The Family Plot (26 page)

She shined the light at him. “Did you bring a flashlight up there?” A look at his empty hands answered her question. “Right. So if the boy
did
want to show you something, you might not have been able to see it.”

“Can we go check?”

“After I poke around in here for a minute…,” she told him. “Or, go ahead and get a lantern from downstairs, and then I'll come with you.”

“Are you okay in here all by yourself?”

“Sure,” she said. She even meant it. Something about the relative normalcy of the place reassured her. This was a comfortable room, a refuge for a reasonable woman. Dahlia might be angry and unhappy and insomniatic on top of everything, but she was still reasonable. “I'll be all right. If for some reason the door shuts and locks me in, your daddy's Sawzall's lying on the floor just outside the door. I'm trusting you to bust me out.”

He disappeared into the hall and headed down the stairs.

She sat down at the vanity and started opening drawers.

In the top right drawer there was another gothic romance, plus a couple of antique Harlequin paperbacks that might actually be worth money to the right reader, somewhere. In the next drawer down, she found several pairs of gloves and a couple of small hats—fascinators, really—with their accompanying pins. “Nice,” she said, pulling one out and letting it sparkle in the light.

Thank you.

Dahlia jumped, and this time her heart nearly stopped. It couldn't take two shocks that bad in such a short span of time. She dropped the hat pins and lifted the light, blinding herself in the mirror again, and leaving blobs of yellow, green, and purple swimming in her vision.

She pulled the light down into her lap, away from the mirror.

“Hello?”

The only reply was the sound of Gabe stomping gently back up the stairs again. Out in the hall she saw the harsh white glow from another LED lantern. Then she saw a hand in the mirror behind her. A raised finger, and a pair of lips behind it.

Gabe stuck his face around the corner. “Still good?”

“Uh-huh,” she nodded. She didn't look away from the mirror. She couldn't do it if she'd wanted to. “Go on, I'm right behind you.”

When Gabe was gone, she swallowed, and counted, and breathed. She looked into the mirror, then quickly away. It was shadowed by weird gleams and angles thrown by the flashlight in her lap. She felt a breath on her neck, a cotton-soft gust that wouldn't blow out a candle—and she threw up her hands without even meaning to. She closed her eyes. It was easier that way. “Who are you?”

Open the left-hand drawer.

With quivering hands, she did what she was told, looking away from the glass. She blinked down into the drawer and saw a metal pendulum on a string and a series of cards. One card had a circle with numbers around its edge, like a clock. One had letters. Below the cards, she turned up a dog-eared paperback on astrology, and another one regarding communication with the dead.

“Are you … are you Augusta's aunt, Hazel?” Dahlia guessed. Suddenly, she didn't want the lady to leave. “Was this your room?”

Down in the drawer, a scratching noise—like a large bug, or a small mouse. The pendulum wiggled. Dahlia picked it up; it vibrated in her palm. “Hazel?”

No one answered, and Gabe was on his way back. He was on the attic steps, descending swiftly toward the hallway, and toward the door that shouldn't have been open—but was all the same. “Dahlia? Dahlia, I found something. Come on. Come and see.”

She tucked the pendulum and the cards into her pocket. Rising to her feet, she checked the mirror one last time. She saw nothing and no one except herself, her image bleached out by the yellow-white circles cast from her lantern.

“Coming, Gabe. I'm coming.”

She climbed over the trunk and into the hall, slipping in her sock-feet and catching herself on the carpet runner—which disintegrated as she tripped through it, yanking it from whatever tacks had held it into place. It came apart in decaying rags. “Ew,” she complained, shaking the gray fluffy dust off her toes and smacking at her sock to clean it further.

“
Ew
what?”

“Moths and old fabric. What'd you find upstairs?”

“Come on, I'll show you.”

She fell in line behind him. “Why didn't you just bring it down?”

“Because I can't,” he said, holding the lantern up and forward to illuminate the entrance to the narrow set of attic stairs.

“What is it?” she pressed. “Give me a hint.”

