The House on the Gulf

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  I didn’t have any time to waste waiting around for the dryer. I had a mystery to solve.

  As soon as I got home I attacked the shed. I unlocked the door and slipped inside, then pulled the door shut behind me. This, of course, made the interior of the shed as dark as night, and I debated: take the risk of leaving the door hanging wide open, or waste time going into the house for a flashlight?

  In the end the problem was solved for me. As I was groping around, trying to get my bearings, I found a switch on the wall. I pressed it, and a light glowed overhead.

  “Thank you, Mr. Marquis,” I muttered.

  Then I settled down to the serious business of searching boxes.

  The odd-looking plastic plates and cups with the plaid pattern filled two of the boxes, and two others held nothing but ancient-looking cups and glasses. The other boxes I looked through yielded odds and ends: vases, baskets, knickknacks. I found the collection of ceramic cats from my room in the last box, and it made me want to cry. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had. I had so much sweat running down my face that I wouldn’t have even noticed a few tears.

  I sat back on my heels and looked at the pile of boxes I’d just finished searching. Had I missed something? I leaned over the stack of boxes, but there was nothing behind them.

  Why was Bran so worried about this junk?” I asked out loud.

  I thought about what Bran hadn’t bothered boxing up, what he’d left sitting out in the Marquises’ house: the TV, the VCR, what looked like a brand-new stand mixer.

  Bran hadn’t hidden away anything valuable. He’d just hidden everything old.

  This seemed like a clue, but I didn’t know what it meant. I carefully put everything back the way I’d found it and locked the shed again. Then I rushed into the house.

  At first Bran’s closet was no more revealing. It just confirmed what I’d already thought. I didn’t find any acne medicine or other embarrassing teenage-boy secrets. I just found boxes of old games and old books and old blankets, including the quilt he’d taken from my room.

  Why had Bran hidden away this falling-apart Monopoly and left a brand-new game of Sorry in the TV stand? Why had he packed up all these musty-smelling Reader’s Digest condensed books and left the new-looking row of Mary Higgins Clark mysteries on the built-in bookshelf in the sunroom? Why had he stored an afghan so ancient that it was unraveling, but let me sleep on Marquis sheets that were so new they were stiff?

  I felt more and more confused the more boxes I opened. I was beginning to give up on solving any mysteries when I opened the second-to-last box at the very back of the closet.

  It held pictures. Marquis family pictures.

  And suddenly I almost forgot about trying to understand Bran. I slowed down and studied the pictures as greedily as if they were food and I was starving. A pile of loose snapshots was on the very top. They were all of laughing people, all of groups who must have been the Marquises’ entire extended family gathered for Christmas dinners and Easter egg hunts and birthday parties. . . . I had barely seen my mother in days and I didn’t trust my brother anymore—and, meanwhile, the Marquises seemed to be living their lives in a Hallmark commercial.

  I ached a little as I put the snapshots aside and moved on to a stack of framed formal shots.

  The very first one was of a dark-haired girl a little younger than me, maybe nine or ten. She had a red ribbon in her hair and wore a red velvet dress. It was one of those Christmas shots people have taken of their kids at JC Penney or Sears or Wal-Mart. (Other people. Mom had never been able to afford it for Bran and me.) This little girl had a trusting, friendly smile. I decided she absolutely had to be a Marquis grandchild.

  “What’s your life like, little girl?” I asked aloud. She smiled back at me. I decided that Mrs. Marquis had bought the little girl’s dress and shipped it from Florida. And Mr. and Mrs. Marquis called Little Girl Marquis’s family every week, to find out how she’d done on her spelling tests and how many goals she’d kicked in soccer. And back in their home in New York, the Marquises had pictures all over the place of Little Girl Marquis and—

  I remembered I didn’t have an eternity to spend staring at Little Girl Marquis.

  I dug down a little farther into the box, and there was a framed shot of what I thought must be the entire Marquis family: an old man I recognized as Mr. Marquis, an old woman who had to be his wife, two men and two women who looked to be about my mom’s age, and five kids. I almost didn’t recognize Little Girl Marquis because she was only five or six here, but she was wearing another velvet dress—green this time—and she had the same smile. So I was right. She was a grandkid.

