“Ghosts?” He looked at her over the top of the frames of his eyeglasses. “You seem to be preoccupied with ghosts. That’s the second time you’ve brought them up.”
“On Christmas eve, after midnight, I was driving home in the fog and I stopped when it was getting too thick. There were voices coming out from the sea. I thought it was a party or a husband and wife having an argument, but now I could swear they were the crew and passengers on that ship. I had to find out. I went to the museum and dug up records from the Porthleven. A handwritten list of the passengers. Did you know that people around here came and claimed the bodies found in the wreck? And some bodies were never found, just left there at the bottom of the sea? And then this bone turned up, a human bone, the arm bone of a child, right on our property. Don’t you see, it all adds up. Ghosts.”
Setting a cup and saucer before her, he picked up the knife to attack the strudel. “In general, no to ghosts or wandering spirits. Tell me, Holly, have you been talking with my housekeeper here? About the yurei? Have you no shame, Miss Tiramaku?”
Miss Tiramaku poured a shot of cream in her cup, and it swirled round like a cloud.
*
The snow reminded him of that woman who had come to the house yesterday. In one eye, snow had swirled like a shaken globe. Jack Peter knew he should not stare, but he could not resist the strangeness of the white flakes in the black of her eyes. She was speaking to him, telling a story, but he was not listening, for he was watching the snow fall in her eye. His parents and Nick were in the other room, listening to Frank Sinatra. She had been talking for some time, and he had no idea what she was saying, and he looked for some way out so he would not be lost.
“Your mother tells me you like to draw.”
“I got an artist’s kit for Christmas. And paper.”
She pretended to look away, the way adults sometimes do, to show they are not that interested in the conversation and try to throw off suspicion. “What do you draw? Things you see or things you imagine?”
He turned his head in the opposite direction and drummed his fingertips on the table.
“Maybe sometime I can see your drawings?” she asked. “Even your secret ones.”
He nodded. That would be okay.
“I know you like monsters. Do you draw monsters, too?”
“Yes,” he said. “And Nick.”
She looked puzzled. “You like to draw pictures of Nick, or do you like to draw with Nick?”
He did not understand her question and did not reply.
“Nick seems to be a nice boy,” she said. “Is he a good friend?”
He nodded. “He comes over here to play. He stays inside with me.”
She leaned in closer, so close they nearly touched, and she asked, “Does that make you happy?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “And sometimes I am mad. They said they might send me away.”
“Your mother and father?”
Jack Peter nodded. “And Nick,” he said. “He held me underwater. He wanted to get rid of me.”
She gasped. “Did that make you angry?”
“They should send him away. Not me.”
“You are a special boy,” Miss Tiramaku said. “I understand, because I was a special girl, too, just like you, and other people, they don’t know, do they? They think we are not listening, but we hear everything. They think we are not watching, but we see everything. They think our heads are filled with made-up things, but we know the difference between what is real and what is not.”
”I am tired of having to draw all of the time, every day, to take care of everything. Nobody listens, nobody knows.”
“I know your secret,” she said, and in her eye raged a storm.
“Snowing,” Nick said at the window, jarring Jack back from his memory of the conversation with the woman who could see the pictures inside his mind. She vanished from his mind as suddenly as she had arrived.
From downstairs, his father called to tell them, too, that it was snowing. Jack Peter laid down his pencil. He wanted out.
ii.
At first the storm mesmerized the three of them, and they watched for a long time as if drugged by the shifting patterns of white. One by one, they peeled away, off to do other things while the snow fell in the background, slowly accumulating without their awareness, an inch sneaking up on another inch. Tim loved the feeling of the first heavy storm of the season, how it covered the ground and blanketed the house. He had switched on a lamp in the living room, but the rest of the house had softened to a muted gray. The snow deadened outside sounds to a whisper, while the old house creaked and groaned like a timbered hull rolling in the waves. The sensation made him sleepy, and he would have settled on the easy chair for a nap if not for the vague anxiety brought on by Holly’s absence. She had taken the car that morning, not his Jeep, and if the conditions worsened, she might have trouble on the roads.
At one o’clock, he climbed the darkened stairs to find the boys. Pausing outside the door, he heard them bicker.