All the Way Home

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  The thought of her older brother brings a sharp pang in the vicinity of Molly’s heart. She frowns, missing him desperately even though he just left this afternoon.

  How could you leave me? she demands silently, thinking that by now, he must have boarded the jet at JFK Airport and is about to take off for London.

  Either that, or he’s changed his mind about going and hopped the next commuter flight back to Albany. And any second now, she’ll hear his voice in the driveway next door, calling her, saying he couldn’t leave her for the whole summer.

  “Molly got a boo boo?”

  She realizes that Ozzie’s watching her face, his big brown eyes wide with concern.

  “A boo boo? Oh, you mean because I look sad? Yes, Molly has a boo boo, sweetie,” she says wistfully. A big, hollow boo boo right in her heart.

  “I will kiss it for you,” Ozzie declares. “Where the boo boo is?”

  She smiles and ruffles his big blond corkscrew curls. “I’ll tell you what, Ozzie. A great big hug will help the boo boo heal. Okay?”

  She pulls him into her arms and squeezes him tight, feeling his small heart thumping against her own.

  He’s so sweet, this child. And his affection is so . . . needed.

  Especially now that Kevin’s gone and she has no one else.

  Tears spring to her eyes and she holds Ozzie close until he squirms and demands to be put into his bath.

  She leaves his little sandals on, knowing he’ll insist that he be allowed to walk down the hall. The floors are a mess, and she hasn’t let him go barefoot since he got a splinter several weeks ago.

  “I walk,” Ozzie says eagerly, bolting for the door the moment she sets him on his feet. “I walk.”

  “No, you run, little guy,” Molly says with a laugh.

  She hurriedly follows him back down to the bathroom, flicking the light switch outside his door as she goes, so that the naked bulb in the ceiling high above illuminates the long hallway.

  She knows Ozzie likes to linger in his bath, and once or twice before, she’s found herself having to make her way along the darkened hallway back to his room.

  Being in the dark in a haunted house isn’t a prospect she would like to repeat.

  And even though she’s never actually seen a ghost here, or heard so much as a strange creak, she’s certain the place is haunted. So is Rebecca, who lives on the other side of the Randalls and refuses to baby-­sit here. If Molly didn’t love Ozzie and his parents so much, she wouldn’t be willing to set foot inside, either.

  She can’t help thinking of the girl who used to live here. Emily Anghardt.

  She doesn’t remember her at all. But there are times, when she’s alone downstairs at night after Ozzie’s asleep, that she feels connected to Emily in some inexplicable way.

  After all, this was her house. She lived here, slept here, played here. And one day, she walked—­or, perhaps, was carried—­out the double front doors with the leaded glass panes, and she never came back.

  The very thought of what might have happened to Emily, and to Carleen, and the others, sends a chill down Molly’s back despite the muggy summer night. So does the local legend that Emily Anghardt’s spirit haunts the house.

  “C’mon, Ozzie,” she says brightly. “Let’s take off your sandals now.”

  “Do ‘wee wee wee,’ ” he responds, wiggling his toes expectantly as she unfastens the buckles of his sandals. “Do ‘wee wee wee,’ Molly.”

  “Sure,” she tells him, and begins, “This little piggy went to market . . .”

  It’s dusk, and lamplight spills from the windows of the once-­grand old houses looming along Hayes Street. There’s no breeze to stir the heavy, still air. He can hear crickets, and the faint sounds of a baseball game coming from a television set or radio, and, farther off, the steady drone of a lawn mower.

  He’s the only one walking along this street right now, looking for all the world like he’s taking a casual stroll after dinner on a warm summer night.

  He slows his steps as he nears number 52, a shabby three-­story house set back behind a cagelike wrought-­iron fence. The gate stands half open, as though beckoning a visitor—­or perhaps, he notes as an afterthought, as though providing a potential escape route, should an occupant be startled into having to flee.

