Echoes among the Stones

by Jaime Jo Wright

  “Well,” Lola said as she eased onto her chair, her dark curls pinned back from the sides of her face, her longer nose and strong features signs she had definitive German roots. “Hazel had nothing to hide, Genie, we know that.”

  “Do we?” Imogene retorted.

  Lola’s brown eyes raised to meet Imogene’s in surprise. “You’re saying Hazel was secretive?”

  “No!” Imogene shook her head, a sigh expelling from her lips. “No, I’m saying maybe there was something else. Maybe Hazel was afraid of someone, or—or maybe someone was bothering her and she just didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t tell me.”

  “You would have known if Hazel was afraid.” Lola took a sip of her coffee, her rose-pink lipstick staining the rim. “You and Hazel shared everything. You’d have been the first to know.”

  Imogene stared into the corner of Lola’s little kitchenette. A small room just off the main living space she shared in her apartment with Ben. The yellow walls were cheery, and it was decorated simply, the colorful porcelain cookie jar in the shape of a pig the most compelling object demanding the eye’s attention. It had on blue-painted overalls, and its snout was big. One only had to lift the pig’s head to retrieve the temptation inside. And Lola’s cookies were a temptation . . . normally.

  Not today. Imogene wasn’t hungry. She wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to eat again without feeling that pit in her stomach clenching with grief.

  “Chet said they pulled some fingerprints,” Imogene continued, assuming Lola wanted the details, however gruesome they might be. “Nothing came back. They didn’t match any of the cards on file. They haven’t even found the murder weapon.”

  Lola paled, but to her credit she didn’t react. “I never did hear of—well, of how she died.”

  Imogene lifted the teacup and took a long drink. It was lukewarm already, its chamomile intending to calm instead coating Imogene’s throat and lodging at the lump of emotion that had stilled there. Her breath shuddered as she drew it in, then released it.

  “She was—hit. On the back of the head.”

  “Lan’ sakes,” Lola whispered in shock, shaking her head.

  “More than once,” Imogene added. She squeezed her eyes shut. She could see every detail. Every detail that she had promised Hazel she would remember.

  “Chet’ll find him.” Lola reached across the kitchen table and grasped Imogene’s hand, squeezing. “He will. Give him time. Someone out there knows something.”

  “But it’s already been a week.” Imogene had never been patient. “I swear, Ivan isn’t any more patient than me. Chet won’t say much. Mother and Daddy may have moved back into the house, but it’s silent as a tomb. Daddy gets up first thing and heads out to the cows to do the milkin’. He stays out all day.” She paused. The recent events harboring deep inside threatening to bubble up and out. When Imogene met Lola’s dark eyes, she could hold it no longer.

  “Folks came in and cleaned it up.” She remembered the blood. The stained floor. The spattered bedspread. But cleaning hadn’t erased the last remnants of Hazel. She and her mother still had to go through Hazel’s things, pack or give them away, and shut up the attic bedroom for good.

  “Shhh . . .” Lola hadn’t released Imogene’s hand yet. “Don’t bother yourself with it. Things will set themselves right.”

  Set themselves right.

  Could anything ever be right again? Imogene let Lola’s soothing murmur seep into her soul, but along with the nurturing reassurances came a darkness that Imogene couldn’t ignore. It slithered inside of her, taunting her, telling her that someone had literally gotten away with murder.

  Yes. Yes, someone would set things right.

  Imogene would.

  CHAPTER 8

  Aggie

  She couldn’t sleep. Melatonin hadn’t helped, and Aggie was about ready to get up and chug a bottle of nighttime cough syrup. Tossing to her right side, she stared through the filmy lace curtain that hung over the four-paned window. Her bedroom in the house Mumsie had moved into when Aggie was a toddler was on the second floor. Its whitewashed wood floors creaked with every step, and she still remembered which parts of the floor were the worst and how to step over the especially loud squeaks. The ceiling slanted downward from the peak of the roof, creating an adorable window-seat area that was piled with old throw pillows. Everything in this house screamed old-fashioned, as though Mumsie had decorated it to match what her home might have been like in her early days. Mom had told Aggie that Mumsie grew up on a farm outside of Mill Creek in what was now a subdivision. Much of the furniture in this house, Mom had told her, once belonged to Mumsie’s mother.

