“I don’t want you to spend all your time parked in front of the television,” I said. “So if you don’t want to run around this afternoon, we have to plan some kind of activity for the weekend.”
“Sledding! There are sleds in the shed, but we have to ask Uncle Thane to get them out for us because they’re behind a bunch of stuff. And the best hill is across the street, so it’s too far to go today anyway.”
“All right. Sledding it is. Tomorrow. Which means you are done for today.”
It did not occur to me until she had run from the room and I heard her footsteps on the stairs to wonder how Hailey might know about the sleds if they were hidden away. Had she explored the shed on her own? And if so, might she have seen someone else while she did? Nathaniel’s fall weighed on me. I would rest easier if I could attribute the sabotage to a completely mundane enemy.
I had hoped, with another hour or so until sunset, to be able to search through the pool room for Jim Prescott’s book. But Liza had another activity in mind. Her steady gaze never left me as I tidied the classroom, and when I lifted my bag from beside my desk, she jerked her head to the side in a distinct “follow me.”
My heart sank. The ghost book attracted her as surely as it repulsed me. I’d avoided it as long as possible, however, so I nodded. “Where shall we go?”
She aimed her thumb at herself.
“Your room it is.”
We walked out together, but I made her go into her room while I removed the book from beneath the mattress. In her room, I found Liza perched on her bed, writing in a small notebook that she hurriedly stuffed under her pillow when I entered. A diary? I’d kept one at her age.
I ignored the notebook, though I could not ignore my curiosity. Liza kept herself completely closed off, utterly hidden away. Not merely through her lack of speech but through a deliberate dampening of affect. The journal could provide a key to everything she endured. But I could not invade her privacy. Not if I expected her to learn to trust me.
I opened the book and flipped to the spot where we’d left off. The chapter title—The History of the Talking Board—ambushed me and I had to take several deep breaths before I could begin. Three times in a matter of hours the Ouija had come up. Even I could feel the weight of the number.
Liza listened intently as I read the chapter, and when I closed the book she leaped from the bed and gestured for me to follow her. Down the hall we went, and into the playroom. There we found Hailey engrossed in a video game, and Liza’s expression blackened. A sick weakness washed through me as I realized what she’d intended: Nathaniel had mentioned that he and Daniel had Ouija boards. She must want to try to communicate with whatever spirit she felt inhabited the house.
But not in front of her cousin. I broke out into a cold sweat. Could I find and remove the boards while the girls were out sledding and then play dumb? Perhaps Nathaniel knew where to lay hands on them. I could ask him to do it—surely he would understand why such a game, while harmless for him and his brother, could be detrimental to his daughter even if the board’s answers were only reflections of the subconscious wishes of the questioners. I would ask him after dinner. All I had to do was keep the girls together until then.
Luck was with me for the remainder of the afternoon. Hailey stubbornly refused to leave the video game, thwarting Liza’s evident desire to be alone in the playroom. Meanwhile, Liza squirmed and fidgeted for a good half hour, then grabbed a book and plopped herself in the corner of the playroom where she could watch in case her cousin got up for even an instant. And as for me, I collected my crochet and settled in to oversee the situation, hoping to ward off any untimely searches.
Stalemate.
Mrs. Vogel had to call up the stairs twice to get Hailey away from the television for dinner, by which time I had pried Liza loose and herded her downstairs. Safe, at least for the moment.
At dinner, I brought up the topic of sledding.
“Oh, absolutely,” Nathaniel said when I suggested it. “We have a couple of blue plastic sleds and one of those red flexible flyer ones in the shed. I’ll dig them out in the morning.” He grinned at Hailey. “I suppose your uncle Matt told you the story about how Danny and I almost got him run over sledding down the big hill across the road?”
“Yup.”
“It wasn’t true, you know. That hill’s not steep enough to land you in the middle of the street. He stopped with at least three feet to spare. I think the whole thing scared the driver far more than it scared Matt.”
