by Laura McHugh
When a week had passed with no signs of me wanting to harm myself, Mom and Gary were glad to put me on a plane back to Colorado. I didn’t have much left to do to complete my degree besides turn in my thesis, but I hadn’t told anyone—especially not Dr. Endicott—that my thesis wasn’t finished. After what had happened, I didn’t see how I could go back to school. A few of my friends from the history department called and emailed to check on me, to ask where I was and what was going on. I didn’t know if I should lie, or if Dr. Endicott would tell everyone what I’d done anyway.
I wasn’t thinking, at the time, that he would want to keep everything quiet to avoid revealing to his colleagues and his estranged wife the details of our somewhat inappropriate relationship. I just knew that I couldn’t face him, so I returned to my basement apartment and stayed there, sleeping at random times and staring at the blank screen on my computer, ignoring messages from the other graduate assistants, until the lawyer called with the news about Arrowood—letting me know that Granddad had always planned for the house to go to me, but not until my father died.
Coming home hadn’t been the new start that I thought it would be. The house didn’t feel the same as it had before, and neither did I. I had been altered by grief, remade as a version of myself that I would not have chosen to be but couldn’t help being. The girl I was meant to be had been stolen along with the twins, spirited away to some dark place where I would never find her.
CHAPTER 17
* * *
“I brought you something,” Josh said. The sweating Styrofoam cup was almost too big to hold in one hand. It was a forty-four-ounce root beer from A&W. I took a sip, and though the ice had mostly melted during the drive from Fort Madison, it still tasted divine. “I need to talk to you for a minute about the open house,” he said. I let him in.
“There’s been some discussion on the website about people coming to see Arrowood on the holiday tour,” Josh said. “None of the people seem threatening, that I can tell, but I thought you should know. I was thinking maybe I could be here, to help keep an eye on things. If you don’t mind.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s fine.” I sipped my root beer, the taste taking me back to Grammy’s Chevy Nova with the textured cloth seats that left patterns on the backs of my legs. She had stolen one of the miniature A&W mugs from the drive-in tray, tucked it under the seat for me. She hated the idea of stealing, but I had begged her.
“I found something you might want to see,” I said. “It’s about Mrs. Ferris.” I got her file from the office and brought it to him, watched as he read it. “Could that be a motive?” I asked. “If she thought the baby was my father’s? Maybe she was jealous, that she lost her child and my mother had twins. She said she and my dad weren’t in love, but I think she might have been lying.” I was thinking of how I’d loved Ben but had never managed to tell him. “Or maybe she wanted my dad to leave my mom, and he wouldn’t do it because of us, and she decided to do something about it.”
“I’ve talked to her several times at the Miller House,” Josh said. “She’s a bit overbearing, but she doesn’t strike me as that kind of crazy.”
“How can you be sure? Can’t people snap sometimes under the right circumstances, people who seem normal otherwise?”
“Anything’s possible. But this is someone who cares very much about appearances, about her reputation. Her affair with your father was kept very discreet. I don’t think she would have committed a big splashy crime that would draw attention. It just doesn’t fit. And there’s still that three-hour window,” Josh said. “If they disappeared at one and the police weren’t called until four…why did it take your mom three hours to make the call?”
“That’s only if they were really gone right after I saw Singer’s car. I was wrong about everything else, I could be wrong about that, too. If there was a gap, though…My mom was on a lot of medication back then. She was always tired, and kind of zoned out. I was tired that day, too, and sick. Maybe we fell asleep. Maybe we were all napping and someone came into the house.”
“Maybe,” he said, though he didn’t sound convinced. He was looking not at me but through me, and I imagined him with a Rubik’s Cube, twisting it in a hundred different directions trying to get all the colors to line up.
—
I had another visitor later in the day, one who rang the doorbell so many times on my way to the door that I was ready to chip through the wall and disconnect the wires, as my mother had done years before. My stomach dropped when I peeked out through the sidelight and caught a flash of familiar platinum hair. I couldn’t think of a good reason why Mom would show up at Arrowood unannounced—or at all. It quickly registered that my mother would never wear a stretchy pink hoodie and short denim skirt from the juniors department, like the blonde on the porch was wearing, and then the woman leaned forward to jab the doorbell again and I got a good look at her face. She was younger than my mother, though not by much. In her forties, probably, with thin lips and an overbite and too much eyeliner. Her skin was pale to match her hair, and I remembered Mrs. Ferris saying that Heaney had hired cleaning women who resembled my mother. I opened the door.
“Oh, hi,” she said, forcing a polite smile. I was clearly not the person she had been expecting.
“Hi,” I said. “Can I help you with something?” She didn’t answer right away, and I looked out to the driveway, at the little Hyundai parked there, but didn’t see any sort of sign on it. “Are you from the cleaning service?”
“What? No.” She snorted, shaking her head. “Sorry I’m just standing here like a goof. I’m Deirdre. I was looking for Eddie.”
