Mothman's Curse (4 page)

Dad noticed anyway. He gestured to the room. “Go on and have a look around. You see something you can't live without, let me know.”

“Really?” I blurted, surprised at the change in protocol.

“John's lawyer gave me the option to keep some pieces as partial payment; the profits from the auction are earmarked for a local charity. But be respectful. I'm asking you to keep this to yourselves until I decide when and how to announce the sale and the name of the deceased. Are we clear?”

We nodded.

“I'll leave you to it, then.”

I gave his hand a final squeeze before letting go. He smiled and kissed the top of my head, then ambled back out to the auction floor.

I didn't know where to look first. Larger pieces crowded the fringes of the room: hand-carved furniture, Persian rugs, brass lamps, brooding portraits in gilded frames, silver candelabras, and velvet chairs. Tables held the smaller bits and pieces of the Goodriches' lives: mountains of books, wooden pipes, car parts, watches, photographs, five sets of golf clubs, record albums, musty clothes, stacks of old newspapers and magazines, old TVs and radios, and hundreds of tools. The storeroom was almost always full of stuff, but I'd never seen it so truly
packed
from one end to the other.

Fox had already wandered farther in. I hoped he remembered we were here for information, not to add to his personal collection. Fox collected anything he deemed cool or valuable, or both. His room was filled with old maps and globes, tin toys, printer's blocks, and sports memorabilia. It was like a shrine of auction leftovers, a monument to all his best finds.

And don't get me started on the rest of our house. Momma was a pack rat her whole life, and when Aunt Barb moved in, we found out that she was even worse. Aunt Barb was famous for the phrase “That's a perfectly good (fill in the blank).” Like, “That's a perfectly good piece of used tinfoil,” or “That's a perfectly good headless Barbie doll.”

I made sure my room was just the opposite. Our family saw firsthand all the stuff people collected over a lifetime, only to have it sold to the highest bidder once they were gone. I didn't see the point. I didn't want piles of belongings for people to fight over when it was my time to go.

Jewelry was my one exception. Momma left me her grandmother's cameo brooch, a pretty piece carved in coral and ox bone. I wore it on a chain around my neck. I'd been hooked on vintage jewelry ever since, and it was the first thing to grab my attention in the storeroom. I lingered over a tray of cocktail rings, admiring a setting done in onyx and marcasite.

As I slipped the ring on my finger, my eye settled on something farther down the table, a glimpse of antennae and pincers and shiny black shells. I stepped closer. It was a grouping of black-framed shadow boxes, each one containing a collection of pinned bugs—beetles, butterflies—and one with all different sizes and shapes of moths. “Yuck,” I whispered at the sight of the spindly legs and brittle bodies. My stomach turned. My skin prickled as if I had ants scurrying up and down my arms. Still, I couldn't seem to look away. I reached out, cautious, my hand not quite steady, fingers poised to pick one up.

“Josie?” Fox said inches from my ear, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. My fingers bumped the stacked shadow boxes and sent them skidding off the table. I grabbed at them to keep them from clattering to the floor.

Fox stood beside me with an open photo album in his hands, his mouth a tight line. “It's him. John Goodrich.”

Sure enough, there stood our mystery man. He was much younger, dressed in a tuxedo and standing next to a woman in a wedding dress, but it was definitely him. I took the album and flipped through it page by page. The man appeared in different clothing and different places, always looking pleasant enough, even smiling sometimes. But toward the end, as the styles hit full-on leisure suits, double-wide ties, and sideburns, his expression grew more serious, his eyes more solemn, until, in the very last photo, he looked just the same as he did in our Polaroids, right down to the identical suit and tie.

I clutched the album tighter. I had pretended for Mason's sake that we couldn't possibly be dealing with a ghost. But a knot of worry had settled in my chest, and I could still see fear in Fox's eyes. We both knew the truth, but it seemed easier to keep pretending. I cleared my throat. “So, this picture must be the one he used to rig the camera somehow,” I said. “Why would he do it? He doesn't seem like the practical-joker type.”

