Echoes in the Walls Read online

  However, when Dr. Davenport’s wife was killed in the automobile accident, my mother was still breastfeeding Ryder. Dr. Davenport was beside himself with grief. Slowly, as she had described it to me, she became more and more like a wife and mother. He threw himself into his work, but when he returned home, he was almost immediately submerged in a darkness that nearly drove him mad. She was his respite, his comfort, and one thing led to another, until she was eventually pregnant with me.

  “I was just there,” she told me. “I know it’s not enough of an explanation, but sometimes you really do have to be there to understand why we didn’t develop into something more substantial.”

  Of course, I would wonder about that. My mother had been and was still a very attractive woman. She had all the characteristics that would make her a perfect doctor’s wife. She was bright and sociable. When she was involved with other people, she was never at a loss for conversation. Perhaps my father’s parents had instilled class distinctions in him. It was the only real reason I could think of for his marrying a woman like Bea Howell.

  Once, when my mother was particularly annoyed with Bea, she muttered that it was mainly Dr. Davenport’s guilt that drove him to marry a woman like her a few years after his first wife’s death. Bea’s father was head administrator at the hospital at the time, so it was probably a good career move as well.

  “There was never any real love between them. I’ve seen so many marriage like that, marriages of convenience,” my mother told me.

  So despite how she presented it, it was bothering her, I thought. She had slept with, made love to, Dr. Davenport, cared for him, nourished him out of his grief, but even when she was pregnant, he did not offer to marry her. I couldn’t believe that deep down in his heart, he didn’t want to marry her. I tried to find out, but my mother thought she had said too much to me already, so she shut up about it and refused to answer any of my questions. Until now, that is.

  With every passing year, we were becoming more like sisters than mother and daughter. It was easier for that to happen when your mother was young when she gave birth to you. I sensed that in years to come, if not sooner, I would understand more and more about the strange relationship my mother and my father had and still, to some extent, had today.

  Maybe it was Wyndemere. Maybe this house had the power to turn everything into something dark and mysterious. Perhaps my imagination never did run wild, and the shadows I saw moving and the moans I heard coming from the uninhabited places in the mansion were as real as anything else. Sometimes I awoke in the night and thought we were all actually in some danger. Eventually, the house would claim more victims.

  Who would be next? My half brother was already a victim. My half sister was as infected with jealousy and as conniving as any evil ghost trapped in the shadows could be.

  When Samantha found out that I was going to the mall for dinner and a movie on Saturday, she whined at breakfast that she should be permitted to go, too. Ryder hadn’t come downstairs yet. A new medication he was taking caused him to sleep more.

  “It’s not fair,” she moaned, quickly bringing on her crocodile tears. “Why should Fern be able to go and not me?”

  I expected my father to acquiesce to her demands as usual, but he shook his head. “Fern is going with her friend, someone her own age,” he said. “You have to do things with your own friends, and we have to be sure there is proper supervision. When you’re her age, you’ll have more privileges, too. I’ll see about my schedule. Maybe I can take you to Jolly Joe’s. You like those submarine sandwiches,” he offered as a consolation.

  “I don’t want to go to Jolly Joe’s. That’s for kids.”

  “You’re not exactly an old lady,” my mother said.

  Samantha looked up at her so hatefully that I thought I might just reach across the table to slap her silly.

  “We might bring Ryder along,” my father said.

  Samantha’s eyes widened with surprise and delight. “Really?” she said.

  “Dr. Seymour thinks it’s time he was exposed to more people and places.”

  “I’ll take care of him,” Samantha said quickly. “I’ll tell him what’s good to eat, too.” She smiled at me triumphantly.

  It took all my self-control to keep from heaving my glass of water at her elated, reddened face, a mirror image of her mother’s spiteful joy.

  My father looked at me and saw it, I’m sure. “We’ll see later if he’s up to it,” he said. “He’s adjusting to some new drug therapy.”

