Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 I''m raking dead leaves in my front yard when a figure with a leather briefcase and a crooked smile appears on the sidewalk. "Talitha Velkwood?" he asks, as if it''s a genuine question, as if he doesn''t already know exactly who I am. I barely look up at him. "You''re here to talk about ghosts, right?" He offers to buy me a cup of coffee at the shop across the street, and with a stack of bills marked Past Due stuffed in my mailbox, I''m in no position to turn anyone down. We sit at a corner table next to a smudged window, fidgeting in our seats. "Thank you for meeting with me," he says at last, and flashes me that crooked smile again. Up close, he''s younger than I expect, maybe even a few years younger than me. These days, it seems everybody''s younger than me.
He tells me his name is Jack, and on reflex, I introduce myself, even though we''ve already been over this. He knows my name, knows everything about me. The whole world does. When you survive a tragedy like mine, privacy is suddenly a luxury you can''t afford. "You from the government?" I ask, as I grip my coffee cup in both hands, the heat warming my palms. He shakes his head. "Foxwell Enterprises," he says, as though that''s supposed to mean something to me. I sit back and stare at him, wondering how long this will take.
Those leaves aren''t going to rake themselves. "Foxwell''s a nonprofit," he clarifies. "We''re interested in the Velkwood Vicinity." I scoff, turning toward the window. "You and everyone else." The Velkwood Vicinity. I''ve always thought how it''s a bit of a misnomer since it''s not much of a vicinity, not much of anything. It''s just a single street, one little block, eight houses in total.
A blink-and-miss-it sort of subdivision, smack-dab in the middle of the suburbs. Or at least it was blink-and-miss-it until something happened, something the world has spent years trying to unravel. A cosmic anomaly, a few people say. Proof of life after death, according to others. Either way, it went from a nothing neighborhood to a literal nothing--you can barely see it now, even when you''re looking right at it. Day and night, it wavers in between, there and not there, like some kind of ghoulish Brigadoon. And because we lived there, me and my mom and my little sister Sophie, it''s named after us. "Why couldn''t you choose the Owens or the Spencers down the road?" I asked at the time, but it made sense in its own morbid way.
We were the first ones to build a house on the allotment, way back in ''88 when Aqua Net and indoor shopping malls were the order of the day, and ghosts were the furthest thing from our minds. That meant the street was christened with our last name. So when reality split in two, and there was suddenly no more neighborhood, only the misty outline where one used to be, the zone ended up named for us, too. "I''ve got to tell you," Jack says, leaning forward, cappuccino machines hissing pleasantly in the background. "I''ve been studying Velkwood Street for years. Since back when I was still in high school. So this is a real honor to finally meet you." He''s so earnest when he says it that I almost laugh in his face.
I take another sip of coffee instead. "It''s been a while since anyone asked me about this." No matter where I moved, I used to get guys like him sniffing around at least once a month. Cut-rate journalists and eager scientists and more than my fair share of G-men, all of them with lots of questions and very few answers. They expected me to fill in the blanks, like the neighborhood was just a riddle waiting to be solved, and I was their own personal cipher. But that was a long time ago. It''s been twenty years now since it happened, and even ghosts have got a shelf life. Everybody tried to study the phenomenon, tried to get inside and see what had really happened, but the neighborhood would have none of that.
So the government did the next best thing. They blocked it off with pylons like it was a sinkhole and called it a day. Until this afternoon, I thought everyone had abandoned the street. But Jack''s apparently not the type to walk away. "We just got a grant," he says, a flinty look in his eyes. "For research. You see, I''ve got a theory." And with that, he starts in, expounding on his four-part hypothesis.
I stare into my coffee cup and wish I was someone else. They all used to have a spiel like this one, everyone so cocksure they knew why the neighborhood vanished off the map, even though they never seemed to be able to prove it. "I''ve got pictures," Jack says, and fumbles in his briefcase. "We sent in a drone. It didn''t last long inside. They always break down after a few minutes, but we managed to get these." He slides a small stack of eight-by-tens across the table to me. They''re the same size as acting headshots, as though the neighborhood is an ingenue auditioning for a movie role.
