The Secrets of Winterhouse

by Ben Guterson

  “We can only hope,” Mr. Rajput said.

  “Enjoy,” Mr. Wellington said.

  Elizabeth joined Elana and her grandmother, just as Jackson was indicating the car Mrs. Vesper had arranged was out front. Elana was dressed all in white, including a puffy white parka; Mrs. Vesper was once again all in black, though this time with a heavy overcoat.

  “All set, my darling?” Mrs. Vesper said.

  “This is going to be great!” Elana piped.

  “I’m ready,” said Elizabeth.

  Mrs. Vesper leaned forward. “Let’s not waste any time,” she whispered.

  The ride to Havenworth was uneventful. Elana’s grandmother didn’t say a word—perhaps because a young woman was in the car with them, something that bothered the old lady immensely when Jackson, just as the sedan pulled up and Mrs. Vesper was ushering the girls in, explained that a woman at the hotel needed to get to Havenworth right away to handle some unforeseen emergency, and requested that she be allowed to ride to town with the three others.

  “We will reimburse you for the car,” Jackson explained patiently, and although Mrs. Vesper scowled and sighed, she relented and then tried her best to appear fine with the arrangement. The lady with them was anxious the entire ride; Elana prattled on about her upcoming ice-skating competition and how glad she was that her grandmother had given her new skates for Christmas. Elizabeth was relieved when the car finally reached town.

  “Shall we have some tea,” Mrs. Vesper said, “and a nice talk?” She looked sternly at Elana, making plain she wasn’t asking what they wanted to do but, rather, explaining what they were going to do. The street where they’d been let out, just down the block from the gazebo, was bustling with shoppers and people out to enjoy the wintry afternoon. Music drifted from the gazebo and the sky was dotted with stray flakes of snow in the gentle wind.

  Before Elana could agree for both of them, Elizabeth spoke up. “That sounds very nice, but there’s a bookstore here that’s very interesting, and I’d like to check it out first, so maybe we can meet up in a little bit, okay?” She took Elana’s hand.

  “Yes, but…” Elana said.

  “It’s such a great store,” Elizabeth said. “You’ll love it!” She looked to Elana’s grandmother. “We’ll meet you back here in two hours. Is that all right, Mrs. Vesper?”

  The old woman put out an arm to block their way. “We’ve come here to discuss a few things,” she said softly but firmly.

  Elizabeth adjusted her glasses and looked at Mrs. Vesper. “Oh, definitely. And to have fun, too.” She stared at the old woman’s arm before her until the moment became so awkward that Mrs. Vesper moved aside. “I’m sure the tea place will still be open in a couple of hours.”

  Mrs. Vesper looked sternly at Elizabeth and then shifted her eyes to Elana. Her expression became conciliatory. “You’re right, dear. You two go enjoy yourselves, and we can meet here in two hours.” She smiled thinly and flashed Elana a look that indicated, You be sure to be on your best behavior. “And then we can talk,” Mrs. Vesper said before turning and walking away.

  Elizabeth realized she still held Elana’s arm. Elana pulled it away slowly as she watched her grandmother depart. She seemed to be relaxing more with each step the old woman took.

  “I hope I wasn’t rude,” Elizabeth said. “I figured it would be nice to be on our own.”

  Elana appeared flustered. “Yeah, well, we can just do what we want for a couple of hours and then meet back up with her.” She nodded hesitantly. “Good thinking.”

  * * *

  Harley Dimlow and Sons, Booksellers, was just as dim and overstuffed with books as it had been the week before when Elizabeth had first visited, and the man behind the counter was just as silent and weary-seeming. There were, however, a handful of people quietly browsing the shelves, and Elizabeth felt the shop was somehow warmer and more inviting than before.

  “Cool place,” Elana whispered, glancing around.

  The clerk leaned forward to examine the two girls. “You’re back,” he said softly. His face was so sallow, and his hair was so wispy, he resembled someone who should have been sitting in a nursing home waiting for an afternoon snack.

  “I am,” Elizabeth said, pleased he remembered her.

