Patricia Briggs: Home Improvement: Undead Edition

And then Quiana got up and left the room, her face blank. She wasn’t even walking like herself.

I scooped up Sara, who was shrieking like a banshee.

“Sara,” I said. “Please stop crying.” To my amazement, she did. The baby looked up at me, her face red and tearful, panting with exhaustion. “Let’s get your brother,” I said, since Robbie’s wails continued unabated. “We’ll make him happy, too.” Robbie also responded to my touch, and in a moment I was walking slowly holding the two babies. It was awkward and terrifying.

What would have happened if Quiana had been utterly overrun by the ghost while she was here alone with the twins?

Now that the bones had been uncovered, the emotional miasma in the house was intensifying, without any doubt. It was a struggle to get out of the house, aside from the difficulty of carrying two children. Though I wanted to leave more than anything, I stopped in the kitchen to put them in their child seats. I opened the back door and passed Sara to JB. I went down the back steps with Robbie, moving very carefully. Sam, Tara, and Quiana were in the corner of the yard farthest from the bones, and JB and I joined them there.

In sharp contrast to the lighthearted meeting we’d had when we were planning the renovation, our conference in the backyard was grim. The late-afternoon sun slanted across the bricks of the patio, and the heat of them radiated upward. Even the heat was preferable to the haunted house.

We waited. Nothing happened. Finally, Tara sat in a lawn chair and started feeding Sara after JB fetched her nursing shawl. Robbie made squeaky noises until it was his turn. They, at least, were content.

Sam said, “I dug some more, and I think it’s a complete skeleton. We don’t know whose bones, whose ghost, or why it’s angry.”

An accurate and depressing summary.

“The only neat stories are the ones made up,” Tara said.

Quiana, who seemed to be herself at the moment, sat slumped forward, her elbows on her knees. She said, “There’s a reason all this is happening. There’s a reason the haunting started when the hammer came out of the wall. There’s a reason there’s a body buried in the backyard. We just have to figure it out. And I’m the psychic. And it’s trying to live through me. So I got to try to take care of this.”

I looked at Quiana with some respect. What she was saying made sense.

“It’s tied to the hammer,” Quiana said.

“So, okay, if we want to know what happened so we can fix it,” I said, “and since I can read minds, and since the ghost can get into Quiana’s mind . . . I’m wondering if maybe Quiana and I can do something with the bones and find out who the spirit—the ghost—is.”

Quiana nodded. “Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s get this bitch settled.” She reached over to the old patio table and took the hammer.

We stood, full of purpose.

JB and Sam shot out of their chairs. Sam said, “You don’t need to do this, Sookie.”

Wild horses couldn’t have held me back from this experience. I stepped away from Sam and took Quiana’s left hand, bony and strong and cold. We went over to the excavated skeleton. Its skull gaped up at us from its grave. Quiana was holding the hammer in her free hand. Then she gasped and jerked, and suddenly I was holding the hand of someone completely different.

And I was seeing what Quiana saw, but not through Quiana’s eyes. I was seeing . . . faces. A round-faced woman working over a kitchen table. I recognized what she was doing; she was making piecrust. She was looking up, bewildered and sad. Mama. A burly man bending over something on a tool bench, with the same air of worry about him. Father. And looking at a boy—older than me, but still a boy with an open, honest, freckled face, a face that was serious and full of doubt. Albert. I would have done anything to remove the anxiety from their faces, anything to silence the cruel words that had caused that unhappiness.

Words spoken by that devil, Isaiah Wechsler.

Part of me could still be only Sookie, and that part felt the growing resolution, the horrible resolve, as the entity in Quiana played out his plan.

The night, the darkness, only streetlights in the distance where town lay. (That almost threw me out of Quiana’s mind. Since when had Magnolia Street been out of town?) Running silently across the short distance between the windows, from my window to his, and his was open in the warm night . . . through it quietly enough not to wake him Father’s hammer in my hand and . . . then he raised his hand, oh . . . oh, no. In the moonlight the blood looked black.

Back out the window, breathing hard, and over to the one in my house, safe now, back home hide the hammer under the bed but Albert woke up, Albert beloved brother, and Albert said what did you do? And I said I shut his foul mouth .

And there was more, but it was too much for me, Sookie. I had to pull Quiana out of this, but that was impossible until we saw the end.

Then we did. We saw the end.

I gasped and choked, and Quiana folded silently to the dirt as if her strings had been cut.

Sam caught me, braced me, as JB supported Quiana.

JB said, “What happened? Why were you all holding hands, Sookie?” Tara said, “They’ll tell us, honey. Wait a minute.” The twins were silent, and when I could see I realized they were back in their infant seats, at the base of the tree. The evening was closing in. The shadows had gotten so long they almost covered the yard. I could hear a car door closing next door. Andy had gotten home. Should I call out, get him to come look?

“Do you know who it is?” Sam asked, keeping his voice low, pointing at the open grave.

I went over to it. “This boy killed Isaiah Wechsler. This boy is Carter Summerlin.”

“But you said his folks sent him away,” Sam said.

“In a way, they did,” Quiana said weakly. Tara had propped her up against the fence and was giving her a bottle of water. Quiana looked as if she’d survived a death march. “This boy killed himself because he couldn’t stand what he did. He climbed through the window at night—the window of the house next door—with the hammer he took from his dad’s toolbox. Came back in his own bedroom window, blood all over.”

I shuddered. The others stared at us, their mouths open.

“But his big brother saw? Is that right, Sookie?” Quiana asked.

I nodded. “Albert took Carter’s nightshirt and burned it in the backyard in the middle of the night, and hid the hammer in the closet wall. Later on, he closed it in. The fight he’d had with the Wechsler boy, it was because—well, Isaiah had made fun of the, what he thought was the effeminate ways of Albert’s little brother. And to Carter it was so terrible, so unthinkable a slur, that he had to wipe out the one who’d voiced it. Albert believed he should have protected Carter better; he thought he should have shown Carter how to behave in a more manly way.”

“But I felt terrible about killing Isaiah. And about how people thought Albert was to blame. The next week, I killed myself,” Quiana said. She was unaware she was saying anything odd. “I hanged myself in that same closet, from a hook. I figured that would make things better for Albert. When they found me, Albert started crying. He told them what the fight had been about and how he’d helped cover up for me. They had one son dead, so to protect Albert and the family’s good name, my folks buried me in the yard in the dead of night and told everyone they’d sent me off to live with relatives.”

“And Carter haunted them?” I said, not liking how shaky my voice was.

“He haunted his parents, because they were ashamed of him.” Quiana said, and I welcomed her return to perspective with huge relief. “But not Albert. Albert had tried to keep faith with Carter, but he must have felt terribly guilty himself every time he saw the Wechslers.”