← Lantern's Glow

A Fresh Set of Eyes

A Fresh Set of Eyes

"How long a story?" Liam asked.

He kept his pencil where it was, hovering over the roped passage on his page, and Caitlin felt her face start to warm. She could have let him draw the stairs and given him the tour Ms. Hawthorne had actually asked for, which had no cautionary tales in it at all and far fewer chances to sound unhinged in front of a handsome man. But he'd asked. People hardly ever asked. At the town library, when she started telling somebody where a book had come from, their eyes went to the clock.

"Depends," she said. "Do you charge by the hour?"

"By the illustration."

"Oh, good. Then you can have the long version. There's also a longer version, but you have to earn that one."

The corner of his mouth moved. He sketched the sag in the rope and left room behind it for the narrow stair, and Caitlin, watching, saw that he'd drawn it the right size. That was more than the postcard in the foyer had ever managed. The postcard turned this passage into a sweeping corridor fit for a tragic heiress, when in real life two people carrying grocery bags had to negotiate.

"That goes up to the guest floor," she said. "The Rose Room's at the far end, and past that there's another stair up to the attic, which is why the rope. Every year somebody gets into the cider and decides the attic is where she keeps the good stuff."

"Is it?"

"It's where she keeps her Christmas boxes and a wasp nest. If there's good cider up there too, she's been holding out on me for years, and I'm going to be hurt."

He looked over the top of his sketchbook at the real passage, and she watched him count the steps he could see, his lips moving a little. She liked that more than she should have. She'd planned to show him the front parlor while she still had some control over her decorations and her hair, and here she was, standing at a rope, wondering what he would do if the strand that had brushed his shoulder fell forward again.

Some women have a type. Caitlin was beginning to suspect hers involved graphite.

"And the story?" he asked.

She led him back toward the front parlor, talking over her shoulder. "It's a library story. I mean, the party was in there, in the parlor, but I found it at the library. The town library, where I work. I'm the librarian. I probably should have led with that."

"You found a story at the library."

"I know. Groundbreaking. Somebody alert the papers. Except the papers are where it came from in the first place, so maybe don't."

He fell in beside her, sketching as he walked, stopping to mark where the hall turned into the foyer. She waited for him. If he drew that turn too generous, the parlor would come out big enough for an orchestra, and she'd spent too many years squeezing past the fire screen with trays to let that stand.

In the front parlor the paper ghosts had started twisting on their threads above the shelves. There was no draft. It was cheap thread; she had stood in the craft-store aisle refusing to pay for the good stuff, on the grounds that no paper ghost of hers had ever lived to see November. She climbed the little ladder to untangle them, and Liam took his chair in the corner by the door.

He made a frame with his thumbs and fingers, lowered it, and nudged the chair a few inches left until the window sat where he wanted it. Caitlin felt that small correction somewhere under her ribs. He cared where the window really was. She had seen enough glossy drawings of old houses to know how easy it would be to make this room grander, and instead he drew the squat mantel with the window crowding it, the way it truly stood.

"You can move the pumpkin," she said. "The half-finished one."

"I like it there."

"It has one eye and no stem."

"I can see that."

She pressed a piece of tape to the shelf and discovered she was jealous of a paper pumpkin. He'd looked at the lopsided thing long enough to decide it belonged. She could feel the flush coming and turned toward the shelf to hide it.

"You're judging it," she said. "I can tell. It's the exact face people make at the returns desk when they tell me the book was like that when they got it."

"The pumpkin?"

"My folding. I did that one in a hurry, and the eye was an accident too, honestly."

"Your ghosts are doing fine." He glanced up as one of them turned its face to the wall. "Most of them."

She turned it back around and heard herself say, "You've been in town one afternoon and you're already on their side," and then his pencil stopped, and she looked down.

He'd drawn the shelf under her hand, the lopsided pumpkin on the table, and a narrow strip of her own sleeve. He tipped the book toward himself before she could see more. Caitlin stayed on the ladder longer than the ghost needed, because her face had gone hot to the ears, and she wanted it back to a normal color before she had to come down and be looked at.

I'll say this for him: he didn't pretend he hadn't been drawing her, and he didn't apologize for it either. I still can't decide whether that was nerve or bad manners. I liked him for it either way.

