The Family Plot by Cherie Priest
Brad shrugged stiffly. “Why not? Who would come after any of this stuff? I haven’t seen another soul since we got here.”
She grunted, and set the door down hard—narrowly missing her foot. “Gabe saw someone, or he thought he did. He brought it up yesterday, and I told him…” She went to the pile of useful work things, and retrieved her gloves. She slipped them on, using her teeth to drag the right one into place. She wiggled her fingers to settle them in. “I told him he was right, and we should lock the place up better when we’re not around. I’ve been lazy about it, though. I guess I feel a little bad about slacking off on the security issue, because it seemed real important to him. He was a bit shaken up; wanted to search the premises and everything, but…”
“But you think he’s being overly cautious?”
The ladder was right where they’d left it, with the top step barely a foot below the entrance to the loft. Dahlia put one foot on the bottom rung, and gripped the sides. “Not exactly.”
“Then … what? You think he saw a ghost?”
She stopped, half on the ladder, and half off it, ready to climb. “Why would you say that?”
“I saw Bobby’s face when he came down the stairs. You know how people say, ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost’?”
“Yeah.”
“He looked like that. I’m just curious, since you guys do these teardowns all the time, and demo is supposed to stir up the spirits. Or that’s what I’ve heard.”
“Have you seen anything creeping around?”
He took a breath, looked behind him at the open doors, and let it out, all in one sentence. “Okay, this might sound nuts but I thought I saw a guy over by the graveyard you found yesterday.”
She pulled her foot down off the rung and turned to face him. “A guy? Are you sure?”
Brad fidgeted under her stare. He shook his head, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “If I was sure, I would’ve said something sooner.”
“What did this mystery guy look like?”
“Young. Clean-cut. He was wearing a uniform.”
“A uniform? Like an army uniform?”
He nodded. “How’d you guess? Oh, wait, never mind. The tombstones, they were from World War I.”
“Right. So … you think the ghost is a soldier, maybe?”
He pulled his hands out of his pockets and tugged his sleeves down until he could ball them up in his fists. “You know what? Forget I said anything. It was just my imagination. I was looking outside, from that window in the parlor—I was thinking about the fireplace mantel in there, and wondering if you’d want to save the tiles on the floor around it, even though half of them are broken. I was staring off into space, you know … but staring toward the cemetery. The whole thing was daydreamy bullshit; let’s write it off to that.”
“If you’d rather.”
“Yeah, I’d rather.”
Dahlia took the lead up the ladder. “All right. But for what it’s worth, and in case it makes you feel better…,” she said over her shoulder as she climbed.
“If what makes me feel better?” He started up behind her.
“I do think Gabe saw a ghost. I think he’s seen a couple, since he’s been here: a woman, and a little boy.” She stepped off the ladder carefully, across the water-softened wood and onto a steadier patch of boards. “That’s why I think it’s pointless to lock up: Even if we searched the property, we wouldn’t find any flesh-and-blood intruders.”
Brad started climbing behind her. “Seriously? You’re not making fun?”
“Seriously. It’s like you said, I’ve done a lot of old houses. I’ve seen stuff, and heard stuff that made me wonder if my eyes and ears were playing tricks. Once or twice, I’ve even seen people—or leftovers of people, who couldn’t have possibly been there, you know? Shadows, and shapes. Voices. Whatever stays behind. I had an old house once, myself … it might’ve been a little haunted, I don’t know.”
“You did?”
“The one I lost,” she said. She waited a moment for the usual lump to rise in her throat, but it didn’t, so she kept talking, daring it to make an appearance. “In the divorce. Andy basically forced me to sell it. Watch your step there, sweetheart—rain’s been coming in, and the floor’s not safe until you get over to this section.”
Brad stretched his leg over the rotted patch and joined her on the safe side. “Oh, right. The divorce.”
“Most days, I’m more mad about losing the house than losing Andy. The house was a lot of work, but it was never an asshole. It’s funny, though,” she said. “As soon as I bought the place, everyone in the family wanted to know about the ghosts. That was the first thing—not how much it cost, or where it was, or how big it was. They heard it was built in the 1890s, so somebody must be haunting it. Then they’d sit around and share stories about their own ghosts through the years. They all took it all for granted that someone was hanging around.”
“You think they were right?”
She dusted her hands on her jeans and looked for the trunk Gabe had opened last night. “Probably. I never saw much of anything, but sometimes I felt like I wasn’t alone, and somebody was watching me. Sometimes I’d lose things, little things—never anything big—and they’d turn up in strange places. Eventually, I got used to it. So if I did have a ghost, it wasn’t a very interesting one. It never scared me, or anyone else.”
“I’ve never had a ghost before,” Brad said quietly. His eyes ran from stack to stack, taking it all in. “But this is as good a place as any for my first one. Would you look at all this?”
“I know, right? It’s not as much stuff as we found downstairs, but there’s plenty to sort through all the same. Too bad a lot of it’s gone soft with rot, and we’ll have to throw it out. We’re lucky, really. Another ten years, and the floor here”—she tapped her foot on the plank below her—“would’ve fallen right through, on top of everything we scored yesterday.”
