“Really? A hippie?”
“Not for long. Carolyn found him and dragged him back home. He was the oldest, the heir, and she wasn’t letting him run off. He came back, got married, had me, and continued to be a great disappointment to my grandmother. Shortly before my parents died, he wanted to move us to Vermont and open an organic food store or something like that. Carolyn hated the idea, of course. She forbade him to even think about it.”
They were standing in the middle of a long, empty room with tall windows. Two of the panes had been replaced with colored glass: yellow and green. She leaned down and looked through one of them. The world outside became a shade of emerald.
“What was your mother like? Was she also a hippie at one point?”
“No. She was a Cushing, of the Cushing Manufactory. My grandmother has always been strategic about marriages. You marry someone for the cold wads of cash, not for the love. My parents spent many miserable years together before they were buried in two nice plots, side by side. It’s a family tradition, you know, to stay together with someone you can’t stand.”
She glanced down at the worn floorboards, then at him. “How did your parents die?”
“A freak accident. A truck driver had a heart attack and plowed right into them,” he said simply.
“How old were you?”
“I was eight.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, you’ve said that before,” he replied, and for a moment she thought he was irritated with her, but it was that veneer of indifference being peeled aside, showing the raw edges of the man. He shrugged. “Anyway, after that I moved in with my grandparents. Then Grandfather died, and it’s me and Carolyn now.”
Carolyn. The name was spat out, not really spoken. Noah stuffed his hands in his pockets with a smirk.
“Did you get along with your grandfather?”
The smirk still danced on his lips, but he took a breath, and the corners of his mouth trembled.
“He was okay, I suppose. It’s funny being raised by old people. The thing they talk about is the past. How good it was, how much they miss it. I guess that’s why I liked it when Betty would come over and talk to my grandfather. At least then they were talking about ghost stories, even if they scared me a little. It was something different. I still remember most of them. Want to hear one?”
“Which one was the scariest?”
“It would have to be the story of Anya Martin. She was a girl who was lured into the ocean by a mysterious singing voice and drowned. They say you can see her ghost walking around Glass Cove. It wasn’t an especially gruesome story. I suppose it’s because she was a kid that it frightened me much more than the other stories they told.”
Noah leaned down next to her to look out the dirty yellow glass pane.
“It was a bit morbid, how they sat in front of the fire and swapped ghost stories. Carolyn hated it, but I liked it, for the most part. The only thing that bothered me was the Black List.”
“What was that?”
He looked away from the window and stood up straight. “Come get a coffee with me. I’ll tell you about it.”
“You said you’d tell me about the time you saw a ghost in this building.”
“I’ll tell you about that over coffee, too,” he said breezily.
They stepped out of the building, he locked the door through which they’d let themselves in, and they headed to Temperance Landing. There was one coffee shop on the main street—P. Jessup’s Java Hut; the logo in bright yellow letters looked like it had been designed in the swinging sixties and never updated—and it was reliably packed with students during exam season. But in the summer the place seemed as deserted as the factory they’d visited. The corkboard, which was normally covered in notices advertising tutoring services or local events, had one lonesome sheet of paper promoting a reading club for children at the library.
They sat by the window. The furniture and décor inside were also of a dated psychedelic variety, from when students walking into this joint would have said “dig it” and “groovy” and found the yellow-and-orange wallpaper fashionable and vibrant instead of hideous.
“My grandfather figured we were living near the Bermuda Triangle because of the Black List. It was a sort of scrapbook. Betty and my grandfather kept a tally of missing people. Not just people near Temperance Landing: in all of New England.”
She carefully measured a spoonful of sugar while he tipped the sugar dispenser with abandon. “How long was that list? I bet there are hundreds of disappearances every year, between people who run away and crimes,” she said, sipping her coffee.
“The list had certain criteria, so you’d be disqualified if it looked like it was a run-of-the-mill teenage runaway or something thatstrongly indicated a crime. There had to be a certain element of the uncanny. I think that’s how Betty defined it.”
“Uncanny how?”
Noah shrugged. “I don’t know. The stories were weird. Made a chill go down your spine.”
