“I—you guys—you didn’t—?” Brendan looked back. Suddenly the whole scene looked much smaller and safer to him. It couldn’t have been more than fifty feet from the sidewalk to the house. The whole time he’d been running, his heart pounding in his chest, still seeing the old crone’s face in front of him . . . that had been only seconds.
And the woman was gone.
The sun had moved. The side of Kristoff House was bathed in shadow. The stone angel might have been there or it might not. Shadows hid all sorts of things.
“Brendan . . . ? Did something happen?” That was Cordelia. She was looking at him seriously; she knew he was freaked. Brendan started to explain—but what would be the point? He couldn’t prove anything. He didn’t want to sound like a little kid.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just . . . I thought I lost this.”
He turned on his PSP. He had never been happier to see the title screen of Uncharted. Back in a world that he understood and controlled, he slipped into the car.
A funny thing happened to Brendan on the drive back from 128 Sea Cliff Avenue. Every second that he put between himself and the old crone, he became more and more convinced that she hadn’t been so scary after all. Dressed in rags, barefoot, with bad teeth . . . obviously she was a homeless lady. The more Brendan thought about it, the more it made sense: She lived in the yard. That was why the price was so low. She’d been spying on the Walkers, and she’d hidden when they’d spotted her—that was the darting shadow that Eleanor had seen. She loved the angel statue—she was obviously mentally disturbed; maybe she talked to it—and so she moved it (never mind how) when she saw Brendan and his sisters investigating. Then, when she had the chance, she snuck up on him to scare him, to drive his family away. And she asked his name because . . . because she was crazy! What other reason did there need to be?
Brendan kept telling himself this as he went through the hypnotic motions of gaming, and soon he was not only convinced that the old crone wasn’t dangerous or supernatural (supernatural, come on); he was determined to go back and drive her from the property. After all, Brendan Walker wasn’t somebody you could just push around. He was practically JV lacrosse.
The Walkers had been renting since “the incident.” Their new apartment was much smaller than their old house, especially the kitchen, which was more of a corner than a room. That meant less cooking and more cheap takeout. The night after seeing Kristoff House, Dr. Walker convened a family meeting over Chinese food in the living room.
“So what’s up?” Brendan asked.
“I just want to make sure you’re all comfortable with our decision to buy Kristoff House.”
“You mean your decision,” said Brendan. “We had no part in it.”
“Fine,” said Dr. Walker. “But speak now if you have a problem.”
“If we moved in, wouldn’t it be Walker House?” asked Eleanor.
“I think we should call it One twenty-eight Sea Cliff Avenue, its proper address,” said Mrs. Walker. “Otherwise it sounds like we’re moving into something that belongs to someone else.”
It does belong to someone else, thought Brendan. The old crone. But he didn’t want to sound scared. He said, “I like it fine. Better than this dump.”
“I like it too,” Eleanor said. She was using a sauce-dipped spring roll to gather up as much shredded carrots and celery as possible; it looked like the spring roll was wearing a wig. “The faster we move in there, the faster we can get Misty.”
“Nell, how many times do we have to go through this—”
“But Mom said I could get her. Mom made me picture her—”
“You’ll get your horse someday,” Mrs. Walker said, “if you eat your spring roll and stop playing with it.”
Eleanor tackled the spring roll in four huge bites. She looked at her mother and spoke with a full mouth: “Do I get my horse now?”
Everybody laughed—even Brendan. You’d have a hard time getting them to admit it, but the Walkers liked dinners this way, quick and greasy, instead of with cloth napkins with rings.
“What about you, Cordelia?” Dr. Walker asked.
“Let me show you something.” Cordelia ducked out of the room and returned with an old book. It had a black cover, no dust jacket, and gold lettering nearly worn off the spine.
“Savage Warriors by Denver Kristoff,” Cordelia announced. “First edition, 1910. I took it from the library. And look!” She pulled out her MacBook Air. “On Powell’s Books they’re selling this for five hundred dollars! So that library alone is worth, like, the closing cost of the house!”
