Haunting the Deep

by Adriana Mather

  She studies her hands. “A man.”

  “What kind of man? Can you describe him?”

  She looks around nervously. “He had hair on his face. Not a mustache like my papa, just a little bit.”

  There is only one spirit I’ve seen who is unshaven. “Was he about this tall?” I hold my hand up above my head.

  She nods.

  “Irish accent?”

  She nods again.

  The drowned man. “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing. Just that I was to say that. I told him I didn’t want to come here again. That I saw you on the ship. That I was scared you were a ghost. I just wanted to stay with my mum. But he said I had to. This one last time. To tell you that you were invited back.”

  “I’m not a spirit. I promise you I’m not.”

  She eyes me like she’s not sure. And I can’t blame her. I was scared of her when she first showed up, and she looks more harmless than I do.

  “What is your family name, Ada?” Elijah asks.

  “Sage. My given name is Elizabeth. Ada is my middle. But my sister Stella always says that Ada is much prettier and that I should be proud I have such a good name.”

  I freeze. I wrote out a note card for the Sage family last night. “Ada, what’s the date? Do you remember?”

  She scrunches her face up. “The thirteenth of April?” She blinks out.

  “The same date Mollie said it was two days ago? The day hasn’t changed for them,” I say. I run over to my bed and sift through my pile of passenger note cards.

  My fingers tremble slightly as I grab the Sage family card. Elijah moves to my side and reads over my shoulder.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Sage boarded the Titanic at Southampton with their nine children,” I read out loud. “Wow, nine. They had purchased a pecan farm in Florida. That’s right, she said something about them going to Florida and how Stella didn’t want to. Here she is.” I point to the card. “Elizabeth Ada Sage, age ten. And here’s Stella, too, age twenty. Stella got in a lifeboat, but when she realized her family couldn’t join her, she got back out.” My voice catches. “Both parents and all nine Sage children died in the sinking. So much for women and children first.”

  “Those rules were mainly for the first- and second-class passengers. The third-class passengers were trapped behind gates,” Elijah says.

  I nod. “I know. They were locked in when the ship sank. It’s wrong.”

  Elijah frowns. “Yes, a system in which value is placed on human lives because of wealth or position or race is an utmost injustice.”

  I place the Sage family note card back on my bed. And now in death they’re back behind those gates. Who would do such a thing? I’m here worrying about having to go to the Titanic as a first-class passenger with tea and parasols; meanwhile, some of those passengers have probably been locked in steerage for the better part of a century. Maybe Redd was right. I don’t even know how privileged I am.

  “Was the man she was referring to the drowned man?” Elijah asks, snapping me out of my thoughts.

  “I’m pretty sure. But I have no idea who he is. I mean, he’s a spirit. But was he a Titanic passenger? Is he the Collector? Ada just looked so rattled. Every time I’ve seen her before, she’s been giggly and happy.”

  “When she thought you were a dream.”

  “Mmm-hmm. She definitely wasn’t coming here intentionally. And what did you make of that invitation? Why invite me back when someone threw me off?”

  “She said ‘one last time.’ ”

  I look at Elijah. “Yeah, I caught that. Why ‘last,’ though?”

  Elijah’s eyebrows furrow.

  My phone buzzes. It’s Alice in our group text.

  Alice: No luck. I’m staying the night with Mrs. M. I’ll be at breakfast tomorrow. Text if you need me.

  Mrs. Powell leans against her desk, holding The Truth About the Titanic in her hand. “When you read first-person accounts like this one, you realize how subjective they are and how much is left to interpretation. Gracie made a strong effort to interview people and cross-check stories. But we can also see how his voice, and his understanding of what happened, play a role in his account. We always think that history is fact and literature is fiction. But the truth is, they are all stories. And the people who tell them influence our understanding in various ways.”

  She places the book on her desk and scans the room. “So tell me, what sort of influence do you notice in this story, good or bad? What did you take away from this one?”