  The man nodded to her. “Ah, yes, you too,” he said. “The Damien Crowley enthusiast.”

  Elizabeth was confused.

  “It seems you’re both back,” he said.

  Elana was shaking her head. “My first time in here,” she said quickly.

  The man frowned. “You bought a book a few days ago.”

  “Not me,” Elana said brightly, shrugging. “Someone else. Sorry.”

  The man frowned dubiously and retreated into his little nook.

  Elana turned to Elizabeth and arched her eyebrows. “You were looking for something in particular, right? There’s a book you wanted?”

  The encounter with the clerk had been strange enough; now Elizabeth was hoping Elana might want to drift off and find something on her own, but that seemed not about to happen. In fact, now that Mrs. Vesper had been left behind, Elizabeth realized she would need to spend the next couple of hours alone with Elana, and she wasn’t sure what they might talk about or do.

  “Oh, I just wanted to check out a section I was looking at when I was here before,” Elizabeth said. Elana gave her a lead the way look, and Elizabeth headed for the back of aisle 13 to find The Wonderful World of Words! Several minutes later, though, after much searching and re-searching on all the shelves in the area, Elizabeth discovered the book was gone.

  “Finding anything good?” Elana said. She was thumbing idly through some books on UFOs across the aisle from Elizabeth.

  “Still looking,” Elizabeth said.

  “Oh, the Bermuda Triangle!” Elana said suddenly, yanking a book from a shelf. “This is such a cool subject. I did a report on it for school.”

  An idea came to Elizabeth, especially now that Elana was occupied. “I’ll be right back.” She moved away before Elana could object.

  “Excuse me,” Elizabeth whispered to the clerk when she reached his desk. She kept glancing back to make sure Elana wasn’t following.

  The man leaned forward, tipped his glasses up onto his forehead, and licked his lips. His ancient face was so lined with creases it looked something like a parched mud puddle, all gray and cracked. “Yes?” he said softly.

  “Can you tell me where the Havenworth cemetery is?”

  The man looked at her sidewise. He removed his glasses from his forehead. “The cemetery?” he said, a bit more loudly.

  Elizabeth hoped the man’s voice hadn’t carried to the rear of the shop. “Yes, I’d like to see it. I’m always interested in the history of a place, so I thought I would check it out.”

  “I see.” The man blew softly on one of the lenses of his glasses and began to polish it with the sleeve of his shirt. “Are you looking for something in particular?”

  Elizabeth felt uneasy. “I just wanted to see the cemetery,” she said with a shrug, keeping her voice low. She glanced behind her and heard a faint swishing noise from aisle 13, the sound of steps. “Is it nearby?”

  “It is,” the old man said. “It is.” He began to polish the other lens, and then he examined his glasses by holding them up to the light. He put them on and glanced around, apparently testing to see if his eyes still worked. “Three blocks from here. You go up Alder, take a right on Cedar, then a left on Spruce, and it’s right at the very end of the street.”

  “Thanks.” Elizabeth turned to see Elana rounding the aisle.

  “Hey!” Elana said. “I thought you got lost or something.”

  “No, I just had a question.”

  “About what?” Elana said, standing before her with a perky smile.

  “I couldn’t find the book I was looking for.” And then, to lend plausibility to her story, she removed a piece of paper from her pocket and set it on the clerk’s desk. “I brought my book list with me,
though.”

  The man peered at the sheet before him. There, folded but with some of the writing displayed, lay the page on which Winifred had worked through the words on the Winterhouse seal.

  “Oh, I must have grabbed the wrong list,” Elizabeth said.

  The old man continued to stare at the paper. Very slowly, he moved his finger just over the words “Snow-Rioter.”

  “Winter or so,” he said.

  Elizabeth looked to him, then shook her head with incomprehension. The man jabbed a finger at the letter “w” in the words and then moved on to the “i-n-t-e” and “r” and then the “or” and “so” before repeating himself: “Winter or so.”

  Elizabeth was stunned: The word “winter” had been hiding right before her all this time.

  “I don’t get it,” Elana said. “What’s that all about?” She leaned in with interest.

