The Last to See Me

by M Dressler

  “No, it’s more being on the road all the time. And yes, you’re helping, thank you. Who do we have in the photos, here?”

  “The original owners. The timber family.”

  “Serious and healthy-looking.”

  Yes. Mr. and Mrs. Augustus Lambry, sitting in their great peacocked wicker chairs, a century and more ago. Standing behind them, stiff in their collars, their handsome sons and their dutiful daughters. All of them posing in the rolling garden, bare of arbors and rose bushes then because the roses hadn’t been planted yet. And off in the distance the smoke rising from the family’s mills. But no pictures of the workers inside them. Just smoke dancing in the air over their heads, as if the white puffs came out of the Lambrys’ imaginations and nothing more.

  “Would you like to go right to the pantry, Mr. Pratt? Or up to see where Alice died? I thought maybe she would be, you know, the best candidate?”

  “She would be. But was she the only person to meet her end in this house?”

  “I honestly don’t know the answer to that. I ought to tell you I’m still a little new to this area. So I don’t always know the things the old-timers do. But I can find out anything you need.”

  “Then let’s find out. Do you mind making a note?”

  She takes out her device.

  “Find out,” he says, peering over her shoulder, “who else might have died at this address. At any point before, during, or after the house was built. The constable can help with that, or county records. And let’s start by you showing me the house exactly the way you showed it to the Danes. In this direction?” He walks through the carved archway, brushing it with his bull’s shoulder, into the west parlor, the Red Parlor. “Very nice. Who did all the watercolors?”

  “Alice did. She loved to paint, they say.”

  “Did she sell to anyone?”

  “She didn’t need to. She had the Lambry money. Or what was left of it. And she liked keeping to herself. She liked going down to the beach to paint. She took care of the roses. She spent a lot of time in the garden. They say.”

  Pratt has stopped to study one of Alice’s seagulls flying through a storm. Wings slicing through the air, its shape like a heart cut in two.

  Ellen opens the parlor’s heavy drapes. “Some of what I know about this property my broker told me. She has a string of offices along the coast. Very successful. But I’m the lead on this house. I know all the stops and views.”

  “What did you tell the Danes here?”

  “Well, I said, from this room, you get this wonderful northern exposure and the best views of the garden, all the roses, camellias, rhododendron, poppies. When I was readying the listing, I spoke with Mrs. Fanoli, who docents at our Botanical Garden, to be sure I was getting all the details right. She said some of the rose vines are exceptionally old—you can tell by the way they’ve twisted and thickened around the arbor. Now, if you look this way,” she says, moving over to the next window, “you can see all the way up the hill, toward St. Clements Church. There, past your car. That’s Evergreen, our cemetery.”

  “Yes. I took a quick peek in before I came.” But Pratt goes on staring at the garden. “Those yellow roses. I’m curious about them. One nicked me as I came in.”

  He remembers. Good. I’m glad.

  “They’ve gotten a little wild. Sorry. I should have noticed. Alice had a man who used to help her tend the garden, Manoel. But things have gone a little south since she died. I’ll call him and have him tie back the creepers.”

  “I’d like to know what kind of roses those are. See if you can find out from your contact at the Botanical Garden.”

  “Are you thinking they’re somehow important?”

  He rubs his thick wrist near the silver band, his weapon, his protection, my enemy. “We’ll see. Keep going.”

  I follow, keeping close. Studying, reading them to find signs of things they can’t read themselves. It’s my own work, in a way. To see what the living can’t see. Notice what they can’t notice but is being written across the envelopes of their skins. Ellen, for instance: she clenches her jaw when she’s nervous but pretending not to be and twitches ever so slightly just below her right eyelid. Pratt strokes his sideburns and wipes his stubbled chin and doesn’t know that the base of his neck is damp enough that I can taste it, like the fog before it sweeps in. Yet he’s not really sweating; he isn’t nervous at all, I think, but curious and alert, and that dampness is part of him. It’s the kind of stickiness a fly might have on the tip of its tongue.

  Ellen is telling him, rightly, that the Lambry Timber Company was one of the greatest in the North till the mills closed down, one by one, done in by wars and progress. What riches were left trickled their way down to Alice, the last Lambry in the village, who at least had enough to live on and be the hermit she was, shut up for the most part with her paintings and shells and bits of sea glass. And Manoel.

  “And her heirs have no interest in keeping up the place,” Pratt says matter-of-factly, pushing open the great pocket doors between the parlor and the dining room.

  “They live in the city. They don’t care for it up here. Too isolated for them.”

  “It would take a hardy breed to live here year-round.”

  “I like to think we’re hardy, sure. But we’re a good place for vacationers, too. For weekends. For pretending life is quiet and refined, the way it used to be.”

  “I believe that’s a big part of the attraction for the Danes. Do you think they’ll be good keepers of the Lambry legacy?” He curls his hand around the back of one of my Chippendale chairs.

  “No, to be honest. They basically want to blow everything inside up. I mean, in addition to blowing up the ghost that might live here. I mean resettling the ghost.”

  I don’t like it, her using that lying word.

  “I know that’s the correct term, these days,” she says. “Isn’t it?”

