What the Dead Want by Norah Olson
PART ONE
ONE
HER MOTHER HAD SAID THE HOUSE WAS BUILT BY ANCESTORS. That it was a century and a half old. That it was “in the middle of nowhere” and that the rooms and hallways were full of portraits of long-dead relatives. There was a library full of letters and journals and books from the past. But Gretchen’s mother had told her almost nothing else about the Axton mansion, not about the years she’d lived there as a child, not about any of her other relatives, nor why her parents had left it behind.
Only once had Gretchen seen an image of her mother’s family at the place; a snapshot of her mother as a child, standing on the large round front porch with her parents, a rose trellis growing up the side, and a smaller child running through the frame, looking like nothing more than a blur, a smudge in the background. The photograph was focused on the porch and the immediate foreground, and honestly, it could be any house. The picture she liked better was an old sepia-toned print they’d had hanging in their apartment in the East Village, taken from farther away down a little slope. You could see the whole house, the rounded cupola, the balconies, the rosebush, up to the top of the front porch.
She could barely tell it was the same front porch the driver was pulling up to now, it bore such little resemblance to the house in the picture. The Axton mansion was waiting at the end of a long dirt road surrounded by trees. The entire place leaned undeniably to the left, bricks uneven and precarious, porch columns no longer straight, shedding their paint like some kind of molting bird. Kudzu and ivy and clematis climbed up one side of the porch and part of the front of the building, and on the other side was a thicket of thorny roses, untended and untrimmed for maybe a century, grown into an unwieldy monstrous tower as high as the third floor. She could smell their dense, smothering sweetness without rolling down the car window. The place had been beaten by the wind and the rain, and the heat of the sun had bleached and cracked it. The roses—so tightly ingrown with the pillars—may have been one of the only things providing structural support to that part of the house.
She knew the place would be old—ancient, even. And that it wouldn’t be well kept up. It wasn’t like she expected a real mansion. But she in no way expected this.
It was so different from the image she’d had in her mind all these years, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to utter a cry of horror or burst out laughing. Then the driver double-checked the address on his phone and said Nah, seriously? in a heavy Bronx accent and she really did start laughing.
He’d picked her up at Eighty-Eighth and Park Avenue in the city and the job was to drive her all the way to Mayville. She must have seemed like some spoiled rich girl, but there wasn’t really another way to get there; her aunt had paid for the long car ride because Gretchen didn’t have a car in the city, there were no trains to Mayville, and buses rarely ran there. The landscape had gotten stranger as they drove, and part of the trip was through a deep wood.
A scrawny gray cat sat on a weathered rocker on the front porch, eyeing them blankly. Then the front window curtains parted and a pale face with fierce dark eyes peered out.
The driver cleared his throat, straightened his shoulders involuntarily, then glanced at Gretchen in his rearview mirror. She could only see his eyes, but his expression looked remorseful and a little incredulous. “You gonna be a’right here?” he asked.
She smiled at him. “Yeah, totally,” she said, still laughing. The question was ridiculous; of course she’d be okay—she was a city girl, used to doing things on her own. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
“You sure?” the driver asked, putting the car back in gear.
“I’m sure,” she said, though the house had been startling, even to her. “That’s my aunt.”
He shrugged. “A’right then, I’ll pop the trunk.”
But as she got out to help him with her suitcase Gretchen fought her own creeping sense of astonishment and unease.
This was indeed the place. Her aunt Esther’s house: the mansion her family had owned for centuries, but she had long stopped thinking about the mansion, and had barely even heard of this aunt until yesterday. When the landline rang.
Gretchen and Janine had looked at each other in surprise. “I forgot we even had one of those,” Janine said on the third ring. Then she went back to their argument.
“You can’t use Pythagoras,” Janine said. “I’m sure you can’t because it’s a proper noun. Totally against the rules!”
Scrabble marathons, Chunky Monkey ice cream, and reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were what they did in the evenings when Gretchen’s dad was away for more than a few weeks and her mother’s best friend, Janine, came to stay at their place. This time he was away for a few months building a hospital in Guatemala.
On the eighth ring Janine looked pointedly at Gretchen and raised her eyebrows—like she should get up and answer the damn phone.
“Not it,” Gretchen said, putting a finger on her nose.
Janine sighed and walked over to the kitchen while Gretchen flopped back on the couch and watched Will Smith talking to Geoffrey the butler. She didn’t like the laugh track, she didn’t know if she really liked the show at all, but Janine did, and it had become a kind of welcome, if not so interesting, routine.
She texted Simon while Janine was on the phone. Fresh Prince night!