Eleanor, Alice, and the Roosevelt Ghosts

by Dianne K. Salerni

  Franklin stomps snow off his shoes and steps inside. “It started snowing when I was halfway here, and I didn’t want the papers to get wet.” He sets his burden on the floor and whips off what I now realize is his coat. Underneath is the cardboard box of documents from Aunt Bye’s attic. “I brought it around back because I didn’t think your grandmother would want this coming through her house.”

  I see his point. I didn’t notice when it was in the attic because everything there is so grimy, but the box is streaked with cobwebs and dust. Grandmother will have a conniption if she sees it. Rosie isn’t keen on it either. “What is this?” she asks with distaste.

  “Documents I need to sort through and then burn,” I tell her.

  “You should burn them first,” she mutters.

  Franklin shrugs his coat on, preparing to leave immediately. “You must be freezing,” I protest. “Stay for a cup of tea. Or coffee.” Franklin is fond of coffee, a taste he picked up from Uncle Theodore, who drinks nearly a gallon of the bitter brew a day.

  “Can’t.” He turns up his collar. “I have my marching orders. We’re emptying the attic today.”

  “Emptying it completely?”

  “Almost. The street cleaners won’t be very happy with us. Oh!” He snaps his fingers and points at me. “I almost forgot. You’re invited for charades tonight. Helen insists.”

  I glance out the kitchen window. “I’ll come if the snow stops.”

  “If the snow doesn’t stop, we’ll send a cab,” Franklin says. “Pack a bag and stay overnight in Alice’s room. It’s hardly a real reunion when one of us isn’t there.”

  I feel my cheeks grow warm and pretend to be interested in the box of documents. I thank Franklin for bringing it. He tips his hat, grins, and steps out into the snow.

  As soon as he’s gone, I sit down at the kitchen table and apply myself to the unpleasant task of sorting through the filthy box. The first few documents are papers concerned with the purchase of the house. Next is a life insurance policy for Edgar Drummond and several bills of sale. It turns out we were right. The dress patterns belonged to Davy’s mother, and so did the dressmaker’s dummy. Mrs. Drummond was a seamstress.

  None of the papers pertain to Davy’s haunting, however, and my mind wanders while I stack them in a discard pile. I think about what I need to pack for a night at Aunt Bye’s and whether emptying the attic will really diminish the ghost’s power to torment the living residents. Several more papers go into the discard pile with barely a glance.

  Then I’m holding Susannah Drummond’s life insurance policy in my hand, staring at it with an unsettling feeling that I might be overlooking something important. “Rosie, how does life insurance work?”

  Rosie, chopping carrots, glances over her shoulder at me. “You purchase a policy and pay a small fee every year to maintain it. If the person covered by the insurance dies, the beneficiary of the policy receives a sum of money the company has agreed upon.”

  “Is it usual to buy a policy for a young person? Or a child?”

  This time Rosie pauses, and her answer is more hesitant. “Life insurance policies are usually purchased for adults. But…if an older child has a job that helps provide for the family, I suppose one might purchase insurance to protect that income. As for a young child…I don’t believe an insurance company would pay out very much—maybe enough to cover the cost of a decent burial.”

  A decent burial. The image of Davy’s flat stone flashes through my mind, the letters so shallowly carved they had almost worn away.

  I examine the paper in my hand. Susannah Drummond, age sixteen, was insured in 1844 for one hundred dollars in the event of her death. The beneficiary of the policy was her stepmother, Ella Drummond.

  I dig through the discard pile, pulling out the policy for Edgar Senior and two more that I shifted without paying attention: policies for Edgar Junior and Benjamin, the Drummond brothers who died in the same year. Both of them were insured in 1843, the sum of their lost wages listed as compensation to the beneficiary of the policy.

  Who happened to be their stepmother, Ella Drummond.

  I paw through the box, tossing aside Ella’s bills of sale for her dressmaking and other unrelated documents and singling out the insurance policies. Because there are more.

  Ella’s husband and stepsons were insured through one insurance company, but she switched to a different one for her stepdaughter, Susannah. For her son, Charles, and her daughter, Mary Isabel, she signed with a third company.

