The Spite House(37)
“Thirty-three,” she said, confident it was a trick question, and that the trick was simply fooling her into second-guessing the obvious answer.
“No, ma’am. Twenty-seven,” he said.
“What? No way. How?”
He put on that big grin that she never quite trusted and said, “What do you mean? I told you. A farmer had thirty sick sheep.”
“That’s not fair. That’s not what you said.”
He laughed. “May not be what you heard, but that’s what I said. You’ve gotta always pay close attention.”
That was the orphanage now, trying to trick her with sly misinformation, ready to allege she was inattentive.
Chill, it’s not alive, she thought. It’s not trying to do anything. She scanned the buildings to figure out what she was missing. She spotted it on the church steeple, as she ran toward the spite house on the back half of her lap. It wasn’t something that she had missed, but something that should have been missing. The large cross she saw atop the church hadn’t been there yesterday, the day before, or earlier today, before she started her run. She remembered it clearly. The conical spire had looked incomplete to her without a cross. There was no way to explain why one was there now. The door and undamaged exterior could be waved away. The cross couldn’t be. Nonetheless, as she stopped to stare at it, she tried to think of how she could have overlooked it before.
A gust stirred the treetops behind her and sent a throng of screeching birds flying. All that noise made her jumpy. Dess turned, ready to see and flee any animal charging out of the woods toward her. She remained tense even when she saw that nothing was running at her, because she had turned her back to the orphanage.
She thought she heard something far behind her. People singing? Chanting? It was either a song or a prayer. Or just the wind, she told herself. It was blowing harder, the sound of it rushing past her ears, but that wasn’t it. She felt the voices crawling under the skin on her back. She stiffened, gritted her teeth, then made herself turn around because it had to be done. She had to see.
The singing stopped. The cross was gone.
Heart pounding and mind fraying, she backed away from the orphanage. She spared a glance at the spite house to make sure it was still there and hadn’t pulled a disappearing act, and she almost laughed at the idea of that house as a sort of haven.
She looked at the orphanage one more time. The main building looked as washed out and neglected as it did from the spite house. Some of its windows that had appeared intact minutes earlier were shattered. The front door was gone again. Not just open, gone. She saw that. She thought she saw something in the dark, open doorway. Was someone standing there? It became more of an impression than something visible with each passing second. The presence of a woman in a dark, long dress, pinned to this site for decades.
“Tell him to leave us alone,” the presence said, sounding angry and anguished. When Dess heard those words, too clear to be a hallucination, she turned and ran to the house.
* * *
She made it back just as the stranger who had arrived was leaving.
Dess had seen something she didn’t like in her dad’s expression when she got back. She couldn’t figure out exactly what it was at first. All that she’d seen near the orphanage was still too fresh in her mind; she was still working to rationalize it. Were both places haunted, the spite house and the orphanage? The entire estate, from the hill through the valley? Was it just the previous night’s encounter somehow lingering with her? That struck her as more likely, but she didn’t understand why she thought that. It was like spending one night here had awakened something intrinsic to her, let her see things that would have escaped her before. Was that possible? God, how haunted was this place?
She needed real answers, starting with what was going on with her dad. After taking a minute to collect herself some more, she realized why she didn’t like way he had looked. He’d been wearing Pa-Pa Fred’s smug, cunning smirk, like he had just won something from someone who didn’t know a game was going until they lost. What had he done to earn that feeling, even for a second? Was it something he’d said to that lady, Emily?
Emily.
Dess remembered that name. The lady who wrote the article about Eunice. Emily Steen. Did Dad think she’d forgotten? That she might skip a detail as important as knowing who wrote that article? Of course she read and recorded the name of the person who had strong misgivings about a stranger they were putting their trust in. She’d made a mental note to look up more of Emily’s writing on her own when she got a chance, see if she had more or worse to say about Eunice. Now she knew she could do one better and go right to the source if the opportunity presented itself.
How’s that for always paying close attention, she thought, then imagined Pa-Pa Fred somewhere on the other side, reading her mind and laughing to show his approval, and also to take a little credit for her acuity.
CHAPTER 16
Millie
Lord, how had she screwed that up so badly?
Millie Steen replayed her conversation with Eric for the thousandth time, wondering what she should have said differently and whether it would have mattered. He had read what she’d written about Eunice and that had predisposed him to think less of her. But how could anyone read what she’d written and take it the way that he had?