House of Secrets (4 page)

“Ms. Dobson, we’ll take it. Please draw up the papers and we’ll close as soon as possible.”

“Wonderful!” Diane opened a silver case to give Dr. Walker a business card. Mrs. Walker hugged her husband. Eleanor asked, “What’s that mean? We got the house? We’re going to
live here
?”

Brendan stepped forward. “Why is it so cheap?”

“Bren!” Mrs. Walker snapped.

“It’s the same price as an apartment. Less, even. It doesn’t add up. What are you trying to pull?”

“Your family’s inquisitiveness is welcome,” said Diane. “Brendan, the owners are trying to liquidate their investment. Like many families they’ve fallen on hard times, and they’re willing to drop the price to get out—especially if it means helping others in a tough spot. You may have noticed that there’s no For Sale sign on the lawn. The owners aren’t looking to sell to any family—they’re looking for the
right
family. A family in need.”

She smiled. Brendan hated being the object of her pity. It would have been one thing if she only pitied him—that he could deal with—but she pitied all of them. And that was because of his father. It was so embarrassing. Dr. Walker was trying to do it all backward: reverse-engineer his reputation by getting an impressive house to land an impressive job at an impressive hospital with an administration that was impressed by his renown and willing to overlook “the incident.” But he couldn’t even impress this real estate agent. Brendan felt like he’d be better off on his own, or maybe at boarding school like some of his friends. But there was no way his parents could afford boarding school.

Diane led the Walkers downstairs, through the great hall, to the front entrance. “I think you’ll find Kristoff House a wonderful home.”

“We shouldn’t take it,” Brendan whispered to Cordelia. “You know Dad’s not thinking right these days. There’s something fishy here.”

“You’re just scared.”

“What? Me? No.”

“Sure you are. You don’t want to live with that creepy angel on the lawn.”

“Excuse me? There was a bat skeleton in the attic and I wasn’t scared of that.”

“So? Doesn’t prove anything. Nell, wasn’t Bren scared of that statue?”

Eleanor nodded.

“I rest my case.”

There was no way Brendan was going to let Cordelia have the last word. As his family walked out the front door and headed down the pebbled path, he split off and ran to the stone angel, pulling out his phone to take another picture. He’d put his arm around the thing and grin and show the world he wasn’t frightened of a hunk of rock with moss accents.

Except the stone angel wasn’t there.

Brendan suppressed the urge to call out. Maybe he was just confused. Maybe the statue was on the
other
side of the house. But no: He remembered the broken hand was the right hand, and that it was a few inches from the exterior wall.
Who moved the statue?

Brendan knelt to investigate the pine needles that carpeted the ground. There should have been a clear imprint where the base of the statue had been, where the needles were flat and damp, maybe with pill bugs scurrying around, but it looked like the statue had simply never been there.

Suddenly a face appeared. Inches from Brendan’s own, its voice hissing like a swarm of wasps leaving hell.

“You don’t belong here.”

S
he was a bone-white old woman, as tall as the stone angel, bald, with cracked lips pulled back over brown teeth. She stared at Brendan with glistening steel-blue eyes. She wore dirty layers of rags and no shoes; her toenails were amber, encrusted with soil. She was the crone that Brendan had feared, but a hundred times worse, and when she spoke, her breath was fouler than six-month-old compost.

“Leave this place!”

She wrapped her hand around Brendan’s wrist. It felt like a rope. He tried to pull away, but she held him fast . . . and then she looked into his eyes. “Who are you?” she asked more quietly.

“B-Brendan Walker,” he said.

“Walker?” she repeated.

Brendan had never been so scared. Not scared stiff—beyond that, scared into action, like someone had shot a spike of adrenaline into his back. He twisted and wrested his hand free. He ran, spit flying out the side of his mouth.
“Mom! Dad!”

Surely they’d seen her: She was a six-foot baldy with the body-mass index of a skeleton; she’d be tough to miss. He reached his family back at the Toyota after running across the lawn, which suddenly seemed to be the size of a football field.

“Bren, what’s wrong?”

“Are you okay?!”

“I—you guys—you didn’t—?” Brendan looked back. Suddenly the whole scene looked much smaller and safer to him. It couldn’t have been more than fifty feet from the sidewalk to the house. The whole time he’d been running, his heart pounding in his chest, still seeing the old crone’s face in front of him . . . that had been only seconds.

And the woman was gone.

The sun had moved. The side of Kristoff House was bathed in shadow. The stone angel might have been there or it might not. Shadows hid all sorts of things.

“Brendan . . . ? Did something happen?” That was Cordelia. She was looking at him seriously; she knew he was freaked. Brendan started to explain—but what would be the point? He couldn’t prove anything. He didn’t want to sound like a little kid.

“Nothing,” he said. “I just . . . I thought I lost this.”

He turned on his PSP. He had never been happier to see the title screen of
Uncharted
. Back in a world that he understood and controlled, he slipped into the car.