"Years ago," Caitlin said, when she trusted her voice, "somebody donated a box of old clippings to the library. Newspaper bits, dance cards, church menus. And an account of a Halloween party here, at the inn. I found it between a recipe for boiled icing and an advertisement for a dentist who promised painless extractions."

"Which one did you believe?"

"The icing." She came down and moved the ladder out of his view. "The clipping says a few guests heard music out in the hall. They thought the party had moved to another room, so they followed it."

He turned a page. "What kind of music?"

"Depends who's telling it. Some people say piano and some say singing, and one lady at the library swears it was a fiddle, but she also swears the book drop eats her returns." And then, without meaning to, she hummed it: four uneven notes, the last one dragged out long. It came out flat. It always came out flat. "My grandmother used to do that part when she told it. I've never found the tune written down anywhere."

She hadn't said my grandmother out loud to anyone in a while. It caught a little on the way out, and she hoped he hadn't heard it.

I heard it.

I did do that part, and I did it in tune, thank you. I told that story to Caitlin at the kitchen table more times than either of us could count, and I'll confess I changed it to suit my audience. She has never once changed it. She tells it the way it's written and then tells you exactly where the writing stops. She got that from the library, not from me. It was my story first, though, and I never did settle on an ending. I'm not sure I have yet.

"So the tune belongs to your grandmother," Liam said.

"As far as I can prove, yes." She tried for the librarian voice and got most of the way there. "Which is the librarian way of saying I looked everywhere and never found it written down, and at some point you have to admit that the thing you can't find might just be her."

He looked at her then, and his pencil stayed where it was above the page. Caitlin had a version of this story for kids at story hour, the spooky one with the good voices, which she used to trick them into checking out a book before they went home. It worked on about half of them and on none of their parents. She could feel herself reaching for it. But he had asked whose tune it was, and he seemed to want the answer, and it felt strange and a little frightening to be taken seriously about something that mattered to her.

She sat down across from him at the pumpkin table.

"The guests went through a door they knew," she said. "When they turned back, the door wasn't where they'd left it. They could hear everyone at the party the whole time. Voices, glasses, somebody laughing so loud the paper bothered to mention it. They followed the sound, and every time they got to a room, it was empty."

"The clipping says that?"

"The missing door and the laughing, yes. It calls the laughing merriment, because apparently newspapers used to charge extra for words people actually say."

Liam put a short line in the corner of his page. "Could they have gone upstairs by mistake?"

"Maybe. It doesn't say. But there's two real floors and an attic. You can't lose somebody in here for long."

She meant it as reassurance, and she heard her voice go practical, the way it did when a patron was upset and she was trying to sound like a person with a plan. She knew how close the side parlor was to the foyer, how sound carried through the conservatory glass, how fast Ms. Hawthorne could appear out of the kitchen if anybody touched her pies. There was no maze here, whatever the postcard thought. She wanted him to see what she knew about this house. She also wanted him to see her knowing it, and she understood, with some embarrassment, that those were two different wishes and she'd only admitted to the first.

"Sounds like a prank," he said.

"That's the sensible answer. I hate the sensible answer. I give it out for a living."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing. Except it would have to be a really good prank. You'd need a whole bunch of people in on it, in a house where Ms. Hawthorne can hear a cookie tin open from upstairs. She'd have shut it down before the second verse and then fed everybody."

He looked around the room again, and his eyes went to the lantern on the mantel among her ghosts. Every October some guest stopped in front of it and asked her what its story was, and Caitlin found she was waiting for him to do the same, and bracing for it. He didn't. The relief was warm and immediate, and on the heels of it came something smaller and pricklier, because some part of her had wanted him to ask, so she could tell him she didn't believe a word of it and watch what his face did.

"Okay," he said. "Were there ghosts?"

"There are always ghosts in October." She pointed past his shoulder. "That one's losing an eye."

He turned in time to see a paper oval drop onto his page. He picked it up by the edge. "Do they usually shed?"

"Only when people ask hard questions, which almost never happens. At story hour the kids mostly want to know if ghosts have to use the bathroom."

She held out her hand, and he put the eye in it and went on looking at her after she'd taken it. She nearly launched into the rest of the Glensford ghost inventory, the weeping bride and all, who had never troubled a soul but had done wonders for the inn's reputation. She stopped herself. She taped the eye back on, pressing twice because the first piece never held, and when she turned around he was still waiting, pencil down.

Nobody over the age of six had given her that much patience in years. It went to her head a little.

