Haunted (3 page)

I wandered out to the living room, where Steven was reading. The room was dark and he sat in the light cast by the gigantic hanging orb. Mom must have already gone to bed.

“Did you hear that?” I asked him.

His gaze didn't waver from the page. He was like that; he'd get caught up in whatever he was reading

“I thought I heard that organ playing, Steven,” I said louder. “Do you think there's someone else in the house?”

He closed the book, letting it lie in his lap, and rubbed his face with both hands. Exhausted. Maybe sad. “Just forget about it,” he said. “Let it go.”

“Seriously? But if there's someone in the house . . .”

He sighed. He knew how to make gestures like that speak volumes. That sigh said,
You're a hysterical teenager, chill out.

Insulted, I almost said something pissy, but I stopped myself. We had moved to England because of me. I had done something so very, very awful that we had to leave the country. If he didn't think the organ was anything to worry about, it wasn't anything to worry about.

“Okay,” I said with a little smile. “They'll come for you first.”

He grimaced.

I had imagined the organ because I was jet-lagged and out of sorts. Freaked out about living in a different house, a different continent. I went back down the hallway, opening the door to my own personal scarab-green room.

I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, but I didn't sleep. I couldn't relax enough.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

The small town of Grenshire has no industry to boast of.
Dotted with small pastures and dairies, the landscape is rural
and unremarkable. The Hoffman Academy provided excellent
education for boys until its closure in 1964; today's Emmons
School is a coeducational facility with consistently high test
scores. A privately held estate, the Arnaud Manor (built
1721–23) was the home of French émigrés and has
fallen into disrepair.

 

—From
A History of the Towns of Northern England

T
he next morning, I went and sat at the breakfast table even though I wasn't hungry. Mom and Tabby were eating toast topped with butter and jelly, which Tabby managed to smear all over the lower hemisphere of her face. I listened to Tabby's charming attempts at conversation, wondering where Steven was. Mom valiantly carried on her side of the inane discussion. She had a lot of patience, I had to admit, watching her try to clean wriggling Tabby, who kept saying “Don't want.”

This move sucked for Mom. She would be stuck here all day with a toddler and without any neighbors.

“Mom, I'll help you watch Tabby this summer, before I go to school,” I said.

She paused and smiled tiredly. “You're going to have the summer of your life, running around this place,” she said. “Just try not to fall through a trapdoor.”

“Track door,” said Tabby.

“You want me to watch her now?” I asked. “You and Steven can have some time together. Go out for coffee or something.”

“What would I do without you?” she said, but she made no move to transfer Tabby to my arms. Whatever. She'd complain about never having time to herself, but then not take me up on a babysitting offer. I watched her continue to coo at Tabby and decipher her stilted sentences.

Later, I went outside. It was making me nutty that there were no windows except in the living room, which faced the central courtyard. Our apartment was like a closed shoe box wedged into a large closet.

I looked up, studying the face of the manor. The stones were dark with age, and the leaded glass windows offered no curtains to soften them. I could see that this was an architectural masterpiece with turrets, towers, and lots of engineering to make the varying levels of the stories work, but it left me cold. It was basically the manor you'd like to pay an entry fee for, roam around in for an afternoon, then go home to your clean, bright, real person's home.

I continued wandering the courtyard, thinking about how things had changed in the last few years. Babies need a lot of attention, but so did I. Dealing with Richard Spees would've been easier if Mom had actually shown some interest in my first real boyfriend. Deciding to break up with him wasn't that simple, and she wasn't there for me.

If you think about it, I had basically been an only child for the first decade-plus of my life. Suddenly there was this unexpected baby that wailed all night and depleted Mom's energy with breast-feeding, and the house got filled with all these happy-colored toys that plinked out songs I could
not
get out of my head. Dinner conversations were no longer about what we'd all done that day, but instead what
Tabby
had done all day. Very little, in my opinion—but to Mom and Steven it was a freakin' marvel that she'd managed to identify the letters
a
and
b
in a police lineup.

I'm not as bitter as I sound. These years are the ones in which you're supposed to detach from your parents, right? Preparing for college and adult life, becoming independent? But it was still a surprisingly hard adjustment for me.