  The guy next to me raises his hand. “I think men like Gracie did a brave thing, letting the women and children get into the lifeboats first.”

  “Yes, certainly,” Mrs. Powell says. “It also says something about how women were viewed.”

  The boy looks confused.

  A girl raises her hand, like she’s not sure if she wants to.

  “Yes, Maya.”

  “It showed who he thought mattered and who he thought didn’t.” Her voice is a little shaky, probably just like mine when I speak in class.

  “Ah. That’s a very interesting point. Elaborate,” Mrs. Powell says.

  “Ships like the Titanic were made for immigrants. They were funded from the money of good, honest workers. Yet there isn’t much in the book about minorities or people not in the first class, even in the research he did afterward. And the third-class passengers had the highest death count by far. Even third-class women and children,” Maya says.

  My chest tightens. Ada.

  Mrs. Powell smiles. “There is certainly something to be learned by what is omitted—who is omitted—from stories, especially historical ones. Very nice.”

  She scans the room. I direct my eyes to my notebook. I’m not here and you can’t see me.

  “Sam?”

  I sit there for a second, trying to think past my exhaustion to what I’ve learned during my research. “The way Gracie talks about the before moments made an impression on me. Before the ship sank, I mean.”

  Mrs. Powell waits for me to go on.

  “Everything was so luxurious and happy, like everything was okay but not quite. And there were a thousand tiny things that decided the fate of the ship. The completely still water that prevented the lookouts from seeing the iceberg. The nearest ship’s Marconi operator going to bed and turning off the radio system. The lack of lifeboats. The arrogance that stopped the ship’s operators from worrying about the iceberg warnings in the first place.” Ada, Nora, Mollie…all those people who didn’t make it off. “Why is it that when you’re headed for a disaster, some part of you almost always knows?”

  “It’s a good question,” Mrs. Powell says. “There are accounts of passengers who were said to know with certainty that something was going to happen, even if they didn’t know what and couldn’t stop it. Esther Hart is said to have stayed up all night every night in her clothes waiting for the unknown disaster, the ship’s cat carried all her kittens off board before it left Europe, and people canceled their journeys at the last moment because of a feeling. I suppose it’s important to trust yourself. Even Gracie says that if he hadn’t gone to bed early that night and hadn’t been exercising with some frequency, he would never have had the energy to survive the freezing water.”

  The bell rings.

  “Have a good lunch,” Mrs. Powell says over the noise of the chairs moving against the floor. “Only three more days left of Titanic curriculum before the much-anticipated Spring Fling. Give it your all.”

  Her words remind me of Ada’s yesterday. This one last time. I exit into the hallway and almost collide with Mr. Wardwell.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  Mr. Wardwell straightens his blazer. “Sam. Well, this is a lucky coincidence. I had wanted to talk to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I tried to get your attention after class, but you were out the door too fast.”

  I try to hold back my yawn, but fail.

  He takes a better look at me. “You seem awfully tired
and distracted recently. Is everything okay?”

  I eye him suspiciously. He’s never asked me if I was okay. In fact, I’m not sure he’s ever really liked me at all. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

  “Also, it’s time to decide what to do about those missed exams from last semester. A paper should do it. I’m around for office hours today.”

  Alice doesn’t believe in coincidences. Maybe I don’t, either. “I can’t today.”

  Mr. Wardwell frowns. “Tomorrow, then,” he says with finality, and walks away.

  I rub my eye with the heel of my hand and push through the lunchroom doors. I head straight for the Descendants. Blair and her friends whisper behind their hands as I pass. She looks like she wants to say something to me, but instead she glances at Matt and then goes back to her conversation. I’m sure Niki didn’t waste any time telling people about me insisting on seeing Jaxon’s bracelet. I take my seat facing the window, my back to the lunchroom.

  “I feel terrible for Mrs. M. It took me an hour to convince her this morning that keeping Jaxon home would only agitate him more,” Alice says.