  I studied the picture intently, trying to figure out which of the grown-ups were the Marquises’ sons or daughters and which were in-laws. Then I tried to decide which kids belonged to which grown-ups, and which ones were brothers and sisters and which ones were cousins. Little Girl and two of the boys had dark eyes and dark hair, and the others had light hair and greenish eyes, but I knew better than to jump to any conclusions. Bran’s hair was much darker than mine—in fact, he looked more like Little Girl Marquis than like me.

  I put the big family photo carefully on the floor and reached down even deeper in the box. I could see the corner of a photo album just below a few more framed photos. I tugged on it, angling it out sideways.

  I’d gotten it just far enough out of the box that I could make out three words embossed on the cover, when I heard the sound of a door opening at the back of the house. The door I’d left unlocked in my rush to get to Bran’s closet.

  “Britt? Hello? Are you here?”

  It was Bran.

  I glanced at my watch quickly, wondering if I’d just spent five hours staring at the Marquises’ family portrait. But it was only two o’clock. What was Bran doing home already?

  I heard him coming down the hall toward his room. Quickly I yanked the closet door shut, hiding inside. I had one foot practically on top of the Marquises’ pictures, the other foot crammed between two boxes, and both hands braced against the wall. It was a good thing I was small for my age, because I wouldn’t have fit otherwise.

  “Britt? Britt?” Bran kept calling. He was in his room now. I could tell from the sound of his footsteps that he had stopped near the dresser. I heard a series of rolling noises—he seemed to be pulling the drawers out of his dresser and then shutting them, one after the other.

  “Where is it?” he muttered, then shouted, “Britt?”

  He walked all the way around the room, stopping here and there, but he didn’t come near the closet. As soon as I heard him leave the room I jumped out of the closet, locked the door again with shaking hands, then sidled over to the door of his room.

  I peeked out into the hall, but Bran wasn’t anywhere in sight. I stepped out and forced myself to walk casually out toward the living room, where Bran was still calling for me.

  “There you are,” he said with great relief. “Where have you been?”

  “Bathroom,” I lied.

  “Really? But I just walked past there—”

  “Mom’s bathroom,” I amended. “I like using it sometimes. I like having two bathrooms.”

  He didn’t seem to notice that I was practically panting with relief at not having been caught, that I was still sweat soaked and dirty from being in the shed.

  “Oh,” he said. “Hey, have you seen my keys? I got to work and I didn’t have them, and I’m on my break now so I came home to look for them—I’ve only got five more minutes—”

  Trying to keep my hands from trembling, I pretended to reach into my pocket, then lifted the key ring high into the air. I let the keys dangle before his eyes.

  “Oh, thank you,” he said. “I was so scared I’d lost them.”

  “You don’t have any copies?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Just of the house key. Just the ones you and Mom have,” he said. “Of course, the Marquises have extras of the other two, but I don’t want to bother them.�
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  I would have bet anything that the Marquises didn’t have a copy of the closet key, but I didn’t tell Bran that.

  “You left them in your shorts,” I said. “I found them when I was doing laundry.”

  Bran looked down, and he seemed to take in the wet laundry I’d basically thrown down on the living-room floor.

  “I. uh, ran out of quarters,” I lied. “I came home to get more so I can dry everything.”

  I didn’t think my lie sounded any more convincing that any of the lies Bran had told. But he just reached down into his pocket and came up with a handful of change.

  “Here,” he said, dumping the coins into my hand. “Use these.”

  I felt like I was being bribed.

  “Hey, thanks again,” Bran said. “Now I’ve got to go. Good luck with the rest of the laundry!”

  And then he ran out the door again.

  I sank into the couch. Now that the emergency was over, I felt like the bones in my legs had melted and couldn’t hold me up anymore. I hadn’t been caught. I hadn’t managed to put away everything in Bran’s closet, and if he looked he’d probably figure out that I’d been snooping. But I wasn’t sure that he’d bother looking in there the rest of the summer.