“Cordelia,” Brendan said, “you stole from the Kristoff House library?”
“You don’t steal from libraries. You borrow. Not that you would know.”
“No, your brother’s right,” said Dr. Walker. “It’s not our house yet, and you shouldn’t have taken that—”
“That’s right you shouldn’t!” Brendan stood up. “Somebody might be really mad at you for stealing! You ever think of that?”
“Seriously, Bren?” Cordelia smirked. “Since when do you have a moral compass?”
Brendan didn’t answer—partly because he didn’t know what a moral compass was, partly because he was terrified of the old crone. Maybe she was a homeless lady, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she lived at 128 Sea Cliff Avenue. Maybe she didn’t take kindly to curious girls stealing books from her library. Brendan almost spoke up then about seeing her, about how he could still feel her hand around his wrist, about how that wrist felt cold even now, about how she had said “Walker” like it meant something . . . but he didn’t want to get made fun of. He would handle the crone himself when they moved in. Like a man.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just . . . it’s not right to steal.”
“That’s true,” Dr. Walker said, “and Cordelia, you’ll be putting that book back next week.”
“What happens next week?”
“We’re moving in.”
Spartan Movers was a moving company in San Francisco, the name of which was a source of huge embarrassment for Cordelia. “Why don’t we just go with Low-Rent Movers?” she asked her mom. But when she saw the truck, she realized it wasn’t spartan like self-denying; it was Spartan like a citizen of ancient Sparta, with a plumed helmet for a logo.
The Spartan truck pulled up in front of Kristoff House, and a trio of burly men got out. The Walkers were already there, eager to get their stuff moved in. Brendan was more eager than anyone: He had visions of turning his attic bedroom into a teenage man cave where he could happily ignore the rest of his family. He started trailing one of the movers as the man carried a bag of lacrosse equipment into the house.
“That goes in my room, the attic,” Brendan said.
“No problemo,” said the mover, eyeing Kristoff House. It looked the same, except the lawn needed mowing. Brendan’s dad would probably make him do it.
“Nice place,” the mover said. He was clearly one of those people who liked to talk. “Most folks are downsizing these days. But you guys are moving up.”
“Back up,” corrected Brendan as they walked down the path. When Dr. Walker looked over, Brendan gave a big smile, pretending to help the mover with the bag. “We used to live in a place like this.”
“What happened?”
“There was an incident,” said Brendan, before realizing he’d said too much.
“Oh yeah? What kinda incident?” asked the mover. “Your old man was running schemes on the stock market and he got caught?”
“No.”
“He did time in the joint for tax fraud?”
“Oh, no—”
“Did he wear a scuba suit to check the mail? Was he riding his bicycle naked in circles? What?”
Brendan stopped short. “Yes. Yes, you totally nailed it. Riding his bike naked in circles.”
The moving man nodded and frowned as if he knew Brendan didn’t want to hear any more from him. They moved into the kitchen . . . and Brendan’s mind went back to the day tha
t had changed everything.
Dr. Walker had been a surgeon at John Muir Medical Center. His specialty had been gastric bypass surgery; he’d been headed for a senior position—but then one day he fell asleep in the break room during a shift and woke up standing over a patient, holding a bloody scalpel.
He had carved a symbol into the man’s stomach.
It was an eye, with an iris and pupil in the center and half circles above and below.
Brendan had come home from school and found his mother and sisters in tears. His father couldn’t remember disfiguring the man’s stomach; Dr. Walker had been taking sleeping pills to help him rest, and they had made him sleepwalk.
The patient had sued, of course. Dr. Walker had lost his job. The lawsuit was still pending, and the Walkers had spent so much money fighting it that they’d been forced to sell their old home and their two cars. It was so weird—so crazy and unlikely—that Brendan still had trouble believing it had really happened, even though he was living with the results.
“You know, I heard weird stuff about this place,” the mover said as they walked through the upstairs hall, past the portraits of the Kristoff family.
