A Sound Among the Trees (8 page)

Adelaide remembered asking her great-grandmother how she knew there were echoes rippling in the house—she had been eight—because she had listened for the echoes and had heard only silence inside and woodpeckers outside. Susannah had said a house is meant to be a place of safety and
refuge, not a place for spilled blood and lies and broken promises. Adelaide could still recall, even eighty-some years later, the images that filled her head as she tried to hear those echoes of violence and lies and broken promises. She had bad dreams for several nights afterward, and she might have had worse nightmares had Susannah expounded, but her grandmother Annabel had stepped into the parlor at that moment and told Susannah not to tell Adelaide any more stories like that, that it was Susannah’s fault the notion that the house was cursed perpetuated year after year and for pity’s sake to stop it. Before she was hushed a second time, her great-grandmother had told Adelaide to listen carefully and she would hear them, the echoes, and that only the women of Holly Oak could hear them. And when Adelaide asked her in a whisper if it was true that she had been a spy—gossip at school and on the streets was that she had been—Susannah told Adelaide to let the house tell her if she had been a spy or not.

The parlor became the center of the house’s mystery after that day, since Adelaide’s great-grandmother passed away a few months later, having never mentioned the echoes again, and her grandmother and mother would not discuss it. But Adelaide began to sense the rippling effect of time crumpled in on itself—echoes perhaps—the year her father died, and again much later when her husband Charles died, and again when dementia swallowed up her mother, all amid the whispered consensus of local gossipers and rumormongers that Holly Oak’s women were cursed because of what happened in the war. Because of what Susannah Page did.

And didn’t do.

In her adult years Adelaide found a stack of her great-grandmother’s letters to her cousin Eleanor Towsley of Maine shoved to the back of Annabel’s escritoire, written in the early years of the Civil War and returned to Susannah by a family member upon Eleanor’s death in 1920. But Susannah’s letters portrayed her as merely a young woman in love with a man who happened to be a Union Army scout. Eliza Pembroke, Susannah’s aunt, was the one accused of Union loyalties. Adelaide didn’t know where
the letters were now. She’d given them to Caroline when her daughter was sixteen. Likely as not, Caroline had carelessly tossed them in the trash or sold them for drug money. Caroline hadn’t believed that the house still echoed with reverberations from the past. Caroline hadn’t believed in much of anything.

Adelaide shared her great-grandmother’s stories of crippling echoes and Holly Oak’s strange fascination with its women with her good friend Pearl decades later, to her utter regret. It wasn’t long after that that Pearl, as a self-proclaimed favor to Adelaide, asked her so-called clairvoyant cousin Eldora Meeks to verify the existence of ghostly activity.

That had been a mistake. The woman knew nothing about houses. Eldora Meeks may or may not have the ability to talk to spirits, but she surely had no gift for talking to houses. Yet Pearl passed the story of her cousin’s unsubstantiated discovery of the ghost of Susannah Page to anyone with the slightest interest, despite Adelaide’s persistent requests that she shut up about it. Susannah Page didn’t haunt the halls.

Undeterred, Pearl had told Adelaide that sooner or later someone was going to have to make peace with Susannah’s ghost.

And Adelaide had said that was proof enough that Eldora hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about.

There was no peace to be made with Susannah. Susannah wasn’t the one at war.

Adelaide now set the cut pieces of the frock coat on a third chair and folded the wool. She spread out the green silk lining and reached for her pin cushion. She heard the kitchen door open and close again. Marielle had come back inside.

The doorbell rang, and Adelaide stood motionless for a moment. It was early, only a little after nine. Too early for even the Blue-Haired Old Ladies to make a social call. She listened as Marielle opened the door, heard a man’s voice say he had a package for a Mr. Carson Bishop, heard Marielle say that she could sign for it; she was his wife.

Adelaide went back to pinning the weightless length of silk, glad that Pearl or Maxine or Deloris hadn’t decided to stop in. The Blue-Haired Old Ladies were making stops at Holly Oak even after the other neighborly welcomes had ceased. Pearl had been by just the day before to visit for a spell in the kitchen and invite Marielle to lunch the following week.

And just as Adelaide had predicted, Pearl’s reaction to finding out Carson and Marielle were sleeping in Susannah Page’s bedroom had been swift and animated.

“Oh dearie, are you sure that’s wise?” Pearl had said to Marielle. “I mean, of all the bedrooms,
that
one?”

To which Marielle had replied, “But nothing happened in that room. Right?”

Adelaide had patted Marielle’s hand. “Nothing happened in that room.”

Pearl had leaned forward in her chair, vigorous concern multiplying the wrinkles around her eyes. “She
slept
in there, Marielle.”

“What difference does that make?” Adelaide had said.

“Well, where do you think her ghost would feel most comfortable? Where do you think her ghost would want to be?” Pearl replied. “Wouldn’t she want to be in her own bedroom?”

Adelaide reached for her teacup. “To do what? Sleep? I wasn’t aware that ghosts needed sleep.”

Pearl loudly clucked her tongue. “That is my point exactly! Carson and Marielle are sleeping in a room occupied by a ghost who doesn’t sleep!” Pearl turned to Marielle. “You really should consider moving into a different bedroom.”

“That’s enough, Pearl.” Adelaide had taken a sip of her tea and replaced the cup. Pearl clamped her mouth shut. And Marielle offered to refresh all their teacups.

After Pearl left, Marielle hadn’t asked Adelaide for any more information about Susannah or the room she was sleeping in except to say that
Pearl was nothing if not insistent. And Adelaide had reassured her that Pearl’s imagination had always been hanging on one hinge and to pay her no mind. But Marielle’s mood seemed thoughtful the rest of the day, brooding almost. Pearl’s persistence that Susannah was an unhappy ghost traipsing about Holly Oak had obviously unnerved her. Adelaide had wondered if Marielle told Carson about Pearl’s visit and warnings. But since Carson hadn’t said anything, not even a gentle request that Adelaide tell Pearl to mind her own business, she assumed she had not.

