“She’s . . .”
“Weird? Does she drive around in a Rolls Royce smoking with a gold cigarette holder? Does she have an expensive little dog that wears a bow and goes everywhere with her?”
“She’s . . . she’s dead,” Gretchen said quietly. “She killed herself.”
Simon didn’t say anything for a full ten seconds. Then he said, “I’m coming there. Give me the address.”
“No, Simon. It’s crazy here right now . . . there’s no bus and there’s . . . I think my mother . . . there’s some kind of thing with accidents happening. . . .”
“Give me the address,” he said again, and with great relief she did.
They were a team. If anyone was going to help them get that mirror out of the house, if anyone was going to help them figure out what was going on, it was Simon.
She could hear him already scrolling through car services on his phone. “I’ll be there by tonight,” he said and hung up.
Gretchen checked her other messages—apart from the dozen from Simon, there were two from Janine and one from her dad. Her father was calling from a café near the village where he was working; the connection was fuzzy and she could hear people talking in the background and loud music playing. He said he hoped she was having fun and would call again in three weeks. Gretchen’s heart sank at having missed his call. She knew that he would be so absorbed in his work she’d be lucky if he really did call back in three weeks. Last she knew he was on assignment in South America. There was no Wi-Fi where he was working, and he couldn’t just take trips into the village whenever he wanted. Sometimes, if he was on a very tough assignment, treating dengue fever or Rotavirus, she went months without hearing from him. He said “I love you” twice. And she whispered it back into the silent phone.
Janine’s message made her smile; she could tell she was eating ice cream and the TV was on in the background. “How’s life in the big country?” she’d asked. How could Gretchen possibly explain how much her life had changed in just a matter of days? It was a question she couldn’t have answered if she tried. And when she called back no one answered.
The box of Esther was sitting on top of the TV. Hope and Hawk had brought all the journals and other boxes in from the car and were carrying them down to the basement.
“My friend is coming from the city,” Gretchen said.
“She’s picked a bad time to visit.”
“He,” Gretchen said.
“Oh,” Hawk said, looking away for a minute.
“Where are you taking those?” Gretchen asked, gesturing toward the boxes.
“C’mon,” Hawk said.
She followed them downstairs to a long table that was piled with books. Beside it stood a tall gray filing cabinet.
“Our mother’s research,” Hope said. “She’d been working with Esther for a while—”
Gretchen looked around. The place was neat and orderly, like the upstairs. The archival materials had been put into plastic sleeves or files and set out in piles on the table. The way everything had been handled, it was almost like these old papers and photographs were volatile material. It reminded Gretchen of a crime lab from some old TV show.
“The folks at Shadow Grove would pay a lot of money for these kinds of things,” Hawk went on. “They have another library—but it’s less historical.”
“And more hysterical,” Hope said, looking up from the document she was cataloging.
Hawk smirked at his sister. They busied themselves unpacking boxes and setting more journals and photographs out on the table.
Hawk pulled out a brown folder thick with papers and hand-scrawled notes on yellow legal paper, tossed it on the top of the pile. Gretchen picked it up and leafed through it.
It was Esther’s will. A long rambling heavily annotated form that established a bank account specifically designated for “funds to fight the gas company.” It also had whole paragraphs about destroying the house. The only thing she left Gretchen was the mirror and the camera. The car she left to Hope.
“C’mon, we’ve really got to get to work on this stuff,” Hawk said, dusting off more of the papers and setting them aside. “We’ve got just over twenty-four hours before the anniversary and the Shadow Grove people start coming out here.”
“So? What do they do?” Gretchen asked.
“A bunch of loony shit,” Hope said, “in hopes of not getting killed themselves by a hunter’s stray bullet or a lightning strike. Or they honor the spirits of those who passed and try to communicate with them—depending on how you look at it.”