CHAPTER 3
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The Girl in the Closet

Nickie stared. The girl stared back. The dog wriggled in her arms and paddled its hind legs frantically.

“Who are you?” Nickie asked.

The girl hunched up her shoulders and craned her head toward Nickie. She had a long face and thin brown straggly hair. Her front teeth were a little crooked. “Please,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t tell that I’m here. Please don’t tell.” The girl stepped cautiously out of the closet. “I’m not supposed to be here,” she said. The dog wrenched its muzzle out of her hands and yelped. She grabbed it again. She was wearing jeans and a limp green sweater. Nickie could see that the girl was older than she was—a teenager.

“But why are you here?” said Nickie.

“I took care of the old man,” the girl said. She spoke in a trembly whisper. “For the last six months, till he died. But now I don’t have nowhere to go, and if they find me, they’ll put me in a home. And take him away.” She ducked her chin toward the dog. “So I need to stay here till I can figure out what to do next.”

“What’s your name?” Nickie asked. She spoke in a whisper, too.

“Amanda Stokes,” said the girl. “What’s yours?”

Nickie told her. “Arthur Green was my great-grandfather,” she said. “My family owns this house now.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Amanda. She had a worried-looking face, as if she’d been worrying all her life. “Are you going to come and live here?”

“Yes,” said Nickie firmly. “But not right away.”

“So you won’t tell that I’m here?”

Nickie considered. Would it be wrong to keep this girl a secret? She didn’t want to do anything wrong. But it seemed to her that telling on Amanda would cause more harm than not. What would it matter if she stayed here a few days longer?

“I can live here real quietly,” Amanda said. The dog jerked in her arms and tried to yelp. “Even with him. He’s pretty quiet, usually.”

“What’s his name?”

“Otis. I found him a couple days ago out by the dump. I know he doesn’t have no owner, because he didn’t have a collar and he was real dirty. I washed him in the laundry sink.”

Nickie scratched the dog behind his small, pointed ears. He was a light-colored dog, a sort of strawberry blond, with round brown eyes. His fur grew in a way that made his face look like a ragged sunflower.

From somewhere downstairs came Crystal’s voice. “Nickie! Where are you?”

Nickie dashed into the hall and shouted down. “Upstairs!”

“Come on down!” called her aunt. “Let’s get settled in.”

She went back into the bedroom. “Okay,” she said. “I won’t tell about you, but you have to be really quiet. Stuff some rags under the door—this door and the hall door both. I’ll try and keep my aunt from coming up here. If she’s going to, I’ll try to warn you.”

“Oh, thank you,” Amanda said. “Thank you a lot. It’s just for a couple days. I’m looking for a job, and when I get one I’ll find me a place of my own.”

Nickie nodded. “Goodbye,” she said, and she dashed back down the stairs.

 

For dinner that night, they had tomato soup from a can Crystal found in a cupboard. They sat at the big dining room table and ate while the rain beat on the windows. On a pad of paper, Crystal started making a list of all the things she’d have to do to get the house ready for sale: Call cleaning service. Call auction house. Call salvage place. Talk to lawyer. Call painters. Call plumbers. It was clear to Nickie that Crystal would be spending a lot of time on the phone.

“Crystal,” Nickie said. “I don’t see anything so awful about Greenhaven. Why do you say it’s awful?”

“It’s huge and dark and impossible to clean. The kitchen is unspeakable. The plumbing is ancient. The whole place smells like mice. That’s just for a start.”

“But it could be repaired, couldn’t it?”

“With great effort and expense.” Crystal went back to her list. Schedule open house, she wrote. She tapped a long red fingernail on the table, thinking.

Crystal wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she always wore stylish clothes and fixed herself up—nail polish, earrings, makeup. Her hair was a sort of streaky blondish color that required frequent visits to the beauty salon. She’d been married twice. First there’d been Uncle Brent, and later there’d been Uncle Brandon. Now there was no one, which was probably one reason Crystal was more snappish and impatient than usual.

“Crystal,” said Nickie, “if you could live in any kind of house, what kind would it be?”

Crystal looked up. She gazed at Nickie blankly for a second, her mind elsewhere. Then she said, “Well, I can tell you what it wouldn’t be. It wouldn’t be an old pile like Greenhaven. And it wouldn’t be a dinky, tacky little apartment like the one I live in now.”

“What, then?” said Nickie.

“A gracious house,” said Crystal. “Big rooms, big windows, a big garden. And—” She leaned forward and smiled a wry little smile. “A nice big man to live in it with me.”

Nickie laughed. “Another husband?” she said.

“The first two weren’t quite right,” said Crystal.

“Would you want to have a dog?”

“A dog? Heavens no. Dogs ruin furniture.”

“But if a dog just showed up and needed a home, would you keep it?”

“Certainly not. It would go straight to the pound to wait for a happy life with someone else.” She spooned up the last of her soup. “Why are you asking about dogs?”