  I wished that I hadn’t locked the closet again. I wanted to look at the rest of the pictures. And I wanted to double-check the words I’d seen on the photo album, to make sure I’d read them right.

  Marcus Family Memories.

  Marcus, not Marquis.

  I could believe a family’s name being misspelled on a furniture ad, on an Eckerd’s circular. But on a personalized photo album?

  I now had proof that Bran had lied. Absolute proof.

  But how could I confront him or Mom with the proof without admitting that I’d been snooping? And why did it matter how the Marquises spelled their name?

  I ate dinner that night in a total daze. I kept trying to decide: If Mom or Bran asked, “What’s wrong with you?” would I tell them the truth? Would I confess and accuse Bran all at once?

  But Mom and Bran both looked so tired they probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d suddenly sprouted green hair.

  I went to bed early and dreamed about meeting Little Girl Marquis—or, Little Girl Marcus, I guess. She was wearing her red velvet dress and kicking soccer balls to me, but I kept missing them.

  “Come on,” I said, “I want you to meet my brother.”

  Suddenly she was her younger self, the one in the green velvet dress. She shook her head violently and sucked on her thumb. Then she pulled her thumb out long enough to say, “He’s bad. He lies.”

  “No, no. Bran’s good. He’s the perfect brother. Well, he used to be. Come on! He’ll be nice to you!” I tugged on Little Girl Marcus’s hand, but she wouldn’t budge. She kept shaking her head.

  “Then can I meet your family?” I asked. “Please?”

  “Won’t share,” she said, and went back to sucking her thumb.

  I woke up feeling more confused than ever. The Marcuses’ flowered sheets were tangled around my legs. It was late—past ten o’clock. Mom and Bran were long gone. The entire house seemed to echo with secrets and lies.

  I got up and got dressed and escaped to Mrs. Stuldy’s.

  Her kitchen seemed safe and cozy with the smell of spices in the air and a plate of oatmeal cookies on the table. And yet she had a secret too, about her son the murderer.

  I wanted to ask her if her son had ever lied when he was a teenager, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t ask if she knew how the Marcuses spelled their name, either. Instead, I blurted out, “What are the Marcuses like?”

  “Didn’t you meet them?” she asked, pausing over her lemonade.

  “Just Mr. Marcus. Just briefly,” I said.

  I didn’t tell her how Bran had interrupted when I’d tried to introduce myself, how he’d hustled me out of sight. I didn’t tell her how many pictures I’d seen, or how I kept thinking I was missing something. Something obvious.

  Mrs. Stuldy didn’t seem concerned.

  “Oh,” she said. She took a drink of lemonade. “They’re good people. Good neighbors.”

  “Good how?” I asked.

  “Oh, nice types. They keep their place tidy, they don’t make a big racket all the time. Once when one of our trees blew down, John loaned us his chainsaw and helped us clean up.”

  “Do you know them very well?” I pressed.

  “Well enough,” she said. “They keep to themselves a lot. But they—they know about my son, and they don’t make comments like some people do. That goes a long way with me.”

  I was temporarily distracted, feeling glad I hadn’t asked about her son lying. I hoped she didn’t think I would make comments about her son.

  “They do sound nice,” I said. I ate an entire cookie before I asked my next question. “How many kids do the Marcuses have?”

  “Two, I think,” Mrs. Stuldy said. “A girl and a boy. One lives in—Oregon? Washington? Somewhere out West. The other’s in New York, I think, close to where the Marcuses live.”

  Somehow I knew that meant Little Girl Marcus had her grandparents right there, close by, half the year.

  “Do you hear much from them during the summer?”

  “Nah. Strange, isn’t it? Half the year we see them just about every day, at least to say hi over the fence. Other half the year, it’s like they don’t exist.”

  “You could call them,” I said. “Just to say, ‘How are you doing? What’s up?’”

  I didn’t know what I was pushing for. My heart beat strangely.

  Mrs. Stuldy was shaking her head.

