“Does anyone still live here?” she asked.
“No,” said Crystal. “Just the mice and cockroaches.”
When Nickie looked up again, the light was gone.
CHAPTER 2
__________________
The Third Floor
They put up the hoods of their jackets and dashed through the pelting rain, along the path, up the steps, and across the stone terrace to the wide, wooden door. The Yonwood real estate office had sent Crystal a key; she fitted it into the keyhole, turned it, and pushed the door open.
They stepped into a wide hall. Crystal groped for the light switch, and a light came on, revealing walls hung with gilt-framed paintings of old-fashioned people, such old paintings that they were nearly black. At the end of the hall was a flight of stairs curving up into the darkness.
Through an archway to the left was the dining room, where chairs stood around a long table. Through an archway to the right was the living room. “The front parlor,” Crystal said, turning on a lamp. It was a gloomy room: dark red curtains at the windows, floor-length; walls lined halfway up with bookcases, and above the bookcases red fuzzy wallpaper; Persian rugs on the floor, thin as sheets of burlap, patterned in dusty blue and faded red. And beside the window, a long couch with three bed pillows and two blankets neatly folded.
“This must have been where Grandfather spent his last days,” Crystal said.
“Who took care of him?” Nickie asked.
“He hired a girl, I believe. For those last few weeks, he wasn’t able to cook for himself, and he needed help to get around.” Crystal reached out and picked something up from a side table. “Look,” she said. “Here he is. Grandfather.” It was a silver-framed photograph of a smiling, silver-haired man. “You would have liked him,” Crystal said. “He was interested in everything, just like you.”
Nickie studied the man in the photograph. He was very old; his skin sagged, but his eyes were lively.
Crystal strode to a window and swept back the curtains. “What I need to do,” she said, “is make a list of the valuables.” She took a notebook out of her big purse. “I may as well start on it, as long as we’re here. I think there might be some first editions among the books.”
“I’m going to look around, okay?” said Nickie. “I want to see everything.”
Her aunt nodded.
Nickie went back through the dining room and through a swinging door that led to the most ancient kitchen she had ever seen. It had a smell so indescribably repellent that she hurried away down a passage that led behind the front parlor.
There she found two bedrooms, each with a towering four-poster bed of black carved wood and a great black chest of drawers topped with a mirror in a heavy frame. Up on the second floor were four more bedrooms. She pulled open a few drawers, expecting to find them empty. But they were filled with folded clothes and jewelry boxes and hairbrushes and old bottles of dried-up perfume. It looked as if no one had ever cleaned these rooms out after their occupants had gone away or died.
There was a study on the second floor, too, where a computer sat on a desk, and a lot of file folders and papers and books lay scattered around the room. Her great-grandfather must have worked here. He’d been a college professor before he retired, but Nickie wasn’t sure what he’d been a professor of. Some sort of science.
It was strange, she thought. Until just a few days ago, this house had been lived in continuously for over 150 years. It was never vacant, and it was never sold—her ancestors had always owned it. Children had grown up here. Old people had died. The house had been so full of life for so long that it probably felt like a living thing itself—and now, in its sudden emptiness, knowing its family no longer wanted it, she imagined it must feel frightened and lonely. Well, I want you, she thought. I think you’re wonderful.
Remembering that there was a third story, Nickie looked for another stairway. She found it behind a door to the left of the big front stairs—these weren’t broad and polished but narrow and plain. There was no handrail along the wall.
At the top was a closed door. She opened it to find herself in a hall with two doors on each side. She looked into all the rooms. Two of them were crammed full of stuff: suitcases and boxes and hatboxes, enormous old trunks with leather straps, stacks of papers and portraits in broken frames and mildewed books and paper-wrapped packages and grocery bags stuffed with who knows what, all of it draped in swags of dusty cobwebs.
The third room was a tiny bathroom that hadn’t been cleaned for a while.