  He studies the house as he passes, noting the lopsided front steps and the gaping holes in the porch railing where spindles are missing. The place is badly in need of a paint job, having faded to a peeling, nondescript neutral shade with a muddy-­colored trim. The shrubbery is unkempt, though the patchy grass is at least mowed, and the bright pink dianthus in full bloom by the front steps seem conspicuously out of place in the drab landscape.

  So this is where Carleen Connolly lived, he muses, and moves on, glancing up at the next house on the block.

  Number 54.

  And this is where Emily Anghardt lived.

  This place is just as run down as number 52, but it shows subtle signs that somebody intends to do something about it. There are paint cans stacked on the front porch, and a ladder is propped against the side steps. A big Dumpster, the kind you can rent when you’re working on renovations, can be seen at the back of the long, straight driveway that runs along the far side of the house.

  The first floor is dark, but there are lights on upstairs. He knows that a young family lives there now, with a new baby on the way. He wonders if they know the history of the place, or if they care.

  And he thinks about the Connollys, still living at number 52, even though the place must hold memories of the daughter they lost.

  He walks on up the straight, sloping sidewalk toward the corner, leaving the two big houses behind, not wanting to be so bold as to stop right here and stare, and risk bumping into one of the occupants.

  He doesn’t need to know them yet. There will be plenty of time for that later.

  After all, he’ll be here all summer.

  Just as he was ten years ago.

  Rory hesitates outside the closed door in the third-­floor hallway, her hand on the knob and her heart pounding.

  Then, after closing her eyes briefly, she turns the knob and pushes the door open.

  Nothing but blackness.

  She reaches out, feels along the wall to her right, just inside the doorway, until she finds the light switch. She flicks it and blinks at the burst of brightness overhead, then finds herself looking around at her sister’s old bedroom.

  A wave of emotion surges over her and she reaches out to grab the nearby desk for support.

  Oh, God, Carleen, she thinks, desperately missing the sister she has tried so hard to forget.

  She takes a deep breath to steady her emotions and notices that the air is hot and musty-­smelling. She forces herself to look around.

  There, on the cluttered desk, is a Stephen King novel with a bookmark in place—The Shining. Carleen had been reading it that summer, Rory recalls. She was always reading something.

  The bookcase on the far wall of the room is packed with double rows of books, and more are stacked on the floor beside it. Some are mainstream fiction, and there are a few cherished classics and hardcovers among them; others are dog-­eared young-­adult paperbacks—­mostly “sophisticated” books by authors like Avi and Richard Peck and Paul Zindel, rather than the Sweet Valley High series that takes up most of the shelf space in Rory’s room across the hall.

  Above the bookcase hangs a wooden crucifix, identical to those in every other bedroom in the house, placed there, of course, by Maura. Rory remembers being frightened, as a child, of the gory image of the blood-­encrusted gaping wounds in Christ’s feet and hands. She swiftly moves her gaze past the crucifix even now, focusing on the wide dresser beside the bookcase.

  One drawer is ajar, as though someone has just grabbed something out of it and not bothered to close it
all the way. Rory notes the dresser top is cluttered with cosmetics and hair clips and lotions, and she can see a round purple glass bottle that she recognizes as Carleen’s favorite perfume. Chris­tian Dior’s Poison. Some boy had given it to her for her seventeenth birthday, and Carleen had bragged about how expensive it was. She used to douse herself in it, ignoring everyone’s wrinkled noses and comments that she was wearing too much.

  Over there on the bedside table is Carleen’s senior yearbook, and, tossed haphazardly on the floor, a familiar-­looking maroon leather-­bound document binder that Rory recognizes as her sister’s high school diploma. She herself got one just like it from Lake Charlotte High School the following year.

  There’s Carleen’s canopy bed, the one Mom and Daddy had bought her for her thirteenth birthday after she’d begged them. Rory, who had always believed her sister was Mom’s favorite anyway, had, of course, been jealous. But Carleen had generously allowed her to spend a few nights in the bed when she was away on a Girl Scout camping trip.