And if I think hard about it, maybe there was something about the fact that Steven is my stepdad, but Tabby's real father. Steven's been a great dad to me since my dad split . . . maybe I'm also mourning the loss of
his
attention. My status as his “daughter” took a blow when the real one showed up—although that's just my imagination. He still treats me like I'm his.

“Oh please, Phoebe, get a life,” I said aloud.

I really, really do love Tabby, by the way.

 

Steven told us he'd watch Tabby while Mom and I went into town. I was glad to get off the grounds of our bleak mansion, but soon found I was in another uncomfortable situation. I had to hold my breath, biting my lip, as Mom negotiated the strangeness of steering from the other side of the car. I looked over at her, her pretty face strained, wrinkles a little more noticeable when she was stressed out. She took her hand off the wheel for a second to tuck a strand of her short hair behind her ear. I noticed that her perfectly shaped eyebrows were starting to grow in; she'd meant to wax them before we'd left the U.S.

“Aren't most people in the world right-handed?” she muttered. “Who would put a gear shift on the left?”

As soon as the road became paved and Mom got the knack of driving, I felt better. Soon we were seeing other houses, and gardens. When we hit town limits, I looked closely to see what our new “hometown” offered. It was very small, with a movie theater that listed only two movies on its marquee. I saw a few restaurants with floral half curtains, and some impressive wood-paneled structures with the strange, wonderful word
pub
on them. Somehow the British made a bar seem timeless and historic by calling it a pub.

Not many people walked these narrow streets. We saw a few middle-aged women wearing handkerchiefs over their heads and carrying string bags with their groceries inside. There weren't any parking meters on High Street, which was the town's main street. Our British car, which Steven had purchased unseen while we were still in the U.S., was one of the few vehicles at the curb after Mom parked. I saw the grocery store, a small glass-fronted shop the size of a retail store, rather than a supermarket.

We got out and started walking, looking in at quaint, dark stores. I didn't see a single person my age. I tried to ignore the sick feeling in my gut.

In four blocks, we had reached the limits of town. The shops and pubs gave way to homes. In the distance, I could see the curving roofline of a behemoth of a tall brick building, overly grand for the plainness of Grenshire. Something about it seemed familiar.

“That's the pool,” said Mom. She had stopped walking and was staring at it.

She had researched Grenshire a little before we moved here. Not much, since we were in a rush, but I'd leaned over her shoulder as she searched the Web, and I remembered now that this big brick building was the pool house of the former boys' academy, now owned by the town.

“My kind of place,” I said.

“Tabby will need swimming lessons eventually,” she said.

“Yeah!” I said excitedly. “I'll help her learn.”

“Not for a long, long time, though,” she said.

“Some people start kids when they're newborn,” I said. “I think you waited until I was four, though.”

“Oh, Phoebe,” she said, and her voice was filled with love.

I grinned. Mom and I had great memories of my learning to swim at the Y in San Francisco. We'd eat at the nearby Mediterranean hole-in-the-wall restaurant before going home. To this day, when I finish a swim I have a momentary craving for falafel and lemonade with crushed mint leaves floating in it.

“Mind if we check it out?” I asked. She turned away and I started to frown at her abrupt departure from a moment of nostalgia I wanted to linger in . . . but she rubbed her shoulder. This was her little message to me from back in the swimming-lesson days. Rather than nagging me about whether I had my duffel bag slung over my shoulder, she'd touch hers to remind me.

So I touched my shoulder now, and burst out laughing. Somehow she'd slipped my swim bag onto my shoulder without my noticing. She truly was the coolest mom. “How about just a half hour?” I asked. I doubted there was enough retail to keep her entertained in the town for longer than that.

 

As soon as I opened one of the glass double doors, I could smell the magic elixir: chlorine and damp towels. This was my world. Longing rushed through me. It had been forever since I last swam.

I approached the woman tending the counter in the lobby, a high-ceilinged atrium of wasted space, the kind of grand entrance builders never indulged in anymore.

“Hi,” I said. “I don't have any cash on me right now. Any pounds, I mean. But I'll be buying a membership. Is it okay if I swim today?”

Toward the end of my pitiful speech, her cell phone rang and she simply nudged the pile of towels on the counter closer to me.

“Thanks!” I said. “But it's okay. I brought my own.”

