by Etta Faire
Time was something we didn’t have much of anymore. Or maybe, I was doing just what the curse wanted me to do: Losing my life obsessing over it.
He didn’t respond, so I elaborated. “Please tell me you’ve at least found us a new client.”
“Not yet,” he said. “But, I have been very busy putting the word out. I’m sure one will pop up any second.”
Putting the word out. We both knew that meant he was doing nothing.
We had very different ideas on how to solve this curse. Mine were the good ones.
Jackson hovered closer to me and the scrapbooks. The smell of cedar mixed with some sort of earthy essential oil came with him.
The man could smell like anything he wanted to now that he was a ghost, or he could smell like nothing at all, which would have been preferable. But lately, he was trying to smell like his old beard oil for some reason, and that reason was probably to annoy me. He knew I hated that beard oil most of all, along with the fancy way he’d comb down every whisker, and even talk to his beard sometimes. “We’re coming along very nicely,” he’d say to his chin on good-beard days.
He looked good today. I hated to admit it. He was more than 20 years my senior, but it was always in a charming kind of way, minus the strange beard-pep-talks. His coloring was strong. His cheeks even had a pinkish glow.
“I’m just worried that you’re not taking your job seriously,” he said.
“Really? Even though I’m doing the exact same thing as your father, sitting in the same spot, with the same scrapbooks open in front of me. You gave him the benefit of the doubt. Why are you criticizing my research? Because I’m a woman?”
“It’s because you’re in the same spot, doing the same thing. This curse hasn’t progressed since I was six years old. And we certainly don’t need to go into detail about how long ago that was.”
The newest scrapbook was open to the Eliza photo, the one where she was looking in the mirror in her dark tailored dress. Henry was staring at her while she looked at herself, his face in profile, hers facing the mirror dead on. It was almost like she was looking through the mirror and the lens of the camera straight to me.
Was she trying to tell me something?
But the most intriguing part of the photo was that someone had labeled it in pen underneath with the word “SPARROW” in all caps.
I mindlessly twisted my blondish-brown curls into a slightly off-centered up-do, similar to the one Eliza was wearing in the photo. “It’s different now because I’m here,” I said, like I knew. “The sparrow returning must have something to do with me. If she’s the sparrow and we look alike… it just makes sense, right?”
He pointed at the photo. “Maybe Henry’s the sparrow. The photo doesn’t specify which person is the sparrow. Why do you think it’s her? Because Henry’s a man?” he said, pushing his lips together, smiling in that tired way that was just short of polite. His coloring faded a little.
“If you really thought Henry was the key to all of this,” I said, laughing a little to myself because Henry was definitely not the sparrow. “Then why bring me to Gate House? You saw me in your English class twelve years ago, knew I resembled Eliza, and wooed me away from my boyfriend at the time…”
“Wooed?” he said, smiling into his beard. “You were quite easily wooed, if I remember correctly. All it took was some nicer restaurants and a few presents.”
I looked down at my clearance-sale sandals, ashamed of the superficial 19-year-old I used to be back then. “And when you died last year, even though we were no longer married, you left me Gate House. I don’t think you would have done that if you thought Henry was the key.”
He motioned to my scrapbooks. “Yet here we are, in the same exact spot my father was with his research,” he said, like he wasn’t the one slacking off around here. Like “putting the word out” meant something. “The very least you could do is turn the page on that scrapbook.”
I yanked the scrapbook open to a different page, away from the sparrow photo. He did have a point. I was obsessing over one photo while leaving everything else out.
I landed on the spot with three black-and-white photos of the nursery. None of the pictures included babies, because why take a nursery photo with a baby?
They were only photos of the furniture. What looked like a stiff, woolen baby blanket with embroidered animals on it was draped over the crib, making it look even more like a cage than it already did. And the fireplace beside it looked like a dark hungry mouth waiting for children to fall asleep.
I briefly wondered where I would put my baby if I ever had one because there was no way this room was going to be the place.
I turned the page again, stopping on one of the sepia-toned photos. It was of a dirt road and an opened metal gate on a hill.
“Gate Hill,” I said, tapping the photo.
He nodded. “Judging from the looks of it, I’d say this was taken in the early 1900s when the curse was just making itself known.”
In the photo, a lone horse and carriage stood off to the side of the opened gate A man with a light bushy mustache and black top hat stood next to the carriage.
It looked to be fall, but I was only guessing by his thick, dark clothing. The hill itself did not change from one season to the next.
Jackson pointed to it. “My, my. That’s strange,” he said. “Do you see it?”
I looked at the photo closer. The camera was facing downhill, away from Gate House, as if the photographer had set up his or her shot so it would highlight the absurd security you had to go through to get here.
You could just see the front end of a black car coming up the hill behind the man in the top hat, so maybe the photographer was also highlighting the differences between a horse-run carriage and a horseless one.
