Chapter Twenty-Five

chapter twenty-five

June 20, 2019

Ryan dropped me off at nine thirty. Diane texted to say she was running late but would be by with pizza and wine soon.

I walked through the door to find my father cooking again. The air smelled spicy and sweet. “Ted?” I called, walking back toward the kitchen. All the lights in the house were out.

I heard him say something. He was talking to someone. Diane? But I hadn’t seen her car.

“Ted?” I said again as I stepped into the chaos of the kitchen, trying to make out what was happening. I flipped on the lights. The floor was littered with empty grocery bags. There were pots on every burner. The counters were covered with flour, sugar, canned goods, mixing bowls, measuring cups and spoons. The kitchen table held plates and bowls of chocolate chip pancakes, cheeseburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches. The door to the broom closet was open, and the cat was in there, cowered in the shadows, watching.

“What’s going on?” I asked my father, who stood in front of the stove flipping bacon. I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, tried to sound calm and matter-of-fact. But this was a Lexie-style mess. I’d never seen my father do anything like this.

He didn’t respond. I walked up to him slowly, put a hand on his shoulder. “Ted? You okay?”

“She’s hungry,” he said, still not looking me, poking frantically at the bacon, then at a pot of creamed corn. “She’s hungry, but she won’t eat.”

“Who’s hungry, Ted?”

He turned, looked at me. “Lexie,” he said. His pupils looked huge, his face pale and sweaty. I turned off the burners, took his hand. It was cool and clammy.

“She was here,” he insisted. “She wanted food! I kept making her things, but she wouldn’t eat. She pushed them all away.” He looked so miserable, so agonized.

“Come sit down with me.” I led him over to the table. He shuffled forward in a daze, like a sleepwalker. We sat at the table, covered with all of Lexie’s favorites.

“She was here,” he said. “She sat right where you’re sitting. Look!” he said, scrambling through the mess, knocking a cheeseburger off the table, pulling a sketchbook out from underneath a plate. He flipped it open, shoved it at me. “Proof!” he said.

I held the sketchbook in my hands. It was a series of quick pencil sketches: Lexie in the kitchen. Lexie sitting in the chair I was sitting in right now. I struggled to keep my breathing even and level. In the drawings, my sister’s eyes were wild, and her hair looked wet.

“She said she could come back to stay. That we could help her do that,” he said.

“Ted,” I said in my calmest social worker voice, “I don’t think—”

The front door banged open, and I jumped. My father looked at me, eyes wide and excited. “She’s come back,” he whispered. “You’ll see.”

I dropped the sketchbook, tried to stand, but couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

I was underwater, holding my breath, playing the Dead Game with my sister. You move you lose, Jax.

“Honey, I’m home!” called Diane from the front hall.

I exhaled with relief; my father’s face fell in disappointment. “You can’t mention anything about Lexie’s visit today to Diane, okay?” I whispered, handing my father his sketchbook.

“But you believe me, right?” He looked so desperate.

Did I? Did I actually believe my sister had found a way back and come to sit in the kitchen?

Impossible.

“Let’s talk about it later, when it’s just the two of us,” I said. “It has to be our secret, okay?”

Mum’s the word.

“I’m sorry I’m so late! But I’ve got pizza and wine. The Riverbend store does a Greek pizza that’s to die for, wait until you taste it!” She came into the kitchen dressed in an eggshell-colored linen suit, hair and makeup perfect. She held the boxed pizza in her left hand, the bag with wine in her right. Her eyes widened in alarm. “What in the name of God happened in here?”

“Ted… did some cooking,” I explained.

She surveyed the wreckage. “Your father and what army of trained chimpanzees?”

I flashed her a let it be glance. She looked at my father, took in his ashen face, his clothing splattered with grease and food. I took the pizza from her, scootched some of the mess around on the counter to make room for it.

---

“Is your father all right?” Diane asked once we were finally alone. We’d eaten the better part of the pizza, polished off two bottles of wine, and my father had turned in early, saying it had been a long day and he was exhausted. He seemed anything but exhausted, though. He was revved up, on edge. We could hear him up above us, pacing in his room. Diane and I were cleaning up the kitchen. I was at the sink doing dishes and she was tossing food, wiping down surfaces.

“I think so,” I said.

“Do you want to explain what’s going on with all this food?” she asked as she dumped an untouched stack of pancakes into the trash. “I’m not an idiot, Jax.” She dropped the syrupy plate into the soapy water. “Chocolate chip pancakes? A bacon cheeseburger with ranch dressing and extra onions? Creamed corn? All of Lexie’s favorite foods.”

I nodded.

“So what was he doing? Trying to conjure up the dead with some home cooking? He must have said something to you.”