  Mary scowls at the cafeteria. “And it’s not helping that this school is a breeding ground for gossip.”

  “Yeah, it’d be nice if they all just shut up already,” Alice says loudly enough for the tables next to us to hear. The few people looking in our direction immediately busy themselves with their lunches.

  I pull a piece of paper out of my pocket. “So I had some time in history today, and I went through my third-class passenger cards looking for Mollie Mullin again. I couldn’t find a single passenger with that last name or anything similar. So I looked for anyone named Mollie. No such luck. There were, however, a lot of passengers named Mary.”

  Susannah’s eyes light up. “That’s an old nickname. I had a great-aunt Mollie whose proper name was Mary. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  They all lean toward me.

  “This is the thing: I found Denis and Mary Lennon, who boarded in Queenstown,” I say. “Originally I thought they were brother and sister because that’s how they were listed on the passenger ledger. But when I started looking up each of the Mary passengers, I found a news article that said Mary’s last name was really Mullin and that she and Denis were actually eloping to the United States.”

  “Whoa. The brother-sister act was a cover?” Mary asks.

  “Yeah. They were being chased by Mollie’s brother, who had a gun. Her family didn’t want her to marry Denis because he was the barman in their general store. Her family thought he wasn’t a good match. But her brother didn’t show up until right after the Titanic left port, and the two got away.”

  “Did they survive?” Susannah asks.

  An image of Mollie laughing and telling me stories about her family pops into my thoughts. I sigh and shake my head.

  “How did we not learn about that story?” Mary asks. “It’s so tragic and romantic.”

  “So many people were forgotten,” I say. “They didn’t make the cut for the lifeboats, and they didn’t make the cut for historians.”

  “Change of plans. I’m going to the Spring Fling as Mollie Mullin,” Mary announces, and I smile at her.

  Alice chews on her thumbnail. “What does it mean that a third-class passenger is now a first-class maid?”

  “And why do Henry and Myra believe I was with them in Europe and Asia when I never was?” I ask.

  “Someone or multiple someones are intentionally rewriting history,” Alice says.

  “And keeping the Titanic stuck in time before its sinking,” Susannah says.

  “April thirteenth,” I say, remembering Ada’s and Mollie’s answers.

  “And today is the twelfth,” Mary says, and we all look at her. “You don’t think something is going to happen tomorrow when our time catches up to theirs, do you?”

  No one answers, but I can tell by their faces that they are thinking about Redd’s warning.

  “Wardwell just asked me to come in for office hours,” I say.

  “Did Elijah find anything in his house?” Susannah asks.

  “Lots of Titanic info, so much that he hasn’t even made it through everything. But nothing magical,” I say. “So basically, we have no solid leads on how or if he’s involved.”

  I look out my bedroom window at Mrs. Meriwether’s house. The lights are out, and the last I heard from Alice, Mrs. Meriwether invited her to stay the night again. I sit down on my bed, then stand right back up.

  My phone says it’s 11:08 p.m. I make a lap around my bedroom and pull my hair up into a ball on top of my head. We’re no closer to finding out who’s collecting Titanic spirits, tomorrow is April thirteenth, Jaxon’s still under a spell, Mrs. Meriwether looks as worn out as I do, and my dad wants to move. I take another lap.

  Elijah blinks in with a mug in his hand. I stop pacing.

  “Passionflower tea with honey,” he says, and offers me the mug. “You need to rest.”

  I stare at it. “What are you doing?”

  “This was used even in my time to quell nervous energy. You have been walking around this room for the better part of an hour.” His tone is gentle.

  I don’t feel like anything could stop me from being nervous right now. And Elijah being nice to me only puts me more on edge. “Just because you’re helping to solve this, and we’re spending time together, doesn’t mean everything’s suddenly okay between us.”

  “Quite the contrary,” Elijah says. “The only reason I am here is that everything is far from stable. But it does not change the fact that you must get at least some amount of sleep, however broken it may be.”