  “I prefer to think of cleaning as organizing. Everything into its place.”

  “So … I know there are really only a few of you cleaners who are actually top-notch.” She steps in front of a mirror and rubs a little dust from her suit sleeve. “I googled you. They say you’re one of the best in the state. I’m glad Mr. Dane got a hold of you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I also read that you’ve all been so successful at what you do that the ghost population is getting a bit … thin? That there just aren’t as many hauntings as reported before?”

  “And yet, there always seems to be just one more. Well now. Look at this.”

  He’s come to the Glass Room. The shimmering dome of air and light that Alice had made because I told her to.

  “The conservatory. And over here is the kitchen. The Danes want to blow it out, too. The pantry is this way.”

  “We’ll get to that in just a minute.”

  “But don’t you think we could get on with … it?”

  Pratt doesn’t seem to hear the impatience in her voice. He walks forward instead, into the light and sheen, facing the sweep of the cove.

  He says, without looking back at Ellen, “I wonder: do you have a listing that’s more beautiful—valuable—than this one?”

  “Not right now. Not even close.”

  He gazes through the prisms and panes, the ocean broken up into a hundred, smaller oceans. I often stop to stare at this view, too.

  “Amazing,” he says.

  “Shouldn’t we keep going? Get to the pantry?”

  “Impatience is the enemy. You said the village had cleaners in before.”

  “You think they didn’t take enough time to do the job right?”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  “All right.” She breathes and seems to relax.

  “Next we’ll take the charge in the pantry.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means I need to see what kind of anger has been here, what kind of impulse.”

  “You mean—how mad the Danes were?”


  “No.” He shakes his head and looks down at the cove. “Not living anger. Not the kind of anger you or I would feel. At least—” But he doesn’t finish his sentence. “Imagine,” he shifts, still gazing at the spray bursting against the rocks, “a wave that has no outlet. Like those waves out there hitting on the beach. Again and again and again. Unsettled souls are like that. Trapped. They don’t release emotion the way that we do. If they did, we’d have to say they were still living. We can try to imagine what they’re feeling, but we can’t really do it. Because they are what they are, and we are what we are. The charge isn’t life. The charge is all that’s left.”

  This is the terrible part.

  The terrible, terrible test.

  I have to keep still. Around talk like this. Unmoved. Stay cold and unfeeling behind the mask, the veil of light, under the three hundred broken suns of the Glass Room. I have to be careful not to be angry or allow myself to feel any emotion at all, feel the very thing he says I cannot feel, because if I do, if I show for one minute that I’m human, then in the next moment I won’t be allowed to be.

  The charge is what they call our lasting. That’s all they think we are. A bit of static left in the linen. A spark when you rub your gloves together in the cold.

  So I make myself go as cold as ice. I turn myself into the nothing he believes I am. I push all my anger and love and hate and hope deep, deep down inside me, and only when I’ve done it do I glide and stand even closer to both of them, right by their sides, but closest of all to Ellen DeWight, to her ear, so close that any heat, any hint of feeling that might escape my soul he’ll mistake for hers. Oh, how I’ve learned how to manage such moments as this. Haven’t I? Still. Dead. Be still. I’ve learned things that you, Mr. Pratt, and Ellen, would never dream of. But also things the living know very well how to do. How to act as though you don’t care about the life you live. How to lie and seem to be one thing while being another. I’ve gone to school all these years, all this long century, on you, the living. On the young and old and everything in between. I’ve sat in your classrooms and studied your books and I’ve touched your slates and screens and glowing tablets and I’ve listened at your keyholes and to your telephones and I’ve learned more than any living soul will ever know, because I’ve learned the one thing that people give away when you think no one is there, when you think no one is watching: that you’re frightened beyond belief of that place you happily send others to.

  Ellen touches her shoulder where I’ve rested on it and shivers.

  “Over here—more Chippendale,” she says and turns toward the breakfast table. “These are called hairy-clawed chairs. See, the feet are like lion’s claws? I’ve always thought they were a little frightening. I don’t know why.”

  “Even though nothing scares you in this house.”

  “It generally doesn’t. I’ve been in the pantry several times, already. Like I said.”

  “You’re braver than most civilians.”

  “No.” She twitches. “It’s my job. The heirs liked me when they interviewed agents because I’m young and in touch—that’s how they put it—and that’s what an old house needs. New blood.”

  “All of this architecture at the back of the house was a later addition, I take it?”

  “About twenty years ago. Some members of the historical commission didn’t think a domed conservatory was in keeping with the original structure—but Alice got her way. Apparently the Lambrys pretty much got whatever they wanted. Always. And being in timber, they loved to build things. The steeple, I’ll show you later, and the widow’s walk. But the butler’s pantry, it’s this way …”

  “Before we inspect it, I need to ask you, Ellen: have you ever been angry in this house?”

