Theo paused her rampage through the kitchen. “What do you mean? What happened?”
“Sammy’s a smart kid,” I reminded her. “It’s not like he wanted to go with Dylan. First, he tried making a scene at the school. He told the secretary that I was supposed to pick him up, but I guess Dylan outsmarted the poor girl. Dylan tried to carry him, but Sammy kept kicking at him. When Dylan let him walk, Sammy put stickers on the ground so I could find him.”
Theo sat next to me and rested her forehead in her hands. “Then what?”
“Apparently, he tried to get Sammy into his car.”
“Ugh, that car! It’s probably full of drugs.”
“Well, Sammy wasn’t having it,” I assured her. “He made himself throw up in the front seat before Dylan could even get the piece of crap started. Then he got out and ran off into the woods. Dylan doesn’t know this area like Sammy does, so I guess he gave up when he couldn’t find Sammy.”
Theo’s teeth ground together. “I hate him. I hate that man with every fiber of my being.”
“Hey.” I pulled her hands away from her face so I could look her in the eye. “I know you’re angry and scared, but the important thing is that Sammy is safe. Tomorrow, we’ll call Hillary again. She’ll know what to do about Dylan. You can take out a restraining order.”
“What did I do to deserve this?”
“Nothing,” I answered fiercely. “You did nothing wrong. Do you hear me? Dylan’s a jerk, and from the sound of it, he’s also psychotic. This has nothing to do with you or the choices you’ve made. You’re a great mom, Theo. Don’t let some asshole make you forget that.”
Theo gave a feeble laugh. “I didn’t mean what did I do to deserve Dylan stalking me. I already know the answer to that question—I gave him access to my life. I meant what did I do to deserve a friend as good as you?”
“Oh.” The question took me by surprise. I didn’t feel like I’d gone above and beyond to be a good friend to Theo. I simply cared for her and Sammy. “I’m not sure what you mean. You and Sammy are two of my favorite people. I would do anything to make sure the two of you stayed safe.”
“I’m so grateful for you,” Theo said. “Truly. I owe you so much.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I told her.
A frantic knock on the door interrupted our conversation. Theo nearly leapt out of her chair. “It better not be him,” she hissed. “I might murder him on the spot.”
“Check the peephole,” I whispered.
Theo peered through the tiny window in the door. “What the hell? It’s Della Gordon. She never comes over unless she’s watching Sammy.”
“Answer it.”
Theo opened the door. Della stood on the doorstep, wringing her hands. Her hair—usually neatly tied away from her face—was frizzled and messy. Pink circles decorated the skin beneath her eyes. She looked as though she hadn’t slept in three days.
“Is Peyton here?” she asked Theo. “She’s not at home.”
“I’m right here, Della,” I said, getting up from the kitchen counter. “Is everything okay?”
Della peered around Theo. “I need to speak with you. Alone.”
I gathered my coat, hat, and keys and hugged Theo on my way out. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow, okay?” I told her. “If you need anything, let me know.”
“Thanks, Peyton. You’ve been amazing.”
“Tell Sammy I’ll see him later.”
“Will do.”
I helped Della down the stairs. With every step, she wobbled as if her age had caught up to her in the amount of time since I’d seen her last. I kept my hand on her elbow as we made our way into the parking lot. She refused to say anything until we were safely within the confines of my car.
“Did you find it?” she asked, once I’d fired up the heat and her teeth had stopped chattering. “Did you see where it was hidden?”
“Della, I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I had a rough day. Sammy went missing, and we’re worried that Theo’s ex-boyfriend might still be in town. Last night—”
“Last night!” Della grabbed my hand, squeezing hard enough to cut off the circulation to my fingers. She certainly hadn’t lost the strength in her grip. “Last night, you saw it. I remember.”
My memory circled back to last night’s chain of horrible nightmares, so vivid that I hadn’t been able to tell whether or not they were real. “Were you actually in my house last night? Did you wake me up?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Della released my hand, and all of the blood rushed back to my fingers. “I knew it. I knew you were listening. Did you find it?”
Stumped, I replied, “Did I find what?”
“Think,” Della pleaded. “What did I show you? Remember?”
Reluctantly, I dug through my fuzzy memories of last night. “Are you talking about the chef’s knife? In the drawer that rattles?”
Della snapped her fingers, a weird gesture that I interpreted as triumph. “You know it’s true, don’t you? The other story.”
I stared at Della’s wild eyes and crazy hair. “Della, I have no idea what other story you’re talking about. You have to give me longer sentences here.”
She leaned across the center console and took the collar of my coat in both hands, yanking me forward until we were only inches apart. “You know what really happened to Alyssa Abram.”
A familiar lump rose in my throat. It tasted like bile and backwash. No matter how many times I tried to swallow it, it remained stuck near my tonsils, threatening to explode at any second. “What do you know about Alyssa Abram?”
“She was murdered,” Della whispered, her eyes growing wider with every word. “In her own home—that poor, sweet little girl—I can’t go there anymore.”
“You’ve seen Alyssa, haven’t you?” I asked her. “At the mansion?”
Della violently shook her head.
