The Tale of Halcyon Crane (28 page)

“I know, I know,” Will said. “I should be back by now, but I’ve been caught up in something that’s going to take a while.”

“How are you feeling? How’s your head?”

“I’m fine. Just a headache and a dull one at that.”

We hung up after he promised to come for an early dinner. I looked around the kitchen, not knowing quite what to do. I called Mira at the Manitou Inn; I wanted to find out about her being the one to discover my dad’s overturned kayak the day we disappeared and thought perhaps we could get together and talk about it. No such luck. Her machine said she had gone to the mainland for a few days.

I rattled around the house for a while, wandering from kitchen to dining room to sunroom, but nothing felt quite right. I began to think about Will, and how he believed Iris’s stories sounded too fantastic to be true. She had to be embellishing or outright inventing past events, he said. But now, after his fall, I needed to know the truth. Was I imagining things or was there a ghost on this property that was inclined to push people down staircases . . .?

It hit me, then. Down staircases and
out of windows.

I
called the dogs and ran out the back door and into the wind, grabbing a thick cardigan that was hanging over a chair in the kitchen as I went past. I needed to get out of that house. My thoughts were swimming and I wanted to clear my head. I wrapped the sweater around me and made my way down the drive and onto the road, Tundra and Tika following close behind, dirt crunching under my shoes with each step.

Walking through the leafless, stark landscape, I knew only one thing for certain: I was faced with one of two highly undesirable prospects: uncovering some pretty ugly childhood memories in order to get to the bottom of these visions, or exorcising a trio of dead children from my house.

How had I found myself here, exactly? What would I be doing right now if I hadn’t received the letters from Will? Maybe I’d be sitting in my living room in Washington drinking tea and listening to the seals bark in Puget Sound. Maybe I’d be wandering through my favorite bookstore.

I walked on, my feet heading in an unknown direction. I was going somewhere, even as it began to mist, the spray wetting my face.

The sight of the island cemetery surprised me.
Of course
. I wanted some proof that what Iris was telling me was real, and it doesn’t get more real than gravestones with names and dates on them.

The black wrought-iron gate was rusted and weathered in spots, decaying with age. I swung it open and stepped inside, but the dogs stayed where they were, yowling in warning. I began to wander around, floating from one grave to the next, touching each headstone in reverence.

And then I found what I had been seeking. The sight of it brought me up short: a marble tombstone with the words madlyn hill crane,
1938–2009. Devoted daughter, wife, and mother.

I sat down on my mother’s grave, wondering why I hadn’t visited it before. “Hi, Mom,” I said out loud.

And then I leaned my head against her stone and cried, my tears mixing with the icy rain that began to fall. I don’t know how long I sat there—minutes, an hour maybe. But at some point the dogs’ barking pulled me back into the moment, and I knew I couldn’t sit on that sodden ground anymore.

That’s when I saw my own marker. halcyon hill crane,
1973–1979. Beloved child.

It takes your breath away, seeing your own tombstone. It hadn’t occurred to me before this moment, but of course I had one. Everyone thought I was dead. There had been a memorial service.

Next to my stone, my father’s: noah thomas crane,
1940–1979. Devoted husband and father.
So that’s where he came up with
Thomas
. I wondered where he got
James
.

I was standing on the Hill family plot, obviously, so I looked around at the neighboring gravestones and found them all. Hannah and Simeon. Sadie. Charles—who had died only a few years earlier—and Amelia. And then I saw the names of the three girls, Patience, Persephone, and Penelope. Their stone stark white, crumbling and ancient, almost a century old.

I sat down there, among my ancestors, feeling strangely at home. Thanks to Iris, I knew these people now. I had seen them all through her rich storytelling: Hannah, young and beautiful, when her children were born. Charles, toddling around as a baby, communing silently with animals, now lying only a few miles from where he grew up, having lived more than ninety years. My mother, whispering to her dead twin.

All the Hills had lived on the island; this was where they were born, grew up, and died. And now here I was among them. I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was part of a large family. Yes, they were all dead, but they were my people, my history, my roots. Even seeing my own gravestone there—I don’t know, it felt as though ultimately I knew where I would rest. I was home.

I stood up and looked around once more, knowing I’d return to tend these graves often. I might have stayed longer, but I knew it would be an unpleasant walk home in the cold rain.

When I finally walked through my back door, I found Will in the kitchen, phone in his hand. He looked at me, stunned,
and then said into the receiver: “Thanks, Jonah, but she just walked in. Sorry to have bothered you.” And then, to me: “Where in the
hell
have you been?”

My smile faltered. Except for Richard, when had a man been worried about me? I pushed my dripping hair out of my face and said, “I went for a walk.”

This was met with open-mouthed silence from Will. Finally, gesturing toward the window, he said, “In
this
?”

The dogs had followed me inside the warm kitchen and were shaking their fur dry as I took off the sodden sweater I was wearing; nothing smells quite like wet wool or wet dog. “Not the smartest decision I’ve ever made, although it wasn’t raining when I left. I got caught in it a few miles from the house.”

“I called everyone I could think of.” He was still standing with the phone in his hand. “Jonah, Henry, Mira, the grocery store. I even called the wine bar, wondering if you had ended up there. I couldn’t imagine where you had gone.” Then his arms were around me and I could feel his heart beating fast, like a bird’s. “I was so worried about you,” he murmured into my wet hair.

Suddenly I was freezing. Something about coming into the warm kitchen made me acutely aware of how awfully cold I had been.

“You’re shivering,” he said to me, pulling back from our embrace. “My God, your lips are blue. They’re actually blue.”

