Phantom Heart Page 3

  He would not be staying long enough to achieve even halfway similar results. Still, I’d taken small pleasure in informing him just how to get it right.

  Large and powerfully built with dark brown hair, beard, and mustache, Mr. Armand reminded me of the shipyard workers I had glimpsed when I first arrived in America. And in that moment, with his eyes on his work but his mind so clearly elsewhere, I had to wonder which of us more closely resembled a ghost.

  Neither of us, I’d say, quite so much as Mrs. Armand, who, through the very act of failing to exist, had begun to make her presence known.

  Family photographs had appeared in the home, but none depicting her. Talk of her had been even scarcer. And Mr. Armand chose not to wear the ring I had twice now witnessed him pull from a lockbox to examine before replacing it.

  Stephanie’s interlude with the piano that morning had stayed with me despite all my efforts to dismiss it. Now Mr. Armand’s intermittent glances at the piano had confirmed the thing I had come to assume.

  That Mrs. Armand was not absent. Not so much as she was gone.

  Also, that the pain here was still fresh.

  Though I did not celebrate its existence, I could admit that there were fewer poisons more potent than loss.

  My curiosity quenched, I left Mr. Armand to his pains and swept toward the grand staircase, which, like this side of the house itself, could now be called “grand” only in its ruin.

  Had Charlie been present, she might have heard me approach the second floor. As it was, both girls were at school.

  Clearing the remainder of the steps, I moved down the hall—and passed through the open doorway of Stephanie’s room.

  Until now, my sense of propriety—ingrained into me by my own mother from nearly the moment of birth—had prevented me from trespassing into Stephanie’s quarters. Now, though, reason and purpose, not to mention the increasing deficit of time, demanded I ignore my breeding in favor of doing all I could to investigate this small chink I may have located in Stephanie’s impenetrable armor.

  Avoiding my cloaked and masked reflection in the mirror of Stephanie’s dresser, I searched for my in.

  “Spartan” was the word that came to mind when I took in the extent of her possessions, most of which remained sealed in columns of stacked brown boxes.

  There was one item, however, that caught my attention.

  A simple porcelain angel, her wings tucked, knelt on Stephanie’s nightstand, her faceless countenance downcast as she harkened to the music of her silent lyre. The size of a swallow, the angel sat close to the pillow where Stephanie laid her head at night.

  Its presence there intrigued me.

  Stephanie had neither seen me nor sensed me in any capacity since her arrival. Even when I had dipped inside her dream, she had not perceived me.

  And so, forced into the role of voyeur, I had observed her in her sleeping fantasy bestow her affections on the yellow-haired boy. The one who I had ascertained, through the eavesdropping of her conversations with her father, went by the name of Kyle Benedict.

  My being invisible to Stephanie, though, did not disturb me quite so much as the presence of this angelic statue.

  Because its placement in her otherwise unadorned room suggested that she reserved for the artifact some measure of reverence.

  Also that she did believe.

  The stoic and levelheaded Stephanie. The sensible and seasoned scholar.

  Could she truly believe in something as otherworldly as angels? Or was this figure, like Mr. Armand’s coveted ring, yet another idle and hollow token of loss and remembrance?

  I plucked the angel from her place, taking her prisoner within my palm. Then I frowned into the face she did not possess, my ears tuned to the epiphany she whispered voicelessly to me.

  Did I not also have a face I no longer possessed?

  I glanced away from the angel, doing something I took pains never to do, and offered to Stephanie’s standing mirror my masked and cloaked visage.

  Two pinpricks of light regarded me through the holes of the mask. I looked away, my thoughts unfurling faster until suddenly, a breakthrough.

  Indeed. Why had it not occurred to me before how thoroughly I had been going about this the wrong way?

  Stephanie, more pragmatic than arithmetic itself.

  Given her disposition, would it not take months of my wheedling at Charlie for her to even notice the smallest hint of my presence?

  Him, though . . .

  Truly, who would Kyle Benedict be next to him?

  Had Stephanie not proven with each of my efforts how there existed in her world no room for monsters in masks?

  Might she entertain, however—should one make an appearance within her next dream—an angel?

  When it came to angels, I of course knew none. Thanks to the curse, I never would.

  I had once, though, been well acquainted with a devil.

  One who’d never had even the slightest trouble passing for just the opposite.

  My plan decided, a check of accomplishment registering in my hollow chest, I turned to make my exit, along the way depositing Stephanie’s figurine atop her dresser.

  Charlie could rest easy tonight. Perhaps every night after as well should I, through this new avenue, succeed in obtaining the audience I truly sought.

  That of her elder sister.

  FIVE

  Stephanie

  “Well, Dad, you did it,” I said, joining him where he stood on the cobblestone walkway. We gazed up at the monstrosity that loomed like a grizzled beast before us. Our new house. “You’ve successfully turned us into the Munsters.”

  Red ivy clung to the turret that rose three stories high, capped by a spire. The home had a second, shorter turret at the rear, but its roof blended with the jutting, tent-shaped sections crowning the rest of the house. While the home’s gray stone structure gave the exterior a Wayne Manor feel, the actual architecture and facade made me think of a creepy old-fashioned dollhouse left in the attic to rot.

