For a second I believe he’s going to. Then his hand is gone and he’s leading us past another trunk, an old wardrobe, two little chairs, child-size. The light of his flashlight is bouncing ahead of us, illuminating dark corners and more buried treasure. All these things just abandoned here, as if the people who owned them fled in a hurry.
“Years later your great-great-aunt had her mother moved to the family cemetery so she could be laid to rest next to Sam.”
And now we’ve reached the end of the basement, and there’s light coming in again from narrow ground-level windows. And there, sitting by the chimney, is a rickety, old-fashioned baby carriage. The hood is intact except for a small tear in the fabric, but the basket part is missing, hollowed out, so that it’s really just a skeleton.
He’s telling me about Tillie’s ghost, that she loves jewelry, that he thought all ghost stories were bullshit until the second summer he lived here and the doorbell rang at his house over and over again between two and three a.m., no one there. “If you haven’t already, you’ll hear it—the screen doors here. I call it the island slam. They are loud. I go back to bed, and just as I start to drift off—slam.”
I’m trying to concentrate on the words, but as soon as he says them, they change into touch kiss feel skin naked.
He’s telling me about this bracelet thing his sisters made for him. He’s raising his hand so I can see it, a black braided cord looped a couple of times around his wrist. The words morph into See these hands? I want to touch you all over with them.
He’s telling me how, when he got up the morning after the doorbell, the bracelet was gone. How he discovered it on the other nightstand, the one on the opposite side of the bed. I’m only half listening, and then he says, “Now, here’s something you don’t know about me, Captain—I don’t ever move in my sleep. Like, the other side of the bed is still made because I don’t go over there.”
I completely miss the next thing he says because I’m now thinking of him lying in bed, probably naked, alone on his side, the other side still made. What is he trying to tell me? That he doesn’t have a girlfriend? That he’s not sleeping with anyone right now? Is this something he wants me to know?
I tell myself, Control your face, Claudine. And I stand there listening and nodding my head and hoping to God he can’t read minds.
“So there’s my bracelet on the other nightstand. Where I didn’t put it.” The other nightstand on the other side of the bed where no one is sleeping. “Two months later, I’m having dinner with Bram and Shirley up on the north end, and Bram says something about a ghost and a screen door slamming, and I’m like, wait a minute.”
And then he looks up, so I look up. There, propped against the wall, is a faded portrait of a young woman in a large oval frame. The woman is blond and lovely, dressed in blue, smiling brightly. She’s not wearing a single piece of jewelry. Her only adornment is a crown of flowers in her hair. Just over her heart, there is a small tear in the canvas.
And suddenly I’m wholly and completely here in this basement.
“What’s your full name, Captain?”
It’s an effort to drag my eyes away from her. “Claudine Llewelyn Henry.”
His eyes are smiling and he’s looking into me. “Claudine Llewelyn Henry.” The way he says it. My name on his lips. And then he turns away and says to the portrait, “Claudine Llewelyn Henry, meet Tillie Donaldson Blackwood.”
Tillie beams down at me.
“They found the painting like that, with the rip in the canvas. Because supposedly it wasn’t the gunshot that killed her. It was a broken heart.”
“Over losing her baby?”
“Probably. Combined with losing her brother in a car accident and her mother to the flu, all in the same month.”
“How do you know all this?”
“My friend Shirley. Her grandmother Beatrice was the island storyteller.”
We are there for what feels like a long time. There’s something in me that wants to stay here, because there’s something in me that relates to the ruins and the ghosts, to Claudine, who haunted this place until her death, and to Tillie and her broken heart. Especially to Tillie and her broken heart,