The House on Tradd Street (42 page)

Jack faced me, his skin a little pale. “I got the distinct impression last night that there were two people in the house with you—somebody who was trying to hurt you and a woman who was trying to protect you. It was almost as if once the woman asserted her presence, the other one fled.”

I chewed on my lower lip, waiting for the inevitable question.

“So tell me, Melanie”—he took a deep breath and then looked steadily into my eyes—“is your house haunted?”

“Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to just believe that you imagined all that and everything had a logical explanation?”

“Yeah, that would be easier. But it wouldn’t be the truth, would it?”

“I don’t—”

“Melanie, what are you afraid of? That I’ll laugh at you? I won’t, you know. Wouldn’t even occur to me. I actually think it’s a pretty amazing gift.” He paused for a moment. When I didn’t say anything, he asked again, “Your house is haunted, isn’t it?”

Slowly, I nodded. Without meeting his eyes, I said, “There’re three more prominent ghosts in the house—a woman and a little boy, and a man who is wholly evil. I’m pretty sure the woman and the boy are Louisa and Nevin, but I don’t know who the man is. I keep thinking that maybe he’s Robert Vanderhorst, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. Robert was taller, and Louisa loved him. She wouldn’t have loved somebody evil.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “And you know all this because you see dead people.”

I looked away, toward the house, noticing as if for the first time its graceful lines and symmetrical perfection, and I felt a small stab of what I could only call pride.
It’s a piece of history you can hold in your hands.
I sighed, knowing I would tell Jack the truth. He wouldn’t laugh at me because he thought what I had was an amazing gift, and the thought made me smile. “Yes, Jack. I do. I always have. Ever since I was a little girl.”

He just nodded and stared out of the windshield for a long moment. “Do you think you could just ask Louisa about the diamonds?”

I laughed, but with my smoke-roughened voice, it sounded more like a bark. He looked at me with a worried frown. “It just doesn’t work that way, Jack. Honestly, I wish it did. Because I could just ask these people why they keep following me around and be done with it already.”

“Must get annoying.” He gave me a crooked grin.

“Yeah, sometimes.” My own grin softly faded. “Mostly I can ignore them. But not when I’m living in a house with them.” I looked down at my hands, recalling something my mother had once told me. “It’s a blessing. And a curse. I can’t help all of them, because with each one I listen to, each one I help, it takes a little something from me.” I looked into his eyes and saw only interest, not the ridicule or disbelief that I’d grown used to.

“Do they ever scare you?”

I remembered the weeks following my grandmother’s death when my mother and I lived in the house on Legare, and dark shadow people began appearing as suddenly as a November storm. I had thought at the time that they were relegated to my nighttime dreams, until my mother woke me in the middle of the night and took me out to my grandmother’s garden and told me that she saw them, too. And that they weren’t there to ask for my help; they were there to make me one of them. That was when she’d told me that I was stronger than them, and that if I repeated it often enough, I would begin to believe it.

“Yes,” I said. “Sometimes they do.”

“Like that guy in there.”

I nodded, then looked away toward the house again and knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. “Emily loved you, Jack. She never stopped.” I listened at his sharp intake of breath but couldn’t bring myself to look at him.

“You’ve . . . seen her?”

“A few times, always around you. That’s how I figured out at first that it wasn’t Louisa. She . . . she wanted me to tell you that she only left because she loved you. And that she loves you still.”

I watched as he swallowed and turned away. “Did she tell you why?”

“No. I found that out on my own. When your mother told me that Emily had moved north to New York, I had a suspicion. So I made a few phone calls.”

He faced me, his eyes meeting mine, and his face looked like the ones you see on TV of survivors interviewed following some unforeseeable calamity.

“The Mayo Clinic is in Rochester, New York.” I stopped for a moment to let that sink in, but his face remained impassive. “I found out from her boss at the paper that Emily had a cousin who lived near Rochester, and that’s where Emily went after she left Charleston.” I was quiet for a moment. “Her cousin told me that Emily had lymphoma, Jack. By the time her doctors here discovered it, it had already spread inside of her. She went to the Mayo Clinic to see if she could participate in a few clinical trials or investigational treatments.” I reached for his hand and felt how cold it was. “There was nothing they could do for her. I’m pretty sure after her original diagnosis she knew she wasn’t going to make it, which is why she left you so badly. She didn’t want you to suffer, so she tried to make you hate her.” I fought back my own sob as I thought of my mother and how I’d never been able to get over losing her. “Hate’s a lot easier to get over than love.”

He kept his gaze focused on the windshield, a vacant stare seeing something I couldn’t. “I did my own research and found out about the cousin in Rochester. That was about the week after she left when I was still so angry. And then I realized that I didn’t want to know where she was. She didn’t want me anymore, so it didn’t make any difference whether she was here in Charleston or someplace else. There was only so much humiliation I could take. It just didn’t occur to me that she could be . . .” He squeezed the steering wheel so tightly that it made his knuckles turn white, and then he let his hands drop to his sides. “Do you know where she’s buried?”

I shook my head. “I don’t. But I could find out if you like.”

“Maybe later.” Jack sat absolutely still, as if by moving he would shatter into tiny pieces. I knew that feeling, so I did the only thing I could—knew it because it was the one thing I missed the most after my mother left. I reached for him and held him in my arms as his body shook with unshed tears. I couldn’t take the pain away, but maybe in the sharing of it, I could at least help him begin to heal.

I
left Jack in the car, unsure what he would do next but knowing he wanted to be alone. He’d brought my purse to me at the hospital, so I dug to the bottom for my house keys, then stood in front of the door for a full five minutes before finding the courage to unlock it and step inside.

