Sammy placed his hands on my shoulder, squeezing as hard as he could, as if trying to emphasize how serious the information he was about to impart on me was. “Because that’s what happened to her. Alyssa’s dead, and she needs your help.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach as I stared at Sammy’s trembling lips.
“Don’t tell my mom,” he whispered.
11
Don’t tell my mom.
The voice whispered to me every night now. Sometimes, it was familiar, belonging to six-year-old Sammy Baker, who was alive and well. Other times, the voice belonged to a little girl whose name was the only thing I knew about her. Oh, I also knew that she was dead. Her voice—high-pitched, wavy, and distorted as if she had soap bubbles in her mouth—followed me through the corridors of my dreams, corridors that were remarkably reminiscent of the immense mansion I lived in at the present time.
The Abram Mansion seemed older than time itself, and I had recently discovered that it was home to more than me and my soon-to-be ex-husband. In Falconwood, the tiny town that lay below the woods beyond the mansion, the Abram family tragedy was all but forgotten. Only a few retold the tale of Percy Abram losing his sanity and committing suicide on the mountainside when his wife, Penelope, took their young daughter Alyssa to live with Penelope’s lover. The events occurred over forty years ago, but the mansion was much older than the Abrams. This was evident in its Victorian architecture and—as our lovely contractor, Jim, would say—its “old bones.” The house and its secrets lay abandoned since the tragedy, and though Jim and his construction crew were doing their best to restore it to its former grandeur, the mansion did not go easily. For one thing, it was so large that Jim had to section it out room by room. In the two months that we’d been here, the construction crew had only repaired the front wing of the house and half of the terrace that faced the mountain.
Two months. Our sentence was six. Had it been my choice, I would have ignored my grandfather’s instructions about the Abram Mansion. It was all a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo anyway. His will stipulated that Ben and I had to live in the mansion for six months before we could sell it. It was the only loose end left to tie up before we could finalize our divorce. Though Ben saw our time at the mansion as an opportunity to mend our relationship and get back on track as a married couple, I wanted less and less to do with him. It wasn’t that Ben had been a terrible husband or that either one of us had sinned against the other. Simply, I had outgrown Ben and our life together, but it was getting difficult to separate the reasons from our divorce from the strange feelings that emerged between us at the mansion.
A mere week ago, Ben had fallen off the slippery tiles of the terrace. With a shattered arm, broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a minor concussion, it was a miracle he survived the fall. When I lay awake at night, staring at the patterns of moonlight on the ceiling, I wondered if Ben’s fall was some sort of cosmic warning to me, like a wake-up call from the universe that forced me to question whether our divorce was the right decision or not. When he woke up from his surgery, I’d kissed him out of pure relief. Ever since then, he’d been in an oddly cheery mood, reverting back to the smiley, good-humored Ben that I fell in love with once upon a time. The only differences were that we weren’t in high school anymore and Ben was mostly confined to his bed while he recovered.
My relationship with Ben, however, was one of the last things on my mind. Mostly, I obsessed over the Abram Mansion itself, trying to figure out the discrepancy between what I knew and what the residents of Falconwood knew to be true. As was the way of the world, asking someone was out of the question. Little Sammy Baker had sworn me to secrecy.
“Please don’t tell my mom,” he’d whispered. It was the night following Ben’s accident, when the voice of a crying child had led me to Alyssa Abram’s old room. I hadn’t told anyone what I’d experienced there. Who would believe an invisible entity had attacked me—throwing books and toys and furniture around the room like a tornado— anyway? Sammy had been the one to rescue me. He’d taken his hand in mine and led me from the room with a revelation about Alyssa Abram that I wish I’d never heard.
“Alyssa’s dead,” he’d told me. “And she needs your help.”
Blood dripped onto the carpet outside Alyssa’s room. My hand had been injured in the onslaught. I wrapped my sleeve around it and took two things out of my pocket with my good hand. The first was a picture I’d taken in the attic of the mansion not too long ago. It featured a mess of storage and the fuzzy outline of a red-haired girl wearing a pink polka-dotted scarf. The second thing was a drawing that Sammy had given to me. In marker, he’d drawn the same red-haired girl lying in a puddle of blood.
