The Poe Estate (9 page)

“That's horrible!” I said.

“Then what happened?” Cole asked.

“Beedie tried to comfort her sister, but it was no use. Windy
spent her days and nights on the widow's walk, pale as a ghost, staring at the sea, as if she hoped to see her husband's sails come up over the horizon. Then, one morning, they found her body under the widow's walk, her neck broken.”

“Did she throw herself off? Did Japhet push her?” I asked.

“Nobody knows how she fell. They called it an accident and buried her in the little graveyard beside her husband's hand. After Beedie had mourned for three years, Japhet convinced her to marry him. So he got the Thorne property after all.”

“Wait! What are you saying?” I asked, horrified. “You mean
Japhet
is our great-great-whatever-great-
grandfather
? That
murderer
?”

“That's right,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “And that's when our family started losing children. Japhet's son, Japhet Junior, was the first to die of the Thorne blood disease. They say it's a punishment for his crimes.”

“But that's not
fair
!” I said. “Why should my sister die because of him? Kitty didn't murder anyone!”

Cousin Hepzibah squeezed my hand. “I know. It isn't fair,” she said.

After an awkward pause, Cole asked, “But what happened to Phineas? You said he was a pirate?”

Cousin Hepzibah sighed. “He and his shipmates washed up on an island, where they were taken in by a colony of Africans who had survived the wreck of a slave ship.”

“This story is getting very complicated,” I said. It reminded me of one of those long, winding Laetitia Flint ghost stories I'd been reading on the bus. Cousin Hepzibah liked those books too—and it crossed my mind that maybe some of the details
had found their way into her story. Or maybe she was right, and our family had inspired old writers.

“Of course. Nothing about our family is ever simple,” said Cousin Hepzibah. She continued, “After Phinny's arm had healed, he determined to return home to Windy. But when sailors brought word of her death, he decided to avenge himself on Red Tom Tempest. With the help of his old shipmates and his new friends, he captured the
Pretty Polly
, made Captain Tempest walk the plank, and turned his hand to piracy himself. He and his friends were picky about which ships they stopped, though—they preyed only on slavers. They would pocket the valuables and set the cargo free.”

“How did he capture the
Polly
? And how do you know all this?” I asked.

“Family lore,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “And there's a lot written about it in the family papers.”

“But if Phinny was still alive, why didn't he inherit the Thorne Mansion?” I asked. “Why did it go to Beedie and Japhet?”

“Japhet had connections. He got his magistrate friend to declare Phinny dead on the strength of the hand and Tom Tempest's account. Besides, Phinny was a pirate, an outlaw. If he ever did come home, he never showed his face.”

“What happened to his treasure?” asked Cole.

“Nobody knows anything for sure,” said my cousin. “Just rumors.”

“What's the treasure supposed to be? Jewels? Pieces of eight?”

She shrugged. “All I know is the story: There's supposed to be hidden treasure,” said my cousin. “Maybe even a map.
Nobody's ever found either one, though.”

“Can we look?” Cole flashed his magic smile at Cousin Hepzibah.

“Please do—I hope you find it. Sukie, dear, why don't you show Cole around?”

“Right now? It's almost dinnertime, and I have a lot of homework,” I said.

“Next time, then,” said my cousin, holding out her hand to Cole. “It was lovely to meet you, child. Come again soon.”

“Thanks, I will. I can't wait to see more of this house. I always knew it would be cool in here, but I had no idea
how
cool.”

“I'll show you out,” I said.

• • •

“What are you doing here
really
, Cole?” I asked as soon as we were out of the room. “Are you after Cousin Hepzibah's treasure?”

“Depends what you mean by
after
. You said your family needed money. If we find it, you could get a phone and we could text each other like normal people. Maybe you could even buy back your old house.”

The thought made me ache with longing, as if someone was squeezing formaldehyde through my own heart. “Except it's
Cousin Hepzibah's
treasure, if it even exists.”

“I bet she would use it to help you, though. She seems really nice. You sure we don't have time for a little look around before I go?”

“Sorry.”

