What the Dead Want(41)

“We could ask them,” she said finally. “We could ask the girls.”

“There’s only one other person who’s talked to them,” said Hawk. “And she also talked to Fidelia. This lady named Annie at Shadow Grove. Says she can channel Fidelia and other people in the Axton family.”

“They talked to me,” Gretchen said. “They told me they were going to ‘fix the house.’ Then they looked frightened and ran away—some disgusting white creature with hooves was coming.”

A silence fell over the room. Hope opened the filing cabinet and riffled through some folders. She pulled out a photograph and laid it on the table.

“Did it look like that?”

Gretchen expected to see something like one of her mother’s spirit photographs. Instead she was looking at a picture of a WCP member in a mask riding a horse. And yes, because of the light or the composition of the photograph, it did look just like the creature.

Gretchen gasped and put her hand over her mouth. The sheet the WCP man was wearing was tattered and a little singed, as if he had just come from a fire. It resembled what she had thought were feathers on the creature. But the holes in the mask were the most frightening—as if she was looking straight into insatiable black holes of hatred. She was repulsed. It was the same with all of Esther’s pictures—Nazis, American soldiers burning huts, cowards in planes dropping bombs on cities. The blunt, ignorant hatred was the same.

Seeing the picture made her want to work harder than ever to figure out what was going on, and to get that mirror—get her mother—out of that ancestral trap.

Gretchen handed the photograph back to Hope. “Simon should be here later tonight,” she said. “You stay here and go through the archive. Hawk and I will go up to Shadow Grove now.”

“What we need here isn’t a spiritualist to make it all better,” Hope said. “We need a historian to let everyone know the facts.”

“Nothing’s going to make what happened here better,” Gretchen said. “But folks keep paying for the things these people did centuries ago.”

“Yeah,” Hawk said. “And it’s the same people. Look at Esther’s photographs, Vietnam, Hiroshima . . .”

“Fidelia’s journal,” Gretchen said, “where she’s barely allowed to even work outside the home, can’t go to school. The faces of the people who are downtrodden are different. The faces of the people keeping them down are the same. Men with money, white men with money, who believe the world belongs to them and will do anything to protect their power.”

“We need to get over there and talk to Annie,” Hawk said. “See if she can get us some information from someone who was a witness at the time. You didn’t get very far talking with Celia and Rebecca—they’re children, even if they’re more than one hundred years old. I don’t think they’re reliable sources.”

“How you gonna get there?” She looked at them warily. “You’re not taking the car.” She set her papers aside and got out her keys. “I’ll go with you, Gretchen. Hawk, you stay here. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

“You better be,” he said. “Or you might not be back at all.”





TWENTY-ONE


THE ROAD TO SHADOW GROVE VEERED OFF MAIN Street into more forests and hills, but after several miles the trees turned to pasture, and a bright sliver of water ran alongside the road. There were farmhouses and red barns dotting the fields, and sheep and cows standing so still it seemed they had been painted onto the landscape.

The air was fresh and the car windows were down and if they weren’t on a gruesome mission, Gretchen would have felt like she could drive forever beside Hope, the girl’s steady hands on the steering wheel of the beautiful vintage car, windows down—her hair blowing in the breeze. She punched in the cigarette lighter and then sighed to herself as it popped back out.

“All the women who were working on figuring this stuff out are gone,” Gretchen said. “Esther, your mother, my mother.”

Hope gave her a wry smile. “When you put it like that it doesn’t sound like such a good idea to find out what happened.”

“Just when these women thought they’d made a breakthrough, they died—almost like some secret world protecting itself.”

“And my father was just an innocent bystander? Killed ’cause he was in the car with my mother?”

“You haven’t talked about your father,” Gretchen said.

“He was like Hawk.” Hope squinted, drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, then rubbed an eye with one hand.

This surprised Gretchen. She knew their father had been in the military; they had talked about it last night when they stayed up late. Hawk was a gentle spacey musician who had no interest in driving a car.

“Really?”

“Before he came out here with my mom, our father was the head of Remote Viewing for the air force,” Hope said, as if Gretchen knew what she was talking about.

“He worked with some kind of surveillance technology?”

Hope laughed. “Sort of,” she said. “He was part of an elite group who could see where the enemy was with their minds.”

“Oh my God,” Gretchen said.

“Yeah,” Hope said. “Try skipping school with a dad like that. He died before he’d managed to teach either me or Hawk much about it. But Hawk turned out to be a natural.” She took a deep breath. “I do think if my parents had lived none of this would be going on. Anyway, none of this stuff happened exactly on the anniversary. Not Esther, not my parents.”