The Turning (7 page)

But it’s not like that here. In fact it’s more like a cheery sitcom called
Crackstone’s Landing
than like a slasher film. I hang out with the kids, eat good food, spend the evenings chatting with Linda. I write you letters whenever I can. I send my letters off on the ferry, and I keep waiting to get one back from you. I try not to wonder why you haven’t written me back so far. I’m sure you’re busy. Or something. I refuse to let it upset me.

Anyway, I was just settling into this pleasant routine when … okay, I’m going to take a break and finish tomorrow so I can figure out how to tell you this part of the story without sounding crazy.

DEAR SOPHIE, PART TWO,

Okay. Here goes.

A couple of evenings after I got here, Linda and I were sitting out on the porch.

Linda said, “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” I asked. Then I heard it, a howl like some wild animal caught in a hideous, pain-inflicting trap. Linda was already out of her chair, tipping over the teapot as she ran into the house.

“It’s Flora,” she yelled.

I followed Linda to Flora’s room. The lights were on, and Flora was sitting up in her pink four-poster bed, among her pink blankets and pink sheets, surrounded by pink walls and pink curtains. She was holding the side of her face, and tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“My tooth hurts,” she told Linda.

It turned out that Flora had been so eager to spend the day playing with me and her brother that she hadn’t told anyone that her tooth had started to bother her. And now her whole cheek was swollen, and she couldn’t stop crying and begging us to please make the pain go away.

Linda got some children’s aspirin and a clove to rub on Flora’s gum. Before long, still weeping quietly, the poor girl dropped off to sleep. Linda said she would stay with her, in case she woke up again, and I said good night and went to my room.

The next morning Linda woke me early to explain that the ferry—which she could get to stop at the island by raising a blue flag at the end of the pier—would be there in half an hour. She was taking Flora to see the dentist on the next island over, and Miles wanted to go along. The dentist was an old friend of the children’s uncle; they often played golf together. She knew that he would be willing to see Flora when they got there, even without an appointment. Then they could catch the last ferry back and be home in time for dinner. I asked if she wanted me to go along, and she said no, in fact she’d like me to stay on the island and keep an eye on the place.

The gardener, Hank Swopes, would be arriving with his crew, and though Linda would leave a note explaining what needed to be done, she would feel more comfortable if I was there to greet Hank and his men when they arrived. It didn’t make sense to me. I was sure the gardener knew way more about the island than I did, and to tell the truth, I was a little uneasy about being left alone. What if something went wrong? I told myself that nothing was going to go wrong. Besides which, I wouldn’t be alone. The gardener would be here, and by the time he left, Linda and the kids would be back.

“I’ll be fine!” I told Linda.

“Why wouldn’t you be?” she said.

Linda’s shiny red truck headed down the road to the pier, and I kept waving long after they could no longer see me. I went back into the huge black house, which suddenly seemed extremely noisy in the silence. The floors creaked beneath my feet as I walked over the carpets, and the ticking of the clocks sounded much louder than I remembered, and somehow ominous.

I wandered around, and after a while I found myself in a long corridor where I’d never been before. The walls were lined with portraits—of the children’s ancestors, I guessed—and the eyes of the stern-looking men and women seemed to watch me disapprovingly as I passed. I told myself it was just an optical illusion and that I should enjoy this opportunity to be alone, to
really
figure out my way around and to look at things that I might have felt self-conscious examining closely if Linda and the kids were there.

For example, the family photos, framed and arranged on the bookshelves and the end tables in one of the sitting rooms. One picture showed a group of people in turbans and saris, with a very beautiful woman standing in the front row beside a tall man who looked a little like Jim Crackstone. I realized that it was probably a wedding picture of the children’s parents with their mom’s family in India.

A couple of other photos showed Jim Crackstone with Miles and Flora, two little toddlers who looked so dazed and tragic that I assumed the pictures were taken soon after their parents were killed. Linda was in some of the shots, also with the kids. In some of them Linda was arm in arm with a handsome guy who I guessed was her husband. Then there was one photo of Linda’s husband looking much thinner and older, and after that he disappeared from the pictures.

There were a few fairly recent photos of Miles and Flora, one of which drew my attention, not because of what it showed—the kids standing on the shore of the lake, in front of the boathouse, with stiff, posed smiles on their faces—but because, unlike the others, it was mounted crookedly and creased and sort of bunched up as if it had been taken out of its frame and hastily stuffed back in.

When I picked it up, the glass fell out of the frame, and the creased photo also slipped out.

There was another picture concealed beneath the first. In the hidden photo, the children (looking around the same age as they are now, maybe a year or so younger) were standing on the lakeshore, near the boathouse. Only in this one they were standing beside two adults, a man and a woman. The woman was wearing a long dress, the man a formal, old-fashioned black suit, but that was all I could see of them. Because their faces had been scratched out, as if someone had taken a knife or the point of a scissors and slashed away at the paper until nothing remained but jagged holes where their faces should have been.

Well! That gave me a creepy feeling! Who were the mystery man and woman? What had they done, and why did someone hate them enough to obliterate their faces? It didn’t seem like something Linda would do, but I didn’t know her that well. Could it have been Miles or Flora, with their perfect manners and their gentle little voices? I figured I could ask Linda about it when I got to know her better, but something told me I’d have to wait and find the right moment. It was also possible that Linda didn’t even know about the mutilated photo, and I didn’t want to upset her. It sure upset me.

It seemed wiser, at least for a while, to pretend—even to myself!—that I hadn’t seen it. I carefully replaced it under the other photo and put both pictures back in the frame. Then I decided it might be a good idea to make myself some breakfast.

