The Haunting of Abram Mansion

by Alexandria Clarke

  Della slammed her empty water glass against the table top. “I can’t speak for Penelope, but she’s never trusted anyone who has set foot in the mansion since her death. She won’t ask you for help.”

  “She doesn’t hate Sammy,” I said. “She saved him.”

  “Because Sammy is Alyssa’s friend,” Della said, “and Penelope refused to see another child die in that house. What did Charles tell you about the Abrams?”

  “He confirmed a hunch of mine,” I answered. “He thinks Percy killed Penelope and Alyssa. Is that true?”

  Della suddenly became infatuated with her veggie omelet again, shoving away huge bites so her mouth was too full to talk.

  “Why won’t anyone tell me anything?” I hissed across the table. “I’m tired of having to piece everything together by myself when it seems like everyone else already has the information. I found out the truth, so now it’s your turn to hold up your end of the bargain. What are you going to do to help Alyssa and Penelope pass over?”

  “Pass over?”

  “Do I look like a freaking ghost whisperer to you?”

  Due to her frantic feasting, Della ran out of omelet to distract herself with. She patted her lips with a paper napkin. “What you need is the item of information that Penelope specifically asked me to keep from you. She doesn’t trust you with it, but I do. I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to go to the police.”

  “Things would be so much easier if people didn’t say that,” I muttered.

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I promise.”

  Della beckoned me toward her, and I got out of my seat to lean across the table. She cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered, “Percy Abram is still alive. He faked his own death. That’s why Penelope and Alyssa can’t move on. He goes free for his crimes against them.”

  I lowered myself into the booth. “That can’t be.”

  “Oh? And why not?”

  “He wrote a suicide note,” I reminded her. “He jumped from a cliff edge. The Falconwood police found his body in the river by the house.”

  “Not so,” Della countered. “Yes, Percy left a suicide note and staged his death. Penelope thinks he actually climbed up that mountain and left his gear there to lead the police astray, but they never located his body, Peyton. Percy Abram is alive.”

  “Say I believe you,” I said. “Say the information we have is actually true. What are we supposed to do about it?”

  “We have to locate Percy Abram,” Della answered, as if it was the most simple thing in the world.

  I stirred my cold coffee with a straw. “Della, he’s gone. Disappeared. That guy was rich enough to buy himself a new identity. How do you figure we’re going to find him?”

  “That’s where you come in,” she replied. “Your grandfather, Andrew Anderson. How much do you know about him?”

  “Barely anything at all,” I said. “We didn’t speak to him. He left my grandmother for a job here in Falconwood and never came back, so he was basically shunned from the family. I never met him.”

  “He was also Percy Abram’s best friend,” Della said.

  I stretched my legs underneath the booth. I’d been sitting here for far too long. “Charles Rainer mentioned something to that effect. Makes sense. Apparently, my grandfather wasn’t much of a stand-up guy either.”

  “His personality matters not,” Della said. “The information he might have on Percy does.”

  “One small problem with that,” I said. “My grandfather is dead. That’s why I ended up in this mess to begin with, remember?”

  Della stacked her plates and put them on the edge of the table for a busser to collect. “I never said we needed him alive. All we need is what he knew about Percy.”

  “Andrew Anderson was a hermit,” I said. “He disappeared and never spoke to us again.”

  “Sounds like it was the other way around,” Della pointed out. “You just said that your family shunned him. Maybe there was a misunderstanding.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “Your grandfather may be the key to this investigation,” she interrupted. “All I’m asking you to do is look into his last-known whereabouts. Whether you knew him or not, the two of you are connected by blood. You inherited his property. That means you probably have legal access to his information. Use it.” She stood up, tossing her crumpled napkin onto the stack of plates. “I’m ready to put the Abram Mansion to rest if you are, Peyton. All you have to do is step up.”

