Restless Spirits Boxset: A Collection of Riveting Haunted House Mysteries

by Skylar Finn

  “Oh my,” said a voice behind them. “What did they do to you folks?”

  Emily sagged against the couch with relief. Richard. She turned to see him standing in the middle of the living room, regarding them with wide eyes. He looked from the two of them, tied up on the couch, to the bag of money in front of the fireplace, taking it in.

  “It was Theresa,” Emily said. “She’s Cynthia’s sister, they’ve been in it together from the beginning. Them and Watkins. Richard, please untie us, hurry! She said she was leaving us here, but I’m afraid she might come back.”

  Richard approached them on the couch. Emily held out her hands. “Do you have a knife or something to cut the tape with?”

  Richard walked right past her and sat in the chair Theresa had only recently vacated.

  “Richard?” said Emily. “What are you doing?”

  She glanced over at Jesse, who sat stock still, watching Richard with an expression of dread. She looked back at him. “Richard?”

  He smiled. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of black gloves. He pulled them on slowly, one at a time.

  “I’m sorry, Emily,” said Richard. “I’d like to let you go. I really would. But I’m not going to be able to do that. Not now. Not later.” He looked into the fire and continued to smile, as if they were at a pleasant neighborhood gathering. He turned to look at them again. His smile was broad and insane.

  “Not ever,” he said.

  6

  No…not Richard…not our only ally.

  Emily stared at Richard and thought these words of denial in her mind. But even as she thought them, when she regarded Richard’s mad stare, she knew that it was true.

  Looking back, she thought of how ever since they had arrived at the house, Richard always seemed to appear, with uncanny timing, immediately after something had gone wrong. How convenient it must have been for him. He had access to the house at all times. He worked there long before Emily and Jesse ever got there, or even Matilda. He must have known about the tunnels. Emily thought of how many times she’d been in the house alone with him and felt sick.

  Richard took out his gun and rested it on his knee. “My sisters would rather we kept you alive. They think you’ll take a payoff and vouch for them, that you’ll publicly reinforce this story that you transferred the deed of your own free will. But I know better. You’re honest people. I don’t think you could do that, even if you wanted to. I don’t need you to put one of our names on the deed in order to get the house. And your husband here probably knows this from the way he’s looking at me, but Matilda named someone else in the will when she changed it from Cynthia to you—in case you didn’t want it. An old, falling-down house in the middle of nowhere from a woman you never met who your family didn’t like? In the likely event you didn’t want it, she wanted it to go to someone she knew and trusted. She wanted it to go to me. So you see, I don’t need you around to make sure I get the house. If anything, I just need you to disappear. Just like Matilda and those kids.”

  “People are going to ask questions, Richard,” said Emily, her heart pounding. He no longer seemed like good old easy-going Richard, like someone she could reason with. But she had to try.

  “Getting rid of Matilda and the children and making it look like it was her fault is one thing,” said Emily. “But to do the same to us, ensuring that you get the house, don’t you think that’s going to be a little more than suspicious? People are not going to believe that we went missing out of nowhere, or that Matilda came back from the dead, murdered us, and then disappeared again. And that you, coincidentally, just happen to get everything.”

  “Oglethorpe doesn’t care whether or not you go missing,” said Richard dismissively. “He doesn’t want that kind of scandal in his town. He’ll cover it up, like he covered it up last time. Otherwise, he’ll have every reporter from every news outlet in the country, running their twenty-four-hour cycles, making him look worse and worse with every second that ticks by while he fails to come up with answers. And he’ll never find them. We covered our tracks too well for that.”

  Emily realized something important as he spoke, something she had missed: Richard was smart. Only an intelligent mind could execute something of this scope, and his aw-gee-shucks routine was probably nothing more than that. A routine. And how thoroughly he had fooled her with it.

  “But why, Richard?” Emily asked. “What did any of us ever do to you?” It wasn’t that she thought beseeching him would do any good. She only hoped that if she kept him talking long enough, it would buy them a little bit more time. Maybe in the interval she could come up with a plan. She didn’t know how she would convey it to Jesse without Richard noticing, but she would find a way.

  “You didn’t do anything,” said Richard, smiling as if they were simply exchanging pleasantries while in line at the bank. “That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? I was invisible to you. Richard, the local yokel; Richard, the help.”

  Emily thought of how transformed he was before her, how very different from the person she’d once thought.

  “I was nobody,” he continued. “I was a nobody my whole life. My father was a nobody. His father was a nobody. All a bunch of nobodys, going all the way back. Is it so wrong, for a man to want to be somebody?” Richard looked into the fire, the light dancing on the glass of his spectacles. It made him look even more insane. His voice was distant now, as if he was in the place he was remembering.

  “My father worked for Matilda’s father, did you know that? I’m sure you didn’t. He did the same menial, thankless tasks that I did. He performed his drudgery with pride. He thought that as long as a man had a job, any job was honorable, as long as you took it seriously and did it well. He thought I should be proud to do the same things that he did. He had me working at his knee when I was barely old enough to spell. I never even had a choice…”

  Richard’s father, Henry Danforth, brought Richard up to “the big house” (as he called it) for the first time when he was a child. It was one of Richard’s earliest memories. He introduced them to Matilda’s grandparents and told them he would work for them one day, too. Richard was embarrassed. Even at a young age, something about the idea of working for two people as what was, in his mind, a servant, bothered him. But he said nothing. He resented his father even then, but only ever in his mind.