“You can tell me.” I unfurled Della’s fingers from my coat collar and held her hands in mine. “I can see her too. I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Not Alyssa,” Della said.
“Last night, you spoke to someone upstairs in the west wing,” I reminded her. “I heard you talking to them. Alyssa talks to me too.”
Della pulled her hands out of mine. “It wasn’t Alyssa.”
“Then who was it?”
“I can’t tell you,” Della said. “It’s for your own good. Alyssa doesn’t talk to me anymore. Not since I stopped visiting all those years ago. I think she’s mad at me.”
“She doesn’t understand why you left her,” I told Della. “She’s young. She’s still only five years old, no matter how long she’s been trapped in that house. I’m sure if you apologized to her—”
“No, I can’t go back to the mansion.” Della trembled in her seat. I turned up the heat, but it didn’t make a difference. Her shivers weren’t weather-related. “I can hardly live in Falconwood anymore. I hear that voice everywhere I go. It’s following me.”
“What voice? Who’s following you?”
Della’s eyes focused again, and her frantic energy radiated throughout the car. “You have to find out the truth about Alyssa—what really happened to her. That’s the only way all of this stops.”
“All of what?”
“Everything,” Della whispered. “The voice in my head will go away. Alyssa Abram will find peace. Sammy Baker won’t run away from his mother anymore. All you have to do is figure out the truth.”
I let out a long sigh that fogged up the driver’s side window. Night had long since fallen, and I was ready for a good night’s sleep. Then again, a good night’s sleep was never guaranteed in the Abram Mansion. “Della, what do you think I’ve been trying to do? Ever since I realized Alyssa was trapped there, I’ve been trying to find out how she died, but there are no records of the Abrams that I can find. There are hardly any clues, and the ones that I have found don’t make any sense. For instance, why did you show me the chef’s knife last
night and then hide it away again? I couldn’t open that weird compartment in the drawer.”
“Do you know why I showed you?”
I thought of Alyssa’s neck without her scarf. “I have a guess.”
“Someone else showed me the knife,” Della said. “I had to show you. It’s important.”
“Well, without it in my actual hand, I don’t have anything to go on,” I told her. “If that knife is a murder weapon, the police need to see it.”
“No!” Della hit the dashboard hard enough to rattle the plastic spoons I’d been hoarding in the glove compartment. “No police. They’re incompetent. They’ll make this harder.”
“I don’t know what to tell you then,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to Alyssa after Percy died. We all thought Penelope Abram took her along when she left Percy for Charles—”
Della snapped her fingers again. Another moment of triumph. “Charles! Charles Rainer.”
“How do you know that name?”
“You have to find him,” Della ordered. “He might know something. Go to him.”
“The address I have for Charles Rainer is printed on a letter from over forty years ago,” I said. “Who knows if he even still lives there?”
Without warning, Della got out of the car. It had begun to rain, and within seconds, the moisture had flattened her crazy hair against her forehead. “Find Charles Rainer. Ask him what happened to Penelope Abram. Come to me when you know the truth.”
“Penelope? What about—Della, wait!”
She slammed the door and walked off, her gray sweater blending in with the dark, foggy evening. The rain grew heavier, bouncing off my windshield with a vengeance. As I pulled out of the bakery’s parking lot, I expected to find Della again, walking along the sidewalk, but it was as if she had dissolved into droplets and absorbed into the concrete, just as the rain did.
To my relief, Basil’s car wasn’t parked in front of the mansion. He’d already finished his work with Ben and left for the day. When I went inside, Ben was making dinner in the kitchen. I admired him as he stirred a pot of pasta sauce with his good hand. With the other, he squeezed a stress ball to strengthen his grip. He was making decent progress with his physical therapy, but he had a long way to go before he was back to his usual self. As I shook off my wet coat and sank into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, I wished things were as simple as they used to be. A simple house, a simple husband, and a simple life. Then again, I hadn’t been happy with simple either.
“Do you think I’m making the right choice?” I asked Ben.
“About what?”
“About you and me.”
His grip tensed around the wooden spoon. “I’m not sure why you would ask me that.”
“Because you have a good head on your shoulders, and you know me better than anyone else.”
Ben lifted the spoon from the sauce and tapped it against the pan. “Peyton, I’m not sure what good this conversation will do for either one of us.”
“It’s just a question.”
He sighed and turned the burner down to low. “Are you making the right choice? I don’t know. I guess it depends on who you’re making that choice for. If you’re making it for me, it’s the wrong choice. I love you now as much as I loved you the day we got married, but that doesn’t matter if you’re making this choice for yourself. I know being married to me stopped you from doing a lot of the things you wanted to do. If I could go back in time and listen to what you wanted, I would have given you the freedom to travel and come back to me when you needed a safe place to land. I know that now, but it’s too late.”
I could tell from the slump of his posture that my question was hurting him more than it was helping me. I cleared my throat. “What are you making?”
“Arrabbiata,” he answered, his tone lighter now that I’d changed the subject. “Do you want some? I didn’t make it too spicy.”
“Sure.”
