The Sitter (9 page)

21

D
id you like the flowers, Ellie?

They didn’t upset you, did they?

Once you got over the shock, did you think about what they mean? Or did you toss them in the trash—the way you trashed me?

Yes, they were funeral flowers. Black flowers to honor the dead.

They were for
your
funeral, Ellie dear. Did you figure that out?

Yes, I sent them early. But I wanted to be the first. I’ll be there. I want you to know that. I’ll be the first at your funeral—because I’m going to cause it.

But don’t worry, you have a little time.

I want to torture you a bit more. Because the very thought of you tortured me for seven years. Because you were there torturing me. Even in my sleep. Even in my dreams.

Maybe tonight you’ll dream about my present to you. Maybe you’ll dream about cockroaches crawling up and down your body. Maybe in your sleep tonight you’ll feel the prickle of their feet against your skin, their dry bodies as they move over you, swarm over you . . . cover that cute little string bikini of yours, cover your arms, your legs, climb into your eyes, your mouth . . . choke you . . . smother you.

Soon you’ll be a playground for bugs and worms. Under the ground, in the dark, where the bugs and worms play.

Soon, Ellie. Soon.

22

A
few mornings later—cloudy, gray, the ocean air heavy and wet—I dropped the kids with some friends on Noyac Road and then headed the Taurus toward town.

My tires splashed through deep puddles of rainwater. The trees on both sides of the road glistened and dripped. It must have rained hard during the night, but I hadn’t heard the storm.

I’d slept a deep, dreamless sleep. And when my alarm went off, I’d blinked my eyes open, confused. I didn’t know where I was.

Now I was on my way to Southampton to buy party supplies for Abby. She was having a small party—a barbecue if the weather cooperated—and she needed beer and wine, and paper plates, lemons and limes, and a long list of other items, which I had tucked safely in my bag.

Noyac Road bumped past woods and small frame and shingle houses set close to the road. I passed a homey-looking restaurant with a big sign that proclaimed
ARMAND’S
, then a pretty marina with small boats bobbing in the choppy, gray bay water.

I searched the radio for some lively music, something to wake me up, and I settled on Party 105: dance, dance, dance. I recognized Pink, singing a song from a couple of years ago— “Get the Party Started”—and I sang along with her at the top of my lungs.

The music cheered me up, and thinking about Teresa coming out made me eager for the weekend.

Oh, yeah. Get this party started, all right!

I was still in a good mood at the gourmet store on Main Street when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

I had a sudden heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach, a feeling of cold dread as I turned and stared at Mrs. Bricker.

So much for my good mood.

Her bony hand was still on my shoulder. She pulled it away slowly. She wore a blue-and-white flower-print dress, a little faded with age. She had the same scarf she’d been wearing last time tied loosely around her throat.

Her round face was heavily rouged, and as a smile formed on her scarlet lips, her cheeks appeared to crack and crumble.

“Ellie? I hoped I’d find you today.” Her voice was soft and smooth, a young woman’s voice.

Had she been coming to town every day hoping to run into me?

Leave me alone, you old freak!

No. Don’t do it, Ellie. You’re a polite, young woman. Especially to old people. Remember?

“Hi, Mrs. Bricker. Nice to see you,” I said.

She licked her heavily lipsticked lips. Her teeth were smeared with red. “You’re still working for the Harpers?”

I pulled two boxes of wheat crackers off the shelf and dropped them into my basket. “Yes, of course. It’s been only a few days.”

Her smile faded. Behind the thick-lensed glasses, her blue eyes were sharp and cold. “Did you think about what I told you?”

“Well, actually—”

She grabbed my arm so hard I nearly dropped the shopping basket. “I need to talk to you, Ellie. I didn’t get a chance the first time. You really need to hear—”

I raised my free hand, as if calling for a truce. “Please, Mrs. Bricker. I have so much shopping to do. I really can’t today.”

I tried to turn to the shelves, but her grip tightened. “You’re in danger, Ellie. I must speak to you. Now. It really can’t wait.”

