The Spite House(56)
“What are you trying to remember, Stacy?” Eunice said.
The girl’s mouth hung open for a moment. Finally she said, “I think I forgot something really important.”
She thought about pressing the girl for a real answer, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. With Lafonda there, it wouldn’t look good, either. It would just give Lafonda something else to question later, while Eunice’s own question for Stacy went unanswered. Besides, she wanted to get the girl back inside in case her sister woke up. Tomorrow, she’d bake the girl some brownies or more cookies, get her in a more comfortable, trusting state, then ask why she had really come out here. What exactly “they” had told her.
Eunice stood and handed Stacy off to Lafonda. “Would you mind sleeping in Miss Lafonda’s room the rest of the night? That way we don’t have to wake your sister if she’s still sleeping. I think she could use the rest. In the morning we’ll have Miss Lafonda make your favorite, and when your sister comes down we’ll tell her you got up early because you smelled it cooking, and nobody will be in any kind of trouble.”
“Thank you,” Stacy said.
Eunice looked to Lafonda and said, “How rude of me, Miss Lafonda. I didn’t even think to ask you about this. But you don’t mind having a guest for the night, do you?”
Lafonda had a hundred questions etched into her expression but managed to suppress them and put on her kindest voice. “I don’t mind at all. It’ll be my pleasure.”
Eunice followed Stacy and Lafonda as they walked to the house. She stopped at the door and waved for them to go on.
“I just need a moment,” she said. When Lafonda looked hesitant, she added, “I’ll be fine. I’ll take a little something to help me sleep when I get upstairs and I’ll be all right. Go ahead.”
* * *
No child had lived at the Houghton Estate since Eunice was young. There was a reason for that.
Left alone, Eunice looked back to Oscar’s pond. A vision of him in the water came to mind. It wasn’t a memory. No one saw him enter the water that night. He snuck out late when everyone was asleep, just like Stacy.
No one was ever sure of why he did it, although Eunice thought she knew, which was why she didn’t picture him falling into the water by accident, but going in deliberately. Not quite appreciating how cold the night was—how much colder the water was—until it was up to his chest. Even then, for a few seconds, he probably tried to keep swimming.
He’d been a frail and undersized boy. Clumsy, awkward, and asthmatic, all of which hurt his chances of making friends even more than being the outsider from up north did. His father—one of Eunice’s paternal uncles—sent him down from Connecticut in the hopes that the warmer climate would be easier on his lungs. Eunice was the only person Oscar’s age who paid much attention to him at school. Outside of school, he was confined to the estate.
A few boys befriended him just prior to Christmas break. Eunice found this suspicious. She was mindful and protective of her older, bigger, yet somehow “little” cousin. Aunt Val would have wanted her to look out for him. So she made it her business to listen in on what the other boys said to Oscar. She heard one of the boys tell him, “My father was like you when he was young, but he made himself strong by swimming in cold rivers in the winter.” Had she realized Oscar might take this comment seriously she would have spoken to him, dissuaded him, or at least warned her parents to keep an eye on him during that harsh December.
He must have believed putting on a sweater and coat would insulate him. Instead, the added layers probably made it harder for him to get out of the water when its temperature drove the air from his chest. The extra exertion, no doubt, contributed to the asthma attack that killed him.
A groundskeeper found Oscar in the morning, lying on his side next to the pond, his clothes wet, his lips blue and drawn back in a grimace, his eyes open so wide it looked like he didn’t have eyelids.
Eunice gleaned much of this through eavesdropping on her parents’ discussions in the weeks that followed. One discussion in particular stood out.
Her father, remorseful for allowing his brother’s son to die under his care, refused to believe that their familial curse accounted for the fear frozen on Oscar’s face. “He’s a boy,” her father said. “Was a boy. He’s too young for them to have come for him.”
“There is no such thing as too young,” her mother said flatly, like an old professor dismissing a wrong answer she’d heard a hundred times before. At the time, Eunice had thought her mother cruel, in part because she wanted to believe her father was right, which would mean her youth granted her temporary immunity from the curse that made Val’s death so horrible. She also thought her mother should spare her father such harsh sentiment, no matter what the truth was. Later, with better understanding of all her mother went through, she understood why her mother said that. Eunice also understood why she had no younger siblings, and resolved to never become a wife or mother herself.
“You can’t know that they came for him,” her father had said.
“You can’t know what I know,” her mother answered. “You’ll never know what it’s like to feel a body turn to ice as it’s being born. I’m sorry for this loss. I’m very sorry for Oscar. But hiding from the truth does no good. You hid it from me and let me marry into it. Now it’s mine as much as yours, and I can promise you that there is no such thing as too young.”