The Hundred-Year House (14 page)

Case said, “She put her finger on my lips.” He reached out one finger and actually pressed it right to Zee’s mouth before she could move, before she could even register his words. His eyes were wild and green, fixed on hers. Zee took his hand as gently as she could and removed it from her face. “And you’ve seen her too, I know you have. She comes to you too.”

Zee regretted the alcohol fog that wasn’t quite allowing her to shift paradigms. He couldn’t be talking about Miriam, could he? He looked like he might cry, actually cry. “Are you talking about Violet?”

He shrugged, humiliated, and didn’t answer.

“Case, I think you need to see a doctor. This house can get to people, but no, I haven’t seen—not
literally
. Not like that.”

He was devastated, she could tell. However difficult it was for him to say all this, he’d been counting on her understanding, on some kind of validation.

“This place doesn’t want me,” he said. “It’s rejecting me. Like a transplanted organ.”

“You shouldn’t be here. You should go back to Texas.” She said it purely out of concern, and only afterward remembered that this was what she’d wanted all along.

He blinked down at the vodka. “Miriam won’t leave. This is the happiest she’s ever been. This is the best work she’s ever done.”

She wished she could tell him that it wasn’t the house, that Miriam was only happy because she was in love with Doug, and it was the wrong kind of happiness. But she couldn’t do that to him right now. “Tomorrow, if the world doesn’t end. Bruce will loan you guys money, right? Go home and get healthy.”

But now Gracie was in the doorway saying “
There
you are,” and asking who would join Bruce for a spin in the ’57 Chevy “before the streets get dangerous.”

Case said he would, and he handed Zee the vodka and walked from the room like a broken marionette. Zee went back to the dining room, where Miriam and Doug both still sat. Their whispering stopped the moment she appeared. But she wasn’t there for
them
, she wished they knew. She walked around to the back wall, to the portrait of Violet. If the artist had been less skilled, her great-grandmother might have remained as flat and uninteresting as any
other ancestor. Instead, her skin glowed and her mouth hovered before some small movement, as if she were just now about to say something she’d held in these past hundred years. Zee tried to look at Violet straight on, but Violet was always looking somewhere else.

It was frustrating. Because (and maybe it was just the vodka) Zee needed that moment of silent communication. She had a question for Violet today, a hypothesis she wanted confirmed in this most unscientific of manners.
You aren’t even the ghost,
she wanted to ask,
are you? Something drove you crazy in this house, and it’s the same thing killing Case, and it’s the same thing driving me mad. Everyone in this house is crazy. And look at the blown-out window, the strangling ivy. It isn’t you. This is why I felt fine in Pennsylvania. Something’s wrong with this house. Something’s broken. Things don’t work normally here.
(If the semester weren’t over, she’d float the idea by her seminar: not a haunted house, a haunting house.)

But Violet avoided her eyes.

38

A
t ten thirty, fortified by bourbon, Doug asked Gracie if he could speak to her in the solarium. Gracie had been drinking champagne since six, and Miriam had made sure to refill her glass every time it was even halfway empty, till she was wobbly and glassy-eyed. Miriam ran interference now on everyone else, making sure they stayed in the den, where the TV replayed the celebrations from the International Dateline and points west. Doug and Gracie sat on the long white couch and he said, “I have an offer for you. A good one.”

She looked skeptical. She said, “If this is about your employment situation, I can’t do more than I already am.”

“No. It’s—I think you know that I’ve been in the attic.”

Her hand fluttered to her forehead.

“I shouldn’t have, I know, but please understand how important this is for me. Those archives are the whole meat of the book. But I’ll get back to that.” He pushed his fists into his knees. “While I was up there, quite by accident, I also found some personal papers of yours.”

“Oh, Douglas.” She started looking for her champagne glass. Doug found it on the floor and handed it to her.

“And I did figure some things out. I want to help you. In exchange—I mean, I know you’re nervous about the Internet. I checked, and it’s already out there. It says you’re seventy-four. We can’t change what’s already there. But if it’s important to you,
there are ways to create alternate timelines, to get those circulated as well, to confuse things. I have a friend who does Internet stuff. I want to help you. I do.”

