The Secret Grave

by Lois Ruby

  Nana’s a round, top-heavy bundle of super-efficiency on two short, pretzel-stick legs that end in neon-green high-top sneakers. Scooter says she looks like Humpty Dumpty’s mother. Actually, she’s Dad’s mother.

  Mom opens the door. “Fiona! Great to see you, and you’re right on time, because look at this mess.” Mom’s arm sweeps around the chaos of our front hall—toys littering the floor, jackets flung in a heap over a bench, an enormous red cooler gaping open with yesterday’s picnic. “We’re way out of control, as usual.” Mom gives Nana a hug, pushes a mug of coffee into her hand, and says, “Work your magic,” which is exactly what Nana means to do.

  Dad throws his arms around Nana and dances her around the living room a couple of times. “The kids will be thrilled to have you here,” he says as he drops her off by the stairs. “Sorry, Mama, deadline looming.” Then he disappears upstairs to his studio. Nana’s in charge now. Except to provide necessary transportation, both parents will barely show their faces for the next few days until Nana’s back in her Studebaker, pointed north.

  The first thing she does is line us kids up oldest to youngest, to inspect us like the drill sergeants you see on TV. She doesn’t believe in nicknames, which is fine, since I’m the only one in the family who doesn’t have one.

  “Frances Elizabeth, pin your hair back from your eyes, child. They’re lovely green Irish eyes, but your hair’s a widow’s veil over ’em.” Nana Fiona pulls out a red-flocked velvet headband and tucks it onto Franny’s head behind her ears.

  “Patrick Sean, I see you’re wearing one of those infernal baseball jerseys. Fine, but Braves? At least, at least, son, wear the Yankees with pride,” and she hands him a vintage Babe Ruth shirt that makes him sputter with thanks.

  Nana’s smile lands on me (and yes, I’m her favorite). “Hannah Ruth, why, you’re taller and more rounded out since I was here at Christmas. I pray you haven’t grown up too much for this.” She lifts a music box with a revolving Georgia peach out of her shopping bag, gives the key a turn, and it plays “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

  When she comes to Scooter, her eyes cloud a little. “Scott Thomas, you’re too thin, child. It’s that vexing breath matter, isn’t it? Ay, but you’re the bookworm in the house—”

  “We call the house Nightshade, Nana Fiona,” Trick reminds her.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Nana says, “but I don’t have to talk about a house as if it’s a living person, now, do I?”

  Trick snorts under his breath. Lucky that Nana’s hard-of-hearing, except when she wants to hear.

  Scooter’s got his nose in the book she brought him. “Wow, it’s the only one in Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series that I haven’t read. How did you know?”

  “I have a camera in your room.”

  Gracie fidgets beside Scooter, peering into Nana’s huge Trader Joe’s shopping bag to see what’s in it for her.

  “And Baby Grace Eileen. Why, you’ve stopped sucking your fingers at last!” Which reminds Gracie to pop her first two fingers into her mouth and suck the way Scooter sucks on his inhaler. Nana reaches forward and unplugs the fingers with a loud slerk sound. “Here, my darlin’, chew on this raspberry licorice twist instead.”

  Nana stands back and looks us all over, then takes in the cluttered kitchen counter and dishwasher gaping open and a hundred paper scraps magnetized to the fridge and pots crusting on the stove and Gracie’s alphabet letters scattered across the floor.

  “Well, let’s get to work, shall we? I’ve only got two days, but the good Lord made the world in a mere six, so there’s hope here.” She issues commands, and we all leap to our tasks to restore order. No wonder I adore this woman!

  Later, Nana Fiona knocks and barges right into my room. She nestles on my bed with her thin legs sticking straight out. “Tell me all about your life, darlin’. Don’t spare me a messy detail.”

  Should I? I tell her how I’m worried about Scooter, who’s definitely getting sicker, and about Cady in the forest, how she’s saving my miserable summer, sort of. “The thing is, sometimes she’s there, and sometimes she’s not there, and I never know which it’s going to be.”

  “Tricky, that one.”

  “And then she does something awful, like giving away secrets and calling Scooter a fake, and I swear I’m never going back into that forest, no matter how boring and lonely my summer is.”