  Her nighttime perusal of the architecture and décor of her bedroom had Aggie missing how not long ago she’d spent her days identifying selling points in a home, coordinating her pitch to her client, and plain old letting herself reimagine properties.

  Man. She’d really messed up her career. People management wasn’t her forte. Having a few junior realtors beneath her had been more of a pain than anything of promise. Now here she was eyeing her grandmother’s house as though it were listed in a For Sale brochure.

  Aggie rolled back toward the opposite wall. The red light on the clock told her it was two in the morning. She was going to be exhausted tomorrow when she had to endure another awkward breakfast with Mumsie, then try to put the files in the cemetery office into some sort of order, so that she and Collin could start working on the new graveyard map.

  Aggie growled and sat up, flipping her legs over the side of the bed. Warm milk. Maybe that would do the trick. She couldn’t exactly medicate at two a.m. or she’d not wake up until noon.

  The doorknob wobbled in its housing, the crystal knob uneven beneath Aggie’s hand. She tugged at the door, wincing at the fact that humidity in the house made it stick. The last thing she wished to do was wake up Mumsie, who’d been oddly reserved and lacking opinion at dinner. Mumsie’s room was just across the hall. Aggie paused and looked at the closed door, a pang nudging her heart. All these years, Mumsie had lived in this place alone. She was nearing a century old. What if she fell? Why hadn’t she moved to a room downstairs where it was safer? Mom would have checked in on Mumsie these last couple of years, but with her gone . . .

  Aggie blinked away the emotion. No. Tonight was not the night to consider Mom and her passing. She tiptoed down the hall, the wood floors cold against her toes. Her oxford-style nightshirt hung to just above her knees, the buttons matching the red satin material. Aggie hesitated at the top stair. To the right was Mumsie’s study. At least that was what Mom had always called it. When she was little, Aggie had titled it The Room with the Closed Door, because she liked to be super original with titles. She’d caught glimpses inside the room when she’d met Mumsie in the hallway as she came out. Nothing unusual. Nothing mysterious to draw Aggie’s curiosity.

  But now, for some reason, the moonlight shafting down the hall from the window behind Aggie illuminated the door as if it were asking to be opened. As she complied, the silence was more powerful to Aggie than had the hinges moaned their argument against the intrusion. A waft of musty air met her nose. The kind that hinted of days captured in a treasure box of memories and if she stepped over the threshold, somehow, she would be stepping back into time.

  The room held an eerie glow, bluish-yellow moonlight stretching across the wood floor. A large oval rag rug adorned the middle of the room, its hues of reds and pinks and yellows all muted in the nighttime light. Aggie caught sight of an old floor console radio, reminiscent of the thirties. The prewar era when the world was broiling, ready to shatter the lingering darkness of the Great Depression and catapult them into the over-glorified horrors of war that would not leave anyone untouched.

  Aggie’s fingers clung to the doorjamb. For some reason, she was holding her breath and wondered if in the morning she would still firmly insist she heard the jazzy strains of Billie Holiday rising from the radio. Her gaze skimmed the rest of the room.

&nb
sp; A desk with an old yellow vinyl-covered chair, much like one might have seen in a kitchen during the same era. On its top, a porcelain figurine with a pink-hued hooped dress, her dark hair coiffed into a Civil War–era style. It looked as though one might lift the girl by her glass shoulders and she would split from her skirt into a small jewelry box.

  Something drew Aggie into the room, into its capture. Mumsie’s home was dated in all its rooms, but it had no sentimental ties. Nothing nostalgic. It wasn’t an old family home, but rather a house Mumsie bought when she was in her retirement years. But this room . . . something was different. A part of Aggie instantly felt as though she should feel drawn to it. As though it housed memories that told stories of family history—even though that couldn’t possibly be the case.

  Or could it?

