A Darker Shade

by Laura K. Curtis

  We were headed downstairs with the first batch of books—even with Liza’s help it would take two trips to ferry everything to the library—when I saw her. She did not hover or float as a misty apparition the way ghosts in novels always had. Instead, I was aware of her as a flicker, like the glimpse of a dancer seen in a strobe-lit club. A flash of brown unruly hair, a darker blot on the darkened stair, nothing I could point to and say there, there she is, let’s get her. And yet, she was. Watching, waiting. I felt her as much as saw her. She had not yet ingested enough of us to completely solidify her form, but hurrying down those steps, my arms filled with books, I knew it was only a matter of time.

  Passing that spot on the way back up, I kept my eyes firmly on Nathaniel’s back. Mama would have approved of his posture. I could barely see the outlines of his shoulder blades beneath his T-shirt. Liza, who had the center spot behind him and in front of me, tended to slouch. I’d need to address that in the future. If we had a future.

  “We should get a Ouija board from the playroom,” Liza said on the way down. For a moment, I saw her again, a shadow of a shadow, standing near us on the second floor landing, dark hair whipping in a wind that did not affect the rest of us.

  Nathaniel detoured to the playroom, where Liza dug a battered Ouija box out of a pile of well-used board games. The sight of it in her pale hands made me slightly queasy, but a series of thuds from the library was followed by a cracking crash and we all ran for the stairs.

  The wind that had whirled around the shadow on the second floor had torn through the library, sending the neat stacks of books we’d laid on the coffee table flying. One had slammed into the window, shattering it, and the cold streamed in along with flakes of snow.

  Nathaniel cursed. “What the hell just hit the window? The wind wasn’t supposed to pick up like this until later. Maybe we should go into town. Hole up in a hotel for a couple of days until the storm’s over. I’ll go get the Rover and pick you guys up out front.”

  “No.” I grabbed his arm, unthinking. He studied my hand, resting there on his forearm, and something I could not read passed across his face. “Don’t you see? It wasn’t the storm. There’s no snow inside.”

  His gaze flew to the shattered window and back to me. “Get your coat. You, too, Liza. I’ll meet you out front.”

  Dread seized me in a grip colder and stronger than the stranglehold of the spirit. “No. Don’t. We can’t let her split us up. We’ll all go.”

  We all grabbed our coats from the kitchen and headed outside. The wind grew wilder, blowing snow and ice down from the branches and up from the ground in a tornado of stinging spray.

  “Can you drive in this?” I had to shout to be heard above the howling gale that stole my breath and threw my words into the trees.

  Nathaniel did not answer. He forged ahead to the garage and punched in the door code. Nothing happened. He tried again with the same result.

  “We can go around to the side door,” he shouted. “The overhead door opens from the inside manually. But the path isn’t shoveled. You should really wait here.”

  I shook my head, more certain than ever that she intended to separate us so she could hurt him. He had been a target long before my arrival. I grabbed hold of his jacket with one hand and reached for Liza with the other and we struggled through the deep drifts in a human chain.

  The suffocating darkness inside the three-car garage blinded after the dirty white storm outside. When Nathaniel cursed and pounded on the hood of the Range Rover, it took me a minute to see what had upset him.

  All four tires had been flattened, and the two nearest us had screwdrivers sticking out the sides.

  “Back to the house. Double time. This storm’s getting worse, and we don’t want to be stuck out here.” Nathaniel scooped up Liza and settled her on his hip despite her size and took my hand with his free one.

  Blowing snow had nearly obliterated the path between the house and garage, so we stepped off it several times. Twice I fell, tripped by the deceptively even whiteness of the snowy ground and the corresponding lack of depth perception. The house was a massive, black silhouette against the gray trees, a half-solid form behind the snow’s white scrim, and had it not been for its size, we might never have found it.