  “Yet you do,” Nana Fiona says, and I can only nod miserably.

  After a while, with Nana and me holding hands, I say, “I have something to show you.” I open my bedside table and take out the pearls wrapped in a white silk scarf. “These were your mother’s, weren’t they? Her wedding pearls?”

  Nana rubs the pearls between her fingers with such tenderness that it almost makes me cry. “Mercy me, where did you ever … ?”

  “A trunk up in the attic, along with this, your parents’ wedding picture, see?”

  She takes the framed photo out of my hand and rubs her index finger across her father’s face. “Oh, don’t be fooled by the uniform. My father, Cecil, was a milquetoast,” Nana says with a laugh. Then seeing my confusion, she explains, “A timid man. He was a dear, sweet soul, but entirely under the thumb of my mother.” She taps at her mother’s face. “This Moira Flynn, she was a vixen if there ever was one. As feisty as a filly at the opening bell.” Nana lays the picture down on the bed and holds the pearls up to her neck to model them in the mirror. She sinks into her round self like a balloon losing air. “My mother was my dearest friend. Twenty years, and I’ve not gotten over losing her.”

  “She tucked a letter in with the pearls. Did you know she meant for me to have them, even though I hadn’t even been born when she wrote the letter? Can I ask you a tough question?”

  “I don’t have to answer if I don’t relish it, now, do I?” Nana’s smile carves big parentheses around her mouth, making me think it might not be so bad to be wrinkly someday.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Ghosts, now there’s a perplexing question. The answer is, I’m Irish. That should settle it.” She says Irish like Eyerrr-rrish, rolling every one of those r’s.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Oh, ’tis, because there’s a long fierce connection between people and ghostly sprites in Irish folklore. The spirits linger between this life we know, and the next that we don’t, because they aren’t quite done with the business of their lives—loved ones left behind, anger still brewing like spitfire, frights they’ve never got past. You see?”

  “Sort of, but I’m not sure.”

  “Did you ever hear of a banshee? ’Tis an eerie being if ever there was one. No? Then let me tell you, darlin’, and you’ll never forget this. You’ll be reminded every time you hear your mother’s teapot whistle and wail.”

  Nana Fiona reaches across me and turns off the lamp. She loves atmosphere for her stories. We lie next to each other in the gathering dark, sharing one pillow. We’re the same height. My feet are bare; her neon-green sneakers point up toward the ceiling.

  “A banshee is a female spirit, a messenger from the world beyond. She’s ashen, shadowy, and wraith-like. You know her by her wail, for she weeps and screeches ferociously to warn us living souls that someone dear is about to pass into the next world.”

  I shudder. “So, she’s a kind of ghost messenger?”

  “What brings you to ask me about such things, Hannah?”

  I don’t answer right away, hoping she’ll think I’ve dozed off so I don’t have to respond.

  She rises up on her elbow and peers down at me.

  “When I found the pearls up in the attic, I fastened them tight around my neck, but someone unclasped them, and they fell to the floor.”

  Nana’s eyebrows rise, but she keeps still.

  “I think there’s a ghost in our attic.”

  “Do you, now! Well, I’ll be. And who might be hauntin’ this house, do you think?”

  And so I tell her about the house changing fr
om Autumn Splendor to Nightshade and back, the year her parents lived here. And about blind Vivienne.

  “Ay,” she says.

  “Then, you do believe in ghosts?”

  “Of course not! But to be on the safe side, you never know, do ya, darlin’?”

  Yesterday Nana Fiona inspected the refrigerator and freezer and cleared out things that were too fuzzy or too icebergy. By the time we were all awake this morning, she’d been to the grocery store, had sourdough bread rising, and ingredients lined up for Franny to cook three freezer meals.

  Also, she has new jobs for us. Gracie’s is to pick out ten toys she doesn’t love anymore that she’d like to share, and Scooter’s polishing silver that’s turned black since Nana was here at Christmas. Trick’s on a tottering ladder cleaning bugs out of the light fixtures and changing burned-out bulbs. I have the best job, rearranging the pantry and the linen cabinets. (Order, I love it!) We’re a beautiful, fine-tuned orchestra of activity, and Nana, the conductor, is everywhere at once.

