The Poe Estate (7 page)

A Dead Phone Rings

A
man in an expensive-looking coat with a leather briefcase was standing on the doorstep. He looked surprised to see me, then quickly hid his surprise in a fake-looking smile. “I'm here to see Miss Thorne,” he said. “Hepzibah Thorne,” he added—just in case I was Miss Thorne too, I guess.

“Is she expecting you?” I asked. I didn't know why, but I didn't like him. Neither, I could sense, did Kitty.

“Yes. I'm here on business.” He said it politely enough, but I could hear undertones of “none of your business.”

I wanted to shut the door in his face. This was Cousin Hepzibah's house, though, not mine, so I couldn't be rude. “This way,” I said and led him down the creaking corridor to the drawing room.

“Miss Thorne, I'm Craig Jaffrey from Dimension Partners,” said the man, crossing the room to Cousin Hepzibah's chair.

“Yes, I remember you perfectly well,” she said drily. She indicated her cane and added, “You'll forgive me if I don't rise.”

I noticed that she didn't ask him to sit down—not that there would have been anywhere for him to sit if she had. Well, he could have sat on the footstool. I forestalled him by plopping back down on it myself.

Mr. Jaffrey shifted his weight from one foot to the other and said, “Have you had a chance to think about our offer to buy
the property here, Miss Thorne?”

Buy the property! My heart fell. Where would we go?

“Why, yes,” Cousin Hepzibah said. “I had all the time I needed the day you first made your offer. My answer is still no.”

My hands, I found, had been clenched so tight my fingernails were digging into my palms. I took a deep breath and unclenched them.

“Well, we certainly appreciate your consideration,” Mr. Jaffrey said. “I was hoping I could explain the advantages a little better. I've brought some materials that I'm sure you'll find . . .” Here he looked around for somewhere to put down his briefcase. I saw him consider the little table at Cousin Hepzibah's elbow—the only table at this end of the room—but it was covered with Cousin Hepzibah's complicated-looking needlework.

He gave up, put his briefcase on the floor, squatted down, snapped it open, and took out a shiny folder with a too-bright photograph of some ugly buildings on the cover. He held it out to Cousin Hepzibah, who made no move to take it. After an awkward moment, he handed it to me instead.

“As you'll see when you take a look at that prospectus, Miss Thorne, we've upped our offer by a very considerable eleven and a half percent,” he said, still crouching by his briefcase. The pose made him look like an overdressed frog. I could see his shiny scalp through his thinning hair.

“I don't think you're likely to receive a higher offer, and certainly not in the time frame we're looking at,” he went on. “At your age, I imagine the expense and inconvenience of living in a house in this kind of shape would add to the appeal of making a move sooner rather than later. I really encourage you to take a look at those numbers. It's a very generous proposal. We would of course help you relocate to an appropriate facility, take care of your relocation expenses.”

Cousin Hepzibah waited until he seemed to be done talking. Then she asked, “Mr. Jaffrey, do you know how old I am?”

“Why—no. I was taught it was never polite to ask a lady's age.” He smiled an oily smile, rocking a little in his crouch. He looked very uncomfortable, and I wondered why he didn't stand up. Had he gotten stuck?

“I'm ninety-one years old,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

Evidently he
had
gotten stuck. He leaned forward onto his hands and knees, put one leg forward, pushed down on the floorboards, and staggered to his feet.

“I have trouble believing
that
, Miss Thorne. You certainly don't look a day over—” He stopped, clearly unable to come up with a polite but plausible number of years that she didn't look a day over.

“I'm ninety-one years old,” Cousin Hepzibah repeated. “My family has lived in this house for more than three centuries, and I have no intention of leaving it—certainly not in the little time I have left aboveground. So please don't waste any more effort.”

“It's no effort at all, Miss Thorne. It's my pleasure.”

Cousin Hepzibah continued, “Your best bet is to wait until
I'm dead and then try my heirs. But I warn you, we Thornes are a long-lived family.” She glanced at me and added, “And I don't think you're making a very good impression on the younger generation. Sukie, child, will you show our visitor to the door?”

“I really appreciate your taking the time to see me this afternoon, Miss Thorne. I'll just leave you those materials to look over, and I'll come back in a week or two to see if you have any questions,” said Mr. Jaffrey.

“No need,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

“Oh, like I said, it's no trouble at all.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Jaffrey,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Sukie?”

I got up from the footstool. Something in the room felt hard and threatening, as if the entire house and all the Thornes, living and dead, wanted the guy gone. For once, I thought, we all agree. “This way, Mr. Jaffrey,” I said, heading down the corridor to the front door.

Mr. Jaffrey followed quickly. “You must be very concerned about your grandma, Suzy,” he said.