“It's a message. It wasn't there yesterday, or the day before.”

The walls were close around them as they scaled the creaking steps single file. Wallpaper hung in strips, dangling over the holes where fixtures used to brighten the cramped nook. Dahlia and Gabe's two bouncing lights made the space look and feel like a funhouse that was no damn fun at all.

Dahlia was relieved when they reached the top of the stairs and Gabe lifted the hatch. He climbed through it ahead of her. For an awkward moment, his ass was fully in her face; but she crawled behind him. She was about to ask what she was looking for when she saw the message carved into the floor. You couldn't miss it: The letters were a foot long each. They were roughly scrawled like they'd been cut with a huge fingernail, or a carving knife.

YOUR FAULT

“My fault?” She crooked her neck and stepped closer. “Somebody else's fault? For what?”

“Who do you think wrote it?”

“Abigail,” she replied, with an unsettling degree of confidence. The devil had taken her, Augusta'd said, but he'd taken his own sweet time, and maybe he didn't take her very far. “But I don't know why she'd accuse
us
of anything. We just got here.”

In one of the dark corners where the roof sloped low toward the floor, something moved. Dahlia chased it with her light, but caught only the impression of someone small, and then no one. Nothing. Not even a rat or a bat. But there was a scrambling noise in its wake, and the image reappeared—flickering swiftly in another corner, beneath another web of batshit-covered support beams. It looked away. It vanished.

“Gabe…”

“It's him. You saw him.”

“I saw something.”

She could still see something, but just an outline of darkness—a cutout silhouette, snipped from the same paper as the photo album. It moved, but it did not breathe. It hunkered. She pointed her light, trying to pin the shade into place so she could see it better, but the specter only absorbed the beam, swallowing it up. It drank the light down, and snuffed it out.

Dahlia crouched down. Her knees popped, so she stood again—not straight, not certain. She kept her back bowed so she could leave the center where the ceiling was high and the way was clear and go towards the lower corners where the walls met the roof. She ducked slowly, dodging the supports as she pushed onward, a small, terrified step at a time, toward the little shadow that curled up tight with its arms around its knees and its head tucked down against its chest.

“Buddy?” The word came out cracked. She said it again. “Buddy? Is that you?”

The huddled shape gave no response, only the impression that as she approached it … it grew smaller before her eyes. When Dahlia reached it, leaning the light around a support post covered in nails, she saw nothing there at all.

No child-shaped ghost of a man long dead gazed up at her. No phantom with charred-out holes for eyes. No sad-faced soldier giving a longing or threatening salute, and no poltergeist girl in a yellow dress or covered in mud and blood offering screams or warnings or threats.

There was no one. Nothing.

“What is it? Do you see it?” Gabe asked. The white gleam from his lantern went wobbly as he passed it to his other hand and wrestled with the idea of joining Dahlia.

“He's gone. But there's something else back here. Not a ghost,” she was quick to clarify. “It's a box. Maybe a suitcase. Or a briefcase. Something like that.”

She wished she'd found her sneakers before embarking on this adventure; there was rat shit, bat shit, and probably possum shit and snake shit up there, never mind all the nails and splinters. She stuck the lantern's handle between her teeth and braced herself anyway, hanging on to a nail-free spot on the support post with one hand while she reached for the object with her other one.

Her fingers brushed against dry, brittle leather. She found a handle, and pulled. The container came free. She teetered on the balls of her feet, but held steady, adjusting her balance.

She let go of the wood and retrieved the lantern from her mouth.

There wasn't any clean space to sit, but she sat down with the case anyway, fiddling with the latches on top. The briefcase, or satchel, or whatever it was had had a combination lock years ago. Now it'd rusted to the point of being useless, and the elements had shrunk the leather back away from the hinges. With a twist of her hand, the contraption broke and the bag opened wide.

Gabe sat down cross-legged beside her. “What's in it?” he asked before she had a chance to see for herself. “Just dump it all out.”

“No way. There could be rats. Spiders.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “But hurry up.”