“Timing is everything. Some of this looks pretty heavy. How do we get it down the ladder?”
“We don’t. When Bobby and Gabe arrive, we’ll pass the smaller things through the hatch; but for the bigger stuff we’ll chainsaw a hole … over there, maybe—” She pointed at the far end of the room. “Then throw a pulley from one of these cross joints, and send it down that way. But let’s make a wish list first, and then move on to the engineering particulars.”
“Okay. I’ll go right. You go left.”
“Works for me,” she agreed. “Holler if you see anything worth drooling over.”
They set off in different directions. Dahlia found the children’s trunk again, without even trying. It was still on the floor, lid closed (Had she closed it? Had Gabe?), and when she opened it, the contents appeared undisturbed. She left it where it was, filing it away for future reference.
Before long, Gabe and Bobby arrived, gingerly stepping across the rotted places and getting to work. There wasn’t as much to take as she’d hoped, since water had come farther inside than their cursory nighttime inspection suggested. But they still found loot worth saving.
Nothing was big enough to require the chainsaw and a whole new window after all, so everything went down the ladder—even the trunk. The trunk came down last.
“What all’s in this thing, again?” Bobby asked, setting it down on the ground. He nudged it with his foot. “Clothes and toys, I remember. Is that all?”
“Open it and see.” Dahlia climbed down the aluminum ladder and started breaking it down behind her.
He was way ahead of her, already knocking back the lid. “I’ll give you a pass on the toys, but do we really need clothes? Can Uncle Chuck sell them?”
“Some of them are nice. Vintage baby wear, and what looks like a wedding dress.” The last bit fell out of her mouth before she had time to consider it. Was there a wedding dress? Had she seen one, last night? Well, she couldn’t see much of anything by the LED light. She’d check it again in the daylight. Maybe there was a wedding dress
“Hello?” The word was accompanied by a soft knock on the edge of the carriage house door.
Everyone turned around.
“Hello,” the woman said again, this time without the question mark.
Dahlia half recognized her, and half guessed at her identity. She’d only seen her once, in passing. “Ms. Withrow?”
“Yes, and are you Dahlia Dutton?”
Dahlia pulled off her gloves and crammed them into her back pocket, far enough to stay there and wave at anyone who came up behind her. She held out her hand, saw how dirty it was, and wiped it on the top of her jeans. “That’s me. Thanks for coming—I didn’t know if you’d be able to make it or not. But I’m glad you’re here.” She put her hand away with a sheepish smile.
“Never mind that,” Ms. Withrow said pleasantly, with regards to the truncated handshake. She was wearing a cream-colored turtleneck and slacks, with pleats as crisp as the leaves around her, plus tasteful gold jewelry that was probably worth more than at least one of the salvage trucks. She was one part somebody’s great grandmother, one part 1960s Vogue cover girl. “Getting dirty is part of the job, I understand. You’ve gotten quite a lot of work done, haven’t you?”
“Oh, we’re barely started.” Dahlia turned back to the rest of the crew and said, with a wave of her arm, “Guys, this is Augusta Withrow. This is her family estate we’re disassembling.”
Bobby fired off a little salute. “So I gathered.”
“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” Gabe offered, and Brad said something similar.
“Likewise, of course. And it’s … the four of you, is that all?” she asked.
Dahlia said, “My dad is joining us on Friday, bringing a Bobcat on a Doolittle. We’re saving the heavy equipment for last.”
“Ah.” She peered curiously into the carriage house, which was more empty than full by now. Anything even remotely promising had been drawn out into the yard.
“Would you like to … um … can I show you around?” Dahlia asked. She felt stupid for asking, so she amended, “This was your place, and all, but you said nobody’d been inside the carriage house for years, and I thought you might like a look at some of the things we’ve found. In case there were any family items you’d like to keep.”
The woman’s eyes landed on the trunk, lingered there a moment, and flickered back to Dahlia. “That’s quite all right. I don’t mean to interrupt, and the things you find here … they all belonged to people who died before I was born. If you can find some use for them, that’s wonderful. But I came because you said there was something important…?”
“Yes!” she said, too fast and too eager. “Boys, why don’t you finish up without me, or … or get set up over at the barn, since it looks like we’re just about done here.”
“Will do…,” Bobby murmured. He shouldered the collapsed ladder. “See you in a bit.”
They filed past her, headed for the barn nearby.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Dahlia said again, ushering her guest toward the lawn. “You didn’t have to, I know. But I thought I ought to call you, and see what—if anything—you want us to do about the little cemetery.”
Augusta’s face went blank. “The cemetery? Good God, dear … what are you talking about?”
“It’s right here, between the garage and the house’s front lawn. You didn’t mention it in the paperwork, and I thought it was just an old family plot or something; but when I went digging around, I didn’t see any Withrows anywhere, so…” She indicated the patch with the rosebushes, the fallen logs, and the broken stones.
“Over there, you say?”
