by Becca Fox
“Whoa. What are you doing?”
“They’re the source of this feeling, Charlie. We have to talk to them.” As if it were that simple.
“We can’t. They’re suspects in the Ward case,” I hissed.
“A chilling coincidence,” our uncle muttered.
“We don’t know anything about them. They could be dangerous.”
Jasmine gave me a flat look. “They’ve been touched by Death, just like us.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“Why else would we feel this way?” my sister demanded.
“I don’t know, but we can’t just walk up to strangers and ask them how they’re connected to Death!”
“Remember where we are, Charlie.” This from our uncle who was subtly glancing at our surroundings.
I ran a hand down my face and lowered my voice. “Sorry.”
“How about this?” Uncle Victor said, glancing from me to Jasmine and back as he held his hands out in a placating gesture. “I’ll interrogate them alone. You two can watch from the other side of the two-way mirror.”
“I’ll watch.” I nodded at Jasmine. “You can wait downstairs.”
My sister rolled her eyes. “What exactly do you think is going to happen, Charles?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I want you to wait downstairs,” I said, trying very hard not to shout. I couldn’t protect her if I couldn’t predict what was going to happen. How did she not get that?
“Seems a little excessive since they’ll be locked in the interrogation room,” Jasmine said with much sass.
“I think,” Uncle Vic said before I could tear my hair out, “your sister will be safe enough behind the mirror. Come on, Charlie,” he added when I was going to argue further. “She deserves answers just as much as you do.”
He could’ve left it at that and gone to ask one of his subordinates to prep an interrogation room, but he didn’t. He stood there and watched me expectantly, waiting for me to agree, giving me a chance to disagree. Despite my slightly illogical fear and frustration, I respected him for that. A lot.
“All right,” I muttered. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Chapter 26
Esmeralda
“I’m going out,” Aunt Dinah announced.
I was picking at the mystery casserole she’d placed in front of me half an hour ago but her words made me stop. “It’s after six.”
“I’m aware,” the old lady snapped.
“You usually read for two hours and then go to bed.”
My aunt busied herself gathering her empty dinner dishes but her tone was no less harsh. “Yes, I know, Esmeralda. I’m doing something different tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because I feel like it!”
I studied her from across the table. She didn’t look sick…Still, I had to ask. “Are you okay?”
“What? Yes. Fine.”
Three notes, one high, two low, all of them uttered with barely a rest between them. It was a lie. I knew it.
I should’ve let it go. It was probably the safest course of action. But I didn’t. Hunter always said I had a nose for trouble and I chased after it like a bloodhound on the hunt. He was probably right, given my smart mouth and my irrational urge to push people’s buttons. But I’d never admit it to the douche.
“Are you sure?” I asked despite my better judgment. “You always stick to your routine.”
My aunt shut her eyes and breathed deeply. Any normal person seeing this obvious attempt to hold back some violent reaction would’ve backtracked or, better yet, apologized for prying. What did I do? I kept talking. Like a jackass.
“Are you pissed because you saw me and Charlie boy kissing? You can’t honestly say you didn’t see it coming. Besides, I thought you liked him.”
“Es—mer—alda,” the old shrew said, separating my name into three frigid syllables. Her eyes were open now, burning holes through my soul. I felt microscopic under her scornful gaze. The speech that came from those chapped lips cut me down even further.
“There is nothing I care less about than your love life. If I’m mad, it’s because you insist upon pestering me with personal questions when I’ve made it abundantly clear you and I are not friends. Since you refuse to acknowledge Hunter as your father, then we are not family either. We’re housemates at best and I have never felt the need to share anything personal with a housemate other than exactly what they need to know.”
I felt sick to my stomach, like someone had tied a bunch of worms together in one big knot and forced me to swallow it. I blinked hard to counteract the stinging. My lungs heaved. Swimming just underneath the surface of my hurt was fury. I couldn’t tell if I was angrier at her or at myself. Yes, she was being incredibly bitchy right now, but why was I surprised? Because, without me knowing it, I had come to think of her as family. She was my old lady, my grouchy tenant who occasionally did small and annoying things to prove she cared. She’d started to grow on me. I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d started to grow on her too.