  That was back when Carleen was still herself, before . . .

  Well, before everything changed.

  Rory takes a few cautious steps into the room, noting that it’s just the way her sister left it ten years ago. Mom wouldn’t let anyone touch it after Carleen vanished, saying she wanted her room to be waiting the day she came back.

  And Daddy hadn’t argued.

  Maybe he, too, thought Carleen was coming back.

  Or maybe he knew how traumatic it would be for Mom to give up hoping.

  During the first few weeks and months after Carleen disappeared, there had occasionally been reason to think that maybe she was out there somewhere, alive; that maybe she had simply run away. Doug McShane, the detective in charge of the police investigation, said they had received tips from ­people who claimed to have seen her—­but then, nothing ever came of any of the information.

  And, as Daddy said, the world is full of crackpots and sickos.

  Rory remembers the night she had answered the phone to hear a girl’s voice, a girl claiming to be Carleen. And her heart had leapt into her throat even though it didn’t sound like her sister’s voice, and she was momentarily fooled until the girl burst into a fit of giggles, and she realized it was just some kids playing a prank.

  Another time a psychic showed up at the door and told Mom she had a message from Carleen. She said Carleen was alive and being held in an underground dungeon by a stranger. For two hundred dollars, she would describe the stranger and provide his initials.

  Mom, the devout Catholic who should have known better than to believe in occult mumbo jumbo, would have given her the two hundred dollars if Daddy hadn’t come home right then and thrown the so-­called psychic out.

  Rory still remembers how the woman had scurried to her car parked out at the curb as Mom wailed helplessly and Daddy yelled.

  “Don’t you think I want to believe she’s alive someplace?” he had hollered at Mom after the psychic had driven away. “Don’t you think that my heart jumps every time Doug McShane calls and says he’s got another tip from someone who says they saw her?”

  And that was when Rory, who was crouched at the top of the stairs listening, had realized her father thought Carleen was dead.

  That was when she allowed herself to believe it, too.

  And after that, she had never set foot inside Carleen’s room again. She knew it would be too painful to see everything waiting for her, as if she were coming back.

  Now, after ten years, the pain has dulled somewhat to a hollow ache. Now she’s an adult. Now she can stand here and look at her sister’s room and mourn the loss of someone she had once loved, but she isn’t paralyzed with grief the way she once might have been.

  Now there’s only this deep-­seated sadness.

  And, of course, the mystery.

  What happened to you, Carleen?

  And to you, Emily?

  She reaches into the neck of her T-­shirt and pulls out a locket on a chain, fingering it absently as she thinks about her sister. Then, realizing the room is unbearably warm, she steps over to the window and tugs on it. After a few tries, it begins to raise with the reluctant, squeaky groan of wood scraping along wood.

  The air outside is hardly cool, but not nearly as stifling as it is in here. Rory inhales the sweet scent of honeysuckle blossoms from the sprawling hedge two stories below.

  She stands looking down at the side yard, remembering how she and Carleen used to spread their Barbie dolls in the shade of the big oak tree just inside the fence. They would play there for hours, trading clothes and setting up elaborate Barbie houses among the gnarled roots jutting out from the base of the tree.

  Carleen had the best ideas, Rory remembers, smiling faintly. She was always staging a Barbie wedding or sending her Ken off to war. And I would forget to play with my own dolls. I would end up sitting there, watching the scenes she created with hers, like the audience at a show.

  If her sister had lived, Rory thinks wistfully, she might have become an actress. Or maybe an interior decorator—­she was a genius at designing her Barbie houses, turning postage stamps into framed “prints” for the walls and propping plastic coffee can lids on spools to create tables.

  A sudden, involuntary shudder takes Rory by surprise.

  She stares out into the twilight below, feeling as if something startled her, when there’s nothing to see but a deserted yard.

