Tighter
Authors: Adele Griffin
Tags: #Mystery, #Fantasy, #Horror, #Young Adult, #Thriller
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Adele Griffin
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Griffin, Adele.
Tighter / Adele Griffin. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Based on Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” tells the story of Jamie Atkinson’s summer spent as a nanny in a small Rhode Island beach town, where she begins to fear that the estate may be haunted, especially after she learns of two deaths that occurred there the previous summer.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89643-9
[1. Death—Fiction. 2. Ghosts—Fiction. 3. Nannies—Fiction. 4. Social classes—Fiction. 5. Emotional problems—Fiction. 6. Mental illness—Fiction. 7. Rhode Island—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G881325Ti 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010025301
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
for Q., for M.
Contents
No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I
don’t
see—what I
don’t
fear!
—Narrator,
The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
ONE
The last thing I did before I left home was steal pills.
“Wait!” I raised my finger and did the
oops
smile, then sprinted back inside while Mom stayed in the car to take me to the train station. First to Teddy’s bathroom to swipe painkillers—we were an athletic family, prone to sports-related injury—and then to my parents’ stash. Mom’s allergies, Dad’s insomnia.
Maybe fifty, all in. A good haul, but would it be enough?
Pills were new for me. I’d been sucked in innocently enough, after a track hurdle that ripped some tissue. A major lower-lumbar strain, the doctor had diagnosed. When the pain persisted, I’d started therapy at the Y, which just became another thing to skip. And pill filching was easier.
Now here it was late June and I wasn’t an addict, not at all, but the heat packs and aspirin hadn’t been getting it done for weeks.
The pills also helped me not think too hard about Mr. Ryan. Sean. I’d called him Sean, a couple of times, in the end. And I was so tired of thinking about him. I gripped a small fantasy that the moment I set foot on Little Bly, he’d evaporate from my memory.
Mom honked. I wavered in the doorway of my bedroom, so safe and familiar. I shouldn’t be leaving home. I was worse than anyone knew—not my parents, not my best friend, Maggie. Maybe I needed more than pills, but I’d already swiped such a haul.
I stepped inside, gravitating toward my bookshelf. What to take? What would help? The book of poems Tess gave me last birthday that I’d skimmed and liked. My old
Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes
, which I’d read so many times in childhood that the cover was unhinging from its spine.
On impulse, I popped them both into my satchel. Not much, but comforting, a double shield to protect me from homesickness. Then I stood, helplessly searching—what more had I forgotten? Surely there was something else, something better—before the horn jounced me from my trance.
“Everyone falls in love with Little Bly. The beaches, the houses.” Mom had been nervous-chatting the whole ride. Now we stood by the tracks, waiting for the train to pull in. “This’ll be so relaxing! I wish I could come along. At the very least, Jamie, I bet it will be therapeutic for you.”
I nodded and yawned. These past weeks, Mom had been big into telling me what Little Bly would be “at the very least.” I’m not sure either of us had a clue what it might be at the very most. But a yawn or a “you said it” were my best conversation stoppers in this summer of limited energy. Not that anything was stopping Mom.
All I really knew,
at the very least
, was that I’d be farther from Maplewood than I’d ever been, outside of a chorus trip to Vienna three years ago, in eighth grade.
“A nice change for you, Jamie.”
I nodded again and flattened my hand against my satchel, where my Ziploc bag was stashed. Nice change or not, it was happening. Mom had moved pretty quickly, too, rearranging my life one night while she and Dad were out at a dinner party. She’d made it seem like luck, but her secret motive—her trial kick out of the nest for her youngest, her hang-around-the-house kid—wasn’t lost on me.
And I couldn’t discount that this was my dullest summer on record. Maggie was off with her family touring a handful of national parks, all of them gone cold turkey off wireless networks as they hopscotched from Appalachia to Yosemite in their TrailManor RV. The twins were gone, too—they’d left right after graduation. Teddy, for college football training in Orlando, while Tess was in Croatia teaching English in a one-room schoolhouse. She sent postcards that told us the weather (broiling hot, every day) and what she was eating (beef on a stick, every day). We stuck the cards on the fridge next to pictures Teddy emailed of himself as a dot in a helmet.