“Is this her?” I’d asked Sammy, showing him the picture. “Is this Alyssa?”
His eyes flickered toward the blurry image. “Yes, that’s her. She hides in the attic.”
“Why does she hide there?”
“Because she’s scared.”
“Of what?”
Sammy squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head as he rocked back and forth on the toes of his worn-out sneakers. He was covered in a thin layer of snowflakes, evidence that he’d walked to the mansion from his mother’s apartment in town yet again without her permission. I brushed the snow from his shoulders and pressed the back of my hand to his cheek. Surprisingly, his skin was warm and soft, but I worried for his comfort even so.
“Come on,” I said, pocketing the drawing and the picture to take Sammy’s hand instead. “Let’s get a snack in the kitchen. Maybe you can tell me more about Alyssa.”
Minutes later, Sammy munched happily on crackers and apple slices, his appetite unaffected by the scary events that had just occurred upstairs. As he ate, I applied antibiotic serum to the cut on my hand and wrapped it in a thick bandage. Every time Sammy’s teeth crunched through a new cracker, I almost reached for my phone. His mother, Theo Baker, was the closest thing I had to a best friend in Falconwood. If she woke to find Sammy missing, she would panic, and I didn’t want to be the cause of alarm for my only friend. On the other hand, I wanted to know more about Alyssa Abram, and Sammy was the only person who could tell me.
“How do you know this is Alyssa?” I asked him, tapping on the blurry figure in the photograph. “It could be anybody.”
“I told you before,” Sammy said. “Alyssa and I are friends. I met her the first time I walked here.”
“Why did you walk to the mansion in the first place?”
His little shoulders met his ears. “Something told me to.”
I shuddered and decided to ignore the implications of Sammy’s answer. He was no ordinary kid, and I hated to think what doctors or psychiatrists might do to him if they ever caught wind of his ghostly communications. “Sammy, I need you to be entirely truthful with me, okay? According to the rest of the town, Alyssa Abram isn’t dead. She left Falconwood with her mother forty years ago.”
Sammy shook his head, sending cracker crumbs flying. “That’s what everybody thinks, but Alyssa never left the mansion. She’s still here. She’s still five years old. I’m not old enough to help her, and I didn’t think anyone else would understand” —he lifted his eyes to mine— “but you get it, don’t you, Peyton?”
A shiver radiated down my spine. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to understand what Sammy was talking about, but at the same time, my curiosity waved a checkered flag. Ever since Ben and I arrived at the mansion, I’d sensed there was more to it than met the eye. On our first night, I’d sworn voices were whispering to me in the walls. Later, I heard a woman arguing with her husband behind a closed door, but when Ben checked the room with a baseball bat in hand, he found nothing but an abandoned master bedroom. I wondered if the stress of our impending divorce and the renovation of the mansion was making me hear things, but with Sammy’s insistence that Alyssa was real, I started to think it wasn’t just my imagination.
“Listen, Sammy.” I sat next to him at the kitchen table and almost reached for his
hands, but he was busy with his apples and crackers. I opted for pushing his hair away from his forehead instead. His bangs needed a trim, but Theo hadn’t found the time to take him to the barber lately. “This thing with Alyssa scares me. Do you understand why?”
“Because you’ve never seen a ghost before?”
My heart dropped into my stomach. It was the first time either one of us said the word out loud. When it came out of Sammy’s mouth, it felt like a confirmation of what might have remained imaginary if neither of us had ever mentioned it. “You think the girl in your pictures is Alyssa’s ghost?”
“I know she is,” Sammy replied matter-of-factly. As he chewed on his last piece of apple, one of his front teeth wobbled, on the cusp of loosening enough to fall out. “You know it too, but you’re scared. Your face is pale. It’s okay. She won’t hurt you. She’s just sad.”
