Free What the Dead Want by Norah Olson Page A

trying to think of nice things about Mona.
    â€œI woke up and the study door was wide open and she was gone. I thought maybe she’d gone over to Shadow Grove.”
    â€œWhat’s Shadow Grove?” Gretchen asked.
    â€œA spiritualist colony,” Esther said. “Which is a nice way to say, a bunch of kooks who made their own little town out here in the country.” Someone as eccentric as Esther calling people a bunch of kooks made Gretchen laugh.
    â€œShe’d been back and forth between here and there that last visit,” Esther went on. “But nobody there saw her after she’d disappeared. You must know all this already. The police and that psychic your mom’s friend hired were putting together a timeline.”
    Gretchen turned away and looked out into the woods. She had been sheltered from many details in the aftermath of Mona’s disappearance, but now as Esther was talking, she remembered people in and out of their apartment, looking through her mother’s things. She remembered seeinga story on the cover of the Post that said The Lady Vanishes and had a picture of Mona standing in front of one of the gallery’s most recognized acquisitions—a photograph by Michelle Manes of ghostly children playing in front of a tombstone shaped like a lamb. She remembered her father whisking the paper out of her hand. Telling her it was garbage. That’s she shouldn’t read those things.
    What Gretchen wanted least to remember was this: after two months the detectives and even the psychic said the same thing. There was no foul play. All evidence pointed to Mona leaving on her own accord. She’d abandoned them, the gallery, everything. She didn’t want to be found. The psychic said she saw Mona with a second family, and that it was a struggle and she missed Gretchen and her father, but that she was needed where she was. The police said there was nothing to do without a motive or a body.
    Gretchen also didn’t want to remember the grief her father had gone through, or how he quit his practice in the city and started taking medical assignments in the developing world—gone for months at a time—and then came home and spoiled her, buying her whatever she wanted. The only saving grace of that time period was living just two floors above Simon.
    For some time, people continued to tell her they’d findher mom, that things were going to be okay. But after a while no one talked about it, about Mona. The gallery closed.
    The lady vanishes, Gretchen thought. Just like that. And now here she was six years later, maybe closer than she’d ever been to knowing what Mona might have been doing those last days. She was almost an adult herself. She was inheriting a house, and had more freedom and access to information than she’d ever had. If she could find Mona she could tell her how she felt. And some part of her knew that she also just wanted to see her again. To have a mom.
    She looked right at Esther. “Let’s solve this.”
    â€œHell yeah,” Esther said, raising her glass. “That’s the plan!”
    Sometime after midnight Esther thought the woodland creatures would be done scavenging and safely back up in the attic. “They come down around dusk and then go back up to their place,” she explained.
    â€œHow can you live with squirrels or raccoons or whatever those are?” Gretchen asked. “Also, doesn’t the cat keep them away?”
    Esther laughed. “Used to be three cats,” she said, not needing to explain more.
    â€œWhy don’t you call someone to come and take them out of here?”
    â€œNot a bad idea,” Esther said, her speech languid from drink. “Let’s add it to the list.”
    Gretchen laughed and shook her head. It was hard to fathom this woman. In one sense she was so put together—the way she dressed, her intelligence, her down-to-earth sophistication. And at the same