One of her veiny hands beckoned. “Is that you, Avery May? I know I’m a sight, but don’t be afraid. I’m just old, is all. People don’t visit me much anymore, especially not charming young ladies.”
I straightened up and smiled, happy to take it as a compliment, even if it was just her old-fashioned manners.
Mrs. Shelton pointed a knobby finger. “See that chair? Pull it up next to me and I’ll tell you all I know about the history around here. And who did you bring with you? I can barely see anymore.”
“Oh, sorry. This is my mom, Maddie Hilliard, and behind her is my brother, Blake.”
“I’m not sure there’s enough room in here for everyone.” She raised her chin and bellowed. “Loretta, why don’t you get Avery May’s mother a glass of Coke in the parlor? The young gentleman might want one, too.”
“Actually,” I said quickly, “I was hoping he could stay and film our conversation. It’s for the documentary I’m making.”
Mrs. Shelton’s eyes widened. “Mercy! Are you telling me that handsome young man brought a camera for filming? Does he need space to set everything up?”
“He uses his smartphone.” I glanced at Blake, who was looking kind of squirmy. “It makes pretty decent videos.”
“The good Lord knows I’m old, but you two are making me feel like Methuselah.”
“Would you rather not be filmed, Mrs. Shelton?” asked Mom.
“No, no, it’s fine. It’s something new, and I thought I’d seen it all. Loretta, is my hair looking all right?”
“Your hair is as good as it gets, Aunt Aileen. Do you have any lipstick or powder around here?”
“Lord, no. I’m past all that.” She turned to me and patted my arm. “Honey, will you just tell me if I start drooling?”
Ordinarily that would have grossed me out, but her cozy way of talking made me feel at home. “No problem, Mrs. Shelton.”
“All right, then. Loretta, you be sure to open a fresh bottle of Coke. The real stuff, not that Kroger brand.”
Loretta sighed. “Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Shelton nodded and turned back to me. “Well, Miss Avery May Hilliard, are you ready to get to work?”
I took a seat and waited for Mom and Loretta to move on to the parlor. Then I checked my notes and gave Blake the thumbs-up to start filming.
“I was hoping you could help me with some family history. I found this in the old Hilliard House.” I pulled the photo out of the notebook’s inside pocket. “It’s a photograph, and I think you’re in it.”
Mrs. Shelton took the photo and peered at it. Then she snorted. “Sweetheart, would you hand me that magnifying glass on the side table? Yes, that’s it. Without it all I can see are two blobs.” She propped the photo on her belly with one hand and held the magnifier in the other. The glass shook a little as she stared at the photo.
“That’s me, all right. I sure was a scrawny thing back then. Guess some things never change.” She started to laugh, but it ended in a wet cough. “That’s Margaret Anne Hilliard next to me. She was your grandpa’s cousin.” She nodded to herself. “All those golden curls always falling out of ribbons. Her hair had a mind of its own, I tell you.”
“What was Margaret Anne like? Were you good friends?”
“Good friends? It was more than that.” Her eyes softened. “We were nothing alike, but we were kindred spirits. I called her Meganne, because her real name had too many syllables. Her mama hated the nickname, though—she thought it ‘common’—so I only called her that when we were alone.”
“Meganne,” I said. “I like that.”
Mrs. Shelton nodded. “Her mother’s folks owned the land we farmed, so whenever Meganne visited her grandma, we would spend as much time together as possible. She was a dreamy gal, loved stories and such. Me? I was a girl of action. I suppose she taught me to be a little more thoughtful, and I taught her how to be brave, how to take risks and live life.”
She settled back with a smile, as if thinking about Meganne made her feel young again.
“We found something else at Hilliard House, Mrs. Shelton,” I said. “An old china doll with gold hair and a pink dress. Did that belong to Meganne?”
“Her name is Bettina.” She grinned. “Can you believe that sprang to my mind so quick? Bettina was a gift from Meganne’s daddy. She came all the way from Germany and was quite a treasure. More than anything, she was a comfort when that poor girl was confined to her bed, which was often. I was forever trying to get Meganne to take long walks, to breathe fresh air, because she needed strengthening up. I was half her size but strong as a bull. She tended to get every little bug that came along.”
“Is that why she got typhoid?”
Mrs. Shelton winced. “That was…well, that was a real tragedy.”
I straightened and took a breath. “How’d it happen? Was it the flood?”
She closed her eyes, and the photograph trembled in her hands. “I couldn’t say for sure. By the time her daddy got hold of the doctor, there wasn’t much that could be done.”
A bead of sweat trickled near my eye. I glanced at Blake, whose armpits now had dark circles of perspiration. The room had seemed warm when we came in, but now it was practically boiling. I waited for Mrs. Shelton to continue, but the silence stretched on.
“Did she drink contaminated water, Mrs. Shelton?” I finally prompted.
She swallowed hard before opening her eyes. The next words were spoken to the ceiling. “Everyone said that Mr. Hilliard didn’t take the proper precautions. That’s what his wife claimed, anyway, and her story got around real quick.”