"The people in the clipping turned up again, by the way," she said. "I checked the other papers, because of course I did. One of the guests was at the autumn fair afterward, arguing about a prize pumpkin, which is the most Glensford thing anybody has ever done. So I don't think they vanished into a wall."

"But?"

"But the clipping never says when they got back to the party. My grandmother changed the ending depending on who she was telling. Sometimes they followed the music back to the parlor and everybody was waiting for them. Sometimes the innkeeper found them at dawn up near the attic." She smoothed the tape on the ghost's face with her thumb. "She couldn't have seen either one. I asked her."

He set his pencil down beside the sketchbook. "They might have gone home."

"They might have. That's what I tell myself. They walked home and went to bed and never thought about it again, and it's probably true, but nobody wrote it down, and it bugs me that nobody wrote it down."

She could have made a joke then about librarians and unsolved endings. She usually did. His eyes were on hers, and she found she would rather let him see the small blank place in the record than cover it with something clever.

"Did they ever find their way back?" he asked.

"I know they got out of the inn. I don't know how they got back to the party, or if they did."

He closed his sketchbook. For one sinking moment she thought she'd bored him. Instead, he turned his chair all the way around to face her, rested his empty hands on the cover, and waited to hear whatever else she knew.

She had stopped doing the tour-guide smile. Liam noticed that first. She'd given him the part of the story she could stand behind, and now she was sitting across the table looking at him as if waiting to find out whether that was enough. He could have asked for another story and kept her there till he'd filled the sketchbook. He put the sketchbook on the table instead, face down, so she'd know he wasn't hiding behind it.

"What happened to the dentist?" he asked.

She laughed, sharp and surprised, the same laugh as in the foyer. He was starting to want to hear it on purpose. "He got caught. It was painless because they fainted, and he was charging them anyway."

"You kept the clipping."

"Of course I kept it. Glensford history is basically people fighting about pumpkins and teeth."

The old wooden chairs crowded the table, their arms worn smooth by a century of guests hauling themselves up out of them. It was a room for sitting down to tea and getting up two hours later wondering where the afternoon had gone, and Liam, who in Boston couldn't sit through a meal without checking his phone, found he didn't mind that at all. Caitlin bent over a paper ghost beside the lopsided pumpkin, fixing a crease. He had enough of this room for his studies. He could go find Ms. Hawthorne and ask about the others. He stayed where he was.

He opened the book again. "Can I show you something?"

"If it's a portrait of that ghost without its eye, I'm not ready."

He turned to the floor plan, a rough spread behind the mantel study. "This is what I've got so far."

She leaned in. He watched her eyes follow the foyer, the parlor door, the main stairs, and the short hall to the kitchen. He sketched in the side parlor and conservatory as boxes while she looked. The whole house fit between his two open hands. The finished piece for the magazine would need color and guests and better leaves outside the windows. This plan was for him, so that wherever he stood, he'd know what the door behind him opened onto.

"Your kitchen hall's too long," she said.

"How much?"

She slid the pencil out of his fingers. He let her. She rubbed out a section with the pad of her thumb, stopped when the graphite smeared, and redrew the hall shorter. Her hair fell forward while she worked. She pushed it back behind her ear with the end of his pencil and studied the page again, and Liam, who had drawn a great many hands, watched hers and forgot for a moment what he was supposed to be looking at.

"There," she said. "If you leave it that long, you'll have poor Ms. Hawthorne carrying trays a mile."

"Maybe she likes the exercise."

"She'd rather you drew her apple cake. She makes one every Halloween that people genuinely fight over. There was an incident with a fork one year. She'd want that in your article way more than her hallway."

He redrew the hall to her measure. "How'd you catch that?"

"I've carried the trays down that exact hall with cider sloshing and somebody's kid under my elbow since I was about eleven. Trust me. It's short."

She handed the pencil back, and he ran its tip from the foyer to the parlor, then across to the side parlor. The conservatory sat off that; the kitchen tucked in behind the public rooms. Upstairs the guest landing was short. The west stair came up at its far end near the Rose Room, and the narrow attic stair went on up from there. He could draw the whole building without lifting the pencil, if he ignored the walls. It pleased him more than it should, the way a house this small held together.

"So if the guests heard the party from here," he said, touching the west passage on the paper, "they'd have to come down from the guest floor."

"Or they took the main stairs, if they were even on the guest floor, which the clipping doesn't say. And believe me, I've read it enough times to know exactly what it doesn't say."