A funny thing happened to Brendan on the drive back from 128 Sea Cliff Avenue. Every second that he put between himself and the old crone, he became more and more convinced that she hadn’t been so scary after all. Dressed in rags, barefoot, with bad teeth . . . obviously she was a homeless lady. The more Brendan thought about it, the more it made sense: She lived in the yard.
That
was why the price was so low. She’d been spying on the Walkers, and she’d hidden when they’d spotted her—that was the darting shadow that Eleanor had seen. She loved the angel statue—she was obviously mentally disturbed; maybe she talked to it—and so she moved it (
never mind how)
when she saw Brendan and his sisters investigating. Then, when she had the chance, she snuck up on him to scare him, to drive his family away. And she asked his name because . . . because she was crazy! What other reason did there need to be?

Brendan kept telling himself this as he went through the hypnotic motions of gaming, and soon he was not only convinced that the old crone wasn’t dangerous or supernatural (
supernatural,
come on
); he was determined to go back and drive her from the property. After all, Brendan Walker wasn’t somebody you could just push around. He was practically JV lacrosse.

T
he Walkers had been renting since “the incident.” Their new apartment was much smaller than their old house, especially the kitchen, which was more of a corner than a room. That meant less cooking and more cheap takeout. The night after seeing Kristoff House, Dr. Walker convened a family meeting over Chinese food in the living room.

“So what’s up?” Brendan asked.

“I just want to make sure you’re all comfortable with our decision to buy Kristoff House.”

“You mean
your
decision,” said Brendan. “We had no part in it.”

“Fine,” said Dr. Walker. “But speak now if you have a problem.”

“If we moved in, wouldn’t it be Walker House?” asked Eleanor.

“I think we should call it One twenty-eight Sea Cliff Avenue, its proper address,” said Mrs. Walker. “Otherwise it sounds like we’re moving into something that belongs to someone else.”

It does belong to someone else,
thought Brendan.
The old crone.
But he didn’t want to sound scared. He said, “I like it fine. Better than this dump.”

“I like it too,” Eleanor said. She was using a sauce-dipped spring roll to gather up as much shredded carrots and celery as possible; it looked like the spring roll was wearing a wig. “The faster we move in there, the faster we can get Misty.”

“Nell, how many times do we have to go through this—”

“But Mom
said
I could get her. Mom made me picture her—”

“You’ll get your horse someday,” Mrs. Walker said, “if you eat your spring roll and stop playing with it.”

Eleanor tackled the spring roll in four huge bites. She looked at her mother and spoke with a full mouth: “Do I get my horse now?”

Everybody laughed—even Brendan. You’d have a hard time getting them to admit it, but the Walkers liked dinners this way, quick and greasy, instead of with cloth napkins with rings.

“What about you, Cordelia?” Dr. Walker asked.

“Let me show you something.” Cordelia ducked out of the room and returned with an old book. It had a black cover, no dust jacket, and gold lettering nearly worn off the spine.

“
Savage Warriors
by Denver Kristoff,” Cordelia announced. “First edition, 1910. I took it from the library. And look!” She pulled out her MacBook Air. “On Powell’s Books they’re selling this for five hundred dollars! So that library alone is worth, like, the closing cost of the house!”

“Cordelia,” Brendan said, “you
stole
from the Kristoff House library?”

“You don’t steal from libraries. You borrow. Not that you would know.”

“No, your brother’s right,” said Dr. Walker. “It’s not our house yet, and you shouldn’t have taken that—”

“That’s right you shouldn’t!” Brendan stood up. “Somebody might be really mad at you for stealing! You ever think of that?”

“Seriously, Bren?” Cordelia smirked. “Since when do you have a moral compass?”

Brendan didn’t answer—partly because he didn’t know what a moral compass was, partly because he was terrified of the old crone. Maybe she was a homeless lady, but maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she
lived
at 128 Sea Cliff Avenue. Maybe she didn’t take kindly to curious girls stealing books from her library. Brendan almost spoke up then about seeing her, about how he could still feel her hand around his wrist, about how that wrist felt
cold
even now, about how she had said “Walker” like it meant something . . . but he didn’t want to get made fun of. He would handle the crone himself when they moved in. Like a man.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just . . . it’s not right to steal.”

“That’s true,” Dr. Walker said, “and Cordelia, you’ll be putting that book back next week.”

“What happens next week?”

“We’re moving in.”

S
partan Movers was a moving company in San Francisco, the name of which was a source of huge embarrassment for Cordelia. “Why don’t we just go with Low-Rent Movers?” she asked her mom. But when she saw the truck, she realized it wasn’t
spartan
like self-denying; it was
Spartan
like a citizen of ancient Sparta, with a plumed helmet for a logo.

The Spartan truck pulled up in front of Kristoff House, and a trio of burly men got out. The Walkers were already there, eager to get their stuff moved in. Brendan was more eager than anyone: He had visions of turning his attic bedroom into a teenage man cave where he could happily ignore the rest of his family. He started trailing one of the movers as the man carried a bag of lacrosse equipment into the house.