Gingerly, all the while wishing she had her work gloves handy, she withdrew the contents in clumps and spread them out in the light of their lanterns. “Gabe … these are … they look like medical records.”

“Whose?”

She read a few lines, turned the page, and scanned a bit further. “Oh, God…”

“Dahl?”

“The water,” she said, which didn't really answer him. “I knew it had something to do with the water. This is a report on patient care from a sanitarium in Michigan.”

“Was Abigail there?”

“Looks like it. I wonder if they sent her away to have the baby? No, that can't be right—if no one but Buddy knew about it. Maybe she left it somewhere, or gave it away. Maybe it died.”

“Maybe she killed it.”

Dahlia didn't know how to respond. She didn't want to think it, and she hadn't planned to say it out loud. “If it died, one way or another, I wonder if anyone ever found its remains. You'd think Buddy would've known where to look.”

Gabe frowned, and poked at the nearest folder with his finger. “Why didn't he show them?”

“Maybe he kept his mouth shut so he wouldn't make things any worse. He was only a kid,” she reminded him. “The message might be for him. Everything after that wedding party … everything that happened to Abigail was his fault. These records here…” She scanned them quickly. “At this sanitarium, they were treating Abigail for hysteria—like it was still the nineteenth century, or something. They used hydrotherapy on her.”

“That's what she blames him for? Water? Come on. It could've been worse.” He wiggled his fingers like he was trying to zap her. “It could've been shock treatments.”

“I don't think they used shock treatments back then, but water therapy wasn't exactly a walk in the park. It involved a lot of unwanted baths. Ice water, high-pressure hoses, that kind of thing. No wonder the poor ghost has a hate-on for plumbing.” She pushed some of the pages around, ignoring the things that looked redundant and discarding the paper that was too deteriorated to read. “It looks like she was discharged in 1924. They sent her home, and … and then what? There are no more pictures of her, no further mention of her anyplace in the family record, as far as I know.”

“What did Miss Withrow tell you?”

“Not everything, apparently. She said Abigail disappeared after the wedding fell through, but it's more like she was banished.”

Gabe eyed the attic with a wary expression. “Maybe they locked her in the attic. I bet she went crazy up here and died.”

Dahlia whapped him with her light. “And you gave
me
crap about the gothic romances.”

“She must've died somewhere!”

“Yeah, but not up here. This attic was never finished out—there's no Sheetrock or plaster, no insulation. Just subflooring and exposed beadboard. This was never a living space. I can't imagine why you wanted to stay here the other night.”

“It's kind of cool, until the ghosts show up.”

She sat back and fiddled with the light, aiming it from page to page. “Whatever, man. Tomorrow,” she said suddenly, pointing the light at Gabe—then away from his face. “Sorry. But tomorrow … or this morning—God. I don't know what time it is, but it must be so late that it's early. When the sun comes up, at any rate, I'll start looking for the real Withrow plot, and see if she's buried there. I bet it's close by, and if we find her grave, we'll know when she died. Maybe even
how
she died. Sometimes they would put that stuff right there on the tombstone.”

“Good idea.”

“I'm full of them. Now, what else is in here?” she asked herself. The rest was mostly receipts, church bulletins, and two old issues of
National Geographic.
The folders with Abigail's sanitarium records were the only thing of interest. She pushed everything back inside the weather-ruined satchel, then picked it up. “Let's put this downstairs in Hazel's room. That seems like a safe place.”

“Who's Hazel?”

“Augusta Withrow's aunt. I found her name in a book, after you left,” she lied. It was easier than telling the truth. “After that, you and me, kid—we're going to get some more sleep.”

“I don't know, Dahl. I'm pretty worked up. I don't know if I can go back to sleep now.”

She stepped around the thin sheets of subflooring and tried not to look at the accusation carved there. It wasn't meant for her. “Me either, but we've got a lot of work to do over the next couple of days. We need all the rest we can get.”

He fussed along behind her. “I don't know how anyone's supposed to sleep with that storm going on out there. And in here, we've got more ghosts than rats.”