Mom wi me. not kidnapped. fine. will call soon. All okay.
Texting. Jane figured that someday she would be explaining the term letter-writing to her grandchild as something people used to do. It was like texting with a pencil, she’d explain. Then she’d have to answer her imaginary grandchild’s next question: What’s a pencil?
No time for domestic daydreaming. Nick was only a kid, not even in high school, and she and Charley were far from grandparents. Far, perhaps, from being a family at all. In the flicker of all the lights from the jack-o’-lanterns, in the middle of the creaks and groans of this haunted house, Jane allowed herself, for just a moment, to think that she might have imagined the whole conversation with Charley. Perhaps she just dreamed the whole thing. Jane looked down at her phone, allowed herself to push the button that revealed the received phone call history, and watched Charley’s name appear on top of the list. Proof. No dream.
Jane shook herself and flipped the phone closed with a definite click and slipped it into her pocket.
Nellie stood up straight after whispering one more secret to Rita and looked up at her daughter who stood nearly a head taller than she.
“You look like hell,” said Nellie. “What’s the matter?”
Jane began to shake her head, to swallow back any words that might come out, unfiltered, scared or angry, then an internal switch flipped—on instead of off for a change—and she took a deep breath.
“You want to know what’s the matter? I start out my weekend trying to get to the bottom of an Internet scam that may or may not involve Michael. Simple plan since whoever his twin is seems to be operating out of Herscher, a stone’s throw away from you guys. Then I get pulled into Swanette’s house sale and she gets attacked. I meet your cousin Ada, whom you’ve managed to hide from both Michael and me all our lives, and she’s living in a haunted house. Then when I have a pretty good plan for luring Swanette’s attacker out, you call for lights, camera, and action a little too early. We get poor old Joe shot and you disappear. One of the police even tried to say you might have been the one to shoot him. I thought Dad was going . . .”
Although Jane had begun the speech full of anger and purpose, the more she unraveled the evening’s events, the more ridiculous sounding and complicated and hilarious the whole thing seemed. When she pictured her dad ready to deck the officer who had tried to put Nellie in the shooter’s position, all of the fight left her voice and she began to laugh.
Nellie grinned. “He was going to defend my honor, was he?”
“Oh yes,” said Jane. “And you should have seen how scared the guy was when he saw Dad’s face.”
“Good.” Nellie unwrapped a candy bar and shoved it at Jane. “Eat this. You look like hell.”
“So you’ve said,” said Jane, accepting the chocolate. There were a few oohs and aahs coming from the backyard. What was Ada up to now? Fireworks?
Nellie told Jane how she ended up in the backseat of whoever had shot Joe.
“I covered myself up. We only drove for a few minutes. I knew we hadn’t gone farther than town. I stayed put after the car was parked and the driver got out. Then I counted to twenty-five, figured whoever it was was far enough away and I climbed out. The car’s a little wagon-type thing that’s parked out in back of Ada’s garage with a bunch of others. It was dark, so I couldn’t see the color and I don’t know cars, so I just took out my house key and put a big scratch in the side so we’d know the right one later. Then with all the gawkers here for Scary Night, it was easy to mix in with the crowd.”
“You keyed the car?”
“He shot that boy!”
“He? Who was the driver? Who shot Joe?” asked Jane, unwrapping another candy bar for herself.
“How the hell do I know? I kept my head down while we were driving, and when I get out, there’s a hundred people out there with those damn pumpkins. Could be any one of them. Did you get the message I left behind?”
“Not right away. Rita kept pointing to the photo album, but we didn’t pay any attention at first.”
Nellie knelt down and draped her arm around the dog’s neck.
“You’re better than Lassie, you know that?”
“Why did I grow up thinking you hated pets?” asked Jane.