  “Nothing,” Elizabeth said as she looked to the clerk. “I just grabbed the wrong paper, but thanks for helping me.” She took Elana’s hand. “Wanna go walk around?”

  “But we just got here.”

  “We can come back later if we want to warm up.” Her mind was racing; she’d need to wait until she was back at Winterhouse—with Freddy—to continue deciphering the words the clerk had revealed.

  “I thought you wanted to look around for a while,” Elana said, glancing at the rows of books.

  The old man sat back slowly.

  “I’m just excited to see more of the town,” Elizabeth said. “And I couldn’t find the book I was looking for anyway.” She looked to the clerk. “It was by Dylan Grimes.”

  But before the old man could say anything, Elana grabbed Elizabeth’s hand, moved toward the door, and said, “Well, if you want to go, let’s go.”

  * * *

  One hour later, Elizabeth had steadily guided the two of them closer to the cemetery without being obvious—she hoped. The snowfall had picked up, and the day was growing dim already. The colorful lights on the buildings of Havenworth made the first half of Spruce Street bright and welcoming; but farther down the block, the shops gave way to a few small houses set back from the road, and it suddenly felt like the warmth of the town had dwindled away.

  “Let’s head back,” Elana said as they moved down the street.

  Elizabeth peered toward the end of the block. “Hey, look. What’s that?”

  Elana gazed through the snowflakes. “Is that a cemetery?” She put a hand to Elizabeth’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s go back. Those places creep me out.”

  Elizabeth was determined; now that she was this close, she wasn’t going to turn away.

  “It looks interesting,” Elizabeth said. “I love old cemeteries.” This wasn’t true at all, of course. She could recall being in a cemetery only once, back in Drere after the death of Aunt Purdy’s friend Mabel Gulwether, when her aunt had dragged her to the graveyard to place a small bouquet of sunflowers on Mabel’s grave.

  Elana looked to her with alarm. “Well, I don’t. Let’s go back.”

  “But it looks so mysterious and interesting here. It reminds me of something out of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Have you ever read it?”

  “No,” Elana said, shaking her head and squinting into the snow. “It’s pretty cold out.”

  It was definitely snowing harder now, and Elizabeth wasn’t feeling all that chipper about traipsing around in the cemetery herself, even though she was resolved to see if there was one particular gravesite there.

  “Well,” she said, “if you don’t want to go, just give me a few minutes to check it out, and I’ll come right back.”

  “Why are you so stuck on going there?”

  It really did sound kind of unusual, Elizabeth thought. “Five minutes,” she said. She pointed to an antique shop back near the start of the block. “I’ll come meet you in there, okay?”

  Elana examined Elizabeth as though she’d asked her to plot out a bank robbery, but she peered at the store, took a deep breath, and said, “I’ll see you there in five minutes.”

  Elizabeth turned and trudged toward the cemetery.

  Without the bright lights of town, Elizabeth realized just how dim the afternoon had become. She stood before the wrought-iron gate, open wide between a line of brick walls that enclosed the cemetery, and looked inside. The graveyard wasn’t very big, not even as big as the playground at the small school in Drere; and there were a few cedars here and there, which had been growing so long their roots created bumps and little berms all around. Some of the tombstones were so old and worn, the words carved on them were unreadable; plastic flowers lay on the snow atop a couple of graves; a few wooden crosses appeared ready to rot and fall over. Elizabeth stood in the entranceway and scanned all about to see if she could spot a relatively new tombstone somewhere. Darkness was closing in quickly.

  “Not many visitors out this way,” someone said. Elizabeth gasped.

  From around the other side of the brick wall, a man with a thick gray beard stepped forward. He was enormous, even taller than Norbridge, and about as wide a person as Elizabeth had ever seen. He wore a tattered wool overcoat frosted with snow, his jeans were caked with dirt stains, his stocking cap clung to his head like a cowl, and his boots were laced high above his ankles and looked nearly as old as he was.

  He stood blocking Elizabeth’s way, staring at her with night-black eyes barely visible through his squint. The distraction of his ruddy and wrinkled face almost kept her from looking at him long enough to hold his gaze.

