Whispers from the Dead

by Joan Lowery Nixon

  By the time Dee Dee wound down, we had reached the front door. She stopped talking and just stared as I opened it.

  “We’ve got a calico cat named Dinky,” I told Dee Dee. “She’s boarding at the vet’s. Mom thought it would be easier for her while we were moving in.” I could see that Dee Dee wasn’t paying attention to anything I was saying.

  I led the way into the house, and Dee Dee followed slowly. She stood very still just inside the entry hall as I closed the front door behind us, and I could swear that for a moment she stopped breathing. The pale blue pupils of her eyes darted back and forth as she tried to scan every inch of the entry hall.

  “The hall’s kind of plain right now,” I told her, “but Mom has a big potted plant and a large picture that should look good right over there.”

  With an effort Dee Dee looked directly into my eyes. “I’m ready for that Coke,” she said. “Which way is the kitchen?”

  Dad had left for his office already, but Mom was still at home. Mom had worked for years as a legal secretary, but she planned to give herself a month’s vacation before she started job-hunting. I introduced Dee Dee, and while we were finding the Cokes, Mom asked her about the people who had lived here before we bought the house.

  “Holt. That was their name, wasn’t it? Mr. and Mrs. Martin Holt,” Mom said.

  “They weren’t very neighborly,” Dee Dee added quickly. “None of the neighbors knew them very well.”

  “Oh,” Mom said. “I guess I just wondered a little about them—if they had children, things like that.”

  “They had one boy.” Dee Dee’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “He wasn’t very friendly to most of us. Except he was to a guy down the block—Eric Hendrickson. They were friends.”

  I handed Dee Dee a Coke and a glass filled with ice cubes and motioned toward a chair. She sat on the edge and shifted and squirmed. I was pretty sure it wasn’t the chair that was making her uncomfortable.

  “You’re bound to meet Eric soon,” Dee Dee said to me. “He likes pretty girls.”

  “Will I like him?”

  She shrugged. “He’s okay, I guess, but he did stand up Cyndi Baker once, and she hates him. They were going to a dance at the country club her father belongs to, and she’d bought a new dress and—” I heard Dee Dee shift gears. She was back in safe territory again.

  “If you girls will excuse me, I’m going to run to the grocery store for a few minutes,” Mom said.

  “You’re leaving?” Dee Dee was half out of her chair.

  Mom threw Dee Dee a puzzled look, rummaged under a pile of rumpled packing paper for her keys and purse, waved good-bye, and left.

  Dee Dee turned to me and asked, “Why don’t we go to my house?” That strange expression was on her face again.

  I sat down beside her and poured a little more Coke into my glass. “We just started these. We can stay here until we finish, can’t we?”

  “Uh, yes. I guess so,” she answered.

  As I looked over at Dee Dee she deliberately brightened. She took a big slurp of Coke, fought back a burp, blinked, and said, “Tell me, do you have any pets? A dog or a cat?”

  For an instant her question took me by surprise, but I remembered Dee Dee’s wary look as we entered the house. I knew at the time she wasn’t paying attention to what I’d been saying. “We have a cat. She’s still boarding at the vet’s,” I answered, and patiently repeated everything I’d told her about Dinky.

  “I’ll tell you about Memorial High,” Dee Dee said. “There’s this ‘in’ group, of course, but forget them. Who needs them, huh? I like people who are interesting because they’re different, don’t you?” She began to relate a funny story about some guy she knew at school, but I tuned her out. That horrible experience I’d had the day before wasn’t a hallucination, and it wasn’t something growing from my imagination. There was something strange about this house, and Dee Dee knew what it was.

  How was I going to get her to tell me?

  “—so that’s what he said, and he never knew why he got in trouble!” Dee Dee laughed, and I laughed with her. I wondered what the joke was.

  “You said you hadn’t been in this house before. Would you like to see the rest of it?” I asked.

  She stiffened but finally answered, “Sure. Why not?”