Although the lobby was a masterpiece, the locker room was dank.

Lined with those old-fashioned gray lockers that take padlocks (my high school got rid of lockers circa 1982 when the administration wised up to the idea of drugs) and containing a moist concrete floor gently sloping to a central drain, it looked like an asylum basement.

But when I walked out the door marked
POOL
, I quickly changed my mind.

Despite the morose locker room, the building's owners had obviously once had lots and lots of those pound notes with the image of a slightly worried young queen. The two-story ceiling was high above and created of tinted glass bricks, so everything had a green glow. The water rippled with the handful of people doing laps in their buoyed lanes, and a lifeguard station towered over it all like a derrick. Although I could smell the chlorine, the airiness of the structure made it so it wasn't the slap in the face an indoor pool can sometimes be.

I used the ladder and winced as I always did at the initial cold of the water. I kept moving and forced myself to submerge at the bottom, so I could start swimming and get warm. Half the pool was for free swim, and three lanes had been marked with cones for slow, medium, and fast. I dipped under the buoys and went to the fast lane. One person was already swimming there. I waited until he was at the other end before starting, so we wouldn't lap each other.

I adjusted my goggles and pushed off, with a wave of relief that was so tangible it broke my heart.
Oh, dear water, you are my savior,
I thought. With my body doing its mechanical, happy thing, my mind was able to sink into a blue-green haze and release my stress over our sinister mansion and whatever I'd done to get us there.

My arms pulled overhead, forcefully pushing water behind me as I outswam my furiously churning mind. The rhythm of waiting to take a breath, counting to do so, let me relax in a way nothing else does. Arms moving, legs kicking firmly, my hips slipping like an eel through the water, tilting my head to take that breath when I needed it, my ear catching the muffled buzz through my swim cap of the world above the pool . . . I could almost burst with how good it felt.

It took a while for me to even notice the guy in the lane—he had been a flicker every few minutes as we passed each other mid-pool, just someone to avoid bumping into. But when we next drew up level, facing different directions, I'd reached the Zen point where I could begin to accept other input, so I checked him out. He was
fine
. I couldn't see his face too well because he wore goggles, too, but he had nice thick black wavy hair and a long, muscular body.

I continued swimming, but now I was anticipating each time we passed, sucking in my stomach even though I knew he couldn't see it through the spume of kicked water. But I had to laugh at myself. It's impossible to look good while you're swimming. Your mouth is doing funny stuff as you fight for that breath, your eyes are hidden behind the goggles, and your head is encased in black rubber. Not the best look.

I finished my laps, then moved into the free-swim area to tread water and stretch into my cooldown. I turned my head to look for him still swimming back there—but he wasn't in the lane. He had followed me.

Close enough to touch, he treaded water. He had an amazing head, strong jawline and ruddy cheeks, with that great jet-black hair. His shoulders were massive and muscled—but unlike most jocks, his neck was not a football player's stubby trunk, but instead was graceful and long. This was all I could see of him through the goggles and water, and it was very impressive. He grinned at me and I smiled back, hoping my nose wasn't running like it sometimes did after a swim.

“You've got a great stroke,” he said in a totally charming English accent.

I bit my lip to not laugh. My mind's not always in the gutter, but c'mon, a great stroke? Maybe it didn't mean the same thing to British guys.

“Thanks,” I said. “You, too!”

“Oh, you're an American.”

I nodded. “My family just moved here. From California.”

“Brilliant. Then you can be on our swim team!” He looked truly excited about the idea, even through the dark blue of his goggles. That reminded me; I could take mine off. I slid them up to prop them on my swim cap. I thought it would look way too vain to take the cap off, a little too much like those romance novels where the heroine shakes her hair out of its bun. As soon as I had done it, though, I remembered that these goggles left red furrows around my eyes. Great. Now I looked like a sleep-deprived raccoon.

But he did the same thing—somehow he had avoided the red mark of goggle suction—and now I had a chance to see his beautiful sapphire blue eyes, with the dark lashes and eyebrows that were just the right amount of tufty. If you had asked me to describe the kind of guy I found most attractive, I could have just pointed to him and saved myself the trouble of explaining.

“Sure,” I said. “I was on the swim team at home.”