“Ah…are you a friend of his?” I wasn’t sure why anyone would be looking for my dad here, since he hadn’t lived at Arrowood in years.
“Yeah,” she said, shrugging. “Friends. Is he not home?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I simply answered the question, thinking that might be enough to make her go away. “No, he’s not home.”
“Maybe you can give him a message for me?” She shifted back and forth in her scuffed stiletto boots. “I tried to message him, but he didn’t message back.”
I figured it was only fair to let her know that Eddie would not message her back, ever. “Um. I hate to tell you this, but he passed away.”
“He did? When?” She looked more surprised than upset.
“February.”
She frowned. “But I just saw him at the bar over in Hamilton a month ago. He told me he was gonna be busy for a while, that his daughter was moving home. That’s you, right?”
Nausea pooled in my stomach. She couldn’t have seen my father a month ago.
“How do you know Eddie?”
She made a face, scrunching up her nose. “I’m not sure he’d want me talking to his daughter about that.”
“What does my dad look like?”
“Big forehead. Sort of reddish-brown hair. Why are you asking?”
“Because that’s not Eddie, and this isn’t his house.”
She stood up straighter, indignant. “It is so. I’ve been over here before. He had me put on his letter jacket, and his name was embroidered right on the front, Eddie. That was his thing, you know, like he wanted to relive his glory days. Some of the older guys are like that.”
“Well, he’s not here,” I said. “And you shouldn’t come back.”
I shut the door on Deirdre, feeling like I might vomit. The blond women Mrs. Ferris had seen at Arrowood were not housecleaners after all. Heaney had been indulging in a fantasy with women who looked like my mother. And he had told Deirdre that he had a daughter. It was disturbing, if not exactly criminal. His contract would expire at the end of the year, and I wouldn’t renew it. I could avoid him until then, and let the lawyer take care of the details. I wouldn’t be letting him back in the house, no matter what needed fixing.
—
My deadline to turn in the Arrowood profile was the first of November, which I missed by a week. I wasn’t h
appy with the end result, which sounded too dry on paper, though I knew it didn’t matter, that no one would read the profile with the same care I had put into writing it. In my haste to send it off, I sent the wrong file first, the long one, and Mrs. Ferris had emailed back almost instantaneously to ask if I’d somehow misunderstood about the length.
She came by Arrowood about a week before the open house to discuss a long list of action items I needed to attend to before and during the event, and she was shocked to see that I hadn’t yet made any preparations.
“I don’t see any holiday décor,” she said, smiling aggressively, her face shiny and pink like she had recently undergone a chemical peel.
“Yeah, it’s all up on the third floor,” I said, though I hadn’t checked to make sure. “I just need to bring it down.” I felt jumpy and uncomfortable having her in the house, after my discussion with Josh.
“Mm-hmm, and what about lights for the porch? Are you going to be able to hang them by yourself? Because the outdoor lighting is crucial. You know what, I’ll send Ben over to help you. He knows exactly how I want it done.”
“Sure,” I said. “If he wants to help, that’s fine.” I hadn’t seen Ben since the night Lauren and I had snuck into the carriage house, though we had texted back and forth a few times about nothing in particular. How’s everything going? Not bad, how about you?
Mrs. Ferris made a note to herself and moved down the list. “We’re going to have a girl from the high school here with her cello, so you need to have an area in the foyer where she can set up, and you’ll need to figure out where to put the cookies and drinks. I have a folding table if you need it. Oh, and I was thinking you might want to make an informative poster for the hidden room in the basement, the one you mentioned in the profile. People are very excited to see an actual stop on the Underground Railroad. Everyone’s going to want to see that room.”
“I’m not sure anyone will be able to look inside. It’s sealed off from the rest of the basement. I’d have to pry up a floorboard or something.”
“Oh, just have Ben do it when he’s over here hanging the lights. I’m sure he won’t mind. He’s become quite the handyman, working on that house of his.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was thinking maybe we could limit the tour to the first floor. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with people roaming through the whole house.”
She snapped the cap back on her pen and looked up at me. “I know this must be hard for you,” she said, “opening your home up to strangers. Ben was worried that people would come here out of, what did he call it, ‘morbid curiosity’ about your sisters. There will always be people who seek out that sort of thing, but you don’t have to let it be about that.” She came closer and I reflexively shrank away from her. “I think it’s perfectly reasonable to block off the stairs so that no one goes up to the twins’ room. But don’t forget why we’re doing this. If you highlight some of the fascinating details of this house, and your family, it will help keep the focus where we want it to be: on the rich history of Keokuk. We’re using that past to build a future.”
I was fairly certain I’d seen that exact line in the historical society brochure, the idea that our history could somehow save us. “Do you really think it’ll work?”
She shot me a stern look. “Not everything is a lost cause,” she said. “You don’t know until you try to prove it otherwise.”
—
Ben showed up after dinner two days later, carrying a toolbox and a six-pack of beer.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry your mom made you come over here to help me with all this stuff.”