Gracie leaned back, her eyes closed. She looked pale—fine wrinkles on top of tissue-paper skin on top of a sudden gray bloodlessness—and he felt he should be taking care of her, getting her a blanket, rather than tormenting her like this. But then she sat up and leaned toward him. She tapped his leg.

“Douglas, you’re clever. And I’m smarter than I seem. I want you to know that.”

“I’m sure we can strike a reasonable bargain.” He was glad Miriam and Leland weren’t there to hear how ridiculous he sounded.

“Those papers are just a joke. People with our kind of wealth, we need other documents sometimes.
Alternate
documents.”

“But that would be illegal.”

“Not at all. Bruce is smart with these things, and he has lawyer friends.”

“Gracie, I’m talking about
old
documents. Long before you knew Bruce.”

Miriam had told him just to stare Gracie down if he was at a loss. He pressed his thumbs together and looked right at her. She gave a high laugh, a sound like a teacup hitting the floor.

“Well. Are you trying to ask for money, Douglas? You’ve never been direct.”

“I just want the colony files.”

“What files?”

He said, with as much conviction as he could summon, with an edge of threat that surprised him when he heard it: “The Parfitt files. You know exactly what I mean, because you’re the one who replaced them.”

Gracie looked furious now, which was at least a development, if not an admission. She said, “I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.
Replaced
them!”

“I went searching, and instead of what I should have found—”

“Douglas, I’ve been good to you.”

“And that’s why I know we can help each other.”

“What precisely did you find?” The downside of her champagne consumption, he realized, was that she’d become difficult to read. He didn’t want to anger her further by implying that her father was gay, so he tried to word things carefully.

“I found—I mean, you must know. It was those two people who—I don’t know who they were, exactly. Two people, here at this house. Doing something very strange, very unorthodox. You
do
know what I mean. And please don’t lie to me.”

Gracie took a breath so deep that Doug worried about her ribs. “The world’s about to end, isn’t it? One way or the other.” She was so small on the other end of the couch. She said nothing for a long time, and Doug wondered if the question wasn’t rhetorical after all. Then she said, “But you have to understand that there was
no
point calling the police. Douglas, there was a lipstick mark halfway down the top of her dress. That’s how far her neck had snapped. The car was like an accordion.”

Doug had the horrible feeling that he’d jumped down the wrong rabbit hole, that the prospect of Edwin Parfitt was growing dimmer and dimmer as he fell. All he could think to say was “Oh.”

“It was the worst thing I’d seen in my life.” She was crying, he saw with horror. Her eyes were pink. He felt like hyperventilating himself, and it was only his utter confusion that kept him pinned to the couch, that kept him from breaking down over lipstick and accordions himself. “But you
do
know it was an accident. I’d die if you thought otherwise. Max would never have let him take the car if he knew Grace was in it. He didn’t answer the phone—he wouldn’t answer the phone—but he didn’t know it was
her
.”

There was a paper napkin in Doug’s pocket, and he unfolded it and handed it to her and tried to rewind those last sentences,
tried to guess whether speaking of herself in the third person was a rhetorical flourish or a sign of mental breakdown.

He said, idiotically, or perhaps brilliantly, “Max wouldn’t have let him. If he knew Gracie was in it. The car.”

“She was always
Grace
. Oh, she was a fool. No one got divorced in 1955, but still, I remember thinking there was something wrong with her that she didn’t leave him. He was terrible. A
terrible
person.”

Doug wished he had Leland on an earpiece, telling him what to say. He managed: “How so?”

“Oh, you know, a drunkard.” She was still crying, but there was a gossipy edge to her voice now, a mean one. She spoke quickly. “That’s why the family left them alone out here. They
never
came to check on her. Not
once
. They died not long after—the father, and then the mother a few years later—and the brothers didn’t care for her a fig. But Douglas, that family! They made it easy for us, by not caring. Half the time she was hiding a black eye. He tried me, but I could handle him. I knew about drunks. My father was in
jail
, Douglas. Can you believe that? George never dared mess with me.”

