Buried to her neck in fallen leaves, she stared straight ahead without blinking, and the third time I passed her I realized she was a doll. Another had been lashed with a red jump rope to a tree trunk nearby, and dismembered arms and legs poked up at odd angles from the long, unmowed grass. At the end of a string tied to a chokecherry limb, a head hung and rotated in the breeze, and the headless body was stuffed into the mailbox, anticipating Saturday’s postman. The masterminds behind this mayhem giggled from the porch when I stopped the car in front of their house, but they looked almost catatonic as I walked up the sidewalk.
“Can you girls help me? I seem to be lost,” I said from the bottom step. The older girl draped a protective arm across her sister’s shoulder.
“Is your mommy or daddy home? I’m looking for someone who lives around here. Do you know the Blakes’ house?”
“It’s haunted,” said the younger sister. She lacked two front teeth and spoke with a lisp.
“She’s a witch, mister.” The older sister may have been around ten, stick-thin and raven-haired, with dark circles around her eyes. If anyone would know about witches, it was this one. “Why do you want to go see a witch, mister?”
I put one foot on the next step. “Because I’m a goblin.”
They both grinned from ear to ear. The older sister directed me to look for a turn before the next street corner, a hidden alleyway that was really a lane. “It’s called Asterisk Way,” she said, “because it’s too small to have a real name.”
“Are you going to gobble her up?” the smaller one asked.
“I’m going to gobble her up and spit out the bones. You can come by on Halloween night and make yourself a skeleton.” They turned and looked at each other, smiling gleefully.
An invasion of sumac and overgrown boxwood obscured Asterisk Way. When the car began to scrape hedges on both sides, I got out and walked. Half-hidden houses were scattered along the route, and last on the left was a weathered foursquare with BLAKE on the mailbox. Obscured by the shrubs, a pair of bare legs flashed in front of me, racing across the yard, and then a second someone rustled through the bushes. I thought the horrid little sisters had followed me, but then a third movement in the brush unsettled me. I reached for my car keys and nearly deserted that dark place, but having come so far, I knocked on the front door.
An elegant woman with a thick mane of white hair swung open the door. Dressed simply in crisp linen, she stood tall and erect in the doorway, her eyes bright and searching, and welcomed me into her home. “Henry Day. Any trouble finding the place?” New England echoed faintly in her voice. “Come in, come in.”
Mrs. Blake had an ageless charm, a physical presence and manner that put others right at ease. To gain this interview, I had lied to her, told her that I had gone to high school with her son Brian and that our class was organizing a reunion, tracking down classmates who had moved away. At her insistence, we chatted over a lunch she had prepared, and she gave me the full update on Brian, his wife and two children, all that he had accomplished over the years. Our egg-salad sandwiches lasted longer than her report, and I attempted to steer the conversation around to my ulterior motive.
“So, Mrs. Ungerland . . .”
“Call me Eileen. I haven’t been Mrs. Ungerland for years. Not since my first husband passed away. And then the unfortunate Mr. Blake met with his strange accident with the pitchfork. They call me ‘the black widow’ behind my back, those awful children.”
“A witch, actually . . . I’m so sorry, Eileen. About both your husbands, I mean.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be. I married Mr. Blake for his money, God rest his soul. And as for Mr. Ungerland, he was much, much older than I, and he was . . .” She pointed to her temple with a long, thin finger.
“I went to Catholic elementary school and only met Brian in ninth grade. What was he like growing up?”
Her face brightened, and she stood up so quickly that I thought she would topple over. “Would you like to see pictures?”
At every stage of his life—from the day he was born through grade school—Brian Ungerland looked as if he could be my son. His resemblance to Edward was uncanny, the same features, posture, even the way they ate corn on the cob or threw a ball. As we paged through the album, my conviction increased with each image.
“Brian used to tell me pretty wild family stories,” I said. “About the Ungerlands, I mean, the German ones.”
“Did he tell you about Opa Josef? His grandpa Joe? Of course, Brian was still a baby when he passed away, but I remember him. He was a crazy loon. They all were.”
“They came over from Germany, right?”
She sat back in her chair, sorting through her memories. “It is a sad, sad story, that family.”