  Dee Dee tagged closely after me. She didn’t give a second thought to the whirlpool in the master bathroom. The Pritchards had one too. “Same builder. He did everything on this block,” Dee Dee said. “Our Colonial’s probably the largest. Mom went nuts over those pillars across the front of the house. Frankly I think it’s too Gone with the Wind inside and out. It should have come with Rhett Butler.”

  She continued to babble until we crossed the entry hall and headed up the stairs. She not only fell silent but also seemed to be holding her breath. The guest bedroom was cluttered with boxes we hadn’t sorted through yet, but my room was fairly well put together.

  “Good.” Dee Dee gave a relieved sigh. “You’ve got the back bedroom. Adam had the front.”

  I whirled and faced her. “What are you talking about?”

  She looked as though she’d been caught cheating on an exam. “N-nothing,” she said, stammering. “I was just rattling on. Everybody says I talk too much. You’ve learned that about me by this time.”

  “Who’s Adam?”

  She shrugged. “Adam Holt.”

  “I thought you hadn’t been in this house.”

  “I haven’t. Mom described the house to us when she listed it for sale.”

  I leaned against the chest of drawers and said, “Okay. Now tell me about Adam Holt.”

  “Adam ignored me,” Dee Dee said, “which was just as well.” I must have looked puzzled because she quickly added, “He was very charming when he felt like it. He was …” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Seductive.”

  “Seductive?” I echoed. “That’s a strange way to describe him.”

  “Adam was strange, period,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t even bother to speak to most of the people on the block.” She sneaked a quick, defensive glance at herself in the mirror over the chest of drawers and added, “It wasn’t just me.”

  “But ‘seductive’? What did you mean by that?”

  “Adam could make girls fall all over him.” She leaned closer to me, although there was no one around to hear, and murmured, “There was a story about a girl he raped. At least she said he did, but Adam insisted she was lying.”

  “Was he arrested?”

  “No. She had a reputation, so it all kind of died down.” She stopped and looked at me helplessly. “That’s all I can tell you about Adam.”

  “Then tell me why you’re afraid of this house.”

  She gasped, and her eyes widened. “I’m not,” she insisted, but it was easy to see that she was lying.

  Bluntly I said, “There’s something frightening about this house, isn’t there, Dee Dee? I don’t know what it is, but you do, don’t you?”

  Dee Dee laughed nervously. “I don’t know why you think that,” she said, but her eyes didn’t meet mine. As she spoke, she moved toward the door. “Come on over and meet my mom. She said she had an appointment at eleven, so she’ll still be home.”

  Silently I followed Dee Dee, making sure I locked the front door as we left the house. By the time we crossed our double lawns and reached her home, she was once again her outgoing, talkative self.

  I quickly discovered what she meant by Gone with the Wind decor. There was an artfully arranged clutter of tiny, enameled boxes, porcelain birds, family photographs, and all sorts of small odds and ends on every table of every size throughout what I could see of the Pritchards’ home. The deep blue brocade draperies in the large living room were shirred, ruffled, and sashed; and a gigantic portrait of a couple from Civil War days hung over the fireplace.

  “Your relatives?” I asked.

  Dee Dee shook her head. “Mom picked up the painting in some antique shop in New Orlean
s. She bought it because the woman’s gown matched our drapes.”

  “You didn’t meet Billy,” she said, and pointed to an old, nondescript dog who was snoozing at one end of the sofa. Billy flicked an ear but didn’t bother to open his eyes.

  I heard footsteps behind me and turned, prepared to greet Dee Dee’s mother, but a small woman in a white uniform nodded and smiled at us as she removed two used coffee cups from the arrangement on the ornate mahogany coffee table. With all the clutter, I wondered how she’d found them.

  “Lupita,” Dee Dee said, “this is one of our new neighbors, Sarah Darnell. She and her parents just moved into the Holt house.”

  Lupita’s eyes opened wide and her lips parted. Her words came out in a bare whisper. “Buenos días.”

  “I’m not going to keep teaching you English if you won’t use it,” Dee Dee told her. “Now … how do you say it in English?”

