“
Shelly Reisman, get your hand off this boy, right now,” Sareta glared and hissed. Shelly jumped back as if burned.
“
Why? Evan?”
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He was thrown down the attic stair,” Her grandmother said with another hiss. The look on Shelly’s face made Evan pull his arm free of Richard’s grip, and he took her chin and kissed her very gently.
“
I just need to sit down, Sweetheart. We were just in a panic over where you were.”
“
Why were you there?”
“
We will explain all that when we find out why you are not where you are supposed to be,” Her grandmother shot back as she helped Evan get settled. Shelly just stood there watching.
They saw instantly what Shelly had been doing there, she had been reading all of Evan’s work strewn about on the floor, and the photographs from Papa’s chest were arranged in much the same way. Richard was stunned at the depth of the work to discover why the Reisman Portraits held its spirits and would not allow those spirits to leave. Then he saw the photograph on the wall, the beauty the other three had known about, the angel who died as Yousep tried to build protections around her. Richard stood back from the couch and stared at the image on the wall. He backed further across the papers on the floor and stopped at the window. He shook his head in disbelief and whispered to himself,
“
She is real. How can she be real?”
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Daddy, we don’t know her name. I’ve been trying to find it here. I did not know Evan printed the plate.” Then she took her father’s hand and turned his face to meet her eyes. She was careful he should understand what she was telling him. “She’s not perfect, Daddy. That is more than an image and it has a horrifying secret you do not want to see suddenly.” Richard just looked at his daughter with confusion on his face. “Daddy, the image shows what was done to her, the things Yousep was trying to save her from. They will break your heart if you are not prepared.”
And he turned from Shelly’s eyes to see what she meant. They were silent for him, and the only sound, came from his lips, as his eyes cleared to see behind the beauty. Shelly tried to comfort her father, he still had not expected, still was not ready to see the angel wounded as he did. Evan suddenly remembered, Sareta had not seen the image printed so large. She too could not look away, until the sorrow made her weep.
“
Daddy, she became part of our family, because of Yousep. It’s why she’s still with us - to be with him. But we do not know why he is still here. We don’t even know what we are looking for to help them.”
She turned to see Evans’s face, to try and smile at him, she didn’t even know yet if he could forgive her, or even wanted to try. The image on the wall in the den stopped time around them before she could get his answer. He was very quiet and distant; he would not reach to touch her.
She left her father’s embrace and walked to kneel at Evan’s feet where he sat, tense on the couch. He studied her very closely, suspiciously even. She tried to smile again. Her grandmother sat beside them and told Shelly there were too many important things which needed to be explained, which must be understood before she and Richard could leave the two alone. Shelly would have Evan alone, if she would but wait a bit, to hear what was done at the building, and what had been done to Evan.
Sareta asked Evan to tell all he knew of the hauntings, and the things he learned from Papa’s chest and the archives. He explained to Richard and Shelly how he discovered clues to the grave they would find in the garden, it was still not certain whom the poor soul might have been, no real clue surfaced. Richard heard the hole called a grave, but neither he nor Shelly knew human remains had been taken out. It took Evan and Sareta together the next half hour to make the story known.
Evan needed to explain to Shelly, the opened grave had not released any spirit from their entrapment in the Reisman Portraits. Sareta needed to explain to her son they must endure the place until all the story could be known, if ever it could.
He had seen and heard enough in the building that night; he did not want those things to pursue his family, but to remain where they were. He needed even more comfort from his daughter now, she was in the greatest danger because she felt the spirits more than anyone else, and nothing had yet been solved for them, but so very much was disturbed around them. Shelly was as trapped and tormented as the ghosts in her building.
“
Evan I had a terrible dream of a garden last night. It was awful until I tried to wake up.” She was touching him softly, seeking some clue he wanted her to continue. Her father interrupted her.
“
You scared the shit out of everyone in the house, screaming Evan was not dead. And then crying about the laughter being gone.”
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What laughter, Sweetheart?”
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From the storeroom. From here, last month,” she said with hesitation. Her folks may not have known what happened the last time she and Evan were together in his apartment.
“
It was very different up there tonight,” Evan told her. “The room was fine for a few seconds, but I didn’t really go in, just stuck my head in and flipped the light.” He explained that when he turned around to let them know below that Shelly was not inside, the room menaced him suddenly, but could not hold him, the way it had when he fell into the shelves. But the presence there did not surrender its grip on Evan; it threw him down the stairs.
“
Something has changed, I just don’t know what.”
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I’ve changed,” Shelly surprised him. “I do not hear it now. The laughter does not haunt me like it did.”
Richard and Sareta were satisfied the two could be left alone. Shelly’s father was still in disbelief the old tales and family legends caused so much pain to his daughter and her young man. He did not approve of their returning to the building at all, but he relented under his mother’s increased anger about his stubbornness. Shelly had not moved from Evan’s feet, but was now lying across his legs with her head on her arms, and Evan was absently running his fingers through her hair.
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I can’t believe all this began with the opening of this box,” Richard said as he peered into Papa’s chest. All the documents and papers were still inside and he fingered them around a bit with curiosity. “No one still alive knew Granddad owned anything but the studios. That is a stunning bit of history. What it means may be as disturbing as the events in the shop. Why would the family hide that?” and he looked to his mother for some answer.
Her own husband settled the estate, but told her nothing of the other properties. Sareta’s husband, and his mother Sarah, may have been the only people to know this.