"Nobody's mistaking the attic for the front parlor."

"You haven't seen the attic."

He looked up. She was smiling again, though smaller. He could hear Ms. Hawthorne talking to someone in the foyer, and a pan going down hard in the kitchen. A person would have to work at staying lost in a building like this. Maybe that was why the story stuck with her. She knew exactly how silly it sounded, and she'd kept the clipping anyway.

"Is that an offer?" he asked.

"To show you the attic? No. Ms. Hawthorne would never forgive me, and then she'd bake me something to prove she'd forgiven me, and I'd have to eat it feeling guilty."

"Does she believe in the ghosts?"

Caitlin considered that longer than he'd expected. "She believes in feeding people. Past that she won't say. I've asked."

He drew a little rope across the west passage. Caitlin watched his hand. The pencil caught on a flaw in the paper, and he steadied it. She had a thin smudge of graphite on her own thumb now, from fixing his hall, and she hadn't noticed. He liked that she hadn't noticed.

"You think somebody staged the music?" she asked.

"I think it'd take a lot of people who can keep their mouths shut."

She tilted her head and didn't argue. He could have told her he didn't believe the tale. She hadn't asked him to. She'd shown him the building, told him what the paper said and where it stopped, and left him to make up his own mind. It struck Liam that nobody had trusted him to make up his own mind about anything in a while.

"The tune you hummed," he said. "Is that how your grandmother sang it?"

"More or less. Except she could carry a tune, and she did this little wobble on the last note that I have never once managed, and believe me, I've tried. In the car. Loudly."

"Ah."

"Okay, don't say it like that. I know mine's more of a cover."

"A loose one."

She opened her mouth, shut it, and gave him a look that sent him back to his page before he drew something he couldn't pass off as architecture. Her sleeve was already in the parlor sketch, and her reaching arm, which he'd left unfinished. She'd see it if she turned the page. He found he wanted her to, and was a little afraid of it too. He'd show her later, when he knew whether she wanted to be seen like that.

He set the pencil down. "Will you be here tonight?"

"At the party?"

"Yeah." He could have tacked on a reason to do with the article. They both knew he was done asking about doors.

She touched the corner of the floor plan. "I've been here every Halloween since I was old enough to carry a pumpkin up the hill."

"That's not what I asked."

Her eyes came up to his. The gray afternoon light through the willows caught the loose red hair at her cheek. She had been talking fast all afternoon. Now she stopped, and took a breath, and he watched a flush start at her collar and climb.

"I'll be here," she said. "Will you?"

His train home wasn't till Friday. His room was upstairs. Neither of those things would ordinarily have gotten him into a costume and into a room full of strangers; in Boston, on a night like this, he'd have been at his drafting table with the radio on and his phone face down, calling that a quiet evening. He thought about her stopping halfway through the ghost story to tell him what she could prove and what she couldn't. He thought about the correction she'd left on his page, in his pencil, with her thumb.

"If I'm invited," he said.

"You're a guest, and the party's open to guests, which I realize sounds like the sign on the front door, because it is the sign. I made the sign."

"That sounds official."

"I can make it less official." She reached for his pencil again. "Give me your map."

He turned it toward her. She wrote 7:00 in the front parlor, circled it, and added a tiny pumpkin at the edge of the mantel. For good measure, she drew an arrow from the foyer to the parlor door. There was no possible way to miss the party in a house this size. She left the arrow anyway.

"Time and place," she said. "With an arrow, because I can't help myself. And also because I'd really like you to find the right room."

He studied the mark. "Where do I find you?"

"Probably trying to keep children from using the good spoons on the pumpkins."

"Specific."

"You'll know me. I'll be the one telling somebody's kid to put the spoon down, and I'll probably look up every time the parlor door opens, so you won't have to try very hard." She heard what she'd said a second after he did. Her face went scarlet. She didn't take it back.

She pushed the book across to him. Her fingers stayed on the edge of the paper over his, long enough that he could feel the pause was on purpose. He turned his hand under hers, only a little. She left it there one breath longer, then got up to rescue a ghost that had started to spin.

The plan lay open in front of him: a circled seven, a small pumpkin, and her arrow to a room he already knew how to find. Liam looked at it for a while. He was going to be there. He'd known it since the dentist.

I could have told her that, or I'd like to think I could. Nobody asked me.