  “G-glad to meet you,” Lupita said, stammering. She seemed awfully nervous.

  “I’m glad to meet you too,” I answered.

  As Lupita scurried out of the room Dee Dee sighed. “She’s in this country illegally, of course. Mom hires illegals so she won’t have to pay as much. Maybe if Immigration offers amnesty again, Lupita will make it, but until then she either works here for someone like Mom or goes back to Mexico.”

  “Is that why she seems frightened of me?”

  Dee Dee glanced at me sharply for an instant, then shrugged. “I don’t think you frightened her. Lupita’s been scared of being caught and sent back ever since she arrived in Houston five years ago, but she’s used to Mom entertaining people here. She knows that some of Mom’s friends hire illegals, too, so she’s in no danger from them.”

  “You’re teaching her English?”

  Dee Dee grinned. “Yes. Just between you and me and Lupita, if she learns to speak and read and write English, she can get a better job than this one.”

  I grinned back. I was beginning to like Dee Dee.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go and find my mom.”

  Just then Mrs. Pritchard strode into the room, briefcase in hand, and beamed at me. Her handshake was firm and quick, but she clung to my hand for just an instant, as though she were reluctant to let go. “You must be Sarah,” she said. “Your father was right to brag about you. You’re a lovely girl. All that dark curly hair and those gorgeous green eyes!” She leaned closer. “My goodness, there’s a ring of gold around the green. Very dramatic! Isn’t that supposed to mean something special? That you’re fey? Attuned to things the rest of us aren’t?”

  I gasped as a shiver wiggled down my spine, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “I would have come over to pay a call, but I had some clients who had to be taken care of. You know how it is,” she said. “But I’ll be over as soon as I can possibly make it. I can’t wait to meet your mother. She’s going to love the neighborhood. Everyone is so friendly. We’re all so happy that you and your family live here now.”

  She kissed Dee Dee’s forehead and smiled at me again. She had a radiant smile. She was a taller, trimmer, much more polished version of Dee Dee.

  As she left, her high heels clicking on the marble tiles in the Pritchard entry hall, I said to Dee Dee, “I like your mother.”

  “Everybody does,” she answered. She looked at her watch. “I’m working the noon-to-two shift as lifeguard down at the pool. Why don’t you put on a bathing suit and come with me?”

  I couldn’t help shuddering.

  “What’s the matter?” Dee Dee asked. “Don’t you know how to swim?”

  “I’m a good swimmer,” I managed to say.

  “You looked at me the same way you would if I asked if you’d like to catch rattlesnakes.”

  I decided to be open with Dee Dee—about why I wouldn’t swim, that is. “In May I got caught in some vines at the bottom of a lake. I nearly drowned. I’ve been afraid to go into the water ever since.”

  Even though her eyes widened in surprise, she didn’t miss a beat. “You’re missing a lot of fun,” she said. “You’re supposed to go right back into the water, to face up to your fears. Didn’t anybody tell you that?”

  “My doctor did.”

  “Well?”

  “I had to—well, work out other problems first.”

  The wary look in her eyes was so much like Marcie’s had been that it scared me. I didn’t want Dee Dee to think I was strange, too, so I blurted out, “Your face shows everything you’re thinking, Dee Dee. You don’t have to worry about me. The problems had to do with the near drowning. I almost died, and— Oh, it’s a long story.”

  Dee Dee smiled. “My father told me never to play poker. Everybody in the game would be able to tell if I had a good hand or was bluffing.” Her glance flicked in the direction of our house. “I tell you what. When you want to go swimming again, I’ll go with you. I’ll be right at your side, so you won’t need to be afraid. I’m a good swimmer, and I’m a good lifeguard too. A lot better than that snooty Richard Ailey, who’s head lifeguard.” She launched into another story, and by the time she reached the end we were both at ease with each other again.

  We sauntered toward the front door with the usual “I’ll call you later.”

  “Come over whenever you want.”