  I don’t have their death dates in front of me because Franklin recorded them at the cemetery and took the notes back to Aunt Bye’s house. Nevertheless, I have a general idea of the order in which these people died, and it seems as if Ella took out a life insurance policy on each of them a year or so before they passed.

  If Rosie is right, it is reasonable to take out insurance on the people who contribute income to your home. But it’s beyond reason to predict the order in which they will die. That’s what stands out to me as I lay the policies on the kitchen table and examine the dates they were signed. I’m certain that the order in which these young people were insured by Ella Drummond is the same order in which they died.

  Rummaging through the box, I pull out more bills of sale until finally, in the bottom of the box, I locate the document I’m looking for, one last policy. The insured: David Drummond, age eleven. The beneficiary: Ella Drummond, age forty-two.

  The value of the policy…My hand trembles.

  Thirty dollars.

  The value of Davy Drummond’s life was thirty dollars.

  I drop the document and stand up so quickly, I nearly overturn my chair.

  “Miss Eleanor!” Rosie turns to face me. “What’s wrong?”

  “Rosie—” I can hardly bring myself to say it. “I think she killed them. The mother. She insured them, killed them, and collected the money.”

  “No! That’s impossible! No woman would do that. Not to her own children!” Rosie puts a hand to her heart, no doubt thinking of her little grandchildren.

  But Mrs. Drummond didn’t start with her own children. She started with her husband, moved on to her stepchildren, and when she ran out of those…then came her own flesh and blood.

  “She wouldn’t have gotten away with it,” Rosie insists. “Someone would’ve noticed. The authorities…a doctor…someone…”

  But evidence seems to show she did get away with it.

  People get sick or injured every day, and sometimes they die. I lost three-fourths of my family in the span of two years. Alice’s mother and grandmother died within days of each other. The Drummond family deaths were spaced out over a decade. Maybe no one suspected.

  I look at Rosie. “I have to show these to Aunt Bye.”

  Her eyes dart between the papers and my face. She has stopped trying to tell me I’m wrong. “Yes, maybe you should.” She opens a cupboard and pulls out the leather satchel she uses for shopping when the weather is bad. “I’ll put them in here so they don’t get wet.”

  While Rosie packs the papers into the satchel, I fetch my coat and hat. Aunt Bye will have to move out of that house when she sees these insurance policies. Regardless of what that ghost whispers in her deaf ear, she won’t want to live in a house where all those people were…what? Poisoned? Smothered? Pushed down the stairs?

  Did Davy know? Did he know how his brothers and sisters died, one by one, and why? When he was the last one left with his mother, did he know he was next? Did he wake up every morning and go to sleep every night wondering when his mother would decide she’d like to have thirty dollars?

  I can’t bear the thought.

  19

  ALICE GOES HOME

  WHEN Alice catches Teddy and Corinne whispering in the hallway on the second floor, she chastises them for dawdling. “Let’s go!” She claps her hands noisily. “Those musty old carp
ets aren’t going to roll downstairs by themselves!”

  Teddy pushes his glasses up his nose with his index finger and growls, “All right, Sissy. We’ll be right there. You don’t need to order us around.”

  His tone of voice startles her. It isn’t like her brother to be short-tempered.

  “I do if you’re standing idle,” Alice mutters, stomping up to the attic. She hasn’t stopped moving since the purge began, and now that it’s snowing, she’s even more anxious to get the attic cleared before her cousins revolt and call it half a day on account of the weather.

  They must clear the attic of everything that could possibly hold Davy Drummond here. Alice is hopeful their efforts are already having an effect, because there haven’t been any ghostly manifestations, friendly or otherwise, all day.

  She makes two more trips up and down the stairs, lugging boxes and smaller, manageable items of furniture, before noticing that she hasn’t seen Teddy or Corinne since she spoke to them in the hallway.