My heart started to pound. What did I do to deserve this? Didn’t I have enough trouble back at the house?

“No, I’m sorry. Please,” I said sharply. “I don’t mean to be rude, but—”

She brought her face close to mine. The powder and rouge on her cheeks smelled like oranges. Her breath smelled like sour tea. “You have time to buy me a coffee,” she whispered, giving me a tight smile. “When you’re finished here, we’ll sit down and have a coffee. It will take ten minutes, Ellie. And it may save your life.”

She led me to a little bakery and coffee shop called The Golden Pear, at the end of the row of shops. A light rain had begun to fall, and she held my arm as we walked along the sidewalk to the restaurant.

She must have been in her seventies or eighties, but she didn’t walk like an old woman. She wore black New Balance sneakers and had no trouble keeping pace with me.

“My family used to own most of that block,” she said, pointing to a row of stores across the street. “But they sold it during the Depression for next to nothing. Can you imagine how rich I’d be today? I’d be taking
you
out for coffee.”

“Your family has lived in Southampton a long time?”

She sniffed. “We’re not summer people. I’ll tell you that.”

We found a cramped booth by the window in back and ordered coffee and croissants. The restaurant was noisy, the little square tables were jammed together, and a man on a cell phone at the table across from us was having a loud, embarrassing fight with someone. Probably his wife.

I shouldn’t have been there with her. I had so much shopping to do, and I barely knew my way around town. But Mrs. Bricker promised she would never bother me again, if I would only let her tell her story.

“I wouldn’t be nagging you like this if you weren’t in danger,” she said, those sharp blue eyes trained on mine.

“Well, why don’t you start with that?” I said, leaning forward. “How am I in danger?”

She shook her head. “I’ll have to start at the beginning,” she replied.

23

O
ur coffees and croissants came. Mrs. Bricker pulled her croissant in two and carefully slathered both halves with butter and strawberry jam. Then she spooned two teaspoons of sugar into her coffee and stirred it slowly, staring into the cup as if thinking hard, trying to decide how to tell her story.

I wanted to scream. I glanced at my watch. How long was this going to take?

Luckily, the loud, angry man on the cell phone got up and left. He was replaced by two gangly teenage girls in midriff tops and short shorts. They both wore rhinestone beads in their navels.

I counted to ten as Mrs. Bricker took a small bite of her croissant. Jam clung to her upper lip. She raised her cup, took a long sip of coffee, and I noticed the ring on her ring finger. It was an oval ring, silver with a large, dark green stone—an emerald?—mounted in the center.

She saw me gazing at it and raised her hand to give me a better view. “Isn’t that the most perfect emerald you’ve ever seen? See how it catches the light? My husband gave me that on our fortieth anniversary. He said it once belonged to Queen Victoria.” She snickered. “He always was a fucking liar.”

Whoa. Such language. I almost did a coffee spit.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “But please, Mrs. Bricker . . .”

Finally, she cleared her throat and started her story.

“I guess I’ll start with the Harpers’ house. You know, the little guest house was built first. You’ve seen the guest house by now, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, it was built sometime in the 1850s. Back then, Sag Harbor was a major whaling town. There’s a museum there to this day with displays about the whales that were caught and the sailors who went after them. It’s all gone today, of course. No more whaling boats. All gone. Like just about everything else that was real out here.”

She sniffed again, frowning, and took another bite of the croissant.

“Well, the little house was built by a whaling captain, a man named Halley, who sailed off Montauk. The truth is, Halley was a dishonest old scoundrel. My great-grandfather had a whaling boat, and Halley robbed him of it. Promised to buy it on credit, then never paid. A typical Halley. My family never had any use for them from that day to this.

“Well, Halley wanted to build a house for his family. He had four children by this time. But he couldn’t really afford a house. So he stole a lot of lumber. Would you believe he stole some of it from coffins? Don’t look at me like that, Ellie. I’m only speaking the truth. The man stole wood from people’s coffins.”