  “He’ll be up to it. He’ll be up to it,” Samantha insisted. “He wants to get out, too. He’s told me so many times.”

  Of course, she was lying.

  My father said nothing. He finished his coffee and rose, looking to my mother as if he anticipated her doing or saying something to rescue him.

  “I’ll bring Ryder his breakfast this morning,” she said.

  He nodded. “I should be home by four. Behave yourself,” he told Samantha, who grimaced and stabbed her egg yolk so it would bleed over her plate. He glanced at me, a smile in his eyes to show me how pleased he was with my decision, and then left.

  “I’m going to tell Ryder that we’re taking him out to Jolly Joe’s,” Samantha said when my mother went into the kitchen.

  “You’d better wait for Daddy to decide,” I warned her. “He might decide against it, and Ryder could be disappointed.”

  Her eyelids narrowed, and her eyes grew steely cold with her inner rage, just the way her mother’s would. “You want me to call your mother Ms. Corey all the time. You should call my father Dr. Davenport like you used to have to,” she said. “He’s probably not really your father. He probably made all that up to make you feel better about what you did to Ryder.”

  “I didn’t do anything to Ryder. How dare you say that?”

  She shrugged. “If you didn’t make him take you in the boat just before a storm, he’d be fine,” she said, making it sound like an obvious fact. Was it possible she’d overheard two of the maids saying that, or one of the grounds workers? Perhaps it was a topic of conversation she had with her equally spoiled-rotten school friends?

  I was about to blast her with threats and expletives, but she got up quickly, flashed a spiteful smile, and practically ran out of the room.

  My mother appeared with Ryder’s breakfast tray. She looked at Samantha’s plate. “She’s hardly eaten a thing. Where is she?”

  “Making a witch’s brew in her room,” I said. “You want any help with that?” I asked, nodding at Ryder’s tray.

  “No, it’s fine. But that child’s beginning to worry me,” she said, nodding at Samantha’s empty seat as if her nasty presence always lingered for a few moments. She left to go upstairs to Ryder.

  There was an understatement, I thought.

  I began to clear the table. During the holidays, my mother had less help. I knew she was looking forward to Mrs. Marlene’s return and, along with her, the part-time maids. Helping to clean up and tidying the living room took up the morning. I spent most of the afternoon organizing my room and reading, doing my best not to think about Ryder. Despite everything my father and mother had said, there was still this guilt gnawing at my conscience, a guilt my father had specifically warned me against.

  It wasn’t what Samantha had said about my causing the accident. No, what was on my mind now was that I was going out, to socialize and enjoy myself, while Ryder remained confused and lost. The best to hope for was my father taking him out to a fast-food place, probably inundated with children Samantha’s age and younger. Some Saturday night out for the boy who was the most popular in our school. If anyone there recognized him, he wouldn’t know it, and he wouldn’t understand why they were looking at him with pity.

  Samantha’s hateful words had stung me, though.

  In a way, she was right. I should not have been so eager to go for that boat ride. I was so excited about our being alone that I had let that overwhelm my caution. I had seen what was coming in the om
inous clouds. When the storm hit, Ryder had struggled so hard to try to get me safe. I couldn’t help wondering if my father ever considered it that way, too. It was at least somewhat my fault.

  On the other hand, his regret had to be that he had never insisted on the truth about being my father being known long before Ryder and I had become secret lovers. If that had happened, nothing intimate would have occurred between Ryder and me, and we would surely not have gone for a romantic boat ride.

  And then I wondered, wouldn’t we? Would we have backed away from each other? We might just as easily have become even more defiant, frustrated, and angry about a secret kept hidden for so many years.

  Still, it had to be something my father wondered about often, and in that sense, he bore more responsibility than I could for what had happened to Ryder. It didn’t make me feel much better, though.

  Everyone in this house, in one way or another, lived with some guilt, I thought. Why should I be spared?