“What?” Brendan asked.
“Maybe I’m no Harvard grad, but I’m a real good listener and an even better eavesdropper. And I heard this house was cursed. That’s why the last family left.”
“You believe in that stuff? Curses?”
“In San Francisco? With all kinds of hippies and freaks running around? Anybody could get cursed.”
Brendan had a question, but he wasn’t sure if he could ask it without sounding crazy. He pulled the string so the attic stairs came down and went into the attic with the mover.
“Where you want the hockey stuff?” the mover asked.
“Lacrosse,” Brendan said. “Put it anywhere.” The mover put it by the window. Then Brendan said, “If this place is cursed, how do I fix it?”
The mover didn’t seem to think that question was weird. “Best way to fix a curse is to find the person who set it up,” he said, shrugging. Then he left Brendan to think about the old crone.
Out on the sidewalk, the mover returned to the Spartan truck for his next item: a white trunk with bands of riveted bronze. It had rounded metal corners and the faded initials RW stenciled over a hefty lock.
“What’s in that trunk?” Cordelia asked. She was standing outside with her father.
“Just some old family records,” said Dr. Walker. “You never noticed before? I’ve been lugging them around for years. Master bedroom!” he told the mover. Two hours later the Walkers had settled in, hardly daring to believe that this was their new home. Since the purchase price had covered the furniture, everything inside was as beautiful as when they’d first visited: the pottery, the suit of armor, the grand piano. . . . The Walkers’ belongings seemed out of place, unworthy of their new surroundings. Even the box of groceries that they had brought from their old house didn’t seem to belong in the shiny kitchen. After making her family take a self-timed photo with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, Mrs. Walker let her kids wander while she made tea in the stellar kitchen and her husband dozed beneath a sunbeam in the living-room Chester chair.
Cordelia went to the library to return Savage Warriors to the shelves but was surprised to see there wasn’t any space for it, as if the other books had multiplied in its absence. Oh well, she thought, putting it on the table and taking down a book called The Fighting Ace.
Eleanor went upstairs and bravely passed under the creepy old pictures, moving to where Diane Dobson had pointed out the dumbwaiter. She pulled the knob in the wall; it opened like a mailbox. She was just tall enough to see a small compartment hanging on what looked like two bicycle chains. She wanted to climb in, but she knew that her mother would have a fit, so she tossed her dolls inside the dumbwaiter and tried to figure out how to make them go down to the kitchen.
Brendan grabbed a lacrosse stick to use as a weapon and went outside to investigate the stone angel. He was sweating nervously and hated himself for it as he crept around the side of the house. He came to where the statue had been . . .
And it was still gone. Pine needles and twigs lay over the area in uniform distribution.
It was her, Brendan thought. He had no idea where the thought came from, but he knew he was right. He remembered how the angel had been missing a right hand. He tried to remember which hand the old crone had grabbed him with. He would put money on the left. Eleanor saw her, and she turned into stone to hide herself. Now she could be anywhere.
Brendan scanned the property. He didn’t hear anything but a babbling squirrel and the irregular sibilance of cars passing on Sea Cliff Avenue. After a few minutes he decided he wasn’t doing anything useful and made his way back inside.
She was right there, in the great hall, talking to his family.
“What are you doing here?” Brendan demanded, brandishing his lacrosse stick like a two-handed ax. “Leave my family alone!”
“Brendan!” his mother snapped. “Have you lost your mind? Put that down!”
The old crone turned to face him. She wasn’t dressed in dirty rags anymore. She wore a loose polka-dot dress and a floral bandanna that hid her baldness; her teeth were freshly cleaned and polished, almost white. She carried an apple pie in her left hand; her right was tucked into her dress pocket. “What’s wrong, son? You seem troubled.”
Brendan gritted his teeth. “You bet I’m troubled. Now drop the pie, put your hands over your head, and get out of our house—”
“Brendan! Give me that lacrosse stick! Immediately!” his father ordered.
