I had him bring them through into my office, and his shoulder brushed the floor lamp. Set it rocking. “You should move that thing,” he said. “There’s room behind your desk.”
I couldn’t tell him that the ghost refused to let me plug anything in there, but I could say with full honesty, “That outlet isn’t useable.”
I should have known Sam would see that as something to fix. With the box of books safely set down, he selected a screwdriver. Knelt by the plug.
I said, “Shouldn’t you turn off the breaker, first?”
“I’m just going to look.”
I couldn’t bear to. I pretended interest in the books that Dave had sent, instead: The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, printed at London in 1743 and containing two hundred and fifty-four sermons and discourses on several subjects. It was a beautiful set, bound in full calf with gilt and raised bands on the spines. Twelve volumes, marked with numbers on the sides. I counted all of them, hoping in silence the ghost wouldn’t mess with Sam.
“Look at this,” Sam said.
I sighed. “What?”
“This wiring. A good thing you didn’t plug anything in here,” he told me.
I felt the hair lift on the back of my neck as I turned.
“If you’d left something plugged into that mess,” he said, very sure, “you’d have burned the whole place down.”
? ? ?
Childhood fears and childhood wishes never lost their power. At the moment you were certain they’d been set aside, they rose up unexpectedly and took you over just as strongly as they had before, as though reminding you that no one ever truly left the past behind.
I wasn’t sure which held me strongest, fears or wishes, but I felt them both as I approached the red brick posts that framed the iron gates of Bridlemere.
I’d actually begun this long walk in my mind two days ago, when I’d been in my office and Malaika came in with the morning’s mail. There’d been a card from somebody donating fifteen dollars to our artifact appeal, a little padded package that had held an old clay pipe—one of the items on our list—and a slim envelope, addressed to me. I’d smiled at the pipe. “Dance or not,” I had said to Malaika, “we’re doing okay with our fundraising.”
“Yes, we are.”
Then I had opened the envelope.
It held a cheque, with For the Wilde House Fund marked on the memo line. I’d looked at the amount, and at the signature. I’d had to sit.
Malaika had asked, “What?”
I’d shown her. She’d sat, too. She’d told me, “That’s enough to take us past our goal.”
“I know.”
“That’s more than we asked from the Sisters of Liberty.”
I knew that, too. What I didn’t know was, “Why?”
Malaika, watching me, had said what both of us were thinking. “I guess you’ll just have to ask her.”
I’d known she was right. I’d known it, just as I’d been well aware a huge donation like the one my grandmother had made deserved a formal thank-you. But it was one thing to know it, and another altogether to work up the courage to approach these gates.
In childhood dreams I’d knocked and they had opened and my grandmother had met me with a hug of welcome, taking me inside as though this place had always been my home.
Today, the gates were firmly locked. A gardener was working just beyond them in the flower beds that edged the path. It might have been a woman or a man, I couldn’t tell, but they wore overalls, a denim shirt, and one of those Australian hats whose brims could be snapped up to make them look more stylish. The gardener’s hat brim was left down, forgoing style for common practicality.
I’d parked the car beside the road, because I felt it would be harder, if I was on foot, to run away. I’d set out walking with my head up, showing confidence, but now that I’d come right up to the gates, with every window of that mansion staring down at me like disapproving eyes, I lost my nerve.
I took the thank-you note I’d written from my pocket, and prepared to pass it through the black iron bars. “Excuse me,” I said to the gardener, “could you give this to Mrs. Van Hoek, please? It’s from the museum.”
There. That sounded formal enough, in control, and polite.
Except when the gardener straightened and faced me, she wasn’t a gardener.
My grandmother’s eyes met mine with the same cool reserve they’d held that day at the Privateer Club. My hands shook a little, the way they’d done then, but I held the card steady so it became almost a dare to see if she would cross the small distance between us and take it.
She did.
I said, “That was a generous donation you made to us. Thank you.” And then, in the hope I would look like a dignified grown-up, I turned away.
“Charlotte.”
Her voice was melodic. A likeable voice. When I turned back and met her eyes this time, I realized my father’s eyes looked like that when he was on unfamiliar ground, worried he’d make a mistake.
She said, “I was about to have lunch.” She reached over to touch a post, and the gates started to part. “Would you like to come in?”
? ? ?
Her favourite room appeared to be the one I found most beautiful—an elegant conservatory, ringed with windows, filled with light. It opened to a terrace with a view across the gardens and the lawn down to the bay. The room was done in white and green and lilac, rich with texture, and my chair beneath its cushions was an Art Deco revival of the style of Spanish chair we’d just retrieved for our museum. We had lunch here, chicken sandwiches and tiny sweet tomatoes tossed with olive oil and herbs, brought by a woman who was either a devoted servant or a nurse, I couldn’t tell. She gave my grandmother a pep talk on the benefits of protein before leaving us alone.
I had expected explanations from my grandmother. Instead she asked a thousand questions, everything from whether we’d had pets when I was young to where we’d lived and where we’d travelled, and inevitably everything came back to, “And your father, what did he do? What did Theo say?” and “What did Theo think of that?”
It wasn’t that I didn’t understand. I couldn’t keep from thinking of my father, either. Everywhere I looked I’d think: my father used to climb those stairs, watch sunsets through that window, cross that hallway. Even so, her desperation to have word of him was touching and infuriating all at once, and finally I just had to set my teacup down and say, straight out, “I need to ask you why.”
She turned her head away, and watched the shadows lengthen on the lawn. “It was a different time.”
“He was—he is—your son.”
“I had two sons.” She said it quietly. “My handsome boys. They were a handful, let me tell you, and I was the only woman in the family, all those years. Even the dogs were male.” Her smile was faint. “I didn’t mind. I had my boys. And then,” she said, “I didn’t.” In the pause that followed she turned back to me. “When they sent Jack home in that body bag from Vietnam, I was so angry, Charley. May I call you Charley? That’s what Sam said you prefer, but . . . I was angry. I just wanted to go over there myself and take a gun and shoot whoever killed him. Burn that country to the ground. The whole place. Burn it all. I couldn’t understand why anybody wouldn’t feel the same. But Theo,” she began, then stopped. Another pause. “He couldn’t kill things. Ever since he was a little boy. If he went fishing, he would take the fish right off the hook and put it back.”
“He’s still like that. He never kills a spider, he just traps it in a glass and takes it outside.”
“Yes, that’s Theo. And he told us. When his draft card came, he stood right there and told us that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t kill someone. He told us that he thought the war was wrong. And I told him he was a coward.”
I could see the sadness touch her face when she remembered that. I asked her, “Did you mean it?”
“I don’t know. I think I did, yes. But I didn’t understand, back then.” She looked away again. “I watched a documentary a while ago, on Vietnam. They interviewed some men who, like your father, went to Canada. I heard them say how hard it was to leave their loved ones, leave their country, and I knew for Theo we had made it so much harder.”