“All right, see you in the morning, then. Oh, wait.” He dug
in his book bag and pulled out my lab notebook. “Better take care of this. Ms. Pitch would kill us if we lose all that data—we only get one heart.”

• • •

“I like your friend,” said Cousin Hepzibah when I came back. “What a thoughtful young man. Handsome, too, and so fond of you.”

“Fond of
me
?”

“Of course. Didn't he come out of his way to return your notebook? He says he's been making better grades in science since you became his lab partner.”

“He told you that? I don't know, Cousin Hepzibah. I'm not sure I trust him. He and his friends used to call me names and throw food at me in the cafeteria. They didn't stop until Kitty gave them food poisoning. She really doesn't like him.”

Cousin Hepzibah shrugged. “Well, that's ghosts. They can't change, so they don't understand when the living do.”

The Thorne Mansion Library

I
spent the next few afternoons after school searching the Thorne Mansion library for clues to Hepzibah Toogood's treasure.

The library was a large, dark room that was lined floor to ceiling with bookcases. Ladders rolled along a railing so you could reach the upper shelves. A pair of old armchairs covered in cracked green leather flanked the fireplace, and inlaid cabinets guarded the windows, making deep nooks for window seats. With a few more lamps and a lot less dust, I thought, I could make it into a very inviting room.

I found a pair of table lamps made from Chinese vases in the attic and brought them downstairs. They threw cozy circles of light.

My Thorne ancestors loved to read everything, apparently: sermons, essays, and poetry, but especially fiction. They favored American writers. Their shelves were crammed with multivolume sets of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, Washington Irving and Laetitia Flint, James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe, bound in leather or faded crimson cloth. Some looked old enough to be first editions. I checked to see if any of the authors had signed them—if Cousin Hepzibah was right and they wrote some of their stories about our family, maybe they were friends of our ancestors. A signature might make a book even
more valuable. But I didn't find any signed copies.

I did find something much more exciting, though: One whole bookcase held diaries! The Thorne ladies had filled volume after volume with their faded, spidery descriptions of apple harvests and new bonnets, steamship jaunts to Providence, toothaches, baby nieces, and recipes for arrack punch. Reading the diaries gave me a strange thrill—it was like traveling back in time and talking to my own ancestors!

I pulled volumes off the shelves and opened them at random, getting lost in the stories. Theodosia Thorne, the lady who presided over the expansion of the outbuildings in the 1830s, had strong opinions about horses: Her favorite mare was Scheherazade, a white Arabian, and her favorite carriage horses were called Twilight and Novalis. I remembered seeing a painting of a white horse in the gun room—I wondered if that could be Scheherazade.

But Windy had lived long before the 1830s. I combed the shelves for older volumes. In the 1790s, Miss Mary Thorne accompanied her brother John on a trip to the Far East, where she greatly admired the shape of the pagoda roofs and brought back a set of porcelain from Canton—maybe the very teacups we'd just been drinking from.

Even the 1790s was too late for Windy, though. I made myself put down Miss Mary's account of a typhoon east of Japan to search the rest of the room.

I couldn't find any diaries by Windy or Beedie, so I opened the fancy secretary desk beside the door. I found a bundle of family papers there, and a lot more in the cabinets by the windows: wills and deeds and account ledgers and endless bundles of letters tied up with cloth tape. It was overwhelming. Where would I even begin?

Notes in the big leather-bound Bible and a calligraphic family tree drawn by some 1880s Thorne confirmed the outlines of Cousin Hepzibah's story. Squinting at the doves and curlicues and trumpet-blaring cherubs, I read that Obadiah Thorne and his wife—Patience, née Cloyse—had had two daughters, Hepzibah and Obedience; Hepzibah had married Phineas Toogood and Obedience had married her second cousin, Japhet Thorne; Hepzibah Toogood and her young son, John, had died within a month of each other, not long after Phineas; and Thornes in every subsequent generation died young. The Bible and the family tree had nothing to say about murders or buried treasure, however.