  The fire in the library had gone out. Nathaniel knelt to rebuild it, and I walked over to the broken window to see if the drapes could block the hole. Wedged into the broken glass, with a shard driven straight through it, was the paperback about the Canadian boarding schools. I pulled it out, which broke yet more of the window, and set it to the side. Then I opened the window, stuck the bottom of the drapes outside, and slammed it shut. The drapes billowed and drafts pushed their way around and through them, but it was better than no barrier.

  “We can duct tape them to the walls, too. That will help,” said Liza.

  “Good thought.”

  I picked up the book and tried to ease the shard of glass out, but it was stuck fast.

  “Does it mean something?” Liza asked, observing my actions.

  “I’m pretty sure it does, yes.” I glanced out to the hall where the phone sat on its stand. “I don’t suppose that’s going to work in this weather.”

  “Won’t know until we try.” Nathaniel headed for the door and the room seemed to hold its breath. Suddenly, I pictured the door slamming shut, separating us. I grabbed Liza’s hand and hurried after him. He dialed and I thanked whatever benevolent spirit looked after the phone.

  “Dad?” He paused, and I could hear a man speaking. “I’m okay. But I don’t have time to chat. I need you to do me a favor.” Sputtering from the other end. “Dad, really, we’re in the middle of a storm and we could lose the phone at any second. Please. I need you to listen. Yeah. Okay. I’m going to put you on with Molly—what? Oh. Right. Molly’s Liza’s new tutor. Dad, I told you, I don’t have time to answer questions. Please. Talk to Molly and tell her what she needs to know.”

  A second later, he handed the phone to me and I found myself wordless. A huge breath, and I mustered the arguments I’d come up with.

  “Mr. Prescott? Hi, this is Molly Allworth.”

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on, Miss Allworth?”

  “I don’t have time. I promise, we’ll clear it all up later. I had some questions about the books you used for research. The ones in the billiards room?”

  “What were you looking for in there?”

  “Are all those books yours? Because I didn’t see much on the history of spiritualism in Maine: Seafarers and Settlers through the Civil War.”

  “You read it?”

  “I skimmed. Were those books yours?”

  “I looked through them. But in the main, they were my father-in-law’s. He’s a character.”

  “And the Native American books?”

  “Oh, sure. I did a lot of research on local tribes.”

  “What about the book on Canadian boarding schools?”

  He did not answer and I thought we’d lost the connection. “Mr. Prescott? Are you there?”

  “That wasn’t part of my project. It was part of Linda’s mother’s. She was constructing a family history.”

  “She’s Native American?”

  “No…” a scuffle took place on the other end of the line and then a woman’s voice came on.

  “Who is this?”

  “Molly Allworth. Liza’s tutor.”

  “Miss Allworth, what can my family history possibly have to do with you?”

  “It’s not me. It’s Liza. I’ve gotten her to talk, but I am working on bringing her further along. I’d be happy to give you all the details, but not now.”

  “She’s talking again?”

  “Yes. Can you please tell me why your mother would have been interested in Native American boarding schools in Canada?”

  “Because she had a sister adopted out of one of the residential schools. My grandparents had had no success conceiving, and they were desperate for a child. My grandmother�
�s sister had married a Canadian—a Catholic, so imagine the scandal—and she told my grandparents that if they weren’t too picky about their child’s skin color, they could adopt. There wasn’t the oversight there is now, you understand? This was the 1920s. So they adopted a Native child and brought her home. And then in 1931, they got pregnant with my mother and her twin sister.

  “The other girl, they’d named her May, and my mother never did find a record of her real name, she was about ten or eleven when my mother was born. You’re welcome to go through mom’s papers. They’re in the room on the third floor that looks like a ladies’ sitting room. She lost enthusiasm for the project and never finished. I bought that book myself, the one you mean, because I considered picking up where she left off, but I never had time.”

  The schoolroom. That meant climbing those stairs at least one more time.

  “May, your mother’s sister, she’s still alive?”

  “No. She died in 1938. Influenza. It took my mother’s twin as well.”

