What the Dead Want(40)

The box of Esther was sitting on top of the TV. Hope and Hawk had brought all the journals and other boxes in from the car and were carrying them down to the basement.

“My friend is coming from the city,” Gretchen said.

“She’s picked a bad time to visit.”

“He,” Gretchen said.

“Oh,” Hawk said, looking away for a minute.

“Where are you taking those?” Gretchen asked, gesturing toward the boxes.

“C’mon,” Hawk said.

She followed them downstairs to a long table that was piled with books. Beside it stood a tall gray filing cabinet.

“Our mother’s research,” Hope said. “She’d been working with Esther for a while—”

Gretchen looked around. The place was neat and orderly, like the upstairs. The archival materials had been put into plastic sleeves or files and set out in piles on the table. The way everything had been handled, it was almost like these old papers and photographs were volatile material. It reminded Gretchen of a crime lab from some old TV show.

“The folks at Shadow Grove would pay a lot of money for these kinds of things,” Hawk went on. “They have another library—but it’s less historical.”

“And more hysterical,” Hope said, looking up from the document she was cataloging.

Hawk smirked at his sister. They busied themselves unpacking boxes and setting more journals and photographs out on the table.

Hawk pulled out a brown folder thick with papers and hand-scrawled notes on yellow legal paper, tossed it on the top of the pile. Gretchen picked it up and leafed through it.

It was Esther’s will. A long rambling heavily annotated form that established a bank account specifically designated for “funds to fight the gas company.” It also had whole paragraphs about destroying the house. The only thing she left Gretchen was the mirror and the camera. The car she left to Hope.

“C’mon, we’ve really got to get to work on this stuff,” Hawk said, dusting off more of the papers and setting them aside. “We’ve got just over twenty-four hours before the anniversary and the Shadow Grove people start coming out here.”

“So? What do they do?” Gretchen asked.

“A bunch of loony shit,” Hope said, “in hopes of not getting killed themselves by a hunter’s stray bullet or a lightning strike. Or they honor the spirits of those who passed and try to communicate with them—depending on how you look at it.”

“It’s more than that,” Hawk said. “The anniversary is the only time those who have passed can really interact with us.”

“Celia and Rebecca were interacting with me just fine and there was no anniversary,” Gretchen said, putting her hand up to where she had been scratched; it was sore and the skin was raised, beginning to scab. She lifted her shirt to look at her side where she had been bitten, and there was an ugly round welt, teeth marks visible. Her forehead and part of her eye was swollen from the wasp sting, her shoulder was terribly sore, and she remembered she hadn’t taken the time to disinfect the wound. “They’re already biting and scratching and tripping people. Knocking over the wasp nest.”

“All of that is new,” Hope said. “It used to be only on the anniversary, and it used to be only one person got hurt. Things have been changing over the years, escalating.”

Gretchen thought of her mother’s image behind the charred and ornate mirror. How Celia and Rebecca were always playing next to it, as if they were guarding it. How Hawk couldn’t see what she had seen. She needed to get back to the house soon, maybe hire a moving company to get the mirror out. She reached in her pocket for her cigarettes, then remembered she didn’t smoke.

“Did Esther talk to you guys about a triangle?” Gretchen asked.

“All the time,” Hawk said. “And she’s not the only one. Folks at Shadow Grove have this idea that there’s a zone where spirits are suffering. It’s the same theory Esther and your mother had.”

“Is it true?” Gretchen asked. “Can you see them?”

He shrugged. “I see things all over,” he said. “You may have thought we were the only people in the funeral home—but to me it was full of mourners, walking through the rooms. And the woods are full of spirits trying to find the church. I try to believe in their triangle idea, but there are so many wandering souls in the world. . . . It’s more like an ever-expanding circle with the house at the center.”

“What do you mean, the center?” asked Gretchen.

“Like an aperture,” he said. “Like . . . they always come from the attic down into the house and then outward from there. To me it feels like the house is a rift between worlds.”

“Our mother, your mother, and Esther thought they could release the spirits,” Hope said. “That was before Celia and Rebecca became as strong as they are now. Hawk says they used to be confined to one little place; now they roam around the whole house and he’s seen them out here too and once in the woods.”

“There’s got to be something that’s making them stronger,” Gretchen said. She racked her brain. Esther’s death? The presence of another Axton at the house? How were they supposed to rationally figure out something so irrational? She set out Esther’s photographs, the ones from Poland and Japan and Vietnam. Like a whole world on fire. She peered over them, thinking of Esther’s ashes in the box upstairs.