I shrugged, gave in, knowing it was pointless to lie. “He says he saw her. That she was here, in the house, and she was… hungry.”

“Jesus Christ!” She leaned back against the counter, physically bracing herself. “You’ve got to be kidding me. First he sees her in the pool and nearly drowns, now she’s come into the house looking for a snack?”

“He’s exhausted, grieving, and drinking.”

Wasn’t I in similar shape? Imagining I heard something in the pool, that something had brought my flashlight back up from the murky depths?

“Is he going to start insisting that we leave out plates of food for her like Rita did with Martha?”

I stiffened at the name. Wondered what I’d really seen in the water that long-ago night.

She picked up dishes from the rack and started aggressively swiping at them with a dish towel. “This is concerning, Jackie. Very concerning. Grief is one thing, but full-on hallucinations—that’s something else altogether. You, of all people, have to know that!”

“Yes,” I agreed. It seemed this was just an extreme form of denial. My father was unable to accept that she was gone, so he imagined seeing her. Hadn’t I imagined seeing her since I’d been back? Hadn’t I heard her voice, caught myself talking to her, even? Grief is a powerful force. “I think that between the grief and the drinking—”

“You didn’t encourage him, did you?”

“Of course not!” I snapped—too quickly, too loud.

She was quiet a minute, thinking, stacking plates in the cabinet. “I think I should spend the night again. I think it’s a good idea to have both of us here.” She looked up at the ceiling. We couldn’t hear my father walking around anymore. “In case he decides to do any late-night cooking. Or take off on a road trip with Lexie. We can get up in the morning and pick up Val’s canoe, head out to the lake and have a little ceremony with Lexie’s ashes. Maybe doing that will help your father realize she’s gone. Give him a sense of closure.”

Gone.

“Closure,” I repeated. I wasn’t a big believer in closure. In my experience, both in my life and working with my clients, solid resolutions to conflicts, problems, or grief were elusive. I believed it was more beneficial to recognize emotions and learn to deal with them appropriately; to find ways to live with the loss rather than tie everything up with a neat little bow and pronounce you’ve had closure.

We were quiet for a minute as we finished the dishes.

“Diane, can I ask you something? What do you know about the hotel that used to be here? Before the house was built?”

She narrowed her eyes, squinting like she was looking at me from the other end of a very long tunnel. “Not much. It was open less than a year. It burned down.”

“I think it’s weird that I never heard about it growing up. I mean, I knew there had been a hotel here once, but I didn’t know a thing about it. And I certainly never heard about the fire. All those people dying.”

“It’s not that weird.” Diane sighed and rubbed her forehead wearily. “Because that’s what our family does. Pretends that if we don’t talk about a thing, it didn’t happen. As if we could shape the truth with our stories, or lack thereof.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but realized she was right. No one talked about what happened with Rita. And when Lexie first showed signs of being sick, didn’t we all put our heads in the sand, refuse to acknowledge that something was wrong?

“But Lexie found out about the hotel,” I said. “She was digging around, not just looking into our family history, but the history of this place. I found some pictures and drawings and old deeds in her papers. She wrote down stuff about the hotel and the history of the land in her journal. And she went to see Shirley. Shirley has a photo album with old pictures of the hotel. She showed them to me today, said she’d shown them to Lexie, too.”

Diane frowned. “When I saw her at Lexie’s service, she seemed a bit… off.”

“You know what Shirley said to me? She told me Lexie’s out there in the pool.”

Diane shook her head. “Your father’s cooking for her, and Shirley thinks she’s gone for a swim.” She was quiet a minute, then said, “Do you know what I think? I think you should leave your sister’s journals and all those papers and albums she found, right in the boxes we put them in. Put some tape around them so you’re not tempted to keep digging through them. I don’t think it’s good for you, for any of us right now. They’re a record of your sister’s illness. It’s too soon, too heartbreaking.”

“But they’re a record of her life, too. Of who she was.”

Diane shook her head, bit her lip. “The best thing to do is seal it all up. Go back home, get away from all of this, and clear your head.”

I opened my mouth to argue, to tell Diane that I couldn’t do that.

Diane watched me carefully. “Jackie, you shouldn’t make any big decisions right now; you’re not thinking of staying, of moving to Sparrow Crest, are you? Not that I wouldn’t love to have you living close by, but I just don’t think it’s the best idea. I don’t think you should be here, in this house.”

She seemed almost frightened by the idea.

“Diane, did you ever see anything… weird… in the pool?”