“Dad, this old bag’s evil. I’ll bet she spiked that pie with arsenic—”
“You’re playing too many video games. Hand over the stick!”
Silence gripped the room. Brendan gulped and gave his dad the lacrosse stick.
“Now apologize,” ordered his mother.
Brendan took a deep breath, refusing to make eye contact with the old woman, and said under his breath, “Sorry.”
“You’re more than sorry. You’re grounded for a month. You can’t just threaten people,” said his father.
“I’m not sure she’s a person,” Brendan mumbled.
“Bren,” Cordelia said, “she was introducing herself. She’s our next-door neighbor.”
“Great.”
“I apologize for my son’s unconscionable behavior,” said Dr. Walker, putting the lacrosse stick against a wall. “Brendan, go to your room; we’ll discuss this shortly. Ma’am, we never had a chance to get your name.”
“Dahlia Kristoff,” the old crone said. “And please don’t worry about your son. I understand about young boys. Especially these days. So many stimuli.”
“Are you related to Denver Kristoff, the writer?” Cordelia asked breathlessly.
“He’s my father.”
Was your father, Brendan thought as he mounted the back stairs, unless he’s like two hundred.
“I’m a fan,” Cordelia said. She held up her copy of The Fighting Ace.
“It’s so nice to meet a fellow bibliophile. Did you get that from my father’s library?”
Cordelia nodded, a little embarrassed—but then again, it was her library now.
“I remember when he finished it. I was born here. See that old joker behind you?” Dahlia nodded to the philosopher bust in the great hall. “Used to call him Arsdottle. Never could pronounce his name correctly.”
“How long did you live here?” asked Cordelia.
“Oh, not too long,” replied Dahlia. “I’ve moved around a bit. Europe, the Far East . . . I’ve lived in places you wouldn’t believe. But I could never get Kristoff House out of my soul.”
“Where do you live now?” Eleanor asked. “One thirty or one twenty-six?” Cordelia gave her a squeeze. She was getting better with numbers.
“Aren’t you a precious one!” said Dahlia. “One thirty, the fine painted lady next door.”
“The purpl
e house with the white trim?” asked Mrs. Walker. “It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you. And you are . . . Walkers, correct?” said Dahlia.
“How did you know that?” asked a slightly unnerved Dr. Walker.
“The neighbors,” replied Dahlia. “They like to talk. But they didn’t tell me your Christian names—”
“She’s lying!” Brendan called from the staircase where he’d been spying. “Don’t listen to her—”
“Brendan. To. Your. Room,” Dr. Walker said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Kristoff—”
“Miss Kristoff.”
“Miss Kristoff. We are the Walkers, yes.” Dr. Walker put on his business voice. “I’m Jacob. This is my wife, Bellamy; our daughters Cordelia and Eleanor; and . . . um . . . Brendan . . . who is apparently refusing to leave the staircase.”
“That’s right!”
Dr. Walker sighed.
“Such a pleasure,” said Dahlia. “So, what are you children ‘into’?”
“Excuse me?” Dr. Walker asked.
“What are your enthusiasms and interests? Isn’t that how the young people put it today?”
“Reading,” said Cordelia.
“Horses,” said Eleanor.
“And your brother? What about him? Is he more adventurous?”
“None of your business!” Brendan yelled. “Why are you guys letting her stay here? You should be kicking her—”
“Brendan! I’ve got this,” Dr. Walker said. “I don’t want to be rude, Miss Kristoff, but we have dinner to get to. We do look forward to being your neighbor. And we gratefully accept your pie.”
Dahlia handed Dr. Walker the gift and looked at each of the Walkers in turn. There was nothing in her eyes but equanimity.
“I know I ask too many questions. It’s only because I don’t have many friends left. Or much time.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” said Mrs. Walker. “Your health . . . ?”
“It’s nothing to worry about. Nothing lasts forever. I shouldn’t have even mentioned it! Please, enjoy your pie—and your evening.”
With that she left, closing the door behind her.
House of Secrets Page 3