essentially a glorified, pumpkin-covered lemonade stand. The windows were always covered by curtains, and even the most determined of busybodies had found themselves cut off at the pass when they tried to get past the porch. People mostly blamed it on the Healys being foreign, and said that things would likely be different when Alexander and Enid got too old to run the household. Jonathan had grown up in Buckley. He'd no doubt be friendlier than his parents.
But maybe not. Maybe there was a reason for their privacy, something that had nothing to do with accents or places of birth. Mary stepped up onto the porch, fighting both to keep herself from gawking, and to keep herself from going insubstantial and plummeting straight down into the basement.
Fran shot her a kindly look. "It's all right, really," she said, and opened the front door.
No hellfire billowed out to consume them; no monsters poured through to swallow their souls. Instead, the open door revealed the bottom of a curved stairway, and a weathered hardwood floor softened by the long red runner of an imported throw rug. Alice squirmed in Fran's arms. Fran put her down, and the little girl raced into the house like she wasn't stepping on what was, for most of the children in Buckley, utterly forbidden ground.
"Now I haven't done much like this before," said Fran. "I married into this life, I wasn't raised to it, so please forgive me for needing to ask, but you're not going to haunt us from now on just because I'm inviting you in, are you? I wouldn't mind a ghost around the place, and we could definitely use the help with childcare, but there's some stuff that goes on that I don't really want to think about you seeing."
"Like...murder?" asked Mary, voice trembling a little.
Fran stared at her before saying, very slowly and clearly, "No, like sex. I'm a married woman. Murder is messy, but sex is private."
"Oh," said Mary, cheeks turning red. It was an impressive sight, her being dead and all. Fran wasn't sure how a ghost could blush--but then, how did a ghost do an
ything at all? How did a ghost walk, and talk, and take up space in the world? It seemed like an awfully big question, which meant that it was probably best left for somebody who asked awfully big questions for fun.
"Come on now," said Fran. "You get to talk to my father-in-law."
Walking through the Healy house felt unreal and strange, like some sort of flashback to the dares that Mary and her friends used to give each other when they were in their first year of high school and still believed that the world knew the meaning of "mercy." They'd challenged each other to go into graveyards and skirt the edges of the swamp, to run by the lakeside when the marsh lights appeared in the fog, and generally to dare the universe to punish them for their boldness. And it never had. Again and again, the town that had killed so many of their classmates had let them go.
At least until the night Mary had walked home from a babysitting job on Old Logger's Road, and hadn't made it any farther than the cornfields outside of town. On that night, she had paid for all the near misses and miraculous escapes she and her friends had made across the years, and she had paid so dearly that their ledger was cleared in full.
The foyer was almost normal, with pictures hanging on the wall and an umbrella stand next to the door. But there were swords and pole arms and even what looked like a longbow mixed in with the umbrellas, and the customary horseshoe above the door had been joined by several bundles of herbs and a string of garlic. Through the open door into what must have been the parlor, Mary could see glass-fronted cabinets and some truly unnerving taxidermy. She wasn't sure bears were supposed to have that many arms. She definitely didn't want to meet one that did.
"All right, Alice went up to talk to the mice, so she'll be in her room. Alexander was the one who told me to come check on you in the first place, and he didn't have a hunting trip planned for tonight, so this time of day he should be...this way. Come on, Mary, you don't get to dawdle just because you're dead." Fran turned right, heading down the hall.
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