Footsteps on the Stairs: A Novel

by C. S. Adler

  “It’s not for no reason. How are we going to find out anything if we don’t ask?”

  “I guess I better tell you. I’m so shy that I won’t even ask a stranger in a restaurant where the bathroom is.”

  “Okay then, wait here, and I’ll go alone.” I smiled to reassure her that it was okay, but when I knocked on the screen door, she was right behind me. “How come you’re here?” I asked while we waited for someone to come.

  “You stayed with me when we were chasing ghosts around the house and you were scared,” she murmured.

  A young woman in a bikini opened the door. She was friendly enough, but she didn’t know anything. “We’re just renters,” she said.

  We were on our way to the third house when we spotted the fenced-off cemetery tucked in the scrubby growth of pitch pine and berry bushes. The fence was just a knee-high railing that used to be painted white but hadn’t been in a long time. We stepped right over it.

  “Here we go,” Anne said. “We’re bound to find something here.”

  I wasn’t too thrilled to be prowling around a graveyard, but the sun was bright and it wasn’t scary. It was no bigger than a house plot, with skinny stones tilting every which way. Their inscriptions were sometimes worn away, and some of the stones had fallen on their faces.

  “What are we looking for here?” Chip asked.

  “We’ll know when we find it,” I said.

  “Dodie, you take the front row and work across and I’ll do the back,” Anne directed. “We’ll meet in the middle.”

  Chip stayed with me, maybe because neither he nor I felt easy walking over people’s buried bodies: Anne bustled from stone to stone perfectly at ease.

  “Saunders, nineteen forty-two?” she called to me.

  “Male or female?”

  “Joshua.”

  “Is his family there?”

  “No.”

  “No good.” I read Silas and Mary Fawkes, 1830–1892 and 1836–1890. Their four children were there too. All the kids had died between the ages of three and twelve. Poor Silas and Mary.

  “Dodie!”

  Anne had found something. She was crouched, staring at a white marble square set in the ground.

  “Look at this one,” she said.

  Irma and Renee Thomas, aged 16 and 15,

  drowned August 10, 1943

  In life they were together;

  in death they were not parted.

  “I knew it,” Anne said. “I knew we’d find something here. Thomas—I bet we find out Thomas was the name of the people who owned the house way back then!”

  “I wonder how they drowned,” I said, and then I remembered that Chip had said they smelled of the marsh. “Could you drown in the marsh?”

  “At high tide, maybe, or in one of the creeks,” Anne said.

  “Irma and Renee. They could be kids like us.”

  “They were older than us,” Anne said.

  “But I mean—” I couldn’t put it in words. Just suddenly they were closer—not weird like ghosts should be, but more like regular people.

  “Let’s try the next house,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “Because there’s plenty we don’t know. What are they still fighting with each other about? You’re sure they were fighting, Chip?”

  He nodded. “She was pulling her hair and the other one was scratching her face.”

  “They have to be running up and down those stairs about something,” I said.

  “Up,” Anne said.

  “Huh?”

  “We always hear them coming up the stairs, never down—right?”

  I considered. “I guess so.”

  At the third house we woke a man up from his nap. He glared at us. Anne backed all the way to the road, but I figured since the damage was already done, I might as well go ahead and ask what he knew about the house on the marsh.

  “Place has been vacant for ten years, ever since the old man died. You mean they’re still renting it? Can’t believe they can get away with renting that shack. Must be hard up for space to con people into paying money for that place.”

  “Was his name Thomas?”

  “Who?”

  “The old man who died.”

  “John, old John. My mother used to buy clams from him. He was a clam digger.”

  “But his last name—”

  “How should I know what his last name was? Go bug somebody else now, kid.” He latched his screen door and scowled at me until I retreated to the road, where Anne and Chip were waiting for me.

  “Nice fella,” I said. “He invited me in for milk and cookies, but I declined with thanks.”

  “He looked nasty,” Anne said.

