Page 98 of Haunted

There are photographs still on the walls—Alice and Rita on a beach somewhere, Alice much younger with a baby on her hip—and a bookcase mostly emptied out.

“It’s on her iPad, I think,” Rita says. “Give me a minute.”

While she’s gone I look at the boxes, because there is nothing else to look at. The nearest one is full of greeting cards. Not a few. Hundreds, in bundles with elastic bands round them, and there are more still standing along the shelf above it.

“Thank you cards,” Rita says, coming back in with the iPad. “From the women at the university. Mom fought for maternity leave, and she was ferocious about it—she’d fight the department heads for every single week they were entitled to and then some.” She looks at the box with an expression I recognize as pride. “That was the part of the job she loved. There are boxes and boxes of them going back years. She was always fighting for what was right, and always thinking about others. She was right, you know.”

“About?”

“She said, when she took the videos, that the insurance would stiff us if we didn’t have video. Well, she was right. And because she had the foresight to take those videos, the Dares were able to get a full settlement. Such a shame about him. He was a nice guy.”

“What happened to him?”

“Booze, mostly.” She taps something. “He was never the same after the fire. Mixed some booze and some sleeping pills and by the time anybody found him it was too late to bring him back. It was probably accidental. That’s the shame of it.” She sighs. “Look, it’s here. It’s just enormous and this wifi has been possessed since August.” She looks up. “Give me your email and I’ll send you a link tonight when it’s behaving. I promise. I’ll do it before I go to bed.”

I hand her one of my business cards and underline the email on it, and then go to my car, turn on the engine, and stare up at what Denning Court has turned itself into in its absence.

It is a completely ordinary street. Somebody has put a basketball hoop up over a garage. There is a wheelie bin out at the end of a driveway and a hosepipe coiled on a lawn and a bird doing something in a gutter.

The houses are in the wrong places and the wrong colors. The trees all look young. Even the road surface is new—they must have relaid the whole cul-de-sac after the fire, because it is black and smooth and unmarked and I remember it gray and cracked with a crooked seam running past our mailbox that I used to ride my bike over on purpose.

There is nothing left here. Not one single thing. The only place Denning Court still exists is inside my own head, and I cannot check my own head against anything, because everybody who could tell me whether I’m remembering it right is dead.

Except one.

I sit up.

One person alive sat at our dining table. One person met my grandmother, and my mother, and heard Elliott scream. There is exactly one living witness to the first seventeen years of my life and I threw him away on Saturday night with a key wedged under a doorframe. Not because he was violent. Because he was right.

Jonny Bishop was never in that house. Jonny Bishop came from nowhere. I built him so that nothing could reach me, and it worked. The price is that he has no right to any of it—no right to grieve them, no right to be angry at her, no right to miss a fourteen-year-old boy. Jonny Bishop never even met them.

But Parker Bishop did. And I have spent ten years telling everybody that Parker doesn’t exist anymore, and Lance stood in a classroom and said I miss him and I told him it was just a name.

It was never just a name. It was the only part of me that was ever actually here.

I put the car into gear and drive back down Hemingway for the last time, and when I pull into my aunt’s assigned parking, I don’t go home. I go onto the campus.

The Whitfield building is quiet at lunchtime. I go up to the second floor and through the glass doors into the Comptroller’s Office, and Joe, the terrifying receptionist, looks up from behind the reception desk with the expression of a man who has just found something on his shoe.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

“I’m here to see Lance Broussard. Is he in his office?”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Does that affect whether or not he’s in his office?”

“That’s a no, then. Please make an appointment.”

“When is he available?”

Joe doesn’t look at his screen. “He has had a cancellation next Thursday at eight.”

“You’re making that up. Why don’t you call him and tell him I’m here?”

“Why don’t you?” he shoots back. “If you’re that close.”

“Because I need to see him in person.”