The third time the question is put to her, Ma Baker counts on her fingers, counts again, adds, subtracts, counts again: Why do you keep asking me this! It’s the only part of the published transcript in which Jackie Baker loses composure.
The Lees and Tamar agreed that it seemed as if the interviewer had had some sort of tip-off that seemed credible to her but, being unable to secure factual evidence, had hit upon the child inventory as a way of trying to shake a little more of the full Baker family story loose. Harriet had intended to ask the estate agent Miss Maszkeradi what she thought of this the afternoon the five of them met outside the Baker House, but there was too much unease, so she forgot. The primary source of the unease was realizing that the rapport she felt for the Baker House only came from looking at photographs of it. Standing outside it, there was no memory of having been there before. The connection she felt to this house was due to a photo she’d seen, a photo that differed from the estate-agency portfolio photo in only one respect—the inclusion of two blurry figures approaching it, the old woman and the young woman Harriet and Gretel had joked were them. And now, was Harriet to go into this house and find that her friend Gretel was in some way the basis of this house’s bad reputation? She preferred to wait outside while the others had a look around and decided whether they felt able to stay the night—but she hadn’t factored in the wishes of Miss Maszkeradi. Miss Maszkeradi, it has to be said, was a secondary source of Harriet’s unease, with her beehive-shaped turban and her sunglasses worn over an eyepatch and the creased cuffs of her sleeves that didn’t look quite right. You looked a little closer and saw that they were bandages in the process of slowly unraveling. Miss Maszkeradi was a woman somewhere around Harriet’s age and somewhere around her height, and her skin tone and coloring were somewhere in the Kartvelian region, but for all this somewhere nearness, when you looked away from her the accessories she donned were the only things that felt likely to still be there when you looked again.
“You’re Drahomíra Maszkeradi?” Margot asked, with some skepticism, but Tamar said, “Yes, of course it’s her,” and the lady herself said, “That’s right . . . and isn’t it a lovely day for viewing a definitely-not-haunted house?”
Harriet said she didn’t feel like going in after all. “Don’t be silly; you’re going to love it—” The trill in Miss Maszkeradi’s voice was loud and clear, and Harriet followed them all into the house for fear that the estate agent would add FA LA LA. A loud burst of song at that moment would’ve been all it took to finish Harriet off.
Aside from having at one time been a madhouse, the Baker House was a heritage house, the interior of which couldn’t be altered without permission from and consultation with various cultural bodies that ensured any changes made were historically accurate restorations. It pleased Miss Maszkeradi to point out to them some features that immortalized the thriftiness of the house’s first owners, the Dalhousies. “As you see, here’s a hearth but no chimney—that was removed to dodge the Hearth Tax of 1662. And kindly note the sparing natural light . . . a number of windows were bricked up in order to avoid paying the Window Tax of 1696. And see here, beneath this staircase, ladies, what do you think this handsome hollow may have once housed?”
“Handsome hollow may once have housed,” Perdita murmured under her breath; never mind answering, the words had to be processed first.
“Grandfather clock,” Margot volunteered. Miss Maszkeradi beamed. “Correct! Of course the clock was removed and sold in 1797 so as to avoid paying the Clock Owner Tax of 1797 . . .”
Even after all this, the Baker House hadn’t given up on the dream of being a pleasant home someday. Margot touched the walls and made comforting little clucking sounds; she told the Baker House what she planned to do for it if the council would let her, and Tamar opined that the council would allow about a quarter of the plans to go through if they were really pushed, which they certainly would be. Perdita said she thought a quarter would be enough. Harriet stood in the gentle gloom of one of the bedrooms and fought the mesmerizing effect of ugly wallpaper, the patterns that recur, not as one would wish a pleasurable visual event to be repeated, but recurrence for the sake of filling space. Blob blob blob . . . Harriet only broke free of the wallpaper—with a synaptic snap that was almost painful—when she heard Miss Maszkeradi’s voice in the hallway: “See you in the morning, girls!” She slammed the front door, and they all heard her lock it, the grinding of mechanisms, like a great maw chewing iron. The crafty woman had locked the back door too; they hadn’t seen when she’d done that.
“Well, we did agree to spend the night. And we can climb out of a window if we need to,” Margot said, heading to the kitchen to put the kettle on while Tamar tried to get hold of Miss Maszkeradi on the phone.
* * *
—
DARKNESS FELL—ALMOST AN HOUR earlier than it would have in a house with more windows. That was going to be one of Margot’s greatest obstacles when it came to reclaiming this place as a family home. And the wiring of the Baker House had been so extensively tampered with that the overhead lights in some rooms didn’t function at all—in others they blazed like an accompaniment to sirens, in yet others the lights flickered until it felt as if knuckles had been roughly pressed to your eyelids, and in a couple of rooms there were light switches that nobody wanted to try pressing; none of them was sure why. There was just a “one last booby trap” feel, a snickering suspicion that hopped across the tendons of the hand before sliding down the palm and pooling into sweat. Harriet couldn’t elude a fear that the seven swords nestled between her breasts had disappeared, and not considering what she would do if she found they really had abandoned her, kept looking down the front of her top. They were there every time, and sentencing her companions to death remained an unappealing idea no matter which way she looked at it. The group spread out, Tamar and Margot choosing bedrooms on opposite sides of the second floor, and Harriet and Perdita choosing neighboring and wallpaper-free rooms on the third floor. Once everyone had settled into their rooms, Harriet did an extensive Gretel-check, soft-footing around the house and finding it happily/sadly changeling-free. She occasionally crossed paths with her mother, who was armed with measuring tape and a camera and would then make Harriet read off a number for her or hold something steady while Margot had a think about it. Tamar had stationed herself in a corner of one of the rooms with the bricked-up window frames, and she appeared to be meditating. The lights in the room Perdita had chosen didn’t work, so she’d lit a candle and was doing her homework by it. The lights in the room Harriet had chosen were working, so she went to bed and tried to read the latest batch of essays her students had submitted. When the house felt too quiet, they all called out.
“Feeling haunted yet, Margot?”
“No. You, Perdita?”
“Nothing. What you saying, Mum?”
“I’m fine. Hang on, who started the ‘Are-you-OK’ chain?”
“No need to stress yourself out, Mum . . . it was Tamar.”
“Me? I hadn’t said anything yet. Only joking . . . it was me, it was me. And I’m fine too. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight!”
“Night.”
“G’night.”
“Goodnight . . .”
And Perdita Lee, who had been counting the “goodnights,” smiled in the darkness.
* * *
—