  “Maybe he’s okay when he’s not sleepy. Anyway, he told me the last guy to live in our house was a clam digger named John. It could be that John was the girls’ father. Let’s go back to the cemetery and see if any more of the Thomas family is buried there.”

  “I don’t like that cemetery,” Chip said.

  “You can wait outside,” Anne told him.

  “Chip could be my brother,” I commented. “We think the same way.”

  “But you and I have more in common,” she said quickly.

  “We do? How?”

  She blushed and looked unhappy. “We’re close to the same age, and we’re girls, and—” She ran out of samenesses.

  “Our parents are married to each other,” I offered.

  “Yes,” Anne said. She hesitated. Then she said, “You have a lot of friends, don’t you, Dodie?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “How do you know that?”

  “You’re always getting letters and postcards.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m a great postcard writer and my friends do write back.”

  “You’re lucky,” she said.

  “Well, it’s not luck exactly. To have a friend, you have to be a friend. I work at it, you know.”

  “My only friends are Mother and Chip.”

  That was some confession to make. What was I supposed to say to her?—“I’ll be your friend”? She tugged so hard on my sympathies, I almost gave way, but she didn’t give me a chance to say anything. She started reading off the gravestones out loud and moving fast toward the back corner where the Thomas girls were buried. Confession is embarrassing.

  “Here he is!” Anne called, and read out, “John Thomas, born nineteen one, died nineteen seventy-one.”

  His stone wasn’t near his daughters’. It was two rows away, beside his wife’s. According to the dates on her headstone, that lady had only lived three years after her daughters drowned. There were no other Thomases in the graveyard.

  “There could still be other children,” Anne said. “They could be alive or buried somewhere else.”

  “They’d be pretty old by now if they were alive,” I said, looking at Irma and Renee’s markers again.

  “I’d bet they were the only kids the Thomases had,” Anne said.

  I thought so too. I touched the stone gingerly. “I’d hate to drown,” I said.

  “Oh, me too,” Anne agreed. “It’d be a horrible way to die.”

  “We’d better go back to home base and get some lunch,” I said. It was a good excuse to get us out of that graveyard.

  In a burst of energy, we hoisted a squirming Chip between us by the armpits and ran down the road with him yelling, “Hey, let me down. Let me down, you guys!” When we set him loose at the macadam road, he marched ahead indignantly.

  “We sure found out a lot this morning,” I said. I was panting from the exercise.

  “And we didn’t have to go very far, either,” Anne said. “But we still don’t know how they drowned, or why.”

  “Maybe they swam out too far and tried to save each other and they both drowned.”

  “Or they could have committed suicide,” Anne said.

  “By drowning?”

  “Maybe they got murdered,” Chip piped over his shoulder.

  “Chip!” I objected.


  “Well, they have to be restless about something,” Anne said. “Or they wouldn’t still be roaming about.”

  We thought about it quietly for a while. “Do you think we’ll ever see them again?” Anne asked.

  “I’ve never seen them,” I said. “And I hope I never do.”

  “They didn’t see me,” Chip said.

  “Were they pretty?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know. I guess so. They had long hair.”

  “Can a ghost be pretty?” Anne asked.

  “Sure it can.” I couldn’t think of any offhand, but I was sure I’d read about beautiful lady ghosts somewhere.

  “Anyway, there’s still a lot to find out,” Anne said.

  “Ask them in person next time you see them,” I joked.

  “If I get a chance, I will.”

  She would, too. “Don’t you dare,” I said. “I was just joking.”

  “That’s how you survive your mother picking on you all the time, isn’t it? By joking.”

  “Anne,” I said. “I even joke in the dentist’s office.” But I was annoyed with her. Why did she have to keep bringing up my mother? She ought to be smart enough to recognize other people’s sore spots even if they were covered up by big talk and jokes. If she wanted friends, she’d have to learn some tact.

