Eleven

“I THOUGHT YOU didn’t want to go to town,” the boy said as they returned to the house’s library.

“Not alone,” Tess said. “I’ll go with you, but you’ll need to do most of the talking. My French is not as good as I thought it was.”

“It won’t get better if you don’t use it.”

She nodded. “If we could switch to French sometimes, that will help. Thank you.”

A flicker of dismay said this was not what he’d meant, which she knew very well. A low threshold for annoyance, mixed with an equally low quota of patience, meant he’d hardly be the person to help her improve her language skills. But he’d opened the door and she’d sneaked in, and now he was trapped. He might be surly, bordering on rude, but he seemed unable to cross the line and actually be rude.

“It’s important to learn French,” she said. “My teacher says it might become an official language in Canada someday. That’s what the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism is discussing. She says—”

“I know the politics,” he said. “Better than you, I’m sure. If you want to practice on me…” He sounded pained. “Go ahead. Just…I’m not a teacher, and I don’t have time to play one. Back to the town visits. I’m not sure having me talk to the locals will help.”

“Are they all like the boulanger?” she asked.

He hesitated as he reached for a knapsack hidden under his blanket. “No,” he allowed. “But it’s a small town. French, Catholic and white. They’re…standoffish. Part of it’s how they’d treat anyone from outside, including you. Part of it’s because they don’t know how to treat someone who’s Métis.”

“So you are?”

A grunt as he pulled a comb from his bag. “Cree Métis. Both sides.” He turned to hand her his comb, but she was already brushing her hair.

“That must be nice,” she said. “Knowing exactly where you come from.”

An odd look crossed his face, then he gave a brusque “Yes” and shoved the comb back into his pack.

“Do you have a washcloth in there?” She motioned to his bag. “That might help you with the locals.”

He gave her a look. “Yes, I know I could use a shower. They’re a little hard to come by out here. But I’m not—”

She handed him her makeup compact. He saw his face in the mirror and let out a curse. Dirt streaked one cheek, and a smear of it crossed his forehead. He pocketed the mirror and, without a word, took a bar of soap from his pack. Then he grabbed a collapsible jug of water from the table and headed outside. Tess followed.

The boy stripped off his jean jacket, leaving his shirt on, and washed his bare arms with soap and water. Then he rubbed his hair between his fingers with another curse, as if only now realizing how badly it needed shampoo. He looked at the water jug, seeming to consider whether he could spare enough. She was about to say they didn’t have time for that when he dumped half of it on his head and used the soap to lather it up.

“You should have told me how bad I looked,” he said. “Before I went into town for breakfast. No wonder the boulanger wanted to run me out of his place.”

Tess bit her tongue and said only, “Do you have a towel? I can grab it—”

“Don’t have one,” he said as he rinsed his hair. “You?”

“No.”

“You should get your bag anyway. Put it inside. I’m not going to steal any of your clothes—I doubt they’re my size. Or color.”

“I don’t have a bag.”

“What?” He swiped his wet hair out of his face and peered at her. “What did you do? Just drop everything and come out here?”

She considered saying yes, that’s exactly what she’d done, but she could tell he’d think her an idiot, and perhaps that shouldn’t matter, but it did. It always did.

“I brought one. It’s just…not here. I had…a problem, and I had to leave it.”

His eyes narrowed. “Problem?”

She fussed with the scarf in her hair. “I might be able to get it back later. I’m fine for now. We should get going.”

He squeezed out his hair and tugged his jacket back on. They started down the driveway.

“We’ll need a story,” she said. “Who we are to each other. In case anyone asks.”

“None of their business.”

“That’s not going to encourage them to talk to us.”

“I thought we were just going for a pry bar.”

“And to ask questions, of course, while we’re there. What this place is. Was.” She glanced at him. “You seemed to have a theory.”

He shrugged.

“You think it has to do with those books.”

Another shrug.

“An asylum. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

An asylum. For crazy people. That’s where her address had led. Not to a home, to a family. To the worst possible answer. That her greatest fear wasn’t unfounded. That somehow, she’d come from this. From madness.

“It’s called a psychiatric hospital,” the boy said, his voice gentler than she’d heard it. “It’s for people with mental illnesses. Illnesses.”

“Where they lock them in tiny rooms without even a window?”

“For their own safety. And even if it was a psychiatric hospital, that has nothing to do with you or your past. It’s a house. Other people have lived there. Probably your family at some point.” He seemed to struggle for something nice to say. “It’s a fancy house. Your family would have been rich. Important.”

She said nothing. He was wrong. Her nightmares and visions couldn’t be a coincidence. If anyone in her family had lived here, it wasn’t because her family owned the house; it was because someone in that family had been a patient. Whatever illness he or she had, it had been passed on to her, and it was deep in her brain, ticking like a bomb, getting ready to explode and—

“So what’s this story you think we need to tell?” he said.