  Aggie’s experienced eye took in the white iron bed with its chipped paint and bedspread of white, with a floral sheet folded in a tight crease over the top. A picture frame, positioned on the bedside table, was strangely empty. The cardboard backing peered through the glass, and the metal frame with its tiny embellishments was tarnished from age. An empty frame. Just the sight of it was sad. Lonesome. Aggie wondered why Mumsie had it there, positioned as if it were waiting for happiness to find it and insert itself behind the glass. Faces with smiles, pleasant memories, or the warmth of a loved one’s profile. But it was empty. Ugly and forlorn.

  Aggie released a pent-up breath. She’d been holding it, drawn into the emptiness that strangely echoed her own heart. Grief was a lonely occupation, made worse with time’s ticking cadence. It passed by each moment as though standing outside looking in at a world that should have stopped moving with death but instead kept striding forward. Oblivious to the pain that screamed just outside its chamber.

  The floor creaked, breaking her concentration. Aggie glanced up and her eyes connected with the four-paned window. Outside, the world was dark, modern, and an airplane’s red light blinked high in the sky. She pulled her attention back to the room. Against the wall, closest to the bedroom door, was a rather large dollhouse stationed on a straight-legged wooden card table. She hardly registered the coolness of the flooring and the way each floorboard’s crease met the bottoms of her bare feet as she approached it.

  Aggie narrowed her eyes, reaching up to tuck straight strands of her dark hair behind her ear, tilting her head to note all the tiny features. The front of the dollhouse was open, as if someone had cut a farmhouse—with an architectural style reminiscent of the turn of the century—in half. Aggie couldn’t resist the small smile that played at her lips. She lifted her fingertips hesitantly, wanting to touch the delicate rooms, the shingling on the roof, the addition that stretched off the left side of the house.

  It was ridiculously detailed. Aggie let her mind embrace the old music that played in her head, the strains of the trumpet, the gravelly voice of Louis Armstrong. Oh, for the time when life slowed to that lazy pace of postwar farm life.

  Her finger touched the peak of the dollhouse. It was a vernacular farmhouse. Obviously not designed by an architect so much as pieced together by the hands of someone who used whatever materials and design skills they had on hand. Probably an original house built in the eighteen hundreds, then added on to and eventually becoming the creative version that sat before her, though now in imitation dollhouse form.

  Aggie was stunned by the detailing. The shingling was pieced onto the roof with the precision of a roofer. The rooms inside were wallpapered or painted, and the flooring was intricate, down to the detailing of the linoleum kitchen floor and its olive-green squares.

  She ran her hand down the center board that divided the house into rooms. Front parlor, living quarters, the kitchen, a small bathroom with pink fixtures, all on the first floor. The second, boasting two bedrooms, a study, and a nursery. Her gaze drifted to the gabled attic. It spanned the entire length of the dollhouse, its walls covered in a delicate paper with tiny roses.

  Aggie frowned. Goodness, if the bed didn’t look just like . . . She tilted her head and squinted, then shot a quick look over her shoulder at the bed in the room. It was. It was exactly the same. The spread, the sheets, the iron frame.

  The moments that had been thick with wistfulness were now replaced by something different that crept in like an uninvited intruder. Aggie couldn’t place it. A feeling that something was very wrong in this quaint house replicating days gone by. She bent to peer into the attic room. It was difficult to see without turning on the bedroom light, but she’d no desire to awaken Mumsie and be confronted with the guilt of snooping.

  There was something on the wallpaper by the bed. Aggie put her face right up to the open room, straining to see. Her vision traveled down the wall to the floor. The sight snatched her breath from her, and Aggie took an abrupt step backward. She shouldn’t be shocked to see a doll in a dollhouse, but this was . . . this was . . . this was no ordinary doll.

  The miniature lay facedown on the floor. Red paint was pooled beneath her head and meticulously spotted along the side of the white bedspread. There was red on the doll’s fingertips, as if she’d dipped her own hand into the imitation blood. A book lay discarded on the rug beside the bloody doll.