“You have to understand that none of this makes sense,” I implored. “People don’t see dead people unless it’s in the movies. There has to be an explanation for this, a reason all these things are happening. Maybe the mountainside affects the pressure around the mansion or something. Pressure systems can really mess with people’s heads—”
Sammy quieted me by placing one damp palm flat on my forehead. His skin smelled like baby wipes and granny smith apples. “That’s the problem with grown-ups,” he said. “You always have to have a reason for something. Sometimes, things just happen. Maybe there’s a reason, or maybe there isn’t, but a lot of the times, the reason isn’t for us to understand.”
“How old are you again? Forty?”
“Six,” he replied with confidence, removing his hand from my forehead to finish off the rest of his crackers. “I don’t ever want to grow up.”
I slumped in my chair. “Who does?”
“It’s not because it’s hard to be a grown-up,” Sammy went on. “It’s because a lot of grown-ups can’t see what’s right in front of them. I don’t want to lose that. If I grow up, I might not be able to help Alyssa, but since you can see her too—”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted him. “I’ve never actually seen Alyssa. I’ve heard her—I think—but the only time I might have seen her was in the attic when I took that picture. Even then, I saw her through the camera, not in real life. I’m not sure our abilities are the same, Sammy, or if we have abilities at all.”
“I’ve seen her.” Sammy pushed his index finger into the direct center of his last cracker, forcing it to shatter into four pieces on the plate. “She appears to me all the time. I bet she’s scared of you.”
“Why would she be scared of me?”
“Because you’re a grown-up living in her house,” he replied. “You’re knocking things down and ruining her room. She’s getting lost in her own house.”
“Are you talking about the renovations? How were we supposed to know there was a ghost in the mansion who would take offense to it?”
“I’m not blaming you,” Sammy said, his tone indicating that maybe he did blame me a little. “But Alyssa doesn’t get it. That’s why she’s scared of you. That’s why she scares you too.”
I pick up a piece of Sammy’s cracker and drag the pointy edge of it across the table, watching the crumbs disintegrate one by one. Sammy hastily eats the other three pieces, as if he doesn’t want me wasting the rest. “What do you want me to do, Sammy? You said I’m the only person who can help her.”
“I’m helping her,” he reminds me. “You’re helping me.”
“Deal. What are we supposed to be doing?”
Sammy dusted cracker crumbs from the front of his sweater. “She needs someone to know the truth, to find out what really happened to her. Otherwise, she’s stuck here forever.”
“Why don’t you just ask her what happened?” I said, feeling like this was the rather obvious way to solve the mystery of Alyssa’s ghost. “Can’t she tell you how she died?”
“I tried that,” Sammy said. “She likes me, but she won’t tell me much about herself. Every time I ask her something, she chases me out of the house.”
“What do you mean?”
“She throws things at me,” he said. “Like she attacked you in her room a few minutes ago. That’s how I know she’s angry. I don’t get it.” He held up both his index fingers, using each one to indicate a separate part of the situation. It was a gesture I’d seen his mother use more than once. “On one hand, I know Alyssa wants me to figure out what happened to her so she doesn’t have to be trapped here anymore. On the other hand, she gets mad when I ask her questions about it. It doesn’t really make sense. That’s where you come in.”
“Oh, is it?”
“Yes.” Sammy patted the collar of my pajama top. “You can do stuff I can’t, like go to the library and stay in this house and figure out all the things that I can’t because you’re a grown-up. Alyssa needs you.”
“What if I can’t help Alyssa?”
Sammy donned a mournful expression. “I don’t think you can leave Abram Mansion until you do.”
“On that note, let’s get you back home.”
As I lifted Sammy from his chair and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders to account for his lack of a snow jacket, he grasped me by my shoulders. “Please don’t tell my mom,” he said again. “If she found out, she would never let me come back here. She would send me to doctors and think I was crazy—”
“Sammy, your secret is safe with me,” I assured him. “After all, it’s our secret now, isn’t it? I can’t tell anyone either.”