But the fourth room was wonderful. It was big and airy, with windows on two sides. The tower formed one corner of it, making a circular alcove with windows all around and a wide window seat running beneath them—the perfect place for sitting with a book on a sunny day, or with lamplight over your shoulder on a dark day like this one. Nickie guessed that this room had been a nursery, because old toys were jumbled into cabinets along one wall. A rolled-up rug lay at one end of the room, and by the windows was a rocking chair. At the far end of the room stood an iron bed, neatly made, as if just waiting for her.
This would be her room, she decided. She loved it already.
As she was about to go back into the hall, a sound stopped her. It was a sort of squeak, or cry, cut short as if someone had clapped a hand over the squeaker’s mouth. Nickie stood still and listened. At first she heard nothing—just the patter of the rain on the windows. She was about to move on when she heard it again—two squeaks this time, and a bump. It seemed to be coming from the closet.
She froze, suddenly remembering the light she’d seen from the street. What if someone dangerous was hiding in the closet? A burglar surprised in the middle of a burglary? Or a homeless person who’d sneaked into the house? Or even a terrorist? She hesitated.
There was another squeak—very faint, but definitely coming from the closet. In a choked voice, Nickie said, “Who’s in there?”
No answer.
Nickie’s curiosity took over. This happened to her a lot. Her hunger for finding things out was so strong that it overcame caution and even common sense. So now, although she was afraid, she dashed to the closet, flung open the door, and leapt back.
Inside, pressed up against the rear wall, half hidden by shirts and dresses dangling from hangers, was a tall, thin girl with wide, terrified eyes. Her hands were wrapped around the muzzle of a small, wildly squirming dog.
CHAPTER 3
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The Girl in the Closet
Nickie stared. The girl stared back. The dog wriggled in her arms and paddled its hind legs frantically.
“Who are you?” Nickie asked.
The girl hunched up her shoulders and craned her head toward Nickie. She had a long face and thin brown straggly hair. Her front teeth were a little crooked. “Please,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t tell that I’m here. Please don’t tell.” The girl stepped cautiously out of the closet. “I’m not supposed to be here,” she said. The dog wrenched its muzzle out of her hands and yelped. She grabbed it again. She was wearing jeans and a limp green sweater. Nickie could see that the girl was older than she was—a teenager.
“But why are you here?” said Nickie.
“I took care of the old man,” the girl said. She spoke in a trembly whisper. “For the last six months, till he died. But now I don’t have nowhere to go, and if they find me, they’ll put me in a home. And take him away.” She ducked her chin toward the dog. “So I need to stay here till I can figure out what to do next.”
“What’s your name?” Nickie asked. She spoke in a whisper, too.
“Amanda Stokes,” said the girl. “What’s yours?”
Nickie told her. “Arthur Green was my great-grandfather,” she said. “My family owns this house now.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Amanda. She had a worried-looking face, as if she’d been worrying all her life. “Are you going to come and live here?”
“Yes,” said Nickie firmly. “But not ri
ght away.”
“So you won’t tell that I’m here?”
Nickie considered. Would it be wrong to keep this girl a secret? She didn’t want to do anything wrong. But it seemed to her that telling on Amanda would cause more harm than not. What would it matter if she stayed here a few days longer?
“I can live here real quietly,” Amanda said. The dog jerked in her arms and tried to yelp. “Even with him. He’s pretty quiet, usually.”
“What’s his name?”
“Otis. I found him a couple days ago out by the dump. I know he doesn’t have no owner, because he didn’t have a collar and he was real dirty. I washed him in the laundry sink.”
Nickie scratched the dog behind his small, pointed ears. He was a light-colored dog, a sort of strawberry blond, with round brown eyes. His fur grew in a way that made his face look like a ragged sunflower.
From somewhere downstairs came Crystal’s voice. “Nickie! Where are you?”
Nickie dashed into the hall and shouted down. “Upstairs!”
“Come on down!” called her aunt. “Let’s get settled in.”