  “You know what I mean, Elijah.”

  He looks like he wants to respond, but changes his mind. “Take the tea.”

  I grab the mug from his outstretched hand and blow on the steaming liquid. “Did you find anything?”

  “I have started searching Blair’s house. Nothing we do not know. Either they are all extremely diligent about not leaving any evidence or we have overlooked something important.”

  I sip my tea. “Also, I can’t come up with one logical reason Niki or Blair would want to help collect the spirits of Titanic passengers. It’s possible Wardwell does for the historical appeal of it, but that’s a weak motive.”

  “Unless it is not logical,” Elijah says.

  “What do you mean? That it’s emotional or personal or something?”

  “Potentially.”

  I look up from my tea. “Actually, what if it is personal? What if we’re not looking at this the right way?”

  “How do you mean?” Elijah asks.

  “Maybe the Collector has a grudge of some sort—a grudge that directly relates to the Titanic.”

  Elijah considers my words. “The Titanic certainly left a wake of financial and personal ruin. It is not unlikely that the motive could be linked. The only issue is that approximately fifteen hundred people died, many of whom we know little about, not to mention the exponential number of extended family members the passengers had in countries all over the world.”

  “I know. But consider this…Redd said the Collector died when she was young and that he recently showed back up in her tea leaves. What if we start there, look at the town records for when she was a child and see if anyone stands out as being connected to the Titanic?”

  “Clever. I will go to the town hall tomorrow.”

  “I think we should go now,” I say.

  “We?”

  “I’m coming.”

  Elijah raises an eyebrow. “You think that is wise?”

  “No. But what if Mary’s right that there’s something significant about the thirteenth? Or worse, what if Redd’s warning is right? I don’t think we can afford to wait.” I slide my feet into my black boots and grab my hoodie.

  Elijah and I walk the back way to the city clerk’s office. The hood to my sweatshirt is pulled as far over my face as possible.

  Elijah turns down a shadowed alley next to a brick building
and I follow. The town is uncomfortably silent, so much so that any tiny sound causes my heart to race. He stops in front of a door and reaches his hand through the wood. It clicks open. I step into the dark building. It smells like old paper and wood polish.

  “Wait here,” he says.

  “Elijah…,” I say, but he’s gone.

  I look both directions, even though it’s so dark that there’s no point. A shiver runs down my back.

  Elijah appears with two lit chamberstick candles. I jump backward, scowling at him.

  He hands me a candle, and I’m fairly certain there is an amused look in his eyes. “This should be enough light to read, but not enough that anyone outside the building will see us. Just the same, avoid windows.”

  Elijah leads me into a room of shelves full of files and folders. There are three round tables with chairs. Each table has a computer on it.

  “It’s a mini-library of paperwork,” I say.

  “Indeed.” Elijah walks to a nearby shelf and holds his candle up. “These are the records and local newspapers for the past hundred years.”

  It only takes him a minute to pull a stack of binders and place them on a table. We sit down with our candles, and I’m reminded of all the nights we stayed up doing research together in the fall.

  “We shall start by looking at local newspapers on or around the Titanic anniversary during Redd’s childhood,” he says. “Every year there is at least one article commemorating the disaster. And if there was a Titanic survivor or a survivor’s relative in Salem, it is likely that person would have been asked for a quote or an interview.”

  “That’s actually really smart,” I say.

  “You sound surprised,” he says.

  “That’s because I am.”

  He tries to hide his smile, but the corners of his mouth betray him.

  “Elijah?”

  “Samantha.”

  “Thanks for the tea.”

  He smiles, and for the first time since he came back, his dimples appear. “You are very welcome.”

  I look away from him and I’m annoyed all over again. How dare he come back here with his thoughtful gestures and his dimples and make me feel this way. I clear my throat and change the subject. “You pulled those binders like you already knew where they were. How do you know your way around this place so well?”