  “Never really got accustomed to making those long-distance calls,” she said. “Roy—Mr. Stuldy, you know—he goes through the roof any time there’s extra charges on the phone bill. He’ll bring the bill to me and say, Talk may be cheap, Early, but it ain’t free. Come to think of it, it ain’t even very cheap.’ Then all I hear about for weeks is how we’re on a fixed income. Just once I’d like him to tell me who isn’t.”

  I finished my cookies and went to Eckerd’s for liniment for Mrs. Stuldy’s back. Then it was Winn-Dixie for Mr. Johnson’s groceries and a new National Enquirer for Mrs. Tibbetts. Then I knocked on all my customers’ doors, just to see if any of them needed anything else. I kept moving. I thought if I walked enough I wouldn’t have to think about Bran lying, or the reason for his lies.

  But finally, in the late afternoon, I had nowhere left to go but home. I let myself in the front door and just stood there, panting. I had so much sweat streaming into my eyes that everything looked like a mirage.

  Maybe that had been my problem the day before. Maybe I’d just misread the name on the photo album.

  Surely the Marcuses’ name was written down some other place in the house. I should have thought of that weeks ago, after I’d seen the furniture ad. I’d just felt too discouraged to look after talking to Mom.

  Now, though, I started with the phone book. I was feeling pretty clever until I reached the middle of the book: The listings skipped from Manning to Mathers. The page that should have contained all the MARs was missing.

  Somehow that didn’t surprise me.

  I could have walked to the public library and looked at the phone book there, but I decided to finish searching the house first. I looked in the desk in the sunroom, in the TV stand, in all the kitchen drawers and cupboards. Nothing. The Marquises/Marcuses might as well not have had a last name, for all the evidence I could find of it.

  Or Bran had hidden all the evidence.

  I started down the hall to Bran’s room, but then I retraced my steps and walked into Mom’s instead. I was pretty sure Mom’s room was where the Marcuses had slept.

  Still, I hesitated on the threshold of the room. I’d barely been in there all summer, except to deliver Mom’s clean, folded laundry to her. I felt shy suddenly, like I was intruding, though I couldn’t have said whether I was embarrassed about invading Mom’s private space or the Marcuses’.
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  This was the fanciest room, with pink swirly wallpaper and a bedspread that looked like it was covered with pink and blue and orange and green waves. I wondered if Mom felt like she was falling asleep in a very colorful ocean every night.

  I looked through the drawers in the dresser, but they held only Mom’s possessions. She had a stack of papers on top of the dresser, and I started sorting through them just to make sure they were all hers, not the Marcuses’. The papers seemed to be mostly information about Gulfstone University: an official brochure, a schedule of Mom’s classes, a listing of pre-med requirements. I even came across a copy of her application to transfer to Gulfstone, and I pulled it out of the stack, thinking vaguely that I might as well read her essay since I wasn’t having any luck otherwise. A slip of paper fell out of the application packet, and I bent down to pick it up. It was a computer printout that said TRANSCRIPT, COMPTON HIGH SCHOOL, COMPTON, OHIO, and under STUDENT’S NAME, it said, MARCUS, REBECCA JANE.

  Marcus, Rebecca Jane.

  Rebecca Jane Marcus.

  Part of me was so stupid that I actually thought, Oh that’s weird that someone in the Marcus family would be Rebecca Jane, just like Mom. And, Wonder how this got shoved in with Mom’s papers.

  But the rest of my brain was setting off alarm bells and sending up flares and scrambling to put a bunch of puzzle pieces together.

  Mom’s maiden name, which I’d never known before, must have been Marcus.

  Mr. and Mrs. Marquis, who’d hired Bran to house-sit, were really John and Mary Marcus.

  Bran had done everything he could to prevent Mom and me from finding out how the Marcuses really spelled their name.

  Strange coincidences? I didn’t think so.

  Dimly, through the sirens going off in my mind, I heard someone coming in the front door. It wouldn’t have mattered who it was—Mom, Bran, the Marcuses making a surprise visit back from up North. I couldn’t hide this evidence, couldn’t hide my knowledge of it. I was done with secrets. Still holding Mom’s high school grades, I walked out of Mom’s room, toward the living room.