What the Dead Want (6 page)

The summer air was making her feel more relaxed. Gretchen listened to the sound of crickets. Whatever was going on, she could handle it. She would make herself handle it.

Esther had come out and sat in the rocker, where she was smoking a cigarette and gazing up at the sky. Gretchen
stood in the yard, looking at the silver light on the meadow and the dark outline of the forest in the distance. Finally she sat on the top step of the porch, near Esther.

“It's pretty as hell here sometimes,” Esther said. “That's another reason our family has stayed so long.”

The throbbing hum of insects was like a tonic. Moths and long-legged bugs fluttered around the porch light. She sat with her aunt watching the sky get darker.

Esther had brought her here to see something, to understand something. If her mother was alive, she would want Gretchen there too, where it was so easy to believe in spirits. She would want her to have made this pilgrimage, to see with her own eyes the brutal and benevolent place where her life began.

Suddenly Gretchen was filled with the anger and confusion she'd felt as a younger girl, angry at falling into a sentimental thought about Mona. All the things she tried to ignore came rushing back here in her mother's family home. Who cared if Mona would have wanted her there? Mona who couldn't even say good-bye, who had been so sweet and loving one day and then gone the next, leaving her father to pick up the pieces, leaving Gretchen to wonder for years what she could have done that would have made her mother stay.

Those old feelings of doubt had tortured her for so
long, and now they were back. But maybe this time she could get some answers. Not for Mona's sake, but for her own. She looked up at her aunt. She had a feeling Esther might understand what it was like to be angry about something you had no power to change.

Dear James,

Three more fires last week. People were running from their homes to see, as if it were a party, the sounds of hooves beating the road—an enormous blaze. All was chaos. The more talk of war and discontent, the more anxious and violent people seem to become.

I ran outside and was astonished to see so many simply standing and looking on as our neighbor's yard caught light from the torches that had been thrown there. I was running back to my parents' house when I saw George.

I told him I couldn't believe we had people like this living in our midst. And he comforted me. He said not to worry, we'd rout them all out. I went home and listened to my parents up talking in the parlor. Their anxiety was clear in their hushed voices. Especially my mother. When I looked around the corner at them, she was standing in front of the mirror nervously pinning her hair up and crying.

But by the next day the whole town was silent again, which seemed even stranger. One of the houses had burned; the other two had visible damage, just one family, going about moving the charred wood from the torches out of their front yard.

We think we are so civilized. But what's the price we pay for our quiet lives?

If either of our families knew what we were doing, James,
they would be shocked, and even if they'd felt the same things themselves, they would tell us to stop.

With all of this happening I feel claustrophobic. I feel an even greater hunger for meaning and learning. I have your brave example to thank,
as you are the only person I know who has ever left Mayville.

Sincerely,

Fidelia

T
HEY STAYED OUT ON THE PORCH FOR A
LONG TIME,
talking about her mother and travel and vintage clothing shops.

“I know you're pissed,” Esther said. “I know it. I can see it. Hell, even I'm pissed and worried, I know it's nothing like what you're going through. . . . But listen, sweets. You got so much from your mom. Mona was a curious girl like you. And I bet you can remember a lot of other good things if you let yourself.”

“Mona,” Gretchen said, her mother's name like a laugh or a sob caught in her throat. “She was so tough but so sweet, you know?”

Esther nodded. “I do know. She could get completely absorbed in what she was doing and just go off on her own. This last time she came to visit, she didn't even say good-bye.”

Gretchen winced. No one had gotten a good-bye. And she was done trying to think of nice things about Mona.

“I woke up and the study door was wide open and she was gone. I thought maybe she'd gone over to Shadow Grove.”

“What's Shadow Grove?” Gretchen asked.

“A spiritualist colony,” Esther said. “Which is a nice way to say, a bunch of kooks who made their own little town out here in the country.” Someone as eccentric as Esther calling people a bunch of kooks made Gretchen laugh.

“She'd been back and forth between here and there that last visit,” Esther went on. “But nobody there saw her after she'd disappeared. You must know all this already. The police and that psychic your mom's friend hired were putting together a timeline.”

Gretchen turned away and looked out into the woods. She had been sheltered from many details in the aftermath of Mona's disappearance, but now as Esther was talking, she remembered people in and out of their apartment, looking through her mother's things. She remembered seeing
a story on the cover of the
Post
that said
The Lady Vanishes
and had a picture of Mona standing in front of one of the gallery's most recognized acquisitions—a photograph by Michelle Manes of ghostly children playing in front of a tombstone shaped like a lamb. She remembered her father whisking the paper out of her hand. Telling her it was garbage. That's she shouldn't read those things.

