Restless Spirits Boxset: A Collection of Riveting Haunted House Mysteries

by Skylar Finn

  Cynthia crossed her legs primly. She wore a long sheer slip dress under a heavy sky-blue pea coat. Her face was devoid of any make-up. She wore no jewelry. Her stockings were pale, her eyes were pale, and so was her hair. She looked insubstantial enough to disappear at any moment. Matilda felt concerned for her health.

  “Would you like something to eat, dear?” she asked kindly. “I have cheese and crackers, or if you haven’t eaten dinner, I could offer you a nice steak. Maybe some potatoes. Asparagus. Dessert, if you’d like some.”

  Cynthia smiled politely, as if used to people attempting to feed her and just as accustomed to politely declining. “That’s quite all right. What sort of help are you looking for, with the children?”

  “I’m looking for a well-qualified caretaker to assist me with everything from morning to night,” said Matilda. “What kind of experience do you have working with kids?”

  “I was a nanny in New York for five years after college,” said Cynthia. “I have references, of course, if you’d like to contact the family I worked for. I was an Elementary Education major in college, and I planned to teach K-12 when I got out of school. Unfortunately, the job market proved much tougher to navigate than I anticipated. I came back home because I thought the competition would be less, but it seems you can’t get anywhere these days without a Master’s no matter where you go, doesn’t it?”

  Matilda smiled, hoping that Cynthia wouldn’t sense her discomfort. Matilda had barely finished high school. She found the insufferable boredom of school intolerable. Her teachers assigned her books and then told her what to think about them, and everything else seemed like mindless busy work to keep kids occupied and out of the adults’ hair all day so that they could work.

  “Well, it sounds like you’re highly qualified to work with kids,” said Matilda. “Were you looking for something full-time?”

  “Oh yes, definitely,” said Cynthia firmly. “Ever since my husband left me, I’ve been struggling to make ends meet.”

  Matilda was uncertain as to whether or not to pursue this: would she seem empathetic, or merely nosy? To be honest, she was a little uncomfortable that the younger woman was so blunt in the first place.

  “Well, there’s plenty of work to be had around here,” she said briskly. “I’ll need help with the children from dawn until dusk. I’d be happy to take you on, if you feel like you’re up to the challenge.”

  Cynthia smiled for the first time since Matilda opened the door.

  “I think I can handle it,” she said.

  “God, can anyone in this town afford to eat?” said Emily as she closed the diary.

  “I don’t know, those property managers look pretty well-fed to me,” said Jesse. “It’s weird enough that somebody came up here to whack an old lady and a bunch of kids, but why the assistant, too? Was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “I don’t think there’s any aspect of this that wasn’t premeditated,” Emily said. “Whoever did this knew Cynthia was there, too.”

  “Why would they need her out of the way? If they wanted the house, why not just take out Matilda and the kids?”

  “Maybe the blizzard was their only opportunity,” said Emily. “The same way they waited till we were trapped to break in. Which makes me even more certain it was the same person. The night they disappeared, Cynthia hadn’t left for the night like she would have normally, but there was no better opportunity for them to break in than a night when the power was out and the roads were closed. I don’t think they would have cared whether or not she was there. They just needed to ensure that everyone in the house was completely trapped and isolated.” Emily thought of how helpless they had been in the house and shuddered.

  “But if she did escape, how could she have gotten out?” asked Jesse.

  “She might have known about the passage,” said Emily. “She’d been here for a year. Andrea said that Cynthia got upset when she opened the closet with the tea towels. There’s an entrance there, under the bottom shelf. Maybe she didn’t want the kids to find out about it. She probably didn’t want them playing in there and getting stuck in the walls.”

  “Do you think she still has family in the area? Someone we could talk to?” said Jesse.

  “The diary mentions an ex-husband,” said Emily. “I doubt he’ll want to talk about Cynthia if it ended badly and she disappeared, but I suppose it’s worth a try.”