  “Did she—” But my time was up. Dead air buzzed on the other end of the line.

  Chapter 22

  We returned to the living room and I told them what I’d learned.

  “Mom’s family?” Nathaniel said. “How did I not know this?”

  “Why would you? She died decades before you were born. By the time your mother thought about taking up her mother’s genealogy project, May was all but forgotten.”

  “It’s interesting, but I don’t see how it helps us. May died of influenza. That’s not tragic or sudden. And why would a little girl who died right alongside another little girl suddenly start haunting the house after almost eighty years?”

  “Maybe it’s not her. But she’s connected. She has to be.”

  “Maybe she’s not the ghost, just a conduit or something,” said Liza.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, maybe she knows what happened. We can call her. Ask her. Maybe she’ll tell us.”

  “Just like that.” Hysterics nearly choked me. “We just call her up, same as we did your grandparents, and have a little chat with her.”

  “We can use the board. We don’t have any choice.” She pulled the lid off the cardboard box and laid the Ouija board on the table. When she reached for the planchette, a little, involuntary squeak forced itself from my throat.

  Nathaniel made a T with his hands. “Okay, time out. Cool off. We are not rushing into anything. My mother said the papers were upstairs?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t get a chance to ask her where. We’ve had class in that room every day and I haven’t seen them.”

  The lights flickered and Nathaniel frowned. “This is our first winter with the generator and I’m not sure how it will hold up to this storm. We should go up and look now. We have plenty of wood in the mudroom for the fire, along with flashlights and candles, but I don’t want us digging around upstairs if the lights go out.”

  No joke. I had no desire to go up with the lights on. But once again, I steeled myself, took Liza’s hand in my own, and followed Nathaniel up the stairs.

  This time, even he felt the difference in the atmosphere. Though nothing compared to the raging wind outside, the draft was too strong to be natural and eddies of cold air curled all around us.

  Again I felt those fingers on my neck. Long and strong and too big to belong to a child. They rested cold and clammy against my skin, not squeezing but reminding me that they might at any moment. That my life was, literally, in her hands.

  “She’s here, isn’t she?” Nathaniel asked as he pushed open the classroom door and ushered us in.

  I nodded, unable to speak, and he put an arm over my shoulders.

  “If you can hear me, ghost, spirit, whatever you are,” he said, “we’re only trying to help.”

  The door slammed behind us hard enough to shake the floor and topple the mug of pencils sitting on the desk.

  “I don’t think she believes you,” said Liza.

  “Where would your mother have kept her papers?” I wanted out of that room as soon as possible, assuming we could even get the door open.

  Nathaniel shook his head. “ I never paid attention. You checked inside the writing desk?”

  “I put everything from the desk into the cabinet below those shelves.” I pointed to the delicate built-in that occupied a corner, where I had stuffed all the fancy glass vases from the etager for safe-keeping, but then I remembered the filing cabinet in the playroom.

  “There are more papers in the playroom. Maybe they were moved and your mother forgot. Or didn’t realize.”

  “We can look there next.” He yanked on the door of the cabinet and the knob came off in his hand. The temperature dropped and without thinking, I crossed myself. A second later, the vases above his head began to rattle and shake and then one flew off, as if thrown by an invisible hand. I did not even have a chance to duck; it crashed into my forehead and knocked me backward.

  The room faded and reality slipped away. A slim figure flitted around the writing desk. She wore a dress with a narrow skirt and puffy-shouldered sleeves that tightened to show off impossibly tiny wrists and hands. Two small children played on the rug. In the background, the shadow of another presence hovered, but I could not see her.

  I came to on the sofa in the living room. Liza was perched by my waist, while Nathaniel knelt on the carpet next to me. My head throbbed and I raised my hand and felt a lump on the my forehead.

  “Look at me,” I said to Liza. “I’m a unicorn.”

  A halfhearted smile lightened her somber face for a moment.

  “Did you find the papers?”

