What the Dead Want (17 page)

R
ATTLED AND BREATHING HARD,
G
RETCHEN
AND
Hawk raced out of the house and off the porch, into the driveway. Gretchen squinted at the contact sheet but couldn't make it out. She kicked at the pillars on the porch, infuriated that she had again left the mirror—and maybe her mother—behind. She'd only accomplished what Esther had wanted. Esther was hijacking her thoughts.

The field was filling up with cars and people wandering around. The spiritualists from Shadow Grove had come to commune with the murdered and the murderers, to honor the dead. Unlike the fearful residents of Mayville,
these people sought out the thrill of contacting the dead. A circle was forming by the edge of the woods where the church once stood. Rain had picked up again and the high grass was wet and becoming marshy.

A car with one headlight was approaching fast and loudly rattling on the road in front of them. Hope and Simon pulled up beside them and screeched to a halt.

“We found one last photograph of the Communion,” Hope said. “You can see they were standing in front of a big gilt mirror—
the
mirror. He made them watch as he set them on fire.”

Gretchen and Hawk jumped into the dry shelter of the car, and she turned on the overhead light and peered over the contact sheet again. There they were—the rest of the shots she'd taken in the house. Esther just before she killed herself in her studio surrounded by her photographs; the house in all its cluttered, ghost-ridden ruin.

And then finally—a shot she'd taken in the field as she'd run to Hawk and Hope's last night. The church ablaze. And outside, a large group of men in white, their hoods taken off in the arrogance of their crime, standing in front of the burning church, holding shotguns and smiling—a group picture.

“Got you,” she whispered under her breath. “At last.”

She handed the picture to Hawk.

“All of them,” he said. “It must have been the whole damn town.”

“This is it,” Hope said. “This is what our mother was looking for all this time. How were that many people held inside? How did they do it?
Who
did it? And here it is. All those faces, we can see them clear as day.”

“But Mom was looking for a real photograph—not some echo from the past,” Hawk said. “Not some spirits reliving their heyday.”

“They're there in the field,” Gretchen said. “And they're there now surrounding the house.”

“Hello?” Simon burst in. “They're NOT
REAL
. For all we know they do this every year.”

“For all we know they do,” Gretchen said. “But this is the first year we know
who
they are. They can't hide behind a sheet.”

“Poor Celia and Rebecca still blame themselves for starting the fire. They blame their friendship. Who knows what they were told about how bad they were before they were killed.”

“Well, whatever it was, they're living up to it,” Hawk said, rubbing the bite mark on his arm.

Gretchen muttered, “The mirror, the image, the picture. Bad picture, bad house . . . all these people with their
souvenir lynching photos. We have to destroy the pictures. Destroy the image.” Then she yelled, “Stop the car!”

Hope hit the brakes and they all jerked forward, hanging suspended by their seat belts.

“We've got to go back,” she said, to a chorus of “No!”

“You better know what you're doing,” Hope said.

“I don't,” Gretchen said. “Not exactly. But we're running out of time. I need to get into that mirror.”

“What?” Simon asked. “You have got to stop this right now. You are not making sense.”

“Celia and Rebecca gain their power from it. They're trapped in it—like souls are trapped in a photograph. They were forced to watch their own death, inside that pretty oval Victorian frame. There are no pictures of them in the house—just the mirror. They use it like a portal.”

“Are you sure?”

“What the hell is wrong with this generation?” Gretchen said, clearly channeling Esther. “Of course I'm not sure, but do we got anything to lose at this point?”

“Yeah,” Hawk said. “Like all of our lives.”

“The mirror is only part of it,” Gretchen went on, as if he hadn't spoken. “We need to get those pictures too. All the pictures of the girls suffering and the ones of them as ghosts—we need to find them all and destroy them.

“You drop me at the house and then the rest of you
go destroy them. The fire we have tonight is going to free people, not trap them.

“Hope—the pictures with the murderers' faces, those we keep. We are going to finish your mother's research. We are going to clear this land of the lies of bigoted old murderers and we are going to free those little girls.”

They stared at her.

“You realize that is the exact opposite of what Esther and our mother had been trying to do for years,” Hope said. “The exact opposite. How can we destroy all these pictures?”

“And how do you suddenly know all that?” Simon asked incredulously.

“Ha!” she said. “Suddenly? It's taken me a lifetime to figure it out. If I'd known this when I was alive I'd never have brought one gratuitous picture of suffering back from Vietnam for the gawking masses.”

Hope parked the car in front of the house—where a crowd of Shadow Grove acolytes had gathered.

Gretchen leaped from the car and ran up the stairs, into the house.