“That’s right.” Dahlia looked at Augusta’s low navy pumps, and wondered how they’d fare across the grass. Should she offer to help? Maybe it would offend her. “If you look close, you’ll see … I found a whole bunch of stones. Most of them are broken, or they’ve fallen over. Some of them, you can’t hardly read what’s carved on the front anymore, but most of the ones you can belong to World War I veterans.”
“Wait, now … hang on just a cotton-picking minute…”
Augusta Withrow ignored the terrain, approached the nearest stones, and crouched down. Despite the dirt and moss, she held herself steady with one hand on the nearest marker. With her free fingers, she traced what remained of the letters there. “Oh my. Oh dear, oh…” She let out a small, raspy laugh that said none of this was funny, but it ought to be. “Goddammit, Grandpa.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Augusta stood up straight and clapped her hands together to dust them off. “My grandfather. This is … oh, darling. This isn’t a cemetery; it’s a poorly conceived joke. But how awfully sweet of you to be so concerned,” she added, seeing the baffled look on Dahlia’s face. “I assure you, no one is buried here. My grandfather had a peculiar sense of humor, and a fondness for Halloween. These monuments came from his company. That’s why the names are all random, and none of them suggest any long-gone Withrows. They were all unclaimed, you see … and one year, he set them up like this. He covered them with pretend spiderwebs, and scarecrows, and stuffed blackbirds, or that’s how my father remembered it. Good heavens, I haven’t thought about it in years. I expect no one has.”
Dahlia’s throat was dry. She swallowed. It didn’t help. “He brought the stones from his company?”
“The Withrow Monument Company. Grandpa married Grandma’s money, but he had his own skills, and in time, his own business. He made tombstones, mostly. Sometimes he did plaques, or other monuments. I think, upon occasion, he could be persuaded to craft a birdbath or a fountain, for the right client and the right price. But all of this…” She laughed again, less raspy. Less ironic. “I’ll tell you the truth: I thought Daddy made it all up.”
“You never noticed it? But didn’t you live here?”
Augusta’s mood darkened, and there was smoke in her voice when she replied. “I didn’t live here very long. I left as soon as I was able, just like everyone who ever had a lick of sense. And when I did come back, after my parents died … I didn’t do much exploring. Besides, that was decades after this … this farce was installed. It was already overgrown by then.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Why not? You’re prying apart everything else.”
Dahlia was confused. “I’m sorry?”
Augusta sighed and shook her head. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry. You’re only doing your job, and a very thoughtful one, at that. You seem like a nice girl. You seem like you care.”
“It’s a job, yes. But I want you to know, I do love old houses. Desperately, I admit. I hate to see them come down, even though I understand that sometimes, they have to go.”
“This one can’t go soon enough.”
“So you said. Or so my dad tells me you said.” Dahlia was getting tangled, feeling strange. If there were no bodies, and no ghosts, and no yellow dresses flashing pale in the early fall forest, no soldiers come home from the front in a box, then who…? “In any case, I apologize—because I didn’t mean to waste your time. But there is one more thing, if I could bother you for just another minute.”
“Now that I’m here, you might as well.”
“There’s a family album. I found it in a trunk, with some clothes. The photos are quite old, and not all of them are labeled. Would you … would you like to have it? It’s not really worth anything for salvage purposes, but it must be important to you, or your family.” She made the offer hoping that the answer was “no.”
Augusta considered it longer than Dahlia had expected. “I … I don’t want it, no. But I think I’d like to see it, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course. It’s yours, after all.”
“No, dear. It’s yours, like everything else on this land. Your company bought it. I am now a tourist, passing through. And that’s how I prefer it.”
“No,” she barked. “I don’t want to go inside. I’ll wait on the porch. You can fetch it, and bring it down. I’d like to see it, but I’d rather not follow you.”
“All right, ma’am, I’ll go get it. Give me one second, and I’ll see you on the porch.”
She darted back to the house, trusting that Augusta Withrow would arrive at her leisure, but half suspecting she might disappear the moment her back was turned.
She entered through the front door (which wasn’t locked) and left it open behind her, barely glancing at the handprints on the rail at the landing (they were still there, and that was odd, wasn’t it?). She hardly noticed the smell of soap and wet plaster coming from the hall bath with its Pepto-pink tiles.
The album was where she’d left it, so the Withrow estate wasn’t like her old house—a place where things moved around. But her house had never moved anything so big as the album, with its black pages and heavy cardboard covers, overlaid with brown fabric that had frayed at the corners.
She retrieved it and hurried back downstairs, noticing with only half her attention that an extra door was open in the hallway—the one door that was always stuck was unstuck, now, and hanging ajar. Gabe must’ve opened it; he must’ve decided he didn’t like the attic. But she had other things to think about now, and other questions to ask—and she had no idea how long she could expect Augusta’s patience to hold out.
Dahlia was huffing and puffing by the time she’d made it to the bottom of the steps, through the living area, down the foyer, and out the door (still open, not shut and locked in her wake).
As promised, the old woman was waiting for her.
She was seated in a rocking chair covered in peeling paint, which didn’t bother her any, despite her fancy clothes. She picked at it with her fingertips, picking it away in little patches and dropping them on the floor.