“It makes me sad for old Mr. Hilliard,” I said. “He told my mom he did everything he could, but people blamed him anyway. Grandma says he turned maudlin and shut himself up in his house. Did you ever see him again after Margaret Anne died?”
“Once or twice, I suppose.” Mrs. Shelton closed her eyes again.
“Did he seem strange to you? Did he talk to you about her?”
“It’s so hard to remember, child.”
“But—”
Blake put a hand on my shoulder, and I shut my mouth.
A tear trailed down the side of Mrs. Shelton’s face. She handed the photo back to me without opening her eyes.
“Young lady, I’m afraid you’ve worn me out,” she said.
My heart lurched. I wasn’t ready for this to end—she’d barely told me anything.
“I only have a couple more questions, ma’am.”
“I’ve said all I have to say.” Mrs. Shelton pulled a tissue from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. “It’s time for you to leave.”
We drove home in silence. Mom was sure I’d said something to offend Mrs. Shelton, and nothing Blake or I could say would convince her otherwise. So after a gloomy lunch of cold sandwiches and Mom’s even colder stare, I escaped to the attic. I had to push that poor old lady out of my mind somehow, and storyboarding the final shots at Hilliard House seemed the best option. These shots would be the last we filmed, but in the sequence of the movie, they would come right after the opening cemetery scene.
Once again I divided several sheets of paper into eight blocks. The establishing shot would be the house, shot from a low angle so it looked proud and spooky. Then maybe Blake could pull back, and I would enter the frame and talk about the history of the house. Like how a smaller house with wood siding stood there first, but when it burned down, this fancy brick house was built to take its place. I’d talk about Joshua Hilliard’s service in the Great War, and how he married a pretty young lady soon after. And then I’d talk about Margaret Anne.
Just like in the cemetery, we’d have to get close-up shots of the house and interesting details here and there that could be edited in to break up the long scenes of me talking. I made a list of possible shots, trying to think like Julian. He would pay special attention to peeling paint on woodwork, to crumbling brick and concrete, or maybe even to a browned-out patch of grass. We could do some wide shots of the river,
too, and the land surrounding the house. I hoped more ideas would come to me once we got there.
The door at the foot of the stairs creaked open.
“Avery, can I come up?”
“Yeah, Mom.”
I gathered the different storyboard pages, but didn’t have time to put them back in the box. Weasley appeared first and jumped on the pile of pages, purring as the paper crackled under his feet.
Mom paused at the top of the stairs. “You doing okay?”
“Mom, I promise I didn’t say anything rude to Mrs. Shelton. She was chatting away about Margaret Anne, happy as could be. She wasn’t the least bit choked up to talk about her. But when I started asking about Mr. Hilliard, she clammed right up. And I’m not sure why, because she wouldn’t say anything more about it. She just started crying and asked us to leave.”
Mom sat on the bed next to me. “I may have overreacted, but I hate the thought of you bullying that poor old woman with your questions.”
“I’ve never bullied anyone!”
She gave me a sideways glance. “Oh, really? You can be pretty forceful sometimes. I just assumed you’d go easy on a delicate, bedridden lady.”
“I did go easy. Ask Blake. You and Grandma taught me to be polite to old folks.”
“To your elders,” Mom corrected with a half smile. “Will the interview still work for your film?”
“I guess. We got a few new details, but I thought she’d have a lot more to tell me.”
“Like I said before, she was very young when she knew Margaret Anne, and so many years have passed.” She pointed at the storyboards. “You about ready to finish this project?”
“Yeah.” I gently pushed Weasley off the pages and smoothed them in my lap. “I’d just hoped for something bigger. Julian told me an artist has to take risks, and I took plenty. Seems like I should have learned more.”
Mom leaned in and kissed my cheek. She smelled like Grandma’s Dove soap rather than her usual perfume, and it was so soft and sweet that I kind of sank into her.
“I can’t say I’m happy with all your actions since you got here, but I am proud of you for taking on this project,” she said. “You’ve grown up a lot this summer.”
“Enough that you won’t keep secrets from me anymore?”
She drew back to look me in the eye. “Is the father issue still bothering you?”
I turned away, expecting that sick feeling in my gut. But it didn’t come. “Not as much, I guess.”
“Avery, if you ever have a question about me, I’ll answer it as honestly as I can. I won’t know what’s bugging you unless you tell me.” She smoothed a piece of hair out of my eyes and tucked it behind my ear.
I still couldn’t look at her. “I’ve been telling people my dad is dead. It was…easier.”
Mom put her hand on my cheek and turned my face toward her. “I want you to think about secrets and honesty, and not just regarding your father. There’s a lot that you’ve been keeping from Grandma, too.”
“Yeah, because I don’t want to die.”
She smiled. “I’m going to pack. Will you keep Weasley up here so he doesn’t jump in my suitcase? And, Avery, let’s all make a special effort to get along during supper. I want to leave on a high note.”
—
Mom had an early flight the next morning because she had a hearing scheduled for Monday and needed the weekend to prepare. She never seemed to get enough time off, but we were pretty used to it by now. One time when she was really tired and crabby, she told us that making partner in a law firm was like winning a pie-eating contest where the prize for eating the most pie was…more pie. Only she used a bad word instead of “pie.”