On the second floor the girls were playing jump rope. They skipped in delight at the sight of her and walked toward her with their dirty hands outstretched.

She pushed past them, straight for the mirror. She could see her mother's face smiling, then faltering as she
approached the glass. She shut her eyes and kept walking quickly, bracing for the moment when she would be sucked into the mirror, prepared for the shock of falling into another world.

Another blind step and her boot connected with the hard flat glass.

The girls shrieked in horror as it splintered and shattered; they knelt on the ground, trying to pick up shards of glass.

Gretchen opened her eyes and stepped back. It was just a mirror. She'd been wrong. She wasn't in some other ghostly dimension with her mother. She was there in the hall. Nothing was behind or inside the mirror—it was just cracked and broken glass and ancient charred wood.

But still, the little girls lay on the floor sobbing, their skinny bodies shaking beneath their tattered, filthy white dresses. Whatever the mirror was—it held a power over them, the real power of a terrifying memory that had trapped them both.

“It's done,” she said, patting them on the backs as if they were two sleepy children who refused to go to bed. “Time to rest now. We can all rest now.” Celia and Rebecca climbed into her lap and she held them, their small frail bodies racked with tears and wailing.

I
N THE BASEMENT
H
OPE AND
S
IMON SHUF
FLED THROUGH
the pictures of the little girls' murder and put them all in a box. They collected the lynching pictures, and the pictures of people in pain—all the photographs from Esther's wall. The box was heavy by the end.

“I've never seen something so awful,” Simon said.

“Yeah,” Hope agreed. “Hard to believe.” The pictures were so sad, mostly because of the details. She thought of the clothes the people were wearing. The shoes on the feet of the hanged men. She imagined them tying their shoes that morning—walking through town, their feet solid on the earth. And she imagined the carefully prepared picnics
of the people who came to watch the lynching. Women in their homes making sandwiches for their families so that they could eat them while watching another human being tortured and dying.

Hope and Simon took the box outside and carried it into the field.

“Where do we put it?” Simon asked.

“Damned if I know,” Hawk said. He watched the ghosts pass by, mingling with the people from Shadow Grove. “Can you see them?” he asked his sister and Simon.

They shook their heads. “Wait,” Simon said. “We're really going to see them?”

“I never have,” Hope said.

“But Gretchen started seeing them her first day here. Maybe you will too. It takes a certain type.”

“We're going to
see
actual
ghosts
?” Simon said again.

“Hopefully only see them,” Hawk said, “and not be hurt or killed by them.”

Simon tossed the box of photographs quickly to the ground.

“With any luck,” Hope said, “this is the last anniversary.”

She lit a match, cupping it in her hand to prevent the slow drizzle of rain from extinguishing it, and dropped it on the dry and brittle photographs. They curled and
blackened—the wind picked up and fed the flame, and then the pile caught light and blazed brightly.

The only pictures they kept were the ones of the White Christian Patriots surrounding the church, their criminal faces clearly distinguishable, and one of George Axton, about to murder his daughter, her cousin, his wife, and an entire congregation of people.

Back inside the house, Celia and Rebecca felt lighter in Gretchen's arms. She rocked them until they stopped weeping. Until they all fell asleep.

When she awoke she was covered in a fine white powder—like ash or dust—and enveloped in the scent of tea tree oil and chai tea. Where there had been shards of mirror, now there was nothing.

And then the house began to shift. She felt it. The great slope of it listed farther to the left with a great cracking sound. She heard it then—the thing, climbing down from the attic. Clomping its way down the stairs. It stood before her where she sat in front of the broken mirror. Then looked beyond her out the window.

“We know who you are,” she told it. “You can't hide behind that mask; I've got evidence.” She turned and watched as it turned and walked out of the house, fading as it slipped into the woods.

Outside, beyond the dark cluttered interior of her ancestral home, the pyre of photographs her mother and Esther had collected of the dead was growing and blazing beneath the moon.

When she felt a cold stinging wetness on her shoulder she jumped. Mona was pressing a ball of cotton against one of her neglected wounds. Gretchen looked up into her eyes in disbelief.

Mona smiled at her.

“How . . . ?” Gretchen began. Then she started crying. Mona held her tight.

“Look at you,” Mona said, still smiling, but tears running down her face. “You're so grown-up.” She tended to the cuts on Gretchen's face, ran a finger softly over her swollen eyebrow. “So brave.”

“Mom,” Gretchen whispered. “I always knew you were out there. I knew I would find you.”

The house groaned and creaked as if a strong wind was pressing against its walls.

“And you almost did,” Mona said. “Almost.”