  His sisters were jealous. They wanted to go up to the big house, too, but their father refused. He said it was no kind of work for young ladies. For a while, Richard tried to make a game of it: pulling weeds and raking leaves; painting alongside of his father. But he couldn’t get past the lingering suspicion that all this meant was that he had to work twice—once here, and once at home, where all the same chores were waiting for him. He seethed at the unfairness of it. It went on like this for several years, until Richard turned sixteen and decided he would run away. He would live his own life and be his own man, and nobody could ever make a servant of him again.

  When he turned thirteen, his father started paying him for his help at the big house—now that he was old enough to make a real difference, rather than “one more thing” Henry had to “look after.” Richard thought with silent fury of how his father made it sound like even taking away his childhood had somehow been a burden on the older man.

  His mistake, Richard thought smugly to himself in his room at night as he hid his earnings under a loose floorboard beneath his bed, was thinking that Richard would just spend the money: baseball cards, sodas, candy, model airplanes. Richard’s father never imagined he’d devote every red cent towards getting away from their family, which was the only thing Richard intended to do. He’d run away and never see or talk to any of them again. He couldn’t wait. He lay awake at night in bed, his young back hurting from pulling weeds or hauling around furniture much too heavy for his skinny adolescent arms, and he would dream.

  He dreamed about beaches, distant shores where waves crashed and lifeguards blew their whistles. Maybe he could become a lifeguard
and save a beautiful girl in a string bikini from drowning. He’d live in a beach shack he built himself where he’d fish and eat crabs. It would never snow. He dreamed about the rodeo, riding a bucking bronco like a real cowboy and living off the land in Texas. He’d start out as a ranch hand and one day have his own ranch. He dreamed about Europe, which he didn’t know too much about outside of Social Studies. He’d ride a bike with a basket through the French countryside and eat baguettes. He’d go to London and look at the Royal Guard and try to get them to react before he went to Piccadilly Circus to ride the Ferris wheel and eat peanuts while he listened to the chimes of Big Ben.

  Two things interfered with his plan. The first was Cynthia. She saw him one afternoon, hiding his money beneath the loose floorboard in his bedroom. Cynthia was always spying on everyone. She’d spy on Theresa until she caught her doing something she shouldn’t, then she’d use the information to blackmail the younger girl into doing her chores. She spied on all the neighbors, gathering information about them just in case she ever got a chance to use it. She spied on Richard, but he was acutely aware of this and usually much too wary to ever do anything of importance when he knew she might be around.

  But on this particular night, he was in a hurry and got careless. His friends were walking to a baseball game at the high school and he didn’t want to be left behind. He didn’t want to bring all his earnings with him; he was too afraid of losing them. It was the worst thing he could think of. It would mean losing his ticket to freedom.

  He turned to leave and there was Cynthia, leaning in the doorway, watching him. She smiled slowly. She knew the leverage she’d just won.

  “So,” she said, sidling over and sitting on his bed. Cynthia hated that he got a room to himself and didn’t have to share because he was the only boy. She resented him for this, among an endless litany of other privileges she assigned him, in her mind, as the only son in a family of daughters. She was probably even irked he was going to the baseball game without her, even though he had worked all day and she hadn’t. “I see you’ve started yourself a little savings account, Richie Rich.”

  Richard was silent. He knew by now that to implore Cynthia would only provoke her further. Your best option was to just wait, find out what she wanted, and how much it would cost you.

  “Tell you what,” said Cynthia, as if she were doing him a favor. “We’ll keep this our little secret, just between us, if you’ll give me a little bit every now and then, just to tide me over.”

  “How much is a little bit?” asked Richard, already dreading the answer.

  The smile immediately vanished from Cynthia’s face and she held her hand out with a scowl. “Twenty bucks.”

  Twenty dollars! He was lucky if he made that in a week. Even though his dad was giving him a little bit of money now, it was still exactly that: a little bit.

  He’d never considered hurting Cynthia before, but for the first time, he thought very seriously about it. If she kept things up at this rate, he’d be broke by the end of the summer, and he’d never get out of here and away from them.

  “It’s that, or fork it all over to Dad,” she said. She pronounced Dad the way other people said scurvy or gout. Richard resented his father, but Cynthia loathed him. She hated being the daughter of a servant, and she thought her mother’s unspoken devotion to her husband, regardless of his station, was pathetic beyond belief.

  Silently, Richard withdrew the money from his hiding place and handed it to Cynthia.

  “Thanks a bunch!” She smiled broadly and tucked the bill in the back pocket of her blue jeans before sauntering out of the room.

