Close to Home by Lisa Jackson Page B

could.
    On the second floor, the bedrooms were dirty, of course, and probably needed insulation, but they could remain as they were if they were cleaned and repainted and the wooden floors were revived. Dee Linn and she had had separate rooms, Roger his own while he was still there, and the twins had shared the largest room. The single bath on the floor would also need a complete overhaul, but she’d expected as much.
    On the third floor, things changed. Here was the master bedroom suite, with its marble soaking tub and shower, both in passable shape. It had a commanding view of the river and took up half the third floor. The hall bathroom was also operational, the faucets tarnished but working, the stains in the tub and sinks minimal.
    â€œThank God for small favors,” she said.
    But there was still another room to view, the corner bedroom, the one where Gracie had sworn she’d first seen the ghost: Theresa’s room. No one had occupied it in the thirty-odd years since she’d disappeared, and even now, as Sarah walked down the old patterned hallway runner to the corner bedroom, she felt a chill in the air, a slight shifting in the atmosphere.
    All in your mind,
    She reached for the doorknob, and when she turned it, she experienced a chill, a tiny frisson of ice that swept up her hand and arm. With the cold rush came a memory.
    â€œDon’t you go in there! Sarah Jane, do you hear me, you stay out of your sister’s room!”
    Arlene’s voice seemed to reverberate down the empty hallway, her strict, demanding tone still echoing in Sarah’s head, though that particular warning had happened when Sarah couldn’t have been more than six or seven.
    Theresa had disappeared years before, so Sarah had no real recollection of her eldest sister, and recognized her only from snapshots and pictures taken over the years before Sarah’s birth, photos that ended abruptly when Theresa had been sixteen and disappeared for good.
    Arlene’s warning still hung in the air, the image of her twisted, pained face burned into Sarah’s brain. “You know better than to step foot in that room, so don’t you dare!”
    Sarah, then, had let go as if the glass doorknob was white-hot, her mother’s wrath palpable though she’d merely been a curious child who had just wanted a glimpse into her sister’s private life, to understand more about the girl who’d become a saint in their mother’s eyes. “She’ll come back, you wait and see,” Arlene had insisted time and again, becoming an avenging angel who guarded the sanctuary and eventual memorial to her eldest daughter with her life.
    And a willow switch.
    Arlene had used the snapping whip sparingly but effectively; she’d lashed Jacob’s and Joseph’s butts and the back of Sarah’s hands when she’d deemed harsh punishment to be warranted.
    Only Dee Linn had escaped their mother’s fury. And Theresa, possibly, though Sarah had never really known. Theresa was an enigma to her, a ghost in the sense that she existed only in her very young memory, and even then, Sarah wasn’t certain the images were real or just her subconscious coming to the fore. Roger was certainly more real, drifting in and out of the house—as well as jail.
    â€œTroubled,” Arlene had said, “so troubled.” However, Sarah often had wondered if her mother’s explanation for her eldest son’s problems was an excuse for something darker, something that couldn’t be cast aside with a simple excuse.
    Standing in the hallway, Sarah imagined her mother’s high-pitched voice reprimanding her, and for a second she paused, closed her eyes, and cleared her mind.
    Get a grip, Arlene isn’t in this house, She hasn’t been for years, And Theresa never returned, did she? She escaped this prison of a home, As for ghosts, they don’t exist except for inside your own weak mind, You know it,