Whatever was behind me was not watching over me like the sunburnt man. It was more like I was being appraised the way I might appraise some alien creature that had wandered into my scope of vision and curled up with his back to me. I felt no big-brotherly protectiveness coming from this watcher, only an intense, almost affronted, curiosity. Whatever was looking down at me seemed to be waiting to see what I would do next.
I’m not sure how much time I remained sitting there with my back to the watcher. It might have been only a couple of minutes but it felt like the clock had stopped and I was trapped in a timeless state of fright. What I did do next was somehow force myself to sit upright on the slanty porch. My heart was thrashing, louder than the ocean. My back, still feeling the prickles trained on it, stayed rigidly turned to the doorway. My knees were shaking so much it was an effort to stand. Snatching up my backpack, I took a flying leap over the rotting steps.
Even after I had crawled under the fence with the CONDEMNED and KEEP OUT signs and started walking south, my neck felt fused forward on my shoulders. I knew it was beyond my powers to swivel it around and risk seeing whether I was still being kept in sight.
V.
“Last time you were there, did it have the fence with all those ‘condemned’ and ‘keep off’ signs?”
“Those have been up for a while,” said Aunt Charlotte. “The fence is in my photographs, but I transformed it into an erosion fence—those picturesque wooden fences you see in so many beach paintings. How did the cottage look?”
“It’s in terrible shape. It has to be a lot worse than when you last saw it. It’s more of a zombie house. Did anybody ever say anything about it being haunted?”
“Not that I’ve heard. Why?”
“You said they started calling it Grief Cottage. I thought maybe—”
“You mean, the parents coming back to see if the boy ever returned home? Their spirits unable to rest, that sort of thing? No, all I’ve heard are the stories about how they were all lost.”
“Or maybe the boy.”
“What about the boy?”
“His spirit being unable to rest.”
“I’ll have to check. I have two books about the history of the island. Grief Cottage is mentioned in one of them, but I forget which one. I’ve never been able to read either of them all the way though. Every time I try, I get angry. Did you feel any spirits when you were there?”
“I only went on the porch.”
“You shouldn’t even have been on the porch. But what boy could resist?”
“Why do you get angry?”
“About those books? Where to start? With the sea turtle eggs, probably. But I need to back up a little. The ladies who wrote these books are from families who have been coming to the island for a zillion years. I don’t know which gets my goat more. Their cozy assumption of entitlement, or their cruel ignorance about anything outside themselves and their family histories. The sea turtle eggs are a case in point. You know how sacred the whole egg-laying thing is now. We have to turn off our porch lights after dark so the mothers can come up to the dunes and lay their eggs in peace. And then the whole countdown period—well, you know. We have our very own ‘clutch’ of eggs with the red fence and warning sign. So I’m paging through this book—I forget which one—and the lady’s saying how much fun it was back in the good old days to go out in the morning and find some turtle eggs buried in the dunes and bring them inside and eat them for breakfast. So delicious. The size of ping-pong balls, and even better, the yolks don’t get hard even after you boil them, so you can suck the yellow out. A real gourmet treat for the privileged few.”
“That was in a book?”
“Yes, and more. Of course, both these books were published back in the nineteen-seventies, before the turtle patrols got going. But I’ll turn them over to you and you can look up the stories about people lost in hurricanes. As for ghosts, there’s this man in gray who appears on the beach before a hurricane. Some say he wears a Confederate uniform, others say just gray clothes. If he looks straight at your house, it won’t get washed away. If he avoids looking at it, you’d better evacuate.”
“And people have seen him?”
“That you’ll have to decide for yourself, Marcus. People see what they want to see. Or imagine they saw. And others say they saw something in order to sound psychic or special. I’m not big on ghosts. There are enough horrors in the real world to worry about.”
That night Aunt Charlotte gave me the promised art tour of her website. We sat side by side in front of her laptop at the kitchen table and she clicked on the different paintings and then we enlarged them. I was mostly interested in the Grief Cottage painting, which I recognized as the “Abandoned Cottage” postcard Mom and I had received.
It was the place I had seen today but it was also something else. If this painting hung on my wall, it would make me feel sad and spooked every time I walked past it. But I would walk past it again and again just because it made me feel this way. Surprisingly, given its dark mood, Aunt Charlotte’s painting wasn’t a night scene. Above the derelict cottage was a soft blue sky with innocent clouds. The sand dunes, though heavily populated with sea grasses and Spanish bayonets, were white and pure. The marked contrast made the picture even more unsettling. It was an anterior view of the cottage, though you could figure out it had lost its south side. The front of the cottage, including the slanted porch where I had slept earlier, had sunshine breaking into its shadows. It was the middle of the day in the painting, the light fell much as it had today, but somehow, the way Aunt Charlotte had painted it, the picture reminded you of the impermanence of everything and the treacheries awaiting you even on a nice day.
“You really captured its mood,” I said.
“What kind of mood?”
I hunted for a good word. “Well, forlorn.”
“Forlorn, I like that. Too bad you can’t really see my brushwork on the computer screen. It intensifies the forlornness.” Pleasure softened her gruff voice. “The actual painting is small, only eight by ten. Nestled in a deep frame under the right lighting, the effect is even stronger.”