The Poe Estate (4 page)

Elizabeth closed her eyes and fingered the curves. Then she brought the doorknob to her nose and sniffed at it. She opened her eyes and nodded. “Well spotted, Andre,” she said. She turned to me and asked, “Where is this from, do you know?”

“Some old house,” I said. “In Vermont, I think.”

“Do you know where exactly?”

“I'm not sure. The house is probably gone now anyway. My dad picks up a lot of stuff from demolitions.”

“Would he remember where it was?”

“Maybe. I can ask him if you like. Or you can ask him yourself if you're going to be around for a while—he'll be back in an hour or so.”

“Okay. We can come back,” said Elizabeth.

“Don't we have to go meet Doc?” asked Andre.

“Oh, you're right.” She turned to me. “Will you and your father be here again next weekend?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “It depends on the weather.”

“We better get the doorknob, at least,” said Andre.

Elizabeth nodded at him. “How much?” she asked me.

I tried to decide what my mom would charge. “Thirty dollars?” I hazarded. “It's brass.”

Elizabeth took a ten and a twenty out of her wallet without argument. Darn, I thought. I should have asked for more.

I wondered about the relationship between the two of them. They didn't look like family, since he was African American and she was white. That didn't necessarily mean they weren't related, of course. Then there was the age difference: She couldn't be more than ten or fifteen years older than him. They seemed to know each other very well. She could be his teacher, maybe, but in that case wouldn't he call her Ms. Rew instead of some silly-sounding nickname?

Andre went back to poking through the boxes while Elizabeth looked over the things on the tables. Then she froze, the way people do when they spot something they really, really want, but they don't want you to know how much they want
it. She casually picked up Cousin Hepzibah's broom, lifted it to her nose like the doorknob, and sniffed it.

“That's not for sale,” I said quickly.

“Are you sure? I would give you a fair price. Maybe I could talk to your dad?”

I shook my head. “It's not ours—it's my cousin's,” I said. “What is it with that broom? Is it Shaker or something? The guy with the pipe tried to buy it too.”

“He did? What did he look like?”

“Short man, fancy clothes, red hat. Smoking a really stinky pipe. Kind of creepy somehow,” I said.

Elizabeth and Andre exchanged glances. “You think it's Feathertop?” he said.

“Maybe,” she answered.

“Who's Feathertop?” I asked.

“He's . . .” Elizabeth thought for a minute. “He's an agent for a private collector we know. You're right, kind of creepy. . . .”

“Why does he want the broom? Is it Shaker, like my mom thought?”

“No, I don't think so. The Shakers made flat, modern-style brooms. They invented them. This one has the traditional round shape. I think it's probably old, though—maybe very old.”

“Like how old?”

She shrugged. “A hundred years? Two hundred? Old. If your cousin decides to sell it, will you or your dad call me first? And if someone else makes an offer, give me a chance to meet it? I would really appreciate it,” she said. She took a business card out of an antique silver card case and handed it to me.

“Um, sure,” I said, reading the card. It said
Elizabeth Rew,
PhD, Associate Repositorian for Acquisitions, The New-York Circulating Material Repository
. It gave a phone number and an address.

She handed me another of her cards. “Here's one for your dad too. Ask him to call me?” she asked. “I want to talk to him about that doorknob. Maybe he could keep an eye out for some other stuff for us too.”

“Sure,” I said again.

A man, maybe in his thirties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a suave look, appeared at her elbow. “Why, Elizabeth Rew! And little Andre too, looking smug. Can I assume you've beaten me to the good stuff again?”

Elizabeth turned around and smiled. “Hello, Jonathan. I was wondering if we'd see you—it seems we just missed your . . . associate.”

Was this the creepy pipe smoker's boss, then?

“Yes, he told me there were treasures at this booth. Will you show me what you found?”

Elizabeth handed him the doorknob. “Very nice,” he said, fingering it appreciatively. “Wharton, do you think?”

“Could be. It's too soon to tell,” said Elizabeth.

“What'll you take for it?”

Elizabeth shook her head, laughing a little. “Pushy, pushy! Not for sale. You're too much, Jonathan! What about you—find anything good?”

He shook his head too. “Not today. I don't seem to have your luck. Unless there's something you missed here . . .”

Andre took out his cell phone and checked the time. “I don't think there is, but you can look. Come on, Libbet, we better go. Doc's waiting,” he said.

“All right. Thank you, Sukie,” said Elizabeth. “Nice to meet you. Happy hunting, Jonathan. Come on, Griffin.”

The three of them disappeared up the exit ramp, the dog's nails clicking on the cement.

The minute they were gone, Mr. Suave Salt-and-Pepper whipped around and picked up the broom. “How much for this?” he asked intensely. For the third time that day I had to insist it wasn't for sale.

