by Mindy Klasky
CHAPTER 2
“THIS MIGHT BE the craziest thing you’ve ever done,” Melissa said on Sunday as we clambered out of Gran’s black Lincoln Town Car.
She would know. We’d been inseparable since the second week of third grade, when we went stomping through puddles during one waterlogged recess. We were wearing identical peacock-blue knee socks that day, and our feet and legs were stained for weeks. It’s amazing how closely bonded two girls can become when they’re laughed at by every child in their P.E. class. The experience wouldn’t have been so scarring if Mrs. Robinson hadn’t chosen that week to introduce our science class to the fauna of the Galapagos Islands. Especially the blue-footed booby.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I was already wrapping a bandana around my hair, trying to lasso my curls. As I often did, I wished that I’d been blessed with Melissa’s perfect hair. She wore it shoulder-length, so that the honey waves framed her gamine face. Everything about her was petite; she was only five foot two. But she packed more energy into her overalls than I’d ever imagined having.
Case in point: she was already emptying the trunk, fishing out dozens of bags filled with the finest cleaning supplies that Target had to offer. If a chemical shined, sparkled, or wiped, we had purchased it, relying on a grandmaternal grant for funding. I collected my share of the loot.
Even in the full light of a spring Sunday morning, I felt the chill of the cottage’s strange power as we approached the front door. A cool finger walked down my spine, making me unable to resist the urge to look behind me, to be certain that nothing was looming over my shoulder. “There!” I said. “Don’t you feel it?”
“You still think the place is haunted?”
“Not haunted,” I said, feeling slightly foolish. “It’s just that there’s a power here. A … presence.”
Melissa whistled the theme from Twilight Zone before lowering her voice to a Rod Serling rumble. “Jane Madison thought that she was moving into an ordinary cottage in an ordinary Georgetown garden.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Of course it was cold, even clammy, next to the building. I was standing in the shade. How silly could I be?
I dug the keys out of my pocket and selected the new one that Evelyn had given me. She had been as good as her word; a locksmith had come out during the week and installed a solid deadbolt on the door. I hadn’t had the nerve to try it alone. Now, the brass key glinted, bright as gold as I slipped it home and turned.
I took a deep breath before pushing the door open. “Ready?” I asked Melissa.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” She stepped forward, Gran’s mop and broom looking like pikes in her hands.
The door opened without squeaking. The locksmith must have seen to the hinges. The rest of the cottage, though, looked as if it hadn’t been touched by human hands in more than a century.
Billowing white sheets clumped over furniture in the parlor, disguising shapes that might have been couches or chairs or massively mutated ottomans. Dust was thick on the floor, and the front windows were so fly-specked that they looked like some rotten form of stained glass. A braided-rag rug was rolled up against the far wall, and the hardwood floor looked dull and diseased. By craning my neck, I could just make out the appliances in the kitchen, and I thought they might once have been white.
“I don’t even know where to start,” Melissa said, even her spirit daunted.
“Might as well tackle the worst bits first,” I said grimly. “Do you want the kitchen or the bathroom?”
“I spend enough time in a kitchen at work. I’ll take the bathroom. Besides, it’s smaller.” She grinned.
We split up the cleaning supplies and activated our divide-and-conquer strategy. I asked myself how bad one kitchen could be, when it hadn’t even been used for decades?
The answer was, bad.
I started by sweeping, figuring that it made sense to get rid of the dry dirt before I tackled the wet. I disturbed enough spiders to repopulate every farm this side of Charlotte’s Web. I discovered that my new home had mice—or at least it had hosted them in the past, back when there was some semblance of food around. I learned that contact paper detached from shelves when the glue was old enough. And it left behind a gold-colored dust that made me sneeze if I peered at it too closely.
Even as I swept though—and scrubbed and scoured and mopped—I couldn’t help but be pleased. This was my home that we were cleaning. This was my pied-a-terre, my escape from the hustle and bustle of the workaday world. With every squeeze of a spray-bottle, I was beating back the cottage’s chilly atmosphere. I was subduing that Twilight Zone specter, pushing away my whispering fears.
Some time well after noon, I glanced out the kitchen window (newly glinting from a liberal application of Windex). I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The cottage lined up at the end of a garden path. While the yellow cowslips and deep pink candytuft had died back at the peak of the summer’s heat, I could still make out the bright white stars of foamflower stalks.
Endless volumes of colonial horticulture had not been wasted on this librarian.
And Gran’s housekeeping lessons weren’t wasted either. When Melissa and I folded back the dust-covers on the furniture in the living room, we were pleasantly surprised to find a pair of deep, overstuffed couches covered with hunter green fabric that looked untouched by time. In the bedroom, we discovered a four-poster with an actual feather mattress. My own clean sheets fit it perfectly.