Fox reached out and plucked the picture from the album. He flipped it over and found something written on the back. “It's dated April 18, 1975. The day before the landslide.”

“The day before his wife died,” I said.

I suddenly felt guilty for poking through this man's belongings. But I swallowed the guilt, handed the album back, and went back to searching. There had to be an answer, a reason Goodrich was haunting those Polaroids.

Fox took one half of the room; I took the other. I wandered up and down the rows, gathering a box of promising items for later inspection.

When we were finished, I had two photo albums, five handwritten journals, and the marcasite ring—because it was pretty and because I knew I could talk Dad into letting me keep it. Fox chose a bundle of maps and papers, a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, and another Polaroid camera about a decade older than the one we'd bought. He'd also picked up a clunky clock radio for Mason to dismantle, knowing Dad would approve. Giving the kid old radios and computer parts kept our curious little brother from taking apart anything valuable.

Dad reappeared, clothes rumpled and dusty from the busy morning. “You about done in here?”

We nodded, trying not to draw attention to our odd array of keepsakes, but Dad's sharp eyes raked over every last item. “You want their old letters and papers? Are you really that curious about these folks?”

We nodded again.

“I'm not sure I'm comfortable with my kids poking around in these people's business. Didn't you find anything else you wanted?” I held out my hand, the ring nestled in my palm. Fox displayed the camera and clock radio. Still, Dad hesitated. “You will not sell these. You will not share them with your friends. I want your word now. These were real people who suffered a real tragedy. I trust you to do the right thing.”

“We promise.”

“Let's go, then, so I can lock up. You two are the oddest ducks I've ever met.” We clutched our treasures tighter in case he changed his mind.

“What will happen to the house?” Fox said.

“The lawyer has asked me to auction that as well. I have to go over there this week to clear out a few last items, have an inspector look at the property—the usual.” He saw our faces light up and stopped us in a hurry. “And no, you may not come with me. I think I've been generous enough for one day.”

“Yes, Dad,” we said, knowing full well that within the hour we'd start pleading our case to go with him. Sure enough, as soon as Dad walked away, Fox turned to me with fire in his eyes. “We're going.” And I knew, because Fox had set his mind to it, that it would be so.

*   *   *

Before we could regroup at the Cave with our finds, Aunt Barb found me and gave me a mountain of laundry to fold, and then I had to help with dinner.

Officially, Aunt Barb and Uncle Bill were living in the apartment above the garage just until we got back on our feet after Momma died. Unofficially, they made sure the bills got paid and the family got fed and all those other pesky details that sometimes slipped Dad's mind.

I had no intention of letting them leave, ever.

Aunt Barb fit right into the Fletcher family. Like Momma, she was loud with a capital
L
. She laughed loud; she talked loud. Her clothes were loud. She and Momma both had wild red hair that curled any which way it pleased. They always used to love bickering about who was the better cook. And next to our mom, Aunt Barb was the kindest, funniest lady in all of Athens County.

Any other night Fox and I would be savoring every last bite of her blue-ribbon cooking. But that night we had bigger fish to fry. While we concentrated on inhaling our food as quickly as possible, Mason kept staring at Fox and me from across the table. His sneakers thumped against the chair legs as he ate, a sure sign that the day had been too much, too exciting and full, and he was ready to burst from it all. But other than spilling his milk and showing us mouthfuls of chewed food just for the shock value, he kept his wits enough not to bring up the camera or any of the day's strange events.

Dad gave us a few odd looks, too. I tried to smile innocently around bites of chicken lasagna. Uncle Bill said very little, as usual, so Aunt Barb filled the silence with the latest town gossip she'd traded that morning, like how Sue Ann what's-her-name had some “work done” and how long Abe Simmons had been out of a job and whether anyone would ever hire such a layabout anyhow.

Fox had dish duty that night. I told him to meet me in my room when he was done, glad for the chance to be alone with my tangled thoughts. Mason ran off to “fix” the radio Fox had scrounged for him.