The sunny kitchen cheered me up. I scrambled some eggs and made some toast, and as I sat at the table, eating the food, which turned out to be delicious, I noticed that I was enjoying the solitude. It no longer felt like a nervous loneliness but like space and … freedom! Once more, I felt hopeful about the summer ahead. The image of the ruined photo crept back into my mind, but … so what? Kids did weird things all the time. They could be destructive without meaning to, without knowing what they were doing. And just because Miles and Flora said please and thank you didn’t mean they weren’t kids.

Just as I was washing up my breakfast dishes, I heard the put-put-put of a boat, and a few minutes later I looked out the window and saw a bunch of guys in work clothes, laughing and joking as they walked across the lawn toward the house.

Mr. Swopes, who told me to call him Hank, wore jeans and a beard and had a warm, friendly handshake. Actually, he reminded me a little of my dad. He looked surprised to see me instead of Linda, but without too much confusion I explained the situation. He seemed disappointed that Linda wasn’t there, in a way that made me think that maybe he had a crush on Linda. I handed him the “to do” list that Linda had left on the kitchen table. Hank laughed when he read it and said, “I can see that me and the guys have our work cut out for us today. I guess we’ll see you around.” I asked if they wanted some water or something to eat. But Hank said no, thanks, they’d brought their lunch and plenty of water with them.

The men began trimming the shrubs and mowing the lawn near the house, and I watched them, feeling a little envious of how smoothly they worked together and what good friends they obviously were. Each one of them seemed to know what the others were doing, or were about to do, without having to talk. When their chores took them farther out toward the lake, I decided to go to the library and see if I could find something interesting to read.

The library was on the main floor, with tall glass doors through which you could walk onto the patio at the back of the house. The light shining through the tall windows was dusty and soft, and the smell of old paper and leather and books was soothing. Glinting gold letters caught my eye, and I took down the plays of William Shakespeare and spent a while, sitting on the floor, looking at an engraving of Hamlet holding a skull. Then I skimmed through another book about the Roman Empire, and as I put it away, I noticed that beside it was a book about volcanoes. I recalled the prints of volcanoes on Jim Crackstone’s office wall. For a moment it seemed like another coincidence, until I realized that Jim Crackstone had grown up in this house. Maybe his love for volcanoes had started when he was a boy.

I began reading about what volcanoes are and why they become active and about the most famous volcano eruptions in history. It was so engrossing that hours must have gone by without my being aware of how much time was passing. I’d just begun reading a chapter on how Pompeii was completely buried by the lava from Mount Vesuvius when I heard a voice in the hall. I jumped.

Hank called, “I guess we’ll be getting on our way now. Tell Linda we’ll see her next week.”

“Bye. Thanks! See you,” I told Hank. I walked to the window to watch the gardeners go, all of them laughing and kidding around. I listened to the sound of Hank’s motorboat starting up, then fading away over the water. For a moment I felt lonely and nervous … and then the anxiousness passed.

I looked at my watch. It was almost five. Linda and the kids would be home soon. I hoped Flora was feeling better.

I returned to my volcano book, and soon I was reading about how the citizens of Pompeii were wiped out. I looked at pictures of the ruined buildings, and then at gruesome photos of the casts of bodies created by lava that had hardened around whole families, who had died in agony, trying to escape. Suddenly, I had this feeling.... I don’t know how to describe it except to say that I sensed the presence of a presence. The only thing I can compare it to is one night when a bat flew into my dad’s house. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood straight up, and I
knew
that the bat was there long before I saw it swooping around our living room, and I yelled, and Dad got a broom and chased it out the front door.

Crazy goose bumps rose on my skin as I turned and looked toward the windows.

A man was standing on the other side of the glass doors, looking in. I could tell that he was looking for someone. Someone in particular, and he wasn’t looking for me. I can’t explain why I was so sure, especially because the light was behind him, so that at first all I saw was his silhouette.

I figured that Hank or one of his men had come back to get something they’d left behind. But the man at the window wasn’t Hank or one of the other gardeners. The angle of the sun shifted, and I was able to see him more clearly.

The strange thing was that I was sure I’d seen him before. He had longish hair and was tall and barrel-chested, wearing a black old-fashioned suit, which made me think of the guy with the scratched-out face in the hidden photo. But that wasn’t where I recognized him from, and anyway, the man in the photo had no face. I’d seen him somewhere else … but where?

The sweetest sound I ever heard was the rattle of Linda’s truck coming up the driveway.

When I looked back, the man outside the window had vanished.

I know it’s not the manliest thing to admit, but my legs were shaking as I got up from the floor. But even with my knees knocking, I felt weirdly brave. I was the man of the house now.

I ran to the French doors and threw them open. There was no one around, no one walking across the lawns that went on for so long that the guy would have had to be airlifted out of there to disappear so fast. He wasn’t anywhere. Of course he wasn’t. There was no one else on the island. The gardeners had gone home. And I’d imagined I’d seen someone. Or maybe it was a trick of the sun, the shadow of a tree. Or, okay, I’ll say it—maybe the house is haunted.

I’m joking about the haunted part. I hope you know that, Sophie.

I left the library, slamming the door. Even if I was seeing things, I had the strange idea that if I kept the library shut off from the rest of the house, I could keep the hallucination, or whatever it was, contained in that one room. Obviously, I realize that ghosts can walk through walls. But I took a deep breath and reminded myself: I don’t believe in ghosts.

I can’t tell you how much I wish I’d get a letter from you.

Love,

Jack

DEAR JACK,

I’m glad you’re having a fairly nice time and don’t feel too isolated on the island. As you know, I was really angry at my dad for asking his friend Jim Crackstone to get you that job and pay you all that money just so my father would have a clever way to keep us apart for the summer.