Part 13

          "So.  You should get a boyfriend."
          "Because that will make my life less dramatic."
          "Because that will help you get a life."
          "I have one! It's just...a little quieter than yours."
          "Because it doesn't exist."
          "Well..."
          "What's your fortune cookie say?"
          "Huh?"
          She points to the plastic-wrapped bit of baked yellow origami on my tray.
          "Oh. Uh..."
          "'Your hard work will get payoff today.' Sweet, I'm getting a raise!"
          "'A kind word will keep someone warm for years.'"  This makes me pause, considering Evelyn, her relationship with me, her non-relationship with her parents.
          "Aww.  See?  That means you should get a boyfriend."  She stabs at her stir-fry in a self-assured way, confident that the cookie has completely validated her point.

          The next day, I manage to remember to call Rosemary.  I did a Google search on the phone number, to figure out at least what time zone she's in - luckily, it's mine, so I don't need to worry about the math.
          "Hello?"  A man's voice.
          "Hi, is Rosemary available?"
          "She is.  Can I ask who's calling?"
          "My name is Kimberly, I talked to her-- to Jeremy Mason recently, he gave me her number to ask about some family history?"
          "Oh sure.  Just a minute.  Rose!"
          The ensuing pause is long enough that I have time to beat myself up for sounding like an idiot.  I have no actual idea what the relationship is between Jeremy and Rosemary, he never mentioned it, and I didn't even realize that until I was halfway through that sentence.
          "Hello?"
          "Hi, my name is Kimber Bennett, I spoke with Jeremy Mason the other day, and he gave me your number.  I'm doing some research on the Mason family, and he thought you might be able to help me?"
          "Well sure now, I probably could.  I keep track of the family history as best I can, and more than anyone else does, anyway.  I don't recognize your name though, you're not a far-flung branch of the family tree, are you?"
          Stumbling a little in embarrassment, I explain that I'm not, but that I live near the old estate, and doing a project - you'd think I'd have this explanation down a little more pat by now, but no, I sound like a greenhorn of a schoolkid every freaking time.  I should make myself sit down and write an actual artist's statement or something, just to force myself to put it all into coherent words.
          The interest in her voice has risen a bit when she responds.  "The Mapleton house, sure!  I visited there once, I was just a little girl so it's a little hazy, but I remember it was beautiful - and felt a little haunted, even to me then."
          I let out a short laugh, she has no idea.  "Oh, it still feels that way..."
          "So, what can I tell you?  Do you have some idea of its history already, or..?"
          "I've read the local newspaper accounts of the fire, but they were pretty sparse.  I've been able to find a few records and old photos and things around town, so I have an idea of the names and birth dates and things, but I probably have a lot of gaps."
          "Well, why don't I just start going through what I know about the house and the family that lived there, and you can stop me if I hit something you already know."
          "That'd be great - I really appreciate this, thank you."
          "Oh, it's no trouble.  To be honest, I'm glad to have an attentive ear - nobody else in my family really seems to care, so I rarely have an opportunity to talk about everything I've dug up!"

          We chat for almost an hour.  Most of it is ground I'd already covered, but I let her tell some of those areas anyway, in case she's turned up details different from the ones I have.  She'd known about some of the photos in the Derick Reese collection, but obviously not the newest ones - I get her address, and promise to have someone send her a prints of the ones I know about that she hasn't seen.  (I'm just happy to have some way to repay her for the time and trouble of answering a stranger's random questions about her family history!)
          "Oh! The baby, the youngest at the time of the fire - who was that, I don't think I ever saw a name," I ask, realizing that's a fairly large and easily-filled gap on my end.
          "That would be Helen, she was Helen Cardinal when she married later on.  Gossip had it that she was the illegitimate child of Cora and a local man, but I've never heard what his name was."
          "I'd heard that too, and some sources seemed pretty confident.  Cora and Azal's marriage had gotten a little rocky by then, it sounds like?"
          "It seems to have been, yes, I never did hear happy things about their relationship.  Not that I've heard much at all, mind, but it's certainly more than I've heard about Meres and Celestine."
          Oh, poor sweet Celestine...  "Do you know what happened to them?  I know Azal and Cora moved in, but where did Meres and Celestine go?"
          "She had died, actually, quite young too."  That's right - I remember now, someone mentioning that to me, but it was before... before I knew them all so well.  "In childbirth."  This, I certainly did not know, and pay rapt attention.
          "When?  Were there any details on the circumstances, or just, that it was such a common thing to happen back then?"
          "Mostly that, it seems.  At least Meres wasn't alone when it happened - as far as I can piece together, Azal and Cora were visiting at the time, or perhaps had begun to move in, it's not entirely clear.  But I have a few photos and things showing the four of them together, along with what I'm guessing were Cora's eldest two children.  Only a few of the images are particularly clear, most seem to have been amateur shots, and the prints aren't very large.  None of them have been dated with much certainty, but I'd guess they're from either the very end of the 1880s or beginning of the 1890s."
          Pieces click into place in my mind.  Celestine mentioned Cora's name, she knew, or knew of, her.  Meres had invited Azal to come stay with him for awhile.  So it must have been during that overlap that I was last there...
          "Looks like I have 1883 as a birth year for Avery, the eldest child, and 1887 for Evelyn, but I'm not sure where the information came from."  (When she went to grab some of her notes earlier in our conversation, I'd grabbed a sketchbook and pencil myself, and have been scrawling information down as needed.)  "Most of my notes were handed down from previous generations, I have birth and death dates for most of the branches, but there are a few gaps.  I guess with members of my family moving around so much, not all of the gravesites were kept track of, I know I haven't been to many for that side of the family."
          "So, Avery 1883, Evelyn 1887, Calvin 1897, and Helen presumably 1902."
          There's a pause on her end of the line.  "Calvin?"
          There's a longer pause on my end of the line.  When I do manage to reply, my voice catches. "Calvin was younger than Avery and Evelyn, but he... he died, very young.  He was buried here, I found his stone in the old cemetary in town."
          "Really!  I don't think I have... no, I don't see any mention of him in here at all, how strange.  But if he died young, and the family left town soon after... what did you say the dates were?"
          I tell her, and give her what little information I feel I can - the dates, his full name, what I was able to make out of the stone, that he was sickly and died of some disease, probably tuberculosis or something similar.
          I don't tell her about him lying alone in that room, asking me so sweetly to bring him his little elephant, how proudly he told me his name, his small frame struggling with ragged breaths... or the bottle of thallium I found in the garden.  (I still have no proof that's to blame.  But I can't help but suspect...)

          None of the family had stayed in, or returned to, Mapleton after the fire.  Once grown, the children all moved away again, all to different states.  Rosemary, it turns out, is the great-granddaughter of Evelyn - and my heart warmed happily when she told me that.  So Evelyn was married, and had children of her own... and, I'm sure, more than made up for the lack of caring her own mother had showed her.  But it's too far removed for Rosemary to have had those kind of personal details.  She promises to let me know if anything else turns up in her files that would be of interest to me, and we've already arranged for a mutual photo-swap through the mail.
          "And be sure to let me know when you've finished your project, I would love to see what you've come up with!  It's always been my favorite family ghost story, the beautiful house and gardens with the mysterious Meres."
          Finished?  It hadn't even occurred to me yet that, at some point, I'll be "finished" with this.  But I guess I will, sometime, be done with all the drawings, and stop going back - there are only so many years the family lived there, and it's not like I've seen every moment...  But I shake this thought away, it hurts too much to even consider right now.