“
I think I know why it was never revealed,” Evan told them. “I’ve known of the deeds since we opened this box, and wondered the same thing.” He reached into the box next to Shelly and pulled up the three deeds, which were kept secret. “Papa was a slumlord.” He said the least possible thing that anyone in the room expected. Sareta seemed likely to respond, but could not apparently find a way to express her shock.
“
He was a landlord, to an entire building of immigrants,” Richard said as he began to understand. “But why was he dirt poor the whole time?”
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Find that out, and most of this will unravel with it, I bet,” Evan said. “He may have been the sweetest landlord in the whole neighborhood, but it was still a slum. He got regular money from them all, or most of them as could actually pay. What he did with those funds…the family buried that mystery with him. But it was serious.” Shelly fingered the other papers after Evan removed the deeds. There was a small book at the bottom of the chest, the other papers, like leaves, thrown on top to cover it. She asked Evan if it was his and pulled it out to look at it. Evan had not seen it before, and told her to look inside it; it must have been under the red cloth, which was beneath the plates and everything else, when they first opened it.
When the cloth came out, stuck to the plates, neither of them looked back into the box, the evening had sort of become difficult for them. Shelly turned the book around and opened its slender cover. The pencil, long hidden in the leaves of the notebook, fell to her lap, and Shelly Reisman held the pencil, last held in the lips of Yousep Kogen before his girl had taken it from him, and replaced it with her mouth. Shelly instantly knew what the book was, the spirits in her heart were happy to see the book and she shivered with sudden joy. Her excited cry took Evan entirely by surprise.
“
They wrote it!” Shelly gasped as she turned the few pages. “They were writing, and somehow Yousep was getting her words translated.”
Her excitement overwhelmed her and she dropped the cherished notebook before she could hand it to Evan. He let her keep it and asked her to read some of what the two lovers had written for each other. “Evan, Daddy, her name…she wrote it. Grandma, her name is Caraliza!”
And at the sound of the name in her heart, Shelly was overcome and could not speak to them. Evan cradled her as she gave into the emotions of relief, sadness and joy combined, which were not entirely hers, but a spirit’s, who had waited so long to have the name found and voiced.
“
Yousep’s Caraliza. We know her name.”
Richard took the small notebook from his daughter’s hands and opened it to see the small writing. He looked repeatedly at the image on the wall, understanding the smile with more clarity than he had been able before. The notebook was their only voice, and in the few words they wrote to each other, a bond and love was forged between them, which could still be felt inside the Reisman Portraits. He began to read aloud what the notebook said to him.
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She was from Amsterdam,” he began, “Caraliza is Dutch.” But his own emotions challenged him to continue. “She was sold, by starving parents….” Shelly began to sob in Evan’s embrace. “She never knew the name of the man, but he beat her.” They waited for him to recover and continue. “…he wouldn’t feed her. She stole food from him. Dear God in Heaven, she didn’t even know where she was, or how long she had been here.” Then, before Richard was unable to continue at all, “He raped her…she couldn’t get away.”
Evan was still comforting Shelly as the words were read, and his dream flashed before his eyes. Part of the story, which had not been read from the notebook, was clear to him now, and his heart ached it was not true. “I dreamed of her, Caraliza and Yousep. The day the photo was made. They embraced in the alley before she ran back to hide.” His voice was but a whisper now. Shelly begged him to not say where Caraliza had to return. However, he could not help telling them what would hurt them most to hear. Sareta was numb and Richard walked to the window, his back to them, his shoulders slumped and his face in his hands.
“
She crossed to the basement, under the stoop, in Papa’s tenement building. She lived across the street. Caraliza was prisoner in that building. Yousep found out and tried to find a way to set her free.”
Sareta found her voice, but it had no strength, she did not want to say anything, but bits of the whole secret were unraveling as they felt the impact of the words in the notebook, now a diary of torture, and the love that wanted desperately to heal the pains the torture had caused. “They couldn’t let anyone know the poor girl had been under that building,” Sareta said sadly. “Papa went mad with the grief, his own property, a dungeon to such evil. It would have rent his mind; only God could have forgiven what the grief could not. When it was learned the estate owned the building, and the crimes it contained, they sold it and buried it with him. No one could ever know and not be ashamed, guilty or no, it was Papa’s crime, too.”
Evan could not help Shelly with her anguish, her beloved Papa, torn inside his very soul with the crime committed within his sight. His dear clerk doing more than his young years were wise enough on their own to do, help, all come too late, and all help, and hope lost, the two lovers murdered, trying to escape. The sorrows of the building, the shop, the studio, the tormented attic storeroom; all lost in a night of pain the building could not endure in silence. Where would the spirits go, if the building were burned to ash to end its misery? Did wood and brick, which could never forget, long as it stood whole, hold the dead there? An angel died, many times, just across the street from Shelly’s beloved building, so near to help.
Evan hated the thought, but a grief mad soul, tormented every waking moment, by the truth of what could have been done, what could have been prevented - such a mad soul would hide the guilt. Papa Reisman did have reason to haunt the shop, the attic in particular above all the rooms in the place. It was where his failure cost two children their lives. So much of him died there with them, never buried, like they, no place in the entire earth to rest and forget. Evan did not think they could ever absolve that, and satisfy the spirit there. Papa Reisman had no hope to redeem that part of his soul.
There had been too much to know and to place in their hearts. Too much to understand, and by understanding, believe. Her own husband never told Sareta what guilts lay in the grave with Papa. What more would they learn? There must be more. This could not be the secret of the hauntings and the unrest. It could not be her father-in-law waiting to murder in the attic room.