She went back into the bedroom. “Okay,” she said. “I won’t tell about you, but you have to be really quiet. Stuff some rags under the door—this door and the hall door both. I’ll try and keep my aunt from coming up here. If she’s going to, I’ll try to warn you.”
“Oh, thank you,” Amanda said. “Thank you a lot. It’s just for a couple days. I’m looking for a job, and when I get one I’ll find me a place of my own.”
Nickie nodded. “Goodbye,” she said, and she dashed back down the stairs.
For dinner that night, they had tomato soup from a can Crystal found in a cupboard. They sat at the big dining room table and ate while the rain beat on the windows. On a pad of paper, Crystal started making a list of all the things she’d have to do to get the house ready for sale: Call cleaning service. Call auction house. Call salvage place. Talk to lawyer. Call painters. Call plumbers. It was clear to Nickie that Crystal would be spending a lot of time on the phone.
“Crystal,” Nickie said. “I don’t see anything so awful about Greenhaven. Why do you say it’s awful?”
“It’s huge and dark and impossible to clean. The kitchen is unspeakable. The plumbing is ancient. The whole place smells like mice. That’s just for a start.”
“But it could be repaired, couldn’t it?”
“With great effort and expense.” Crystal went back to her list. Schedule open house, she wrote. She tapped a long red fingernail on the table, thinking.
Crystal wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she always wore stylish clothes and fixed herself up—nail polish, earrings, makeup. Her hair was a sort of streaky blondish color that required frequent visits to the beauty salon. She’d been married twice. First there’d been Uncle Brent, and later there’d been Uncle Brandon. Now there was no one, which was probably one reason Crystal was more snappish and impatient than usual.
“Crystal,” said Nickie, “if you could live in any kind of house, what kind would it be?”
Crystal looked up. She gazed at Nickie blankly for a second, her mind elsewhere. Then she said, “Well, I can tell you what it wouldn’t be. It wouldn’t be an old pile like Greenhaven. And it wouldn’t be a dinky, tacky little apartment like the one I live in now.”
“What, then?” said Nickie.
“A gracious house,” said Crystal. “Big rooms, big windows, a big garden. And—” She leaned forward and smiled a wry little smile. “A nice big man to live in it with me.”
Nickie laughed. “Another husband?” she said.
“The first two weren’t quite right,” said Crystal.
“Would you want to have a dog?”
“A dog? Heavens no. Dogs ruin furniture.”
“But if a dog just showed up and needed a home, would you keep it?”
“Certainly not. It would go straight to the pound to wait for a happy life with someone else.” She spooned up the last of her soup. “Why are you asking about dogs?”
“Just wondering,” said Nickie, with a sinking heart. “I like dogs.”
After dinner, Crystal went to take a bath and Nickie dashed up to the third floor. She tapped on the door of the nursery, and Amanda, in her pajamas, opened it. Otis stood on his hind legs to greet Nickie, and she hugged and petted him. “Everything okay?” she asked Amanda.
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “I’m being real quiet.”
“Good,” said Nickie. “Because I found out Crystal doesn’t like dogs. We have to be extremely careful.”
“Okay,” said Amanda. “I’ll put him under the covers with me tonight.”
Nickie gave Otis one more pat and hurried back downstairs. For a while, she and Crystal sat in the front parlor and watched the news.
A local announcer was talking. “Several residents in Hickory Cove and Creekside,” he said, “have reported signs of unusual activity in nearby wooded areas. A hiker claims to have caught a glimpse, in a remote part of the woods, of a man wearing a white or light tan coat. Residents of the area are advised to be alert to anything out of the ordinary, including unknown persons arriving in town; evidence of tampering with buildings, pipelines, or electrical equipment; and strange behavior of any kind.”
Then the president came on. Nickie didn’t like listening to him because his voice always sounded too smooth. He said something about the Phalanx Nations and missile deployment and fourteen countries and Level Seven alerts. Crystal frowned. “It gets closer every day,” she said.
“What does?”