  She seems surprised. “If I’m being honest? Absolutely. When the Danes started screaming at me right after I came back into the house. When the whole thing wasn’t my fault; they wanted to be alone. But they tried to blame me for it. I felt they were just trying to set me up, telling lies about a ghost so they could low-ball the price on me. On the heirs. Things like that happen all the time, Mr. Pratt. And I hate to say it, but in my experience people with money are the worst when it comes to money. But then I saw how scared they were and I calmed down and got them away from this part of the house, back out to the porch. Here’s the pantry door.” She presses it with the flat of her hand. “I’ve been keeping it closed. Should I open it? Or do you need to?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  She turns the tight brass knob. The door opens inward with a little breath.

  “And the lights?”

  “Please.”

  She tucks her hand into the dark.

  Electricity. A little miracle. Nobody thinks of it that way anymore. Once, light was hard work for us, for maids like me and Frances, who had to lug oil, every day, to fill the lamps; to say nothing of the toil at Lighthouse Point, where a single beam had to be turned by a chain and fed hour after hour, night after night.

  I stay perched on Ellen’s shoulder while Pratt slips into the mote-filled room. He finds, of course, nothing there. Nothing but the blank, dusty shelves and counters, no life left, though Lambry servants once ducked inside to rest and whisper where no one could hear them, and children snuck in to pinch a stick of cinnamon, and Mrs. Lambry, after her family were all dead and gone, would sweep in and close the door behind her and stand in the darkness, managing her breath, trying to get her life to slide in and out without getting it caught between her ribs.

  Pratt is moving his bulk around, now and again lifting a hand to touch a surface or stroke his chest, as though he’s trying to manage his breathing, too. That’s an odd thing. Each time he touches his chest, I see the hunter’s band at his wrist more clearly. The gouged black markings striped into the silver. The thickness of it, like a cuff a man in chains might wear. Any ghost worth her salt knows what such a band is, the watch with no face, the clock that keeps no time. If only such things didn’t exist, our village would still house spirits by the score, and the mirrors would be full and dancing, and the cemetery empty. If only the hunters lacked their tools.

  But Pratt is going about his evil in a way I don’t follow. He’s brought no other devices with him, nothing other than the band. He keeps tapping and stroking his chest, as though the only meter he needed were inside him.

  “Mr. Pratt?” Ellen blinks.

  He closes his eyes and again he lifts his fingers to his chest. “Yes. Something was here.”

  Ellen backs away from the door. “You feel it right … right now?”

  He opens his eyes, excited. “Something flared and then was controlled. A residue’s all that’s left now. But something. Enough. To begin.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It’s excellent.”

  “But I don’t get it—what do you do next? Don’t you have to—get it, before it gets away?”

  “It’s already gotten away. It’s probably found a safe hollow, somewhere. An empty space that it can fill. An unsettled space or room. Or the image or feeling of a room. They don’t like tightness. Claustrophobia. Feeling trapped.”

  “But this village is full of rooms. How do you find the right one?”

  He closes the pantry door carefully behind him. “Patience. Care. Gentleness. Attention. Slowness. Then more patience, if necessary.”

  “And how long will we—I mean how long do the Danes, and the heirs, have to be patient for?”

  “For as long as it takes me to crack its shell. A haunt is like a hermit crab on the move”—he points Ellen toward the grand staircase—“always stealing what doesn’t belong to it. It has no real home. So it can be forced out into the open. Forced to act. We’ll want to catch it moving, unsteady. That’s when it’s at its most vulnerable. When it’s exposed for what it is, a migrant with no country.”

  But don’t the living need to move to survive, too? As the Irish did when they came across the ocean, and a continent? And would that be stealing, too? From logging camp
to logging camp my father and mother trudged, trying to make their way in this new world, this grand America they hoped would be better than the old country. Up and down the coast they moved, until my mother started having babies, one after another, with me the last one, the one that sent her to her final home. And then it was me always on the move. From cot to cot I was carried, by my Da, until I could walk on my own and started to work bringing lunch pails to my father and the other men at the mills. And then, when my father died, I moved again, to the boardinghouse on Albion Street. I did the laundry, and cooked, and swept, and everything else, because what choice does a soul have but to keep moving if she wants to get by? Yet a soul can crave rest, too, just like any tern on the cliffs. Only a soul that’s finished doesn’t flutter and fight. Only a soul that’s dead takes no flight. Can’t you see, Mr. Pratt? Why would you fault the will to move?

  5

  Upstairs now,” he announces.

  On the first landing I let them pass in a row underneath me.

  “Beautiful staircase. And rosette around the chandelier,” Pratt says.

  Ellen takes him to the north bedrooms first, where the Lambry daughters used to brush their long hair with ivory combs, then across to the boys’ rooms, their paper kites and nautical telescopes and boxes of games long gone. And then to the room poor Alice died in.

  Pratt touches her satin-covered bed, looks under the old-fashioned canopy.

  “The heirs left all her things in the house,” he notices. “Why?”

  “They haven’t gotten around to doing anything about them yet. I don’t think they knew Alice or cared much about this place, anymore. We offered to empty the house and stage it, but they said to leave everything because it added character. And in case buyers wanted any of it.”

  He brushes his fingers across her marble-topped nightstands, then touches his chest again.

  Ellen watches. “Anything?”

  “Anger here. Although nothing unusual. People suddenly passing out of life generally don’t go without some pain or anguish. She died right here.” He points to the floor next to the bed.