My cheek twitched.
“If you’re so worried about it,” I said, “come with me. Atleast then you can do recon and tell Grim what’s happening with his house.”
Sadie opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. She looked toward the bedrooms.
“Do you think Dad will be okay?”
“Here by himself? Why wouldn’t he be? You leave me here alone all the time.”
“Yeah, but people are scared of you.”
And they weren’t scared of Dad. They just hated him.
“Fine,” Sadie said, and followed me out.
Grimshaw House had exactly thirteen ghosts.
A conveniently spooky number. It made a cute tourist story. Thirteen ghosts, all of them Grimshaws or servants of Grimshaws:
Edward Grimshaw, the one who built the house, who sometimes sat in the rocking chair on the front porch;
Lillian, his wife, who could be seen falling from the upstairs window with her white dress billowing;
Edward Jr., stumbling down the upstairs hallway with a bloody wound in his gut from an intruder;
Edward Jr.’s five children, four of whom died of horrible diseases and one of drowning in the lake;
Hattie, Edward Jr.’s sister-in-law, who committed suicide at the age of fifty-three after her husband died in a railroad accident;
Malcolm, Hattie’s grandson, looking out the back window over Addams Lake;
Gerald Mosker, the cook;
Martha Lansing, the maid, and a distant relative of Officer Jack Lansing;
And a nameless gardener who could sometimes be glimpsed around the corner of the house.
These were the stories. I had never seen these ghosts; the house itself had a faint twinge of the supernatural about it, and Mom had guessed it was because the Foresters had lived there for a short time after Forester House burned down in the eighties. She’d checked inside, though, and hadn’t found any firestarter entrance. The residual feeling was enough for all the ghosts in the Goldmine to give the house a wide berth, never coming within the confines of the yard.
When we arrived, the sun was setting and the sky behind Grimshaw House was deep orange, and the front windows were dark. TheDead Men Walkingvan was parked out front, and Eric the tech guy and Mike the sidekick stood nearby with the producer. The front door of the house was open to a gloomy hallway, giving the face of the house the impression of a distressed old man trying to throw up something he shouldn’t have eaten. A police car sat in the driveway, and Norm stood on the crumbling porch with his arms crossed over his chest. He kept a sharp eye on the small crowd of people across thestreet, many dressed inDMWmemorabilia and taking video with their phones. A lot of them had set up shop on the lawns of the houses there, spreading out with their coolers and their lawn chairs. I recognized the college kids I’d pointed in the wrong direction on our way to the mine. One person even had an umbrella. I wanted to ask if they knew they were camping on someone’s private property, and that the interesting thing going on across the street didn’t give them license to hang out wherever they wanted. A few ghosts stood over them, and though they had no expressions on their faces, their presence felt very purposeful. Disapproving.
Grim sat on the hood of his car a little ways down the street. I parked the Chevelle behind him. He wasn’t looking at the house; he faced northwest, toward Black Creek Woods and Piper Mountain.
Sadie touched his arm so we didn’t startle him. I wasn’t sure it was possible to startle Grim. He swung his head around like an owl and smiled sadly at us.
“What’s the matter, Grimmie?” I asked, though we all already knew.
“Nothing, really,” he said. “My problems aren’t that big when compared to others’.”
Being forced to live with your abusive uncle who made you work at his stupid, dangerous junkyard because you had no money to live anywhere else or get a better education,and having to watch people tromp around your family’s home when you weren’t even allowed inside, and knowing that some jerk in the town hall lost the papers that might make your life five billion times better didn’t seem like a small problem to me, but Grim was fundamentally a better person than I was.
Grim turned toward the house and the rest of us followed his gaze. Tad Thompson appeared at the front door, trailed by Leila, who held two cups of coffee and looked like she was going to dump one of them over Tad’s head if he didn’t stop talking.
“I feel bad for her,” I said. “If I had to spend all day with that guy, I’d end up murdering him.”
“Maybe don’t say that out loud,” Sadie said.
“Oh, right, I’m a cold-blooded killer.”