We rolled out the rug in the living room and admired its tight braided pattern. Gran’s vacuum cleaner worked like a charm, sucking up the last stray evidence of the cottage’s abandonment. After I coiled up the vacuum’s power cord, we collapsed on the couches and surveyed our handiwork. “I don’t believe it,” I said.
“Still feel your Ghost of Christmas Past haunting the place?”
“Any ghost who was living here has been asphyxiated by ammonia.” I brandished the nearest spray bottle. “Fairies, begone, and be all ways away.”
“Titania. Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
It was an old game that we played. Smiling to acknowledge Melissa’s Shakespeare skills, I glanced over her shoulder. “What’s that door?” I asked, gesturing toward the hallway.
Melissa followed my gaze and shrugged. “The basement? I tried it and it’s locked.”
Just as well, I thought. There was no telling what creepy-crawlies lurked down there. I sighed and pulled myself to my feet. “So, are we going to reward ourselves with burgers?”
“And fries. Your treat.”
Neither of us could bring ourselves to shower in the sparkling new bathroom; we wanted the fruit of our labors to remain unblemished for just a while longer. I did take a moment to splash some water on my face at the kitchen sink, and I removed my grimy bandana, allowing my hair to sproing out around my ears. Taken together, Melissa and I looked like refugees from a stowaway’s convention, but that was going to have to do.
Besides, Five Guys Burgers and Fries did not exactly require the height of fashion to set foot inside its doors. The counter was already three deep when we got there, and we took a moment to stare up at the menu, red letters stamped on a broad white board. Simple: hamburgers, fries, toppings (extra charge for cheese and bacon.) Cold soda. Peanuts to munch on while we waited. The smell of hot grease made me salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
It was a sign of how long I’d known Melissa that I could order for her without confirming what she wanted. I stepped up to the counter and asked for one good burger (cheese, bacon, grilled onions and mushrooms, lettuce, tomato) and one pitifully flawed burger (mustard, ketchup, nothing else at all in the world, poor bare thing), along with a large order of fries for us to split. Before I could finish giving Melissa grief over her denuded choice of lunch, we found ourselves at a Formica-covered table.
The first bite was heaven. Hot beef and melted cheese and crispy bacon, with juice running down my fingers and a tiny rivulet snaking beside my lips…. I closed my eyes and resisted the
urge to moan out loud.
“Hey,” Melissa said. “Isn’t that your Jason?”
I whirled around without thinking.
So much for cool. So much for suave. So much for calm and self-possessed and witty and urbane. If my whiplash motion had not drawn his eyes to me, my explosion of coughing would have. Five Guys burgers made a perfect meal, but they were lousy down the windpipe.
When I was finally able to breathe again, I saw the true extent of the disaster. My Imaginary Boyfriend was not merely sitting in the same dive-y restaurant that I shared with Melissa. He hadn’t just seen me choke on a bite of hamburger the size of a pack of cards. He wasn’t only privy to my dirt-streaked arms and my stained t-shirt.
He was eating with another woman.
A woman who, even seated, clearly had the body of a classically-trained ballerina. She was tall and thin—willowy is the phrase that you read in books. She had soft brown hair with chunks of buttery blonde that I could tell weren’t highlights—that was her own naturally perfect coloring. Her eyes were pale blue, framed by the longest, darkest lashes that Lady Maybelline had ever touched.
Who was I kidding? Maybelline? That woman didn’t buy her cosmetics at a drugstore. Even Sephora was too downscale for her. She probably had colors mixed by hand at some boutique in New York. But the most astonishing thing about her mascara? It was totally, completely waterproof.
The woman was crying.
And that made me even more jealous of her. Not only was she sitting across the table from my Imaginary Boyfriend. Not only did she have a body to die for and a face to match. Not only did she have more elegance in her elongated pinky than I had in my entire body. But she could cry without her nose turning red and her face going blotchy. I hated her.
“Don’t look!” I hissed to Melissa. Well, as much as anyone could hiss a command that had no S’s in it. I made a big show of eating a French fry. One little French fry. One that wouldn’t put too many inches on my hips. “What are they doing?”
“How can I know, if you won’t let me look?”
“Melissa,” I warned, swallowing some Diet Coke as I tried to wash away the scratchy feeling left over from choking.
She gave in with a grin. “He’s offering her his napkin. She’s wiping her nose. No. She’s dabbing at her nose. My God, she looks like a princess.”
