“She wanted to talk to me, not you.”
“But who was she? What did she want?”
“Our aunt Maeve. Great-aunt.” I realized I’d let her name slip in my excitement. Still, the name by itself didn’t mean anything. And if Ms. Burden had been the one calling her before, she had to have known it already.
“But why didn’t you mention her earlier?” she said. “When I asked you about your relatives?”
“I don’t know. I forgot about her.”
“We could have invited her to the funeral, if you’d just considered other people for a change. If you hadn’t been so selfish. Instead she had to hear about your father’s death from a stranger, over the phone. How do you think that made her feel? How old is she?”
“I don’t know. Seventy, maybe.”
“What’s her last name?”
I knew enough not to tell her that. Hell, Semiramis would have known. I gave her the first name I could think of. “Quinn. Like us.”
“And where does Maeve Quinn live?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
“We—we didn’t see her a lot. And it was a long drive. Bend, somewhere like that.”
I knew a lot of people in Eugene went to Bend for vacation, knew that it was over a hundred miles away. If she wanted to waste her time going there and asking questions, I wasn’t going to stop her.
“Which one was it? Bend, or somewhere like that?”
“Bend. I think.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t see her more often? I heard her say something about her checks—what was that all about?”
“We—Philip found a bunch of checks lying around one time when we visited her. So he took her to the bank and made sure she deposited them.”
Beatriz risked a glance at me, looking impressed. I felt pretty impressed myself, with how quickly I answered her questions. I wondered if Piper was helping me. He was a terrific liar, I knew that.
“What kind of checks?” Ms. Burden asked.
“I don’t know! How would I know?”
“So here’s this old woman, living alone—she does live alone, right?” I nodded. “Living alone, forgetting to deposit her checks. Running out of money, maybe, not paying her rent, unable to buy food. Starving, maybe. And you only saw her once in a while? You weren’t worried that something could happen to her, that she might die if you didn’t keep an eye on her?”
That did it. It wasn’t the questions, though they were getting harder to answer. It wasn’t that she was making me feel terrible, as if I had set out to torture my aunt on purpose. It was the fact that she kept after me and after me, that she just wouldn’t let it go.
“I don’t know!” I said again. “I was only a kid, and Philip didn’t tell me everything. Why are you asking me all these questions?”
“Well, don’t you think we should visit her, try to help her out? She didn’t seem all there on the phone, poor dear. Did she give you her address?”
“No. You took the phone away before she could say anything.”
I thought she’d get mad at this. Instead she said, “You don’t seem to know very much about your own family.”
“I guess not.”
“Well, sleep on it. Maybe you’ll remember something in the morning.”
But the next day, fortunately, she seemed preoccupied, and I managed to leave the house without any more questions.
Beatriz and I were walking home from school one afternoon when she said, suddenly, “Okay, you win. There’s something really weird going on.”
I tried not to grin. Beatriz hated admitting she was wrong. “She wants to find Aunt Maeve for some reason,” I said.
“Yeah, but why?”
“I told you. Because she likes Ivory Apples. Because she’s an obsessed fan.”
Beatriz shook her head. “I don’t know about that. But I think you might be right that she might have—might have done something to Philip. So she could get closer to us, though I don’t know why she’d want to. Remember how she asked him over to her house? Like she really wanted him there for some reason.”
I nodded.
“We could go over there, take a look at those stairs. Figure out what happened.”
“What good would that do?”
“If she did do something, if she messed with the stairs, then it’s a crime. It’s murder. And we could go to the police, or that lawyer.”
Piper stirred at this. And suddenly I had a strong feeling of anticipation, as if someone had opened all the windows in a stuffy room, letting in strong, sharp, bracing air. Or as if spring had started at that moment, every tree and flower in the world stirring in excitement.
We talked about it for the rest of the way home, working out the details. I felt hopeful, for the first time in a long time. If she was a murderer she’d go to prison, wouldn’t she? And we’d get another guardian, Uncle Len maybe.
CHAPTER 10
BEATRIZ UNFOLDED A MAP as big as a bedsheet. We were sitting next to each other on the bus, tracing the route to Ms. Burden’s house.
It had been amazingly easy to put our plan in motion. Ms. Burden usually hung her purse by the door, out of sight of where she was lying on the couch; I had only to dip my hand into it and pull out a batch of keys, and separate hers from Philip’s. Then I found some mail that had been forwarded from her old house and memorized the address. The map showing bus routes had come from a drawer in the kitchen.
It had all gone so well that I couldn’t help worrying about what lay ahead. “What if she already sold her house?” I said. “If there are people living in it?”
“Then we just say we’re looking for her and go away,” Beatriz said.
There was something else bothering me, though. I hadn’t completely realized, yesterday, what it would mean if she’d killed Philip. It meant that she was a killer, someone who got rid of people and seemed to feel no remorse for it. That she had killed my father as easily as swatting a fly. I felt a helpless, choking anger, that feeling you get when you’ve been treated unfairly but are powerless to do anything about it.