“Both my grandmothers are dead,” I said.

“What? No, I meant Miss Thorne. She's what, your aunt?”

“My cousin. Why would I be concerned about her?” I asked.

“Well, her age, for one thing. It must be very hard for her, living in this old wreck,” he said. “All those stairs. Leaky roof. Freezing in here. Frankly, if she was
my
cousin or whatever, I would have found a clean, modern facility years ago where she could be well cared for. With the money my firm is offering, she could live out her last days in comfort with plenty left over for your college fund, hey? A nice new house, money for you
and your brothers and sisters, I bet your dad would love a new car, something for a rainy day. . . . Talk to your parents about it. See if they can convince your cousin to do what's best for everyone.”

He handed me his card. I was getting quite a collection of the things.

“If they ask me, I'll be sure to tell them what I think. Good-bye, Mr. Jaffrey.”

Shutting the door behind him, I went back to the parlor. “What was that all about?” I asked Cousin Hepzibah.

She rolled her eyes. “Just the latest reptile. They've been at it for decades. Back in the middle of the twentieth century they used to want to build housing tracts and golf courses. Then it was shopping centers and office complexes. A ‘spiritualist retreat' once—the old ones had a good laugh at that. I think this fellow is proposing a resort hotel. With a marina in the pebble cove. You can take a look at those papers of his if you're interested. As for myself, I intend to die here.”

“No time soon, I hope! We just got here,” I said, holding out my hand.

She took it and squeezed it. “No, no. Not for a little while yet.”

• • •

Before dinner, I was getting out my science notebook to read over the lab assignment when the phone on my desk rang.

The dead phone.

I stared at it.

It went on ringing.

I picked up the handset, which was tethered to the body of
the phone with a curly cord, and held it to my ear. “Hello?” I said.

“Hey, is that Sukie?” A guy's voice came echoey and hollow, as if he was standing at the other end of a long tunnel.

“Yes?”

“Man, you're hard to find! Don't you have a cell phone?”

“Who is this?” I asked. The voice sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.

“Oh, sorry! It's Andre—Andre Merritt from the New-York Circulating Material Repository.”

“Andre? But how . . . where did you get this number? I didn't even know the phone worked!”

“Yeah, believe me, it wasn't easy. You should get a cell phone. Listen, got a minute?”

“You mean now?” I glanced at the clock on the desk. It said quarter to five; I had about an hour before I'd need to go downstairs and help with dinner. “Sure,” I said. “What's up?”

“Great! Me and Libbet wanted to know, can you zoom down here and take a look at those doorknobs?”

“Zoom down where? What doorknobs?”

“The ones we got at the flea market. We need— Wait, hang on a sec. Libbet wants to talk to you.”

There was a clacking noise and then Elizabeth Rew came on the line. “Hi, Sukie, I'm glad we reached you. Your dad's phone is going straight to voice mail, and I couldn't imagine how we would find you, but then Andre had the bright idea of using the Murray phone. I'd forgotten we had it in our collection. So do you have a few minutes for a quick visit? We were trying to classify these doorknobs you sold us, but we can't
figure out what they do, exactly. You seemed pretty sensitive, so I thought maybe you could help.”

“What the doorknobs
do
? Don't they open doors? I mean, when they're attached to them?”

“Yes, of course, but beyond that. I thought if you could take a look, or get a feel for them, or whatever your sense is, you might be able to help pin it down. It shouldn't take long, if you can just pop over.”

“Pop over where?”

“The repository.”

“But isn't that down in New York? How would I get there?”

Elizabeth sighed. “This is kind of embarrassing, but I have zero sense of direction. I'm going to give you back to Andre, okay? He can give you directions.”

A clatter again and then Andre came back on the line. “Okay, so, if I was you, I would just head east to the coast and then follow the coastline down. When you hit Connecticut, keep west of Long Island and head down along the Sound. It's dusk already, so you don't have to worry about attracting too much attention. When you hit Manhattan, zip down the east side and look out for Central Park—it's right near us.” He gave an address, the same one on Elizabeth's card.

“But—but I can't drive! And it's hundreds of miles! And even if I could, Dad's got the truck.”

“What truck? I thought you had a Hawthorne broom.”

“A what?”

“Hang on.” The phone clacked again, and I heard muffled voices, as if Andre were holding his hand over the mouthpiece. Soon he came back. “Hi, Sukie, sorry about the mix-up. Never
mind now, but maybe we could borrow you next time you come to the flea market?”

“Um, sure,” I said.

“All right, well, sorry, thanks again,” he said. “See you Saturday, maybe.”

“See you,” I said.

The phone went dead. I stared at it for a minute, then hung up. What on earth was that all about?