She clenched her jaw and shook her head. “Of course not. It’s just that this is where your sister died. And I know you blame yourself—you shouldn’t, but you do, and to tell the truth, I blame myself, too, it’s hard not to—and all this ancient history, these scribblings from poor Lexie at her worst…”

“It’s the place she lived, too. And for better or worse, she loved this house and the pool. Gram loved it, too.” I held my head high, defiant. “I don’t know what I’ll do with the house yet. I’ve got to get back home on Sunday, take care of things at work, but I’d like to plan another trip out here soon to really sort through things, try to make sense of Lexie’s papers and notes.”

Diane asked, “What is it you’re hoping to find?”

“I don’t know. I just think—”

She took my hand. “Whatever you find isn’t going to bring her back, Jackie. It isn’t going to change anything. You understand that, right?”

“Of course.”

But then I heard Shirley’s words: Go out to the pool. That’s where you’ll find her.

---

Diane and I said our good nights. I grabbed my father’s sketchbook and went up to my room, holding it tightly, hoping he wouldn’t come out and catch me. Although he’d opened it up for me to look at tonight, taking it was crossing a line. I closed my bedroom door quietly and sat on the bed with the unopened sketchbook. Lexie watched from the dresser. Curiosity killed the cat, she warned.

“Shut up,” I told her, opening the sketchbook.

And there she was again, looking up at me from the page. Lexie in the pool, smiling, one arm up, beckoning: Come on in. The water’s fine.

My breath caught, stuck in my lungs.

I flipped through the thick pages: Lexie in the attic, standing beside her drawing table, sitting on the edge of my father’s bed. The last few, the ones from tonight, showed her at the kitchen table, food piled in front her. I studied the pictures, a chill running through my body like a wire. He’d gotten each detail perfect: the slope of her nose, her damp hair, the tiny dimple in her left cheek that appeared when she smirked, the smattering of freckles across her cheeks. And her eyes, my God, her eyes. They stared up at me, sucking me in, daring me not to believe in her, not to believe that she’d found a way to come back. She was naked, legs crossed, elbows resting on the table. Why would Ted draw her naked? And how did he know each detail of her body—each tiny freckle and scar?

I set the sketchbook down on my bed, pulled out my phone. Still no message from Declan’s mother.

I typed Brandenburg Springs Hotel into the search engine. The first hit I got was from a blog called Nellie Explores the Haunted Places of New England. There was a photo of the burned hotel, very similar to the one Shirley had shown me, and a post beneath it.

ARE THE BRANDENBURG SPRINGS CURSED?

The tiny town of Brandenburg, Vermont, is located in the southeast corner of the state, just across the border from New Hampshire. But legends about this particular hamlet abound.

Deep in the heart of the village lay the springs, long rumored to have medicinal properties. For generations, people have flocked to the springs to drink and bathe in their water. The healing water was said to be a cure for gout, rheumatism, consumption, chronic pain of any type, and some stories say a dip in the waters will even cure the pain of heartbreak. The native people who lived in these hills long before white settlers knew the spring to be a sacred place and called it a door between the worlds. They warned that the springs should be left alone, that their powers could bring great misfortune as well as great healing.

Old legends tell of the Lady of the Springs—a woman who appears in the water, luring men and women with promises of good health and riches, then tricking them into the deepest part of the water and drowning them. In some stories, she appears as a beautiful young woman; in others, she is a child, or an old hag with green hair and clawlike hands.

The first man to try to monetize the power of the springs was Nelson DeWitt, back in 1850. He opened a boardinghouse for visitors to the springs, then bottled the water and had it shipped by train to Boston and New York, marketing it as DeWitt’s Miracle Elixir: “a sure cure for what ails you.” Only five months into his operation, DeWitt drowned in the springs. His employees claimed he’d gone mad—they’d caught him down on his knees talking to the water, pleading with it day after day.

The springs were closed, and eventually DeWitt’s heirs sold the land to Benson Harding, who owned several hotels in New York State, including one in Saratoga Springs. Harding did not believe in curses and was sure that his experience with hotels would lead to tremendous success. Construction of the hotel took six years and faced one setback after another. Trains loaded with supplies derailed, work crews quit, the foundation flooded when a pipe burst. At last, the Brandenburg Springs Hotel and Resort opened its doors in the spring of 1929.

But terrible things awaited Harding, his family, and his guests. Perhaps he should have paid heed to the legends that have long warned people away.

The hotel closed briefly when a child drowned shortly after opening. Seven-year-old Martha Woodcock of Claremont, New Hampshire, apparently wandered out to the springs on her own, fell in, and drowned. Benson Harding closed the hotel, installed gates around the springs, put up lifesaving buoys, hired lifeguards, and only allowed guests to visit the springs during daylight hours.

But despite these precautions, in the fall of 1929, Benson Harding’s wife, Eliza, drowned in the springs. Two weeks later, the hotel burned to the ground. Fifteen of the twenty-four guests were killed. All that remained of the property was a gaping cellar hole flooded from the pipes that had been installed to route the springs into the hotel. Benson Harding returned to Saratoga a ruined, haunted man. He shot himself later that year.