The bus came to our stop and we got off, then walked the three blocks we’d seen on the map. The neighborhood looked even shabbier in daylight, and so did the house: the roof was missing a few shingles and two of the windows were cracked.
We looked at each other for courage and walked through the unkempt garden. I rang the bell. We didn’t hear it ringing inside the house, so I knocked loudly. No one answered.
I pulled out the two keys. One was much larger than the other, and it opened the door on my first try.
There was more dust on the furniture, but otherwise everything seemed unchanged, cold and still and unwelcoming. We went on into the kitchen.
The door to the basement was closed again, and locked with the padlock. Why had she locked it? Was it to keep something inside, the thing that made noises maybe?
We looked at each other again. Beatriz made no move toward the door, and I remembered she hadn’t looked into the basement the last time we’d been here either. I put that together with other things I’d noticed, and finally I realized that she was terrified, and trying hard not to show it.
I didn’t want to unlock the door either. I felt for Piper, hoping he would inspire me, would goad me into a wild flight down the stairs. But Piper had shrunk himself into the smallest space possible, trembling and chattering his teeth in an exaggerated show of fear. He would never do anything he didn’t want to, I knew that much about him. But if even he was frightened, what did that say about what lay behind the door?
I used the smaller key on the padlock and opened the door quickly, then peered down into the darkness.
“Crap,” Beatriz said. “We forgot to bring a flashlight.”
I remembered that for some reason the light switch was at the bottom of the stairs. With Beatriz so frightened I would have to go first and turn it on. I stepped through the door, my mind as blank as I could make it, and star
ted down. “Don’t come after me until I turn on the light,” I called, pretending to both of us that she wasn’t afraid.
I moved slowly, feeling for each step before I put my foot on it. And I kept to the right, my hand brushing against the wall to guide me.
I came to the shadowed part, where the light from the kitchen didn’t reach. It seemed to be rising and falling in places, as if it was breathing. I took a deep breath of my own and continued down. The darkness slid over my mouth, my nose, my eyes.
The air seemed heavier now, like wading through tar. I had an immediate desire to go back, as strong as if I had heard a sharp voice commanding me to turn around. It was getting hard to breathe.
A howl came from the basement, starting deep and climbing higher and higher, finally breaking on a note it couldn’t reach. It sounded like the grief of some huge animal, a rhino or a whale.
We both screamed. “What was that?” Beatriz yelled from the kitchen.
“I don’t know!” One of my feet was hovering over the step below, and I jerked it back and stood still, listening.
Suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore. I took the last few steps at a run, forgetting that one of the stairs might be loose. I reached the bottom before I expected it and stumbled.
“I made it,” I called to Beatriz when I’d righted myself. “I’m going to turn on the light.”
I felt along the wall. Something crept across the floor with a slithery sound. “I can’t find the switch,” I said. A whimper had come into my voice.
“There isn’t a switch, remember?” Beatriz said. “It’s a cord, hanging from the ceiling.”
Oh, thank God. I reached up and felt the cord brush my hand. Or was it a spider web? I jerked away, then forced myself to go back to it, to grab it and pull. Light flooded the basement.
I looked around. The room was nearly empty, with just a lawnmower, some cans of paint, and a chair with a broken seat. Shelves lined one of the walls but they held very little as well—a few empty planters, a trowel, a naked baby doll. It was very cold, and I hugged myself to get warm.
Beatriz came down the stairs and stood beside me. “Where did that noise come from?” she asked, whispering.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back. “Nothing looks like it could have moved, does it?”
There were no tracks across the dirt floor. Dust covered everything, and cobwebs glittered from one of the walls like a ruined tapestry. The lawnmower, the paint, and the chair seemed like props in some sinister play, whose meaning would become clear only later.
Where had my father fallen? I looked for some sign, a bloodstain maybe, but I didn’t see anything.
I felt reluctant to look at the stairs, to turn my back on the empty room. Finally I went to them and worked my way up, tugging on each of the steps in turn. “Nothing,” I said. “Everything’s okay.”
“Well, maybe she fixed them later,” Beatriz said. It was surprising how much we both wanted my theory to be true.
“It doesn’t look like it.”
I wanted urgently to leave, to run away and never come back. Instead I told Beatriz to go back to the kitchen, then started down the stairs to turn off the light. It was a sign of how frightened she was that she didn’t argue, just passed me silently on the stairs.
I watched her until she was out of sight, then looked around at the basement. Had the doll moved? No, it couldn’t have. I’d forgotten where it was before, that was all. I breathed deeply and pulled the cord.
I felt for the first step and started to climb. As I headed upward, the light from the kitchen came into view, and I kept it in front of me like a far-off beacon. Suddenly I heard Beatriz make a noise, a cross between a moan and a scream.
I stopped. “What is it?” I called.
“I felt something. Something—I felt it touch me.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re getting out. They’re leaving the basement. Ivy, hurry up—we have to close the door!”
I ran. I stumbled on a step and kept going, and finally broke through into the light. I could hear Beatriz now, mumbling softly to herself: “Oh my God, oh my God.”