“I don’t need to hear that!” I stuffed three emergency fries into my mouth, and the salty, steamy potato almost drowned out the report.
“Hurry up,” Melissa said with a sudden urgency. “Finish that bite. They’re coming this way.”
I gulped and swallowed and even found a second to take a sip of soda. By the time Jason stopped by our table, I’d pasted a smile on my lips, but it felt fake to me. An Imaginary Smile for an Imaginary Boyfriend.
“Jane,” he said, and my heart leaped somewhere up to the vicinity of my larynx.
“Jason,” I managed before prompting, “Um, I think you’ve met my friend, Melissa. Melissa White.” I needed to find out the name of the woman who was with him.
He nodded. Almost as an afterthought, he turned toward the spectral creature who drifted behind him. “Jane, Melissa, this is Ekaterina Ivanova.”
Ekaterina Ivanova? Just like some Russian princess. Like Anastasia’s long-lost grand-daughter. I waited for her to extend her hand, but she didn’t. It was just as well. My own chewed nails and greasy fingertips would have defiled her forever. She inclined her head toward us, and I felt as if the very Queen of the Wilis had deigned to acknowledge our existence. She said, “Jason, I need to leave,” and her voice was scarcely more than a whisper.
He shrugged and smiled at me, and I told myself that there were volumes behind that grin. He would rather sit with Melissa and me. He would prefer to help himself to some of our fries. He wanted to joke and relax with real women, rather than his ice statue of a companion.
Melissa came unstuck first. “It was nice meeting you,” she said to Ekaterina. “Good to see you again, Jason.”
I muttered something, and then they were gone. “Who do you think she is?” I asked, before the door had closed behind them.
“I don’t know, but she definitely wasn’t happy.”
“She must be Russian. Did you hear that accent? Didn’t she sound Russian to you?”
“I could barely hear her speak.”
“She’s Russian, though.” I heard the words tumbling out of my mouth, faster and faster, as if I needed to reassure myself. “She must be one of his grad students. A lot of Russians study American history. You know, there’s a whole tradition of foreign students specializing in the colonies. Alexis de Tocqueville wasn’t the first, and he certainly won’t be the last.”
“De Tocqueville was French.” Melissa took advantage of my distraction to snatch the last of the fries from the greasy paper sack.
“You know what I mean.”
“We’re in Georgetown, Jane. The man is a professor at Mid-Atlantic. Probably half the people he knows are academics.”
“Did you see her mascara?”
“Yep.” Melissa downed the last bite of her burger before she nodded. “It probably cost more than a month of your pay at the Peabridge.”
“Who bothers with mascara on the weekends, anyway?”
“On the weekends?” Melissa batted her eyelashes at me. I could not think of a time when I’d seen her wearing mascara. Or lipstick. Or blush, foundation, or eyeliner. She always said they just melted down her face while she worked at the bakery.
I sighed and set aside the vision of the Ice Queen. She probably specialized in early women’s suffrage movements. She looked the type.
“Are you through?” I asked Melissa, already collecting our spent napkins and plastic cups of ketchup.
She nodded and tossed her pristine napkin onto the tray. I tried not to compare it to my stained one. Well, how was a girl supposed to stay neat while eating a burger? Didn’t it show a healthy appetite to let the juices run down your wrists?
We walked back to the cottage, and I was pleased to see that our hard labor had withstood the test of time. If anything, the surfaces glinted more in the afternoon light. “OK,” I said after taking a deep breath. “Time to do the actual moving in.”
“It should only take two trips.”
Melissa was much better at spatial relationships than I. That must have been a skill that she developed during all those years of choosing the right mixing bowl, of finding the correct Tupperware for leftovers. Back at my old apartment, she made us slide the Lincoln’s front seats up as far as they would go before she wedged in all of my possessions—first onto the car’s huge back seat, then into the trunk. There wasn’t all that much, actually. After all, I’d been a starving grad student for years, and my library job hadn’t paid a fortune, even before my salary was gutted by the board. Before the London Disaster, I’d spent most of my time hanging out at Scott’s apartment, watching his TV, eating off his plates, using his household appliances.
Mostly, I had clothes. Black clothes. Clothes that I could mix and match in an instant, with a generous apportionment of handmade jewelry to accessorize. My collection ran to necklaces and earrings, although I’d invested heavily in brooches when they were popular a couple of years back. Most of my holdings were cheap, scavenged at yard sales and art fairs, but a few were true treasures, garnered in museum shops and tiny galleries around town. What could I say? A girl has her weaknesses.
In the end, though, we had to run a third trip back to my old place. Neither Melissa nor I trusted Stupid Fish on a car seat with any other belongings.
