What the Dead Want(20)

Gretchen reached out and held her great-aunt’s hand. She wanted the camera, but it was becoming horrifyingly clear there was something very wrong with the old woman, and she wanted to help. Esther needed to be in some kind of assisted-living facility. She needed medication, or maybe to go live in an old-folks home for retired war reporters or something. This was just too much.

“Will you promise me?” Esther asked, looking deeply into her eyes.

“Yes,” Gretchen said. Thinking, I am promising I’ll get us both the hell out of here. Tomorrow. I am promising I’ll get you somewhere where you can get the respect you deserve.

Her aunt, looking relieved, handed her the camera. Gretchen took off her Leica and placed the Nikon around her neck in its place.

“I started seeing them first when the camps were liberated,” Esther said, talking quickly, her eyes glazing over. “And then in Vietnam, everywhere. Everywhere. In the cities and in the villages, even taking a break back at the hotel. They followed me to the hotel. I got used to it. Knew I was doing something no one else could do. That it’s a part of who we are—this family. That’s why I came back here when it was over. I’m done, Gretchen. But someone has to finish the work.”

Gretchen turned to the window, to wrench herself from the desperation and insanity of the moment. She was deeply sad she’d met Esther so late in her life, when she was like this—at old age, after photo chemicals or seeing too many wars or loneliness or some family predisposition to craziness, and imagining ghosts had mangled a part of her senses. It was quite clear to her why no one had introduced her to Aunt Esther before. Even her mother, who had told her so much about the world, knew enough to shelter her from the shadow of deep violence that still haunted Esther, and hung over this house.

Gretchen looked at the pictures on the wall. And began to realize many of them were of fires and children. Some were happy shots, family portraits. Campfires. Others were of buildings on fire, the bombed-out remains of some city, just rubble and carnage, a shadow of a person permanently etched in concrete. Some were the placid rolling hills and forest around the house. But they were clearly all on the walls because they told some story Esther believed in. They were hanging there because she was trying to solve a puzzle with them—something that only made sense to her, because her internal logic had snapped, gone off the tracks. It was like that day Gretchen had tried to photograph her mother. These photos were up because Esther was looking for proof—or thought she had found proof. They were there because she believed she was close to a breakthrough. E. E. Axton’s war photographs were some of the most iconic images ever published, and hundreds of them were published; some even hung in museums. But these pictures were a secret, were personal. If it ever got out that E. E. Axton was living in her ancestral home, photographing spirits, or believing she could, it would be a huge story. The idea that Gretchen alone was there to witness it made her feel light-headed.

A cool breeze passed through the room. The curtains in the window didn’t stir, but she heard what she thought must be the weather vane atop the cupola begin to spin slowly, creakily, overhead. Close by she could hear the scampering feet of squirrels or whatever they were.

“Here,” her aunt said, and she picked up a photograph off her desk and held it out to Gretchen. “I wanted to give this to you too.”

“I can’t be sure,” her aunt said, sounding disarmingly rational. “But I think that’s Piper, with your mother.”

Gretchen felt as if all the blood in her body had stopped circulating. After several heartbeats, she said, “What do you mean?”



“I took it last winter. I heard something outside, and went out there with my camera. I followed the sounds out past the place where our property meets the Greens’ property. When I held my eye to the viewfinder, I saw them, although I couldn’t see them with my eyes. Sometimes when that happens, the film captures nothing, but other times . . . you see? Mona. She was here. She’s closer than you think.”

Gretchen handed the photograph back to her aunt. Her hand was trembling too much to hold on to it. It looked somewhat like a double exposure, but it also looked like her mother. Not like the photo she’d taken for proof when she was a child, but exactly like her mother, standing clearly on this property in the snow, with a little boy who belonged to another era. Her heart pounded in her chest and she felt like she might pass out. What was this awful thing her aunt was doing? Turning her into an emotional yo-yo.

“You see there, a line drawn around the property? I’ve figured it out. It’s a triangle. Within this triangle, the souls are in torment. You mother knew about this too. Sometimes you see them and they’re happy, playing. But here—inside the triangle, they’re tormented. And tormenting.”

Gretchen said nothing. She thought about the awful little girls at the piano, then shook them out of her head. She felt a deep welling sadness for this woman who saw ghosts everywhere. She stared at her aunt as she spoke nonsense in a perfectly lucid tone, growing more terrified by the second.

“Your mother believed that if we could discover what they wanted, we could break the triangle. We could free them.”

Gretchen stared at her.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Esther said. “Your mother wrote about this herself. You’ve seen her collection, you must have. Some of the earliest inventors of the camera were working with precisely the idea that they could capture images of the unseen with their instruments. Some of them believed they had. Some of us believe we can!”