The Night Visitors

Chapter Twenty-Seven Alice

DAVIS IS SHOWING me a stamped certificate of some kind when Mattie tackles me to the ground. For a moment I think it’s because she doesn’t want me to see what’s on the certificate—it’s got one of those stamps on it with the two Greek ladies—but then I hear a gunshot and glass explodes over our heads. There’s a thump behind the desk, and when I open my eyes I see Davis lying on the floor, blood covering his chest. Thank God, I think, thank God he’s finally dead.

But then his arm moves. The gun he’d been holding on us was on top of the desk, but I remember that it’s not the only gun he has. “He’s going for the gun in his back pocket,” I hiss in Mattie’s ear as I struggle to get out from under her.

Mattie rolls off me and hisses back: “Run! Find Oren. Look in the attic.” She scrambles under the desk, trying to reach the gun before Davis does.

I feel like a coward leaving her but I need to find Oren and I want to get away from Davis. As I run from the study I hear another shot and another explosion of glass. I don’t wait to see who’s shot; I sprint up the front stairs and into Caleb’s room, dive under the bed, and scramble through the panel to the back stairs. The attic, Mattie said, so I grope around until I find stairs that go up, wishing I had a flashlight. Anything could be on these stairs. Spiders. Mice. Ghosts.

One particular ghost. A little boy whose own father killed him thirty-four years ago. Caleb Francis Lane. It was his birth certificate that Davis had been showing me—

Something brushes against my hand. Spiderwebs, I tell myself, but then the spiderweb grows fingers that intertwine themselves with mine. Small fingers, ten-year-old boy fingers. The same cold hand that clasped mine in the crawl space and gave me the button. Caleb Francis Lane, born May 10, 1973, at St. Alban’s Hospital, and he wants to tell me something. Just like Oren wanted to tell me his secrets through the tin can phone that day.

Part of me wants to wrench my hand away. But I don’t. I let this ghost boy lead me up the stairs, navigating the dark far better than I could.

At the top of the stairs I can tell we’re in a lofty space because I can hear the snow pattering on the roof high above my head. As my eyes adjust I start to make out a glow too, swirling through the dark as if the snow has gotten in and turned into glitter. I turn to share the wonder of it with the boy at my side but my hand is empty. And then I have the sense that he is everywhere. That he is the glow that moves through the dark and the heart of the light coming from the center of the attic.

I walk across the wide wooden planks toward the source of the light. It’s a lit snow globe revolving slowly on its base, playing a faint tinny lullaby. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” I realize as I get closer. In a circle around the globe is a battalion of toys: Ewoks and Wookiees, but also dinosaurs and Beanie Babies. They’re standing guard over the boy who sleeps, curled up in a Tauntaun sleeping bag, inside the circle.

I kneel and brush the dark curly hair from his warm forehead. He opens his eyes. “Alice,” he says, yawning. “You found me.”

“Of course I found you, buddy,” I say, wrapping my arms around him and drawing him into my lap. “We’re a team, aren’t we? And you left good clues.”

Oren nods, squeezes me once tightly, then wriggles out of my arms. “Some of those were Caleb’s idea. Look”—he digs in a box next to the sleeping bag—“these were his baby things.”

He takes out a pair of hand-knitted baby booties and a tiny baby hat. Then a blanket with the initials CFL embroidered on it. When he shakes out the blanket a picture falls out. It’s an old faded Polaroid of a woman in a hospital bed holding a baby. No, not a woman. A girl. A teenage girl. I peer closer at the picture. Even though she’s so much younger in the picture, even though I’ve only known her for hardly longer than a day, I recognize her. It’s Mattie. Fifteen-year-old Mattie holding baby Caleb. Caleb Francis Lane, born May 10, 1973, mother—

That’s what the certificate Davis was showing me said. Mother: Mattea Celeste Lane. Father: Unknown. Mattie, who was raped at the Hudson Training School, got pregnant. And had the baby. What monster would make a fifteen-year-old rape victim have the baby?

Judge Matthew T. Lane, that’s who. The same monster who sent kids away to juvie for kickbacks from the JD he sent them to. He probably thought he was teaching Mattie a lesson. She’d fooled around with a boy and look what it had led to.

Poor Mattie. I look at the girl in the picture. She was hardly more than a child herself and yet her face is glowing. She loved that baby. Caleb. I think of the picture on her night table and the way she looked when she talked about him dying. She isn’t mourning a lost brother; she’s mourning a lost son.

“Is this what Caleb wanted us to know?” I ask Oren. “That he was Mattie’s son?”

Oren wrinkles his brow the way he does when he’s tackling a tough math problem. “I think there’s something else. I found this.” He holds out a button, identical to the one I found in the basement. I hold it under the light of the snow globe and examine it. It’s worn and corroded, so it’s hard to make out the pattern on it. Some kind of crest, like the fancy buttons on blazers. Scott had a blazer like that, only he said he was wearing it ironically. This has a crest with an eagle on top and two figures of women in drapes—

Just like the seal on the judge’s folders and the birth certificate. It’s the seal of New York State.

“Who would wear buttons with the seal of New York State on them?” I ask.

“Policemen,” Oren says without hesitation. “New York State policemen. Like that policeman Mattie was talking to.”

“Huh,” I say, turning the button around in my hand. “So why would there be a policeman’s button down in the crawl space behind the furnace—”

Suddenly a terrible thought occurs to me.

“Oren,” I say. “I have to ask you a question and I really, really, really need you to tell me the truth. I promise I won’t be mad at you no matter what the answer. Mattie’s life might depend on it.”

“I understand,” Oren says with a solemn nod that makes him look like he’s grown years older since we arrived at this house. “I’ll tell the truth. I promise.”

I hold up the button. “Did you put a button like this in the crawl space behind the furnace?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I haven’t been in the basement. I was too scared to go down there.”

“Shit,” I say, forgetting that I promised myself to watch my language around Oren. “We have to get downstairs right now.”