  As I shift and sort things I’m thinking about banshees wailing. I haven’t been to the forest since Nana arrived. Is Cady wondering about me?

  Lunch done, and the whole house in clockwork order, Nana gives us the afternoon off. “Hannah, I’d like to visit your attic.” She doesn’t say it, but I think she wants to see the ghost. Nana comes upstairs with me, huffing and puffing between the second and third floors. “I believe I know how Scott feels, though he’s sixty years younger than I am. How does a body get to the attic?”

  I show her the pull-down ladder with the narrow, open steps, and the color drains from her face as she gazes up into the black hole of the attic.

  “Mercy me. Another time, perhaps.”

  So Nana doesn’t get to meet Vivienne’s ghost, if that’s really what is up in the attic, because by mid-afternoon she’s packed and ready to leave as suddenly as she arrived. Mom and Dad reappear to kiss her good-bye and wish her safe travels and take over again as the adults in charge, more or less.

  While Mom is trying to figure out where everything is, since Nana and I rearranged so many things, I slip out of the house and return to the forest. It’s the cabin in the woods that I want to explore, with the little chairs and the Smokey Bear poster. If I can sneak back there without Cady knowing, I’ll find out more about this mysterious new friend.

  In the few days since I last visited, there’s a lot more green growth. I have to push aside shrubs and tree branches to get to the cabin, which has some sort of vines climbing up its rough walls.

  One thing has changed since the last time I was here. Cady’s picnic basket sits on the rickety table that leans toward the dirt floor of the hut, and tempts me. I open one flap of the basket. There are no picnic goodies in it, just a variety of loose gizmos, like our junk drawer in the kitchen. I rummage around inside, sifting through batteries and rubber bands and candles and matches and key chains without keys, until I pull out a bottle of blue nail polish. There’s an HF in red on the bottom of this bottle. Franny and I have a deal. We each paint our initials on our bottles of polish so we can claim them. This is my blue nail polish that vanished days ago! What else does Cady have of mine in here? I scuttle around inside the picnic basket, but there’s nothing else I recognize.

  How did she get my nail polish? I can’t believe that she snuck into Nightshade, into my room, into my private desk, and took it. If she’d asked me, I’d have loaned it to her. I’d probably have given it to her for keeps. Luisa and Sara and I trade nail polish and sunglasses and earrings all the time. We don’t have to sneak things out of one another’s houses. No, there’s got to be some logical explanation. I mean, stealing isn’t what honest and true friends do.

  Suddenly Cady comes swirling into the cabin like a whirlwind.

  “You always sneak up on me!” Once my heart stops thumping, I stick the nail polish bottle under her nose. “How did you get this?”

  At first she gazes at it curiously as though she’s never seen it, then says, “Oh, that. It fell out of your pocket the last time you were here.”

  I don’t remember having the bottle in my pocket.

  Cady waves long, tapered nails in front of my eyes. “See? I love blue polish just like you do.”

  “If I wore zebra stripes with purple dots, you’d love that, too?”

  “Yes, because we’re soul sisters.” With a look of pure joy on her face, Cady says, “Welcome to my fort! Isn’t this absolutely the best place to hide out when you need to escape from your obnoxious family? No one would find you here. Ever.”

  I point to the poster of Smokey Bear: Only you can prevent forest fires.

  “Was there ever a fire here?” I ask, because now I see black char marks on the wood that’s so rough you’d get splinters if you even brushed by it. The poster and the silent, deserted faerie cabin are starting to creep me out.

  With a hand-sweep of the whole crumbling room, Cady says, “This is my personal fort. No invaders.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Everybody? Oh, I guess my friends are staying out of the heat today.”

  “You said they were gone for a few weeks.”

  “Maybe longer,” she says vaguely.

  “Do you go nuts being alone so much? Most people would. It’s a funny thing. As far back as I can remember, I’ve craved time by myself, but after a while it gets so lonely.”

  “Craved? What does craved mean?” Cady asks.

  “Oh, you know, it’s like when you’ve absolutely got to have chocolate or else you’ll get very cranky.”

