I exhaled with relief; my father’s face fell in disappointment. “You can’t mention anything about Lexie’s visit today to Diane, okay?” I whispered, handing my father his sketchbook.

“But you believe me, right?” He looked so desperate.

Did I? Did I actually believe my sister had found a way back and come to sit in the kitchen?

Impossible.

“Let’s talk about it later, when it’s just the two of us,” I said. “It has to be our secret, okay?”

Mum’s the word.

“I’m sorry I’m so late! But I’ve got pizza and wine. The Riverbend store does a Greek pizza that’s to die for, wait until you taste it!” She came into the kitchen dressed in an eggshell-colored linen suit, hair and makeup perfect. She held the boxed pizza in her left hand, the bag with wine in her right. Her eyes widened in alarm. “What in the name of God happened in here?”

“Ted… did some cooking,” I explained.

She surveyed the wreckage. “Your father and what army of trained chimpanzees?”

I flashed her a let it be glance. She looked at my father, took in his ashen face, his clothing splattered with grease and food. I took the pizza from her, scootched some of the mess around on the counter to make room for it.

* * *

“Is your father all right?” Diane asked once we were finally alone. We’d eaten the better part of the pizza, polished off two bottles of wine, and my father had turned in early, saying it had been a long day and he was exhausted. He seemed anything but exhausted, though. He was revved up, on edge. We could hear him up above us, pacing in his room. Diane and I were cleaning up the kitchen. I was at the sink doing dishes and she was tossing food, wiping down surfaces.

“I think so,” I said.

“Do you want to explain what’s going on with all this food?” she asked as she dumped an untouched stack of pancakes into the trash. “I’m not an idiot, Jax.” She dropped the syrupy plate into the soapy water. “Chocolate chip pancakes? A bacon cheeseburger with ranch dressing and extra onions? Creamed corn? All of Lexie’s favorite foods.”

I nodded.

“So what was he doing? Trying to conjure up the dead with some home cooking? He must have said something to you.”

I shrugged, gave in, knowing it was pointless to lie. “He says he saw her. That she was here, in the house, and she was… hungry.”

“Jesus Christ!” She leaned back against the counter, physically bracing herself. “You’ve got to be kidding me. First he sees her in the pool and nearly drowns, now she’s come into the house looking for a snack?”

“He’s exhausted, grieving, and drinking.”

Wasn’t I in similar shape? Imagining I heard something in the pool, that something had brought my flashlight back up from the murky depths?

“Is he going to start insisting that we leave out plates of food for her like Rita did with Martha?”

I stiffened at the name. Wondered what I’d really seen in the water that long-ago night.

She picked up dishes from the rack and started aggressively swiping at them with a dish towel. “This is concerning, Jackie. Very concerning. Grief is one thing, but full-on hallucinations—that’s something else altogether. You, of all people, have to know that!”

“Yes,” I agreed. It seemed this was just an extreme form of denial. My father was unable to accept that she was gone, so he imagined seeing her. Hadn’t I imagined seeing her since I’d been back? Hadn’t I heard her voice, caught myself talking to her, even? Grief is a powerful force. “I think that between the grief and the drinking—”

“You didn’t encourage him, did you?”

“Of course not!” I snapped—too quickly, too loud.

She was quiet a minute, thinking, stacking plates in the cabinet. “I think I should spend the night again. I think it’s a good idea to have both of us here.” She looked up at the ceiling. We couldn’t hear my father walking around anymore. “In case he decides to do any late-night cooking. Or take off on a road trip with Lexie. We can get up in the morning and pick up Val’s canoe, head out to the lake and have a little ceremony with Lexie’s ashes. Maybe doing that will help your father realize she’s gone. Give him a sense of closure.”

Gone.

“Closure,” I repeated. I wasn’t a big believer in closure. In my experience, both in my life and working with my clients, solid resolutions to conflicts, problems, or grief were elusive. I believed it was more beneficial to recognize emotions and learn to deal with them appropriately; to find ways to live with the loss rather than tie everything up with a neat little bow and pronounce you’ve had closure.

We were quiet for a minute as we finished the dishes.

“Diane, can I ask you something? What do you know about the hotel that used to be here? Before the house was built?”

She narrowed her eyes, squinting like she was looking at me from the other end of a very long tunnel. “Not much. It was open less than a year. It burned down.”

“I think it’s weird that I never heard about it growing up. I mean, I knew there had been a hotel here once, but I didn’t know a thing about it. And I certainly never heard about the fire. All those people dying.”

“It’s not that weird.” Diane sighed and rubbed her forehead wearily. “Because that’s what our family does. Pretends that if we don’t talk about a thing, it didn’t happen. As if we could shape the truth with our stories, or lack thereof.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but realized she was right. No one talked about what happened with Rita. And when Lexie first showed signs of being sick, didn’t we all put our heads in the sand, refuse to acknowledge that something was wrong?

“But Lexie found out about the hotel,” I said. “She was digging around, not just looking into our family history, but the history of this place. I found some pictures and drawings and old deeds in her papers. She wrote down stuff about the hotel and the history of the land in her journal. And she went to see Shirley. Shirley has a photo album with old pictures of the hotel. She showed them to me today, said she’d shown them to Lexie, too.”

Diane frowned. “When I saw her at Lexie’s service, she seemed a bit… off.”