He looked at me for a moment, and I could tell he was running through various scenarios of what to do. First he poured a brandy and handed it to me. It tasted hot and spicy
on the way down, warming me from the inside. “Right,” he said then, leading me out of the kitchen. “Let’s get you upstairs and into the tub.”

As he drew a bath, I peeled off my sodden clothes. They smelled of peat and rain and centuries-old dirt. Maybe I’d just throw them away. I left them in a heap on the bathroom floor, climbed into the steaming water, and submerged. I felt safe and protected there, with the sound of the water rushing in my ears.

It wasn’t until later, when Will and I were back in the kitchen eating dinner, that he asked me where I had gone. “I know you’re a grown woman, but I was really worried when I got here and found you weren’t home,” he admitted. “After last night, I half expected to find you in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.”

“Or lying under the third-floor window.”

He looked at me. “Well. That’s an interesting thing to say.”

I twirled some noodles around my fork and considered how to continue the line of discussion I had just started. I hadn’t even worked it out in my own head.

Will jumped into the silence. “Are you saying you think that Julie Sutton’s death thirty years ago is connected to what happened to me last night?”

“I’m not sure what I think—about anything.”

“
Anything
?” He poked me with his fork.

I poked him back. “Okay, you I’m sure of.” I smiled. “Everything else is up in the air. But the thing is, whether
they’re fabrications or embellishments or outright lies, Iris told me her cousin was pushed or somehow driven off the cliff—she died, by the way. And my grandmother, Amelia, had several suspicious falls when she was pregnant. She lost two babies, Will!”

The ideas were jelling, becoming more real as I spoke them.

“Then, thirty years ago, we have the death of a child here in the house from being pushed or thrown out of a window. And now, you are pushed—or simply fall—down the stairs. Either we’ve got an epidemic of clumsiness around here or something else is going on.”

“What’s the something else?” he wanted to know.

Even as I said this I felt like an idiot, but it had to be said. “A ghost who likes to push people to their deaths.”

We ate in silence for a few minutes, digesting, no doubt, the ridiculousness of the conversation we had been having. Then Will said, “Listen. You know how I feel about all this ghost business, but what would be the harm in calling a priest to come here?”

“No harm at all,” I said. “A blessing on my new house. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

More silence.

“I was thinking of going at this another way,” I started. “Maybe we should get a medium.”

Will raised his eyebrows, as he took a bite off his fork. “Seriously, Will, this is what these people do for a living—contacting the dead. Maybe we could find out if there’s a ghost here and, if so, who it is.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What’s the difference between a priest exorcizing the house and a medium doing it?”

Will considered this. “Aside from the authority behind the priest, not much, I guess. I’m still not sure this all doesn’t have some sort of reasonable explanation. But whatever you want to do, I’ll support you.”

I squeezed his hand. “I want to get this ball rolling soon. Like tomorrow.”

He nodded. “Whatever you want.”

I stood up and began to nose around the kitchen. “Do mediums advertise in the phone book? Do I even
have
a phone book for the mainland?”

“Don’t need one,” he said, smiling. “I know a medium. And so do you.”

“If you tell me it’s you, I’ll hit you very hard.”

Will laughed. “No, you dope. Not me. It’s Mira.”

I stared at him, wondering if he was telling the truth. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

He shook his head. “As I live and breathe. I don’t know if she’s on the level or not, but Mira bills herself as a—what does she call it?—a
sensitive
.” As he said the word, he elon-gated the syllables and raised his eyebrows in mock fear. I laughed.

“It’s true. She has a little cottage business in tourist season doing tarot card readings and giving walking tours of haunted spots on the island. It’s quite popular, actually.

People tend to get a sort of haunted-house vibe when they come to the island. Mira plays into that.”

“But does she really have any ability at all—beyond the nose for a good business opportunity, I mean?”

“That’s what I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve always thought she was sort of loopy. But at least she’d be a good place to start, if you want to go down that road.”

We cleaned up the kitchen and headed upstairs. For now, we had other important things to attend to.

W
hat does a girl wear for a séance: Jeans? A dress? Beads? In the end, I supposed the spirits wouldn’t care one way or the other, so I pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater and trotted downstairs to join Will in the living room, where he was waiting for me with wine and cheese and some other snacks.

I had called Mira that morning, and after a bit of catching up about her recent trip to the mainland I just dove right in. “Listen, Mira,” I said. “I understand you are something of a—Well, I guess what I’m trying to say is, you’ve got the reputation for—”

“Being a medium?” She interrupted me, laughing.

I sighed. “Well, yes. I heard it from Will.”

“I see,” she said. “It’s true, actually. I do possess a certain sensitivity.” Her just saying the word made me stifle a laugh. “Why do you ask?”

I took a deep breath. I was really going to say this out loud now. I blurted it all out in one quick stream. “I’m asking because I think I might have a ghost in this house and I’d like to find out for sure and, if so, get rid of it.”

Mira didn’t say anything for a moment, and I was wondering if she was thinking I was as much of an idiot as I felt like, right then. But she wasn’t. She said, “You know, I’ve always felt a certain presence in that house. I would say there’s little doubt you’ve got a spirit or two floating around.”

“Can you come over to check it out?” I asked her.

“You bet I can. What time do you want me?”

We decided that she would come for dinner that night, because I wanted Will at the house with me when whatever was going to happen happened.

After I hung up, Will trotted off to work, giving me strict orders either to stay home or, if I needed to go out, to call him and he’d come by and get me with Belle. I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes when I heard a rattling at the back door. Iris.