  Outside Sammy’s elementary school, I enjoyed the crisp spring weather. As the end of April neared, the snow—which had been dumping buckets since we arrived here in January—was finally dying off. There were still traces of it around. Big mounds of it were piled on the sides of the road, but the warmth in the air was finally taking a stand. I turned my face into the cool breeze and let it cool the heat on the back of my neck. I was trying not to think of anything at all, a sort of mindful meditation exercise that wasn’t going as well as I planned.

  Della’s sudden turnaround was nothing short of suspicious. In a few days, she had gone from crazy, stumbling, and unkempt to fully healthy and determined. I wondered if Della was always bouncing back and forth between her two states of mind and this was just the first time I’d witnessed it. My new quest—tracking down my grandfather’s last whereabouts—wasn’t something I wanted to think about, but I knew where I had to start: with my mother. We didn’t have any other family. My grandmother—Andrew’s wife—has already passed away when I was younger. I wasn’t sure how much help my mother was going to be anyway; she was a functioning alcoholic who lived off of disability, and the only time she ever talked about my grandfather was when she wanted to hurl insults at his memory.

  It seemed impossible that my family was connected to the mystery of the Abram Mansion. If everything had panned out in a less graphic way, I might have even known Penelope and Alyssa personally. After all, Alyssa’s father and my grandfather were apparently close buddies. It was weird to think that if we’d all lived in the same area, Alyssa might have been my babysitter or older friend as we grew up. Now, she was trapped in the same five-year-old body for all of eternity unless I dug up whatever information was left about my weird, dead grandfather.

  I was lost in thought until the school bell rang and momentarily freed me from the confines of my old mind. I knew better than to expect Sammy to come out to the front courtyard with the first rush of kids. He almost always stayed behind in his last class. He usually blamed it on having to finish up an art project, but I guessed that the true reason he stayed behind was to avoid the bullies outside. More than once, Sammy’s potential tardiness had turned into a “boy who cried wolf” scenario, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Once the pickup loop cleared out, I spotted Sammy as he stuck his head out from a classroom door, peeked in either direction, and—sensing freedom—made a run for the parking lot. He ran straight into my arms and pressed his cold nose into my neck when I picked him up.

  “Everything okay, buddy?” I asked, patting his messy hair. “How was school?”

  He sniffled in my ear. “Everyone’s saying mean things about Mama.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “That she took me out of school because she’s crazy.”

  I helped him into his booster seat and did up his belt buckle. “Sammy, we’ve been over this before. The kids at your school are mean. Don’t listen to them. All that matters is you know the truth. Also, ice cream matters. What do you say?”

  He perked up and wiped his eyes. “Mint chocolate chip?”

  “Whatever flavor you want.” I finished strapping him in and climbed into the driver’s side. When I checked on Sammy in the rearview mirror, he grinned back at me. “We haven’t talked about what happened at the mansion that night.”

  He pulled two dinosaur figurines from his backpack and made them fight each other. “Yeah, I know. But Mama’s always around.”

  “And you don’t want to scar
e her.”

  “Nope,” he said. “I want to be brave.”

  “You’re the bravest,” I assured him. “Sammy, did you know that Alyssa’s mom was also in the mansion?”

  His dinosaurs went still. “Will you be mad if I say yes?”

  “No, I won’t be mad, but I would like to know why you didn’t tell me.”

  He pursed his lips and wiggled them back and forth like a rabbit sniffing out its next carrot. “She scares me. She was the one who always chased me away from the mansion when I tried visiting Alyssa.”

  “She also saved your life,” I reminded him.

  “I know,” Sammy said. “That’s when I realized she’s scared, too.”

  “What is she scared of?”

  He tapped the noses of the dinosaurs together, like they were kissing. “She’s afraid they’re going to be stuck there forever.”

  My heart clenched. That was the thing about ghosts. Sometimes, you forgot that they used to be actual people. “Sammy, I’m going to do my best to make sure Penelope and Alyssa get to leave the Abram Mansion.”

  “I know you are.”