Cole Farley

I
rode the bus to school the next day—same school, different bus. I waited by the gate at the bottom of the hill, worrying that the driver would forget to stop for me. The bus showed up right on time, though.

My new stop came early in the route, so I got my pick of seats. I chose an empty row in the middle, hoping nobody would sit next to me, and opened my Laetitia Flint novel.

I was right about the mysterious figure swathed in gray: She did turn out to be a ghost. She drove the bad guys to their deaths one by one by materializing suddenly behind them and letting out eerie screeches as they walked along the cliff path above the churning maelstrom.

I thought it was pretty dumb of the bad guys to walk along the cliff path above the churning maelstrom. I didn't blame the first one or two bad guys, but after the third time it happened, the rest of them should have known better.

After a few stops, someone interrupted my reading. “
You're
not on this bus,” said a boy's voice. I looked up and saw Cole Farley, horrible Tyler Spinelli's horrible friend.

“I'm not?” I said. “I must be a ghost, then.”

“Maybe that's why they call you Spooky Sukie.” He laughed—I wasn't sure whether it was at his own joke or mine—and slid in next to me on the seat.

I kicked myself. I should have kept my mouth shut.

“Seriously, what are you doing on this bus?” he asked.

Cole Farley was tall and handsome, with chiseled cheekbones, broad shoulders, clear skin, and straight, silky black hair. His good looks made him seem more hateful to me, not less.

“We moved,” I said, turning back to my book.

“Really? Where?”

I wanted to tell him to mind his own business, but I remembered how mean he used to be, and I didn't want to provoke him. “Thorne Hill Road,” I said.

“Where that weird old haunted house is, with the weird old lady? I didn't know there were any other houses up there.”

“There aren't,” I said.

“So where are you living, then?”

“I just told you. Thorne Hill Road. With my Cousin Hepzibah.”

“The old lady in the haunted house is your
cousin
?” His silky black eyebrows shot up to the top of his high, hateful forehead. “Spooky Sukie is right!”

Oh, you foolish boy, I thought. I'm not the spooky one you should be worried about. My sister was probably listening to every word. These days, Kitty didn't always wait for my whistle before she showed up—I often felt her watching over me invisibly. Lately, she took her job as Sukie protector more and more seriously.

I glared at Cole and didn't answer.

“What's it like inside your cousin's house?” he went on, apparently completely unbothered by my glare.

“Old,” I said.

“Yeah, but old
how
? It's so
big
! What are the rooms like? Is it just your cousin in there?”

“Hey, Farley! Cole!” Some of his friends at the back of the bus had spotted him. “What are you doing up there? Get back here and sit with us!”

“Okay, okay! Coming,” he shouted. He gave me an apologetic half smile—did he think I would actually
mind
his leaving? “Catch you later, Spooky,” he said and strode gracefully away to join his friends.

• • •

Cole left me alone on the bus home. So did everybody else. When I got off, I shouldered my backpack and started up the steep hill to the mansion that was now my home. Big black birds—crows, maybe—sat on the peak of each gable, cawing one by one as I approached.

“Sukie, is that you? Come in here a minute,” called Dad from the carriage house. He had several cardboard boxes open on his workbench. “That doorknob you sold to the museum lady yesterday—remember what it looked like?”

“It was brass. Sort of ferny. Why?”

“She wants to know what house it came from and if I got anything else there. Come help me look.”

“Okay. What am I looking for?” It was warm in the carriage house—Dad had a wood fire going in the potbellied stove. I shrugged off my backpack and coat.

“Another doorknob like the one she bought,” he said. “Here, these boxes have stuff from different houses. Find the doorknob, you find the house.”

I poked through the boxes of old hardware—doorknobs, hinges, knockers, mailbox slots, things like that. All the doorknobs in the first box were made of china, mostly plain dark brown, though a few had swirls in the glaze to make it look like wood grain. The ones in the next box were made of brass, but they were all oval, not round, and instead of the leafy design, they had intertwined initials on them. I wondered what it would be like to be so rich that you put your initials on your doorknobs. But maybe the letters stood for the name of a school or a hospital or something, not a person.

The third box had the doorknob I was looking for—I recognized its ferny swirls. I recognized something else too: The doorknob gave off an electrical coldness when I touched it. It was the same feeling I got when Kitty showed up in a room, the same feeling I got from the broom everybody wanted to buy. Was that what made Elizabeth want these?

Remembering how Elizabeth had smelled her doorknob, I lifted this one to my nose. It smelled like brass, just as you'd expect.

I didn't find anything else very interesting in that box. A couple of the hinges had a faint echo of the doorknob's electrical chill, and there was a bell attached to a neat spring mechanism, but that didn't feel alive like the doorknob. Well,
alive
wasn't quite the word—maybe
inhabited
. I twisted the bell, making it ring.