Adelaide felt a kink in her back from bending over the table, and she stood and stretched carefully. Another cup of tea would be nice. She opened the door of the parlor and took a step toward the kitchen but stopped when she saw Marielle standing statue-still, looking at the family photographs that lined the lower half of the staircase. She stood on the third step, her arms crossed loosely in front of her, unaware that Adelaide had opened the parlor door and now watched her. Adelaide took a step back, wanting to silently close the door and pretend she never had the thought to get another cup of tea. But she couldn’t take her eyes off Marielle as the young woman’s gaze traveled the wall, resting first on the sepia-toned portrait of Susannah Page seated with her young daughter, Annabel, standing next to her, then Annabel’s wedding portrait, and then Adelaide in her mother’s arms with her christening dress flowing over her mother’s skirt, then her father wearing his army uniform. Then Adelaide’s engagement photo, Caroline as a child on a tricycle, Caroline’s senior portrait, Sara in a prom dress, and then Sara in front of her studio with baby Brette in her arms and Hudson embracing her from behind.

Marielle studied the wall from the bend in the stairs at the landing where the first portrait hung to the bottom stair where the gallery ended with Sara and the children. Then she lifted her head to start at the top again, her neck slowly guiding her gaze down the wall of photographs.

Adelaide pushed the door closed without a sound, the hankering for another cup of tea dismissed.

arielle sat on the floor of Brette’s room, an eruption of Barbie dresses blooming in her lap. Brette sat next to her, tugging at a tiny pink warmup suit on a flaxen-haired doll. The roar of the air conditioner pushing cooled air into the room muted the other sounds in the house; Marielle would not hear Carson come home from work unless she opened the bedroom door or the A/C switched off, which was highly improbable.

She had been warned about Virginia heat in June. Two college friends back in Phoenix—East Coast transplants, both of them—had warned her at her bridal shower with knowing looks and clublike solidarity that she hadn’t felt heat until she lived through a humid Southeast summer.

Marielle had reminded them that it’s usually 115 degrees in Phoenix on any day in the summer, and the two friends had just laughed.

“You don’t know what you’re in for, hon,” one of them had said. And the other had nodded empathetically.

Marielle now gently moved the dresses off her lap and stood.

“Where are you going?” Brette said, her face at once morphing into worry.

“Just opening the door so we can hear when Daddy comes home.”

“I don’t want Hudson coming in.”

Marielle walked over to the door and opened it. “I don’t think he will.” She could hear the sounds of the TV two floors down in the family room. SpongeBob turned up too loud.

She came back to the rug and retook her spot, pulling her cell phone out of her pocket as she sat down and setting it where she could see its windowed face. If Carson called to say he would be late, which she was learning happened a lot, she didn’t want to fumble in her pocket for the phone and miss talking to him.

She missed their phone conversations. For the first three months of their relationship, the phone had been their sole tether to each other. They spent an hour or more every night talking across a span of miles that didn’t separate them anymore. He hardly ever called her now. Of course, he wouldn’t. Why would he? They weren’t dating. They were married. They lived in the same house. They talked face to face every day, but somehow it was different.

It had been three weeks since she and Carson and the children had returned from the family honeymoon at Disney World, and it needled her that she was instantly aware of how long it had been. Marielle had expected some transitional stress with the move, the marriage, and instant motherhood. She wasn’t naive. Her mother had warned her she would probably have it; so had her matron of honor, Jill, and just about everybody back in Arizona—as if she didn’t know there might be some tough days, especially since she was moving into a house which didn’t require a towel, a fork, or even so much as a light bulb from her apartment in Phoenix.

Chad had been right about toasters and Crock-Pots. Holly Oak already had those. Holly Oak already had everything.

All it really needed was a wife and mother—roles it was used to having but which she barely understood. She got that. There would be some transitional stress.

But no one could have prepared her for the oddities of living in a house with so profound a past. Photographs of Holly Oak’s former and current residents lined the halls. Downstairs, sepia-toned portraits of Mona Lisa–faced women in full skirts, uniformed men with handlebar mustaches, a child in a christening gown, black-and-white wedding photos, and high
school senior pictures and babies and prom photos—they covered the walls like curious spectators. Carson had taken down a few of Sara’s photos, but he asked to leave up a couple for the sake of the children. How could she say no to that? She didn’t. He removed his old engagement and wedding photos, but he’d left the eight by ten of Sara sitting on the step in front of her studio with Brette in her arms, fat-cheeked and diapered, and Hudson hanging over her back, his arms necklaced around her. It hung next to the third stair, between baby pictures of Hudson and Brette. And Marielle walked past it all the time.

No one had any prenuptial advice about how to walk past a photo gallery like that every day.

And no one had advice on how to put away dishes that Adelaide had been using in the kitchen for decades or how to buy a different kind of detergent than what was on the laundry room shelf or how to handle the rumor that the house was haunted by a ghost, that dead Yankees had been buried in its cellar, and that there may or may not be a curse, depending on who you talked to.

Driving the children to and from school, attending their end-of-year art shows and soccer games, and familiarizing herself with what they liked and didn’t like had filled her days when they first returned from Florida. And so had the neighborly visits. But now school was out. It was the middle of June and the visits had stopped. The summer months stretched ahead of her like a thorny chore she was unprepared to touch. And the oppressive heat outside seemed to confirm that she was no match for the weeks that lay ahead.

She had been stupid to think she wouldn’t need a job right away; some outside task to give her life meaning beyond dishes, ghosts, and making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for two kids she barely knew and yet felt constrained to love.