Crystal just shook her head. “Big trouble,” she said.
The president ended with his usual sentence: “Let us pray to God for the safety of our people and the success of our endeavors.” Nickie always wondered about this. The idea seemed to be that if you prayed extremely hard—especially if a lot of people prayed at once—maybe God would change things. The trouble was, what if your enemy was praying, too? Which prayer would God listen to?
She sighed. “Crystal,” she said, “I’m so sick of the Crisis.”
“I know,” said Crystal. She flicked off the TV. “We all are. But it doesn’t help to worry. All we can do is keep our wits about us. Not let fear take over. And try to be good little people and not add to the badness.” She smiled at Nickie and stood up. “Tired?”
Nickie nodded.
“Which room would you like to sleep in?” Crystal asked. “You can have first pick.”
The room she really wanted was the one on the third floor, but right now it was occupied. So Nickie chose one of the bedrooms on the first floor, and Crystal took the one next to it. They found sheets and blankets in a linen closet and made up the beds, and they unpacked their suitcases and hung their clothes in the closets. Nickie put her nightie on and slid between the sheets of the enormous bed. She thought about Amanda and the little dog, hidden away upstairs. They would be going to bed now, too. It would be nice, she thought, to sleep with a dog curled up next to you.
The bed’s black posts rose toward the ceiling; in the darkness, they looked like two thin soldiers standing guard. Nickie wondered who this room had belonged to in years past. Who else had lain here looking at those posts, and at the violet-flowered wallpaper, and the stains on the ceiling? She wished she could know about their lives—not just her grandfather’s but all the lives of this house, all those ancestors she’d never known.
This is how Nickie was: she wanted to know about everybody and everything—not just encyclopedia-type information, but ordinary things like what people did at their jobs and what their houses looked like inside and what they talked about. When she passed two or three people walking together on the street, she always hoped to catch an intriguing bit of conversation, like “I found her lying there dead!” Or “…and he left that very day without telling a soul and was never seen again!” But almost always, all she heard were the dull, connecting bits of the conversation, things like “And so I said to her…” and “Yeah, I think so, too,??
? and “So it’s really kind of like…” And by the time they said whatever came next, they were out of earshot.
She also wanted to know about things that weren’t so ordinary, strange extraordinary things like, Were there people on other planets? Was ESP real? Were there still places on Earth where no one had ever been? Were there animals that no one had yet discovered? In a magazine, she had come across a photograph of a dust mite taken with an electron microscope. A dust mite was much too small to see with the naked eye, but when you took its picture and magnified it many times, you could see that it was as complicated and weird as a monster in a science-fiction movie, with fangs and feelers and bristles.
When Nickie saw this picture, she suddenly understood that a whole other world existed right alongside the world of things she could see. In the dust under the furniture, in between the strands of the carpet, even crawling on her very own skin and inside her guts were creatures of unbelievable strangeness. She loved knowing this. She took the dust mite picture with her everywhere she went.
Now she listened to the rain pattering steadily at the windows and closed her eyes. She thought about the spirits of all the people who had lived here. Maybe they were still hovering around, wondering who was coming next. It’s going to be me, she told them silently. I’m going to live here. And this reminded her of something she’d forgotten to do. She sat up and turned the light back on. In the drawer of the bedside table, she rummaged around until she found a stubby pencil and a scrap of paper. On the paper she wrote:
1. Keep Greenhaven.
2. Fall in love.
3. Help the world.
Her three goals. She was determined to accomplish them all.
CHAPTER 4
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Break-In
Sometime in the middle of that night, as the rain fell and Nickie slept, someone—or something—came out of the forest above the town. The night was dark and moonless, and whoever it was came so quietly that no one heard him. Wayne Hollister, who ran the Black Oak Inn at the north end of town, glanced out the window when he got up to go to the bathroom around 2:00 a.m., and he was pretty sure he saw something moving on the road, but he didn’t have his glasses on, so he couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe a man in a raincoat.