  “Are you looking for something?” the man said.

  Elizabeth was so startled she couldn’t find her voice.

  “I said are you looking for something?” the man repeated, more loudly. The wind moaned as it pressed through the weeds of the cemetery.

  “I … I was just walking down here with my friend,” Elizabeth said.

  The man looked past her, scanned the street. “I don’t see any friend.” He examined Elizabeth more closely.

  “She stopped in the antique store back there, and I came down here,” Elizabeth said falteringly. “I’m interested in historic places, and I saw this—”

  “It’s not all that historic,” the man said. “It’s just our town’s graveyard.” He ran a hand across his cheek.

  She thought this might be an opening. “It looks pretty old.” The man said nothing. “Are you the caretaker?”

  The man took three steps forward, and Elizabeth had the frightening thought that he might grab her, or at a minimum yell at her and tell her to leave him alone. He suddenly filled nearly her entire vision, looming large and dark before her as the snow fell even harder.

  “I don’t know why you’re interested in this place,” he said. “Besides, no one’s been buried here in years.”

  With that, he turned and walked back inside the cemetery.

  “No one at all?” Elizabeth said. She had a sensation of sinking and felt like she’d been standing on a patch of snow that was suddenly giving way—how could it be that Norbridge had told her Gracella was buried here, and now this man was letting her know otherwise?

  The man didn’t answer. He disappeared behind the wall, and then the iron gate swung into place, barring the entrance entirely. The man came into view again with an enormous chain in his hands and began winding it with a heavy clanking noise around the gate itself before fastening a thick lock on and snapping it in place. The click of the lock died quickly in the wind and darkness; Elizabeth stared at the man as he patted his hands clean.

  “No one,” he said, and then he retreated into the graveyard. In the darkness, he disappeared so completely Elizabeth thought she might have imagined the whole thing.

  The wind stopped for a moment, everything grew quiet, and then Elizabeth went to meet Elana in the shop up the street.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE CAFÉ AND THE SCARAB SCARE

  One hour later, the two girls and Mrs. Vesper were seated at a booth in the Silver Fir Café, the bright paintings of birds on the
high walls all around and cups of hot chocolate on the table before them. Mrs. Vesper had ordered each of them a piece of apple pie, but Elizabeth wasn’t hungry and only picked at hers. The discovery at the cemetery and the awkwardness of sitting with Elana and her grandmother had ruined her appetite.

  Norbridge lied to me, Elizabeth thought. She’d been hearing these words in her head since the strange man had locked the cemetery gate, and she felt so upset and hurt that any conversation with Mrs. Vesper and Elana seemed it would be merely a distraction.

  Mrs. Vesper took a long sip of hot chocolate and fixed her gaze on Elizabeth. Her eyes were so penetrating and cold, and her white hair was so strangely lustrous, Elizabeth found herself unnerved. Her skin, even, had an unusual radiance, so that, despite her generally creepy appearance, there was something undeniably preserved about her. Even with her all-black clothing, which looked like something a woman from a hundred years before might have worn, Elana’s grandmother appeared to have taken remarkable care of herself. She hadn’t succumbed to the wrinkles and dishevelment typical of a woman her age. As the old woman stared at her, Elizabeth almost forgot about what she’d learned at the cemetery.

  “We finally have a chance to visit,” Mrs. Vesper said. “Get to know one another.”

  Elizabeth glanced at Elana, who was hanging on her grandmother’s words.

  “Thanks for bringing me here,” Elizabeth said. “And for the hot chocolate and pie.”

  “My pleasure,” Mrs. Vesper said. “My pleasure.”

  Elana explained how they had spent the preceding two hours—fortunately, leaving out the part about the cemetery—and gushing about how lovely Havenworth was and how they had to come back for another visit before they left Winterhouse in a few days. Mrs. Vesper asked Elizabeth about her life in Drere with her aunt and uncle. Elana mentioned a few things about her school and her skating and where she liked to go in the summer. After fifteen minutes of this, Elizabeth realized the three of them were having something close to an easy little discussion. When she thought back to it later, this part of the afternoon felt … normal.