It was my truest intention to honor my deal with Sammy. If I had a spare moment, I sat down in front of my laptop to search through whatever I could find on the Abram family history. There was a stunning lack of information on the Abrams, as if their family tree began with Percy and Penelope and ended with Alyssa. It was as if the Abrams had appeared out of thin air. Either that or someone had wiped the Internet of all traces of them. The other problem with my research was that I kept being interrupted.
“Peyton?”
Ben popped his head into my newly-renovated office. The front of his wheelchair ran into the trim around the door, chipping off some of the fresh paint. Though he hadn’t lost the use of his legs, the doctor recommended he use the wheelchair to get around until his lung and ribs were fully healed. Watching him wheel himself around the house reminded me of the last time Ben had been this injured after a fateful football play in high school. Then and now, he popped the chair up and skillfully balanced on the two back wheels, but he’d never gotten the hang of rolling himself from room to room without running into something. These days, it resulted in more swear words that usual.
“Shit.” Ben backed the chair up and tried again to angle himself into my office. “This thing’s impossible to steer.”
I closed my laptop so Ben couldn’t see what I was researching. “What do you need?”
“A shower,” he replied with an apologetic grimace. “I’m starting to feel kind of ripe.”
Between his shattered hand and various other injuries, Ben had a hard time getting things done for himself, including unzipping his pants to go to the toilet. After the tenth time of doing it for him, I went into town and bought him seven pairs of stretchy sweatpants that he could pull up and down without help, one for each day of the week. It was only the beginning of finding alternate ways for him to take care of himself, and we’d been avoiding the bath issue ever since he got home from the hospital. He wiped the parts of himself that he could reach with a wet towel every night, but it only did so much. His curls were limp with the amount of grease that had accumulated in them, and a distinct odor lingered around his person. He was right. He needed a real bath.
“All right,” I said, standing from my desk and gesturing for him to back up. “Wheelie it into the bathroom. Let’s see if we can find an easy way to do this.”
The first-floor bathroom had yet to be renovated, but since Ben couldn’t make it down the steps to the redone toilet on the floor below, he had to ma
ke do with the mansion’s original outdated decor and appliances. On the upside, the bathroom was huge, easily three times the size of the one in the house we left behind when we moved to the mansion. It hadn’t been too difficult to clean up either. The previous residents had a cleaning staff to keep the place immaculate, so there was no soap residue or mold to deal with. I’d had Jim replace some of the older copper pipes before turning the water back on to this part of the house, just in case of faulty plumbing. The pipes were all exposed, leading right up to the claw-footed porcelain tub that reigned supreme in the middle of the room. It was big enough to fit two people, something Ben noticed right away.
“Want to join me?” he quipped, throwing in a saucy wink to make sure I knew it was a joke. He rolled the wheelchair up to the edge of the tub and performed his classic balancing act. “You know I make this chair look sexy.”
“You stink,” I reminded him, though I couldn’t help the smile that lifted my cheeks. This is what I’d been struggling with ever since I asked Ben for the divorce. In essence, he remained the perfect man: handsome, funny, smart, and willing to be an active partner in our relationship rather than a passive one. I kept having to remind myself that no matter Ben’s charm, our marriage had kept me from doing the one thing I was passionate about—photography—and my regret was eating away at our relationship.
Ben’s shoulders drooped, though he tried not to let his disappointment show on his face. “Figured it wouldn’t hurt to give it a shot. I do kind of need a hand though. Can you get this shirt off of me?”
He lifted his arms as high as he could without disturbing his broken ribs, wincing when his T-shirt accidentally got stuck around one of his elbows as I worked it off of him. Beneath the fabric, his usual tan had faded to an uneven pale color, and he sported red splotches around his collar and chest. I rested my hand over his heart, feeling it thump against my palm in overtime.
“I think you’re running a fever,” I told him, withdrawing before he could read anything else into my touch. “We’ll have to keep an eye on that.”
The Haunting of Abram Mansion Page 14