A Bat and a Broomstick

T
hat night, I was awoken again. I'm going to kill that ghost, whoever it is, I thought. So what if it's already dead?

But it wasn't a ghost this time. It was a bat.

In theory, I love bats, ever since I did a report on them in sixth grade. They eat mosquitoes. They pollinate banana trees. They're mammals just like us, but they have a whole extra sense—echolocation—and they can fly! Imagine being able to fly!

Loving bats in theory is one thing; loving the one that woke me up at 3:09 a.m. with its frantic twittering is another.

How did it get into the room, anyway, with the windows shut? Did it fly down the chimney? I jumped out of bed, pulling the bed curtains shut behind me, and hauled a window open with a shriek of rusty iron. The bat was flying around the room in irregular, darting circles, occasionally smashing into the wall.

“The window's that way,” I said, pointing helpfully.

The bat flew into one of the closed windows instead. It clicked and veered off toward the ceiling. At the very top of the wall it found a perch on the molding. It folded itself and hung shaking, like a tiny, miserable umbrella.

“Great. Are you just going to hang there all night?” I
considered leaving the window open and getting back in bed, hoping it would find its own way out, but the room was freezing. “Come on, bat!” I reached up with the broom, hoping to persuade the bat to climb on so I could carry it to the open window. Even standing on the desk, though, I couldn't reach the bat.

I put the chair on the desk and climbed up. Almost! “Come on, little guy, get up,” I said, leaning forward as far as I could and reaching out with the broom.

The chair tipped and fell over.

I yelled a curse. “Help! Help!” The chair crashed to the floor, but to my surprise, I didn't. The broom seemed to have caught on something. I held on as tightly as I could, looking around wildly to see what was holding it up. Not just
holding
it—pulling it. The broom was rising to the ceiling.

The bat, noticing an enormous person-and-broom combo heading its way, let go of the molding and started darting and flapping in circles again. The broom decided to follow it.

“No!” I screamed, hanging on for dear life, trailing behind the broom like a pair of overalls pinned to a laundry line in a hurricane.

The bat chose that moment to discover the open window and fly out of it. The broom headed for the window, flapping me behind it. “No, broom!” I screamed. “STOP!”

The broom stopped stock-still in midair. Inertia slammed my legs into the wall. “Ow!” I howled. I took a deep breath. “Go down now, please, broom. Slowly!”

Gently as a dandelion seed, the broom floated down to the floor and set me on the hearth rug.

My heart pounding, every muscle in my body trembling, I let go of the broom, collapsed on the floor, and rolled up into a little whimpering ball.

• • •

Mom heard me screaming and crashing from two floors away and came to see what was wrong. When I told her about the bat—I didn't tell her about the broom, of course—she insisted on checking me all over for bites and scratches, in case the bat had rabies.

“It didn't bite me! It didn't get anywhere near me,” I protested. “And most bats don't have rabies, anyway. Only like one out of hundreds.”

“That's one too many.” Mom isn't as obsessed as Kitty with accidents and criminals, but diseases completely freak her out. She wanted to take me to the emergency room for rabies shots.

“Really, Mom, it didn't get near me.”

“How do you know? You were asleep.”

“I was shut up in bed with the curtains closed. Bats can't fly through curtains! When I heard it flapping around the room, I opened the window, and it flew out.”

Mom frowned, wanting to believe me. We really couldn't afford an emergency room visit. “What was all that crashing and screaming, then?”

“Just me trying to get the window open. And shut again.”

“Aren't bats supposed to spend the winter hibernating in bat caves? What was it doing here this time of year?”

I shrugged. “Spring's coming early? Or maybe it's a vampire,” I said. “This place is spooky enough.” My voice caught.

Mom hugged me. “Oh, honey,” she said. “I miss our house too. Now that we're not trying to pay that mortgage, maybe I can go to nursing school. There are good jobs in health care. And work's sure to pick up more for Dad in the spring. These things are cyclical.”

“Nursing? Wouldn't that make you too sad? Because of, you know . . .” I didn't want to say Kitty's name. She might hear me.

“I was thinking I could work with elders. Helping Cousin Hepzibah doesn't make me sad. But this is a daytime conversation, and you need your sleep. Why don't you come spend the rest of the night downstairs with me and Dad?”

“Oh, Mom! I'm not a baby. I'll be fine—the bat's not coming back. You should have seen how fast it went, once it found the window.”

• • •

I lay awake for a long time after Mom left, wondering about the bat and thinking about the broom. Of course, I'd known about ghosts for a while. Were magic brooms really so different?