“Find anything?” asked Dad.

I held up the doorknob. “Here. Do you remember which house the stuff in this box came from?”

He nodded. “That was a great old one, with the beams and gingerbread trim, but in terrible condition. It was a shame they had to demolish it. Almost nothing was salvageable. All the floors were rotted through. And the bats in the attic!” He whistled. “The whole thing gave me a chill. Thanks, Sukie. Here, toss it back in.” I dropped the doorknob in the box. Dad tore a piece of transparent packing tape with his teeth and sealed the box shut. He taped Elizabeth's card to the top. I wondered if she would want everything in the box, or just the doorknob and the chilly hinges.

• • •

Mom and Cousin Hepzibah were sitting at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. “Hi, sweetie. How was school?” asked Mom.

“Okay,” I answered, as always. Even when things were bad, I never told Mom. But in fact, aside from Cole Farley's unexpected visit on the bus that morning, my day had been pretty uneventful. Nobody bothered me at lunch, and I'd gotten a 93 on last week's math quiz. It felt odd having such a normal day at school when everything at home was completely new and strange.

“Do you have everything you need in your room?” asked Cousin Hepzibah.

“Yes, thanks . . . or, actually, where's the vacuum cleaner? I want to try to get some of the dust out of the curtains.”

“Ours is still packed,” said Mom. “Hepzibah, do you have one?”

Cousin Hepzibah shook her head. “Not for years. It was
hard getting it up and down the stairs, so I didn't replace it when it broke.”

“I'll unpack ours first thing tomorrow, then,” said Mom.

“Oh, that reminds me. . . .” I spotted the broom in the corner behind the door and brought it over to Cousin Hepzibah. “What's the story with this?” I asked her. “Everybody kept wanting to buy it.”

Cousin Hepzibah put down her potato and her knife and held out her hand. “Oh, my. This takes me back,” she said with a faraway smile. “Where did you find it?”

“In the attic. I was using it to sweep out the truck, and then at the flea market, people kept wanting to buy it. You wouldn't sell it, would you?”

“Sell it? No, no. Not that broom. But of course it's up to you. It's yours now.”

“Mine?”

“Oh, yes. I'm far too old to be running around with a thing like that.” She smiled and put the broom back in my hand, closing my hand around the broomstick and patting it. “It's time for you to have it.”

“I . . . Thank you, Cousin Hepzibah.”

“Most of the things here will be yours, sooner or later,” said Hepzibah.

“Much, much later, I hope,” said Mom.

“I rather hope so too.” Cousin Hepzibah picked up her potato and started paring again, the peel falling away in one long, narrow, curving ribbon.

• • •

That night, the ghost in my room was Kitty. She threw herself
on my bed, sending up puffs of dust from the curtains. I know ghosts aren't supposed to have bodies, and Kitty didn't exactly—if you tried to hug her, your arms went right through her. But she could move things. She was particularly good with cold drafts and liquids; for weeks after that conversation about me living in a haunted house, Keisha kept shivering in the hallways and Ava Frank's milk spilled all over her lunch, over and over. Kitty did worse things too, sometimes; I was pretty sure when Ava's friend Ellie tripped and sprained her ankle after dropping my backpack in a slush puddle, it wasn't an accident.

One thing Kitty didn't do, though, was talk. That was okay. I knew her well enough to understand her anyway.

I was right: She had been listening to what Cole Farley said on the bus, and she didn't like it one little bit. I could feel the anger coming off her in waves. It was like standing too close to a barbecue on a windy day.

“I know he's a jerk, Kitty, but please leave him alone,” I begged. “He's already calling me spooky. If you mess with him, it'll make things worse.”

I could tell Kitty wouldn't mind teaching Cole a lesson, or his friends, either, but she reluctantly agreed not to bother them—for now. There were other things worrying her. She didn't think Mom should have left me alone at the flea market, and she didn't think I should talk to strangers there, especially not weird, creepy strangers. She thought I should probably just stay home. She wished I
could
stay home, but home was gone. She hated leaving our old house. It wasn't the same here—she hadn't spent much time in this place before, it wasn't
hers
, and it
made her feel weaker and somehow scattered. She liked Cousin Hepzibah, though.

I asked her about the other ghost, but she didn't seem to understand me.

“But you're a ghost yourself, Kitty!”

She gave me her patient impatient look, the one that says “My baby sister is talking like a silly little baby.” With a sigh that fluttered the bed curtains, she floated off the bed and sank slowly into the painting over the fireplace. I got up and went over to it to look for her, but I couldn't make out much, just glimpses of a river through shadowy trees.

I wondered where Kitty went when she wasn't here. Was she in the picture now, behind a tree or over a hill, out of sight? Was she in the walls? Was she nowhere at all?

I felt as lonely as I had when she'd first died.