  At a red light, I twisted around in my seat to look at him. “Listen, your mom might take you to a doctor to talk about all the stuff that’s happened so far. If she does, it’s probably best not to mention Alyssa or her mom. The doctor—”

  “Won’t believe me,” Sammy finished. “It’s okay. No one ever does.”

  23

  That night, the first real rainstorm of the season hit Falconwood. It pounded against the windows and flooded the garden in the courtyard of the mansion and made a mess of the trees and plants outside. When Ben and I woke up the next morning, it was to a muddy front yard that had captured the wheels of our car with determination so fierce that we needed several scrap pieces of wood to bolster the car high enough to free it. After we were through, we were covered head to toe in mud. It was all over the plaster cast that covered Ben’s arm from hand to shoulder.

  “Oh man,” I said, wiping fruitlessly at the mud that had saturated the plaster. “We’re never going to get this clean.”

  “It’s okay.” Ben pushed the slick hood of his raincoat away from his face for the tenth time. I remembered telling him that coat was too big for him when he bought it, but he insisted on going a size up. He finally gave up and pushed the hood off entirely, and I watched as the rain loosened his golden brown curls. “I’m getting it off today anyway.”

  “You are?” I asked. I hadn’t heard the news yet, but me and Ben had been spending a lot of time apart lately. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He attempted to clap some of the mud off his hands, but only succeeded in rubbing it further into his skin. “I forgot, I guess. Besides, you’ve been busy with Sammy and Theo. I’ve had my job with Basil. We both had a lot on our minds.”

  “Well, what did the doctor say?” I asked. “Did you go for a checkup?”

  “A couple weeks ago.” Ben gestured me up the steps to the porch so we wouldn’t keep standing in the mud and rain. “Once it comes off, I’ll be doing a lot of physical therapy to get my grip strength and mobility back. Would you be able to help me with that stuff?”

  “Of course.”

  “Great,” he said, taking a seat on the swinging bench beneath the porch overhang to assess the situation of his drenched, muddy boots. “I’ll need some motivation, and I know you’re the best person—” Ben’s phone buzzed, and he pulled it out of a dry pocket on the inside of his raincoat. “It’s Basil. Hello?”

  Though he wasn’t on speakerphone, I could still hear Basil’s aggravated tone babbling across the front porch. Ben held the phone away from his ear with a grimace.

  “Basil, hold on,” he said. “Slow down. What happened?” As Ben got up and paced back and forth on the porch, Basil yelled some more. Ben ran his fingers through his hair—something he did when he was stressed—spreading mud through his curls like crusty gel. “Okay, don’t worry. I’m on my way. We’ll figure something out. No! Don’t do anything until I get there. I need to see how much damage has been done.”

  “What happened?” I asked when Ben hung up.

  He stepped back into his drenched boots with a long sigh. “Basil says the storm flooded his entire garden and the greenhouse.”

  “Oh, no. That’s terrible. Della’s probably upset about losing her herbs.”

  “Della’s upset? I’m upset!” He kicked a rock off the porch. “We’ve been studying that greenhouse for the past two months, Peyton. It’s the basis of our entire book. If it’s ruined, there’s nowhere for us to go with the material.”

  The reason for Ben’s anger sank in. Basil was our only source of income at the moment. If Ben was no longer able to write Basil’s book for him, then we were back to square one for the second time since we moved into the Abram Mansion.

  I grabbed Ben’s arm before he could step off the porch and into the rain again. He looked startled when I pulled him for a hug, then he relaxed into my grip. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I told him. “We’ll figure it out.”

  He lightly kissed the top of my head. “Thanks for your support. I’ll keep you posted on the damage. Don’t get into too much trouble today.”

  “Me? Never.”