  Then she catches a glimpse of movement out of the corner of her eye. Turning her head, she sees the dark silhouette of a person moving along the sidewalk beyond the black iron fence.

  It appears to be a man, and he’s walking slowly, his head turned in Rory’s direction, almost as if he sees her standing up here in the window.

  He might, she realizes, remembering that the light is on behind her.

  She steps back automatically, instinctively wanting to conceal herself, and then wonders why.

  It’s probably just one of the neighbors, she tells herself. Everyone on the block must know that this was Carleen’s old room. That’s the kind of detail that’s become legendary in Lake Charlotte—­at least it was in the year Rory lived at home, after her sister vanished.

  She remembers the way cars would slow in front of their house as curious onlookers stared, and how kids would gather on their bikes outside the iron fence, peering at the house as though they expected to see Carleen’s ghost.

  Rory sighs and moves to the light switch, turning it off and plunging the room into darkness once more. She pulls the door closed behind her and goes slowly down the stairs to the second floor, passing her mother’s closed door.

  She hesitates for a moment, considering knocking and asking if her mother is all right.

  But that seems too invasive somehow. Kevin told her that their mother spends a lot of time in bed, sometimes watching her portable television and sometimes just staring at the ceiling or out the window. The only time she leaves the house on her own is to walk to morning mass at Holy Father Church two blocks away.

  Rory vowed, when she came here this summer, to make an effort to turn her mother around—­to get her out of bed and back out into the world.

  But tonight, she’s too exhausted to make the effort.

  She passes the closed door to the master bedroom and continues to the guest room down the hall. This is where she’s staying for the summer, instead of in her old room upstairs, across the hall from Carleen’s.

  She’s been telling herself that she’s chosen to stay down here because it’s cooler, and because she wants to be near her mother and Molly.

  But the truth is that her childhood bedroom, like her sister’s, simply holds too many haunting memories. And though she now realizes that it’s going to be impossible to spend the summer here avoiding any thought or discussion of the past, the last thing she wants is to immerse herself in it.

>   She goes into the guest room, leaves the door open behind her so that light spills in from the hall, and turns on the big, ancient box fan propped in the window. As the motor hums to life, she sits on the edge of the twin bed and looks out the window, facing the same view as she had from Carleen’s room directly overhead.

  There’s no sign of the man she had seen on the sidewalk.

  Yet for some reason she finds herself shivering again, hugging herself as she stares out into the still, steamy summer night.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Cap’n Crunch? I used to love that stuff.” Rory peers over Molly’s shoulder into the bowl of cereal in front of her on the table.

  Her sister glances up and narrows her eyes. “Do you mind? I’m trying to eat.”

  “Just checking to see if it’s the kind with crunchberries,” Rory says.

  Silence.

  “So, is it?”

  “No,” Molly tells her. “It isn’t.”

  “The peanut butter kind?”

  “No. Okay?”

  Rory shrugs, refusing to take her sister’s hint. Maybe, she tells herself, Molly just isn’t a morning person. Carleen never was. She would growl at anyone who tried to talk to her before noon.

  Or maybe Molly just can’t stand me, Rory thought ruefully, going over to the counter and looking around for a coffeemaker. I guess I can’t blame her for that. She thinks I took off and left everyone behind without a second thought while I gallivanted around the country these past ten years.

  Which is basically what I did.

  Rory sighs, opens a cupboard in search of the Mr. Coffee machine she vaguely remembers from years ago. Yesterday morning, there hadn’t been time to make coffee. She’d forgotten all about it in the flurry to get acclimated and see Kevin off. Now she has a pounding headache from not feeding her three-­cup-­a-­day caffeine habit, and if she doesn’t find that Mr. Coffee machine . . .

  But the cupboard is filled with stacked glass mixing bowls, all of them faded pastel colors and most of them chipped, and an unfamiliar Corning Ware casserole set that looks as though it’s never been used.