The Piper

SIX




Olivia spent the next week moving into the house, getting acclimated to the new office, and, in the little spare time she had, roaming the city like a ghost, haunting her past life. In the evenings, just before dinner, after she picked Teddy up from Charlotte’s house, they would take small detours into the past on their way back home. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the Bearden Kroger’s with a little half smile, telling Teddy how her family had done the weekly shopping there every Friday night, buying sausages in the deli, and each of them picking out their favorite box of cookies. Chris, invariably, Pecan Sandies, Emily, the powdery white wedding cookies, Olivia always dithering between Oreos and Devil’s Food.

She took Teddy down to the river and showed her the tree where she’d gotten stuck when she was four, the hood of her little blue jacket caught on a branch while she dangled what seemed an enormous distance over the ground. Olivia had loved trees then and she loved trees now, and she had always been better at climbing up, and bad at climbing down. She had driven her siblings crazy on walks in the park, insisting on hugging her favorite trees.

Chris had pushed at the bottom of her little red Keds – even then she had loved red best – threatening to dislodge her hood from the branch and catch her when she fell, but she had not cried. Nor had she threatened to tell, the usual power base of the youngest child. She was not above such things, but she was not stupid, and crying or telling would mean that the next time something interesting happened, she might get left behind. Her mother swore her first word had been mine, the second move, and her first sentence wait for me.

With the carefully honed wisdom of the baby child, Olivia had simply said she was fine where she was, thank you very much, and clasped her hands, and sung quietly to herself, until Chris had finally climbed the tree, grabbed her roughly around the waist, and passed her down to Emily. They kept it to themselves, the three of them. Even in those days, when children were left to themselves in cars while their mothers shopped and allowed to roam the neighborhood, they were not supposed to be in the park.

There were strangers in the park. The Mister Man. The childhood bogey who had come true one day and taken Emily away.

Far from being bored with these mundane nostalgic trips, Teddy egged Olivia on, so that each night they arrived home later and later. Almost as if Teddy dreaded going home.

At night, after Teddy went to bed, and sometimes, quite honestly, at the office when she was supposed to be doing her work, Olivia roamed the Internet, haunting the paranormal websites. She found a wealth of phone call incidents, personal accounts of relatives calling after they were dead, some of it linked to electronic voice phenomena, most stories more comforting than anything else. Whether you believed them or not, the calls seemed to be about telling people that death was not the end, that their loved ones were somehow still close.

Olivia knew that she was one of legions of people roaming the Internet late at night, paying psychics for readings, talking to priests, haunting bookstores and libraries, all of them wanting the same thing – relief from a pain that stretched on forever, some alternative to the brutal severing of someone you loved from your life, an unwillingness to accept how bad it could all feel. The research was dangerously seductive. It felt more important than the drudgery of day in and day out things. Olivia had spent more hours than she liked to tally up, reading story after story, crying a little over the grandmothers who reached out from beyond the grave to troubled teenage grandchildren, the aged parents who sent comfort from the afterlife to grown children in stress. The children who had died but wanted their parents to know that it had been their time and their plan, and they would all be together some day. Those were the stories Olivia liked reading. She hadn’t run across any stories about a warning call from the dead, though she had not tried all that hard. Having that call from Chris, knowing he was somehow and some way okay, had given her a peace she had not thought possible. Peace was all she wanted right now, she craved comfort and nothing else.

Olivia found the holy water after they’d been in the house for a week, when she was down in the basement, changing over the laundry.

The basement was the only part of the house she hated. Footsteps echoed on the backless, dirt encrusted steps. The light switch was weirdly located halfway down the wall, the traditional horror story naked bulb hanging from a wire in the center of the room. Orange rust stains on the floor let you know where the water trailed in during heavy rain, and the heating and air unit was older than God, with a metal filter she would have to take out and wash by hand.

The layout was a maze of half walls put up by Chris and her dad many years ago, when the foundation started to sag, creating crawl spaces and dark corners. Chris and Charlotte had left a variety of junk, including an old washer and dryer that weren’t hooked up to anything, but created a nice ambience along the back section of the wall.

Olivia had her back turned when a stack of boxes toppled and fell with a crash, three of them splitting open and spewing her collection of old tax records onto the damp concrete floor. Something had broken, Olivia heard the shatter of glass.

She stared at the boxes, and set her laundry basket of dirty towels on top of the washing machine.

‘Mommy, are you okay?’

Olivia jumped and looked up. ‘Teddy? What are you doing down here? I thought you were in the backyard, with Winston.’

‘I was.’

‘I didn’t even hear you come down.’ Olivia looked at her daughter, who pushed her glasses back up on her nose and clasped her arms behind her back. ‘Why were you rooting in those boxes? Those are old financial records, you don’t need to be getting into those, and now look at this godawful mess. And I am sick and damn tired of packing and unpacking boxes.’

‘I didn’t do it,’ Teddy said.

Olivia put her hands on her hips. Closed her eyes and counted to ten.

‘I think something broke,’ Teddy said in a soft little voice, bunching the hem of her shirt in a fist.

‘I heard it,’ Olivia said.

She headed for the mess, looking for the shine of broken glass. The movers had stacked the boxes neatly on wood pallets, in the only corner of the basement that was swept clean. Olivia saw the wet spot near the water heater, and saw the glint of a thick shard of glass. She crouched down to take a look.

The boxes had knocked over a jam jar of clear water someone had set behind the stairs. The front of the jar had a label on the front where someone had handwritten Holy Water.

Olivia sat back on her heels. She was not a Catholic, and as far as she knew, neither were Charlotte or Chris. It was a nervous thing, finding this jar of holy water hidden away in her basement. Who would put it there, and why?

‘What broke, Mommy?’

‘Nothing. Have you finished your homework, Teddy?’

‘Everything but math.’

‘Then go and do the math.’

Teddy trudged away, then sat down heavily on the bottom step and put her head on her knees.

‘What’s the matter, Teddy? It’s okay, I’m not mad at you about the boxes.’

‘It’s scary here, without a daddy in the house.’

‘Why don’t you get your homework finished, and then call your dad?’

‘Janet says this house is haunted. Janet says it’s not safe.’

Olivia gritted her teeth. ‘Janet is telling you stories to scare you, which is mean, but it’s something big kids do. I’ll talk to Charlotte and make her stop.’

‘I didn’t touch those boxes, Mommy. There was no reason for them to fall down. Are you scared here, Mommy?’

‘No, I am not.’