“Because I do. Most of them are dirty, smelly, and don’t belong in a house with people. And that’s because most people don’t take care of them right or get bored with them or don’t train them or pay attention to them after a while. I don’t like most pets but that doesn’t mean I don’t like animals. It’s not that different from people, Jane. I like some animals and I don’t like others. This one, this Rita, I just really hit it off with,” said Nellie, looking directly at the dog, who looked ready to lay down her life for Nellie.
“Well, that’s quite different than with people,” said Jane. “You hate most people.”
Nellie laughed. “I don’t hate them. I just don’t have the patience for them. People can be such time wasters. Most of them anyway.”
Jane was oddly pleased. This was an insightful conversation she was having with her mother. Perhaps a shooting and a possible kidnapping was all they needed to give their relationship the little boost it needed. Fear and danger certainly seemed to help them communicate.
“So I think I interpreted the message you left behind,” said Jane. “But I think you ought to tell me yourself what this photo means to you.” She pulled it out of her pocket.
“Ada’s mom, or whoever, wrote under one of them pictures that Ada was James’s new twin sister and under that other one of me and Veronica and Ada, the photo said we were sisters and cousins,” said Nellie.
“I got to thinking about my mother and dad. You know they were married eight years before they had me and then they had Veronica the next year. Ma always talked about how poor they had been and how sick she and Pa were when they were first married. Pa lost his job because of something and then was in bed for six months with some kind of fever. They really had hard times. Then she’d tell me about her brother and his wife and how they were so rich and important out in Herscher and how their farm never went under and how they always had plenty of everything and how they always got what they wanted. She’d talk about it and go on and on, then get all weepy, then get real mad and blame me and Veronica for something we never did and make us sew or scrub something that was already clean.”
“You think Ada isn’t your cousin after all?” Jane asked softly.
“Ada’s my sister,” said Nellie.
Jane tried to think of something to say. This was monumental, she knew, and she also knew that she would never be able to read what this meant to Nellie by staring into her poker face.
“That means she’s your aunt,” said Nellie.
“Wow,” Jane said, nodding, and wishing her comment held slightly more weight.
“I’ll say,” said Nellie. “Now you got two old ladies to take care of and one is even more batshit crazy than the other one.”
Jane began to laugh, really appreciating this new self-awareness that Nellie was demonstrating.
“We’re going to have our hands full with her and Veronica who, you know, is a few bricks shy of a load,” said Nellie.
So much for any self-awareness.
“A few bricks shy of a load?” said Jane. “I just heard that about someone else tonight . . . right. So, do you think you know who Joe is, too?” asked Jane.
“What the hell is going on out there?” said Nellie. The crowd noises had gotten louder and Jane followed her mother to the window over the sink. A huge pile of wood had been built up at the very end of the backyard that backed up into now plowed-under fields. Jane couldn’t see Oh, but thought she made out Tim’s profile in the crowd.
“Does Ada make a bonfire on Scary Night?” asked Jane.
“Fire department shut that down years ago. She got a ticket when James was still alive and he told her no more fires.”
“But this year he told her to build one,” said a voi
ce behind them. “A little scary, isn’t it? I’m afraid it might get out of control.”
Jane and Nellie both turned to see a woman who had come in so quietly that neither had heard her. Just as Jane had described her to Ada . . . she moved quietly, like a cat. Neither noticed that she had taken Rita’s leash from the floor and looped it over and tied it to an iron rail bolted into the frame of the dining room door until the woman pointed it out.
“That’s convenient, isn’t it?” she asked. “Ada uses that to anchor a loom she uses for weaving. Her brother, James, sunk it into a beam in the wall when they were just teenagers, so it’ll never pull out.”
Rita whimpered. She seemed to be agreeing that she might be stuck for good.
“I know you’re not a ghost, now,” said Jane. “You’re the woman I met here the first time I came. You were in the study reading the mail that was on the desk, complaining about Honest Joe’s Internet auctions. You said you dropped in to check on Ada.”
“I lied. My brother and I actually live here most of the time. Ada doesn’t know. There are rooms upstairs where Ada never goes. Brother James left her a note a few months back with the groceries and told her to stay out of the east wing of the house. Told her there were some bad ghosts there who wouldn’t bother her if she didn’t bother them. So I spend a lot of time here.”