The four of us ate breakfast together at the airport café. Mom and Grandma behaved themselves all morning, but even I could see the relief on Mom’s face when she waved at us before joining the security line.
The clouds were low and dark on the drive back, but only a few fat drops came down. By the time we got to the house, the air was so thick you could practically swim in it.
“The garden will sit for a day,” Grandma said as she pulled into the carport. “You two should make yourself some sandwiches…and then you might do a rain dance for a proper downpour. Actually, I don’t mind what you do as long as you stay out of my hair until supper.”
Grandma was always grumpy after taking Mom to the airport, so it was a good thing Blake and I already had a plan for the afternoon. We packed a lunch of sandwiches and homemade brownies and headed out the door.
When we passed through the thicket of trees and Hilliard House loomed ahead, I turned to Blake. “Can you get footage of this view? It looks cool with the gloomy sky behind it.”
He took some video. Then he took a few photos and showed me one with different filters. The black-and-white version, with its edges kind of blackened and torn, gave me a little shiver.
“Does it bother you to be here again?” he asked.
I stared at the house. “Julian and Lily made all that stuff up. I don’t think the house bothered me until I got in trouble with Grandma when I was little, and then all I could think of was the whipping she gave me. And when I told Julian about that, he did his best to make the house seem scary. But it was all lies, right?”
Blake nodded slowly.
A blob of sweat trickled down the side of my face. “Let’s sit under that tree and eat first,” I said. “I need to cool down before we start filming.”
Blake studied the storyboards while we ate. “We could start with a shot of you sitting on the porch step,” he said. “And after you do your introduction, I could pull back to reveal the whole building—that would be cool, don’t you think?”
I considered it. “Yeah, that might work.”
“And I like that rusty old water pump over there. It would make a good shot to show the character of the place.” He took a bite of sandwich and kept on talking. “I mean, added to the ones you wrote down.”
“You’re actually getting into this filmmaking stuff, aren’t you?”
He swallowed hard. “Excuse me?”
“I thought you were just doing it because you felt sorry for me or something. Or maybe Mom put you up to it.”
“Does that even sound like me?”
“Well, you didn’t want to do Kingdom with me, so…”
He groaned. “I don’t know why you took that so personally. I just…Kingdom didn’t work for me anymore. It was getting a little lame, you know, with the pretending and everything.”
“But we’re still telling a story.”
“There’s more action to this filmmaking stuff. It’s hands on.” He took another bite and then talked with his mouth full. “Can we please not analyze it to death?”
After we’d packed up the trash, I sat on the front step and practiced my lines while Blake did his close-up shots. By the time we got around to filming, I only needed two takes to get it right.
“Turns out I’m pretty awesome at this,” I said after we’d watched the clips.
“Yeah, but the learning curve was steep.” He swiped through the previous clips. “You want to watch all the bad takes we had at the cemetery? There’s only about five thousand of them.”
I grabbed at the phone. “Just delete that stuff, Blake.”
“No way!” He clutched the phone to his chest and grinned. “I’m saving them for the gag reel on the DVD release.”
I couldn’t help a little giggle at that, but when his expression changed I hushed right up. Blake had shifted his gaze to something behind me, and whatever he saw made him frown.
“What the heck?” he muttered.
I turned around in time to see a familiar figure ducking behind a cedar tree.
“We saw you, Julian!” I shouted. “Might as well come out.”
After a moment he did. He was wearing his backpack, and that camera was hanging from his neck as usual. His shoulders were kind of slumped, though, and it looked like he’d been picking at the scab on his cheek.<
br />
“So you’re the infamous Julian Wayne.” Blake crossed his arms. “You better be here to apologize. Otherwise, you’re trespassing.” He turned to me. “You want me to take care of this?”
I have to admit it was nice to have my brother acting all chivalrous, like a knight from Kingdom. And I was supposed to still be mad at Julian—I knew that—but somehow I couldn’t help feeling kind of relieved to see him.
“It’s okay,” I said. “What do you want, Julian?”
“I just, um, wanted to talk to you,” he said quietly.
“Was that you at the cemetery? You could have said hi instead of hiding behind trees like a creeper.”
Julian sighed. “You were still mad, Avery. And it looked like you were making your own movie, so I figured you wouldn’t want to talk to me.”
“But you’re still following us,” Blake said. “What’s your deal?”
Julian turned to face the house. “I keep thinking about that place. I’ve even tried to get inside again.”
“But you gave the key back.”
He turned to me. “The day after you got scared and everything—”
“The day after you tricked me,” I interrupted.
He nodded slowly. “That day, I went to town with Dad and made a copy of the key…because it wasn’t over.”
“Man,” said Blake, “you really are a shifty little punk.”
Julian met his gaze. “I didn’t mean to be shifty. I just get so…caught up in my movie projects.”
“You can’t go in Hilliard House whenever you want,” I said.
“I went about this all wrong—I know that—but there’s something going on in that house.” His hand went to the scab on his cheek. “You think you’re done with it, but I’m not sure the house is done with us.”
Blake snorted. “What does that even mean? Avery said you made all that stuff up.”
Ghostlight Page 14