  To keep myself from thinking all these heavy thoughts, I spent more time on my clothes, makeup, and hair than I had for the past six months. I’d been barely concerned about my appearance these days, forgetting to put on lipstick, running my brush quickly through my hair, and only vaguely thinking about what I would wear to school.

  I laid out some pants, shirt, and sweater combinations on my bed and then matched up a pair of leather ankle shoe boots. In the end, I chose a pair of black stretch pants and a turquoise sweater with a sweetheart collar, with one of my Christmas gifts, a black cashmere poncho. After I showered, I decided to wear my hair up, with a pair of yellow gold hoop earrings my mother had bought me for my last birthday.

  I was at my vanity table, still wrapped in my bath towel and doing my eyes, when I felt someone’s presence. I turned very slowly. My door was opened slightly. I knew I had closed it when I entered my bedroom. I set down my eyeliner pencil and rose slowly. For a moment, I stood there, listening and watching the door. I walked to it, listened sharply again, and then opened the door quickly.

  My heart stopped and started. Ryder was walking back to his room. I stepped into the hallway.

  “Ryder,” I called.

  He paused and looked back at me.

  “Did you want something?” I asked.

  He started back toward me and then stopped. We could both hear Samantha running up the stairs. He turned away and quickly continued to his room.

  Samantha stopped and looked in my direction and then at Ryder’s room.

  “Was Ryder just in your room?” she cried, as if not including her was a cardinal sin. “Why are you walking around like that? What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “He wasn’t in my room.”

  Before she could say anything else, I returned to my bedroom and closed the door. I remained there, my heart thumping. I expected she would come knocking, demanding to know what had happened, nagging me, but she didn’t. I still didn’t move. The look on Ryder’s face remained on the surface of my eyes. Maybe it was all in my imagination, in that part of me that wished none of this had occurred and we were still secret lovers. He looked full of the sort of pain that comes from a desperate longing to be loved.

  Or was it just more confusion? How much did I see, and how much did I want to see? Later, would Ryder even remember he had come to my room? Perhaps he was simply trying to find his way through the maze of twisted memories. Best to make nothing more of it, I thought, best to make the turn my father was urging—no, demanding—that I make.

  I turned back to preparing myself to go out with Ivy and start something of a social life again. I couldn’t snap down on the feeling that I was battling to rise to the surface of some dark pool, a place to which I had retreated both in disappointment and in fear.

  After I had dressed, I paused to look at myself in the full-length mirror next to my dresser. Was I pretty again? Had I ever really been? There was no doubt in my mind that my mother had been pretty and still was. I looked mostly like her, didn’t I?

  What did I inherit from Dr. Davenport? It was a little more difficult to see the resemblances, because I had never looked for any. A part of me wanted to deny that I looked at all like Ryder. No one had ever said so, and in fact, no one said so now.

  This house had so many secrets and lies embedded in its walls and in every shadow.

  My mother’s and Dr. Davenport’s confession could be another secret embedded in this house for reasons I had yet to discover.

  Couldn’t it?

  If you wanted something so much, with so much of your every breathing self and soul, could you make it true?

  No one had asked me who I wanted to be. Did I want to be a Davenport? Or did I want to remain a Corey? Was I comfortable in my new skin? It was a question impossible for anyone to imagine, I guessed.

  But the girl in the mirror was asking.

  I fled my bedroom as if I feared the answer she demanded, an answer dancing on my lips.

  6

  DESPITE HOW WE had fooled around about him on the telephone, I didn’t expect to see Dillon Evans waiting alongside Ivy in front of Tops. She had a silly grin on her face, anticipating my reaction. He was standing there with his hands in his pants pockets and staring at the ground. He wore a black hoodie, black jeans, and a pair of western-style boots.

  When I had described Dillon as shy, I really wasn’t giving him much thought. A better word for him was loner, which was why I wasn’t astonished that Mindy Harker didn’t invite him to her party or, if she had, why he didn’t attend it. He wasn’t very social at school. As far as I knew, he had no close friends. However, I wouldn’t deny that he often drew my curiosity.

