“Sit close. Let me say it in your ear.”
He told her about the cabinet meeting. His failure to sway them to change the course of government, followed by the opening of the secret door. The boy that came out.
“What he said to you, about the twenty million souls,” Jane said after mulling his account. “Are you sure you heard it correctly?”
“I’m certain.”
“But that’s what I said to you.”
“Yes.”
“Which means he was there. So close to our bed.”
“That’s why I brought you out here. So we may speak beyond reach of their ears.”
“We ought to try again,” she said. “Perhaps your men may yet be convinced.”
“It’s too late for that. They are here to carry out their instructions just as I am.”
“Then defy them alone.”
“To what end? A vote that’s soundly defeated by Congress in a week? And they’d be seeking my resignation the week after that.”
Jane smoothed her hands over the soil in a clay pot by her feet.
“You mustn’t leave,” she said.
“I thought you’d be grateful at the suggestion.”
“I would have. Before. But I know now that if you were to go it would only leave Splitfoot here.”
“And with new residents who have no knowledge of him. They would be devoured.”
“You’re right,” she said. “On two counts.”
“Two?”
Jane pushed her hands deeper into the dirt. The coolness felt good. She had the idea that she was planting herself. Soon, in this sun, she would start to grow.
“We can’t singlehandedly alter the policy of the nation with a change of one man’s conscience, even if it’s the president’s,” Jane said. “We were wrong to think it was so, just as we were wrong to think a good deed would cast Splitfoot out of the house in any case. It might quiet him for a time, but he would stay on, wait for new opportunities to come.”
“A new administration.”
“A new family. There’s always a child to steal, or some other crack in the spirit he can find a way in through.”
Franklin raised his head high enough to look out at the mansion through the glass. He found the two windows of Bennie’s room. The curtains of one were closed, the other half-open, but nobody was there.
“So there’s nothing to be done,” he said, crouching low again.
“Nothing on this side of heaven.”
She pulled her hands from the soil. He watched the black crumbs fall from her fingers, exposing the skin beneath like roots.
“What do you mean?”
“We need to meet him not where we live,” she said, “but where he lives.”
“And where’s that?”
“My father called it the otherness. Our world is on this side, his on the other. But now he’s come to move between the two.”
She placed her hands to the sides of his head. He smelled the perfume of her bath powder, combined with the lush rot of the potting soil. Our world. His on the other. When she removed her hands he brought his own fingers to his face, smearing the dirt she’d left on his skin. As he spoke, he looked down at the black lines of his palm as if the map of a land he’d never seen before.
“Look at us,” he said with a laugh, loud and short as a sneeze. “Cowering in a hothouse, whispering about ghosts.”
“He’s not a ghost.”
“No?” He considered it a moment. “No.”
“But that may be to our advantage,” she said. “I have a thought.”
There was a creak somewhere ahead of them. They rose to find the gardener had returned. Franklin was about to ask him to leave again, but Jane started out before he could, thanking the gardener for the respite. The Pierces exited the way they’d come in, hands held this time.
“Keep your eyes down,” Jane said as they made their way toward the mansion. Franklin realized she was trying to prevent him from looking up at the Grief Room’s windows at the same time he looked up at them.
In one of the windows stood Franky. His child. The one at whose bedside Franklin had sat, had prayed to go instead of Bennie before having his prayer answered by Sir.
There was a boy in the other window as well. Younger than the other, just tall enough to peek his head over the sill. This one Franklin didn’t recognize. But Jane did.
As her husband had paused to look up, she had too. It was John. The little brother she’d sat vigil by, witnessed the moment of his passing and in it, the possibility of bringing back the dead.
“Don’t look at him,” Jane said, seeing her husband’s stare fixed on their lost son. “He’s not real. Our boy is with God.”
“He knew,” Franklin said.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Come inside. Come—”
Franklin grabbed her arm. It wasn’t meant to hurt her, but the grip made her wince.
“I wasn’t a good enough father,” he said, a gasp between each of his words.
“Nor I a mother.”
“I have thought terrible things, Jeannie. Wished terrible things.”
“And I have done them. But we must go inside now.”
She led him toward the east door, his fingers still dug into her arm. Don’t look, don’t look, she said, over and over. Franklin kept his eyes lowered, whether from her beseeching or to hide his tears she couldn’t tell.
Just before the second-floor windows of the Grief Room were angled out of view, Jane disobeyed her own command. She looked up and saw that someone stood there still. Neither Franky nor John this time. Her father. She had to squint to make out his face. Once she did, she saw that he was angry. A rage she’d never seen him show in life now directed down at her.
What broke her was the uncertainty whether he was real. While Jane could believe that her little brother and son were out of reach of demons, she wasn’t sure the same was true for Jesse Appleton, given his transgressions.
Which would mean she would never know, after her own passing, if she would find the protections of God or not.
PART THREE THE GRIEF ROOM
32
That night, Jane told him what she thought they must do. How they could pull Sir back into the darkness by visiting the darkness themselves.
She would write a letter to Kate Fox. Ask her to return to the mansion and conduct—what might it be called? Not one of her knock readings, nor a séance. Not an exorcism, certainly. Perhaps this: a cleansing. An opening of themselves of the same kind that had brought the false Bennie into the house, and also let Sir become fully realized. Open the door for me. And I can open the door for you. If Jane had been the necessary accomplice to opening the door to Splitfoot, then by the same means, she might bring him out and close it.
“But I will need help,” she whispered.
She was keeping her voice low because they were lying together in bed. And though neither of them said it aloud, they were both aware they may be under surveillance by something in the dark of the room, or inside the walls, or hovering inches over them in the gloom.
“You mean the Fox girl,” Franklin said.
“She has a gift for detecting these ways of passage. It may take some pleading—along with a healthy payment, I expect—but if she agrees, she will be our conduit.”