But somehow ghosts don't seem as—I don't know, as
weird
as flying broomsticks. I was so used to Kitty that she seemed like part of the natural world. Even though she could do things like making mean girls trip and fall and sprain their ankles. I thought of her as an extension of ordinary life. A dark
extension, maybe, but still part of life.

Magic brooms, though—that seemed impossible, like something out of a fantasy book.

• • •

Apparently Kitty thought so too. She let me sleep, or try to, but when I stumbled blearily onto the bus the next morning, she took the seat next to me and expressed her disapproval. I should
not
be chasing bats around on flying broomsticks. For one thing, flying broomsticks were
way
more dangerous than
bicycles
, even. And I had no idea where that bat had been. Bats were like flying
rats
! It could be carrying all kinds of diseases! And I hadn't even washed my hands afterward!

I looked around. Evidently nobody else could see Kitty, so at least there was that. But I couldn't really talk back—nothing enhances a girl's reputation quite like having a fight with her invisible dead sister on the school bus.

I got out my book—another Laetitia Flint novel that I'd borrowed from Cousin Hepzibah—and tried my best to ignore Kitty, but it was hard to drown her out. I had to read each sentence three times.

The bus stopped to let some kids on, then lurched forward again. “Hey there, Spooky,” said Cole Farley, dropping his book bag next to me.

“That seat's taken,” I informed him.

“Yeah? By who, your imaginary friend?” He threw himself down with a flourish—right through Kitty.

I gasped. Kitty didn't vanish. She stayed there, sort of interspersed with Cole. She looked pissed.

Cole shivered. “Ooh, I feel an eerie chill! Is your imaginary
friend a ghost?”

“I wouldn't joke about ghosts if I were you, Cole. You never know who—or what—might be listening. Now, is there something you want?”

“I want to take a nice, scenic bus ride with my lab partner,” he said. “It's crowded in the back.”

I started to tell him to go away, but instead I shrugged. It
had
been pretty nice of him to ask me to join his lab group. Even though he probably just did it to make Becky Crandon happy.

Kitty let me know what she thought of Cole in pungent terms—at least, they would have been pungent if she'd been using actual words. She tugged his T-shirt sideways, twisting it around his torso.

He squirmed uncomfortably. “Hey, what's your cell number? I need to be able to reach my lab partner.”

“I don't have a cell phone.”

“You're kidding, right?
Everybody
has a cell phone.”

“Everybody except me.”

“How come? Are your parents paranoid about Internet stalkers or something?” he asked. “Do they limit your screen time? Is that why you're always reading?”

Kitty pushed her face through his and hovered so it looked as though Cole was wearing a scowling Kitty mask. If I hadn't been worried I would seem like a complete lunatic, it would have made me laugh. “I don't have a cell phone because my family is poor, okay? We can't afford it.”

“How can you be poor? You live in that gigantic mansion.”

“We live in my
cousin's
gigantic mansion. Which is kind of
falling apart. Otherwise we'd be homeless.” I knew I shouldn't be saying these things—I could just be handing over ammunition for him and Tyler and those creeps to blast me with. But I told myself that not being able to afford a cell phone was nothing to be ashamed of—jeering at people for not being able to afford a cell phone was.

Cole took my outburst in stride. “Oh, okay. That makes sense. You know one of the things I really like about you, Spooky?” he said.

I gave him a “yeah, right” look. Yeah, right, there was even one thing he really liked about me.

“It's that you're so gloriously, magnificently weird.”

Kitty took a lock of his hair and poked it into his left eyeball. He screwed his eyes shut and shook his head hard.

“Me?
I'm
weird? You're the one who's making crazy faces!”

He pushed his hair out of his face and went on, “Like, my other friends, I always know exactly what they're going to do next. Don't get me wrong—they're great guys—but they're so predictable. Right now Tyler and Ben are going to get into a big argument about who has a better defense, the Tigers or the Cardinals. Then Garvin is going to make a fart joke and Tyler is going to sit on him, and he's going to knock Ben's backpack over and everything's going to spill out, because Ben never remembers to zip it closed. Am I right or am I right?” He jerked his head toward the back of the bus, where his horrible friends were making a racket.

“Whereas you,” he went on, “are sitting here reading a million-year-old book you stole out of a mummy's crypt. At least, that's what it smells like. And it's not even for school.”

“That's why you think I'm weird? Because I like to read?”

“It's not so much
that
you like to read as
what
you like to read.”

“Uh-huh. I'm going back to my book now. I'm at an exciting part,” I said. “The heroine is telling the villain exactly what she thinks of him.”

“Read away,” he said. “I'll just sit here.”

And he did, only squirming a bit, and cursing softly when Kitty pinched the cap off his pen, stabbed him with the point, and made ink leak all over his pants.