Are the springs cursed? Look at the history and judge for yourself.

*Please note: The springs are now privately owned. They are not open to the public!

My head spun. I reread the article. The little girl who fell in and drowned—seven years old. I said her name out loud, “Martha.”

Martha W.

Rita’s imaginary friend.

The little girl who lived in the pool and came out sometimes. The little girl no one but Rita could see.

But I’d seen her once, too. Hadn’t I?

I shoved my phone back into my bag, looked down at my father’s drawing of Lexie on my bed. She grinned up at me.

“You knew,” I said. “You figured it out.”

I went back to the boxes, tore through the papers until I found the one I was looking for. The list Lexie had made:

Nelson DewittMartha W.Eliza HardingRita HarknessThey were all people who had drowned in the springs.

I put my finger on the next line, the one under Rita’s, thinking I should write Lexie’s name in there.

Listen to me,I heard my sister say, clear as could be. I held my breath, listening. I was losing my mind. Lexie’s death, being here, back at Sparrow Crest—it was unraveling me.

I made out my father’s voice through the propped-open window. “Please,” he was saying. I stood up, pulled open the screen, leaned out the window, craning my neck, trying to see the pool. My mother, when she was a child in this very room, wondered who her sister Rita was talking to—if Martha was just imaginary or an actual flesh-and-blood person.

Rita’s drawing in the lid of the board game, of the little girl in the blue dress: Martha W. 7 years old.

My father said something else I couldn’t catch, and then I heard a woman say, “Shh. Mum’s the word.”

I’d know that voice anywhere.

It was Lexie.

I jerked up and back, slamming my head against the window sash, hitting it hard enough to see stars. “Shit!” I ran out into the hall and straight into Diane, who was wearing Lexie’s old Nirvana T-shirt and a pair of her running shorts.

I jumped when I saw her.

Ghosts were everywhere.

“I thought I heard something,” Diane said. “Your father’s gone. He’s not in his room or the bathroom.”

“He’s down at the pool!” I said, rushing past her.

And Lexie is with him! She’s come back!

Diane was right behind me as I took the stairs two at a time, got down to the front hall to find the door open. My feet hit the stone floor and I slid, caught myself on the wall before falling. There were puddles of water everywhere.

Footprints, my brain told me. Wet footprints.

Herfootprints.

“It’s wet, be careful,” I called back to Diane, as if my near wipeout wasn’t caution enough. I turned to see Pig crouched farther down the hall, eyes on the open door, his back arched and fur raised.

Outside, my father yelled, “Please!”

I ran through the open front door and across the driveway, along the flagstone path to the gate, which also stood open. I could not understand what I was seeing: only my father. No Lexie.

“Ted?” I called, taking care not to slip on the wet stone.

My father was at the far end of the pool, holding something in his hands. I willed my eyes to adjust, to see what he was struggling with. Trying to open.

“What are you doing, Ted?” Diane yelled, hurrying toward him.

My father was holding the plastic urn that contained Lexie’s ashes. He’d gotten the top off, pulled out the plastic bag inside and opened it. Now he was holding it over the pool while he looked down into the dark water as if waiting for a sign.

“No!” Diane cried, flying toward him. “Ted! What are you doing? Stop!”

We watched in horror as my father dumped all that was left of my sister’s physical body into the inky black water. No words of goodbye. No sentimental ceremony or talk of how much we loved her. My father’s movements were quick and jerky—like watching someone dump the contents of a Dustbuster into the trash.

“No!” Diane wailed.

“It’s what she wants,” he said. “She told me.”

“Jesus!” Diane said. She’d stopped, just a few feet away from him. “Ted! What have you done?” She looked at the empty plastic bag in my father’s hands, then down at the water, where there was a thin skim of fine gray ash resting on the top. And she began to cry. She collapsed into a nearby chair, put her head in her hands, and wept harder than I had ever seen her weep.

My father looked at me, eyes widening. “Don’t you see,” he said, frantic. “This is what she wants. She told me! It’ll help her come back. Come back and stay!”

I watched the pale ashes floating, sinking, mixing with the black water.

“Look,” my father said, pointing. “There she is! Look!”

I lifted my gaze from the sinking ashes to where he was pointing: the dark heart at the center of the pool.

It couldn’t be…

I held my breath.

There was movement, a ripple in the still surface of the water.

Squinting, I stepped forward, too close to the edge, teetering dangerously. The water smelled like blood.

I was sure, for a half second, that I did see something: a flash of white in darkness.

A pale hand and arm rising up out of the black water.

“Lex?” my mouth made the shape of her name, but no sound came.

I blinked, and she was gone.