“It’s more than that,” Hawk said. “The anniversary is the only time those who have passed can really interact with us.”
“Celia and Rebecca were interacting with me just fine and there was no anniversary,” Gretchen said, putting her hand up to where she had been scratched; it was sore and the skin was raised, beginning to scab. She lifted her shirt to look at her side where she had been bitten, and there was an ugly round welt, teeth marks visible. Her forehead and part of her eye was swollen from the wasp sting, her shoulder was terribly sore, and she remembered she hadn’t taken the time to disinfect the wound. “They’re already biting and scratching and tripping people. Knocking over the wasp nest.”
“All of that is new,” Hope said. “It used to be only on the anniversary, and it used to be only one person got hurt. Things have been changing over the years, escalating.”
Gretchen thought of her mother’s image behind the charred and ornate mirror. How Celia and Rebecca were always playing next to it, as if they were guarding it. How Hawk couldn’t see what she had seen. She needed to get back to the house soon, maybe hire a moving company to get the mirror out. She reached in her pocket for her cigarettes, then remembered she didn’t smoke.
“Did Esther talk to you guys about a triangle?” Gretchen asked.
“All the time,” Hawk said. “And she’s not the only one. Folks at Shadow Grove have this idea that there’s a zone where spirits are suffering. It’s the same theory Esther and your mother had.”
“Is it true?” Gretchen asked. “Can you see them?”
He shrugged. “I see things all over,” he said. “You may have thought we were the only people in the funeral home—but to me it was full of mourners, walking through the rooms. And the woods are full of spirits trying to find the church. I try to believe in their triangle idea, but there are so many wandering souls in the world. . . . It’s more like an ever-expanding circle with the house at the center.”
“What do you mean, the center?” asked Gretchen.
“Like an aperture,” he said. “Like . . . they always come from the attic down into the house and then outward from there. To me it feels like the house is a rift between worlds.”
“Our mother, your mother, and Esther thought they could release the spirits,” Hope said. “That was before Celia and Rebecca became as strong as they are now. Hawk says they used to be confined to one little place; now they roam around the whole house and he’s seen them out here too and once in the woods.”
“There’s got to be something that’s making them stronger,” Gretchen said. She racked her brain. Esther’s death? The presence of another Axton at the house? How were they supposed to rationally figure out something so irrational? She set out Esther’s photographs, the ones from Poland and Japan and Vietnam. Like a whole world on fire. She peered over them, thinking of Esther’s ashes in the box upstairs.
“We could ask them,” she said finally. “We could ask the girls.”
“There’s only one other person who’s talked to them,” said Hawk. “And she also talked to Fidelia. This lady named Annie at Shadow Grove. Says she can channel Fidelia and other people in the Axton family.”
“They talked to me,” Gretchen said. “They told me they were going to ‘fix the house.’ Then they looked frightened and ran away—some disgusting white creature with hooves was coming.”
A silence fell over the room. Hope opened the filing cabinet and riffled through some folders. She pulled out a photograph and laid it on the table.
“Did it look like that?”
Gretchen expected to see something like one of her mother’s spirit photographs. Instead she was looking at a picture of a WCP member in a mask riding a horse. And yes, because of the light or the composition of the photograph, it did look just like the creature.
Gretchen gasped and put her hand over her mouth. The sheet the WCP man was wearing was tattered and a little singed, as if he had just come from a fire. It resembled what she had thought were feathers on the creature. But the holes in the mask were the most frightening—as if she was looking straight into insatiable black holes of hatred. She was repulsed. It was the same with all of Esther’s pictures—Nazis, American soldiers burning huts, cowards in planes dropping bombs on cities. The blunt, ignorant hatred was the same.
Seeing the picture made her want to work harder than ever to figure out what was going on, and to get that mirror—get her mother—out of that ancestral trap.
Gretchen handed the photograph back to Hope. “Simon should be here later tonight,” she said. “You stay here and go through the archive. Hawk and I will go up to Shadow Grove now.”
“What we need here isn’t a spiritualist to make it all better,” Hope said. “We need a historian to let everyone know the facts.”