  Most of the time, he either had his face in a book or was scribbling something in his notebook that absorbed all his attention, even at lunch, whether he was alone at a table or even when he was not. Whenever someone spoke to him, he looked startled that he or she even had noticed he was there, but from what I could see, he usually showed little interest in what anyone was saying. Sometimes he didn’t respond at all; most of the time, he had a monosyllabic reply and returned to what he was reading or writing.

  Dillon was a senior, so I didn’t have any classes with him. His excellent performance as the character of George in Mr. Madeo’s production of Our Town astounded his teachers as much as it did the students who were aware of him as someone who looked like he was gone but whose body kept moving through the school. One of the girls in the cast, Sari Cook, said he came to rehearsal, did his part, and stayed off to himself. She said whenever any of them tried to talk to him, he claimed he had to remain in character.

  Nevertheless, I always perked up when someone mentioned his name. According to the girls in his classes, he was a good student but not like some who enjoyed answering questions as if they were on Jeopardy! I gathered that he wasn’t competitive and acted as if he really didn’t care what anyone’s opinion of him was, teacher or student. He’d wait to be called on and always looked like he wasn’t paying attention, yet he always had the right answer. Some sounded annoyed about it.

  I knew a little about Dillon from scattered conversations. He was an only child. His father was some sort of salesman, and his mother worked on and off as a dental hygienist. He and his parents lived in a modest ranch-style home two houses south of Ivy’s house, which was why I thought she probably knew him better than anyone else in our school.

  I sensed that his aloofness actually frightened some of the students. They misinterpreted his disinterest in them and their school activities as aggressiveness, belligerence, a don’t bother me with your personal information, I couldn’t be less interested sort of attitude. There were rumors that he was friends with some of the boys at the community college and went to wild parties, which was a popular reason for some of the girls at school to explain his indifference to them.

  After he had done so well in the play, I watched a few girls flirt with him, but he didn’t show interest in any of them. They concluded that he was either hanging out w
ith older college boys or perhaps was gay and closeted. No one would admit she was simply unattractive to him. Most couldn’t imagine being unattractive to anyone. Some of them took enough selfies to cover all the walls in the Pentagon.

  I always thought there was something interesting about Dillon, even though I never said so. He was certainly good-looking, with his rich dark brown hair just a little unruly, the bangs slightly uneven and swept to one side, which was kind of sexy. Not quite six feet tall and slim, he sauntered along the hallway with his eyes down, his shoulders back. He looked like he was navigating through a maze and was worried about stepping on a land mine, but I couldn’t help thinking he was intriguing. It was as if he had a secret, something we all should know. I understood how many of the other girls felt about him, why some avoided him. It was easy to imagine there was also something dangerous about him.

  “Hi,” Ivy said. “Guess who wanted to see this movie, too?”

  “Let’s see,” I said, looking around and pretending to think about it. “Dillon Evans?”

  Anyone else would have laughed. He looked at me and shrugged. “I don’t have to sit with you if you’d rather be alone.”

  “What? Yes, you do,” I said forcefully.

  “Oh, yeah? Why?”

  “You’re buying the popcorn.”

  He didn’t smile as much as he relaxed his lips and brightened his eyes, which I now realized were a strange bluish-green. Whenever I had looked at him, I hadn’t looked long enough directly at him to read the true color of his eyes.

  “Let’s eat,” Ivy said. “The movie starts in forty-five minutes.”

  Tops was one of those fast-food restaurants where you ordered your food and then moved down a counter and picked up your glass for a drink, your silverware, and your napkins and then paid for what you ordered and sat where you wanted. They had individual-size pizzas, sandwiches, burgers, and fries, a real grab bag of foods that seemed perfect before or just after a movie.

  Dillon entered behind us, far enough behind for me to lean over and whisper to Ivy without him hearing, “Did you say anything about Dracula?”