“No, ma’am, I really—”
She holds up a single warning finger, the way she did when she caught me stealing out of the break room fridge as a kid. It means: Last chance, bud.
I scrub the heels of my hands into my forehead, but—for once—no better lie occurs to me. “Okay. So I got a job housekeeping at Starling House, which is a pretty freaky place, but that’s none of my business because I’m just in it for the money, except now there’s somebody asking questions about it”—Charlotte’s eyes are widening with every comma—”and I want to know what exactly I’ve signed myself up for.” I’m not used to telling the truth, the way it just comes pouring out of your mouth, unedited, unrefined. I could keep going. I could tell her that Arthur Starling gave me his coat, that he has strange signs tattooed all down his arms and I wonder sometimes where they end, that Elizabeth Baine knew my name.
That I just saw my mother’s phone number written on a dead man’s receipt.
I bite my own lip instead, hard enough to hurt.
Charlotte watches me calmly. If I told Bev everything I just told Charlotte she’d give me a ten-minute lecture about fast money and bad news and shut off the internet for a week, but Charlotte takes another drink of coffee and sucks the sugar off her teeth before she says anything.
“How did Bev tell the story of Starling House?”
“She said Eleanor Starling came to town and married this rich coal guy—”
“John Peabody Gravely.”
“Yeah, and then murdered him for his money? And then built the house and disappeared.”
Charlotte nods at her cup. “I heard that one, when I went asking about the Starlings. But I heard a lot of other stories, too. I heard they worshipped the devil and stole little children. I heard the house is haunted, that no Starling ever died of natural old age. I even heard they keep wolves on their property, great big white ones.”
I feel a smile tugging up one side of my mouth. “I thought it was Siberian tigers.”
“Well, Bitsy can’t decide which one sounds scarier.”
“You don’t believe any of it, do you.”
Charlotte lifts one shoulder. “I believe if somebody’s just the littlest bit different, people will make up all kinds of nonsense.” Her face shifts, sobering. “But then . . . remember I was doing all those interviews for my book? I ended up on the phone with a woman named Calliope Boone, who said her family had a history with the Gravelys.”
“What kind of history?”
A certain degree of discomfort passes over Charlotte’s face. “Miss Calliope is Black.” She does not elaborate, inviting me to consider exactly what kind of history a Black family might have with a rich family just south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“She related to the Stevenses?” I know of exactly one Black household in Eden; their daughter was in my grade at school, before she left for Kentucky State.13
Charlotte shakes her head. “No. The Boones are up in Pittsburgh now. They left Eden well before the First World War—I’d say it was Jim Crow they were running from, but Miss Calliope said it was more than that.”
“What else did she say?”
Charlotte takes off her glasses and rubs hard at her eyes. “She told me a different story about Starling House. Or maybe it’s the same one, seen from a different angle, I don’t know.” She pulls out her phone and fiddles with it, frowning down at the screen. “She let me record it. I have a transcript, but it’s not the same.” She sets the phone between us, the screen staring up at the ceiling, and taps play.
I hear Charlotte’s voice first. “Miss Calliope? Are you all set? Okay, whenever you’re ready: You said you had a story to tell me?”
“No.” The voice is querulous, and very old. “I don’t tell stories. I tell the truth.”
We sit in silence when the recording ends. Eventually Charlotte goes back out front to hurry the last people out the door before closing, and by nine she’s locking the doors. I follow her out.
We stand together in the white circle of a parking lot light, listening to the distant clatter of the coal train and the white noise of the river.
Eventually I offer, awkwardly, “I didn’t know any of that.”
“No,” Charlotte agrees.
“It’s . . . pretty awful.” I’m thinking of the old mine shaft in the riverbank, the one the city boarded up. I’m wondering how many men died down in the dark before that one little white boy, and why his death is the only one we remember.
“Yeah.” Charlotte blows out her breath in a long, sorry stream. “You know I started writing a history of Eden because I liked it here?” Well, that figures; Charlotte is the sort of person who would adopt the ugliest cat at the shelter. “I didn’t think I’d stay long when I took this job, but I did, and I guess I wanted to show the world why. But sometimes it feels like I’m pulling up the carpeting in an old house, and finding everything underneath has gone to rot.”
My mouth twists. “Most people around here would just staple the carpet back down and pretend they hadn’t seen anything.” They didn’t like anything ugly or unfortunate, anything that took the shine off the story they were telling about themselves.
I must’ve sounded bitter, because Charlotte looks at me with concern, verging on pity. “I guess so,” she says gently. “And maybe I’m no better. Maybe I’ll just leave, and forget about the book. Go someplace none of it matters.” She gestures at the rumpled black horizon. “Maybe you should go, too.”
On any other night I’d lie to her, tell her I’m saving up money, dreaming up some grand future. But maybe telling the truth is like any other bad habit, which gets harder to quit the more you do it. “Maybe. But Eden is . . .” I don’t know how to finish the sentence.
“I know,” Charlotte says, softly. “I thought I might set down roots here, too.” When most people in Eden talk about their roots they’re waving rebel flags and making bullshit arguments about the Second Amendment, but it sounds different in Charlotte’s mouth. It makes me think of an apple seed spit carelessly by the side of the road, sprouting despite the bad soil and the fumes, clinging hard to the only patch of earth it was ever given.
She sighs. “But when I finish this degree . . . well.” She exhales as she turns away. “People aren’t trees, Opal.” Her shoes tap across the blacktop.
“Hey. Could you send me that transcript, if you get a chance?”
Charlotte hesitates. She nods once. “Don’t spread it around. I know where you live.”
By the time I make it back to the motel I still haven’t thought up a good story to explain how late I am, but I shouldn’t have worried: Jasper’s bed is empty. My heart seizes before I see the note on his pillow. Went over to Logan’s, will catch the bus with him tomorrow.
Logan’s dad is a roofer and his mom works in the county clerk’s office, which means the Caldwells have a pool table in the basement and name-brand coke in the fridge. They’re members of the PTA and the Rotary Club and they always bring tinfoil vats of mac ’n’ cheese to the church dinners and send out color-coordinated Christmas cards full of foster kids, even though they’re only a few years older than me.
I hate them.
The note ends with a cold P.S. We’re out of cereal instead of his usual x’s and o’s, so I’m pretty sure Jasper’s pissed at me. I should text him and find out why, but I’m tired and overcaffeinated and secretly relieved to have the room to myself tonight.
I don’t have to wait for my brother to fall asleep before I can sit cross-legged on the bed and prop the laptop on the radiator. I close the open tabs—job search engines, a special effects tutorial, the Gravely Power website, for some reason—and open “document 4.”
I wait. After a while, an email appears from the Muhlenberg Public Library staff account. The subject line reads: Interview 13A—Calliope Boone.