  “At this stage,” Dad said, speaking up at last, “I think it looks more Addams Family myself. They always struck me as having a bit more class, y’know?”

  “They did have a butler,” I admitted.

  With a fast slapping of shoes, Charlie barreled past us in her purple puffer jacket, toward the crooked-limbed maple on the leaf-covered front lawn. I only saw what had lured her there when the creature she’d spotted sprang into flight.

  A huge moth.

  The bug fluttered off the tree’s trunk just before Charlie could grab it, ruining its camouflage. How had Charlie even seen it?

  While Charlie jumped after the ugly thing, I handed my father one of the heavy brown paper grocery bags weighing down my arms.

  He took the bag and asked the obligatory, “How was school?”

  “Okay,” I said, supplying the obligatory answer. “Except I found out that, apparently, our house is haunted.”

  “Humph.” Dad retrieved the other bag from me.

  “So,” I said, pulling the rest of the groceries from the Civic, “when were you going to tell me we had specters?”

  He smirked. Dad didn’t believe in ghosts any more than I did.

  “Why bother when I knew the neighborhood kids would do it for me?” he replied. “You know, I’m surprised it took this long. I thought for sure you’d come back on Monday with some cock-and-bull story.”

  Charlie whooped past us, back to the car, where she’d left her My Little Pony lunchbox.

  “First off, Dad, you have to live in a neighborhood to have ‘neighborhood kids’ and, secondly, unlike you, I do not broadcast the fact that I live in an ancient Victorian deathtrap.”

  “Oh, c’mon. It’s not that bad.” His mouth quirked, dark beard wrinkling. “As long as you stay out of the basement.”

  “Wh
y? Did you go down there today?”

  “No. I’m actually kinda scared to go back down there.”

  “Because of the ghosts?” Now it was my turn to smile.

  “Because I’m pretty sure we’re going to need a new furnace, and I don’t even want to know what it’s going to cost to heat a place like this. And because I still need to get an estimate on installing a washer-dryer setup down there. You know. The really scary stuff.”

  “Yeah, well.” I glanced behind me to where Charlie pulled open the Civic’s rear door. “I wish you would have told me up front whatever the realtor said about this place.”

  “Why’s that? See something strange?”

  “Not me.”

  “Chess?”

  Our eyes met for the first time, Dad’s hazel stare shadowed by his heavy brow and, I was glad to see, by concern, too.

  “Last night, Charlie complained about a man in her closet. I’m worried the kids at her school may have said something to her. Apparently, this place is some kind of paranormal hotspot. Or am I telling you something you already know?”

  “Humph,” Dad said again.

  “Dad.” I glowered at him. “What did the realtor say?”

  “Nothing.” He shrugged. “When I asked if this place was haunted, I’d meant it mostly as a joke. You know, to make him sweat since they’re supposed to disclose stuff like that if you ask.”

  “And he just said, ‘Yes, here be ghosts’?”

  “He checked his papers and stated the place was ‘rumored to be.’ But no stories. Why? You hear some good ones today?”

  “Nothing specific.”

  “Well.” Dad laughed, a soft sandpaper-on-stone sound that I loved. “Might be a fun research project. And, after what I discovered today, I know where you can start.”

  “Where?”

  “Let’s just say that if I ever see that realtor again, I will live up to my former reputation and jack him in his clean-cut jaw.”

  Dad had a bit of a record. After he got out of the service and before he met Mom, he’d gotten into a few bar scuffles. One turned out to be the chair-smashing, bottle-over-the-head sort. I never knew about the brawl until after Mom passed. When I’d turned sixteen, though, Dad had sat me down and confessed everything. Not in a get-it-off-his-chest kind of way, but more like I was some kind of lawyer who needed to know the whole truth. He’d said he wanted me to be informed in case it ever came up again. He’d also told me he did time for assault.

  Not a long time, he’d said, making it clear that the man he’d pummeled had walked out of the hospital without permanent physical damage. But he’d also wanted me to know why, even though he’d spent several years in anger management and therapy, normal jobs weren’t going to be an option for him. Not the good kind that would allow a single father to properly care for two daughters.

  The only part of the story I side-eyed was that last part. Because his Richard Smash days were so far in the past that I felt sure he could have settled in any town he really wanted to.

  But Dad needed his projects. And to not be in any environment that encouraged looking back. And I needed him to be Dad.

  So, house flipping we a-went.

  “What did he leave out?” I asked. The realtor must have omitted some truly odious piece of information for Dad to even joke about breaking his longstanding no-violence track record.

  “You know all that tall grass in the back? Close to the woods?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Turns out there’s a family graveyard hiding in one patch.”

  I sucked a hissing breath in through my teeth.

  Selling a house rumored to have ghosts was something we’d dealt with before. Successfully, too, since—as far as amenities went—ghosts weren’t real. Sometimes buyers even wanted a “haunted” house.

  But bodies in the ground? Not a good selling point.

  I tilted my head at him. “Can’t you sue him for that?”

  “Not on an ‘as is’ buy, turns out,” he said, making it clear his brain had already traveled these neural pathways and that he’d probably even made some phone calls.