“Just wondering,” said Nickie, with a sinking heart. “I like dogs.”

After dinner, Crystal went to take a bath and Nickie dashed up to the third floor. She tapped on the door of the nursery, and Amanda, in her pajamas, opened it. Otis stood on his hind legs to greet Nickie, and she hugged and petted him. “Everything okay?” she asked Amanda.

“Yeah,” Amanda said. “I’m being real quiet.”

“Good,” said Nickie. “Because I found out Crystal doesn’t like dogs. We have to be extremely careful.”

“Okay,” said Amanda. “I’ll put him under the covers with me tonight.”

Nickie gave Otis one more pat and hurried back downstairs. For a while, she and Crystal sat in the front parlor and watched the news.

A local announcer was talking. “Several residents in Hickory Cove and Creekside,” he said, “have reported signs of unusual activity in nearby wooded areas. A hiker claims to have caught a glimpse, in a remote part of the woods, of a man wearing a white or light tan coat. Residents of the area are advised to be alert to anything out of the ordinary, including unknown persons arriving in town; evidence of tampering with buildings, pipelines, or electrical equipment; and strange behavior of any kind.”

Then the president came on. Nickie didn’t like listening to him because his voice always sounded too smooth. He said something about the Phalanx Nations and missile deployment and fourteen countries and Level Seven alerts. Crystal frowned. “It gets closer every day,” she said.

“What does?”

Crystal just shook her head. “Big trouble,” she said.

The president ended with his usual sentence: “Let us pray to God for the safety of our people and the success of our endeavors.” Nickie always wondered about this. The idea seemed to be that if you prayed extremely hard—especially if a lot of people prayed at once—maybe God would change things. The trouble was, what if your enemy was praying, too? Which prayer would God listen to?

She sighed. “Crystal,” she said, “I’m so sick of the Crisis.”

“I know,” said Crystal. She flicked off the TV. “We all are. But it doesn’t help to worry. All we can do is keep our wits about us. Not let fear take over. And try to be good little people and not add to the badness.” She smiled at Nickie and stood up. “Tired?”

Nickie nodded.

“Which room would you like to sleep in?” Crystal asked. “You can have first pick.”

The room she really wanted was the one on the third floor, but right now it was occupied. So Nickie chose one of the bedrooms on the first floor, and Crystal took the one next to it. They found sheets and blankets in a linen closet and made up the beds, and they unpacked their suitcases and hung their clothes in the closets. Nickie put her nightie on and slid between the sheets of the enormous bed. She thought about Amanda and the little dog, hidden away upstairs. They would be going to bed now, too. It would be nice, she thought, to sleep with a dog curled up next to you.

The bed’s black posts rose toward the ceiling; in the darkness, they looked like two thin soldiers standing guard. Nickie wondered who this room had belonged to in years past. Who else had lain here looking at those posts, and at the violet-flowered wallpaper, and the stains on the ceiling? She wished she could know about their lives—not just her grandfather’s but all the lives of this house, all those ancestors she’d never known.

This is how Nickie was: she wanted to know about everybody and everything—not just encyclopedia-type information, but ordinary things like what people did at their jobs and what their houses looked like inside and what they talked about. When she passed two or three people walking together on the street, she always hoped to catch an intriguing bit of conversation, like “I found her lying there dead!” Or “…and he left that very day without telling a soul and was never seen again!” But almost always, all she heard were the dull, connecting bits of the conversation, things like “And so I said to her…” and “Yeah, I think so, too,” and “So it’s really kind of like…” And by the time they said whatever came next, they were out of earshot.

She also wanted to know about things that weren’t so ordinary, strange extraordinary things like, Were there people on other planets? Was ESP real? Were there still places on Earth where no one had ever been? Were there animals that no one had yet discovered? In a magazine, she had come across a photograph of a dust mite taken with an electron microscope. A dust mite was much too small to see with the naked eye, but when you took its picture and magnified it many times, you could see that it was as complicated and weird as a monster in a science-fiction movie, with fangs and feelers and bristles.



When Nickie saw this picture, she suddenly understood that a whole other world existed right alongside the world of things she could see. In the dust under the furniture, in between the strands of the carpet, even crawling on her very own skin and inside her guts were creatures of unbelievable strangeness. She loved knowing this. She took the dust mite picture with her everywhere she went.

Now she listened to the rain pattering steadily at the windows and closed her eyes. She thought about the spirits of all the people who had lived here. Maybe they were still hovering around, wondering who was coming next. It’s going to be me, she told them silently. I’m going to live here. And this reminded her of something she’d forgotten to do. She sat up and turned the light back on. In the drawer of the bedside table, she rummaged around until she found a stubby pencil and a scrap of paper. On the paper she wrote:


1. Keep Greenhaven.

2. Fall in love.

3. Help the world.


Her three goals. She was determined to accomplish them all.