  “It ended badly…then she disappeared…” repeated Jesse slowly. “Do you think her ex-husband could have had anything to do with it?”

  “Wouldn’t the police have questioned him?” Emily said.

  Jesse snorted. “Oglethorpe might have sent him a survey, strongly encouraging him to return it as his leisure.” He pulled into the driveway and cut the engine, then glanced at the incident report.

  “Her address is in here,” he said. “Do you think the ex is still there?”

  “It’s possible,” said Emily dubiously. “You think we should go out there?”

  “It seems like the best possible lead.”

  “But what if he’s a murderer? Even if he’s not, what’s our pretense for questioning him?”

  “We’ll go up there together in broad daylight. We won’t go inside, even if he asks us in for tea. And as far as pretenses go, we’re frustrated that nobody can tell us what happened that night. I’m sure he is, too.”

  “Okay,” said Emily. “As long as we’re safe.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be—what’s that thing Richard said? The day we moved in? Safe as houses.”

  “Yeah, and look how well that turned out,” said Emily.

  Inverness Lane was more of a long dirt alley between two streets than an actual lane. It wasn’t even labeled, and they passed it several times before realizing it was there. On Inverness, the houses were spread out few and far between until the very end, where a small cluster of trailers was situated around a cul-de-sac.

  Emily peered through the windshield of the truck. “Are we sure this is it?”

  Jesse parked on a narrow strip of gravel between Cynthia’s address and the trailer next door. “You were expecting maybe the Taj Mahal?”

  “Do you think her ex-husband’s here?” Emily glanced anxiously around their gloomy surroundings. “Lurking in the trees with a baseball bat?”

  “Oh man, you have got to start writing again. You’re doing that thing where you write everything we do out loud. No, there’s no way he’s lurking around with a baseball bat. Let’s go. I want to get our untimely murder over with.”

  They approached the trailer cautiously. It was dark, and the grass in front was overgrown. They peered in the small windows of the little Airstream. It was pitch dark with no sign of life.

  “I don’t think there’s anyone in here,” said Emily.

  “Not unless they’re hiding under the trailer,” said Jesse.

  “Oh my god, Jesse, stop,” said Emily with a shudder.

  “I’m serious. It would be a good hiding place.”

  “Can I help you?” said a voice behind them.

  Emily jumped and screamed simultaneously, turning in the air as she landed to face whoever had just spoken. Her reaction was so strong she scared both Jesse, who gave a scream of horror of his own, and the woman who’d just approached them, who also screamed. She placed a hand to her heart over the flowered housecoat she wore beneath her parka as she stared at Emily, wide-eyed.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Emily, embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” said the woman in the flowered housecoat. “I just saw you in the yard, looking lost, and I thought you must have the wrong place. I live next door. I’m Theresa Plumber.”

  “I’m Emily and this is Jesse,” said Emily. “I’m sorry again about scaring you. We were looking for anyone related to Cynthia Harkness. Her husband, maybe? I’m not sure who would be here.”

  “Oh,” said Theresa, looking solemn. “Cynthia. No one knows what h
appened to her, do they? This place has been sitting here empty since she up and vanished. Husband hasn’t been around since before she moved in. She came here alone.”

  “Did you know her? Or anything about her?” Emily asked.

  “Cynthia mostly kept to herself. She was real quiet. I offered her coffee and pie a few times, but she always said no. Polite as could be. I got the impression she wasn’t too trusting after her divorce. Some people get like that. They get disappointed by somebody, or betrayed, and they just shut right down.”

  “No one ever bought the land after she disappeared?” asked Jesse.

  “Not much to buy, is there? The trailer is all tied up in probate. The ex-husband is after it, but so is her brother. Big mess, if you ask me.”

  “It’s a trailer,” said Jesse in disbelief. “How much is an Airstream going for these days? Five grand?”

  “Families are messy,” Theresa said wisely. “Some will fight for the sake of fighting.”