G
RETCHEN AND
M
ONA WALKED OUT INTO
THE MEADOW
and headed in the direction of the blaze.

But then Mona took her hand and led her closer to the woods.

“I was here years ago,” Mona said, “helping Esther and Sarah. We had so many theories. So many ideas about what could be causing all the accidents, the trouble. We really thought the dead needed to be acknowledged and laid to rest.”

“I know,” Gretchen said. “We found the archive you were working on, the spirit photos. Why didn't you tell Dad and me that you were here?”

At this Mona raised her eyebrows as if it was obvious. “This isn't a safe place for a family,” she said. “I didn't want either of you to get hurt, or to worry about me. Mayville may look pristine and bucolic, but you know as well as I, that's not true, the history beneath that facade needs to be revealed. It can't be denied any longer.”

They could already make out the silhouettes of Hope and Hawk and Simon as they fed the fire. But they kept walking along the perimeter of the woods.

“I have the proof now,” Gretchen told her mother. “You were right that spirits can be photographed.”

Mona held Gretchen's hand and brought her to the edge of the woods. There was a deep hole in the ground surrounded by flagstone.

“I love you, Gretchen,” Mona said. “And I am so proud of you and how you have taken my work and your aunt's work and done the right things with them. And I am grateful to you, sweets, for breaking the mirror and setting us free.”

“Us?”

Mona looked down into the dark hole and Gretchen stood by her side. Peering down, she could just make out the form of a skeleton.

“It was an accident,” Mona said. “Just before the anniversary. Someone had taken the stone cap off the old well.
And I didn't notice until it was too late.”

“No,” Gretchen whispered. “No, Mom.”

“I would never have abandoned you,” she said. “And I'm so glad we had this chance to say hello before we see one another on the other side. I'm eager to see what it's like out there.” Her voice contained the same happy curiosity it had when Gretchen was a child. She looked away from the hole and held her mother, desperately.

“Please don't leave me again,” Gretchen said.

“I'm with you always,” Mona said. “You're a woman now, Gretchen, and you are strong. You can make sure our family doesn't get away with murder. You can hold this town accountable; make sure they can't look away.”

Gretchen nodded. “Say hi to Daddy and Janine for me,” Mona said. “Tell them I'll see them later.”

Gretchen felt stunned, proud of how strong and loving her mother was.

“What do you want me to do with . . . ?”

“My body?” Mona asked matter-of-factly. “Whatever you decide, sweets. The world belongs to the living.” Then Mona Axton kissed her daughter on the forehead and faded into the drizzling June night.

By the time Gretchen made it back to the bonfire of photographs, Hope was nose-to-nose with a long-haired man
wearing a vintage top hat and a fancy batik shirt. Hawk was trying to intervene, pulling her back from him. A crowd of people from Shadow Grove surrounded them.

“You're destroying evidence!” the man shouted. “You're destroying our history!”

“Oh, believe me,” Hope was shouting, “we've got plenty of evidence stored in a nice, safe place. But you wouldn't want to see that, would you? Be afraid your great-grandpa is front and center wearing a white sheet.”

“People need to see those photographs of the dead,” he said. “They're proof.”

“We've saved any that are important. The rest were trophies!” Simon shouted. “Trophy pictures taken by criminals.”

“Who the hell are
you
?” someone from the crowd yelled at Simon.

“
Excuse
me?” Simon yelled. “EXCUSE
me? No. Who the hell are
you
? Don't you
even
get up in my face!”

Gretchen pushed her way through the crowd. She rushed up to Hope and threw her arms around her. Hope breathed a sigh of relief and returned the hug. The crowd seemed to take a step back.

“It's the Axton girl,” someone in the crowd yelled.

“Esther,” a crazy-eyed woman in a flowing skirt with ridiculously short bangs and rhinestone-edged glasses
called out. “Speak to us, Esther!”

Gretchen looked up at the crowd of people standing around them in the light of the fire. Then she laughed.

“I'm not Esther,” she said. “Esther is dead. The whole Axton family is dead now. Except for me.”

She looked out at the field, once full of ghosts walking among the living. Now all she could see were the people from Shadow Grove.

She looked over at Hawk. He had a strange smile on his lips, and for the first time he looked relaxed.

“They're moving on,” he said, and it was as if a great burden was being lifted from his shoulders. “It's really happening.”

A white flash of lightning followed by a clap of thunder rang out, and suddenly the place where the lynching tree once stood was nothing but a scorched and smoldering patch of grass.

There was a sudden hush among the crowd. The only sound was the crackling from the dying fire. Ashes from the photos floated up into the sky, fluttering, glittering in the moonlight.