But I’d been wrong. She was just like Hunter. Just like the teachers from my old school. Just like everyone else who looked at me and only saw a nuisance.
Turning her back on me, she muttered, “Now, did you have any other questions?”
“No.” I stabbed at my dinner with the fork. “Enjoy your fucking outing.”
It spoke volumes when she didn’t chew me out. Whatever was bothering her must’ve been so consuming that she didn’t have the strength to care about anything else, not even my “foul” language. But I wasn’t in the mood to wonder what was on her mind.
Aunt Dinah deposited her dishes in the kitchen and walked past me without a glance. I heard her take her raincoat out from the closet. A jingle of keys traveled from the little table in the sitting room to the foyer. Then the front door opened and shut.
For the first time since I’d arrived in Seattle, I was completely alone. My devious little mind, fueled by heartache and fury, came up with so many things I could do to piss Aunt Dinah off. Like hide last night’s fish behind her sock drawer. Like open all the windows in the house and let the rain ruin her carpet. But I settled on what was perhaps the worst, most expensive thing to replace: the wine. I’d strip the plastic coverings off those couches and empty every bottle of wine my aunt owned over the exposed upholstery.
Leaving the rest of my dinner at the table, I hobbled to the stairs. I suffered through the chair lift, my heart thumping hard with suppressed emotion. I rubbed a fist against my eyes.
I wasn’t gonna cry. I didn’t mean anything to her? Fine. She didn’t mean anything to me. Nothing she said mattered. Nothing that belonged to her mattered.
I slammed my crutch tip through the wall beside my bedroom door, leaving a golf-ball-sized hole. The damn crutches slowed me down! I never hated them more than I did right then but I’d be moving even slower without them. Biting back curses, I swiped a couple of hairpins from my dresser and proceeded to return downstairs. I had to set my crutches aside in order to drag the pouf from the sitting room to the wine cellar door. Hopping on my one good leg, I dragged the pale pink footstool across the hardwood. Once it was positioned in the right place, I sat on it and got to work picking the padlock. I was rusty so it took longer than I liked, but I did eventually get in.
I expected everything to be as immaculate as it was upstairs so I was surprised to see spider webs and thick coats of dust after I flipped on the light switch. Footprints created a path down the cement steps to the wine racks against the furthermost wall. The space was the size of the sitting room if only a little bigger, not the length of the entire ground floor like I’d originally assumed. It was empty other than the wine racks, a couple of plastic bins, a space heater, and...a bed?
I limped over to the solitary twin mattress, my anger ebbing as curiosity crept in. The blankets and sheets were disturbed, as if someone had slept in it last night. But that was impossible. There was dust here too and not a single footprin
t around the bed. The space heater, which was aimed at the mattress, was still plugged into the outlet. As I stepped around the bed, toward the plastic bins, something crinkled under my foot. I looked down to see old black and white pictures scattered over the floor. I hadn’t noticed them earlier because they were veiled by dust. I created a cloud when I sat over the bed. Setting my crutches aside, I coughed and then waved my arms around until the air was clear again.
I bent over to collect the pictures. Wiped away the remaining dust with my fingers. And stared into the face of a teenage version of my Great Aunt Dinah.
She was tall and thin with the same pointed face but her hair was cut short. It was dark and wavy, curling away from her cheeks. She wore a striped shirt tucked into some dark pants that had wide bottoms along with a pair of God-awful sandals. My great aunt seemed to be running away from the camera in this shot, grinning over her shoulder at whoever was taking the picture. There was a dirt lot ahead of her and the blurry outlines of people milling around a fire pit. The sun must’ve been setting because the sky was bright along the horizon and steadily became darker as it expanded.
