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Kate, Tanya's sister: After Tanya's murder
Kate was just happy to be included. None of her friends talked to her anymore. She hoped that would change when school started again, but ever since Tanya died, her friends stopped coming by or calling. She knew that it was probably her fault. Who wants to spend time with someone who just cries all of the time or sits there not saying a word? But she was lonely.
"You comin'?" Jessica asked, smacking a piece of gum.
Kate nodded and slid down out of the truck.
"I don't know," Lauren said. "This is kind of creepy."
Kind of creepy? It was really creepy. It was awful. It was a black whirlpool of despair.
Kate looked around, not saying a word, not because she was brave, but because her throat was so tight that she couldn't breathe. They'd driven out to the cabin.
The cabin. No other qualifier was needed. Everyone knew what "the cabin" meant. The cabin where Tanya was murdered. But even before that, everyone had just called it "the cabin." Kate had heard the place was popular with the in-crowd but she'd never come before. Her sister had always said that she was too young.
Two other trucks were already parked. It was dark, but Lauren had a flashlight.
"Where are they?" Jessica asked.
"They should be inside," Lauren replied.
But it didn't look like there was anyone inside the cabin. The glow of Lauren's flashlight showed the new padlock on the door, the police tape still in place. Lauren looked at the windows but she didn't shine the flashlight through the glass. Kate wondered if she was afraid.
"Gotcha!"
Jessica and Lauren screamed and Kate jumped. Mike and Tyler and the rest of them laughed. Kate didn't know all of their names. Jessica and Lauren cursed at them and Kate pulled the hood of her jacket up even though it wasn't cold.
"We can't get inside," Mike said.
"Duh," Jessica snapped.
"Let's just do it here," said a girl whose name Kate didn't know.
So they sat down right in front of the door with the new padlock. Kate sat with her back to the cabin. She thought that it would be better that way. She didn't want her back to the woods.
Over the top of Mike's head, she could just make out the dark silhouettes of the cars and, beyond that, the black line where the tops of the trees met the sky. There was supposed to be a full moon, but it was cloudy, so it was mostly murky night. The wind blew.
Kate had never used an Ouija board before. They said that she had to be the one to use it because she was Tanya's sister. But it wasn't working. Her eyes were closed and she was concentrating with all her might, and…nothing.
Mike and Tyler were making too much noise. "How come it's not working?"
"Shut up."
"This is stupid."
"Tanya? Who killed you?"
'I miss you,' Kate thought.
The wind made a low moaning noise
"Let's do it with her," Lauren said. "She was our friend."
And so Lauren and Jessica put their fingers on the planchette along with Kate's and, with their help, the planchette started sliding across the board.
"You're moving it!" Tyler accused.
"No I'm not!"
"Who killed you, Tanya?"
The planchette slid towards the letter I.
Kate held her breath. The planchette slid towards the letter Z.
"Isabella Swan," Mike crowed.
"That doesn't make any sense," someone else said. "You're pushing it."
Kate closed her eyes and concentrated. She pictured the cabin behind her. She imagined Tanya standing in the doorway watching them.
That was the last time that Lauren and Jessica invited Kate to go anywhere with them. Kate called and left messages but they didn't call back.
Kate drew an Ouija board on a piece of poster paper and found a bottle cap to use as the planchette. The last couple of letters on Kate's Ouija board were smooshed together, because she'd run out of room, and the bottle cap was from a beer. The ridges hurt a little when Kate pressed down, but that was alright because you weren't supposed to press down hard. "You're supposed to let Tanya move it," she told Irene. They were sitting on the floor of Tanya's bedroom. It was only two o'clock in the afternoon. It was raining and, with the lights out, it was dark enough.
"What should we ask?" Irene asked.
"It doesn't matter. She'll tell us whatever she wants to."
But the bottle cap didn't move.
"Are you concentrating?" Kate asked.
"I am. I am."
If the bottle cap didn't move, that meant that Tanya was really gone, and they needed her. Things might not have been great before, but they were even worse now. Tanya was the one who knew how to take care of them. Their father's moods were always a problem and he was angry all of the time now. He had never hit them. He was still scary though.
"If your mother was here," he'd trail off, trying to stuff a half-empty pizza box into the refrigerator. When it wouldn't fit, he'd start yelling. He'd shove the box in and out of the refrigerator until things started falling out. He would roar and stalk out of the kitchen with the refrigerator door hanging open and food all over the floor. Kate would clean it up.
Ever since Tanya had died, he had started spending most nights at home, and that was nice, but it wasn't as if he was actually spending time with them. He would just sit in the dark and stare at the wall. "Stop your crying," he'd snap at Irene.
Tanya used to take care of them. Kate and Irene had to leave her alone when she had a guest over, but she made sure that they had lunch and home cooked food. She combed their hair and listened to them.
Kate thought it was just the way things were done. Her sister was pretty, so of course she would have lots of boyfriends.
"How come you have so many?" Irene asked Tanya a week before she died. They were all in the kitchen. Tanya was making them spaghetti. "Susie Remick says you can only love one boy."
Tanya didn't answer at first. She paused for a minute, the sauce she'd been stirring bubbling as she stood over the stove, not moving. "I wish mom were still here," Tanya said at last and started stirring again.
Kate missed their mom too but didn't see what it had to do with bringing boys home.
The Ouija board wasn't working. It was as if Tanya didn't have anything to say. Kate knew that couldn't be true. How could their sister leave them?
"You're doing it wrong," Kate accused Irene, taking her finger off of the bottle cap.
"I'm sorry," Irene said, then burst into tears.