  A shadow moved behind Dee Dee, catching my eye. Lupita was peering at me, her eyes dark with a desperate concern. As my glance met hers she quickly turned away, but I saw her surreptitiously cross herself.

  “What’s wrong? What do you know that I don’t know?” I wanted to shout at Dee Dee and Lupita.

  But Dee Dee was saying, “I’m going to be late, and Richard is going to kill me!”

  The door shut, and I reluctantly trudged toward my own house with the fear that something evil was there waiting for the right moment, waiting for me.

  I hoped with all my heart that Mom was home.

  Chapter

  Three

  As I closed the front door the house settled uncomfortably around me. I hurried nervously toward the kitchen, toward the sound of Mom opening and shutting cabinet doors, and burst into the warmth and sunlight that streamed through the wide window over the sink.

  Mom straightened and looked surprised. “Where’s Dee Dee?”

  “She works each afternoon for two hours as lifeguard at the neighborhood pool.” I began to poke through the cabinet. “What did you get for us to eat? I’m starving.”

  “How about a make-your-own sandwich? There’s some Colby cheese and sliced ham.”

  “Want me to make one for you?”

  Mom sighed. “Thanks. I’d love it. No ham in mine. Just cheese and lettuce.”

  She plopped into a chair and rested her chin on her hands. “I met one of our neighbors in the grocery store. Her name’s Margaret Taylor, and she lives in the corner house. I’d seen her taking her newspaper in yesterday, so when I recognized her in the grocery store, I went over to say hello and introduce myself.”

  There was an oddly strained tone in Mom’s voice, so I stopped slapping mayonnaise on the bread and looked at her. “Wasn’t she friendly?”

  “I suppose she was friendly enough,” Mom answered. “I’m just a little puzzled by the way she acted. She seemed somewhat embarrassed.”

  “Why would she be embarrassed?”

  “I can’t imagine. Our conversation was short. She told me what a wonderful friend and neighbor Evelyn Pritchard is, and how everyone on the block would do anything for her, and how she hoped we’d soon feel the same way about her.

  “I didn’t know quite how to answer that, so I said I was looking forward to meeting Evelyn and invited Margaret to come by for a cup of coffee. She got so flustered, she dropped the box of cereal she was holding and insisted that I visit her instead. She said something about telephoning me soon, and that was that.”

  I stumbled across the kitchen, slid into the chair opposite Mom, and reached across the table to grasp her hands. “Mom,” I said, “there’s nothing wrong with M
rs. Whoever-she-is. There’s something wrong with this house.”

  Mom gave a little gasp of surprise and asked, “Sarah, what are you talking about?”

  “I wish I knew. That neighbor you met isn’t the only one who acts strange. Dee Dee does too. I could tell that she was curious about what the house looked like inside, but even though she came in with me, she couldn’t wait to get out of here and back to her own house.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Mom said.

  “Not to us, it doesn’t, but it does to that neighbor, and it does to Dee Dee.” I leaned back in my chair and sighed. I wished I could tell Mom what I’d felt in this house. Tentatively I tried a test. I wanted to see how Mom would react. “If there’s something wrong with this house, how will we find out?”

  Mom pushed back her chair and stood, appraising me. “There’s nothing wrong with this house, Sarah,” she said firmly. “It’s a beautiful house. It’s the most beautiful house we’ve ever lived in. Please, sweetheart, don’t let your imagination—”

  She stopped, and I hurried to say, “Mom, I’m okay. All right? You’re the one who brought up the crazy way our neighbor was acting.”

  Mom’s cheeks grew pink. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been thinking out loud.” She smiled. “If you’re not going to finish making those sandwiches, then I will.”

  “I’ll do it.” I jumped up and began washing the lettuce. It was obvious to me that there was some unhappy story connected with this house, and people who knew it were trying to keep it from us. Mom may have wanted to avoid finding out, but I had to know. ¡Ayúdame! That desperate, pitiful call for help rushed back into my mind. Something in this house wanted me to know.

  As soon as we finished our sandwiches I asked, “What would you like me to do next?”