Page 31 of Haunted

“He’s fine,” Mom says. “Shelley’s in my book club. He moved away, that’s all. Travels a lot for work. She doesn’t talk about him much, but when she does, she’s very proud.”

Travels a lot. I turn that over in my mind. Not DC, then. Not New York.

“I had to do a school report on the Fairhaven fire back in eighth grade,” Bree says, “Parker was one of the people I focused on. Do you know, they still don’t know for sure what sparked the original forest fire?”

“It was dry that year,” Dad says.

“And then there’s the Curse of Denning Court,” Bree continues, because she’s seventeen and has no off switch. “So, like, thirty-one people died in the fire, right? But if you track what happened to the survivors from Denning Court specifically. Two of them have died of cancer. And they count the streets backing onto Denning too, so the lady who used to babysit the Bishop kids is on there—”

“Martha Gillibrand died?” I ask. My stomach drops.

“Like, five years ago,” Bree says. “The conspiracy people track all of it. Every time something bad happens to someone from that street, they add it to the list. It’s got this whole subreddit.”

“It’s nonsense,” Dad says. “Just people with too much time and not enough sense. You have a traumatic event like that, of course people are going to scatter. Of course there’s going to be health problems. That’s not a curse. That’s just what happens.”

Martha Gillibrand. I think of her at the wake, pulling me aside to ask me my intentions. I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t have a good answer for her. And now it’s too late.

“Do you think you could get Parker’s email from his aunt?” I ask Mom. “I’d really like to catch up.”

I’m surprising myself, that’s for sure. Oh, look, there’s a sword, Lance. Would you like to throw yourself on it? Why yes. Yes I would. “There’s so many people I’d like to reconnect with,” I add quickly, because now I need to make it look casual. “Remember Toby Gilham? He’s a pharmacist at the CVS now. Have any of you seen Rochelle Lewis?”

Nobody has. I keep going anyway, like I’m reading off a roster, making it sound like those were my glory days when I couldn’t have cared less about Farley or anybody in it. Dad rescues me by complimenting Mom’s cooking.

I spring up to clear the table, but Dad stops me. “Before you go. You said you wanted crates for the move—there’s a stack of them down in the basement.”

I follow him down. He shifts boxes of Christmas decorations and an ancient sled that’s seen better days. Then he stops, with his hand on a small carton, taped shut and furred with dust, FROM THE TRUCK written across the lid in marker.

“I didn’t want to make a thing out of it,” Dad says. “I found this behind the seat of the truck when I took it in after the fire. I put it down here and I forgot it was there until I went looking for the Christmas decorations last year. It’s Parker’s. But by the time we got the truck back, he was long gone, and you were about to join up, and I didn’t want to talk about something that hurt you so much. But this needs to go to Shelley Bishop at the very least. She’ll see it gets to him.”

“I thought Mom and Shelley were friends.”

“They are. But I think you need to be the one who gives it to her.” He hands it to me. “It’ll make it less awkward when you see each other on the street if you go and say hi first.”

“I’ll take it,” I say, too fast. I try to work out which window Parker pointed at from the Bean Stop courtyard, but I can’t. “Mom’ll have to give me her address.”

“When you’re ready.”

“Have you looked inside?”

He shakes his head. I know I should resist the temptation, but I’m too greedy for him. I sit down on the ancient rocking chair that’s been in this basement as long as I can remember. The tape is curling. I pull it off and open the box.

Sketchbooks. Three of them, heavy, hardcover. They must have been in the truck when I drove Parker out of the fire. He grabbed what he could and I stowed it behind the seat. Then the world kept going. Nobody thought to look.

I open one at random. Then I don’t turn the page for a long time.

Faces. Dozens of them. His teachers, rendered in careful pencil. His friends—Pete, Rochelle—caught in the middle of laughing or talking. His mother, Angela, drawn from what must have been the kitchen table, her face tired but focused on something in front of her. Elliott, asleep on a couch with one arm hanging off the edge and his mouth open. I saw that boy twice. Once with his hands clamped over his ears and the sound coming out of him like something being torn, and once hanging out a car window telling us he’d beaten us. Parker saw this. Parker sat and watched his brother sleep and got out a pencil. I have to put the book down on my knees for a second. And me. Page after page of me. In profile, from across a classroom. Grinning at something off the page. Looking down at my hands. I didn’t know he was drawing me. I didn’t know any of this existed.

“Jesus,” I say. “Dad, these are his sketchbooks. From before the fire.”

Dad clears a spot on one of the dining chairs he’s been meaning to fix forever and sits down. “That boy lost everything. Every photograph, every stitch of clothing, everything his mother and his grandmother ever put away for him.” He rubs the back of his neck. “This is all he’s got. And it’s been in my basement.”

There are a few other things in the box—a plastic bag of papers with Angela’s name on them, insurance or bills by the look of them, and a spiral address book with a rubber band around it, so stuffed with loose things that it won’t shut flat. I don’t look closely. They’re not mine to read. None of this is mine to read, and I’ve already been through three sketchbooks.

“He’ll want these,” Dad says quietly. “Whatever else, he’ll want these.”

I nod, but I’m not listening. I’m looking at a sketch of myself from the back row of a classroom, drawn by a boy who was watching me when I didn’t know I was being watched.

What else didn’t I know?