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Kate was window shopping in Seattle when she saw the photo. She stopped and stared.
"You interested?" a voice asked, and Kate glanced up to see a guy with a box in his hands. "I can take your picture if you want," he said as he struggled with the door.
Kate helped him with the door but lingered in the entrance.
"Come inside," he said.
She hazarded a few steps past the threshold. The walls were covered with framed photos in all manner of styles, but it was the old fashioned ones like the one in the window that interested her. The portraits in sepia and gray tones with the blurred outlines standing behind the people who were posing.
"You into spirit photography?" the guy asked.
"Spirit photography?"
"Ghosts. See?" He pointed at one of the blurred outlines. It looked like a person. Kind of.
Kate didn't know what to say. He couldn't be serious, could he?
"I can take your picture and maybe someone will hitch a ride," he laughed.
Kate didn't think it was funny. She heard a click behind her and she looked back to see that he had a camera aimed at her face.
"You're really photogenic."
She was photogenic. Kate was pretty. Just like Tanya. Sometimes, Kate would put on Tanya's old clothes—they'd never gotten rid of them—and fix her make-up just like Tanya's.
Kate thought that she could probably pass for her sister if she had to.
But none of the pictures that the photographer took that day showed any blurred outlines standing behind Kate. If Tanya was there, the camera wasn't picking her up.
*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.*_.
'In time it became quite clear that the subject was possessed of a subtle brand of evil, so inherent, so unassuming, so seemingly innocent, that his crimes seemed all the more shocking.'
Kate read that in a book about a spirit photographer who was tried for fraud in 1905. The prosecution accused the photographer of preying on his victims' grief.
But why shouldn't spirit photography work? You can't destroy matter—Kate remembered that from her science classes. So what happened to people after they died?
The job at the diner didn't pay that well and Kate couldn't ask her father for the money, at least not for a camera. Aro Denali would never win an award for parenthood, especially not now that Irene was acting out.
Kate didn't think that he'd be happy knowing what she wanted a camera for anyway. He didn't like it when they talked about their mom or Tanya.
Kate bought some inexpensive equipment and did a few experiments. It was easy to see how the spirit photographers had faked their pictures. Sometimes her own work came out a little strange. Her tiny bathroom wasn't exactly designed for developing film and she made mistakes sometimes. She'd stare at the resulting images, at the fuzzy details in the corners, trying to reconcile the blurred outlines with Tanya's features.
'Spiritualists are the most unfairly maligned of creatures. We want only to help our fellow man and we are constantly persecuted for our efforts.' — from A Defense of Spiritualism
Kate wondered if some of the spiritualists she read about were crazy. If they actually thought that they were telling the truth.
It was all tricks, though. Table rapping and strings.
She went to a palm reader. The woman said that Kate had suffered a terrible loss at a young age. How could the palm reader possibly know? She must be the real deal, right? The woman said that Kate was shy but likeable.
Shy, yes. Kate wasn't sure about likeable though. She didn't sleep around like Tanya had. A couple of guys in high school had made fun of her, asking why she wasn't more like her sister, but Kate didn't want to make the same mistakes.
Part of her wondered how Tanya could have done all of those things. She wondered whether Tanya had regretted it. She imagined how it must have made her sister feel. So cheap.
The first time Kate stripped it was because Irene needed the money. Their father had thrown Irene out and Irene had moved in with a guy, which would have been fine, maybe, except that the guy she moved in with turned out to be a drug dealer and Irene had stolen his money. Unsurprisingly, he wanted it back.
"What did you do with it?" Kate asked. She couldn't believe that her sister had sunk so low, not even bothering to ask Kate for a place to stay before moving in with this creep.
"I spent it."
"On what?"
Irene just looked at her, so high that she could barely sit up.
Kate had never done anything like stripping before, but she knew that she could maybe make a couple hundred in a single night if she was lucky. One of the other waitresses at the diner had quit and moved to Seattle because she made twice as much money in two nights at one of the strip clubs in the city than she'd made in an entire week in Forks.
'Just one night,' Kate told herself. 'Just to pay off Irene's debt.'
But Kate felt sick when she stepped out under the lights. She looked down at the stage, not wanting to see anyone's face looking back at her. What if someone recognized her?
A voice jeered. She wasn't dancing yet. She was just standing there.
She wanted to turn around and leave, but she had to take care of her sister, just like Tanya had always taken care of them.
Kate closed her eyes and imagined Tanya standing behind her, a blurred outline keeping her company. 'I'm not alone,' Kate thought to herself. 'I'll never be alone.'
In point of fact, it took Kate several nights to make enough money to pay off Irene's debt. By then, she had decided to quit her job at the diner and move to Seattle.
It was a change of pace, to be sure, but she never went home with the customers. She wasn't like that. Stripping was just like any other job. Besides, it wasn't like she was qualified to do much else.
And it meant that she was able to invest in much more sophisticated camera equipment. Maybe she'd even open her own photography shop one day. She'd hang a picture of Tanya in the window. It would make people want to come inside.
'Posing for the portrait, I sensed almost immediately that I had been joined by the spirits of my deceased daughters. Tears sprung to my eyes as I realized that I was reunited with the dear souls from whom I had been so cruelly parted. I observed the photographic processes being carried out before me and knew that I would forever cherish the irrefutable evidence that it would provide me of my children's continued survival in the hereafter.' – from Testimony at the Trial of D— S—, reputed spirit photographer and charlatan
AN: The "quotes" from texts on spiritualism are "fake," having been composed by author-self-insert based on actual documents related to study and prosecution of spiritualists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.