The Family Plot (17 page)

Augusta shrugged, and turned the page. “Tombstones are heavy. I suppose he didn't feel like going to the trouble. He wasn't so young anymore, not by then.”

“He'd have been in his forties, if I read the dates right. That's not so old.
I'm
almost forty.”

“And you're a mere babe,” she murmured in return, keeping her eyes on the pages before her. “Judson didn't build this house, you know. His father, Francis—he's the one who built it. But he and Mary both died, not too long afterward. Judson was still a boy.”

“Poor kid.”

“It happens. It happens more often than it should, around this house.” Another page, and another mumble—a softly spoken name or two, and flecks of black paper falling onto her lap like pepper.

“Does it? It's such a beautiful place.”

“Beauty lies, dear.” She looked up, meeting Dahlia's eyes in a hard, serious gaze. “So do houses.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Oh, I think you do. You're a hopeless romantic; it's written all over your face.”

Dahlia grunted a laugh. “You've got the hopeless part right, but the romantic's been burned right out of me.”

“Then there's hope for you yet. Don't get too attached, Miss Dutton. This place, this family … I'm the last of them, you know.”

“That's what my dad said. I'm sorry,” she added lamely.

“Why?”

“It must be lonely.”

Augusta shook her head, and returned her attention to the album. “It's a relief. The Withrows have had their time, and they spent it poorly. Oh, it's Aunt Hazel.” She pointed at a photo of a woman holding a carnival mask and grinning broadly. “Speaking of spinsters … or, not speaking, but I was thinking about them—spinsterhood was the only way a woman might get out alive, so you can see why we're finally dying out.” She tapped a fingernail on the photo of Hazel. “This picture must've been taken in New Orleans, around 1930. Aunt Hazel had … interests.”

“In New Orleans?”

“In the dark things taught there. She went to Lily Dale, too, and Cassadaga in Florida. She wanted answers, and never got them—though she hunted all her life. Maybe she found them after the fact. I'd like to think so.”

“She was a spiritualist?” Dahlia guessed. “Interesting hobby.”

“It's a religion, you know. Don't be condescending.”

“I didn't mean to be. I'm sorry.”

“You apologize too much. It makes you look weak, not polite.”

Dahlia fought the urge to apologize again. “Yes ma'am, you have a point. But let me ask you, did something happen to Abigail? There aren't any pictures of her, not after that last one in the yellow dress.”

The old woman blinked slowly, and the corners of her mouth tightened into something like a smile, but not a smile. Not quite. “That dress … it
was
yellow, wasn't it? Not that you can see from the picture,” she murmured. “But I'll tell you what happened: She died, sometime in the early twenties, I'm not sure exactly when. It was her death that prompted Aunt Hazel's interest in the far side of the veil, you might say. I think Hazel was trying to protect herself. And my father, Buddy. She wanted to protect him, too.”

“From what?”

“From whatever Abigail became.” She closed the book, then closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, she said, “It's an old story, the kind they used to write songs about: Abigail fell in love, and she tried to elope—but her fianc
é
vanished. She cried her eyes out, like you do; but being young and resilient, she fell in love again a year or two later. I never heard too many of the details, but I think the second betrothed was a better match, so far as the family's opinion went.”

“You mean, he had more money.”

“Undoubtedly. But, fortune or none, it wasn't meant to be. The wedding never occurred, and in my opinion, the young man dodged a bullet.”

Dahlia frowned and crossed her arms. Across the yard, she heard the sounds of pry bars and splitting wood, and the guys chatting back and forth. She ought to get back to work, but not while she held Augusta's attention on a thin string that could break at any moment. The wrong question would do it. The end of the album would do it, if nothing else. “So it didn't work out.”

The woman nibbled at her lip, and let it go. “The night before the wedding, Grandpa threw a party. I wasn't there,” she noted. “I wasn't born yet—not for another handful of years. According to family lore, my father went up to the bride-to-be and asked her, quite frankly, if her baby would be in the wedding.”