She blinked, reorienting herself. “Cousins.”

“What?”

“With a boy and a girl of our age, they’ll figure we’re dating, and they won’t like that, us being on the road together alone. So cousins. I was given the address for the house and told it would answer some questions about my parents, who died when I was little. As my cousin, you’re here to help with my language barriers.”

He considered, as if looking for holes to poke in her story. Was he disconcerted when he found none? Maybe. He said nothing, though, just kept walking.

She continued. “And since it will no longer be just the two of us, I’ll need a name for you. It can be fake.”

Silence.

“How about Ringo?” she said.

A hard look. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those girls. The Beatles are coming to Montreal in September, and I’m already planning to be out of the province. I remember when they announced the concert—I swear I heard girls screaming from a mile away.”

“The Beatles are all right. I like the Stones better.”

His eyebrows arched, as if shocked that a small-town girl knew who the Rolling Stones were.

“I could call you Mick,” she said.

“No, you could not.” A few more steps. “It’s Jackson.”

“I need a first name.”

A glower. “That is my first name.”

“So what do you go by? Jack?”

“No.”

“Sonny?”

A more emphatic “No.” Then: “If my parents had wanted to call me Jack or Sonny, that’s what my name would be. It’s Jackson.”

“Huh. That’s different.”

“So I’ve heard.”

He walked on quickly, leaving her jogging to catch up.

“It’s not French,” she said.

“No kidding.” A few more steps, then: “I’m named after the painter, if you must know.”

“Jackson Pollock?”

Again, he seemed surprised that she knew him. He nodded. “My mother met him when she was a kid, and I guess he made an impression. Good enough? Or are you going to keep interrogating me?”

“It’s not interrogation. It’s curiosity. And since you seem perfectly fine with ignoring my questions, I feel perfectly fine with asking them.”

He sighed, and they continued on.

“No one lives there,” the woman at the hardware store said. She spoke French as Tess struggled to mentally translate.

“Obvious—” Jackson began irritably before Tess cut him short with a kick. She was beginning to think her broken French might be more useful than having him speak for her.

“You aren’t hanging around up there, are you?” the woman asked. “Didn’t you see the signs?”

“We only went up to have a look,” Jackson lied. “It was empty and obvious—” He stopped himself. “And it didn’t seem as if anyone lived there. How long has it been empty?”

“Sixteen years.”

“What?” Tess interjected in English. Then a quick “pardonnez-moi” to the woman and to Jackson, “Can you ask if she’s sure? That’s before I went to the Home.”

Jackson asked. The woman was certain—her sixteen-year-old daughter was born the summer after the last owners left.

“So it’s been abandoned for sixteen years?” Jackson asked.

“Empty, not abandoned,” the woman said. “It’s still owned by someone. There’s a caretaker.”

“Can we get his address?” Tess cut in, asking in French and adding a heartfelt “s’il-vous-plaît.”

“Oui.”

Before they left to find the caretaker, Jackson asked the woman what the house had been used for. No one in town knew exactly, she said. All they had figured out was that it had been occupied by a group rather than a family. There had been a barbed-wire fence surrounding the grounds, and locals had been asked, very nicely, not to hunt or otherwise trespass. The man in charge had seemed to be a doctor, and in explaining the need for privacy, he’d mentioned patients. Locals guessed it was some kind of sanatorium or private hospital.

The caretaker turned out to be younger than Tess had expected. Maybe in his early twenties. He worked as the local plumber, having taken over when his father passed on two years ago.

“That’s when I took on the house too,” he said. “It used to be my dad’s responsibility.”

“How long did he do it?” Jackson asked.

“Since the folks up there moved out. The doctors or whatever. I was about eight, so…sixteen, seventeen years ago?”

Jackson asked more pointed questions about the type of doctors, but the young man knew nothing more. “There were stories,” he said. “Especially about this one guy, who snuck up there on a dare at a bonfire party. He got teased because he was so scared when he came back. But I was little at the time. Maybe six. The kids involved were teenagers. So I don’t know what he saw. You’d need to ask him.”

He gave them the man’s address, and then Jackson asked more about the house and the caretaking responsibilities. As they might have guessed from the look of the place, his job wasn’t to keep it in move-in condition. His main task was just enough basic upkeep to avoid violating any laws and having the house condemned. The occasional group of local teens would throw a party there—he admitted to doing that himself when he was younger—but they usually cleaned up afterward and didn’t do any damage, so he turned a blind eye.

He also paid the annual taxes. That money was wired to him, as was his monthly stipend. Both came anonymously.

“I don’t know the owner’s name,” he said. “I’ve never had any contact with him. The deed lists a company in Montreal. I looked it up when I was there once—just curious, you know—but I couldn’t find any record of it.”

Jackson wrote down the name and address of the man who’d trespassed on a dare, and they headed out again.