  Alice checks the kitchen, but Maisie hasn’t seen them. They aren’t in the billiards room or the parlor or Aunt Bye’s sitting room. Finally, she asks Helen, who has chosen for herself the arduous task of opening and closing the front door to the people doing the actual carrying. “They left on an errand,” Helen says, “half an hour ago or more.”

  “What errand?”

  “I don’t know. I assumed you sent them.” Helen peers through the sidelight window and opens the front door for Franklin.

  “Where have you been?” Alice demands.

  Franklin shakes snow off his coat. “You told me to deliver that box to Eleanor. Remember?”

  What Alice remembers is asking Teddy to take the box to Eleanor—and Franklin jumping in to volunteer. Normally, she’d pursue that topic until Franklin blushed, but right now she has other fish to fry. “Teddy and Corinne have gone off somewhere. Do you have any idea where?”

  She expects him to say no, so when the color drains from his face, her heart pounds. “He left?” Franklin says. “They both left?”

  “You know where they went!” Alice exclaims. “Tell me!”

  Franklin spreads his hands. “I don’t know for sure…but he heard me talking to you this morning, Helen.” Helen puts a hand over her mouth, and her eyes go wide.

  “Where did he go?”

  “I’m sorry, Alice. Eleanor told me about your grandmother’s house—and your grandfather’s ghost. Yesterday, the athletic club I visited was so close to that street, I stopped by. Just to see the outside. I told Helen about it.”

  Alice’s heart drops straight to her stomach. “Teddy heard you talking.”

  Franklin nods. “I told him I’d seen the house. But he acted as if he already knew about the haunting. You don’t think…”

  Teddy didn’t know. No more than Alice knew. But he would lie, to save face.

  He has run off to see the house that his half sister was born in, that his grandmother died in, and that his grandfather haunts as a Vengeful. Didn’t Alice do the same thing when Eleanor told her? And of course Corinne went with him. Whenever one of those two wanders into trouble, the other always provides faithful companionship.

  Franklin runs a hand through his hair. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ll go after them,” says Helen.

  “They’ll be fine. I looked at the house and came to no harm,” Franklin states in a voice meant to be reassuring. “So did Alice and Eleanor.”

  That is true, but Alice remembers what she heard…

  Alice. Come home.

  What if that scritch-scratch voice calls to Teddy?

  “I’m sure they’ll be fine.” But Helen grimly follows that up with, “We’ll go with protection.”

  “Iron?” Franklin asks.

  “And salt.”

  While Franklin and Helen dash off to grab what they need, Alice doesn’t dare wait another second. Teddy and Corinne have been gone more than half an hour and must be halfway there by now. Pausing only to grab the first coat that comes to hand, she rushes out the front door and immediately collides with someone walking up the steps.

  “Alice?” It’s Eleanor, carrying a satchel.

  “Teddy’s in danger!” Alice pushes Eleanor toward the door. “They’ll explain. I’m going ahead. Tell them to hurry!”

  Slipping and sliding on the sidewalk, Alice soon regrets the lack of a hat and wonders if she should have waited for her cousins after all. The snow falls faster and heavier. Her ears sting, and her wet hair drips inside the collar of the too-large coat she borrowed. Ducking her head, she concentrates on keeping her footing and not pitching face-first into the street.

  “Hello there, miss!”

  Shielding her eyes from the falling snow, Alice looks up to see a covered grocery wagon stopping beside her in the street. Gazing at her with worry from the driver’s seat is a kindly faced grocer. A pigtailed girl of about ten years sits beside him.

  “Do you need help, child?” the grocer asks. “A ride, perhaps?”

  “Yes.” Lies spill out of Alice’s mouth as fast as she can think them up. “My aunt has taken ill, and I must tell my father to come at once. He lives—” Remembering her current state of dress and the grandeur of the houses at her destination, she amends her words. “He works at Number Six West Fifty-Seventh Street. No, I’m sorry. I mean Number Sixteen.” Number 6 is conspicuously labeled as Unsafe; her lie will come apart at the seams if the grocer delivers her there. Better to run the last block than be delayed with nosy questions from a well-meaning adult.

  “Help her up, Pearl,” the man says, and the girl holds out a hand.