  I lay in bed that night thinking about my mother. I don’t usually like to think about her. Most of the time I kid myself we have just a no-worse-than-usual mother-daughter relationship, but then I’ll go visit a friend and hear how it could go—like a mother being somebody you confide in, who even gives you compliments and acts proud when you do something good. My mother never has acted proud of me. And, yes, I’ve tried. A couple of summers ago I took off twenty pounds at fat camp. I got off the bus grinning, sure she was going to be pleased with me at long last. She greeted me with a cool stare and said, “That’s a start anyway.… Should I invest in a new wardrobe for you, or are you going right back to stuffing your face again?”

  “I’m going to stuff my face, Ma,” I’d said, and started emptying the refrigerator into my stomach as soon as we got home. That’s the way it usually worked with us. And joking about it didn’t help all that much.

  Chapter 9

  I wore a sea gull feather headdress Chip and I made to go out for a gala evening of pizza and a movie the next night. The headdress got me two stares, one smile, and a frown. The frown was from Mother. We ended the evening at the ice cream parlor, where my taste buds had an orgy in a heavenly garden of hot fudge, crunchy sweet nuts, and ice cream. I was so absorbed, I didn’t even notice Anne leave to make a phone call to her mother. She was obliged to call home every three days. Her mother had asked her to call every night, but Anne had bargained her down to every three days.

  “My mother didn’t really want to let Chip and me go this summer. She gets lonesome without us,” Anne had told me. It must be nice to feel wanted. My mother is always eager to ship me off to camp or friends or anywhere anyone’s willing to take me. To be fair, I guess Anne has a lot of appeal to an adult. She’s neat, clean, orderly, polite, well behaved, intelligent, responsible. Really, the poor kid practically is an adult. No wonder Larry was worried about her.

  Larry finished chewing on the straw from the soda he’d slurped right down to the bottom before any of us was finished. “What’d she say to make you look so glum?” he asked Anne, who was back in her seat.

  “Mother?”

  “Your mother.”

  “She wants me to come home.”

  “How come?”

  “Everything’s going wrong. She’s handling the business all on her own now, you know, and some man offered her a price on the carved oak chairs that she bought that she thought were worth a lot of money, and his offer is way too low, but she needs the money because the gas and electric bills are past due, and she’s getting dunned on other stuff she bought, and she doesn’t have anyone around she can even talk to, and she’s so nervous she’s not sleeping, and Grandma is coming.”

  “Good, Grandma will organize her.”

  “But she’s not up to having Grandma around right now, Dad. She wants me to come home and keep Grandma off her back.”

  “Ye Gods! You’re thirteen years old. When are you going to start being a kid? Pretty soon you’ll be too old.”

  “But somebody has to help her. She sounded so … bad.”

  “She’s a grown woman, Anne,” my mother put in, even though it certainly wasn’t her business. “Why can’t she learn to help herself?”

  Anne slid a glance off Mother that should have drawn blood.

  “I don’t want to go home,” Chip said. It tickled me the way he’d drop into a conversation when you didn’t even know he was listening.

  “Do you want to go home, Anne?” Larry asked.

  Anne looked at me. We had a lot of investigating still to do, and she was the fearless ghost hunter.

  “You can’t leave us now,” I said.

  “I don’t want to. But someone has to help my mother.”

  “Why?” Larry argued.

  “Because she’s so desperate that I’m afraid—”

  “Oh, Lord!” Larry said. “Do you want me to take a run down for a couple of days and give her some support with the business? Is that what you want?”

  “Would you, Daddy?” Anne sounded like a kid for the first time. She looked at her father hopefully. He smiled at her, pleased, I guessed, that she was looking up to him for something.

  “For you, baby, anything,” he said. The way he said it, just dripping with love, shook me. This was the real thing, different from any way he’d ever spoken to me. I would never be his own flesh and blood, no matter how much I wanted to.

  “Larry, darling,” my mother said. “Don’t I get consulted in this?”

