The Poe Estate Read online

  Also by Polly Shulman

  The Wells Bequest

  The Grimm Legacy

  Enthusiasm

  NANCY PAULSEN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  Copyright © 2015 by Polly Shulman.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shulman, Polly.

  The Poe Annex / Polly Shulman.

  pages cm

  Companion book to: The Grimm legacy.

  Summary: Sukie braves the twists and turns of the spooky Poe Annex at the New-York Circulating Material Repository to untangle ancient family secrets, find hidden treasure, and help the ghosts who are haunting her house.

  [1. Books and reading—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Ghosts—Fiction. 4. Haunted houses—Fiction. 5. Families—Fiction. 6. Buried treasure—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S559474Po 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014042105

  ISBN 978-0-698-17243-2

  Jacket art © 2015 by Zdenko Basic

  Cover design by Vanessa Han

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by Polly Shulman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. Cousin Hepzibah

  2. The Thorne Mansion

  3. My Sister’s Ghost

  4. A Broom and a Pipe

  5. Cole Farley

  6. Supernatural Salvage

  7. A Ghost’s Request

  8. A Dead Phone Rings

  9. A Bat and a Broomstick

  10. Learning to Fly

  11. Hepzibah Toogood’s Story

  12. The Thorne Mansion Library

  13. Fashion Advice

  14. Adolphus T. Feathertop, Factor-at-Large

  15. The New-York Circulating Material Repository

  16. A Fictional Family

  17. Phineas Toogood’s Kiss

  18. Pirate Toogood’s Treasure

  19. The Lovecraft Corpus

  20. The Poe Annex

  21. The Train Through the Annex

  22. The Spectral Library

  23. The Ariel at Sea

  24. Broken Isle

  25. A Dead Man’s Chest

  26. The Sullivan Looking Glass

  27. Hepzibah Toogood’s Treasure

  28. Setting Kitty Free

  29. My True Self

  30. The Cursed Development

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Praise for The Grimm Legacy

  Praise for The Wells Bequest

  To Irene,

  a crackerjack agent and a true friend

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cousin Hepzibah

  Almost there,” said Dad as we crested the last hill.

  The old Thorne Mansion stood black against the sky, bristling with gables and laced with leafless vines. Crows quarreled in the skeletal trees. I couldn’t see the ocean, but I smelled its salt. The truck, heavy with everything we owned, lurched and bumped up the steep drive. My new home did not look welcoming.

  “It’s been a long time,” said Mom. “I feel bad I didn’t visit more often. Cousin Hepzibah was always so good to my brother.”

  “Well, you’ve had a lot on your mind,” said Dad. “At least we’re here now.”

  • • •

  “Come in, child,” said Cousin Hepzibah. She was sitting in a wooden chair by the window. Pale daylight slanted down over her, making gray streaks in the air.

  I hadn’t seen her in years—not since before my sister got sick—but she looked just the same, straight and thin and pale, like a birch tree. She had her white hair pulled back from her face, but her eyebrows were still black. The dark horizontal stripes made her look even more birchlike. Underneath them, her eyes were sky blue.

  “You must be Hepzibah,” she said. “The one they call Kitty.”

  “What? No! Kitty is . . .” I couldn’t say it.

  “Of course,” she said after a moment. Despite her age, her voice was strong and low. “Forgive me. I remember now, Kitty is the redhead. You’re Susannah—they call you Sukie, don’t they?”

  I nodded. Did she know Kitty was dead?

  Evidently yes, because she went on. “There’s always been a Hepzibah in this house, but now it seems I’m the only one living. Come closer so I can see you.”

  I stepped forward into the gray light. Taking my hand, she studied my face. Her fingers were cold, thin, and hard. They caught me as tight as a blackberry vine when it tangles your sleeve.

  “You have the Thorne look,” she said. “You favor my aunt Hepzibah. It’s good to see her chin again.”

  “Yes, I look like Mom,” I said. “Kitty looked like Dad.”

  Cousin Hepzibah nodded. “I’ve given you the tower room. Second door to the left and up the stairs. I would show you myself, but those stairs keep getting steeper. I hope you’ll find it comfortable.”

  “I’m sure I will,” I said. “Thank you.”

  The wind in the branches outside gave a long moan.

  “That won’t disturb you, will it?” Cousin Hepzibah asked, then shook her head. “No, of course not. Nothing in this house would threaten a Thorne. If you’re cold, draw the curtains—the window frames could use some caulking, but the curtains are nice and thick.”

  “I could fix that,” I said. “I’ve helped Dad lots of times.”

  Cousin Hepzibah smiled and squeezed my hand. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  • • •

  When Kitty died, I thought things couldn’t get any worse. But they did. Mom had left her job at East Harbor Middle School to take care of Kitty, and she couldn’t find a new one—all the schools had hiring freezes. And business was very slow for Dad too.

  “Things will pick up in the spring,” he said. “They always do.”