For the rest of the evening, we kept to pleasant topics, narrowly avoiding our impending divorce every time the conversation veered toward it. When we had finished eating, I helped Ben clear the dishes.
“I might have to go somewhere tomorrow,” I informed him as I rinsed sauce from our bowls. “Out of town.”
“Oh. For a photography job?”
“Not quite.” At this point, I wasn’t sure how much to tell Ben about the Abram Mansion, but it was getting to be too complicated not to tell him. “I’m trying to track someone down who might know more about the house.”
“A friend of your grandfather’s?” Ben asked. “That’s pretty big. Are you sure you want to go alone? I can come with you.”
“I’m not sure if they were friends,” I said. “They might not know each other at all. This guy—Charles Rainer—knew Penelope.”
“Penelope?”
“Penelope Abram,” I replied. “You know, the wife of the mansion’s last owner?”
“Oh, sure. Penelope.” He spooned the leftover pasta into a plastic container. “I don’t need to be worried about you, do I?”
“Why would you be?”
He set the pasta in the fridge before turning to examine me. “Between Della and Sammy, I’m starting to believe that this house does have an effect on some people. Just wondering if you’re starting to feel those effects too.”
“No. Are you?”
Ben shrugged. “I don’t think so. This place seems normal to me. Big and creepy, sure, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Good.” I finished loading the dishwasher, wiped my hands, and kissed Ben on the cheek. “Let’s keep it that way. In two and a half months, we can move out anyway.”
“Counting down the days.”
That night, as Ben’s snores floated across the hallway and into my room, I sat by the window and let the moonlight from the courtyard wash over me. With my computer perched on my lap and the photo of Penelope’s letter beside me, I searched the Internet for Charles Rainer. It was tedious work. Though I had Rainer’s address, I quickly determined it was no longer current. It did, however, tell me a few things about Penelope and Charles’s relationship. He once used to live in the next town over from Falconwood, far enough to avoid controversy but close enough to attend the events held at the Abram Mansion, which explained how he met Penelope. In the letters, they spoke of a hiking trail near Charles’s house. If I had to guess, their interest in hiking was a cover for what they were actually doing together. All Penelope had to do was tell Percy she was visiting her friend to traverse the wilderness together, and if she was talented enough to deceive him, Percy wouldn’t have found out about the affair for years.
There were things that didn’t add up. I had questions for days and no one to answer them. For hours, I scoured the web for Charles Rainer. There were so many men with the name that I had to fish out extra details: where they lived, what age they were, and whether or not they had ever resided at the address I had on record. Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, I found a golden nugget of information in an article about a new art exhibit that was installed in the Garden of Marble two years ago. The statue—a naked woman who sat with her back to the viewer that I remember shielding Sammy’s eyes from—had been commissioned by one Charles Rainer of Hartford, Connecticut. It was too much of a coincidence not to be the same guy. I tried a new search, this time including Rainer’s name, his location, and the title of the statue. I clicked on the first link that popped up—Rainer’s profile on LinkedIn. He was a retired art dealer, and from the information on his profile, he still lived in Hartford. Getting his exact address wasn’t too hard. All I had to do was sign up for a free trial for a “people-finding” website, type in Rainer’s name and city, and press enter. Right away, his records popped up, including his current address. I typed it into my phone and checked my watch. Hartford was less than an hour away. If I left now, I’d show up at Rainer’s house before dawn. Something told me that if I did that, Rainer wouldn’t even consider answering my questions.
“You can come closer,” I whispered, closing my eyes.
The chill and strange displacement of air that happened when Alyssa was nearby neared the window. Then it climbed into bed with me. I felt a tiny hand rest against my arm. To my surprise, it was warm. I kept my eyes closed, just in case Alyssa had taken her scarf off again.
“I won’t be home tomorrow,” I told her. “I’m going to look for Charles Rainer. I promise I’ll be back though. Is that okay?”
The tiny hand squeezed my arm. I felt Alyssa turn over and bury her cold nose into my back. Gently, I tried to place my hand over hers, but there was nothing to touch except for my own skin.
After a few hours of restless sleep, I hugged Ben goodbye and started my drive to Hartford. It was a Saturday, so I didn’t have to worry about being back in time to pick Sammy up from school. That in itself was a relief. After Sammy’s near kidnapping yesterday, Theo needed some well-earned alone time with her son. After getting a coffee to go from the Black Cat, Theo rang my phone.
“You’re leaving town?” she asked when I told her I was on my way to Hartford. “Why? When will you be back?”
“Later this afternoon,” I replied. The quasi-lie I’d given Ben yesterday was the perfect cover to tell everyone else too. “I’m trying to find out more about my grandfather—why he would have left the Abram Mansion to us.”
“Or why he ended up with the mansion in his care in the first place?”
“Exactly.” That was another question that kept bothering me more and more often. My grandfather—Andrew Anderson—had to have known something about all of this before he died. After all, he somehow inherited the mansion from Percy Abram. Were the two of them acquainted? “Maybe this contact can help me shed some light on the situation.”
“Why the sudden interest?” Theo asked. “I thought you were planning on selling the mansion right after the six-month mark.”
The Haunting of Abram Mansion Page 26