  Richard changed his hiding place often so she couldn’t come back and steal everything from him later, as he knew she was wont to do, because who could he tell? He’d been pretending all along to spend the money on other things, like going to movies he never actually saw. He knew she would steal from him bit by bit whenever she felt like it. But of course, just hiding the money made little difference, as she could still demand it from him whenever she felt like it: always threatening to drop the bomb at dinner that Richard was hoarding money for himself even as his father occasionally skipped dinner so the rest of them could have seconds and little Theresa’s too-small shoes no longer fit and their mother’s clothes were threadbare.

  The second thing that happened to dash Richard’s hopes of escape forever, or at least for a very long time, was that his father had a heart attack shortly after Richard’s fifteenth birthday. Henry was working in the garden on a bright spring day, clear and cold, when he suddenly keeled over in the garden. Richard was terrified. Only partly for his father, but mostly, he later realized, for himself—for he realized even in that moment what would become of him if his father never rose again. He’d become the sole caretaker of his entire family’s well-being, and he’d never know a moment’s peace again.

  He ran up to the big house and rushed inside, yelling at the top of his voice. He was normally very shy and reserved when he went in the house, and that was only ever to fix something or clean. But his panic had driven away all the usual thoughts of tact and reservation.

  At first, Richard’s pleas were met with silence: the house was empty. He panicked as he looked for the phone. He ran smack into the inside help, a maid by the name of Henrietta, who called the ambulance that saved Henry’s life.

  His father lived, but was unable to return to work for months while he recovered. From then on, by some unspoken agreement among every member of the family but Richard, it was assumed that Richard would continue working at the big house and keep the family afloat. And not just Richard: if they’d tried to make him do that, placing the full burden of their interests on his young shoulders, he would have run away right then and there no matter what. But his mother took on work as a seamstress, and his sisters baby-sat and shoplifted to contribute. Their parents knew about the baby-sitting but not, of course, the shoplifting.

  Richard still considered running. But one day, Cynthia told him her idea. She summoned him and Theresa to her secret fort in the woods. Richard was never allowed in it and didn’t even know where it was, which he suspected was Cynthia’s way of punishing him for getting his own room. He only knew it existed from Cynthia and Theresa’s whispered conversations and prolonged disappearances. But on this particular day, Cynthia made an exception. Even Richard was permitted to enter her secret headquarters.

  The fort was extremely cunning, Richard thought, not even just for a girl—Cynthia, while one of the most terrible aspects of his life, was shrewder than any boy he knew. He wasn’t surprised her fort was a super villain’s dream.

  Pages from comic books decorated the crude walls of the lean-to, comprised mostly of branches found in the woods. Richard looked closer and felt unsurprised to see many of the pages came from his own collection. There was a hidden stash of snacks, many of them things that went missing from the house almost immediately, on the rare occasions their mother could afford to splurge at the store. There were also things Richard didn’t recognize, which he assumed Cynthia had stolen. As it transpired, he was right.

  “I’ve been taking food from the big house for years now,” Cynthia told them, opening a cupcake wrapped in plastic and shoveling almost the entire thing in her mouth. Theresa watched, fascinated. Cynthia ignored her. She didn’t offer her or Richard one. “It’s easy like you wouldn’t believe. I sneak in, I take whatever I want, and then I sneak right back out again.”

  “How?” said Richard. He knew the house better than Cynthia, and he’d never once seen his sister there.

  “You don’t know?” Cynthia looked at him, aghast. Or, more likely, pretending to be, just to get under his skin. “But you’ve worked there for so long! I thought for sure you’d have found it by now.”

  “Found what,” said Richard shortly. He was getting irritable. He was missing the pick-up game in the park, his back was hurting him, and he would have very much liked a cupcake, which Cynthia clearly wasn’t going to offer him. “
There’s nothing to find up there but china and doilies.”

  “I disagree,” said Cynthia. “There’s a lot more in that place than china and doilies. And some of that stuff is worth a whole lotta money.”

  Richard furrowed his brow. “We can’t just steal from the big house. They’ll think it was Dad, or Henrietta. Or me. We’ll all get fired. Are you stupid? You’re lucky they haven’t caught you stealing food.”

  Cynthia waved a hand airily, dismissing his claims. “I’ve never been caught, and I never will be. I never take enough for them to notice. I just take enough for me. They have so much, they don’t even know when something’s gone. So I say we sneak up to the big house one night, and we go into the safe. We take a little bit of money, and depending on how closely they keep track—based on my observations, my guess is not very—they won’t even notice. Or they’ll each think the other one did it, and is lying about it, because how could anyone else know the combination to the safe? There’s no way you or Dad or Henrietta or anybody could know that.”

  “How do you know that?” said Theresa, staring at Cynthia with awe.

  Cynthia smiled wickedly.

  “I’ll show you,” she said.

  It was evening. The sun had set and it was dark and cold. The Meades were in the parlor playing backgammon. Richard knew them well enough by now to know exactly what they were doing at any given point in the day.

  Cynthia led them up to the house with an authority that annoyed Richard. The house was his territory. Even if he didn’t like it, it was still something only he knew about, and she couldn’t even let him have that.

  Richard forgot his private resentments when Cynthia slipped under the stairs leading up to the back door and moved aside the pile of wood against the wall, log by log.