Jane and Nellie hadn’t moved from the window. They had remained frozen there, instinctively perhaps, since Jane noticed now for the first time that the woman held a gun pointed at them.
“I’ve been listening to you talk. You’re Ada’s sister,” she said, looking at Nellie. “That’s terrible news.”
“Why?” asked Jane, trying to spot the nearest weapon in the kitchen. She had been here twice in the last two days, and each time, the kitchen had been completely littered with carving knives of all shapes and sizes, and now she couldn’t locate even one sharp object within reach.
“If that’s true,” she said, “that means you’re Ada’s closest relative.”
“Yeah, so?” said Nellie.
“Closer than me,” said the woman. “The way I put this together is that Ada owns all this and if she and James were just cousins and you are her sister . . . Well, Cousin Nellie, that means you stand to inherit everything from Ada.”
“You lost me,” said Nellie. “Mind if I have some more chocolate? I haven’t eaten dinner.” Nellie reached for candy and began unwrapping Hersheys two at a time.
“You remember Brother James? My father?” the woman said, still sounding calm, but growing more agitated. Jane could see it in the way she gestured with the pointed gun.
“If Ada is my cousin and not my aunt, I don’t have much of a claim to this estate, do I? Especially if she has a living sister. Not unless you two are out of the picture.”
“I have a brother,” said Jane. “And my mom has another sister. Getting rid of us doesn’t get rid of the problem. We can work out some kind of division here. There’s plenty of time to work out the details of a split . . . Ada’s healthy as a horse.”
“Sounds to me like you’re the only two that found the little family skeleton. And Ada might be healthy,” said the woman, smiling for the first time. “But she’s not fireproof.”
That was when Jane noticed the boxes in the dining room. Their captor had left the door open and Rita’s leash kept it open as the dog had put herself as far from the woman holding the gun as possible. Rita kept Nellie and Jane in her sight and Jane wondered what command Miles had taught the dog that would signal her . . . enable her . . . to break the leather braided leash and go for the gunwoman’s throat. Jane feared that command might not exist.
Jane could see from across the room that the boxes were filled with the Halloween decorations taken down from the dining room. Ada would not have taken them down herself—Halloween was still a week away. She would certainly keep the house decorated for the trick-or-treaters.
“Why did you box up the . . . ?”
“The stuff’s worth a lot of money. It would be a shame if it all burned. My brother’s been taking out the books one by one . . . the ones that are worth the real money. He’s such an idiot, he doesn’t even know why I want them. He thinks I read them, then return them. What a sap . . .”
“You shot him for being a sap?” said Nellie. “Man, if I killed everybody I thought was an idiot, it’d be a lonely damn world.”
“What do you mean, shot him? Joe’s out at Swanette’s snooping around for the sale. You’re a tricky old woman, cousin, but I’m not my brother Joe. I don’t fall for that stuff.”
“Joe got shot tonight,” said Jane. “If you didn’t do it, then someone else—”
“Shut the hell up. How am I supposed to hear the signal?”
Nellie had picked up one of Ada’s homemade taffy apples, studded with chopped walnuts, and raised it to her mouth. Jane knew that there was no way Nellie was going to bite into a sticky caramel apple. It wasn’t that she didn’t like them . . . caramel, along with chocolate and potato chips, was one of her main food groups. She just never ate messy, sticky things in public. As she told Jane many times, there was nothing like a set of dentures to make one into a sneaky private eater. At home, Nellie might cut that caramel apple into a dozen tiny pieces and enjoy it alone at the kitchen table, but here? There was only one reason to pick up something fairly heavy attached to a stick.
