Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children(23)

*

I walked back by moonlight, feeling small. I found my dad in the pub at the same table where he’d been, a half-eaten plate of beef and gravy congealing into grease before him. “Look who’s back,” he said as I sat down. “I saved your dinner for you.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said, and told him what I’d learned about Grandpa Portman.

He seemed more angry than surprised. “I can’t believe he never brought this up,” he said. “Not one time.” I could understand his anger: it was one thing for a grandparent to withhold something like that from a grandchild, quite another for a father to keep it from his son—and for so long.

I tried to steer the conversation in a more positive direction. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? Everything he went through.”

My father nodded. “I don’t think we’ll ever know the full extent of it.”

“Grandpa Portman really knew how to keep a secret, didn’t he?”

“Are you kidding? The man was an emotional Fort Knox.”

“I wonder if it doesn’t explain something, though. Why he acted so distant when you were little.” Dad gave me a sharp look, and I knew I needed to make my point quickly or risk overstepping. “He’d already lost his family twice before. Once in Poland and then again here—his adopted family. So when you and Aunt Susie came along …”

“Once bombed, twice shy?”

“I’m serious. Don’t you think this could mean that maybe he wasn’t cheating on Grandma, after all?”

“I don’t know, Jake. I guess I don’t believe things are ever that simple.” He let out a sigh, breath fogging the inside of his beer glass. “I think I know what all this really explains, though. Why you and Grandpa were so close.”

“Okay …”

“It took him fifty years to get over his fear of having a family. You came along at just the right time.”

I didn’t know how to respond. How do you say I’m sorry your father didn’t love you enough to your own dad? I couldn’t, so instead I just said goodnight and headed upstairs to bed.

*

I tossed and turned most of the night. I couldn’t stop thinking about the letters—the one my dad and Aunt Susie had found as kids, from this “other woman,” and the one I’d found a month ago, from Miss Peregrine. The thought that kept me awake was this: what if they were the same woman?

The postmark on Miss Peregrine’s letter was fifteen years old, but by all accounts she’d been blown into the stratosphere back in 1940. To my mind, that left two possible explanations: either my grandfather had been corresponding with a dead person—admittedly unlikely—or the person who wrote the letter was not, in fact, Miss Peregrine, but someone who was using her identity to disguise her own.

Why would you disguise your identity in a letter? Because you have something to hide. Because you are the other woman.

What if the only thing I had discovered on this trip was that my grandfather was an adulterous liar? In his last breaths, was he trying to tell me about the death of his adopted family—or admit to some tawdry, decades-long affair? Maybe it was both, and the truth was that by the time he was a young man he’d had his family torn apart so many times he no longer knew how to have one, or to be faithful to one.

It was all just guesswork, though. I didn’t know, and there was no one to ask. Anyone who might have had the answer was long dead. In less than twenty-four hours, the whole trip had become pointless.

I fell into an uneasy sleep. At dawn, I woke to the sound of something in my room. Rolling over to see what it was, I bolted upright in bed. A large bird was perched on my dresser, staring me down. It had a sleek head feathered in gray and talons that clacked on the wooden dresser as it sidled back and forth along the edge, as if to get a better look at me. I stared back rigidly, wondering if this could be a dream.

I called out for my dad, and at the sound of my voice the bird launched itself off the dresser. I threw my arm across my face and rolled away, and when I peeked again it was gone, flown out the open window.

My dad stumbled in, bleary-eyed. “What’s going on?”

I showed him the talon marks on the dresser and a feather that had landed on the floor. “God, that’s weird,” he said, turning it over in his hands. “Peregrines almost never come this close to humans.”

I thought maybe I’d heard him wrong. “Did you say peregrines?”

He held up the feather. “A peregrine falcon,” he said. “They’re amazing creatures—the fastest birds on earth. They’re like shape-shifters, the way they streamline their bodies in the air.” The name was just a weird coincidence, but it left me with an uncanny feeling I couldn’t shake.

Over breakfast, I began to wonder if I’d given up too easily. Though it was true there was no one left alive whom I could talk to about my grandfather, there was still the house, a lot of it unexplored. If it had ever held answers about my grandfather—in the form of letters, maybe, or a photo album or a diary—they’d probably burned up or rotted away decades ago. But if I left the island without making sure, I knew I’d regret it.

And that is how someone who is unusually susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies, and Seeing Things That Aren’t Really There talks himself into making one last trip to the abandoned, almost-certainly-haunted house where a dozen or more children met their untimely end.