• • •

I brought a few volumes of diaries upstairs that night to read in bed. Miss Mary had started keeping hers when she was just a girl, only nine, and the way she took care of John, her little brother, reminded me of Kitty. She wrote about him impatiently, complaining about how he pushed through the bushes to get to the blackberries and tore his new “frock,” the one she had just finished sewing. “He made me eat all the Ripest fruit, pushing them between my Lips. He stained my Collar with juice. He is a Naughty, Naughty little Love, and I am very Vex't with him.”

That sounded like Kitty complaining about me. She used to scrub my scraped knees with alcohol wipes. “Ow, Kitty! That stings!” I would wail, trying to twist away.

“Stand still! You're getting blood all over me. You'll get an infection if I don't clean that.”

“I don't care!”

“Well, I do. What if your legs fall off and I have to carry you everywhere? Stop crying! I was just kidding, your legs aren't really going to fall off, because you're going to stand still and let me finish. Anyway, I don't really mind carrying you, as long as it's not very far. If I sing you the nut tree song, will you stop howling?” And she would slap a Band-Aid on my knee, hug me impatiently and a little too hard, and sing my favorite nursery rhyme, the one about the nut tree and the princess and the golden pear.

“Thorne girls take good care of their siblings,” I told the air. “Listen to this.” I read the passage about the frock and the blackberries out loud. Kitty wasn't completely present right then—not present enough to understand the words—but I felt
something
, so I thought she might be nearby. She would probably get the gist.

I could have summoned her with the whistle, but I almost never did that nowadays. She came too often as it was. I had a feeling that the more I used the whistle, the thinner I would make the barrier between her world and mine. What if it wore away to nothing?

When I got to the later sections in Miss Mary's diary, though—the parts when she wrote about sailing to China on grown-up John's ship—I felt a presence much more sinister
than Kitty's or Windy's. The back of my neck prickled. It felt more like that second presence from the other night, the hard, oppressive presence that had chased Windy off.

“Who are you?” I asked the air.

Nobody answered.

“Go away, then!”

Nobody answered again. But nobody left, either.

“Okay, stay, then. Whatever. I'm a Thorne—you can't scare me. I belong here.”

I hoped it was true. It didn't really feel true, whatever Cousin Hepzibah said.

That night dreams chopped my sleep into a zillion pieces. I dreamed about severed hands and dead Thorne kids, about lost wills and storms at sea. That hard presence haunted all my dreams.

Fashion Advice

S
chool lunch on Friday was Mystery Stew, which was bad enough. Becky and Hannah Lee made it worse by pointing at my ankles. Looking down, I saw that the gap between my jeans hem and my shoes had widened to show way more sock than was considered proper in North Harbor society.

These were the last clothes I had left from Kitty. I remembered how much I hated having to wear Kitty's hand-me-downs when I was little. I wanted something new, something of my own, especially in colors that looked good on a pale blonde, not a rosy redhead. Then, after she died, her clothes were all I wanted to wear. They made me feel she was hugging me.

Hugging me pretty tightly, these days. I was taller now than she'd ever been, and the waistband was starting to pinch. I knew I'd been growing, but I hadn't realized it had gotten so bad. Spring might be on its way, but it was still far too cold out to just turn my jeans into cutoffs.

It's not that the snickering bothered
me
. But I worried what would happen if Becky and Hannah got Kitty riled up. She never liked it when people laughed at me, and I didn't think she would react too well to having her jeans mocked, either.

I was scanning the chaotic cafeteria for an empty seat far away from the snickerers when I heard my name. Dolores
Pereira waved me over to the table where she was sitting with her cousin Amanda.

“Ask her, Lola,” said Amanda, giggling.

“No, you ask her,” said Lola. “You're the one who wants to know.”

“Ask me about what?”

“Go on, Amanda!” said Lola.

“You've been hanging out with Cole Farley, right?” said Amanda.

“Uh, yeah. I guess,” I said.

“What's his family like? Is his brother as cute as he is?”

“I don't know. I haven't met his family,” I said.

“See? I told you,” said Lola to her cousin. “What do you think of Cole, though?” she asked me.