  “Well, thank you so much for your help, Theresa,” said Emily. She pulled out one of her cards. “If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to give me a call.”

  Theresa studied the card with interest. “A writer, huh? You doin’ a book about all this?”

  “Something like that,” said Emily.

  She watched Theresa crunch across the icy gravel back to her own trailer, which had a laundry line stretched between two trees next to a ramshackle shed.

  Emily squinted as Theresa disappeared into the trailer, and Jesse turned away to go back to the truck. It looked as if there was a light inside the shed.

  “Jesse?” Emily said, taking a few steps towards it. He turned back.

  The light flickered out.

  8

  The light was rapidly fading, and it would soon be pitch black outside. As the sky changed, so did the temperature, beginning its descent from barely tolerable to freezing. It could have been a trick of the light, her imagination, or any other reasonable explanation—but Emily was now hesitant to attribute anything she saw out of place as something that could be easily explained. She’d once tried to rationalize everything, but now she was starting to see that some things existed outside the parameters of what seemed logical or possible.

  She thought, what if there’s someone out there? What if it was Cynthia?

  “What is it?” Jesse asked.

  “I thought I saw—” Emily took a few steps towards the shed. “A light, maybe? I’m not sure.”

  “Think her old man’s got himself a man cave back there?” said Jesse.

  Of course. The shed was on Theresa’s property, not Cynthia’s.

  “Yeah, it’s probably that,” said Emily, not believing it even as she said it.

  “Should we investigate?” inquired Jesse.

  Emily glanced at Theresa’s trailer, which she’d disappeared into only moments before.

  “She’s probably settling in to watch Wheel of Fortune,” Jesse reassured her, reading her mind.

  “I feel weird creeping around Theresa’s property,” said Emily.

  “I’m sure Theresa doesn’t necessarily want an allegedly dead person hiding in her shack,” said Jesse. “We’re probably doing her a favor.”

  The shack was a crude little lean-to between two tall trees and a wooden stump. It looked like a place to store tools or possibly a snowmobile. They approached it cautiously, as if waiting for someone to come flying out of it at any moment.

  “Where’s the door?” said Emily, mystified. There didn’t appear to be any entrance or exit, and its sides were perfectly smooth.

  “Here’s a window,” said Jesse. “It’s hard to see into, though.”

  Emily circled the shed to where Jesse was standing, peering through a small glass pane. The window was so coated with dust that the only thing visible through it was a small table holding a partially melted candle.

  “I don’t like this,” she said. “Something’s weird.”

  “Maybe Theresa will open it for us,” said Jesse.

  They went up to the door of Theresa’s trailer and knocked. She opened it. She was eating a chicken leg and seemed unsurprised to see them again. On her television in the background, Pat Sajak made a sardonic comment as a contestant leaned over to spin the wheel.

  “It’s us, again,” said Emily. “I mean, um, obviously. I know this sounds really strange, but we were just getting ready to leave and thought we saw someone on your property. In your shed. We just wanted to check on you and make sure you were safe.”

  Theresa smiled warmly at this. “Well, isn’t that nice! But I can tell you right now it’s those damn squatters.”

  “Squatters?” said Jesse.

  “They’re everywhere. All the ones you don’t see in the streets with their signs and the parks with their sleeping bags, they find any space they can and slip in through the cracks. Can’t say I blame them. Not that I’m exactly thrilled about it, either.” She frowned. She disappeared from the doorway and reappeared with a torch flashlight. “Let’s see who’s out there this time.”

  Back at the shack, Theresa slid her hand along the edge of the building. There was a hidden catch on one side, revealing a door that blended in perfectly with the rest of the facade.

  “Thought maybe if I hid the opening it would discourage them, but I guess if wishes were horses, then beggars could ride,” she mumbled, almost to herself.

  “You built this?” asked Jesse, impressed.

  “With my own two hands,” said Theresa, opening the door and shining her light into the shack.

  There was no one there.