Jennifer shook her head. “It scared my parents most of all, even though they didn’t hear about it until later. I thought for sure we’d never come back for Christmas vacation.”
“Will you sled with us tomorrow?” asked Hailey.
“Oh, I don’t think that’s really my thing.”
“Come on, mom. Please?”
“You used to love it, Jenn. Why not?”
“I suppose I could,” Jennifer agreed. “But if I slide out into the middle of the street, someone is going to pay.”
The hours after dinner before the girls went to bed seemed interminable, and every time Liza stood or stretched or shifted, I jumped. But she stuck it out with the rest of the family downstairs until it was time for bed.
I waited by my door until I heard Nathaniel finish his nightly reading session in her room, then ambushed him in the hallway.
“We need to talk,” I whispered.
He raised his eyebrows, gesturing to my room, but I shook my head. I could not chance Liza listening in. Nor did I particularly want to draw Jennifer’s attention. She had yet to come upstairs, so I had a few minutes in private. It wouldn’t be long. Nathaniel usually went back down after reading to Liza; if he did not return soon Jennifer would become curious.
Playroom, I mouthed, and he nodded.
Once we were there, I told him about Liza’s preoccupation with the Ouija boards and asked whether he knew where they were.
“Oh, hell. I should never have agreed to let you read that book with her.”
“I know. But it’s done.”
“I have no idea where those things are. Probably tucked away with the Snakes and Ladders or the Monopoly set that’s missing most of its pieces. Or maybe up in the attic.”
“She was really anxious to look in here—as if she’d already seen one. Can you take them sledding tomorrow first thing and I’ll try to find it and get rid of it? I know you have to go back downstairs now, and I don’t want to make much noise anyway. Neither of the girls is sleeping and I don’t want them to get curious and find us looking.”
“And when she asks—and she’ll find a way to ask, even without words—what happened to the board?”
“I don’t know! I’ll think of something. Maybe she’s only seen the box and never thought of using the board itself. What if I remove the board from the box? Or the planchette?”
“I dislike deceiving my daughter.”
“It’s not at the top of my list, either. But I can’t believe that allowing her to try to contact a ghost—even if the ghost isn’t really there to be contacted—is a good idea.”
He sighed. “No. Not that she needs the board. She used to just talk. Like Marianne could hear her. And like Marianne was answering her. Freaked me right out, I don’t mind telling you, but she didn’t need pseudo-spiritual help.”
“But she’s not talking now. So that avenue’s been cut off.”
“I suppose.” He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t want to lie to her. Did she seem to want your help with the board?”
“Yes. Maybe, as you say, because she’s stopped talking. The book said questions needed to be spoken aloud. So she’ll need a voice to work the board.”
“Then let her find it. When she does, tell her you won’t use it without me. We’ll get her through it together.”
Everything in me rebelled at the idea, but I nodded. I would find a way to put him off. To put them both off. I would not open that door.
Worry wore on me, b
ut every time my eyes drifted shut, the crack of a branch, the call of an owl, the creak of a board would send a spurt of adrenaline into my blood. Impossible currents swirled, brushing across my nose and ruffling my hair, raising goosebumps over my skin. Fantasy? Reality? I could no longer trust the evidence of my own senses. The faint scent of dirty smoke filtered into the room. I choked, blinked, sat up.
What on earth? I flicked on the lamp, but the room appeared normal. I sniffed again and the odor tickled the back of my throat. Where was it coming from?
A muffled noise from Liza’s room had me shoving myself from the bed. I crept toward the connecting door. If the girl was up, I did not want her to find me spying. A draft slipped from beneath her door, icy on my toes as I pressed an ear to the wood.
Nothing. I laid my hand on the knob and turned it, the clicking whine loud in the sleeping house.
“Liza?” I whispered. I poked my head around the door, and every drop of blood in my body froze.
