A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(24)

“Isn’t this where Abe used to live?” asked Emma.

“It is, yeah.”

“Really?” said Olive, leaning up between the passenger’s and driver’s seats. “It is?”

“I turned in by accident,” I said. “I’ve driven here so many times, it was just, like, muscle memory.”

“I want to see,” said Olive. “Can we look around?”

“Sorry, there’s no time today,” I said, stealing a glance at Emma in my mirror. I could see only the back of her head; she was turned all the way around, staring out the rear window at the guard station that marked the beginning of the neighborhood.

“But we’re here now,” Olive said. “Remember how we always used to talk about visiting? Didn’t you always wonder what his house looked like?”

“Olive, no,” said Millard. “It’s a bad idea.”

“Yeah,” said Bronwyn, poking Olive and then jerking her head toward Emma. “Maybe another day.”

Olive finally got the hint. “Oh. Okay. You know, actually, I don’t feel like it, either . . .”

I hit the turn signal. I was just about to pull onto the road when Emma faced forward in her seat.

“I want to go,” she said. “I want to see his house.”

“You do?” I said.

“Are you sure?” asked Millard.

“Yes.” She frowned. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Like I won’t be able to handle it.”

“Nobody said that,” said Millard.

“You were thinking it.”

“What about the clothes shopping?” I said, still hoping to get out of this.

“I think we should pay our respects,” said Emma. “That’s more important than clothes.”

The idea of touring them around Abe’s half-empty house sounded downright morbid, but at this point it seemed cruel to deny them.

“All right,” I said reluctantly. “Just for a minute.”

For the others, I think, it was simple curiosity, to learn more about who Abe had become after he left their loop. For Emma, it was more than that. Since she had arrived in Florida, I knew she had been thinking about my grandfather. She had spent years trying to imagine how and where he lived, piecing together an incomplete picture of his life in America from occasional letters. For years she had dreamed of coming to visit him and now that she was actually here, she couldn’t put it out of her mind. I felt her trying to, and failing. She’d spent too long dreaming about it—about him, about this place. In a way that felt entirely new and unsettling, I had started to feel his ghost looming between us in private moments. Maybe seeing where he had lived—and died—would help lay it to rest.



* * *



? ? ?

I hadn’t been to my grandfather’s house in months, not since before my dad and I left for Wales—back when I knew nothing. Of all the surreal moments I had experienced since my friends came to stay, none felt more like a dream than driving through my grandfather’s lazy, looping neighborhood with the very people he’d sent me abroad to find.

How little it had changed: Here was the same guard waving us through the gate, his face ghostly white with sunblock. Here were the yard gnomes and plastic flamingoes and rusting fish-shaped mailboxes, the houses they fronted all alike, a paint box of fading pastels. Here were the same craggy wraiths, slow-pedaling their orthopedic tricycles between the shuffleboard court and the community center. As if this place, too, were stuck in a time loop. Maybe that’s what my grandfather had liked about it.

“Certainly is a humble place,” said Millard. “No one would think a famous hollow-hunter lived here, that’s certain.”

“I’m sure that was intentional,” said Emma. “Abe had to keep a low profile.”

“Even so, I was expecting something a bit grander.”

“I think it’s sweet,” said Olive. “Little houses all in a row. I’m just sorry that after all these years wishing we could pay Abe a visit, he isn’t here to greet us.”

“Olive!” Bronwyn hissed.

Olive glanced at Emma and winced.

“It’s fine,” Emma said breezily. But then I met her eyes in the rearview mirror, and she quickly looked away.

I wondered if the real reason she’d wanted to come here was to prove something to me—that she was over him, that the old wounds didn’t ache anymore.

Then I turned a corner, and there it was, finally, humble as a shoebox, at the end of a weedy cul-de-sac. All along Morningbird Lane the houses looked a bit abandoned—most of the neighbors were still up north for the summer—but Abe’s looked worse, its lawn gone to seed, the yellow trim along the roofline beginning to flake and peel. Abe, as his neighbors would return to find come autumn, was gone forever.

“Well, this it,” I said, pulling into the driveway. “Just a regular house.”

“How long did he live here?” Bronwyn asked.

I was about to answer, but I was distracted by something unfamiliar that had escaped my notice until just then: a FOR SALE sign staked into the grass. I got out and marched through the yard, pulled it out of the ground, and threw it into the ditch.