  Alice takes it, her hand a block of ice in the warmth of the girl’s mittened one. Pearl scoots closer to her father on the bench to make room. “Thank you!” Alice gasps.

  Pearl examines Alice with worried eyes. “You’re frozen almost to death, aren’t you?”

  “Lucky we’ve finished our deliveries and it’s not out of our way,” her father says.

  “Pa, you’d take her even if we had deliveries and it was a mile out of our way.”

  This is a lucky break. Teddy and Corinne must be slowed by the snow. Alice might even get there before them. Still, she jiggles up and down on the bench, wishing the horse would go faster. Traffic gets heavier the farther downtown they go. People have business despite the weather, and the poor visibility and everyone’s desire for right-of-way at every intersection slow them down. Luckily, the grocer and his daughter don’t pester her with questions. Pearl finds a rag for Alice to dry her face, and Alice tries not to mind that it smells of onions.

  Finally, they reach Fifty-Seventh Street, and Alice launches herself out of the wagon when the grocer slows the horse at an intersection. “This is close enough! Thank you!”

  “You get yourself warmed up, you hear!” Pearl calls.

  Alice waves an arm in the air and hopes they take that as thanks and dismissal. Her head swivels back and forth as she looks for Teddy and Corinne. As before, the block is deserted. Having started from the wagon at a dead run, Alice forces her legs to slow as she approaches Number 6. The snow on the sidewalk makes an unbroken carpet ahead of her. Her footprints alone disturb the snowfall.

  She heaves a sigh. She has beaten them. All she has to do is wait in front of Number 6 for the rest of the cousins to arrive. If Teddy and Corinne appear, she’ll deal with them, although it is possible that the snow made them turn around and go home. The panic she felt when she learned her brother was coming here subsides…

  And then spikes, shooting her heart rate up so fast her throat throbs.

  Two sets of footprints cross the street at an angle, heading for Number 6. They come up onto the sidewalk and merge into an area of churned-up snow that stretches the entire length of the old Roosevelt residence.

  “Teddy!” Alice yells. “Corinne!”
r />   She traverses the length of the house, past the windows through which, on her previous visit, she glimpsed furniture, to the screened-in porch. Here, to her horror, she sees indentations in the snow on the other side of the decorative iron fence leading right up to the porch—and from there to a screen door hanging loose on its hinges.

  “No, no, no!” How could they be so foolish? “Teddy! Corinne!” Alice climbs the fence, straddles it in her divided skirt, and jumps down on the other side. Immediately the damp cold of a February day shifts to something sharper and biting. Alice’s wet hair freezes in place. Every snowflake that lands on her face burns. Instinct wails at her to flee, but her legs drive her forward, one step at a time. “Teddy!”

  Teddy. Her baby brother. Not her new baby brother, but the original. The one she hugged like a doll when she was hardly more than a toddler herself and—to the aggravation of Mother Edith—defended against all visitors. “Don’t touch!” she had yelled at a vicar’s wife. “Ted-deeee!” she calls into the house now.

  Her answer is a scream—high-pitched, thrumming with terror. Corinne.

  Alice slaps the broken screen door open and plunges onto the porch. Darkness drops over her, despite the lack of solid walls. There is an outside to the house and an inside. The porch is inside, by the rules of this haunting. Inside is cold, like shards of glass, and dark, like the gullet of a predator.

  Double glass doors connecting the porch to the house swing open, leading Alice into the huge drawing room she glimpsed through the windows on her last visit. She sees the grandfather clock, sofas, tall vases, and a piano. There are elk and bear heads mounted on the walls, much as in her father’s current home. On a low table, Alice spots a half-completed baby blanket in an embroidery hoop, the needle still piercing the fabric as if the embroiderer laid it aside mere minutes ago. Its once-bright colors are muted with dust. Alice is drawn to it. It might have been her mother who set this down, meaning to finish it on a day that never came. Alice is reaching for it when her mind is jolted by a shout from upstairs—Teddy’s voice—and another harrowing scream from Corinne.