Just as Nellie flung the apple directly at the woman’s head, Jane grabbed her mother and pulled her down, out of the line of fire. As much as Jane wanted to admire her mother’s perfect form—Nellie looked like she had been flinging knives at a target every day of her life—Jane feared the gunwoman might have the time and presence of mind to fire off a shot. No need to worry. The sticky apple caught her in the eye, and Jane heard the gun clatter to the floor. Jane dashed around the wooden kitchen island, grabbing a cutting board. When she got to the woman, who had rubbed walnut pieces into both eyes and was screaming and swearing in pain, Jane hesitated for only a second before hitting her over the head with the heavy slab of maple.
As many times as Jane had seen someone knock another person out by hitting them over the head with a heavy object—in movies or on television—no one had ever mentioned how hard you were supposed to hit them. Jane didn’t want to kill anyone . . . she just wanted to get her mother and her out of the kitchen, out of this house, as fast as possible. Jane picked up the gun and put it in the pocket of her sweater. That was another thing—no one told you how hard to hit someone and no one told you how heavy a gun actually was. Her cardigan pocket sagged down, opening slightly.
“You’re going to stretch the hell out of that sweater and drop the gun to boot,” said Nellie. “Give it here.”
Nellie took the gun out of Jane’s pocket and put it into her own jacket’s flapped patch pocket. “Now that’s a pocket that can hold a gun,” said Nellie, patting it and smiling. She ran over and unhooked Rita, letting the leash dangle from the door frame.
“Do you want to take these boxes?” Nellie asked.
“Yes, but there’s no time. I don’t know if this house is going to blow or what the signal is supposed to be, but it’s clear they want to burn the place down with Ada in it. It must be insured for—”
“A million,” said Nellie. “James insured the place and all the antiques and stuff and had a policy on Ada’s life, too. When he got sick, he took it out. I know, because when Dad and I took over some of the paperwork and stuff here, we were going to drop it, but James had paid it up for a few years in advance. Named his heirs as the beneficiaries, but of course, Dad and I didn’t know his heirs and figured we’d just let the policy lapse when it lapsed. Never heard anything about where Martha went or whether she ever had the baby or not.”
Jane looked down at the unconscious woman. “She had a baby all right. Two apparently. Her brother, Joe, and her. Now we’ve got to get Ada and get out of here. This one is obviously working with others, maybe somebody from the diner—someone was giving her a signal abou
t the fire or—”
“Holy smoke,” said Nellie.
Out the window, Jane saw what her mother had just reacted to and they both ran outside. Ada had been handed a lit torch, and she had touched it to the bottom of the pile of wood at the edge of the property. If the teenagers had actually thought the pumpkin lighting “too corny” as one of the townspeople had told Jane, they apparently thought bonfires were plenty cool. A large group of high schoolers were grabbing the jack-o’-lanterns and throwing them onto the fire, the candles inside the pumpkins adding flame, if not fuel, to the already enormous conflagration.
“Ada’s cloak,” Jane shouted to her mother. “She’s too close. It’s going to catch fire.”
Nellie nodded and they both fought their way through the crowd, which had grown into something other than it was when Jane arrived. It was younger, tougher, uglier, more caught up in the pyrotechnics and a more menacing spirit of Scary Night. Jane saw two boys pulling down a hay-filled scarecrow, preparing to haul it down from the tree and throw it onto the fire.
Jane reached up and tugged on the arm of one of the boys. “Don’t do it. The fire’s too hot and high now. That hay is going to burn like—”
“Wasn’t our idea . . . she told us to,” said the other boy, continuing to pull at the rope.
“Well, I’m telling you not to,” said Nellie. “Don’t make me take out my little friend,” she added, patting her pocket.
“Mom!” shouted Jane. “Help me get Ada.”
Jane had never been part of an angry mob, but she supposed that moving through one must be very similar to working through this crowd to get to the bonfire. What had seemed like a manageable group of neighbors oohing and aahing over the lighting of row upon row of carved pumpkins had morphed into a much larger crowd. Jane felt certain that if a Frankenstein monster were hiding on the outskirts of town, this was the very posse that would pick up lit torches and go chase it down.
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