  “We brought everything that was in the cabinet down. Haven’t had a chance to look at it yet,” Nathaniel said.

  My stomach lurched and the room spun a little as I sat up and I had to take a few deep breaths.

  “Easy.” Nathaniel sat next to me and put a hand on my back. “You probably have a concussion. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about it right now.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let’s have a look at the papers.” They lay on the coffee table, loose papers piled in a tall stack beside an overflowing three-ring binder.

  Liza plucked a few sheets from the pile and handed them to me. They appeared to be copies of newspaper articles about the Fairchild family.

  “That was my mother’s maiden name,” said Nathaniel. “Her grandfather was a Wilton, the last of the family who built this place. His daughter, my grandmother, married William Fairchild. Wild Bill, my father called him.”

  “I remember Matt telling me about him.” It seemed a hundred years ago now. Bill Wilton, boatbuilder and adventurer, now living in Morocco. “So this article is about your grandparents, the family that adopted May.”

  “I suppose so.”

  The newspaper article detailed a fire “of mysterious origin” at Rook’s Rest that had temporarily forced the family to find lodgings in town.

  This is not the first tragedy the Fairchilds have suffered this year. In June, they lost two children, Ellen Elizabeth, age 7, and May Louise, age 18. Last night’s fire appears to have started at the north side of the house. An upward draft brought the smoke in the window of their remaining daughter’s bedroom, nearly taking her as well. It was sheer luck that Nate Fairchild was still awake and realized what was happening in time to save his wife and daughter. He got them out of the house and put out the fire, but not before it had consumed much of the north wall.

  “I guess you were named for your great-grandfather,” I said. “The hero.”

  Nathaniel shrugged. “I never knew him.”

  “May Louise Fairchild,” said Liza. “Now we know her name.”

  “I wonder how she felt about being May Louise Fairchild,” said Nathaniel. “Did they rename her? What was her name at the residential school? Had they called her by her real name, or had they renamed her as well?”

  “That’s so sad,” said Liza. “I wonder whether she’s buried in the litt
le cemetery.”

  “No.” I was certain of it. “She’s one of the outside graves.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  I tried to apply logic to my gut reaction. “They didn’t consider her part of the family. She was Native American, brought to them from a Catholic school in Canada. She was second best. That cemetery is sacred ground, but not sacred Catholic ground and certainly not appropriate for a Native American girl. How long had she lived here? Had she actively accepted their religion? I doubt it. I have to wonder whether she even accepted the name they gave her.”

  “Which one of the graves?” Liza was frowning.

  “Probably the big stone cross. They would have wanted to show some respect for her as a family member, but not as much as they showed for their own daughter, who’d be buried inside the fence.”

  “That sucks,” said Liza.

  “It does,” I agreed.

  “No wonder she’s pissed off and haunting us.”

  “If it’s her.” I touched my neck. “I can’t help thinking the spirit we’re dealing had reached full maturity, though. Eighteen would have been a legal adult, but I got the impression of a strength I am having a hard time ascribing to an eighteen-year-old suffering from influenza, however unhappy her life was.”

  “Whoever the spirit is,” said Nathaniel slowly, “she’s not Catholic. So it might be the kid, angry at all the people who took her from the life she loved.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you were praying when she clocked you.”

  I pushed my mind back, felt my hand crossing my head, my heart, and heard my own voice murmuring an Our Father in the freezing room.

  “I didn’t realize you were Catholic,” he said.

  “Lapsed. A long, long time ago. My mother used to take us to church in New York, but after my dad died, when we moved to Connecticut, we stopped. I didn’t realize I was speaking. It just...came out. Habit, I suppose.”

  “Fear drives us back to the basic comforts of youth,” he said. “I remember when Marianne died and Liza got quiet, my instinctive reaction was to turn to my mother. It’s ridiculous, and once logic reasserted itself, I knew it was impractical, but my lizard brain turned to the authority figure of my childhood.”