  With Ben gone, I spent the rest of the cold, dreary morning in the huge clawed bathtub in the first-floor bathroom. Of all the rooms we’d had remodeled, this bathroom was one of my favorites. When you shut the door, it felt as though you were underground in the catacombs of some historic castle. If I sang, my voice echoed off the tiled walls and came back to me in a chorus, as if there were ten more of me in the room. I stripped off my muddy clothes, filled the tub with hot water, and tossed in a bath bomb that Della had made herself. As it fizzed and dissolved, the calming scent of fresh lavender filled the air. I climbed in, hissing as the hot water came in contact with my cold skin, then settled my head against a pillow made out of a towel. Slowly, I drifted off.

  Someone knocked on the bathroom door, jerking me out of my meditative sleep. My arms flew up to grip the side of the tub, sending a tidal wave of foamy water across the floor. The bath bomb had long since fizzled away and my fingers were wrinkled and pruny. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been lying in the water. My heart pounded as I watched a shadow walk past the closed door of the bathroom.

  “Ben?” I called, my voice shaking. “Is that you?”

  Ben did not answer, and I didn’t expect him to. I knew whoever was out there wasn’t Ben, and though I liked to think I’d fostered a relatively positive relationship with the dead people who lived in Abram Mansion, it was times like these that made me question that fact. The shadow paused outside the door. My skin grew goosebumps as the handle began to turn itself.

  “Alyssa?” I whispered.

  Abruptly, the handle clicked back into its original place. I jumped as a folded piece of paper slid under the crack in the door and settled right out of my reach. The shadow lingered in the hallway, as if waiting for me to pick up the paper, but my fingers seemed affixed to the sides of the tub. Paralyzed with fear, I couldn’t move or even feel my body until the shadow made its way down the hallway, its footsteps fading with it.

  When I felt the nerves in my fingertips again, I slowly stood up. Lukewarm water cascaded off my body as I gingerly stepped out of the tub, dried my hands on the nearest towel, and stooped to pick up the folded piece of paper. With shaking hands, I opened it up.

  Check the Yellow Pages.

  The handwriting was scribbled and hasty, not how I expected Penelope Abram’s handwriting to look. From her expensive education and even more expensive taste in husbands, I thought Penelope would have learned calligraphy early on in her girlhood. Nevertheless, here was this note with a cramped, cryptic message that made no sense at all. What could I possibly find in the Yellow Pages?

  I wrapped my robe around myself, stepped into my slippers, and stood by the door to listen. The hallway was silent, so I cautiously made my way out of the steamy bat
hroom and down to the kitchen, where my laptop rested on the table. I boiled water, added one of Della’s homemade tea mixes to it to steep, then sat down with the curious note and my computer.

  Phone books were such an outdated concept that it took me a minute to figure out how the information was organized online. Though Falconwood was such a tiny place, there were a surprising amount of businesses listed. I scrolled through them from A to Z over and over until my eyes felt like they were going to fall out of my head, but I couldn’t find anything about Percy Abrams or his business.

  A thump echoed overhead, like someone stomping their foot on the floor above. The noise felt like a shock to my brain, and that’s when it hit me. I didn’t need to be looking at the phone book for today’s businesses. I needed a phone book from forty years ago, when Percy Abram was a huge part of the Falconwood business world. But how to find one? If there was one around the mansion, I needed help to get to it.

  I made another cup of tea and set it at the place across from mine. As I added a ton of honey to it, I whispered, “Alyssa? This one’s for you. I need some help, if you don’t mind.”

  Nothing happened for a minute or so. Then I felt a cold spot behind me. I didn’t turn around, instead letting Alyssa come into the kitchen on her own. A lump rose in my throat as the ghostly little girl toddled over to the table, climbed into the chair, and leaned her face over the cup of tea to inhale the soothing aromas. Her pink scarf dipped low—if it were made of real cloth, it would have dipped into her tea—and I caught a glimpse of the gashed skin below it. I averted my eyes. I did not want to think about how Alyssa died.

  “I’m looking for a phone book,” I told her. “It’s for adults. It’s a big, thick book like this” —I held my hands about four inches apart to indicate the width— “and the pages feel kinda funny, like you can tear them really easily. Did your mom or dad ever keep something like that?”