What the Dead Want(18)

But by the next day the whole town was silent again, which seemed even stranger. One of the houses had burned; the other two had visible damage, just one family, going about moving the charred wood from the torches out of their front yard.

We think we are so civilized. But what’s the price we pay for our quiet lives?

If either of our families knew what we were doing, James, they would be shocked, and even if they’d felt the same things themselves, they would tell us to stop.

With all of this happening I feel claustrophobic. I feel an even greater hunger for meaning and learning. I have your brave example to thank, as you are the only person I know who has ever left Mayville.

Sincerely,

Fidelia





TEN


THEY STAYED OUT ON THE PORCH FOR A LONG TIME, talking about her mother and travel and vintage clothing shops.

“I know you’re pissed,” Esther said. “I know it. I can see it. Hell, even I’m pissed and worried, I know it’s nothing like what you’re going through. . . . But listen, sweets. You got so much from your mom. Mona was a curious girl like you. And I bet you can remember a lot of other good things if you let yourself.”

“Mona,” Gretchen said, her mother’s name like a laugh or a sob caught in her throat. “She was so tough but so sweet, you know?”

Esther nodded. “I do know. She could get completely absorbed in what she was doing and just go off on her own. This last time she came to visit, she didn’t even say good-bye.”

Gretchen winced. No one had gotten a good-bye. And she was done trying to think of nice things about Mona.

“I woke up and the study door was wide open and she was gone. I thought maybe she’d gone over to Shadow Grove.”

“What’s Shadow Grove?” Gretchen asked.

“A spiritualist colony,” Esther said. “Which is a nice way to say, a bunch of kooks who made their own little town out here in the country.” Someone as eccentric as Esther calling people a bunch of kooks made Gretchen laugh.

“She’d been back and forth between here and there that last visit,” Esther went on. “But nobody there saw her after she’d disappeared. You must know all this already. The police and that psychic your mom’s friend hired were putting together a timeline.”

Gretchen turned away and looked out into the woods. She had been sheltered from many details in the aftermath of Mona’s disappearance, but now as Esther was talking, she remembered people in and out of their apartment, looking through her mother’s things. She remembered seeing a story on the cover of the Post that said The Lady Vanishes and had a picture of Mona standing in front of one of the gallery’s most recognized acquisitions—a photograph by Michelle Manes of ghostly children playing in front of a tombstone shaped like a lamb. She remembered her father whisking the paper out of her hand. Telling her it was garbage. That’s she shouldn’t read those things.

What Gretchen wanted least to remember was this: after two months the detectives and even the psychic said the same thing. There was no foul play. All evidence pointed to Mona leaving on her own accord. She’d abandoned them, the gallery, everything. She didn’t want to be found. The psychic said she saw Mona with a second family, and that it was a struggle and she missed Gretchen and her father, but that she was needed where she was. The police said there was nothing to do without a motive or a body.

Gretchen also didn’t want to remember the grief her father had gone through, or how he quit his practice in the city and started taking medical assignments in the developing world—gone for months at a time—and then came home and spoiled her, buying her whatever she wanted. The only saving grace of that time period was living just two floors above Simon.

For some time, people continued to tell her they’d find her mom, that things were going to be okay. But after a while no one talked about it, about Mona. The gallery closed.

The lady vanishes, Gretchen thought. Just like that. And now here she was six years later, maybe closer than she’d ever been to knowing what Mona might have been doing those last days. She was almost an adult herself. She was inheriting a house, and had more freedom and access to information than she’d ever had. If she could find Mona she could tell her how she felt. And some part of her knew that she also just wanted to see her again. To have a mom.

She looked right at Esther. “Let’s solve this.”

“Hell yeah,” Esther said, raising her glass. “That’s the plan!”

Sometime after midnight Esther thought the woodland creatures would be done scavenging and safely back up in the attic. “They come down around dusk and then go back up to their place,” she explained.

“How can you live with squirrels or raccoons or whatever those are?” Gretchen asked. “Also, doesn’t the cat keep them away?”

Esther laughed. “Used to be three cats,” she said, not needing to explain more.

“Why don’t you call someone to come and take them out of here?”

“Not a bad idea,” Esther said, her speech languid from drink. “Let’s add it to the list.”

Gretchen laughed and shook her head. It was hard to fathom this woman. In one sense she was so put together—the way she dressed, her intelligence, her down-to-earth sophistication. And at the same time she was just so crazy. The nonsense about the house, her obsession with family history, but then not doing anything to care for the journals and artifacts, the fact that she looked like she was a million years old and Gretchen had just watched her drink a fifth of gin and smoke a half a pack of cigarettes in the course of a few hours. The woman was a force of nature. Or a force of chaos.