  Except that year they didn’t. Nobody wanted new houses built. All Dad could find were small jobs like rebuilding kitchen cabinets so the owners could try to sell their house. Everyone near us was trying to sell their house, but nobody was buying.

  The next spring, things didn’t pick up either. Mom found a part-time job working at the Easymart, and Dad did whatever small jobs he could. I would hear them talking in the kitchen when they thought I was asleep.

  “What if you went back to school for nursing?” asked Dad. “There’s always work in health care.”

  “I don’t think I could,” said Mom. “It would just remind me, all the time . . .”

  I heard Dad’s chair scrape as he went over to her. “I know. Sally, Sally, it’s okay.” They were quiet for a while, but I could tell Mom was crying. “Well, I could go to nursing school, then,” Dad said. “Lots of men do that now.”

  “How would we pay for it? The bank’s not going to give us another loan.”

  “No, you’re ri
ght,” said Dad.

  I pulled the covers over my head, but it didn’t help. I wished I were old enough to get a job. I wished there were something I could do now! I helped Mom and Dad with their weekend work, finding interesting old things at garage sales, auctions, and thrift shops to take down to New York City and sell at flea markets. I helped them pack the things up, and sometimes I went along to the city and helped sell them. But it wasn’t enough.

  The thing is, I was the one who was supposed to die.

  • • •

  Some Thornes live practically forever, like Cousin Hepzibah. Others die young. In my mother’s generation it was her youngest brother, George. He died of the Thorne blood disease just before he turned twenty. In my grandfather’s generation, it was my great-aunt Caroline and a first cousin of theirs, one of the Hepzibahs.

  I was born prematurely, and everyone thought I was the doomed one in our generation. I spent the first two months of my life in the NICU with tubes attached, wearing a tiny knitted hat, which Mom still has.

  “You looked like a little baby bird before it gets its feathers,” Kitty used to tell me. “I was worried a cat would come and eat you.”

  “No way you could remember that, Kitty! You were only three.”

  “Oh, I remember! That’s not something you forget. You were so weird and red, with your twig arms and your big, blind kitten eyes. All the time in the hospital, you looked like you were seeing ghosts. Everybody was so worried, and it seemed like forever before they let us bring you home.”

  I was always small for my age, and I kept getting sick—earaches and strep throat and everything anyone in a three-mile radius came down with. Mom used to make me wear two wool scarves long after the ice melted on the puddles in the backyard. I still had training wheels on my bike a year after I stopped needing them. I wasn’t allowed to jump off the diving board by the waterfall, even though all the other kids did it, and forget about swimming in the ocean, even on the few days when it was warm enough.

  It was Kitty’s job to take care of me. I liked having someone so strong and fearless to stand between me and the barking dogs and rowdy boys. To me, the smell of Kitty’s favorite watermelon soap was the smell of comfort. Still, sometimes I envied kids like my best friend, Jess, who was always tearing around without anyone trying to stop her. Mom made Kitty protect me from pretty much anything fun or exciting.

  It didn’t help that I had the pale, bony Thorne look. I used to slap my cheeks and puff them out, hoping it would make me look more like stocky, rosy Kitty, who took after Dad’s family, the O’Dares.

  And after all that, Kitty was the one who got the Thorne blood disease and died.

  • • •

  “Oh, here you are,” said Mom, knocking on the door frame of the tower bedroom. “Can I come in?”

  I nodded.

  “I always loved this room,” said Mom. “The Round Room, that’s what your aunt Jenny called it. It’s so high up, with all the windows.” She pushed aside the gauzy inner curtains on the four-poster bed and sat down on the end. “Jenny and I used to fight about who got to sleep here. How do you like it?”

  I shrugged. “It’s fine,” I said.

  Actually, it wasn’t. Nothing was fine, and I was sure nothing would ever be again. Fingers of bare vines—ivy or something—scraped across the windows as if they were picking at a scab. The wind whistled and seeped through the cracks, making the curtains move aimlessly. Cobwebs floated in the air high up where the curved wall met the ceiling. I wanted to go home to my own room in the clean, warm house that Dad had built, the house where I knew all the sounds, where my feet knew every tile and corner. But that was someone else’s home now, not mine.

  I didn’t say any of that, of course—Mom already felt bad enough. But I didn’t have to. She came over to the window seat and hugged me. “I know it’s a big change,” she said. “Things’ll look better once you get used to it. We’re lucky Cousin Hepzibah has all this space. We’re lucky she’s so generous.”

  “Well, it’s not like she can live here alone anymore,” I said. “She can’t even really climb stairs. She needs our help.”

  “That’s right. She’s helping us, and we’re helping her. We’re both lucky,” said Mom.

  I knew Mom was right. But I still just wanted to go home.

  • • •

  That night I sat up suddenly, absolutely certain there was a ghost in the room.