George was Zee’s father, the gentle man who had taken Zee on the train to the Art Institute once a month. Doug knew he’d once had a drinking problem, but he’d never heard of any violence. And Gracie’s father might indeed have been jailed once or twice—the Devohrs were never long out of the gossip columns in those days—but none of it, together, made sense. Hidalgo trotted in and stuck his nose in Doug’s crotch.

“And what would we have done, if we hadn’t stayed? The family would have come and covered the furniture with white sheets. They’d have been in no hurry to sell. We’d have been out on our ears. And Max would have died. It would have
killed
him to leave, I really believe that. He was a true gentleman. You should have seen how he turned the pages of the newspaper: He picked up the corner with his
finger and thumb, and just lifted it over. Everyone I’d ever known turned pages with their whole palm, like something they were wiping away. It wasn’t a
romantic
relationship we had. But it was better than most, and Zilla is something. We wanted her so badly. She was born ten years later, exactly. I always took it for a sign. Ten years.”

Doug tried to think if he’d ever heard of someone named Max. He managed to push Hidalgo away and lock his knees against further attack. He said, “Who else knows all this?” As if he himself knew it, or understood it, or had any idea how much of it was a joke.

Gracie shook her head. She was looking at some spot near Doug’s face, but not at Doug. “Max, until he died. I suppose the gardener knew. I always guessed Max bribed him, but I said I wanted no part of it. The hole for the greenhouse was already dug, but the cement wasn’t poured yet. So it was all done the next day, just Max and the gardener. I hid upstairs, but I could hear the wheelbarrows crunching along the drive to the big house.
Wheelbarrows
.” She covered her nose and mouth with her hands and closed her eyes. The sound of wheelbarrows was apparently the worst part, to her. “And he fired the rest of the staff.
Big
tips, of course. More money than they’d ever seen. And hired new people.”

Miriam poked her head in the door just then. If she’d overheard anything, it was only that last sentence. “Ten fifty-five. Five minutes till doomsday, east.”

“We’re just finishing up,” Doug said, though he didn’t know if that was true.

Miriam raised an eyebrow—Doug’s face must have looked as ashen as it felt—and ducked out.

“I need you to know it hasn’t been
easy
, Douglas. Especially at first. The research we had to do, the places we had to avoid. It helped that she’d
never
shown her face in town, and they’d only been here a few months. Those ridiculous sunglasses. And he was
always off in Highwood, drinking. They looked nothing alike. George and Max. But it didn’t matter a bit, in the end. People see what they expect to. And the rest can be handled with money. Still, if you think I haven’t had a thousand heart attacks along the way. And the close calls, the parties where someone was from Toronto and I’d have to get sick and leave. It’s stolen
years
from my life.”

Doug took a risk. “So it’s—under the greenhouse.” He wasn’t sure at all what he was referring to, but the remote possibility remained that it was something to do with Parfitt. Or else why the missing file? He looked over his shoulder, at the sliding glass doors that separated the solarium from the greenhouse. He could see a few geraniums out there, borrowing some of the indoor light.

“Yes. Both of them. Good lord. If you want the real ghosts of the house, it’s those two, not poor old Violet.”

“Those two, meaning—”

“They made that window shatter, you know. They’ve done it before.”

And there was Bruce at the door, waving urgently. “Come on!” he shouted. “This is the big one!”

As they hurried down the hall after him, Doug realized he hadn’t gotten a single answer about Parfitt. He didn’t understand what she was saying, but he believed her. He just had no idea what it was he was supposed to believe. What ingredients he’d just swallowed. He wanted to march Gracie back to the solarium and lock the door, to ask her fifty more questions, but first he needed to see if the world was ending. He was less certain of its survival than he’d been an hour ago.

Zee and Miriam and Case sat on the leather couch, staring at Dick Clark and the drunken masses in Times Square. No one on the screen seemed particularly panicked. They jumped around in the cold, kissing strangers.

Doug and Bruce and Gracie stood with their hands on the couch back, braced for some kind of impact.