  “Sure, Pat. But look—”

  “I mean, I’m not all that thrilled with your running off and leaving me holding the bag here. Before you make any promises to Anne, let’s talk about it when we get back to the cottage, shall we?” She gave him a tight smile. I knew that smile from experience. He was in for a tough session. We waited around until Chip confessed he couldn’t finish the last of his ice cream. I polished it off for him fast, and we left the ice cream parlor with everyone acting down instead of up after our big night out.

  Chapter 10

  Mother was in a rotten mood after her private discussion with Larry. If that didn’t clue me in to who won, his taking off by bus the next morning did. Mother went around frowning, especially at Anne, who had made Larry go; but she went through the motions anyway, driving us to the ocean beach and even buying us steamers for dinner. I couldn’t get over my independent mother, who’d never seemed to need anyone before Larry, acting so lost just because he was gone. That evening she paced between the living room and the kitchen as if she were in jail.

  “There’s not a blessed thing to do in this place at night,” she complained.

  “You could play Monopoly with us,” I suggested.

  “No, thanks.”

  “You could write letters.”

  “Dodie, leave me alone.”

  “Dodie was just trying to help you,” Anne said.

  “There’s no way to help. I’m going to go bananas if he doesn’t come back tomorrow night.”

  “He didn’t tell you when he was coming back?” I asked.

  “No, he didn’t. He said he’d call if he wasn’t coming back tomorrow.”

  She picked up a magazine and sat down to read it, but by the time Chip and then Anne had taken themselves off to bed, she was flicking the pages as if they annoyed her.

  “Ma,” I said. “What are you so mad about?”

  “I’m mad at finding myself in third place after his ex-wife and their kids. That’s not what I got married for—third place.”

  “But just because he went to help straighten out Anne’s dopey mother, doesn’t mean you’re not first with him.”

  “Anne’s dopey mother’s not s
o dopey. A man likes to be needed.”

  “Well, you sure do need him.”

  She looked at me funny. “In a way, I guess I do. And that makes me maddest of all.”

  “He’ll come back to you,” I said.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “He acts like he really loves you.”

  She gave me that funny look again and said gently, “Thanks, honey.” Then she reached out a hand. On impulse, I took it and kissed her cheek. Would you believe it? She hugged me. It was really the most incredible moment.

  She stayed pretty calm most of the next day until noon, when two things happened. First, it started blowing up a storm. When we went to the grocery store, the guy said gale-force winds were expected and small craft warnings were out. Second, Larry called to say he wouldn’t be back until the next evening, but he’d take us all out for a fancy dinner then.

  “Damn!” Mother said, not at all appeased by the dinner promise. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  Anne and I chipped in on a huge jigsaw puzzle—a difficult one that was just geometric designs. When we got back to the cottage, we cleared my completed puzzle off the door-top coffee table and set up the new one. Without discussing it, we kids knew it would be smart to stay out of Mother’s line of fire while she had her mad on. So we worked at the puzzle most of the afternoon. Supper was hamburgers and soup, after which Mother announced that she was going out for the evening, and we should please stay put in the house and not do anything foolish. The wind was growling around the house, rushing at us and shaking the walls every so often.

  “You’re going out in this weather?” I asked.

  “Dodie, don’t bug me.” Mother pulled on her Iceland sweater and took off in the car.

  I wondered where she was planning to go by herself, but didn’t get a chance to ask. Despite her mood, I didn’t like to be left in that house with that wind on the rampage. Anne had been quiet all day. I’d thought it was because of my mother, but after she took off, Anne announced, “Dodie, I’m not feeling very well. I think I’ll go up to bed.”

  “And leave me and Chip here alone?”

  “I really feel sick.”

  I felt her head the way Mother always felt mine, but Anne’s forehead just felt clammy. If she’d had a raging fever, I wouldn’t have known what to do about it anyway. “Do you want me to make you something? Hot tea or cocoa or something?” I asked.