Midnight in Christmas River

by Meg Muldoon

  I glanced at the clock on the far wall, doing some quick math in my head.

  “In that case, I might be able to make that noon instead of 12:30,” I said.

  His answer to that came in the form of a smoldering kiss that knocked me all the way back to Labor Day.

  Then, without another word, Daniel Brightman walked out the back door of the pie shop, down the steps, and away toward Main Street.

  I smiled, basking in the glow of that kiss.

  Trying not to think any more about Ashcroft Black or that scream.

  Chapter 15

  A week later, I found myself standing outside the Juniper Hollow Cabin again, gazing up at its wrap-around porch on a windy, overcast day.

  Even though I now knew the stories about the cabin had been fictionalized, there was still an air of spookiness about the place. Things like that from childhood were tough to shake off, I reasoned. And I supposed that even if they turned the place into an amusement park full of happy people, I’d still mistrust something about it.

  I drew in a big breath. Then I grabbed the container of homemade butternut squash bacon soup from off the passenger’s seat and shut the car door behind me. I made my way along the driveway and up the front steps to the door where I knocked tentatively a couple of times.

  Maybe I had no real reason to be back here. But when Daniel told me earlier that Ashcroft had been released from the hospital, I immediately started making up a batch of soup to bring him.

  I felt the need to check on him — maybe for his own good as much as for mine.

  I hadn’t been sleeping well lately. I’d been having nightmares, waking in a full-on panic several times since the writer’s workshop.

  I couldn’t get the haunted look in Ashcroft’s eyes out of my head.

  Or that scream.

  But there was more to my restless nights than just that.

  Earlier that week, Tiana had told me she finished Ashcroft’s latest book, The Lady in the Glass. And though maybe I shouldn’t have, I asked her for a synopsis.

  It had only gone to feed my nightmares.

  Apparently, while the main character Sheriff Lane Graves solved the mystery of who murdered Lorna Larimer, her spirit still wasn’t appeased. She’d wanted more than for the Sheriff to solve the mystery of her demise and arrest the man responsible — she’d wanted an eye-for-an-eye kind of justice. She’d wanted the Sheriff to kill her murderer.

  The Sheriff had a moral code, though, and wouldn’t do it. At the end of the book, Lorna was still haunting the lake where she had died, appearing to innocent fishermen and vacationers before causing terrible accidents to befall them.

  I shook off a shiver as I stood there on the cabin’s porch, thinking about it all. I was about to knock on the imposing door a second time when it suddenly squeaked open.

  I had to force down a gasp at the sight of him standing there.

  Ashcroft’s face was as pale as freshly fallen snow and there was a kind of unkempt wildness to his dark hair and beard. The skin around his eyes was a sickly pink color. He wore a long flannel robe and sweats and stood in his bare feet. His left hand gripped the silver cane, and he breathed deeply — obviously winded.

  I wasn’t sure how I was expecting someone just released from the hospital to look, but his unhealthy appearance still caught me off-guard.

  “Mr. Black, I, uh, I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  He said nothing in response. He stepped forward, craning his neck, his eyes scanning the woods behind me.

  I glanced back, following his gaze.

  There was nothing but pines.

  I cleared my throat.

  “I, uh, I wanted to drop this off,” I said, lifting up the container of soup. “I heard you just got home and—”

  “Please come inside, Ms. Peters,” he said suddenly.

  He made a sweeping motion with his hand, directing me into the foyer of the cabin.

  There was something in his eyes as he did.

  The stone wall had crumbled, and what remained was only panic.

  Wild, blind panic.

  Maybe Daniel was right.

  Maybe he was suffering from some sort of mental health issue.

  “Quickly, please,” he said, the terror now in his voice, too. “I’ll explain it all. But you must come inside now. You simply must.”

  Maybe I should have just left the soup and driven back to town.

  The man was clearly unwell.

  But in the end, I did as he asked, stepping inside the Juniper Hollow Cabin to hear his story.

  Chapter 16

  “Are you all by yourself here?” I asked, glancing around the messy living room.

  Ashcroft added a small log to the fireplace and took a seat in one of the birch-white wing-backed chairs nearby. I watched his movements as he did, and though his face belonged to someone no older than 40, the way he carried his body was more akin to an elderly person. Not even Warren moved like that, and he was pushing 90.

  Ashcroft Black was an unwell man, indeed.

  “Yes, I’m alone. My wife and I aren’t exactly on good terms these days as I’m sure you overheard the other evening.”

  I took a seat in a chair on the opposite side of the fireplace.

  I didn’t know the full extent of their marital problems. But it seemed a rather cold thing to not be there for your spouse after they’d just been released from the hospital.

  “Well, what about your publisher? Don. Why isn’t he here?”

  A sour smile crossed Ashcroft’s lips.