“He's okay. When he's not being obnoxious.”

“How's he obnoxious?” asked Amanda.

“He's always calling me names, for one thing.”

“I wish he would call
me
names,” said Amanda.

“I'm sure he'd be happy to. Want me to tell him?” I offered.

“What do you want him to call you? Amanda Panda? Amanda Banana?” Lola asked.

Amanda dissolved in giggles and buried her head in Lola's shoulder. When she recovered, she said, “Hey, I like your hair thing. Where'd you get it?”

I felt my head. I was wearing a hair clip with tatted lace that
Cousin Hepzibah had given me. I took it out and handed it to her. “My cousin. She made it for me.”

“Really? Who's your cousin? Does she go to school here?” asked Amanda.

I laughed. “No, she's, like, ninety years old!”

“That's really cool. Can I see it?” said Lola, taking the clip.

“Could she make me one?” asked Amanda.

“I can ask,” I said. “Or I could ask her to show me how.”

“If she teaches you, would you teach me?” asked Lola.

“Sure.” I put the clip back in my hair.

“You know who I think is
really
cute? Garvin Graves,” said Amanda.

Lola and I made faces.

“You're kidding!” I said.

Lola said, “Garvin
Graves
? He's
awful
!”

“How's he awful?”

“He's mean,” said Lola.

“You can be mean and still be cute,” said Amanda. “Look at those arms!”

“Stay away from those arms,” said Lola. “Hey, Sukie, did you figure out Ms. Pitch's extra-credit problem from yesterday?”

“No, I haven't really worked on it yet. Did you?”

She shook her head.

“What is it? Maybe I can figure it out,” said Amanda.

The problem was about strategies for winning the student-council elections in various scenarios, with different percentages of the vote required for avoiding a runoff. Lola and I worked on it together for a while, even though Amanda thought there was no point.

“Who cares? Hannah Lee's going to win no matter what,” she said.

The end-of-lunch warning bell rang, and we crumpled up our food wrappers. “Hey, can I ask you guys something? Are my pants too short?” I asked.

“Stand up,” said Lola. “Now turn around.” She shook her head regretfully. “Yeah, definitely too short.”

Amanda nodded. “Those are some serious high waters.”

“Thanks, I was afraid you'd say that.”

Too bad. I would have to spend what was left of my birthday money on new pants.

Still, it was nice to have someone who would tell me straight out, instead of just snickering behind my back. It felt almost like having friends.

• • •

We ran into Cole when we went to dump our trays in the trash. “Howdy, partners,” he said.

“Howdy to you too, Cole,” said Lola. “Hey, my cousin has a question for you.” She nudged Amanda.

Amanda giggled and fake-slapped her. “I do not!”

“Yes, she does. It's about your brother.”

“Jake? What about him?” asked Cole.

“Nothing,” said Amanda.

Lola said, “Amanda wanted to know, is he—”

Amanda jumped in quickly, talking over Lola. “I wanted to know, is he . . . um, is he on a sports team?”

“Yeah, he plays hockey. He's pretty good too. Why?”

“I don't know, I just . . .” Amanda looked like she wished she could die.

To spare her from having to answer, I said, “Are you athletic too, Cole? What about the rest of your family?”

Cole said, “My dad and my grandfather both played football in high school. And some of my ancestors way back were pretty good at sports—at least, they won races and stuff at church picnics. I don't think they had sports teams back then.”

“Wow—how do you know all that?” asked Amanda.

“My grandpa kept the ribbons they won. He loves that kind of thing, like history. He has a lot of old family letters. Most of them are just about boring stuff like who owes them money or what the pastor said at church. But some of the men were sailors, and their letters are pretty cool. They sailed all over the world, to China and India and places like that.”

Hannah and Becky came over with their sandwich wrappers. “Is this the new hot spot—the trash?” said Becky.

“That's right,” said Cole. “It's where everyone who's anyone dumps their trays.”

Becky glanced at my ankles again, but she didn't say anything out loud. Apparently there were some advantages to having Cole as a friend.