Stupid Fish was the world’s oldest neon tetra. He’d been a college graduation gift from Scott. He’d lasted through English grad school, library school, even through London. When I found out about Scott and the British slut, I almost flushed Stupid Fish. But it was hardly the tetra’s fault that he’d been purchased by a jerk.
And so he lived on. Stupid Fish the Superannuated Tetra. Stupid Fish, who had a ten-gall
on tank all to himself, because I wasn’t about to compound my mistakes by getting him any little fishy companions. Not at this late date.
We moved the tank by emptying out half the water. Melissa carried it to the car (she’d always been stronger than I). She’d even thought to bring a cookie sheet to cover the tank and keep the water from sloshing out as we drove across town for the last time. After she carried it into the house and set it on the counter in the kitchen, I added some spring water and watched Stupid Fish swim around. As ready as I was to be out of the fish business, I was pleased to see that he made the move without obvious trauma.
Before long, Melissa decided to head home. She lived above Cake Walk, the bakery that she owned, down by the canal that ran through Georgetown. Mornings started at an ungodly hour for her. I thanked her a million times for helping me with the move, and she shrugged it off, like best friends do.
She walked down the garden path, and I was alone in my new home.
I strolled from room to room, a little amazed by the amount of space that was mine. It was the height of luxury to have separate rooms—I had lived in studio apartments for all the years since I’d flown Gran’s nest. I made a cup of tea and sipped it while curled up on my hunter green sofa.
I realized that I was exhausted. After all, I’d been up since dawn, packing up my old place, readying this one. It was time to go to bed, so that I could make it to work on time the next morning. Monday was a prime Jason day, and I wanted to be rested.
I changed into my preferred sleepwear, a pair of men’s flannel pajamas cut off at the knees, so faded that I could barely make out their black watch plaid. Making one more tour of my home, I turned off all the lights before climbing into the feather bed and putting my glasses on the nightstand. I lay back on my pillow and closed my eyes, but before I could drift off to sleep, I remembered the chilly feeling that I’d encountered walking around the cottage in the past.
That was not the right thing to think of.
I told myself to relax. I told myself to give in to the bone-deep exhaustion in my arms and legs. I told myself to go through the multiplication table, to bore my brain to sleep.
Around six times seven is forty-two, I gave up. I put on my glasses and found the fuzzy bunny slippers that Gran had given me for my last birthday. I smiled at their floppy ears the way I always did. I walked into the bathroom, grateful that Melissa had latched the decorative shutters over the single window, keeping night-time spooks from peering in at me. I filled my toothbrush cup with water and made myself swallow slowly, all the time looking in the mirror and telling myself how foolish I was being.
When I set the cup back on the counter, I saw that one of the tiles was cobalt blue, darker than all the others, as if it had been replaced some time in the past. I touched it, and to my surprise, it pivoted easily to reveal a cubbyhole. As I peered closer, I saw that there was a brass cup hook planted in the top of the space. And dangling from the hook was a key.
It wasn’t a large key, no longer than the one that worked my new deadbolt. But it was the strangest key I’d ever seen. It was forged out of black iron. Instead of little jagged zigzags of teeth, it had a sturdy black rectangle with an intricate shape cut out of the middle. I slipped it from the hook, and it was heavier in my palm than it should have been.
I could hear my blood pounding in my ears. Stop it, I said. There is nothing spooky or mysterious about this key. It must fit some door around the house. A lot of homes had hiding places, built before people trusted banks, before they poured their life savings into stocks and bonds.
Nevertheless, I turned on every light as I walked out to the living room. The cottage must have blazed in the middle of the Peabridge gardens like a centenarian’s birthday cake. I didn’t waste my time in the kitchen. Surely, I would have found a secret door when I cleaned that morning. The bedroom walls were bare, too, and there was nothing suspicious in my tiny closet. The bathroom, the hallway, the living room—all straightforward lath-and-plaster walls.
And then I saw it.
The basement door. The basement, which I was going to let live in peace, with its spiders and its mice and whatever else had scurried down there for shelter.
But there was the door, right off the living room. It had an iron lock. An iron lock that matched the key in my now-trembling hand. The clammy feeling washed over me again, nearly knocking me over with its force.
I found my purse on the coffee table and dug out my cell phone. I punched in a 9 and a 1. The phone whined in my hand, as if I’d brought it too close to a computer screen. The noise grated on my nerves, making me even more aware of the potential danger that lurked below. My left thumb hovered over the 1 again as I set the key in the lock. Filling my lungs and biting down on my lip, I turned the key and opened the door.