After Adrienne had gone, Trenton stood for a while in the quiet, listening hard to the familiar sounds of the floors creaking and the house settling minutely on its foundations—listening, too, for a voice, a whisper, a word of forgiveness, maybe. But there was nothing.
He cleared his throat. He knew his mother and sister couldn’t hear him, but he still felt embarrassed speaking out loud. “Eva?” he said, and then, a little louder, “Eva?”
There was only silence. He wondered whether she was upset at him, because he hadn’t gone through with killing himself. But no. The silence was dull and complete—not even the faintest rustle or whisper or creak. The ghosts were gone, or he had stopped hearing them. He wondered if it had been like a virus, and he had gotten it out of his system when he puked.
Was it because he had refused them? Because at the last moment, he had refused to cross over?
“I’m sorry, Eva,” he said. “I let you down.” He hated to think of the ghosts trapped in the walls, with no one to listen or hear.
But the problem with death was that you could never get tired of it and go home. No one would ever come and put a jacket around your shoulders, as Detective Rogers had done with Vivian, and put you in the backseat of a warm car and send you back to being alive. If only bodies were like rooms, and people could pass in and out of them at will.
He wondered whether Minna was almost finished digging. The hole didn’t have to be very deep to bury an urn. He moved to the window to check, but his view was obstructed. There was a white work van parked in the driveway. Connelly Roofing was stenciled in black on its side. Connelly. The name seemed familiar somehow.
“Hello?” a man called out. Before Trenton could go to the door, he heard it open; heavy footsteps came down the hall.
“Can I help you?” Trenton said, when the man passed into view. He was old—at least sixty—and dressed in gray work pants and a T-shirt saggy as a loose skin. But his shoulders were wide and his arms still roped with muscle.
“Who’re you?” the man said.
“Who’re you?” Trenton fired back.
“Joe Connelly,” he said. “I got my guys working the job upstairs.” His skin was webbed with burst capillaries, and Trenton smelled beer on him. But he must have been okay-looking, back in the day. Joe seemed to register the food on the dining room table for the first time. “Sorry. I didn’t know you were having a party.”
“It isn’t a party,” Trenton said. He didn’t feel like explaining what it was. “Anyway, it’s over.”
“You Caroline’s kid?” Joe asked, and Trenton nodded. “One of my guys left a ladder up there. We need it for another job. You mind if I go up?”
“I guess not,” Trenton said. Why, he wondered, were they even bothering to fix the roof? Would they ever come back? He couldn’t imagine it. It wasn’t their house anymore—it wasn’t his house—no matter what the will said. They should leave the roof open and give the birds a place to nest.
Joe didn’t move right away. He stood there, sucking on his lower lip, like he was debating whether to say something else. Trenton thought he might not know where the stairs were. “Straight down the hall,” he said.
Joe nodded. “Yeah,” he said, but still didn’t move. “Yeah. I remember this place. Did some work here years ago. It was a lot different then. Smaller.” He shook his head. “Time flies.”
Then Trenton remembered: Joe Connelly. Joe Connelly was the name of the man who’d found the dead woman, the one with her brains blown out—Sandra.
“Wait!” Trenton took two quick steps forward, nearly tripping over the rug. Joe stopped, turned to face him. “Wait. You—you were the one who found her. The woman who died here.”
Instantly, Joe turned guarded. “How’d you know about that?” he said, wetting his lips with his tongue.
“My sister dates a cop,” Trenton said. He could never explain what had really happened: the voices, the visions, the sense of touch whenever Eva came near—like a cool blade running through his very center. It was all true. There was an invisible world; there was meaning gathered like clouds on the other side of a mountain.
“Oh.” Connelly was clenching his fists and unclenching them, like he was squeezing an invisible rope. “Yeah. Wrong place, wrong time. That was a bad winter. Lots of snow. Poor lady’s roof caved in.”
“Sandra,” Trenton said, watching Joe carefully.
“Something like that,” he said. “Screwy the things you forget. She didn’t have a face by the time I got to her. That I remember.”
“What happened to her?” Trenton asked. “The police—I mean, they never found out who did it, right?”
“No,” Joe said hoarsely. He turned away. “No, they never did find out.”
Trenton grasped for another question, something that would keep Joe in the room and talking to him. His pulse was going wild. He didn’t know why it was important for him to know about some stranger who’d died here decades ago, only that Joseph Connelly’s arrival seemed like a sign. There was something he was missing, something he’d forgotten. Eva had told him that the ghost Sandra had been shot; there had been an important letter, too, which was stolen.
“What about the letter?” he blurted out, and Joe stiffened like Trenton had just reached out and electrocuted him.
“How—how’d you know about the letter?” Joe asked. When he turned around, his face was awful: white and frightened, older than it had looked just a minute earlier. “Who told you?”
Trenton didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Joe stood there, still trembling like a wire, his eyes like two dark gashes in his face. Then he pulled out a chair, abruptly, and sat down.
“Are you all right?” Trenton said cautiously.
But when Joe spoke, it was in a normal voice. “Blood pressure,” he said. “I’m an old shit. You got any water?”
Trenton went to the sideboard, where Minna had lined up pitchers of ice water for their guests. He poured a big glass of water and passed it to Joe at the table. Then he sat down.
“Thanks,” Joe said. But he didn’t drink. He just spun the glass between his hands. After a minute, he said: “I got rid of it. I thought it was the right thing to do. Seeing her like that . . . There was blood everywhere.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t help to know the reason. People say it helps. But it doesn’t.”