The gaunt, haggard image of my mother’s cancer-riddled figure, ribboned in fine threads of ashes and dust, hovered beside Liza’s bed, stroking her head with a bony claw. I tried to draw breath, but managed only a rasping wheeze. The corpse thing turned to look at me and smiled. Almost, I could hear her speaking to me, telling me to come to her, to love her, to be with her. To be warm in the bitter cold of the world.
I launched myself at it without thought. It shifted, no more my mother, but that strange, pulsing cloud of smoke I’d seen upstairs. I snatched up the chair next to Liza’s bed and struck out with the chair, screaming as I waved it over the bed.
“Get away from her! Get away!”
The chair slammed into something solid and nearly ripped from my grasp. I fought to hold on though I felt it slipping and about to fall onto the bed. Then, in a rush of freezing wind, the smoke disappeared.
Before I could recover, Liza’s door slammed open. Nathaniel stood there, expression black as widow’s weeds and radiating both fear and fury.
“What is going on in here?”
I could not answer. I set down the chair, catching Liza’s watchful, wakeful eyes as I did so. Her face was moon-pale in the darkness and suddenly I realized that I should not have been able to see the creature at all. And yet, its features were etched deeply into my brain. My legs gave out, so I sank into the chair without a word.
“Liza, are you okay?”
She nodded.
“Miss Allworth, I think it’s clear that this is not the right place for you. We are expecting more snow next week. I suggest you pack tomorrow—today—and leave while you can.”
Shame and relief washed over me in combination. I had failed. Failed Liza, failed myself. But if Nathaniel sent me away, I had to go.
“No.” Liza’s whisper was so thin I should not even have heard it, but I did. We did.
I whipped around to stare at her, hearing Nathaniel gasp. When I looked back at him, he was steadying himself against the doorjamb, his face nearly as pale as his daughter’s.
Footsteps in the hall signaled Hailey’s entrance, then Jennifer’s, but Nathaniel never took his eyes from Liza. He groped his way to her bed like a drunk and settled on the edge.
“Please let Molly stay.” Again that thin, hoarse thread of sound, unnaturally loud in the silence of the room.
Jennifer choked and clapped her hand over her mouth.
“At long last, it speaks.” Hailey was unimpressed as only a teen can be.
“Hailey!”
“Oh, come on, mom. Get over it. She was going to talk sometime.” She looked at me. “Was that you screaming? What happened?”
Nathaniel swung his head round to pin me in that uncomfortable way he had, waiting for an answer.
“I’m not sure.” Too many eyes watched me. Too many ears listened. I had to work through the events on my own before I could begin to talk them over with anyone. “Maybe a bad dream.”
“There was something in here,” Liza’s voice was still small and she frowned as if it physically hurt her to speak, but she was steady. “Molly chased it away.”
“Something like what?” asked Hailey.
“I think,” Nathaniel interrupted, “that it’s entirely too late to make sense of any of this tonight. Hailey, pack yourself back off to bed.”
“I want to know what Liza thinks she saw.”
Liza glared at her cousin. “A wasp,” she muttered. “Maybe there’s a whole nest in your room.”
“There’s no wasp nest in my room! And no one screams like a banshee to get rid of a wasp.”
“Depends on whether or not you’ve ever been stung by a particularly nasty wasp,” said Nathaniel. “But regardless, I don’t see any wasp now, so I think it’s safe for everyone to go back to bed.”
He stayed put, however, and there was a warning in his eyes that kept me in place, too. After a long moment, both Hailey and her mother left. Only then did he rise and check to be sure that the hallway was empty before shutting the door and returning.
“Now, let’s have the truth.”
I looked away.
“You saw her,” Liza demanded. “Tell him.”
“I don’t know what I saw.”
Nathaniel’s mouth flattened and his eyes narrowed. “Are we back to this ghost nonsense again? Liza, I’m sorry, but your mom is dead. That’s not going to change. I would do anything on earth to fix it, but I can’t. And neither can you. You need to remember your mom and love her without pretending her spirit is hanging around.”
