Free The Hawley Book of the Dead by Chrysler Szarlan

one?”
    Caleigh answered in her superior ten-year-old voice, “Catalogs.”
    Nathan entered, bags still in hand. “Will you just drop those,” I ordered, and he did.
    He took a moment to look around him, then told me, “This house is fabulous.”
    It was. Our house in Nevada seemed brash by contrast, too new, uncouth. Even in its desolate state, the Hawley house was an aging beauty from another era: elegant, timeless, built before the country was a country at all, when Massachusetts was still a colony and wealth could be measured by the number of windows a house boasted.
    “Mom!” Caleigh yelled. “Come look!” I followed her voice to the dining room, large and formal. Even unfurnished, it looked grand. At the end of the room was a mural, painted on the wall. I found the girls clustered before it.
    “This is
awe
some.” Fai took my hand. Her eyes were glowing.
    “It’s in bad shape.” One of the only things in the house that had really suffered with the years, the paint flaking, patches of dampness spotting it. But I remembered it resplendent with color. Silvery green willows hanging over azure ponds, shining red barns, the white houses standing ghostly among autumn trees that were like plumes of smoke, scarlet and gold and purple. Tiny people rode horses on the hilly roads, stood outside their houses, hung wash. It was Hawley Five Corners, dated 1824. Painted by an itinerant artist whose name had been long lost and forgotten. “Jolon and I used to look through the windows at it.”
    “Who’s Jolon?” Grace demanded, instantly alert to a secret.
    How could I explain the complexity of Jolon? “He was my best friend,” I hedged. I was on safe ground there. He had been.
    “You mean your
boy
friend?” Fai goaded me.
    “Maybe.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “He left, a long time ago.”
    “Like you did.”
    “Like I did.”
    “But now you’re back. Maybe he is, too.”
    “I seriously doubt it.”
    “You could Google him. Or find him on Facebook. Then you’d know.” Fai hated to let things go.
    “Shut
up
.” Grace pounced on her. “Mom doesn’t need to find any old stupid boyfriend. You make her sound like some Facebook slut. She isn’t even
on
Facebook.”
    “Well, I guess my virtue is safe, then. That’s a relief.”
    Grace was under the impression—they all were—that I was functionally illiterate when it came to modern technology. The Amazing Maskelynes’ website had been kept glossy and exciting by strangers to me, our Facebook page as well. Fai was right, though. It could be that simple. Maybe I would google Jolon. It might dispel my nostalgia to know that he was a bank manager somewhere in Wisconsin, or a sheep farmer in South Dakota. But nothing I imagined seemed right. Nothing real could satisfy me. It was better he stay in the past, where he belonged.
    “Hey, what about dinner?” Fai asked suddenly.
    “I’ll set the table. You girls need to help me find everything,” Nathan told them. “We’ll eat in half an hour.”
    I wanted to get to my office, to make more mental notes as I looked it over. It was a room I’d be spending significant amounts of time in.
    I had a new job: writing scripts for other magicians, other magic shows. Henry, my agent, suggested it. The money I had seemed like a lot, but with none coming in, it wouldn’t last forever. If I was going to support my family, I had to do something. I couldn’t perform, probably never would again, but the shows I scripted were moneymakers. I’d never had a flop. It used to be that magic shows were just one trick or illusion after another with no theme, no integrity. All that changed with David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy, Cirque du Soleil—their spellbinding spectacle shows told intricate stories. And if I brought anything to the Amazing Maskelynes beyond my disappearing act, it was my ability to weave a story.
    Writing is a kind of magic. One person sits in a room alone and makes marks on a page that represent