  There was, however, an old gray blanket in the corner near a stale bread crust next to the table with the candle on it. Emily found herself thinking how easily someone could have slipped out while she and Jesse were knocking on the door of Theresa’s trailer.

  “I knew it,” said Theresa triumphantly, taking in the blanket and old food. “Squatters.”

  “Right,” said Emily. “Squatters.”

  In the truck on the way back home, Emily stared pensively out the window, thinking over what they’d just seen.

  “You think it was her?” Jesse asked. “Cynthia?”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore,” Emily said. “I think there’s a strong possibility she’s alive, and if so, she’s got to be hiding somewhere. She’s the only one who knows what happened that night. We have to find her. She’s the only one who can tell us the truth about what happened and stop what’s happening now.”

  “What makes you think she’s alive?” asked Jesse. “How do you think she got away?”

  “If she knew about the passage, then maybe she escaped,” said Emily. “If they provide an easy way into the house, then it stands to reason that they also provide an equally convenient way out.”

  “How can we be sure?” said Jesse.

  “We need to be able to tell for certain that she’s not in the house,” said Emily.

  “How?” asked Jesse.

  “I think I have an idea,” she said.

  The third secondhand store they visited had exactly what Emily wanted, buried in the toys and games aisle.

  “I found it!” she exclaimed as she pulled it triumphantly from the shelf filled with old used board games.

  “A Ouija board?” said Jesse dubiously. “I don’t know about this.”

  “This seems easiest, for our purposes,” said Emily. “Andrea seems to be the only one who uses the typewriter. The younger kids don’t seem to be able to communicate that well at all; the only time I heard them was when we were trapped in the basement. And unless you want to see the shadow again—”

  “Okay, okay,” said Jesse hurriedly. “Let’s do it.”

  Emily stopped in a second aisle to collect a few partially used candles and went to the register.

  “Oh man, we’re really doing this,” mumbled Jesse, eyeing the candles nervously.

  “Having a séance?” the checkout girl inquired brightly.

  �
��We’re not really serious or anything,” said Emily. “Just messing around.” In her pursuit of the truth and her quest to clear Matilda’s name, she was growing more and more accustomed to telling half-truths and white lies.

  “Well, I always say it’s nothing to mess with,” the girl said solemnly, scanning the game and the candles. “I take the other side very seriously, and I would highly recommend you burn sage and also use a rose quartz.”

  “Of course,” said Emily.

  “We don’t have that here, but there’s a great place off Pearl where you can get all that stuff—it’s near that alpaca fur store, you know the one I’m talking about? Next to the gluten-free pizza place.”

  “I know exactly where that is,” said Emily. She had no intention of going there.

  “Good. Did you guys bring your own bags? Otherwise, I have to tack on an extra dime.”

  “We’ll just carry them, thank you,” said Jesse.

  They took their purchases and carried them out to the truck.

  “Please explain why you believed we could live here comfortably and happily for the rest of our lives,” said Jesse.

  “I never said for the rest of our lives,” said Emily. “It’s not like I knew what we were getting into.”

  “Okay, well, let’s just get home for our séance, then,” Jesse mumbled, starting the truck. “At least we’re not paying rent,” said Emily.

  “Yeah, but at what cost, though?” Jesse answered as the truck rumbled down the road toward the steep hill toward the house.

  They placed the Ouija board on the living room table and arranged the candles around it in a half circle.

  “I’ve never done this before,” said Emily, “so I’m not entirely sure how this is supposed to work.”

  “And I am?” Jesse surveyed their handiwork. “I mean, this looks pretty terrifying, so I’m guessing we have a pretty good handle on it.”

  “Maybe we should build a fire,” said Emily. “So we can turn the lights out.”

  “Oh man,” said Jesse. “Let’s just make this as freaky as possible.” Reluctantly, he arranged the logs on the hearth inside of the fireplace. It was only their first month out west, but already their fire-building skills had considerably improved.