“Swear to your Scarlet Knight here, okay? Cry on his shoulder and maybe he’ll feel sorry for you. But don’t ask me to waste any more time.”
She shoves her books into her bag and then storms past me, nearly tripping as she descends the stairs of my cottage.
“What just happened?” Adrian asks.
“Anya was here, Adrian. She was inside the cottage. I swear to you, I could feel her standing over me. Moving my arm. But the letters were gibberish. We couldn’t spell anything. And then right in the middle Mitzi lost her shit. She started screaming at me.”
We watch from the porch as Mitzi wobbles across the lawn, veering left and then overcompensating to the right, unable to maintain a straight line.
“Is she all right?” Adrian asks.
“Well, she’s pretty high, but supposedly that’s part of her process.”
A dejected Teddy comes walking across the yard. He seems to understand that something bad has happened, that the grown-ups are upset. In a hopeful voice, he asks, “Does anyone want to chase me?”
Adrian apologizes for leaving but says he has to go. “I need to get back or El Jefe will flip.”
“I can chase you,” I tell Teddy. “Just give us a minute.”
Clearly this isn’t the answer Teddy wants. He trudges across the yard to the pool patio, unhappy with both of us.
“Are you going to be all right?” Adrian asks.
“I’m fine. I just hope Teddy doesn’t say anything to his parents.”
But I’m pretty sure he will.
16
After the pool party, Teddy goes up to his bedroom for Quiet Time and I stay downstairs in the den. Maybe I don’t want to know what he’s doing up there. Maybe things will be better for me if I stop asking so many questions.
In the afternoon we take a long walk in the Enchanted Forest. We follow Yellow Brick Road to Dragon Pass and down to Royal River, and I try to spin a new story about Princess Mallory and Prince Teddy. But all Prince Teddy wants to discuss are spirit boards: Do they need batteries? How do they find the dead person? Can they find any dead person? Can they find Abraham Lincoln? I keep saying “I don’t know” and hope that he’ll lose interest. Instead he asks how much it costs to buy a spirit board, if it’s possible to make one.
Caroline gets home from work at her usual time and I hurry out for a long run, eager to get away and burn off stress. It’s nearly seven o’clock when I get home, and Ted and Caroline are waiting on my front porch. And as soon as I see their faces, I know that they know.
“Good workout?” Ted asks.
His tone is light, like he’s determined to keep things pleasant.
“Pretty good. Almost nine miles.”
“Nine miles, really? That’s remarkable.”
But Caroline has no interest in making small talk. “Do you have anything you want to tell us?”
I feel like I’ve been dragged into the principal’s office and forced to empty my pockets. All I can think to do is play dumb: “What’s wrong?”
She pushes a sheet of paper into my hands. “I found this drawing before dinner. Teddy didn’t want to show me. He tried to hide it. But I insisted. Now you look at this picture and tell me why we shouldn’t fire you on the spot.”
Ted rests a hand on her arm. “Let’s not overreact.”
“Don’t patronize me, Ted. We’re paying Mallory to watch our child. And she left him with the gardener. So she could play Ouija board. With the pothead who lives next door. How am I overreacting?”
The drawing looks nothing like the dark sinister pictures that were left on my porch and refrigerator. It’s just a bunch of Teddy’s stick figure characters—me and an angry woman who’s obviously Mitzi, gathered around a rectangle covered in letters and numbers.
“I knew it!”
Caroline narrows her eyes. “Knew what?”
“Anya was here! At the séance! Mitzi accused me of pushing the pointer thing, but it was Anya! She was moving it. Teddy saw her. The picture proves it!”
Caroline is bewildered. She turns to Ted and he raises his hands, pleading with us to settle down. “Let’s all take a deep breath, okay? Let’s unpack what we’re hearing.”
But of course they’re confused. They haven’t seen everything I’ve seen. They’ll never believe me without seeing the pictures. I open the door to my cottage and urge them to follow me inside. I get out the stack of drawings and I arrange them on my bed in a grid. “Look at these. You recognize the paper, right? From Teddy’s sketch pads? Last Monday I found the first three drawings on my porch. I asked Teddy and he said he had nothing to do with them. The next night, I went out to dinner with Russell. The door to my cottage was locked. But when I came home, there were three more drawings on my refrigerator. So I hid a camera in Teddy’s bedroom—”
“You did what?” Caroline asks.
“A baby monitor. From your basement. I put the camera in his room during Quiet Time and I watched him draw.” I point to the next three pictures. “I watched him make these. He was using his right hand.”
Caroline shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Mallory, but we are talking about a five-year-old boy. We all agree that Teddy’s gifted but there’s no way he’s capable—”
“You’re not understanding me. Teddy didn’t draw these pictures. Anya did. The spirit of Annie Barrett. She’s visiting Teddy in his bedroom. She’s using him like a puppet. Somehow she’s controlling his body and she draws these pictures and she brings them to my cottage. Because she’s telling me something.”
“Mallory, slow down,” Ted says.
“We tried the séance so Anya would leave Teddy alone. I wanted to communicate with her. Directly. Keep Teddy out of it. But something went wrong. It didn’t work.”
I stop to pour myself a glass of water and gulp it down. “I know it sounds crazy. But all the proof you need is right here. Look at these pictures. They’re coming together, they’re telling a story. Help me make sense of it, please.”
Caroline sinks into a chair and buries her face in her hands. Ted manages to stay composed, like he’s determined to resolve the conversation. “We are committed to helping you, Mallory. I’m glad you’re being open and honest with us. But before we make sense of these pictures, we need to agree on a couple of facts, okay? And the biggest one is that ghosts don’t exist.”
“You can’t prove they don’t.”
“Because you can’t prove a negative! Look at the flip side, Mallory—you have no proof that the ghost of Annie Barrett is real.”
“These pictures are my proof! They’re on Teddy’s sketch pad paper. If he didn’t draw them—if Annie didn’t magically deliver them to my cottage—how did they get here?”
I see that Caroline’s attention has drifted to the small end table beside my bed, where I keep my phone, my tablet computer, my Bible—and the blank sketch pad that Teddy gave me a month ago, when I first started working for the Maxwells.
“Oh come on,” I tell her. “You think I’m drawing them?”
“I never said that,” Caroline says. But I can see her mind working, I can see she’s probing the theory.
After all: Wasn’t I prone to memory lapses?
Didn’t a box of Teddy’s pencils go missing last week?