“You’ve been living here by yourself?” Gretchen asked.
“Not really,” Hawk said. “Esther spent a lot of time over here, looking out for us once they passed. She’d been good friends with our mom.”
Gretchen felt the lonely resignation in their words. The kind of missing that would not go away. It felt like one more layer of sorrow for all of them.
“Was your mom a photographer too?” she asked.
“She was a historian,” Hope said. “Used to be a professor when we were small, before we moved back here—to where she was from. She wrote books about American history.”
“Did you ever read Uncommon Ground?” Hawk asked.
“Your mother is Sarah Green?”
“Was,” Hope said, but she looked proud, not sad, when she said it.
“I read that book in tenth-grade history.”
“Everyone did,” said Hope.
“Whoa,” Gretchen said. “I can’t believe your mother is Sarah Green. That book is amazing.”
Hawk smiled, clearly thinking about his mother, then suddenly, as if he could actually feel Gretchen’s hunger, he said, “You must be starving. Let’s see what we have in the fridge.”
While Hope and Hawk were in the kitchen, Gretchen tried futilely to call her father and then Janine on Hope’s cell phone—she hung up after six rings trying to reach her father. Janine’s phone went right to voice mail, but Gretchen couldn’t think what kind of message she should leave, so she just hung up.
Hope warmed up some leftovers and they sat at the kitchen table eating rice and kale and chickpeas and tofu. It was surprisingly delicious, and Gretchen, famished from a day with no food, ate heartily.
“Are you allowed to just live here by yourselves?” Gretchen asked.
“Well, I’m eighteen,” Hawk said. “So yeah. But Esther was our legal guardian, after our parents died. We were able to stay in our house and at school here in Mayville because of her.”
Gretchen’s stomach felt hollow, thinking about all the loss Hawk and Hope had been through. She didn’t know what happened to her mother, but she had her father—even if it was every couple of months—and she had Janine. She wondered how anyone could let Esther Axton become a legal guardian to children of any age.
As if he could read her mind Hawk said, “Esther didn’t always drink so much.” At that his face fell and his eyes filled with tears.
“I keep thinking maybe there were more signs,” Hope said. “When I was over there, she had so many books she wanted to give me. Like she was just giving stuff away—wanted to get it out of the house—and I should have realized . . .”
Hawk rubbed his eyes. He had clearly been closer to Esther than any of them. “She struggled, you know. Lost a lot of friends in the war. And saw a lot of shit. And then the house . . . Esther was so strong and funny and cool, y’know? You’d forget she had problems, forget she wasn’t some kinda superhero.”
“I guess she didn’t want to live through another anniversary,” Hope said.
“When I was up there tuning the piano she was talking about it,” Hawk said. “I said she could come and stay with us, but she said no, no, she had to shoot it. She’d been shooting it for forty years trying to figure out a way to make it stop. Trying to account for everyone, make sure she had all of their pictures.”
Gretchen felt a chill go up her spine, but she wanted to find a rational reason for everything that had happened earlier that night. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t know what anniversary you’re talking about. The anniversary of the fire? We can’t just take it for granted that the place is haunted. My aunt let the house fall apart and animals got in, and she was a big drinker. There’s anthills and wasp nests and like—who knows what—little deer or squirrels or moose walking around in there or something, all those pictures and tricks of the light can mess with your head if you’re tired or old or drunk or haven’t eaten—but that doesn’t mean there are ghosts. And what does the anniversary of a horrible crime have to do with all of this?” Even as she was talking Gretchen felt the sense of her own panic, as if she were trying to talk herself out of something she already knew was true.
“What about the crowds in the field?” Hawk asked. “The one Hope couldn’t see?”
“Yeah,” Hope said. “There a reason you came running here in a screaming terror a few hours ago, if you don’t believe in ghosts?”
“But you can’t even see them,” Gretchen said. “How can you believe in them?”
“Plenty of things you can’t see that are real,” Hope said. “You can’t see viruses but you can still get sick.”