I turned the picture over, hoping to see a date stamp or something, but there wasn’t one. So I reached for another picture. Aunt Dinah was chasing two little boys in this one. They were identical twins with blonde hair and wicked grins. Their collared shirts were worn at the elbows, their corduroy pants mud-stained at the knees. It looked like they were playing in the backyard of this house. The familiar porch stretched out in the picture’s background. Another teenage girl sat there with a book in her hand. Her hair was styled in perfect ringlets and pinned back with two little bows. She wore a plaid shirt dress with ruffles down the front. I could barely make out her face but she seemed to be scowling in the general direction of the kids having fun. I could’ve sworn I’d seen this party-pooper before...
Then it hit me. This was the same girl from the picture I found in the guest room while I was cleaning. The reason Aunt Dinah had yelled at me for no reason. I’d climbed out my window and ran into Charlie boy by the taco truck. I knew this girl was related to my aunt; their scowls were too similar. Although, looking into the laughing face of this young version of Aunt Dinah and comparing it to the face of her sister, I couldn’t friggin’ believe it. My great aunt seemed like such a happy person.
What happened?
I looked through all of the pictures on the floor. There were three shots of my aunt’s parents, a beautiful blond woman and a dark-haired man with a mustache and a self-important look about him. The sister was only featured in one other picture. The twins cropped up a lot. But Aunt Dinah was the prominent model in all of them. She rode her bicycle down the street, leaned against a brick wall with a cigarette between her fingers, flashed a peace sign while sitting at the edge of a pool, waved at the camera from the tallest branch of an oak tree, smiled down at her Christmas present, squeezed her eyes shut as she blew out the candles on her birthday cake.
When I’d collected all of the pictures from the floor, I hobbled over to the plastic bins to find more. The first three I opened were filled with puzzle boxes. Not the simple, one-hundred-piece puzzles but the really difficult ones with complex images and up to a thousand pieces. The corners of the box lids were white and scuffed. Whoever had put these puzzles together had done them multiple times. The fourth bin I opened contained toys: wooden cars, tangled Slinkys, green army men, a pair of plastic revolvers, a bag of marbles, an old radio. Mostly things a boy would play with.
Maybe these were the twins’ old toys? But then where were Aunt Dinah and her sister’s old things being kept? And why were they separated?
I moved onto the fifth bin. Inside, I found multiple shoe boxes full of more pictures. The story of Aunt Dinah’s adolescence continued. New faces appeared in these, teenage boys and girls who hung out with my aunt outside of the house. They had familiar-looking lifts to their chins and pride in their stances.
“No way,” I muttered, peering closely at a picture of all four of them. Aunt Dinah casually held a switchblade at her side. The guy with his arm around her wore oversized clothes and had a cigarette dangling from his lips. The next guy had a baseball bat over his shoulder. A girl with a perm stood beside him, arms around his waist.
They looked like a gang.
Next, I found a picture of my aunt sporting a black eye. She was lying in bed in the room I was currently staying in, smiling sleepily at the camera. No, it wasn’t sleep tugging at her features; it was pain. Her lips were split, her arm in a sling. She must’ve gotten into a fight before this was taken.
I dug through the box I’d found that picture in, looking for more evidence, but I came up empty. So I put the shoe box away, closed the plastic bin, and moved onto the final bin. Unfortunately, this one was filled with letters. They were all from the same place, St. Catherine’s School for Girls, written in the distinctive typewriter font and organized by date. The first one was from August 15th, 1949. It was paired with a school picture. My heart sank. It was Aunt Dinah. Wearing a white collared shirt under a dark jumper. Her hair was neatly pinned back. And there was the familiar scowl that drew harsh lines across her face, the one she wore all the time now.
I didn’t need to read the letters to know what had happened. The same thing had been done to me, after all. I’d just gotten shipped off to a distant relative instead of a campus full of strict nuns. I didn’t know what made me turn around. Maybe I sensed someone was staring at me. For whatever reason, I slowly pivoted to face my great aunt. She stood at the foot of the stairs, looking tired and sad—not at all like the happy girl in the pictures or the cold, resentful bitch who’d snapped at me earlier or the awkward but polite woman who’d hosted the Campbells earlier today—but like any other old timer reliving painful memories.
