What the Dead Want(8)

In answer to your inquiry, we are indeed capable of shipping 160 bales of cotton per month, and far more should you require it. AXTON oversees all ground shipments to the port in Manhattan as well as loading and unloading at Manchester and Lancashire. We guarantee delivery of the finest raw materials. And can obtain them at the best possible prices for you.

Yours,

G. C. Axton





SIX


THE PLACE SMELLED LIKE A USED BOOKSTORE OR VINTAGE clothes shop—not the good, fancy kind but the weird kind where there was so much stuff not even the shop owners knew what was there. Once they got past the detritus of the front room, the rest of the house seemed filled with dried flowers, musty rugs, dusty curtains, and moldering knickknacky treasures.

“That’s the parlor,” Esther said, pointing at a dark room as she creaked down the hall. “That’s where we’ll have a drink later. Right in there. You play piano?”

“A little, actually,” Gretchen said.

“Thought so.”

“You drink?”

“Uh . . . not really?”

“Pity,” said Esther. It was clear that the woman was looking forward to this drink.

How long, Gretchen wondered, had her aunt lived in this place without company? She returned her aunt’s smile, and then looked over her shoulder toward the half-closed door of the parlor, where she managed to glimpse a couple of stiff-backed chairs pushed up against a dark-purple wall. There was what looked like a worn Persian rug on the floor, and an antique piano in the corner. Heavy curtains on the window parted, letting in a narrow slip of sunlight.

She followed Esther to the longest, darkest stairwell she had ever seen.

“So how do you like the Leica X2?” her aunt asked as they walked. “It’s pretty fancy, huh?”

“I love it,” Gretchen said, surprised her aunt knew anything about digital cameras. It was fancy. Her father had gotten it for her for a birthday present, before they moved out of the East Village. Some of the first pictures she had taken with it were of the East Village, Tompkins Square Park, an old white-haired guy who played “Over the Rainbow” on the saxophone, a lady with tattoos of the solar system on her face and arms, and little kids playing soccer beneath the massive trees that grew in the center of the park.

Gretchen loved her camera, but she was not the kind of photographer who thought that equipment made the difference between a good photo or a bad one. A camera was an eye, her mother had taught her. And an image was made out of nothing but darkness and light. What made the difference was the photographer’s vision.

“I never used a camera like that,” Esther said. Gretchen pictured the woman doing portraits of children in a department store, or taking landscape shots around Mayville. She tried to imagine what kind of weird old camera Esther had, given the lost-in-time nature of the house.

“So you’re moving?” Gretchen asked politely. “Where are you moving to?”

“Moving on!” Esther said cheerily. “Moving on! Time for the next generation to make decisions about this place. I’ve been here forty years. But we gotta get it cleaned up first.”

Gretchen made a small involuntary noise in her throat.

“I know, I know,” Esther said. “It’s gonna be a bitch. The place is a little ramshackle. The last person who tried to help me with this was your mother.”

Gretchen felt the hair on her neck rise. She didn’t know her mother had come back to the Axton house—Mona had never talked about it. It seemed unusual that she would have left out something as interesting as trying to help clean up Axton mansion.

Esther’s description of the house as “a little ramshackle” was more than an understatement. Gretchen took in the cobwebs, the peeling wallpaper, the water-stained ceiling, the chipped plaster. The sloping floors. Mold might be providing some of the only structural integrity to the place. She had no idea how anyone had lived in there for so long.

“We could just hire someone,” Gretchen suggested and then thought, like a wrecking crew.

Esther waved her suggestion away without comment.

Gretchen took out her phone again to check for reception—this time there were two bars. Thank God. She’d text Simon as soon as it didn’t seem too rude.

When they reached the top of the stairwell, Aunt Esther pointed to the left and Gretchen walked into a hallway that was dark and narrow and lined with at least eight closed doors. The wallpaper was peeling—some of it coming down in great flat sheets that they had to step over.

The smell of dust and plaster and mold was certainly going to make it impossible to stay there for any length of time. Her eyes were already beginning to itch. She didn’t know how the old lady could look so strong. She must not have any allergies.

Gretchen snapped photos as they walked. On the walls, there were at least half a dozen framed and sepia-tinted portraits of what were likely long-dead members of the Axton tribe. The combination of perfect preservation and total neglect was amazing. She felt it had some profound meaning but didn’t know quite what. The house was literally in a kind of slow-motion tumble, floors creaking, layers of dust thick enough to leave footprints in. But the ostentatious wealth of the family—the portraits, the rugs, the furniture, the millions of little objects—had never been sold or taken or simply thrown out.

She stopped walking abruptly when she saw that farther along the hall, an enormous gray wasp nest sat precariously atop a vase that stood on a corner table. She could hear the wasps buzzing inside, and the vase, which was decorated with images of Greek soldiers, was shaking ever so slightly.