WHEN GRETCHEN GOT BACK TO THE GREENS’ HOUSE her cell phone, which had been plugged in and charging near the television, was ringing. She quickly grabbed it, saw Simon’s face, swiped the screen, and heard his exasperated tone.
“Thank GOD, I have only been calling you like every three hours for a million years!”
“Simon!” she shouted, relieved to hear his voice.
“How’s the life of the heiress?” he asked.
“Uh . . .”
“How’s your aunt? Tell me everything!”
“She’s . . .”
“Weird? Does she drive around in a Rolls Royce smoking with a gold cigarette holder? Does she have an expensive little dog that wears a bow and goes everywhere with her?”
“She’s . . . she’s dead,” Gretchen said quietly. “She killed herself.”
Simon didn’t say anything for a full ten seconds. Then he said, “I’m coming there. Give me the address.”
“No, Simon. It’s crazy here right now . . . there’s no bus and there’s . . . I think my mother . . . there’s some kind of thing with accidents happening. . . .”
“Give me the address,” he said again, and with great relief she did.
They were a team. If anyone was going to help them get that mirror out of the house, if anyone was going to help them figure out what was going on, it was Simon.
She could hear him already scrolling through car services on his phone. “I’ll be there by tonight,” he said and hung up.
Gretchen checked her other messages—apart from the dozen from Simon, there were two from Janine and one from her dad. Her father was calling from a café near the village where he was working; the connection was fuzzy and she could hear people talking in the background and loud music playing. He said he hoped she was having fun and would call again in three weeks. Gretchen’s heart sank at having missed his call. She knew that he would be so absorbed in his work she’d be lucky if he really did call back in three weeks. Last she knew he was on assignment in South America. There was no Wi-Fi where he was working, and he couldn’t just take trips into the village whenever he wanted. Sometimes, if he was on a very tough assignment, treating dengue fever or Rotavirus, she went months without hearing from him. He said “I love you” twice. And she whispered it back into the silent phone.
Janine’s message made her smile; she could tell she was eating ice cream and the TV was on in the background. “How’s life in the big country?” she’d asked. How could Gretchen possibly explain how much her life had changed in just a matter of days? It was a question she couldn’t have answered if she tried. And when she called back no one answered.
The box of Esther was sitting on top of the TV. Hope and Hawk had brought all the journals and other boxes in from the car and were carrying them down to the basement.
“My friend is coming from the city,” Gretchen said.
“She’s picked a bad time to visit.”
“He,” Gretchen said.
“Oh,” Hawk said, looking away for a minute.
“Where are you taking those?” Gretchen asked, gesturing toward the boxes.
“C’mon,” Hawk said.
She followed them downstairs to a long table that was piled with books. Beside it stood a tall gray filing cabinet.
“Our mother’s research,” Hope said. “She’d been working with Esther for a while—”
Gretchen looked around. The place was neat and orderly, like the upstairs. The archival materials had been put into plastic sleeves or files and set out in piles on the table. The way everything had been handled, it was almost like these old papers and photographs were volatile material. It reminded Gretchen of a crime lab from some old TV show.
“The folks at Shadow Grove would pay a lot of money for these kinds of things,” Hawk went on. “They have another library—but it’s less historical.”
“And more hysterical,” Hope said, looking up from the document she was cataloging.
Hawk smirked at his sister. They busied themselves unpacking boxes and setting more journals and photographs out on the table.
Hawk pulled out a brown folder thick with papers and hand-scrawled notes on yellow legal paper, tossed it on the top of the pile. Gretchen picked it up and leafed through it.
It was Esther’s will. A long rambling heavily annotated form that established a bank account specifically designated for “funds to fight the gas company.” It also had whole paragraphs about destroying the house. The only thing she left Gretchen was the mirror and the camera. The car she left to Hope.
“C’mon, we’ve really got to get to work on this stuff,” Hawk said, dusting off more of the papers and setting them aside. “We’ve got just over twenty-four hours before the anniversary and the Shadow Grove people start coming out here.”
“So? What do they do?” Gretchen asked.
“A bunch of loony shit,” Hope said, “in hopes of not getting killed themselves by a hunter’s stray bullet or a lightning strike. Or they honor the spirits of those who passed and try to communicate with them—depending on how you look at it.”
“It’s more than that,” Hawk said. “The anniversary is the only time those who have passed can really interact with us.”
“Celia and Rebecca were interacting with me just fine and there was no anniversary,” Gretchen said, putting her hand up to where she had been scratched; it was sore and the skin was raised, beginning to scab. She lifted her shirt to look at her side where she had been bitten, and there was an ugly round welt, teeth marks visible. Her forehead and part of her eye was swollen from the wasp sting, her shoulder was terribly sore, and she remembered she hadn’t taken the time to disinfect the wound. “They’re already biting and scratching and tripping people. Knocking over the wasp nest.”