What Gretchen wanted least to remember was this: after two months the detectives and even the psychic said the same thing. There was no foul play. All evidence pointed to Mona leaving on her own accord. She'd abandoned them, the gallery, everything. She didn't want to be found. The psychic said she saw Mona with a second family, and that it was a struggle and she missed Gretchen and her father, but that she was needed where she was. The police said there was nothing to do without a motive or a body.

Gretchen also didn't want to remember the grief her father had gone through, or how he quit his practice in the city and started taking medical assignments in the developing world—gone for months at a time—and then came home and spoiled her, buying her whatever she wanted. The only saving grace of that time period was living just two floors above Simon.

For some time, people continued to tell her they'd find
her mom, that things were going to be okay. But after a while no one talked about it, about Mona. The gallery closed.

The lady vanishes, Gretchen thought. Just like that. And now here she was six years later, maybe closer than she'd ever been to knowing what Mona might have been doing those last days. She was almost an adult herself. She was inheriting a house, and had more freedom and access to information than she'd ever had. If she could find Mona she could tell her how she felt. And some part of her knew that she also just wanted to see her again. To have a mom.

She looked right at Esther. “Let's solve this.”

“Hell yeah,” Esther said, raising her glass. “That's the plan!”

Sometime after midnight Esther thought the woodland creatures would be done scavenging and safely back up in the attic. “They come down around dusk and then go back up to their place,” she explained.

“How can you live with squirrels or raccoons or whatever those are?” Gretchen asked. “Also, doesn't the cat keep them away?”

Esther laughed. “Used to be three cats,” she said, not needing to explain more.

“Why don't you call someone to come and take them
out
of here?”

“Not a bad idea,” Esther said, her speech languid from drink. “Let's add it to the list.”

Gretchen laughed and shook her head. It was hard to fathom this woman. In one sense she was so put together—the way she dressed, her intelligence, her down-to-earth sophistication. And at the same time she was just so
crazy
. The nonsense about the house, her obsession with family history, but then not doing anything to care for the journals and artifacts, the fact that she looked like she was a million years old and Gretchen had just watched her drink a fifth of gin and smoke a half a pack of cigarettes in the course of a few hours. The woman was a force of nature. Or a force of chaos.

When Esther asked if she wanted to see her studio, Gretchen paused for a few seconds and reluctantly said yes.

“There are no animals in it, are there?” Gretchen asked.

“How the hell would I know?” Esther said. “There might be. C'mon.”

The room was just above Gretchen's but twice the size. When Esther opened the door, Gretchen's jaw dropped.

Every inch of wall space was covered in photographs, so many photographs it would take a month to get a good
look at every one. Some were only a square inch in size, and some were larger, glossy prints. A few appeared to be portraits, but most were landscapes, and figures. Gretchen could see nothing distinctly, only the hundreds and thousands of images becoming a single impression; people and places, history, time, the blur of life distilled into a series of moments. This display was the result of either a highly disordered or a highly meticulous mind.

Then Gretchen's gaze fell on the camera at the center of the room. It sat on a tripod, and its lens was pointed in the direction of the window, out onto the woods behind the estate. A Nikon F2AS Photomic. She stepped over to it, and had to restrain herself from reaching out and touching it. She'd never seen one in real life, but had talked about it plenty. Janine had had a friend who was a war reporter in the eighties in Central America and he still shot with nothing other than his Nikon.

It might have been the most sensitive camera ever invented. And only the surest photographer could manage the F2AS.

“Oh my God,” Gretchen whispered. “You're a professional.”

Esther laughed at her. “No shit.”

“That camera . . .”

“That camera respects light,” Esther said, taking it off
the tripod and holding it easily in her strong knobby hands.
“Lots of folks think it's the subject of the photograph that matters, but some of us still understand that photography is capturing light, and this camera can see all that fast light for you.”

She held it up to her eye and shot Gretchen's astonished face, in the room full of photographs.

“I always felt like this camera understood,” she said, snapping two more pictures of her great-niece, “that light wasn't always what could be seen, but also what could be felt—temperature, and pressure. I felt like a hunter when I was working with this thing. A hunter stalking hunters.”

Gretchen looked closely at her aunt. And something began to shift and fit together in her mind. Axton. Their family name. Esther Axton. E. E. Axton. The war reporter. She'd never even thought to ask her mother if E. E. Axton was a relative—probably because she was ten the last time she talked to her. And she'd always thought that E. E. Axton was a man.

Esther looked at her face and started laughing. She walked over to the small desk in the corner of her room and pulled out an old
Life
magazine. Gretchen had seen tons of these magazines in thrift stores sold for twenty cents apiece, dusty boring rags from the sixties. Esther handed it to her niece and Gretchen opened it to a bookmarked page.