“I’m not making it up. Molly saw her.”
He glared at me, jaw working.
“I saw something,” I said. “I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but I can say fairly surely that it was not your wife. Your mother.”
“Another mouse?” Sarcasm lay thick and heavy on the words.
“No.”
“It was mom. It was.”
“No, honey, it wasn’t.”
“How do you know? You never met her, so you wouldn’t recognize her.”
“That’s exactly the problem. I wouldn’t recognize your mother. But the thing I saw in your room, that I did recognize.”
Her eyes widened. “Who was it?”
“It looked like my mother. Not yours. And something that appears in different forms to different people, well, that’s not apt to actually be any of the forms it takes, now is it? Can you trust something like that?”
Nathaniel pressed two long fingers into the front of his forehead where a vein pulsed. “So you saw your mother? What was she doing?”
“No. It wasn’t her. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s...only vaguely human. It looks like the worst memories of my mom, the things I’ve tried to forget, the shell she was at the very end of her life, when all her vibrancy and vitality had been sucked away. Like a poor artist had tried to create my mother out of dust and dirt and smoke and mirrors and came up with this simulacrum.”
“Is that what you see?” he asked Liza. “Your mom the way she was that day?”
She swallowed, then swallowed again. “Not exactly.”
“Can you tell us exactly?” I started to reach out, but then withdrew my hand. I missed my own family, but I could not make the mistake of believing myself part of this one. It had been less than ten minutes since Nathaniel had attempted to fire me. It would not do to forget my position.
“She’s pretty. I mean, she was pretty...that day...you know. Like, pale and pretty. Her eyes are wrong, though. When she talks to me, when she invites me to come with her, it’s like she has a secret. Mom had secrets, too, but they never scared me. Sometimes, now, I get scared.”
“Does she look the same as she did at your old house?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Nathaniel barked.
“Does she, Liza?”
The girl thought for a minute, then shook her head. “She’s more solid. At home, she was kind of fading. And she didn’t want me to come with her. She asked me about school and stuff, and told me e
verything would be okay. Since we moved here, she’s gotten...angrier, I think.”
“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Ghosts. And not just one, but I imagine you interpret this to mean that two separate ghosts have latched on to my daughter?”
“Do you take me for an expert? Because I assure you, I’m not. Not all Gypsies read fortunes and talk to the dead, you know. Most of that’s fake.”
“Good to know,” he said dryly. “Because I thought you’d be calling in a few of your relatives to clear the place of evil spirits next.”
That cut deep, but I wrapped the wound and soldiered on.
“Liza is the expert here, not me. Liza has been talking to whoever, whatever this thing is ever since you moved here.”
“I don’t really talk to her. Not like I did at home. She mostly talks to me.”
“What does she say?”
Nathaniel gritted his teeth at the question, but let his daughter answer.
“She tells me how lonely she is, and how sad she is that we’re not together.”
I remembered the seductive call of the mother-thing. “What does she want you to do about that?”
“I’m not sure.” But she didn’t meet my eyes.
I would have pressed, but Nathaniel had other ideas. He stroked Liza’s hair. “It doesn’t matter. We can worry about it tomorrow. Right now, I am just happy to hear your voice, sweetheart. I’m so glad you decided to come back to us.”
“I didn’t go anywhere.”
“I know. But I missed you anyway.” He smiled sadly and my wounded heart bled a little more. I’d seen that same fading, the distance that made me want to grab Liza and hang on for dear life. Unlike her father, I wasn’t at all certain that her speech indicated a return but at least it gave us a way to reach her.
Nathaniel kissed her forehead. “Can you sleep now? You’re not afraid?”
She shook her head. But then, the spirit had never frightened her.
“Good. Miss Allworth, would you mind continuing this conversation downstairs?”
A Darker Shade Page 14