“Her
baby
?”

“That was everyone's reaction. Well, Abigail swore she had no idea what her brother was talking about, but he insisted. He told everyone she'd had a baby, and buried it under a tree.”

“You mean, she had a child with the first fianc
é
?”

“One must assume. You should understand, my father … he was always a bit funny, and he got funnier with age. These days, I think you'd call it autism, or something like that; I'm sure there's a term for it, but we didn't have a polite one, not back then. Daddy often said inappropriate things, but he never meant any harm. Likewise, my mother was very patient, and more than a little odd herself. They were a peculiar match, but a good one.”

“And they're gone now? You said they died, and you came here…”

“Oh yes. They've been gone for quite some time—I lost them to a car crash when I was fifteen years old. I see you on the verge of offering sympathies, but I wish you wouldn't,” she said, heading Dahlia off at the pass.

“As you like.”

“Thank you. At any rate, Daddy's little question at the engagement party was a public accusation, and that was unfortunate. Abigail frantically denied it. But she was a terrible liar: For all she cried about how my daddy'd made it up, and he was weak in the head, and he didn't know what he was saying, it was all nonsense, every bit of it. Daddy was funny, but he wasn't stupid.”

Dahlia was both rapt and appalled. “So … what happened?”

Augusta returned the album and rose to her feet. She dusted a smattering of black paper flecks off her designer pants, and held the rail as she took the porch steps slowly and carefully, her shiny pumps crushing leaves and pine needles as she went. She paused at the bottom of those stairs, and looked back up at the house. “As I've heard it told, Abigail swore to God there was never any baby—and the devil could carry her off if she was lying. She vanished that night, and no one ever saw her alive again. Some say the devil took her up on the offer.”

A great silver Lexus was parked by the house. Dahlia wondered why she hadn't heard it arrive, except that she'd been working in the carriage house, and talking with the boys. There wasn't any driver waiting. Apparently, Augusta Withrow preferred to handle such things herself.

She walked away from Dahlia, heading for the car without looking back. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Dutton. Thank you for your attention to detail, and I wish you and your crew the best. But goddamn this house, and this land, and everything left upon it. When you're finished here, the devil can take that, too.”

 

7

D
AHLIA CLUTCHED THE
photo album to her chest and watched Augusta Withrow drive away.

The book crackled and crumbled, shedding yet more black paper flakes across the porch as the sleek silver car did a perfect three-point turnaround and squeezed back through the old stone piles where the gate used to be.

It hadn't been gone for fifteen seconds when Bobby hollered from the barn. “Fucking
Christ,
Dahlia—are you ever coming back? Come on, we have work to do!”

“And we need leadership!” Brad called out. They all three cackled.

She couldn't see them from where she was standing, and didn't know if they could see her—but she flipped the bird in their general direction and went inside to stash the album. It was hers now, free and clear, and for keeps. Back into her messenger bag it went, up on the oversized bay window seat that made an adequate bed if you spread a sleeping bag there. She pulled off her flannel and tossed it on top of the bag. It was getting too warm to wear it.

Out in the hallway, where the broken window let in sunlight, rain, and sound, she heard the guys talking. Their words were so clear they might've been standing beside her, or having a sleepover in the room next to hers. They'd found something odd, and couldn't decide what it was.

Gabe made a guess: “Part of a wagon, I think?”

Brad didn't quite agree. “Farm equipment. Maybe a plow, or some kind of…”

“This wasn't a farm.” Well, Bobby wasn't wrong about that. “So either it belonged to somebody else, or it was something else. Who cares, anyway? It's fallen apart now, and that wood it's made of … that ain't chestnut.”

Dahlia went to the window and planted her hands on the sill, leaning forward to look outside as she eavesdropped.

Gabe wasn't ready to fight him on it. “Whatever it was, it must've been big. Like, the size of a truck.”

“But older than that,” Brad added. “Look at this, it's part of a wood wheel.”

