What the Dead Want(2)

Two seconds later he texted back: Chunky Monkey??

Yes.

Can I come over??

Yes.

Since he lived in the building he could achieve this by a simple elevator ride. “Simon’s coming over,” she yelled to Janine—who put her hand up and scowled. Janine pointed to the big ridiculous house phone and mouthed the word “Wait.”

Wait, sorry. No, Gretchen texted Simon, who replied with a brief u suck see u tmrw :P

Gretchen expected it would be a sales call and Janine would hang up right away, but instead she was silent, listening intently, and then there was a series of “Mmmhms” and then “WHO?” and then “Yes. Wow; no, of course I’ve heard of you. Of course, I totally understand. Oh really? That’s . . . mmmhm . . . Well, I’ll ask her.”

Then she held the phone out to Gretchen. “It’s your aunt,” she said.

“Who?”

“You’re inheriting a house.” She shrugged, then mouthed the words “I don’t freaking know” and handed Gretchen the phone.

“Hello?” Gretchen said skeptically.

“Hello, sweets. This is your great aunt, Esther.” When she heard the low, melodic voice so full of authority, her heart skipped a beat. It sounded so much like her own mother it made her eyes immediately fill with tears. The woman even used her mother’s nickname for her.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” her aunt asked. “Did your mother ever tell you about me?”

“Yes,” Gretchen said, though she was pretty sure that wasn’t true. She struggled to remember anything at all about an aunt Esther. “My mother said you . . . ah . . . I remember . . . You were a . . . She wrote you letters.” She groaned inside at how lame that sounded. She racked her brain. Was Aunt Esther an artist of some kind? Was it Aunt Esther who sent that box of Julia Margaret Cameron photographs years ago? Those rare Victorian photographs that her mother had hung in the gallery alongside contemporary work? Suddenly Gretchen was wondering why this was the first she was hearing from Aunt Esther. If she was close to her mother, why didn’t she get in touch when she’d disappeared?

“I’m leaving the Axton mansion,” her aunt explained bluntly. There was a strange buzzing sound, more like insects than a bad connection, that seemed to be coming from somewhere on the other line. “I don’t want to, but I have to and I need help. Janine can tell you my proposal, but it would require your coming here to Mayville. And soon.”

“Oh,” Gretchen said. “Uh . . .”

She turned and glanced at Janine, who was eating ice cream out of the carton with a spoon and looking glassy-eyed at the TV. She thought of Simon, and their plans for the summer, which mostly involved going to all-ages shows down in the Village and talking to boys. Her father wouldn’t even be within cell-phone range for the next three months. The city was hot as hell and the country would be cool and breezy. And she could finally see the mansion she’d only imagined. And what was this about a inheriting a house?

“You’re next in line,” Esther said. And Gretchen wondered, embarrassed, if she’d asked the house question out loud.

“What?”

“There’s only you,” Esther said. “After me—there’s only you. I can’t do this by myself, sweets.”

Gretchen had always wanted to see the mansion. See where her mother had started out.

“Um . . . okay!” she blurted out, surprising herself. “Great. That sounds great.”

The abruptness of her own decision startled Gretchen and seemed to startle the old woman as well.

“Really?” Aunt Esther asked, sounding relieved. “Oh! Wonderful! Thank you, thank you. I have a darkroom here, of course, but I suppose you’re all digital now, huh? Well, bring your camera anyway.”

“I don’t go anywhere without it,” Gretchen said, wondering how this woman even knew she was a photographer or would be interested in a darkroom. The idea of living in the country in an old mansion and taking pictures, being able to develop them herself, was growing on her by the second. It sounded very posh. She could tell kids at Gramercy Arts, where she and Simon went to school, that she was going on an artist’s residency this summer. She could take photographs all day, wander dewy fields of flowers, find a swimming hole . . . Maybe her aunt had a cook or a butler. It was a mansion, after all.

“I’ll send a car for you tomorrow,” Esther had said.

“Tomorrow?” Gretchen asked.

“There an echo in here? Yes. Tomorrow.” Then she abruptly hung up.

Gretchen stood there with the phone in her hand until it started making a loud, low beeping noise; then she also hung up. “What did my aunt tell you I’d be doing in Mayville for the summer?” she asked Janine.

“She said she needs help moving.” As usual, Janine didn’t think anything strange or exciting was going on. This was Janine’s thing. She had been Gretchen’s mother’s best friend, but she was the total opposite of Gretchen’s mother. Where Mona had been sensitive and passionate about life and art and pretty much everything in the world and even out of this world, Janine was meticulous, orderly, and yet somehow very laid-back. “Unflappable” was how Mona used to describe her. She’d worked as a scientist for a pharmaceutical company.