“Are you kidding?” he said, taking off his coat and hanging it on the newel. “You should see what she had me doing at the Shermans’ up the street. Mr. and Mrs. Sherman are about five feet tall with twelve-foot ceilings, and too frail to get up on a ladder. I think I changed every lightbulb in the house. This’ll be a breeze in comparison.”
I had worried that things might be awkward between us after our last conversation, when he said we couldn’t pick up where we’d left off, but I felt better now that he was here. He’d always had a way of putting me at ease.
“Did your mother mention that she wants you to tear up the floor in the laundry room?” I asked.
Ben twisted the cap off a beer and handed me the bottle. “She’s a gifted delegator.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“So,” he said, taking a swig of beer. “All we need to do is lug some boxes down three flights of stairs, break into a secret room, and hang about five zillion Christmas lights.”
“Only three things,” I said. “Easy peasy.”
The boxes of Christmas decorations were stacked at the back of the second storage room we checked, next to Nana’s red velvet love seat, the one my mother had hated so much that she made my father drag it up the narrow stairs the minute Nana and Granddad moved out. The night Ben, Lauren, and I broke into Arrowood, I had wanted to come up to the third floor and steal a string of Christmas bells. After the incident with the Ouija board, I’d forgotten about the bells entirely until days later, when the last of the mayflies had died. Ben and I had sat together in the dark, on the stone floor of the carriage house, hoping Lauren wouldn’t come looking for us. Outside, the streets were still black with dead flies, the air heavy with the overwhelming stench of decay. I had told Ben about the bells, how I’d wanted to retrieve one small piece of my past. He suggested that we sneak into Arrowood again, but I wasn’t ready to go back into the house. We sat facing each other, our knees nearly touching, both of us aware of the new current running between us.
I’ll go, Ben had said. I’ll get them for you. And I had felt it again, the fluttery sensation that had first appeared when we’d held each other in my old bedroom at Arrowood. I had leaned forward, there in the carriage house, and touched my lips to his. Our first kiss.
I wondered if Ben still thought about that night in the carriage house, or all the other nights that summer when we had snuck away from his sister to be alone. I hadn’t known that it would be my last summer at the Sister House, that Aunt Alice would go into the nursing home, both she and Grammy within a year of dying. I hadn’t known that I would stay with my mother the next summer, working at McDonald’s to earn money to buy a used car.
Ben stacked the two larger boxes in his arms and I took the smaller one. We carried them down the back stairs, and when we got to the laundry room, I wiped the boxes with an old towel and attempted to brush the dust off Ben’s shirt.
“One down,” he said. “I think we deserve to finish our drinks before moving on to step two.”
I opened up one of the boxes while Ben went to retrieve our beers from the front hall. Beneath the top layer of tissue paper lay the garland of bells that my mother had always hung on the mantel in the living room. Ben had never come back to the house to get them. Mom had once told me that she knew when Santa had filled our stockings because she’d hear the bells tinkling as he brushed against them on his way back up the chimney.
“So,” Ben said, returning to the laundry room with his toolbox and the beers, “are we ready to destroy your floor to appease my mother?”
“We can try. I looked over the house plans again after talking to your mom, and I did some measuring up here and down in the basement, and I think our best bet to get into the hidden room would be along the wall right here, under the armoire.”
“All right. Let’s move it out of the way, then, and see what we have.”
I got on one side of the massive antique cabinet and Ben got on the other. With both of us pushing and pulling, we were able to slide it a few feet along the wall. We squatted down to examine the floor.
“Look,” Ben said. “It’s been painted over, but you can just barely see a square outline here. With the way the boards are lined up, you probably wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking for it. What do you think? Are you really okay with tearing up the floor?”
I nodded. Ben dug around
in his toolbox and got out a hammer and chisel. Slowly and carefully, he tapped all the way around the outline and then dug the chisel in deeper to pry up the boards. After a few tries, the edge of a section of flooring popped up, making a sound like a gasp of breath, and Ben removed it in one piece. I got chills peering down into the hole, thinking about the people who had sheltered here as they fled north, seeking freedom.
The opening was less than two feet square, barely large enough for a grown person to squeeze through. There was a narrow iron ladder attached to the stone wall below. The light from the laundry room got swallowed up before it reached the bottom, though I guessed the space couldn’t be more than ten feet deep.
“Anything down there?” Ben asked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” I said. “Hard to tell in the dark, though. You want to go down and check it out?”
He laughed. “Ladies first.”
“Fine with me.”
“I was kidding,” he said. “That ladder could fall apart and then you’d be stuck down there with a broken leg.”
“It would be worth it,” I said. “This is a piece of history. How can you not be excited right now?”
“It’s great,” he said. “But I can enjoy all the historical significance from up here.”
“Well, I can’t. It’s not that far down. Let’s see if the ladder will hold me.”
Ben sighed and held out his hand. “All right, but take it slow, and if it feels like it might give way, I’ll haul you back up.”