  “Oh, yeah, I crave chocolate,” she says flatly.

  “Dark or milk?”

  “What?”

  “Your favorite kind of chocolate.”

  She opens her mouth, but no words come out.

  “Not counting chocolate, what’s your favorite food in the whole world? Mine’s raspberry pie. Yours?”

  Panic flickers across her face. “Food’s a boring subject,” she snaps.

  “Okay, so tell me something that isn’t boring, like what’s up with these little chairs?”

  “They’re old, very old. They’re for forest creatures to curl up in.”

  “What kind of creatures?” I ask, all wobbly voiced, imagining the worst.

  Cady picks up the shivers in my voice, and her eyes go soft. “Don’t be scared, Hannah. Nothing here would hurt you. Trust me.”

  Uh-oh. Dad once warned me, “Those are dangerous words. There’s something untrustworthy about a person who has to remind you to trust in her.”

  I desperately want to trust Cady.

  A large leather tote bag in the corner is bulging with something. I imagine some wild creature’s curled up in there, just waiting to spring to life. Cady reaches in and nothing bites her fingers. Instead, she pulls out a giant ball of orange yarn.

  “Guess what I have hidden inside this ball of yarn. Three guesses.”

  “Um, a tiny blue robin’s egg? No? A hawk’s tooth? Wait, I know, the eyeball of one of those forest creatures who curl up in your chairs.”

  “So far off.” She begins rolling the yarn backward, like she’s reeling in a whopper of a fish. Too slow, so she impatiently tosses the ball against the wall and yanks to unravel it faster, until the floor is covered with orange wool spaghetti, and the dense center of the roll is as small as a tennis ball. What’s inside? Suddenly I don’t want to see what’s in there.

  She carefully uncoils the last tight bit of ripply yarn and shows me on the palm of her hand an old-fashioned pin, the kind Nana Fiona would call a cameo brooch. A profile of a face is cut into black stone, surrounded by delicate gold filigree. Cady hands the brooch to me. It’s ice-cold. I yank my hand away, and it clatters to the floor. She scurries to pick it up and hands it to me again, face down this time.

  “It’s monogrammed, see?”

  The initials are engraved in the gold around the cameo: V.A.S.

  “Who’s V.A.S.?”

  Cady’s stare is intense
. “Can’t you guess?”

  I turn the cameo over, warming it in my hands until now it’s almost too hot to handle. How could it go from ice burn to heat burn in a minute?

  “I introduced you to her, the artist? The blind artist?”

  My mind flashes to the attic, the pearls, the shadow along the wall. “You mean Vivienne?”

  “Yes, V for Vivienne,” Cady says quietly. “I knew … know her better than anyone. She was my mother.”

  “She couldn’t have been your mother! Vivienne lived in the 1890s.”

  Cady shrugs. “A problem only if time ripples along a straight path, like a clothesline from your window to the magnolia tree in the yard. But what if time is like this orange wool at our feet, coiled and tangled and tossed every which way? Would you believe it then?”

  “Absolutely not. It’s another one of your juicy stories.” Or lies? “Here’s what I know for sure. Twelve years and sixteen days have passed since I was born.” I jab the air in a straight line. “See? Not a wiggly zigzag-all-over-the-place line.”

  “Oh, poor Hannah Flynn. No imagination,” she says, clucking like a demented hen. “Why can’t you believe me?”

  She’s so sincere, so sure of herself. A terrifying feeling sweeps through me like the chill of the wind on your back when you step out of a pool. Right this minute, I’m dragged into the kooky way Cady thinks, and I believe anything, everything she tells me.

  Her question snaps me out of it. “How is that brother of yours doing?” The way she asks it sounds like, Is your puppy house-trained yet?

  “He’s getting worse. We’re really worried. Nana Fiona, my grandmother, was here for a little while, and she’s frantic about Scooter.”

  Cady wedges herself into one of the little-kid chairs, her feet sticking out in front of her with the toenails painted blue. “It’s none of my business, Hannah, but aren’t you at all suspicious of Scooter?”

  “No! He’s been to the emergency room twice already this summer, and the last few days he’s been lying around on the couch with a humidifier going next to him to help him breathe.”