And once you’re past the logging roads, well, then it’s just open wilderness for hundreds of miles.
“Noah’s been back since it happened,” Aunt Jet says.
Noah. Riley’s big brother. He’s two years older, so I guess that means he was away at college. Probably the Canadian equivalent of an Ivy League school given how smart he’s always been.
Jet launches into awkward small talk. I don’t exactly tune her out on purpose, but my thoughts keep distracting me. All I can manage are monosyllabic responses, and after a few minutes, I can’t even keep those up.
It wasn’t just topography Riley was obsessed with that summer. He was fascinated by the things people lost among the trees. Discarded soda bottles. Old tires. Pennies and pocketknives. Broken axes and rusting bits of equipment near the logging roads. He almost never touched the things we found; he just recorded them in a small, black notebook.
The Book of Lost Things—that’s what I called it. His parents had another name for it. He had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder a few months before moving to Montgomery Falls, and they worried the time he spent in the woods was unhealthy, that it was tied to his OCD.
Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.
I don’t know. I don’t know if Riley knew.
They fought about it sometimes, he and his parents. They fought about the amount of time we spent out there. Hours and days and weeks—if you added it all up. Lost time spent exploring lost paths and examining lost objects.
How could someone who had been so fascinated with lost things step into the woods and become lost himself?
It takes Aunt Jet pointing out a new sign—the words “Montgomery House: Vacancy” set in neat black letters against an off-white background—to pull me out of my thoughts. If she hadn’t spoken, I might not have realized that we had turned off the street. I might not even have realized we were driving up the long crescent that leads to the house she and Dad grew up in.
“The historical society tried to make me take it down,” she says, speaking of the sign, “but I did a head count of all the plastic flamingos in the neighborhood. And I asked one of the boys in the house to take photographs of the new basketball hoop the president of the society attached to the carriage house at the end of his driveway.”
Riverside Avenue is a street that’s been undergoing an identity war for decades. Back when the town was at the center of a small industrial boom, the rich built their homes here, but as industries folded and fortunes dried up, the houses sat empty. At one end of the street stand rambling Victorians that have been restored to their former glory by new owners, and at the other are houses that have been drawn and quartered into apartments, their manicured lawns paved over and their iron gates taken off the hinges. Spanning the gulf between the two factions are places like Aunt Jet’s.
A year ago, Jet renovated and started renting out rooms to supplement what she makes at the nursing home. She’s hardly alone. The university is one of the few industries in town that’s still booming, and people have turned making money off of students into an art form. People say that half the mortgages in town are paid for by undergrads renting rooms in basements or attics. Without the university and the military base forty minutes away, Montgomery Falls would probably be a ghost town.
If Jet had been renovating almost any other building, no one would have cared. But it was Montgomery House. Home of the founding family. One of the oldest structures in town. The historical society had not been happy with the changes my aunt had made; my father had been even less so.
Dad and Aunt Jet both left Montgomery Falls right after high school, but when their mother—my grandmother—got sick, Jet came back. She gave up her studies, a fiancé, and her whole life so that she could take care of things here. She was twenty-one.
My grandmother hung on for fourteen years. More than long enough for Jet’s old life to have passed her by while my dad finished school, met my mother, and started his career. In a way, Jet giving up those fourteen years made it possible for my father to have the life he wanted, away from the town he had always been desperate to escape.
That much guilt and resentment between them makes things . . . complicated.
In the end, all Jet had was an old house and a fickle-tempered black cat named Brisby. Five years ago, Dad tried to get her to sell Montgomery House. He said it wasn’t healthy, the way she clung to it. He said it was foolish not to try to get as much as they could while the waterfront property was still worth something. He was thinking of the both of them, he claimed. He wasn’t being selfish. He was thinking about her.
He had been charming. He had been persuasive.
His pleas had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he—or, I guess, we—were having money problems. Nothing at all.
Aunt Jet refused.
Montgomery House is one of the two reasons my aunt and father have barely spoken in the past five years. I’m the other.
“Most of the university students have left for the summer, so it’s quiet,” says Jet as she parks in two deep ruts in the lawn. “We only have three guests until September. You’ll barely notice anyone is here, and hardly anything’s changed.”
Living with three complete strangers doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you barely notice, but I don’t say so as I slide out of the car and grab my bags.
Aunt Jet heads straight for the porch, but I stay where I am for a moment, staring up at the house.
People in town say the place is haunted, and it’s not hard to see why. Between its peeling gray exterior and its peaked slate roof, it’s a sprawling shadow caught between the green yard and the river. By some trick of the light, the windows always look flat and black during the day—like the house has dozens of eyes that are constantly watching you.
Inside, it’s filled with dark corners and hidden nooks and the smell of old leather and books. It creaks and groans at night, and you can hear the old pipes rattle in the walls at odd hours.
Maybe some people would call it creepy—Riley used to say it made his spine itch—but it’s never really felt that way to me. To me, it just feels . . . right.
It feels right and I’ve missed it.
“Hello,” I whisper.
The house doesn’t whisper back, but I imagine there’s some tiny, imperceptible shift. The shaking of a shutter in the breeze or the shifting of a shadow as I follow Aunt Jet up the porch steps.
She pauses and turns, one hand on the doorknob as she examines me with a small, worried frown. “You didn’t pack much,” she says, nodding toward my bag.
She’s not wrong. The duffel bag is big, but it’s not that big. A week’s worth of clothes, plus a couple of extra T-shirts. A mostly blank notebook, a charger for the ancient iPod I was allowed to bring, and Pengy—an uninventively named stuffed penguin that I definitely don’t need but felt wrong leaving behind.
Until Dad actually put me on the bus, I was sure he was bluffing, so I hadn’t exactly put a lot of effort into packing. Not that I want to get into that with Aunt Jet. As far as I know, Dad’s given her only the CliffsNotes version of what happened back in New York—just enough to explain why I’m not allowed my cell phone or laptop or to call Lacey, probably—and that’s fine with me. The less Aunt Jet knows, the less she’ll prod me to talk about it. “The backpack is pretty full, too.”