  “Well.” I sighed, giving him a pat on the back. “We’ve got six months to figure it out.”

  “And six months to keep it hidden from Charlie.”

  Like so much else, I added in my head.

  “Easy enough,” I said with a shrug. “The grass will hide the graves for at least another month. After that, we can get some tarps to hide them for the winter. It’s too dangerous for Charlie to go that close to the woods anyway.”

  “You be careful if you go back there, too,” Dad said. “There’s a lake beyond the trees that belongs to the next lot, and probably snakes and varmints and everything else in those woods.”

  “For the moment,” I said, “I’m good just navigating the obstacle course that is our house.”

  “Three weeks from now, you won’t recognize the place.” His chest puffed as he shifted his weight from one steel-toed work boot to the other.

  Charlie popped between us, then, with a loud “Boo!” before erupting into giggles, even though neither of us had jumped.

  “You want me to make this chili or what?” I asked them.

  “With spaghetti!” chimed Charlie.

  “The stove works now,” Dad offered.

  “That’s lucky.”

  Surprising me, Dad set the groceries down on the walkway. He looped an arm around my shoulders and jostled me into him so that the scent of his Old Spice deodorant wafted over me.

  He planted a kiss on my hair.

  Affection from my father usually came awkwardly and out of the blue like that.

  For me anyway.

  But the one-armed hug was his way of telling me thanks.

  Thanks for being me. And for helping him play understudy to the person we both missed. The person Charlie had never known.

  Dad gathered the groceries again with calloused hands.

  I knew better than to try to help him, so I went back to my car to get the rest.

  I stopped, though, jumping at the sight of the gigantic moth from the tree, which had perched itself, wings outspread, on the edge of my open trunk, its dark body contrasting starkly with the Civic’s bright blue finish.

  The thing, mammoth in size, as big as my palm, flickered its yellow-accented wings, its segmented, cigar-thick abdomen giving a shudder. Then it took off, flittering up and away.

  But not before I had glimpsed the strange emblem on its back.

  The symbol, a brownish-yellow skull, must occur naturally in the species.

  Still, it disconcerted me nonetheless.

  * * *

  SEQUESTERED IN THE attic, I sat on the antique periwinkle chaise lounge I’d found there and smirked at my phone screen.

  “Lucas Cheney,” I said, eyeing the profile I’d finally managed to bring up in a search. Officially, Hipster Glasses had a name.

  Too bad my recon-slash-procrastination session would soon be over since, due to his locked profile, I couldn’t glean much more from social media than that. Aside from some basic info and a few photos of him decked out in his Archie duds, it was tumbleweeds.

  “Figures,” I muttered, dropping my cell into the cushions.

  Then, cringing at the attic I still did not want to get started on, I picked it up again.

  This Lucas guy was, after all, way more fun to look at than the disaster spread out before me. He was interesting, too, because why, in every one of his photos, did he look like he was headed to a sock hop?

  I could ask him about that. I could also ask him more about the house.

  Maybe I should have given him my number when he asked for it. Then again, maybe I would have if he hadn’t point-blank said he wasn’t interested in me.

  Rolling my eyes at Lucas, I abandoned my phon
e again and stood, eager to let in some fresh air. This attic smelled like a tomb.

  After putting Charlie to bed, I’d tromped up here with every intention of clocking in for my first day on the part-time job that came with every new house. Dad always paid me an allowance to tackle a few of the more menial tasks while he took on the grunt work.

  At first glance, though, this attic, full of cobwebs and several decades’ worth of junk, had only inspired me to take a load off. Because, wow. This one was going to take a while.

  Still, I had to start sometime.

  Carefully, I picked my way over a pile of rolled-up carpets, heading toward the window. I had to yank the rusted crank several times, though, before the casement pivoted open with a teeth-jarring screech.

  Spiced autumn air surged into the room, cooling my cheeks while the wind whipped at the short stretch of woods flanking either side of our winding driveway. The trees tossed their fiery arms this way and that with a low and traveling shhhhhhhh.

  I leaned through the window overlooking the old iron fire escape that zigzagged up the rear of our house, and took a deep swig of the air that was fresher and cleaner here than it had been at our last house. Though the musty plant smell that rushed my nostrils promised rain, I hoped for Charlie’s sake it wouldn’t storm. She’d actually let me put her in her own bed that night, and though she kept glancing to her closet, she never mentioned her monster.

  I turned and scanned the dancing-dust-mote- and junk-filled room for a good place to start.

  Too bad I didn’t have a strong, awkward, and ghost-obsessed boy here to help me.

  Grinning in spite of myself, I headed to the corner that held the most promising artifacts: a stack of old steamer trunks.

  Grunting, I hauled one onto the floor, then I flipped the latches and opened the lid. Apparently, though, someone had already beaten me to this punch. The trunk, empty except for a child’s yellow-ribbon-wrapped straw hat and a smattering of papers and photos, had been looted long ago.

  So much for treasure hunting.

  I gave the papers a cursory once-over, and just as I was about to close the lid, one of the papers lining the bottom of the trunk—a photograph—caught my eye.