The Guests on South Battery (Tradd Street #5)(74)
A sad, almost painful expression crossed her face. “Yes. He was so good-looking, wasn’t he? And so funny, too. Not to mention charming. Jack reminds me a little of him, actually.” She sighed. “I never expected this house to be empty, without Button, or Sumter, or at least their children. We can’t always plan our lives, can we?”
I shook my head. “No, we can’t.” I pointed at the photo of the young girl. “And that’s Hasell. The first time I saw it, I thought she looked a lot like Button. Now I’m not so sure. There’s something about her chin. . . .”
My mother moved over to the nightstand, where a smaller frame sat, one I hadn’t noticed before. It was a photo of Sumter and Button, although only Button was smiling into the camera. Sumter was also smiling, but his face was turned toward the unseen person at his side. The siblings were both still young and handsome, but it was clear that this photo had been taken several years after the other photos. It wasn’t that the two of them were gray and wrinkled—they weren’t—but it was more that they wore the years in between on their faces. I wondered if it had been taken after Hasell’s death, and around the time of Sumter’s divorce from Anna. That would account for the looks of stress around their eyes and mouths.
Sumter wore a dark suit and striped tie; Button had on a simple summer dress with a sweetheart neckline, a single strand of pearls at her neck, and a large, perfect pearl in each ear. There was another person on the other side of Sumter, a woman with a bare arm linked into the crook of his elbow. But she had been cut from the photograph, apparently to fit it into the frame, so only her arm and hand were visible in the picture.
I thought Ginette was going to pick it up, forgetting that she’d already removed her gloves. Instead she stood looking at it for a long moment before quietly saying, “Rest in peace, dear friend.”
After a moment, I said, “You ready to go up to the attic? It’s Hasell’s bedroom.”
She nodded. “Yes, I know. I remember Amelia telling me that, and how I thought it was a horrible place to put a child. Amelia found the bed for her, you know. She didn’t own the shop back then, but she was working for another dealer and found a bed that could be broken apart and easily moved up the narrow attic stairs.”
She followed me out of the room and I left the door open. “Amelia said that you never visited Hasell because Anna didn’t like you and didn’t want you in the house.”
Her narrow shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I suppose that was one of the reasons. But I was also married by then, and had a little girl. Your father and I were having problems and I was too preoccupied to notice that Button might have needed my friendship regardless of whether or not Anna wanted me in her house. It was Button’s house, too, but she allowed people to take advantage of her.”
I paused outside the door to the attic, as much to steel myself as to find out more about Button’s story. “Even after you retired and returned to Charleston and reconnected with Amelia and with me—and eventually Dad—you never called her?”
She looked down, her lashes shielding her eyes from me. “No. I didn’t. I really regret that now. She’d been so kind to me. . . .” Looking up, she smiled. “Well, that’s all in the past. Let’s see about that ghost of yours.”
As if conjured, an icy wind blew down the corridor toward us, making the door shake in its frame. My mother looked at me and I nodded to confirm that we weren’t alone. “This is where Anna hanged herself, so be prepared. It could get rough.”
“I’m expecting it,” she said with a grim smile.
Another cold breeze whooshed down the hallway toward us, the door vibrating so hard it felt as if someone was on the other side yanking on the doorknob. I grabbed hold of it with one hand, and my mother took my other hand in her own. I twisted the brass knob, the door pulling from my grasp and slamming against the wall with a loud bang.
A screech pierced the quiet, and then the black cat was leaping from the bottom step and scampering between our feet to run down the hallway and disappear into Button’s room. I turned to look back into the attic, willing my heart to stop its heavy thumping.
The first thing I became aware of was the loud buzzing of flies, hundreds of winged black bodies hurtling themselves through the air, the short splatting sound as they hit the walls and window somehow amplified. My mother tightened her hand around mine as we both looked up the attic steps. And screamed.
CHAPTER 21
My mouth was open, but the scream wasn’t coming from me. Or my mother. The high-pitched ringing came from the doll that stood fully erect at the top of the steps. The window behind it cast it at an unnatural angle, creating a grotesquely swollen version of itself, and one much more terrifying.
My mother squeezed my hand so tightly that I thought she might have broken one of my fingers, but it would take a lot more than that to get me to relinquish her grasp. The screaming went on and on and on as if the disc inside the doll had become stuck. But that noise wasn’t coming from a mechanical disc. It was coming from farther away, from a place where I had no desire to visit.
I tried to back out of the doorway, but my mother blocked me. “We can’t leave now, Mellie. It’s asking for help.”
The shrieking stopped as soon as she’d spoken, the silence now punctuated by the sporadic splats of a dwindling number of flies. My eardrums took a moment to adjust, the piercing scream continuing to echo in them, and the words “help me” buried somewhere in that cacophony.