My head down, I thumb through the images, already braced for disappointment. People have tried taking pictures before, but they never come up with anything. And these ones are business as usual--a rusted-out mailbox, a sinuous street draped in shadow, a blur that could be anything at all--until I get to the last one. It''s a grainy photo of a dark gray split-level with red trim, and I recognize it in an instant. That''s my house. Or at least it was my house back when things like deeds and property taxes and family dinners actually mattered. I count the windows in the front. The third one over, the one that belonged to my little sister, Sophie.
Even from here, I can tell her night-light is on. I always made sure of it. Every evening before bed, I''d tuck her in and flip the tiny switch. Sophie didn''t like the dark. She always said it was coming for her. "Don''t go," she''d say, holding tight to her plastic pony named Sam. I''d just laugh and kiss her forehead. "You know I''ll be here in the morning," I promised her.
"I''ll always come back for you." "Please don''t forget," she''d tell me, her face half-hidden beneath her bedsheet. "Because I''ll be waiting, Talitha." "I haven''t forgotten," I whisper and press my fingertips into her window on the photograph, as though I can still feel her there. Velkwood Street isn''t your garden-variety haunting. There are no spectral whispers, no phantoms in chains, at least none that we''ve seen. Instead, it''s the houses and the sidewalk that are ghosts, death leached into the soil, into everything. Or at least that''s the official story.
"Are they all dead?" I asked twenty years ago when the government types sat me down at a long, empty table in a long, empty room. But nobody could give me a straight answer. They couldn''t tell me who was even still in there. Ghosts aren''t keen on roll call, and without a clear aerial view or an eyewitness, it was all guesswork. Sophie might still be inside, haunting her own life. My eight-year-old baby sister, never allowed to grow up. My mom might still be there too, along with everyone else we knew from the neighborhood. Or maybe they''re not.
Maybe they''ve been dead for decades, vanished in whatever disaster turned the street into a ghost in the first place. Nobody knows for sure. That''s the problem. Only I decided long ago what I think: they''re gone, plain and simple. After all, ghosts are rarely subtle. If they were still around, somebody would have seen them by now, lingering at the edges of a blurry photo or calling out from within the confines of the street, their ethereal voices ringing out into the night like an eternal curse. But that''s never happened, not once, not in twenty years. The only thing left now is the illusion of that neighborhood.
A living memory, a vague mirage. I pass the pictures back to Jack, all except for the shot of my house. "Can I keep this one?" I ask, holding it close. He gives me a half smile. "If you''d like," he says, and blushes a little. You can tell he doesn''t usually do this, doesn''t make chitchat with strangers, doesn''t talk much at all. I know what that''s like, the way life sneaks up on you. The way you end up alone, one day at a time.
Of course, I''m only assuming he''s alone. Maybe I''ve been on my own for so long that I just figure everyone else is too. We sit together, the coffee shop bustling all around us, and I hold my breath, waiting for it. For what he''s about to do next. What they always do. "You could help me," he says finally, and I already know where this is going. Or rather, where he wants me to go. "No," I say, before he can even ask.
I clamber to my feet, my head gone gauzy, because I hate this. The way my past is a spectacle to people, a sideshow curiosity. Somewhere they always want to drag me back to. I start to move for the door, but Jack is suddenly standing too, something in his face gone frantic. "Please." He leans closer, his hand on my arm, his touch warm. I should pull away, but I don''t. Instead, I ease back into my seat, my eyes on him.
"Why now?" I ask. "After all this time, why would I ever want to go back there?" "Because," he says, "it would mean so much to us. To everyone. This grant is a real opportunity." A real opportunity. What a joke. If it were a real opportunity, then they could get somebody else for the job. "Why don''t you ask Brett Hadley?" I say, and for a moment, i.