The acrid smell from the electrical fire hung heavy in the air, soot and dust covering the flat surfaces like an explosion of ash. Footprints had beaten paths through the grit on the floor, calling to mind the footprints of history that had marched across this same floor, and the thought made me smile. It wasn’t that long ago that I would have only seen the dirt and the expense involved in hiring extra people to help Mrs. Houlihan in the cleanup. I frowned, realizing that I still needed to do that, but that the money would most likely have to come from my own pocket for now.

I stood in the middle of the foyer and looked up the graceful stairway to the large chandelier hanging above the two stories. “I’m glad you’re all right,” I said quietly to the house, feeling something thick and heavy in the pit of my stomach as it dawned on me how very close I’d come to losing all of it.

“Me, too,” said Jack from behind, and I whirled to face him. “I’m glad you’re all right,” he repeated.

The color had returned to his face and a little of the sparkle in his eyes, too. I smiled tentatively at him. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you for last night.”

“I get that a lot,” he said, the old familiar grin splitting his face.

I punched him gently on his shoulder. “For saving my life,” I said. “Thank you.”

“I’m glad I could help.” His face sobered as he narrowed his gaze, making me want to step back from the intensity of his eyes. “But I need to thank you, too. In a way, you’ve saved my life, too.” He paused, his eyes seeming to darken as he peered at me. “I’ve always listened to family members of missing people talk about how not knowing is almost worse than knowing the truth, and I never believed them. I do now.” He rubbed his hands over his face, bristling the hair around his forehead, giving him a look of vulnerability that I’d never seen before on him. It warmed me, seeing this softness in him, but I realized I could never let him know.

Jack continued. “It’s sort of . . . freeing in a way. Like I’ve finally been given the go-ahead to grieve and to move on.” He looked at me oddly. “It was strange, hearing you tell me something I must have already known. Like my mind had accepted it long ago, and I’d already gone through the five steps of grieving—but I needed to hear it from somebody else before I could give myself permission to move on with my life.”

“Good,” I said, smiling up at him. “I’m glad I could help.”

He stepped a little closer. With a low voice, he said, “The whole time I was sitting in my car, with all of this going through my mind, I couldn’t help but think about how your eyes turn from hazel to green when you’re annoyed—which happens a lot. Or excited—which doesn’t happen enough.”

A slow, steady curl of heat unfurled in my stomach, washing into the rest of my bloodstream like a wave heading onshore. Without even realizing what I was doing, I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, waiting to taste his lips again and wondering if it could even be better than when he was giving me mouth-to-mouth.

A loud cracking noise followed by the sound of wood slapping against wood brought my eyes full open in time to see Jack’s eyes up close and in a similar state of surprise.

“What the . . . ?” Jack grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the drawing room, where the noise had come from. There, lying in front of the tarp-covered grandfather clock, was the perfectly dust-free picture of Louisa and Nevin. The same framed photograph that I had stored with the other accessories from the room in one of the bedrooms upstairs.

I bent to pick it up. “It’s Louisa, I’m sure.” I paused, sniffing the air. “Do you smell the roses? That means she’s nearby. She’s been trying to tell me something for a while now, but I just can’t seem to figure it out. Something to do with her and Nevin—I just don’t know what.”

“Or maybe,” said Jack, beginning to roll off the dusty tarp covering the clock, “it has something to do with the grandfather clock since that’s what it keeps hitting.” He strained to get the cloth over the top of the clock, dropping it in a blue puddle at our feet.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Do you remember those photographs I’ve been taking of the clock? I finally picked them up at the developers.”

I felt a little tinge of excitement, and wondered if my eyes were turning green. “Your mother was pretty sure that the face wasn’t original to the clock, so it’s possible somebody in the Vanderhorst family had it changed. But why?”

“Exactly what I thought, so I was a little surprised when the photographs turned up nothing. The little demilune inset showed only a series of signal flags, apparently in a random order which couldn’t be made into a message no matter what combination I tried. Anyway, my mother said that all of the other Johnstone clocks had dairy scenes, but this one was replaced with a maritime theme—showing the firing on Fort Sumter.” He grinned at me. “That was where the first shots were fired in the Civil War.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “I know that.”

“Well, you once told me that you were blissfully ignorant of history, so I wanted to make sure.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m from Charleston. I’m required to know about Fort Sumter—all native Charlestonians have to, or they throw you out of town.”

Jack snorted. “Yeah, something like that. Anyway, at first I thought this had probably been done just to commemorate a part of history this house and its inhabitants had witnessed. But when I examined the face more closely,” he said as he twisted the small brass knob and pulled open the glass door over the clock’s face, “I realized that a large number of lines that are worked into the painting are three-dimensional, raised up from behind just enough that they can be detected by feel but not by sight.”

Tucking the frame securely between my arm and my side, I moved to stand next to him, and ran my index finger over the mast of a large ship where he indicated, and felt the telltale ridge. “You’re right. But what would be the purpose of doing that?”

“I bought some art paper and a wax stick, removed the hour and minute hands, and rubbed the wax over the ridges.

“Like a tombstone rubbing,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“So what did you find?” I was getting impatient. “Did it tell you where the diamonds are? Or what happened to Louisa?”

He gave an exaggerated sigh. “You remember how I asked you if you could just ask the ghosts your questions and let them answer? And you said something like it’s not that easy? Well, it’s the same thing here. If it were easy, we wouldn’t be trying to figure this out now because somebody else would have figured it out a long time ago.”