“Were they scary?” he asked her sensibly, trying to keep a straight face.
“No, just the old lady, and the man in the dining room afterward. The others were perfectly nice.”
“Why don’t we just give them a chance to vanish again?” he said soothingly, making her feel like an escaped mental patient.
“What if they don’t? Blake, I am not going to live with a family of ghosts. They scared the hell out of me.”
“Why? They’re all dead.”
“Are you crazy? What if they try to chase us away? Isn’t that what ghosts supposedly do if you’ve taken possession of a house they haunt?”
“Why don’t we just calm down and see what happens. We can’t move out just because we had a small earthquake and you think you saw a ghost.” Blake didn’t want to feed the insanity. It was unlike Sybil to be hysterical, but clearly she was.
“You don’t believe me.” She glared at him, even angrier at his condescending tone.
“I believe that you think you saw them, but I don’t know what you really saw. Maybe you just saw the portraits downstairs. Maybe they were moving from the quake.” He was looking for a reasonable answer to what she’d seen, or thought she did. But he did not for a minute believe she’d seen a family of ghosts.
“The portraits were not moving—the people were. And it was the same people as in the portraits, all of them. And they talked to me, Blake!” She was insistent and knew what she’d seen and heard. “And walked up the stairs!”
“Sybil, try to relax and be sensible. I’ll bet we never see them again. And there probably won’t be another earthquake for years.” She refused to answer him and lay down on the bed. He clearly didn’t believe her, and she didn’t know what to do next. There was no one she could tell. But she knew now that there were ghosts in the house. And whatever Blake said, the Butterfields were still there. “Did they try to frighten you away?” he asked her cynically.
“No,” she admitted. “But just seeing them nearly gave me a heart attack.” She was so enraged at Blake for everything that had happened, and for not believing her, that she didn’t speak to him again that night. She was up early the next morning, cooking breakfast, when she saw him again.
“How do you feel today?” he asked her quietly after the children finished breakfast and went back upstairs. They had talked about the earthquake all through breakfast, and how scary it had been. But that had been nothing compared to what Sybil had seen after that, when she went downstairs.
“Are you asking me if I’m sane again?” she said coldly.
“Of course not. You were frightened out of your wits last night, after that shake. I don’t blame you for being upset.” He sounded condescending, and she was just as angry at him as she’d been the night before.
“I know you don’t believe me, but I saw all of them, the whole family, and some other man.”
“Who knows, maybe that’s the way those things work. Maybe they appear every hundred years on some anniversary, or only during earthquakes. They’re certainly not hanging around on a daily basis. We never saw them here before.”
“We’ve only lived here for two days. Maybe they don’t want us here, and they think we’re disturbing them. This was their home.”
“And now it’s ours. We can’t let a family of ghosts frighten us away,” he said, still refusing to enter a state of panic with her.
“Oh, no? I’ve heard horror stories about things like that. They could push one of us down the stairs, or scare us into falling. The old lady is pretty damn scary, and there was some weird old guy with her, the one in the kilt. And who unstuck the window in our bedroom that had been painted shut the night before? You and I didn’t, and there’s no one else. In the morning, it was unstuck and the window was open. And who moved the tables in the front hall? Someone switched them and Alicia and José said they didn’t.” And Blake had said he hadn’t either when she asked him, so she assumed the moving men had. “Maybe they’re here watching us right now.” The idea gave her a shiver. “I’m not going to have my children living in a house full of poltergeists, if that’s what they are.”
“Maybe they’re benign spirits who wish us well,” he said, thinking that his wife was going nuts. “Let’s just try to keep a grip on reality, shall we? If you see them again, we can call in an exorcist or something, I’m sure there’s some way to get rid of them. They’re dead, after all.”
“Precisely. And if they’re still hanging around here a hundred years later, you can be damn sure they’re not planning to leave anytime soon.”
“Maybe they’re friendly,” he said, but he could see that he wasn’t going to convince her. The experience of the night before had been too vivid for her.
“I don’t care if they are friendly. This is our house, and I’m not going to live here with them. This is a little too Twilight Zone for me.”
“Try not to think about it today. Enjoy the kids, before they start school.” They were going to drive by Charlie’s school in Marin County, and take a look at Sausalito on the other side of the bridge. Charlie wanted a tour of Alcatraz, but she had found out you had to book it months in advance. Instead, they were going to see the sea lions at Pier 39. “Have a good day,” Blake said cautiously, blew her a kiss, and left for the office, where everyone would be talking about the earthquake and where they’d been when it happened.
The children commented on it again on the drive to Marin, and Sybil was relieved that none of them had seen any of the Butterfields on the second floor. There was no mention of them.