I set down my coffee cup and stared at her across the table. “Mrs. Bricker, how do you know all this?”

She wiped jam off her chin with her napkin. “It’s in the family records, dear. Besides, it’s all common knowledge around here.”

Common knowledge. Yeah, right.

She really is crazy, I realized. Hel-lo, Ellie. Why are you sitting here with her when you could be getting your shopping done and picking up the kids?

Mrs. Bricker raised her coffee cup to her mouth and slurped the last of it. She held the cup up to the waitress, signaling for more.

“Halley’s wife had left him,” she finally continued. “So when he went off whaling, he left the children in the care of a nanny. Now, I really don’t know if he was humping the nanny . . .”

Humping? Gross! Please—spare me.

“The children loved the nanny. I think her name was Ann-Marie, but I might be getting that mixed up.”

You might be getting everything mixed up, you kook!

“One of the children in particular—Jeremiah, the youngest boy—
really
loved the nanny. He was a frail, sickly boy. Premature by two months, you know, and never made up for it. He didn’t speak much and was shy around people outside his family.

“Anyway, the nanny took the place of the boy’s mother, and she was his best friend, too, I guess. I mean, she meant a little too much to the child. He loved her too much. It became obvious that he had crazy ideas about her. Because one afternoon—and this is in all the newspapers of the time, dear, so you can look it up—Jeremiah Halley caught the nanny making love to her boyfriend, a young Italian man from the village.

“Jeremiah was sickly and thin, remember, but he went into some kind of ungodly rage. He picked up an old whaling harpoon. It was much too heavy for him, much heavier than he was. But in his rage, he lifted it off the wall. And he heaved it. Heaved it at her, hoping to kill her for betraying him.

“But Jeremiah’s aim was bad. He was just a tiny thing, remember. He heaved the harpoon—shot it across the room—and plunged it through the
boyfriend’s
heart. He killed the boyfriend instead of the nanny.”

Yeah, sure, I thought. A sickly little boy picks up a huge harpoon twice his size and throws it across the room with such force that it goes right through someone.

Tell me another one, Mrs. B.

“That’s a horrible story,” I said, making like I believed it. “And you’re sure it’s true? It really happened in the Harpers’ guest house?”

Mrs. Bricker nodded solemnly.

An image flashed into my mind: Brandon poking the seagull to death.

I forced it from my thoughts.

“The nanny ran for help,” Mrs. Bricker continued. “She sent for the town constable. The boy admitted what he had done. He hadn’t moved from the nanny’s bedroom. He stood, staring at the boyfriend’s corpse lying there in a pool of blood.”

“And what happened to the boy?” I asked.

Mrs. Bricker cleared her throat. “They didn’t know what to do with Jeremiah. The local police had never encountered a murderer that young. No one had. Four years old. And the boy was so frail, so sickly and silent. He almost never spoke.”

She took a long sip of coffee.

I shifted in my seat impatiently. “And?”

“Wouldn’t you know it,” the old woman said. “Jeremiah died two days later. They found him lying dead in the nanny’s bed. Some said he died from the strain of what he did. Others said the little boy died of a broken heart.”

I spun my coffee cup on its saucer. Then I raised my eyes to the old woman. “It’s a real interesting story. But I don’t understand. Why did you follow me all over town to tell it to me?”

Behind the thick, square glasses, her blue eyes narrowed to slits. “Because it happened again,” she whispered. “Listen to me closely, Ellie:
It happened again.
Jeremiah’s ghost remained in the house. It never left. It—”

“Whoa. Wait.” I touched Mrs. Bricker’s bony hand with my own. I could feel the big, emerald ring on my palm. “Stop. I enjoy ghost stories. Really. But I have so much shopping to do.”

I glanced out the window. Rain was still drizzling down. The sky had grown darker. I sat there for a moment before I realized that my eyes had slipped from the sky and settled on a man.

I was staring at Chip Harper. He wore a tan plastic rain poncho, raindrops rolling down the front, and a blue Yankees cap. He was staring hard at Mrs. Bricker and me.