I burst into the kitchen. She slammed the door behind me and clicked the padlock shut.
“What happened?” I asked.
She leaned against a wall, breathing heavily. “I—I felt them leave. Like a wind, but dry, like dust . . . I think—I think we let them out.”
I looked around. “So where are they?”
“I don’t know. They left. They can’t go through doors, maybe, or walls. Come on, we have to get out of here.”
She was already heading for the living room. I followed her and opened the front door, and we hurried outside.
“What do you mean, you felt them?” I asked.
“For God’s sake, close the door!” she said. She slammed the door shut. “What were you thinking? You can’t let them out like that!”
“I don’t . . . What do you mean? Let what out?”
“Those slithery things, the ones that made those noises. I felt them again . . .” She shivered.
I’d felt something too, just before she’d closed the door. The wind, I’d thought it was. There was no wind now, though.
She seemed on the verge of panic. I knew I had to pretend that nothing had happened, at least until we made it home. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
We started toward the bus stop. It was cold and the streets were getting dark; we’d been in the house for longer than I’d realized. I hadn’t brought a coat because I’d thought of myself as a kind of ninja, ghosting silently down the stairs, and now I ran my hands up and down my arms, trying to get warm.
“And what about those—those noises?” Beatriz said.
This had to be hard for her, I thought. She was the most rational of all of us, someone who needed proof before she believed anything. “Maybe there was a tape recorder somewhere. In the basement.”
She scoffed. “Did you see a tape recorder?”
“Well, I don’t know then.”
“Strange things happen,” she said. I looked at her. “You said that, before.”
We reached the bus stop. I remembered that I’d thought Ms. Burden had made up that story about the noises in the basement, that it had been a trick to get Philip over to her house. But it had turned out to be true, all of it.
I started shivering in short bursts, stopping and then starting again. I felt cold on the bus, too, and even when we got home, though Ms. Burden had turned the heat on. I kept remembering the way that thing had brushed past me, hurrying outside.
Strange things happen, I thought. But they aren’t necessarily good things, or well disposed toward people.
CHAPTER 11
A FEW WEEKS LATER we were all sitting down for dinner, Esperanza’s delicious lasagna. It was usually the only time that the five of us were together; otherwise we each went our separate ways.
But we didn’t talk much even at dinner, not like we used to. So I was surprised when Amaranth said, “Can we go to the park again?”
Ms. Burden said nothing, just continued eating. “Kate?” Amaranth said. “Are we ever going to the park? Or we could stay here and play Murder again?”
She sounded terribly sad. She was too young to understand what was going on, but I should have tried to explain some of it to her. I’d been too trapped in my own problems to think about her, though.
“Oh, we can’t do any of that now, Rantha,” Ms. Burden said. “I have far too much work here as your guardian—I just don’t have time for anything else.”
“What kind of work?” Amaranth asked.
Ms. Burden looked up sharply. She’d thought Amaranth had been needling her, that the question was Amaranth’s way of pointing out how little she actually did. Then her face changed as she realized that Amaranth really wanted to know.
“Well,” she said. “I have to shop for all of you, and see to it that everything’s going well at school, and take you f
or your check-ups and things.”
Esperanza did most of the shopping, and Ms. Burden hadn’t taken us to a doctor yet. “When are we going for check-ups?” I asked.
My question had been insulting, and she knew it. We’d fallen into this pattern over the months, a petty back-and-forth sniping. We might have even enjoyed it, or enjoyed some of it.
“I’m glad you reminded me, Ivy,” she said. “It’s time to make appointments with the dentist, for all of you.”
A low noise came from beneath us, a sound like a rusty garage door opening, though we didn’t have a garage. It was the same sad howl we’d heard in Ms. Burden’s basement. There was something deeply wrong about it, like that feeling you get during an eclipse, when the sun should be shining but everything around you is in darkness.
I’d been looking at Ms. Burden, about to say something, so I caught the flash of fear on her face, a genuine terror that could not have been faked. Then, an instant later, the fright disappeared, and her expression turned smooth again.
The noise stopped, finally. “What was that?” Beatriz asked, her voice shaky. Her face was as white as the tablecloth.
“I don’t know, dear,” Ms. Burden said. “Could it be the house settling?”
Ms. Burden knew what the sounds were, though. So did Beatriz, and so did I. Those things we’d heard in the basement had not only escaped, they had followed us. And this time they were in our house, not Ms. Burden’s; we couldn’t run away from them.
Ms. Burden and I had become locked in a silent struggle to find Maeve first. She got Caller ID for the phone, in case Maeve tried to call us again. But Maeve must have guessed something was up, because we never heard from her.
One day I remembered how Philip would pick up Aunt Maeve’s mail before we visited her. I even knew her box number, 369, from seeing it on all the letters. I sat down and wrote to her, feeling elated after I mailed it off; I thought I’d won the contest once and for all.
The letter came back about a week later. “No such holder at this post office box,” someone had stamped on the envelope. Luckily it had been delivered on a Saturday, and I’d gotten to the mail first. God knows what Ms. Burden would have made of it.
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