Page 63 of Some Kind of Haunted

I ask this from my spot on a cushy recliner that was likely made in the seventies, based on the olive green-and-orange pattern. We’ve talked about foundlings before, a lot, but not in the context of researching them.

“Of course.” Harrison is going through a box someone dropped off, full of what looks to me like mostly junk fit for a dumpster, not something to put a price tag on. This is why I don’t work here. “I suppose in the old days, it was a more frequent occurrence. The world was harsher. It was harder to communicate with people from other towns who might be missing a child, and orphans were more common all around. In the eighteen hundreds an orphan train ran through Midas, in fact.”

“An orphan train?”

He glances over and sees my confusion. “Oh, they moved orphans in overcrowded cities on the coast to the Midwest where families had more room to house them. They had specific routes. I’ve got a book on it I’ll get you.”

Harrison is forever getting me books—all on topics I don’t have much interest in and never seem to have anything to do with demons. But every afternoon I dutifully lug another stack home with a smile on my face. I’ve built a wall of them in the living room, in the hopes they might fall on Logan while he sleeps. Any day now.

“What about Nora?” I ask. “She said she was found at the clock tower.”

I try not to shudder at the idea, the clock tower looming heavy in my head the way it always does. Even a pretty tapestry of fall colors all along the river can’t make that clock tower feel less oppressive.

“Poor thing. Just a little baby, not more than a few days old.” Harrison clucks his tongue, a kind of sorrow in his tone that tells me he remembers it well. “She was left there to cry in the rain. Luckily, I came across her before she’d been there too long. It was clearly a case of abandonment.”

My heart twists at the idea of a little baby all alone in the rain. Especially when that baby was Nora. Not to mention, the clock tower wasn’t any kind of safe space, and not just because it creeps me out. It also apparently fell on a baby once.

“Did you ever try to figure out who abandoned her?” I can’t help but keep asking these questions. “Or who she belonged to?”

Harrison blows out a breath. “There was a legal process, but everyone involved knew there wasn’t anything good going to come from getting her back to the people who left her out like that.”

I don’t think this really answers the question. Did he go through the legal process? Did he know who left Nora and why? Is he deliberately not telling me—or is the town’s unofficial historian in the dark, just like me?

“What about my mother?” I press. “She was found, too. By my grandmother at that creepy mine, right?”

“That was how Amelia told it,” Harrison confirms. Though that phrasing is off, I think. Like he doesn’t believe that’s the full story. Like maybe he thinks Amelia kept things from him, which maybe means they weren’t the great buddies I’ve been thinking they were.

This only makes me want to know the full story more.

But there is clearly something touchy here. Something about foundlings as well as, maybe, my grandmother. And since I don’t want to push too hard on sore subjects when it comes to the people I like, I let it go.

I page through another diary of a Darling from long ago, since journal-keeping is apparently a Darling family tradition. This one is particularly dull. Just a woman’s list of what she baked and cleaned every day. The occasional mention of a funeral or church event or baby shower, but no mention of demons at all.

I’m not sure if it’s more or less interesting than a Darling ancestor who referred to himself as the Village Lamplighter, made it his life’s work to lobby for Midas’s streetlights, and spoke of his obsession in wildly heroic terms. Very male, in my opinion, to make a chore into an epic poem when it would just be another in a list of household tasks if he were a woman.

Something about that thought has me thinking about this deal, made by a bunch of male settlers who considered themselves protectors. But when is that ever true, the heroic stories men tell about themselves?

I look at Harrison’s hunched back. I know I’ve brought this up before, but I can’t help myself. “I get they wanted safety, but how did they even figure out how to make the deal in the first place?”

“The historical record hasn’t illuminated that for us.” Harrison chuckles. “Wouldn’t it be nice if it did?”

I look out through the windows toward a gaggle of older people clogging up the sidewalk in front of the store. “I guess I can’t believe this is all they got out of it. A steady stream of souls to slurp. Surely there was more.”

Harrison turns to face me and I can see I’ve gotten his attention more than the horror box of moldy clown figurines he’s itemizing instead of burning out back, which would have been my choice. “What more could there be?”

I shrug. “What do people making a deal really want? Power. Have you done any research into the men who made the deal? Did they prosper? Live freakishly long lives? What if there was more to the deal than the Feed?”

Harrison stands very still, though there’s a kind of gleam in his eye that tells me he’s interested. “What if there was? Do you think knowing that would help us?”

I don’t really know. I’m just thinking aloud. Trying to make sense of something incomprehensible. I don’t know anything about demons I didn’t see on a screen or read in a book. On the other hand, I know greedy men who would do anything for power. Who doesn’t?

“I guess I think that to break a deal like this, we really have to understand it,” I say.

Harrison makes a considering noise, but it’s the kind a professor makes when you’ve made a really good point. “That’s interesting. I suppose I’ve always tried to put myself in their shoes, you know. Would you make a deal like that, Lexi?”

“No, of course not.”

Harrison waves that away. “That’s knee-jerk. Think.” He’s said this to me a lot. And not the way my dad used to say it, which was more think before you act or think before you speak. Harrison really does want me to think through whatever the question or problem is before us. “What would it take to make a deal with something evil? What could they promise you that would make you consider it?”