He had an intense scowl on his face. But when he realized I was looking back at him, he nodded awkwardly, then hurried away.

“Please let me finish,” Mrs. Bricker pleaded. “I’m not telling you this for my health, you know. It happened again. In the 1950s. You see, Jeremiah’s ghost remained in the guest house. Because the boy wanted his revenge. He had missed his target. He had missed the nanny and murdered the boyfriend instead. And his ghost couldn’t rest until he finished what he intended—until he murdered the nanny. And so, Jeremiah struck again.”

I squinted at her. “A hundred years later?”

I signaled to the waitress for the check. I’d heard enough.

“Listen to me, Ellie. A doctor owned the house. The guest house. The big house still hadn’t been built. I don’t remember the doctor’s name, but it’s in the newspapers. You can see for yourself. He had a couple of kids. A boy, four or five, a little boy. The doctor came out only on weekends. The kids were left with their nanny.

“Don’t roll your eyes, Ellie. I’m not making this up. It happened again. Just like the first time. The little boy caught the nanny he adored with her fiancée. He picked up a harpoon mounted near the mantel. He had to be possessed. He had to be possessed by Jeremiah, seeking his revenge.

“He tossed the harpoon. He missed. He missed again. He murdered the young man. Jeremiah didn’t get his revenge. Afterwards, the boy didn’t remember a thing. Not a thing. And that’s proof—”

“Proof that he was possessed by Jeremiah Halley,” I said.

“Yes. And he’s still there, Ellie. Jeremiah is still in the guest house, waiting. He can’t rest until he murders his nanny. Don’t roll your eyes. Believe me. Your life could depend on it.”

She licked her lips. Her voice had become raspy and hoarse. “I started work at the Harpers’ in March when they first started coming to Watermill. And a friend told me this story a few weeks later. You can imagine how I felt. I—”

“You started in March? Was Brandon talking then?” I interrupted.

“No. Not a word. Poor kid. He seemed frightened to me. Frightened and strange. Clung to his father. A real papa’s boy. Seemed angry at his mother all the time. I don’t know what she did to deserve it. She was the nice one, seemed to me.”

The waitress brought the check. The restaurant had become crowded, louder than when we had entered. I leaned across the table to hear the old woman better.

“I started at the end of March. The boy wasn’t talking. I remember my first day so well. Cold and gray, with the wind blowing something fierce off the ocean.

“The boy disappeared for a while. He did that sometimes. He liked to be by himself. Liked to collect things from the ocean, shells and stones, and things.

“Anyway, that day, my first day, I found him on his hands and knees behind the guest house. I asked him what he was doing back there. Of course, he didn’t answer. He just stared at me, stared with cold, angry eyes.”

“Weird,” I muttered.

Mrs. Bricker grabbed my hand. “Don’t you see? What brought Brandon Harper to the guest house? It’s Jeremiah Halley at work again. I know it. I—”

“Is that why you left the Harpers?” I asked. “Because you thought Brandon was possessed?”

She snorted angrily. Her rouged cheeks turned even redder. “No. I was fired. Unjustly fired by Chip Harper.”

“Why? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I was telling the story about Jeremiah Halley and the guest house to a friend, and Brandon overheard me. Chip Harper fired me on the spot. I was never treated so badly in my life. Luckily, I got another job down the beach. A better paying job, I might add, with normal kids.”

I dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the check. “Well, thanks for telling me all this.” What else could I say? That she’s a crazy, superstitious old woman who probably shouldn’t be allowed near kids?

I slid from the booth and stretched out a hand to help her up. Her powder and rouge had caked, and her skin showed a thousand tiny cracks. She looked a lot like one of those ancient mummies in a horror film.

“Keep an eye on the boy,” she rasped, waving a bony finger at me. “He looks sweet, but he could be dangerous. And watch out for Chip Harper, too. He’s a shifty one. There’s something definitely wrong with him.”

I laughed to myself and hurried back out into the cool, refreshing rain, eager to get away from the old woman and her ugly stories.

If only I had listened.