A breeze kicked up, the kind of breeze that sounds like radio static, and is thick with falling leaves. Someone said something next, but Dahlia didn't catch it. Her ears were full of the fluttering, flapping, raspy sound of foliage and fabric. There were leaves, red and orange. There was a dress, yellow cotton.

On the other side of the yard, the cemetery plot was barely visible from her second-floor vantage point. She could only glimpse the northern edge, where it bumped against the path that scrolled past the carriage house.

At that intersection between yard and plot, a figure stood, staring up at the mansion.

No, it was looking at the window.

No, it was looking at Dahlia. It met her eyes.

Not a woman in a dress, but a man in a suit. No, not a suit. A uniform, just like Brad had somewhat reluctantly told her. This soldier was scarcely more than a teenager, but broad-shouldered and fair-haired. He looked like a fellow who'd worked hard for a long time already, before he took up the military. He could've been any football player Dahlia had ever gone to high school with, as if the whole breed just fell out of a mold.

Maybe it did.

Her breath caught in her throat, then climbed back out again. This wasn't a ghost. It was a flesh-and-blood thing, solid as the tombstones behind him. Ghosts were not so sharp. Ghosts did not shift their shoulders, adjusting their rifles. They did not lean from foot to foot, like they'd been standing for too long, waiting for something or someone who was taking her own sweet time.

She pointed down at him. She whispered, “
Don't move
.”

Did he hear her? Did he give a damn?

She flung herself down the stairs, through the living area still cluttered with bags and work gear, along the foyer, past the formal parlor on one side and the dining room on the other, and out through the front door, where she could stare squarely at the family plot that wasn't a family plot at all—seeing it from end to end, all the way back to the tree line where the saplings and pokeweed nibbled it away to just another crabgrass-covered corner of the family land.

There was nothing to see. There was no one there.

She dashed to the spot where the soldier had waited, and she stood in the place where his boots had been planted. She caught her breath one mouthful at a time—and with the air came the smell of something else, something rotten. Gunpowder and blood, and graveyard dirt. Burned wool. Shoe polish. Sulfur.

She drew it all down into her lungs and held it there, investigating every molecule.

The soldier had been there, on this very patch of turf. No, there weren't any footprints, and no, there was no sign that anyone had hiked through the brush, the weeds, the monkey grass and gravel and unwanted stuff from the carriage house that the crew had left on the front lawn. Nothing had disturbed all those things too broken to save, too heavy or rotten to keep.

“Nobody's buried here,” she assured herself, and the tombstones around her. She did it quietly, in case the guys were within earshot. Pretty much everything was within earshot at the Withrow estate; every soft sound bounced off the side of the mountain and lingered, half echo and half memory. Every footstep, every gasp. It all stayed longer than it ought to.

“Nobody's buried here. There are no soldiers. No girls in yellow dresses.”

And there was no reason to stay there, standing in a not-a-cemetery like a fool. She shivered, wrapped her arms around herself, and wished she'd kept the flannel—but didn't go back inside to retrieve it.

For October, the weather was positively warm.

It was good weather for hard work, and for camping in old houses that were more drafty than cozy. It was good weather for ghosts, except there weren't any. Not on the Withrow grounds.

Surely, the devil had taken them all.

She left the crooked, shattered stones and the roses, brambles, and flaky dead hydrangeas as brown and muddled as old coffee filters. She trudged thoughtfully back toward the barn. The non-cemetery begged a question: If the Withrows weren't buried there … and no one else was buried there, either … then where
did
the dearly departed Withrows actually rest?

Later on, maybe she'd spend some time on her phone, kicking around on the Internet. She might get lucky and find some of those dusty dead listed online. If they were interred locally, she might even be able to visit their final resting places and pay her respects, or grab phone pictures of their tombstones.

Not that it would accomplish anything. It wouldn't explain any ghosts. It wouldn't save the house, which the devil would take soon enough.