  At first, when I opened my eyes, I thought I might be the ghost myself. The world was as velvety black as it had been with my eyes still shut. Maybe, I thought, I have no eyes. Maybe I have no body at all. But I reached out and touched cloth, which meant I had hands. The cloth was the reason I couldn’t see anything. I had pulled both layers of bed curtains closed for warmth, the white gauzy inner ones and the heavy brocade outer ones.

  When I parted the curtains, the velvet blackness sank into gray shadows. I had closed the window curtains too, but moonlight seeped through around the edges. A figure was kneeling in the window seat, outlined dimly in moonlight. She had her back to me. The room filled with a sweet smell, like cloves and roses.

  I wasn’t scared. I was used to ghosts. Well, I was used to one particular ghost, anyway. “Kitty?” I said. “Is that you?”

  She didn’t move.

  “Hepzibah?” I asked.

  The ghost turned around slowly. Light glowed softly from her and I could see her face.

  She didn’t look a thing like Kitty. She looked like me.

  • • •

  I didn’t scream. Neither did the ghost. We stared at each other for a few moments. She faded slowly, like fog lifting, until there was nothing in the window but moonlight and shadow.

  I pulled the bed curtains closed again, but it was a long time before I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Thorne Mansion

  Cousin Hepzibah was sitting in the kitchen sipping coffee the next morning when I went downstairs. I almost asked her about the ghost, but Dad was there too, and I never brought up ghosts around my parents. I didn’t think they would take it well.

  Dad was making his famous cheesy-chive scrambled eggs on the old-fashioned stove. It was weird to have that familiar smell in this strange place.

  The kitchen looked nothing like our kitchen at home. It was an enormous room with furniture instead of wall cabinets and tables instead of counters. The floor was paved with slabs of stone. The sink was the size of a bathtub. The stove stood inside a huge fireplace.

  “That’s an awesome fireplace,” I said.

  “This is the original kitchen from the eighteenth century,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “Back then the hearth was the center of the house, so it needed to be big. Big enough to roast a whole deer in it.” She pointed to the spit, an iron scaffold thing in the back of the hearth. It looked like an evil swing set.

  “Does anyone ever use it?”

  She shook her head. “Not as long as I’ve been here. In theory you still could. You would have to move the stove and sweep the chimney first, though.” She smiled. “Just in case you’re planning to bring home a deer.”

  Dad and his friends did bring home deer meat sometimes, from their hunting trips. It saved grocery money, but I didn’t like the strong taste. I went over to where he was cooking and stood in the fireplace squinting up the chimney. It was black and dim.

  “Eggs, Sukie-Sue?” Dad handed me a plate.

  I looked around helplessly for a fork. Our kitchen stuff was still out in the truck. Cousin Hepzibah pointed to a wooden box on one of the big tables against the wall. I took out a fork with three metal tines and a wooden handle that felt very old.

  “Good morning,” said Mom, coming into the kitchen. “Mm, cheesy-chives!” She took a plate from Dad, and I handed her a fork.

  Mom turned to me. “Dad and I are going to unpack our stuff today, and then we ca
n load up the truck for the flea market in New York tomorrow.”

  “I want to come too,” I said.

  “Really? You know how early we have to leave. Wouldn’t you rather spend the day settling in? You would be safe here with Cousin Hepzibah.”

  “No, I want to help.”

  My parents’ weekend trips could be grueling—up way before dawn, unloading heavy boxes from the truck, then sitting at a folding table for hours in the bitter wind or sweltering sun. But I wasn’t ready to stay here in this creepy house with nobody but a cousin I didn’t know that well and a ghost.

  • • •

  “Want me to show you the house, Sukie?” offered Cousin Hepzibah. “The ground floor, I mean. You’ll have to explore upstairs by yourself. My knees aren’t so great anymore.”

  I followed her out the kitchen door and down the dusty hallway.

  In the old days, the Thornes would have employed at least three maids and a manservant, but Cousin Hepzibah had been living alone since her brother died a few years before I was born. She had turned the ground-floor music room into a bedroom when her arthritis got bad. An aide, Alicia, had come in a few times a week to help, but she had to go back to Trinidad a month before we came, after her own mother had a stroke.

  Cousin Hepzibah walked slowly, leaning on her cane. Some of the doors swung open with a creak as soon as she touched them; some stuck tight until I thumped them with my shoulder. I’d gotten pretty good at guessing the dates of furniture from helping Mom and Dad with their antiques. Walking through the Thorne Mansion was like walking through history.

  The house had started small, only four rooms: the kitchen, the hall behind it, and two little bedrooms above. That part was built in the seventeenth century, Cousin Hepzibah told me. But three centuries of additions had grown like coral—the hollow shells of dead Thornes—burying the original house in encrustations. The Thornes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had made their money from ships. They had added parlors and work rooms, the music room, endless gabled bedrooms, and at the very top, over my bedroom, the widow’s walk.