So maybe it was my turn to be a body in motion. Specifically, a blur on the Jersey Transit to Penn Station, then all aboard Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor bound for Providence, Rhode Island, where I’d catch another local train and then a ferry to the island of Little Bly. My last major trip this week had been my hour at the Y, and then into town to drop off some movie rentals. I felt unsteady and out of shape, and maybe not totally prepared for the direct thrust of a voyage out.
As the train approached, I could feel myself collapsing. No, no, this was a bad idea. I was scared to be jerked out of my orbit like this; I wasn’t steady in my head. But I couldn’t find the right words to explain any of it to my mother—especially since she was so hopeful that Little Bly was my cure.
A cheery smile, a confident bound up the train steps. I went for the window seat so I could wave as I watched Mom turn miniature. And then with sweating fingers, I sank back and took a pill from the Baggie, swallowing it dry and tasting its bitter silt in the back of my throat. Okay, okay. One step at a time, and I’d be okay. I settled in, rechecking my books, my notebook, my wallet, then unfolding the printout of Miles McRae’s email that I’d slipped into my journal. Even though I’d looked at this note so many times I could have sung it.
Dear Jamie,
Great talking to you on the phone the other day. You must hear it from everyone, how much you sound like your mom. I’m glad you’ve agreed to stay at Skylark for part of the summer, and want to confirm by note our agreed dates, 28 June–7 Aug.
A few punch points. Little Bly is a small island town (about a thousand year-rounders, but the population septuples in summer season). We’ve got cars, but half the time folks hoof it or bike—help yourself to mine, in the garage. Most of the land is nature reserves or private tracts, and landowners don’t care about friendly trespassing (I don’t). Walk any direction and you’ll hit the beach. Blyers are a kick-back bunch, and you’ll see that people aren’t “snobs” once they know who you are.
Connie has an ATM card. Tell her what purchases she needs to make. Please don’t use any of your own money on Isa.
On that, I set up an automatic pay transfer every other Friday. It should hit your account same day.
One Last Thing. The time zone in Hong Kong is exactly twelve hours different from Little Bly. If you need me, I’m only a call or text away, but don’t alert me to crises that I can’t control—example: “Where are the beach passes?” Not only won’t I know, but I’m too far to hop a plane and hunt them down. It’ll only make me feel like a Bad Dad that I’m not around to micro-engineer. Your mother assures me you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. I’m relying on that.
This should work out perfectly, right? Still can’t believe that I’m writing freckle-nosed Sandy Henstridge’s daughter. Everyone tells me you’re the spitting image of her. Lucky you.
Regards,
M.M.
In my mind, I pictured Miles McRae as a martini-sipping, tuxedo-wearing “Bond, James Bond” type. Maybe because I knew he was rich, and because Mom’s face turned as pink as a peppermint when she mentioned him. Presumably, Miles didn’t know I existed until last month, when Mom ran into him at the Wolfingtons’ dinner party.
“McRae, Miles McRae”
might have been surprised to hear that I’d always known about him. Mom had dated Miles a hundred years ago, but she’d kept tabs, the way women do. The way I might on Sean Ryan though he’d left New Jersey to teach high school chemistry in Telluride. No forwarding email—although I’d chased him down online and found him in the school directory.
But Mom’s relationship with Miles had always sounded sweet. Also, his wife had died many years ago, of leukemia, and this had been the sad fact percolating in my mind after Mom had arrived home that night, squeaking with a girlishness that made me feel embarrassed for her.
The widower Miles, “still
so
good-looking,” had been seated right across the table from her, and at some point between the salad and the blackberry tart, Mom won me my job.
“He hasn’t changed,” Mom had assured me, as if I’d have a clue how to tell the difference. “He’s in Hong Kong overseeing a hotel project, and he wanted to find an au pair—a young person, not his housekeeper—to look after his daughter. To take her to tennis and the beach. Isn’t it perfect? You’d stay at their summer home—they’re in Beacon Hill during the school year.”
The tiniest note of grandeur had crept into Mom’s voice as she exhaled these words:
au pair, summer home, Beacon Hill.
She’d grown up richer than we were now, in that toity world of
summering
, and the Wolfingtons were friends from her youth—which was why that night Mom had crunched her toes into heels and salon-styled her hair into a first-lady flip.