  Aggie stumbled back until her hip hit the iron frame of the bed. She whirled and stared with horror at the floor as though the woman’s body had appeared there and was lying in her pooled gore.

  But the floor was bare.

  The rag rug was clean.

  The bedspread that touched the floor where it hung over the side was . . . Aggie covered her mouth with her hand, wishing her imagination was simply being overactive in the midnight trance of no sleep. But it wasn’t. Stains dotted the white spread. She could see them even in the moonlight. Aggie assessed a few of them. Three on the bottom. Three out of many, but those three were . . .

  She hurried back to the dollhouse and stared in. Yes. Yes! The same three stains were brilliant red in the dollhouse and mere pinpricks in comparison to the real blotches that had stained the spread from long ago.

  The figurine replica! On the desk!

  Aggie’s eyes widened, and she spun to assess the figurine on the desk in the room where she stood.

  It was the same. Of course it was!

  The dollhouse was a morbid crime-scene reenactment, and this room—this room was a modified version!

  The room was suffocating now. A cool draft fluttered across Aggie’s bare legs, like the breath of a murdered ghost, softly affirming to Aggie they were there. Still there and haunting the room with more than their memories, but also the details of their death.

  Aggie shivered.

  There were voices here. Old voices hissing to be heard, trapped in the vault of time. Mumsie’s vault.

  She’d had enough.

  Aggie hurried to the bedroom door and then skidded to a stop on the floor. The door was closed. She was certain—certain—she’d left it open on entry. Grasping the doorknob, the door opened without resistance, and Aggie catapulted into the hallway, dragging the door shut behind her. It closed with a firm latch, locking the phantoms inside. The ones who wanted to come out, to fly away, and to revive the horrific memories that came hand in hand with the Grim Reaper. Grief. Sorrow. That feeling that something precious had been stolen and would never be returned. Ever.

  CHAPTER 9

  She’d thought they would have dissipated. The ghosts. But they hadn’t. Instead, they’d clawed their way into her soul and created a permanent residence there. Even over breakfast, it had taken all of Aggie’s reserve not to interrogate Mumsie, seek out answers, and shoo this horrible sensation away. Mumsie had eyed her sullenly. She knew—or it felt like she knew—that Aggie had crossed the threshold into the room at the end of the hall. That she had snooped into a reimagined past that was meant to stay shuttered. That she now had questions parading through her mind to an anthem that would not be silenced. But really there was no way Mumsie could have known, not unless she’d seen Aggie. Unless she’d been the one to
shut Aggie in the bedroom last night, closing her in with the spirits of the past.

  “Are you going inside or are we going to make a practice of opening doors via mind control?”

  Collin’s lilting sarcasm snapped Aggie out of her vacant stare at the cemetery office’s door. The little one-room building wasn’t inspiring peace this morning, and she’d been caught clutching the leather strap to her bag that hung over her shoulder and staring at the paint-chipped door.

  “I’m just pausing for fresh air.” Aggie wished she was witty and capable of responding with quips. But in reality she was practical, and her creativity was reserved for architectural prowess alone.

  Collin winked. He was such a ginger. More so in the morning light than she’d noticed in the past. Even the light stubble on his cheeks and chin reflected copper, and his wavy hair responded to the sun with a vibrance that made Aggie blink. He was a complete visual of his personality. Cheery. Sunny. Charming.

  She, on the other hand? Aggie glanced down at her leather flats, her skinny blue jeans, and the white, tailored oxford shirt that was unbuttoned into a feminine V at the collar. Her hair couldn’t be described any less interestingly than jet-black, and yet she knew the freckles that dotted her nose betrayed her otherwise ivory-skinned complexion. Still, she was uptight, dark, boring, and . . . emotionally fried. She was like a burnt marshmallow that once had been sweet but had come too close to the fire and was left crispy and unwanted.

  “Do you like s’mores?” Aggie tossed the question out before thinking it through.

  Collin pursed his lips, his wire-framed glasses perched with a quirky bent on his nose. “I can’t say as they’re my preferred. An excellent flan on the other hand . . .” He kissed his fingertips and spread them wide. “Delicioso!”