“All of that is new,” Hope said. “It used to be only on the anniversary, and it used to be only one person got hurt. Things have been changing over the years, escalating.”
Gretchen thought of her mother’s image behind the charred and ornate mirror. How Celia and Rebecca were always playing next to it, as if they were guarding it. How Hawk couldn’t see what she had seen. She needed to get back to the house soon, maybe hire a moving company to get the mirror out. She reached in her pocket for her cigarettes, then remembered she didn’t smoke.
“Did Esther talk to you guys about a triangle?” Gretchen asked.
“All the time,” Hawk said. “And she’s not the only one. Folks at Shadow Grove have this idea that there’s a zone where spirits are suffering. It’s the same theory Esther and your mother had.”
“Is it true?” Gretchen asked. “Can you see them?”
He shrugged. “I see things all over,” he said. “You may have thought we were the only people in the funeral home—but to me it was full of mourners, walking through the rooms. And the woods are full of spirits trying to find the church. I try to believe in their triangle idea, but there are so many wandering souls in the world. . . . It’s more like an ever-expanding circle with the house at the center.”
“What do you mean, the center?” asked Gretchen.
“Like an aperture,” he said. “Like . . . they always come from the attic down into the house and then outward from there. To me it feels like the house is a rift between worlds.”
“Our mother, your mother, and Esther thought they could release the spirits,” Hope said. “That was before Celia and Rebecca became as strong as they are now. Hawk says they used to be confined to one little place; now they roam around the whole house and he’s seen them out here too and once in the woods.”
“There’s got to be something that’s making them stronger,” Gretchen said. She racked her brain. Esther’s death? The presence of another Axton at the house? How were they supposed to rationally figure out something so irrational? She set out Esther’s photographs, the ones from Poland and Japan and Vietnam. Like a whole world on fire. She peered over them, thinking of Esther’s ashes in the box upstairs.
“We could ask them,” she said finally. “We could ask the girls.”
“There’s only one other person who’s talked to them,” said Hawk. “And she also talked to Fidelia. This lady named Annie at Shadow Grove. Says she can channel Fidelia and other people in the Axton family.”
“They talked to me,” Gretchen said. “They told me they were going to ‘fix the house.’ Then they looked frightened and ran away—some disgusting white creature with hooves was coming.”
A silence fell over the room. Hope opened the filing cabinet and riffled through some folders. She pulled out a photograph and laid it on the table.
“Did it look like that?”
Gretchen expected to see something like one of her mother’s spirit photographs. Instead she was looking at a picture of a WCP member in a mask riding a horse. And yes, because of the light or the composition of the photograph, it did look just like the creature.
Gretchen gasped and put her hand over her mouth. The sheet the WCP man was wearing was tattered and a little singed, as if he had just come from a fire. It resembled what she had thought were feathers on the creature. But the holes in the mask were the most frightening—as if she was looking straight into insatiable black holes of hatred. She was repulsed. It was the same with all of Esther’s pictures—Nazis, American soldiers burning huts, cowards in planes dropping bombs on cities. The blunt, ignorant hatred was the same.
Seeing the picture made her want to work harder than ever to figure out what was going on, and to get that mirror—get her mother—out of that ancestral trap.
Gretchen handed the photograph back to Hope. “Simon should be here later tonight,” she said. “You stay here and go through the archive. Hawk and I will go up to Shadow Grove now.”
“What we need here isn’t a spiritualist to make it all better,” Hope said. “We need a historian to let everyone know the facts.”
“Nothing’s going to make what happened here better,” Gretchen said. “But folks keep paying for the things these people did centuries ago.”
“Yeah,” Hawk said. “And it’s the same people. Look at Esther’s photographs, Vietnam, Hiroshima . . .”
“Fidelia’s journal,” Gretchen said, “where she’s barely allowed to even work outside the home, can’t go to school. The faces of the people who are downtrodden are different. The faces of the people keeping them down are the same. Men with money, white men with money, who believe the world belongs to them and will do anything to protect their power.”
“We need to get over there and talk to Annie,” Hawk said. “See if she can get us some information from someone who was a witness at the time. You didn’t get very far talking with Celia and Rebecca—they’re children, even if they’re more than one hundred years old. I don’t think they’re reliable sources.”
“How you gonna get there?” She looked at them warily. “You’re not taking the car.” She set her papers aside and got out her keys. “I’ll go with you, Gretchen. Hawk, you stay here. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”
“You better be,” he said. “Or you might not be back at all.”