“I want to do more research before I sit down with them. Try to connect the dots. Maybe something in these pictures overlaps with Annie Barrett’s story.” I lean across the table, talking faster. Already I can feel the caffeine waking up my central nervous system. My thoughts are sharper, my pulse is quickening. I’m no longer bothered by the bitter taste and I take another sip. “According to Teddy, the man in these drawings stole Anya’s little girl. Do you know if Annie had any children?”
“That’s a really interesting question,” Mitzi says. “But the answer will be clearer if I start at the beginning.” She settles back in her chair, getting comfortable, and pops a cookie into her mouth. “Just remember, Annie Barrett died before I was born. So these are stories I heard growing up, but I can’t guarantee they’re actually true.”
“That’s fine.” I take another sip of coffee. “Tell me everything.”
“The original owner of your house was a man named George Barrett. He was an engineer for DuPont, the chemical company, up in Gibbstown. He had a wife and three daughters, and his cousin Annie came to live here in 1946, right after World War II. She moved into your guest cottage and she used it as a kind of studio-slash-guest-house. She was about your age and very pretty, long black hair and just knockout gorgeous. All the GIs are coming home from Europe and they go nuts for her, they forget all about their high school sweethearts. They start coming around George’s house day and night, asking if his cousin is free to talk.
“But Annie’s shy, she’s quiet, she keeps to herself. She doesn’t dance or go to the movies, she turns down all their invitations. And she doesn’t even go to church, which was a big no-no back then. She just stays in her cottage and paints. Or she walks around Hayden’s Glen, looking for subjects to sketch. And so gradually the whole town kind of turns on her. Word gets around that she’s an unwed mother, that she put her child up for adoption and moved to Spring Brook in disgrace. Then the rumors get even worse. People say she’s a witch, and she’s luring all the husbands into the woods to have sex with them.” Mitzi laughs at the absurdity of the idea. “Because that’s just how women talk, you know? I’m sure all the moms on this block say the same things about me!”
She takes another sip of coffee and continues: “Anyway, so one day George Barrett walks over to the cottage, knocks on the door, no answer. He goes inside and there’s blood everywhere. All over the bed, all over the walls. ‘Up to the rafters,’ he told my father. But there’s no body. No sign of Annie anywhere. George calls the police and the whole town searches the forest, combing all the trails, dragging nets through the creek, search dogs, the whole nine yards. And you know what they found? Nothing. She vanished. End of story.”
“Has anyone lived in the cottage since the ’40s?”
Mitzi shakes her head no. “My parents said George nearly knocked it down. To erase the memory of the tragedy. Instead he turned it into a toolshed. And like I told you, when I was growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, we all called it the Devil House. We were all afraid of it. But it was just a tall tale, a local legend in our own backyard. I never saw anything that truly frightened me.”
“What about the next owners? After George died?”
“Well, after George passed, his wife sold the house to Butch and Bobbie Hercik. They were my neighbors forty years. They built the pool that you and Teddy go swimming in. We were real close, terrific friends.”
“Did they have children?”
“Three girls, two boys, and zero problems. And I was close with Bobbie. If her kids were drawing dead people, she’d have told me.” Mitzi takes another sip of her coffee. “Of course they had the good sense to leave the guest cottage alone. Maybe when the Maxwells fixed it up, they disturbed something. Unlocked some kind of hostile energy.”
I imagine myself approaching Ted and Caroline and warning that they’d released a malevolent spirit. I’m pretty sure they would start searching Craigslist for a new babysitter. And then what would I do, where would I go? My heartbeat surges, like a revving engine stuck in neutral, and I rest a hand on my chest.
I need to relax.
I need to calm down.
I need to stop drinking coffee.
“Would you mind if I used your bathroom?”
Mitzi points me back toward the living room. “First door on your left. The light’s on a string, you’ll see it.”
The bathroom is small and cramped, with an old-fashioned clawfoot tub that’s cocooned in vinyl shower curtains. The instant I turn on the light, a silverfish skitters across the tiled floor and disappears through a crack in the grout. I lean over the sink, turn on the faucet, and splash my face with cold water. My heart palpitations level off and I reach for a guest towel, only to find they’re all covered with a fine layer of dust, like they haven’t been touched in years. There’s a pink terry cloth robe hanging on the back of the door and I use its sleeve to blot my face dry.
Then I open Mitzi’s medicine cabinet and take a quick look around. Back in high school I used to snoop in bathrooms all the time, because you’d be amazed at the prescription pharmaceuticals that people left unsupervised; I could skim pills and sometimes entire bottles without anyone getting suspicious. And I guess with my heart racing and my legs shaking I feel like I’m back in high school again. Mitzi’s medicine chest is stocked like a freaking Walgreens, four crowded shelves of Q-tips and cotton balls, medicated pads and petroleum jelly, tweezers, antacids, and half-flattened tubes of Monistat and hydrocortisone. Plus a dozen orange prescription bottles, everything from Lipitor and Synthroid to amoxicillin and erythromycin. And way, way, way in the back, hidden behind all the others, is my old friend oxycodone. I had a hunch I’d find some. These days, almost everyone has Oxy in their house, a half-finished bottle of pills left over from a minor surgical procedure. And few people ever notice when these pills go missing.…
I twist off the cap and peer inside the bottle: empty. Then Mitzi taps on the door and I nearly drop everything in the sink. “Make sure you hold the handle when you flush, okay? I’ve got a problem with my flapper.”
“Sure,” I tell her. “No problem.”
And suddenly I’m furious with myself for snooping, for backsliding. I feel like Mitzi’s caught me red-handed. I blame the coffee—I never should have had the coffee. I put back the bottle and turn on the tap and take long slurps of cold water, hoping to dilute the toxins in my system. I’m ashamed of myself, nineteen months sober and snooping around an old lady’s medicine cabinet. What the hell is happening to me? I flush the toilet and hold the lever until all the water goes down.
When I return to the kitchen, Mitzi is waiting at the table with a wooden board that’s covered with letters and numbers. I realize it’s some kind of Ouija board—but it’s nothing like the flimsy cardboard sets I remember from childhood sleepovers. This one is a thick slab of maple engraved with arcane symbols. It looks less like a toy and more like a butcher’s block.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Mitzi says. “If this spirit wants to tell you something, let’s cut out the middleman. Bypass Teddy and contact her directly.”
“Like a séance?”
“I prefer the term ‘gathering.’ But not here. We’ll get better results in your cottage. How about tomorrow?”