I fanned the Goodrich albums and journals out on the bed, then sat down in the middle of them and opened a photo album with
John
+
Nora
embossed in gold on the front cover. I lingered over photographs of them standing on the Great Wall of China, kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower, and walking hand in hand along a white-sand beach. They looked happy and normal.

So they loved to travel. They had a ton of money. They probably could have lived anywhere they wanted. Why stay in Clark, Ohio? I set the album aside and reached for one of the journals.

The first one looked like a record of financial transactions. Columns and columns of numbers filled the pages, organized by month and year and sprinkled with words like
net
,
gross
,
profit/loss
, and
interest accrued
. By page three, I'd nearly gone cross-eyed from boredom. Impatient, I skimmed the second book and found it was more of the same.

I made myself read every page, but the figures were starting to blur by the time Fox knocked and opened the door a crack to peek in. “Josie? What are you doing?”

I nodded at the journal in my hand.

“Anything interesting?” he said as he entered, his arms full of maps and papers.

“Just financial stuff so far.”

He held up the scrapbook of newspaper clippings he'd found. “Check this out. There are a handful of articles about the landslide, but the rest are about other disasters, most of them in Ohio and West Virginia.” He set the open book on the bed. I shivered as I paged through it and saw what he meant. Headlines shouted up at me, describing car crashes and train derailments, freak storms and fires.

“About half of them are dated before the landslide,” Fox said. “The rest are after. Talk about a creepy hobby.”

Half-formed ideas spilled out as I tried to work through what we knew. “So a man obsessed with disasters survives a horrible landslide that wiped out his whole town. Instead of moving away, he stays there for forty years, surrounded by reminders of the tragedy every single day. That doesn't sound like someone trying to forget.” I pointed at the scrapbook. “He collected articles about it. That's so messed up. Do you think … Is there any chance…?”

“You think he had something to do with the landslide?” Fox said. “How? Why? His wife died, Josie.”

“I know. It's just such a crazy coincidence. Did you find anything else?”

He lifted the stack of papers and maps he'd claimed from the storeroom. “We still have all these to go through.”

I sighed. Research wasn't as exciting as I'd expected, and it had been too long of a day to sift through endless papers in search of clues that might not even exist.

I really did want to know who John Goodrich was, why he'd fallen into our lives this way. But I also worried that the more we learned, the more we wouldn't like what we found.

“Oh, I also checked out that other camera,” Fox said.

“And?”

He answered by taking a stack of Polaroids from his pile of research and tossing them at me. “See for yourself.”

“You're kidding.” There were photos of his bedroom, the kitchen, the hallway, the backyard. Our friend Mr. Goodrich stared, sad-eyed, from every last one of them. “These are all from the
second
camera?”

“Uh-huh.”

“This is nuts.” Suddenly I felt wrung out. My head ached. My eyes were gritty and sore. I needed normal for a little while.

I shooed Fox out, confident he would spend hours poring over his pile of research and fill me in on any new developments when he was ready. I changed into my pink plaid pajamas and went downstairs to watch TV. Dad was already watching a basketball game, so I snuggled up next to him on the couch, trying to cheer in all the right places. Aunt Barb was on the phone with some person who somehow hadn't heard about Sue Ann what's-her-name. Leaning farther into the curve of Dad's shoulder, I let the sound of Aunt Barb's voice wash over me. She sounded so much like Momma it made my heart squeeze. But I felt lucky, too, glad to have my family right there close.

When I felt myself nodding off around nine o'clock, I said good-night and went up to bed, trying not to think about our unsettling day. I kissed the framed picture of Momma on my bedside table. I heard Mason still awake, arguing for a later bedtime, Aunt Barb starting a load of laundry, Dad making something in the microwave. Slowly, the noises faded and the house fell quiet, but I couldn't fall asleep. My thoughts kept circling back to John Goodrich staring out of those photographs, lips moving—like he was trying to get our attention.

I wished I hadn't stashed the Polaroids in my bedroom. Their presence felt like a pebble in a shoe, a black smudge on my tidy room. I curled up under the blankets, trying to make myself as small as possible, but the presence only grew, thick and heavy and impossible to ignore.