Ghostlight Read Online Free Page B

smaller bits, so that every son who wanted land got a parcel.”
    “What about the daughters?”
    Blake rolled his eyes. “Girls don’t inherit.”
    “That’s not exactly true,” said Grandma. “The girls just married men who had land of their own. Or they moved away, like your mother.” Grandma’s lips tightened. “Your grandpa’s great-grandfather Ephraim Hilliard settled the area. It was his son, whose name I don’t recall at the moment, who built that fancy brick house.
His
only surviving son, Joshua Hilliard, inherited the house. Your grandpa was his first cousin once removed, and they were neighbors.”
    “Why don’t we have more cousins?” Blake asked. “You’d think this area would be chopped up into a hundred tiny farm parcels after that many generations.”
    “You’re forgetting the wars, dear. Each one, from the Civil War to Vietnam, took at least one Hilliard boy, some of them not much older than you.”
    “So Joshua Hilliard was the last one to live in the brick house?” I asked.
    “He was. I married your grandpa in 1960. Joshua Hilliard was around sixty-one at that time, already widowed and living alone in the house.” She frowned. “He was a shut-in.”
    “Why?”
    A shadow passed over Grandma’s face, and for a moment I feared she might close down the whole conversation. But after letting out a heavy sigh, she continued.
    “If you must know, Joshua Hilliard was a troubled man. He’d outlived his wife and daughter, and I reckon that’s enough to make anyone maudlin.”
    “He’s not still alive, though, right?”
    “Good grief, Avery,” Blake said. “He’d be, like, a hundred and fifty years old by now.”
    Grandma smiled. “Not quite. He died…I think it was around 1985.” She looked past me toward the living room. “In his last years your grandpa collected all the old family photographs and organized them in albums. You might take a look at them.”
    “I’d like that.” Actually, the idea of looking at black-and-white photos of frowning people in fusty clothes didn’t exactly light my fire, but maybe it would help Julian with his film. “So nobody’s lived in that house since? Even Grandpa didn’t want it?”
    “Your grandpa and I were happy here. And I never liked that house anyway.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “Old Joshua Hilliard wasn’t just maudlin. There was a darkness to him.” She paused to scrape the last bite from her bowl. “Any more questions, my dear?”
    I thought for a moment. “What does ‘maudlin’ mean?”
    Blake leaned toward me. “It means feeling sorry for yourself. Which ought to sound familiar, since that’s how you’ve been acting since we got here.”
    “Enough.” Grandma settled her spoon in the empty bowl. “If you two clear the table, I’ll bring in the watermelon. And, Blake, later on you can help Avery in the kitchen by drying the dishes.”
    It lifted my heart to see Blake getting punished for once. Too bad I didn’t have much space in which to gloat about it while we were actually doing the dishes. It was hard to savor my triumph when he was standing next to me not saying anything. Turns out silence can actually be kind of loud and distracting.
    So I passed the time by making a mental list of all his recent crimes against me. Things like telling me to walk behind him whenever we were in public, just in case some cute girl might mistake me for his girlfriend. Or not watching our favorite cartoon channel anymore because it was for “little kids.”
    Then there was the eye roll. That was a crime against Mom and Grandma, too. If any of us showed enthusiasm for anything—even important things—Blake gave us the eye roll. Sometimes it was big and dramatic, other times it was just a flicker, but it always burned me up. Just thinking about it was enough to make me want to break a plate.
    “Come on, Avery, you’re splashing me on purpose!”
    I gave him a sidelong glance. His shirt
was
pretty damp, but I wasn’t about to