  “He put on a good show that night, didn’t he?”

  I pulled at my forest green flannel scarf and set it down on my lap.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All that talk about my success and how much he respects me and my work… It’s all smoke and mirrors. The real truth is Don doesn’t give a rat’s a—”

  He stopped talking, gazing at me and backtracking.

  “What I mean is Don Wharton doesn’t care about me. His only concern now and forever more will be his cut of my talent. And as soon as book sales start to dip, the praise stops and the bullying begins. Which I’m not too modest to say has already started, considering my latest release hasn’t done nearly as well on the charts as the previous one.”

  Ashcroft shook his head, turning his attention toward the small fire.

  “I think of those young writers who were here for the workshop, and sometimes I think the best advice I could give them would be stop. Cut your losses now and don’t go any further in this industry. Whether you never make it or you make the bestseller lists with your debut, it doesn’t matter — the path is ugly. There’s only heartache and jealousy and vampires looking to suck you dry in this profession.”

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

  It was interesting the way things looked from the outside versus the way they really were. It made me think about Mary Lou Anderson — the writer I’d spoken to at the workshop. There she’d been, dreaming of one day being as successful as Ashcroft Black. Thinking that if she could only get to his level, life would be cake and roses.

  But obviously, that wasn’t how Ashcroft felt about his life, despite all of his accolades.

  “How are you feeling?” I finally asked when he said nothing more on the subject.

  “A little shaky, but I’ve been like this before. I was diagnosed with this heart condition in my teens. It’s probably why I became a writer in the first place. I would have wanted to play baseball professionally if I could have. Alas...”

  He kept his gaze on the fire and gripped the handle of his cane.

  “Nobody outside of my immediate circle knows that I suffer from this condition. I haven’t had an incident like this for quite some time,” he said. “However, I fear that this isn’t the end of it.”

  He met my eyes suddenly.

  “I’m afraid there’s going to be another episode very soon, Ms. Peters. And I don’t know if I will survive that one.”

 
; The wild panic returned to his steel grays.

  “What makes you say that?”

  He took in a deep breath.

  “Because, my dear — I am being haunted.”

  His voice had taken on such an odd tone that at first, I thought he was joking.

  But he didn’t say anything more for a long moment, and the seriousness in his expression made it very clear that this was no laughing matter.

  “Haunted?” I finally said in a low voice.

  He nodded.

  The flames of the fire flickered in his eyes.

  “By Lorna.”

  I felt my mouth go dry.

  “Lor…?”

  The name turned to ash in my mouth.

  “Yes, Ms. Peters,” he said. “Lorna Larimer. The evil spirit from my latest novel.”

  Chapter 17

  “Well, that’s all nuttier than a slice of pecan pie with hazelnut toffee and pistachio ice cream on the side.”

  “I won’t argue with you there, old man. But Ashcroft insists that Lorna Larimer’s ghost is haunting him.”

  My grandfather shook his head, then climbed the ladder that overlooked the large copper brew kettle. When he got to the top, I heaved the large burlap sack of fragrant Cascadia hops up to him. He grabbed it from me and then slowly added the hops to the kettle, stirring the bubbling liquid with a massive wooden paddle before climbing back down the ladder.

  Warren might have been pushing 90, but when he was in the Geronimo Brewing Co. brewhouse, in his domain, anybody might have mistaken him for a 30-year-old.

  He dusted his hands free of hops residue and then rubbed his chin.

  “I’ve heard a lot of things in my time. But a horror author being haunted by his own characters? Poor fella must be a few drumsticks short of a picnic.”

  I had trouble not cracking a smile at my grandfather’s colorful self-expression.

  “Maybe so. Ashcroft says he’s seen her three separate times. Once just after his book reading at the bookstore. Once in the woods behind my pie shop. And the night he had his heart incident, he saw her just beyond the driveway in the woods.”

  Warren scratched his head, then grabbed the paper cup of hazelnut coffee I’d brought him from a nearby work table.

  “So he’s saying these, uh, these hallucinations only just started when he moved into the Juniper Hollow Cabin?” Warren asked.

  I nodded.

  Ashcroft had told me that before he took up residence here in Christmas River, he’d had no run-ins with spirits of any kind. He said he didn’t even believe in their existence, despite what he wrote in his books. He’d also told me that he wasn’t on any drugs other than his prescribed heart medication. And seeing ghosts was most definitely not listed in the side effects for that medication.

  “Hmm,” Warren muttered.

  “But Daniel said all those stories kids used to tell about the cabin were false,” I continued. “The only person who ever died there was an elderly man of a stroke. There was never any murder.”

  Warren took off his apron, hanging it on a hook on the far wall. Then he motioned for me to follow him out of the chilly brewhouse and into the pub. I did, and a moment later, I was sitting on a burnished leather stool at the pine bar. Warren went around the back side of the wooden slab, grabbed a fresh pint glass, and filled it from the draft station.

