“Give me an example.”
He tilted his head back and tapped his fingers against the table.
“Jean Welden in Vermont. She was a student at Bennington College in the forties. She went for a hike, people saw her turn a corner of the trail, and then she vanished. Or Danny Williams, a Harvard student who was involved with Warhol’s Factory in the sixties. He went back home to Rockport, borrowed his mother’s car for a drive, and was never seen again, but his clothes were found by the ocean. Those were the stories that interested them the most, the ones that happened in Massachusetts, and the closer to Temperance Landing the better.”
“How many disappearances happened near Temperance Landing?”
“I don’t remember all of them. Five, maybe six in modern times? There were cases that went back a couple of centuries. Susan King, she’s the one I remember the most. She lived in Temperance Landing sometime in the 1960s. She’d had a stroke and could only walk with the aid of a cane. She was confined to her home. Two nurses and her niece watched over her.
“One morning one of the nurses shows up, ready for her shift. She finds that there’s a teapot and a warm cup of tea on the dining room table. But Mrs. King isn’t inside the house. Since the old lady can’t walk without a cane and is slow on her feet, and since the cup of tea is still hot, the nurse looks outside the house, reasoning that she can’t have gone far. But she’s not there and she never reappears. All she leaves behind is that cup of tea.”
“What happened to the scrapbook? I haven’t seen it in the papers I’ve looked at. Does your grandmother keep it somewhere else?” she asked.
“I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe Benjamin Hoffman kept it. Have you talked to him?”
“No, I’m trying to get in touch with his former editor.”
“Well, if he has it, he can keep it. It was creepy. Anyway, are you spooked yet?”
She pictured the New England house, with its white shutters and its cozy kitchen, and there, on the table, the cup of tea sitting on a saucer with no one to drink it. The image was more disturbing than any skeleton or hideous monster featured on the covers of pulp magazines, for it was not the presence of evil that drew the eye, but the absence of something.
“The disappearances sound creepier than stories of headless horsemen.”
“Definitely another level of morbid,” he agreed. “But I suppose Betty and my grandfather found joy in such stories.”
“Maybe they felt they had to tell them. That it would be dangerous if they were forgotten,” she said, and thought about her great-grandmother in her last few days, rambling about Piedras Quebradas. An old secret, whispered in Minerva’s ear. The ending to a story she’d never fully told before.
Noah looked at her with curiosity. “Dangerous?”
“Every fairy tale has a message hidden in it, a moral that you’ll figure out. Maybe not,” Minerva said, tracing a knot in the wooden surface of the table.
He kept his eyes fixed on her and smiled. “Do you think there’s a hidden message in Beatrice Tremblay’s writings?”
“There’s probably a hidden message in the work of all writers,” she said, and brushed a strand of hair away from her face. She was beginning to grow restless.
She crossed her arms. She didn’t like talking to people that much. Characters in books she could understand, and complicated academic arguments in papers were no problem. But people…they were a puzzle she couldn’t quite crack. Too much time talking with others took a toll on her.
Besides, she figured he was the type that always made her nervous, a person who liked to ask questions, to lift a veil and peek beneath it. She was confined; the table felt too small. She wanted to step out for a breath of fresh air, but people always took it thewrong way when she said that. They assumed she was annoyed, or that they were boring her.
There was also that nagging feeling she’d had since the morning. The portent. Maybe she was having a nervous breakdown. The damn dead rat certainly hadn’t helped her nerves, and that book on witchcraft and her stray wild thoughts made her dizzy with anxiety. She clutched the teaspoon, then let go of it and pushed it away.
“What?” he asked, laughter bubbling in his throat.
“You haven’t told me about the ghost in the factory,” she said, because she didn’t want him to know what she was really thinking.
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the coffee table. “I saw someone standing outside one time. It was a young man in overalls and a flat cap, staring at me through a window. He freaked me out. I stepped out to yell at him and tell him he was trespassing and I’d call the cops. But when I walked out, he was gone.”
“That’s not much of a ghost story. It could have been someone else who was sneaking around the factory.”
“I didn’t say it was agoodstory.”
“It’s sad, the factory,” she said, and she carefully lifted her cup of coffee to her lips.
“What do you mean?”
“The fact that it’s run-down and closed. Doesn’t your grandmother miss it?”
“You heard her, she’s going to make a high-tech hub out of its bones,” he said dismissively. “Maybe she’d care if we were in financial trouble, but my family’s always managed to dodge any money issues. We’re terribly rich.”