“The nuns broke you, didn’t they?” My voice sounded small and hoarse. I braced myself to be shut down, to be yelled at, to be punished. Instead, Aunt Dinah gave a little scoff.
“No. I just let them believe they did so I could graduate and come home. What broke me…” She gritted her teeth as if pushing through a thick, invisible wall. “What broke me was surviving hell just to find out my best friend had died.”
I thought back to the pictures I’d seen of her with her gang. “Was it the boy with the crew cut?”
“Rich?” she asked with a wrinkled brow. “No. He was only a summer boyfriend. My brother…” Here her voice wavered. “It was my brother, Thatcher, who passed away while I was at school.”
“But the twins were so much younger than you. How could one of them be your best—?”
“Keep up, child!” she snarled. “Who do you think took all of those pictures?”
Understanding made my eyes widen. “You had a third brother? And this.” I looked around the cellar, swallowing hard. “This was his room?”
“More like prison,” Aunt Dinah said with a disdainful look at the single mattress. “That padlock on the door was there long before you moved in.”
“But why? Why would your parents put him here?”
My aunt shuddered and hugged herself. “Let’s continue this discussion upstairs. It’s too cold in here.”
Somehow, I got the feeling it wasn’t so much about the cold as it was about the memories. I followed her without complaint. I thought she’d be waiting for me in the sitting room but, by the time I finally made it out, the ground floor was empty. Then she came ambling down the wooden staircase. She cradled a small picture frame and what looked like a black plastic lunch pail.
Once I was settled on the couch and had set my crutches aside, she handed it to me. It wasn’t a lunch pail at all. It was a thick, boxy camera with a circular lens on the front, and a viewfinder along the top next to a white dial. A braided strap was tied from one side to the other, which was why it looked like a lunch pail from a distance. It was a little scratched along the edges and the strap was stretched out, but all in all it was in really good condition considering how old it was.
Aunt Dinah sank into her armchair. “He carried it with him everywhere. It was his most prized possession.”
I’d never heard her talk about anyone with so much affection and nostalgia. I looked up to see her gazing into the picture frame with a tearful smile.
“He said he liked taking pictures because they were pieces of the people and the places he loved. They made him feel less lonely when he was forced to stay in the cellar. This is the only picture he’s in.” With reluctance, she turned the frame around so I could see.
The two of them sat on her bed. Aunt Dinah was still beaten up. Thatcher sat next to her, holding one side of the camera while she held the other to keep it level. He had the same blonde hair as the twins, only his eyes were bright blue. He also had the distinguishing features of a teenager with Down’s Syndrome; slanted eyes, flat nose, short neck. But he had the biggest, sweetest smile I’d ever seen.
It wasn’t a perfect picture. Aunt Dinah’s shoulder was cut off. Their heads barely fit in the shot while their torsos took up too much of the picture. The lighting was off too, casting shadows. But it was a clear representation of their relationship. Thatcher had his arm around her and Aunt Dinah leaned her head against his shoulder. Both of them looked happy and comfortable, like they really were the best of friends.
“He was the result of an affair my mother had early on in my parents’ marriage, and he was born with a handicap,” Aunt Dinah said. “Twice as shameful according to my father. He was the one who insisted on keeping Thatcher locked up, out of the public eye. As a minor politician, he had his reputation to consider.” This she said with a steely edge in her voice. “My mother loved Thatcher just like the rest of us. She stayed with my father because he paid for Thatcher’s care. And I suppose he won her back in time because she kept having his children.” My aunt made a sour face before continuing. “Back in those days, very little was known about Thatcher’s condition but my mother insisted on getting him the best help money could buy. A private tutor came to teach him his letters and numbers three times a week. A physical therapist helped him with his developmental handicaps and a speech therapist worked with him once a week.”