“The angle does seem strange,” I said.
He motioned toward the headlights and the hood. “Not only that, but look at the car,” he replied. “The smoothness of the hood, the shape of the headlights, the glare means it has a windshield, and it’s low to the ground…”
I squinted at it. “I don’t see what you’re seeing…”
“It’s a modern car. The headlights of the first motor cars were usually round. The tires large so they sat up higher, like a horse-drawn carriage, and the hoods were narrower.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s too grainy to know for sure. And, how could it possibly be a modern car in a hundred-year-old photo?”
Even though I said it, I also knew that some of the photos in the scrapbooks had been old yet modern, like the time I saw a photo of the back of a woman’s head while she drank tea, then I went to Delilah Scott’s house and it was as if the photo had been recreated there. The back of Delilah’s head. Her tea cup.
“Strangeness all around,” Jackson replied.
“The only strangeness all around is your eyesight,” I said, flipping the scrapbook’s pages again. “And none of this has to do with the curse. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going back to the sparrow photo and picking the locks of this desk because I think that’s the direction I need to go in. I think the curse has something to do with both Henry and Eliza. And I have to be quick because I need to leave for a child’s party soon…”
The turret swayed a little in the wind as it whipped through the aged walls. I used to cringe every time that happened. This turret, along with the rest of Gate House, had been designed by a madman with no architectural skills. But apparently, back then, no one cared as long as you paid for the work. There was very little oversight. No permits or inspections.
I hardly noticed the swaying now. Crashing to my death in an unsteady turret was the least of my worries.
After a few seconds, I realized the swaying of the turret hadn’t stopped. It was the kind of rumbling that came from underneath the foundation, and it seemed like more than just wind.
“Someone’s coming up Gate Hill,” I announced, not sure how I was so positive about it.
The rumbling was how Henry must ha
ve known so many years ago, before cameras and surveillance. It must have been why his library was at the top of the turret. Not just so he could see who was coming up, but so that he’d be alerted to when they were coming.
My eyes shot up to the trapdoor on the ceiling as I bolted from my spot behind Henry Bowman’s desk.
“If I hurry, I can test out how your great grandfather spied on the comings and goings of every guest the house had,” I said, pointing up.
“Ah, the trapdoor on the ceiling. I remember wanting to go through that secret door as soon as I saw it, until my aunt started calling it the death door. Told my mother it hadn’t been stable even when it was first made, and anyone who stepped foot onto it would surely fall to their death. My mother forbade me to go near it from then on.” He shrugged. “But, now that I’m dead, I say we go for it.”
I knew he was trying to stop me from wanting to go out there, but it wasn’t working, except maybe a little.
I slid the moveable ladder over toward the opening in the ceiling where it curved into its conical roof.
The trapdoor almost seamlessly blended in with the wooden framework, becoming almost undetectable unless you knew to look for it.
After climbing the ladder, I slid the latch over and pushed up on the trapdoor. It didn’t budge until I realized I had to push harder than I expected to in order for the door to create a ledge onto the roof.
Air and blinding light shot through the library as soon as it opened, and I almost fell off the ladder. I could see why Aunt Laura had called it the death door. It seemed almost too easy to fall, like there needed to be more than just a small bar as a barrier between me and a three-story drop.
I gripped the ladder, trying to gain enough courage to step out onto the tiny ledge in front of me. I told myself if Henry Bowman could do it, so could I, even though he was a crazy person doing it.
The wind smacked my face as I took my first tiny step out, grabbing the railing, testing it to make sure it was strong. It seemed to be. I slid my foot forward, just an inch, just enough to say I’d done it.
I looked in the direction of Gate Hill, surprised I was able to see clear down to the bottom, almost the whole winding path, even without binoculars.
“It has to be Justin,” I said, loving it that I now knew I could spy on his driving. “But he’s early. I’m not even ready to go yet.”
A tiny black car was coming up the hill slowly, passing the first gate, and I squinted at it, gripping the railing even tighter, my knuckles turning pink with the force of my grip, realizing it wasn’t Justin.
Jackson was right beside me, so close a chill ran up my arm where his ghostly body skimmed my own. “My, my,” he said, looking down the hill. “This ledge is much sturdier than my aunt Laura gave it credit for. I mean, I’m floating, but I think even if I were standing with my living weight fully on it, I wouldn’t necessarily think I was going to die. And look, you can see clear down to that black car…”
He stopped short.
I knew he was seeing what I was seeing. He smiled smugly from his spot by my side. “Interesting,” he said, like he did when he was my professor and wanted to sound like he was drawing out critical thinking from the class. We all knew he only said, “interesting” when he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
But this actually was interesting. The car coming up the hill looked very similar to the car in the photo we had both been looking at moments before. The modern car in the 100-year-old photo.
Maybe “putting the word out” really had been working.
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