There, in a quarter-page black-and-white photograph, was a woman crouching down, holding a Nikon,
this
Nikon, while a tank drove behind her and thick black smoke rose in the distance. She appeared to be maybe forty years old, with little round glasses, dressed in combat fatigues.

A WILL OF STEEL:

E. E. AXTON PHOTOGRAPHS ANOTHER WAR

Gretchen looked from the page to her aunt, whose eyes were dark and bright. It couldn't be. Her heart was pounding hard. How had she never even considered the last name and the possibility of being related to E. E. Axton? Even if she was only a kid, how had her mother neglected to tell her they were related to E. E. freaking AXTON? This seemed the biggest omission, maybe the biggest lie of her childhood. What else didn't she know about her own life?

“Another war,” Gretchen whispered, looking at the article.

“Yeah,” Esther said. “Vietnam. Before that I was in Poland,” she said, “then Japan.”

Gretchen was stunned. E. E. Axton had photographed Auschwitz, Hiroshima. No wonder she'd been holed up in this house for decades, drinking, acting crazy. No wonder
she wasn't all that bothered living near the site of a mass murder.

Who knew what she'd seen in Vietnam—or in World War II. Gretchen looked around again at the photographs on the wall. She could now see that some of them were very old.

Esther just never knew how to come home, Gretchen thought. And this place must have been as good as any.

Her aunt gave her a look of wry recognition, then held out the camera and said, “You want it?”

“Are you
kidding
me?”

“I'm not kidding you,” Esther said gravely. “There's a new roll of film in there and a few dozen more rolls in the darkroom. It's yours. Right now. Here.” Gretchen reached for it but Esther pulled it away quickly and said, “On one condition.”

“Anything.” Gretchen was in such awe of this woman and her work she couldn't believe she was standing in the same room with her, let alone related.

“You stay,” Aunt Esther said. “The whole summer or until the work is done. You stay and you continue the work. You'll see,” she said. “Take the camera. You'll see. There's such a short time left. Only days until the anniversary. You've got to get out there and capture the light. Document it. But be careful. Very careful. You're a smart
girl or I wouldn't do this.” Then in a lower voice, almost a whisper, she said, “When they realize I'm gone, they'll take the house. So don't leave the house.” She trailed off, and her eyes went blank and hollow.

Gretchen reached out and held her great-aunt's hand. She wanted the camera, but it was becoming horrifyingly clear there was something very wrong with the old woman, and she wanted to help. Esther needed to be in some kind of assisted-living facility. She needed medication, or maybe to go live in an old-folks home for retired war reporters or something. This was just too much.

“Will you promise me?” Esther asked, looking deeply into her eyes.

“Yes,” Gretchen said. Thinking,
I am promising I'll get us both the hell out of here. Tomorrow. I am promising I'll get you somewhere where you can get the respect you deserve.

Her aunt, looking relieved, handed her the camera. Gretchen took off her Leica and placed the Nikon around her neck in its place.

“I started seeing them first when the camps were liberated,” Esther said, talking quickly, her eyes glazing over. “And then in Vietnam, everywhere. Everywhere. In the cities and in the villages, even taking a break back at the hotel. They followed me to the hotel. I got used to it. Knew I was doing something no one else could do. That
it's a part of who we are—this family. That's why I came back here when it was over. I'm done, Gretchen. But someone has to finish the work.”

Gretchen turned to the window, to wrench herself from the desperation and insanity of the moment. She was deeply sad she'd met Esther so late in her life, when she was like this—at old age, after photo chemicals or seeing too many wars or loneliness or some family predisposition to craziness, and imagining ghosts had mangled a part of her senses. It was quite clear to her why no one had introduced her to Aunt Esther before. Even her mother, who had told her so much about the world, knew enough to shelter her from the shadow of deep violence that still haunted Esther, and hung over this house.

Gretchen looked at the pictures on the wall. And began to realize many of them were of fires and children. Some were happy shots, family portraits. Campfires. Others were of buildings on fire, the bombed-out remains of some city, just rubble and carnage, a shadow of a person permanently etched in concrete. Some were the placid rolling hills and forest around the house. But they were clearly all on the walls because they told some story Esther believed in. They were hanging there because she was trying to solve a puzzle with them—something that only made sense to her, because her internal logic had snapped, gone off the
tracks. It was like that day Gretchen had tried to photograph her mother. These photos were up because Esther was looking for proof—or thought she had found proof. They were there because she believed she was close to a breakthrough. E. E. Axton's war photographs were some of the most iconic images ever published, and hundreds of them were published; some even hung in museums. But these pictures were a secret, were personal. If it ever got out that E. E. Axton was living in her ancestral home, photographing spirits, or believing she could, it would be a huge story. The idea that Gretchen alone was there to witness it made her feel light-headed.