  A moment later, he slid the glass of beer across the bar toward me.

  “Say… it’s only two o’clock, old man,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he retorted. “Perfect hour for a pint of pumpkin ale, don’t you think?”

  I tilted my head and then smiled after a long moment, finally taking the beer.

  I supposed that I had nowhere I needed to go until much later in the evening. And anyway, it would be rude of me to turn away such a perfectly poured pint of beer.

  I took a sip, and the very essence of fall danced on my taste buds. Fresh hops and roasted malt and spices intertwined together in a delightful moment of autumnal bliss.

  My grandfather was a true artist.

  “Daniel’s right about nothing sinister ever happening at the hunting cabin,” Warren said, smiling a little as he watched me take such delight in drinking his beer.

  He gazed out the window that faced Main Street.

  “But then, those kids weren’t completely wrong about that place being haunted, either.”

  I set the pint glass down on the bar top.

  “What do you mean?” I said in a breathy voice.

  Warren tilted his head up to the ceiling, as if pulling old memories down from the beams.

  “Well, before they built the cabin, there was another structure on the property. An old shack. Back in the fifties, this shack belonged to a man who went by the name of Ted Gallagher. Ted was the town recluse. He came to Christmas River during dust bowl times. Sorta just blew in with the wind and never left.”

  Warren paused, seemingly deep in thought.

  “Yep. I remember Ted. Not a friendly fella. Only came into town for supplies once in a blue moon. Mostly kept to himself. None of us gave too much thought to the man. But then one day, in 1956 I think it was, a cop came to town asking questions about him. Turned out that Ted was suspected in the death of his wife — Ruth Gallagher — in whatever little town he’d come from twenty years earlier. They’d finally tracked him down. But when the cop drove out to Ted’s cabin, he found a startling sight.”

  Warren paused again, letting a long silence drag out.

  “What’d he find?” I said, unable to take the suspense any longer.

  “There’d been a fire during the night, and Ted’s small house had burned clear down to the ground. They found Ted inside. He was still in bed, like he might have just fallen asleep. But there was something else strange in the ashes — the only thing that survived the fire.”

  I gripped my beer, feeling a chill work its way down my spine — a sensation I’d been getting all too familiar with lately.

  Warren leaned across the bar and lowered his voice.

  “They found a woman’s scarf. Navy blue silk with golden threads running through it. A highly unique scarf. And the thing was, you know that cop that came looking for Ted? Turned out he was the dead wife’s brother. And you know what else? This cop swore that that scarf — the one that had miraculously survived the fire — had been the exact same one that Ted’s murdered wife had been buried with twenty years earlier.”

  I gazed at Warren, my jaw practically on the pine table top.

  “No,” I whispered.

  But Warren just nodded.

  “True story, Cinny Bee. That one’s too scary for even the kids around here to tell.”

  Maybe Ashcroft had been confused. Maybe it wasn’t really the spirit of Lorna Larimer he was seeing.

  Maybe it was the spirit of this dead woman — Ruth Gallagher. Maybe she was still haunting the grounds where she killed her husband.

  It took everything I had not to start shivering like a newborn rabbit.

  It was an even worse story than the rumors about the not-so-accidental hunting accident, proving that fact was by far crazier and scarier than fiction—

  All of a sudden, Warren started wheezing like he’d just inhaled an ashtray.

  He leaned against the counter, crow’s feet tugging at his eyes, his whole body convulsing.

  At first, I was horrified that he was having some sort of seizure.

  But then, I realized that it wasn’t any kind of emergency — unless a person could die from tugging somebody’s leg too hard.

  I felt my cheeks flush.

  I reached across the bar, lightly pushing his shoulder.

  “Old man!” I said. “How could you?”

  That only seemed to make him laugh even more.

  All I could do was sit there and watch him wheeze, feeling the color in my cheeks turn to a shade of beet salad.

  “Casper in Coos Bay, I’m sorry Cinny Bee,” he eventually squeaked out as a tear trickled down his che
ek. “I just didn’t think you’d ever be so gullible. I thought you’d call me out the moment I brought up the scarf.”

  At that, I swear I could feel steam coming out of my ears.

  I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Ah, don’t be angry. I was only having a little fun.”

  “Fun?” I said, snapping my head back. “You think it’s fun to scare the daylights out of your only granddaughter like that?”

  He stared busting up again, and it was all I could do to shake my head.

  “Aren’t we all entitled to a little fun around Halloween?” he wheezed.

  “Don’t you dare go and use that old Halloween excuse. You’re not getting out of this so easily, old man.”

  He smiled, the laughter piping down.

  “All right. Maybe I got carried away. My apologies.”

  I crossed my arms tighter against my chest.

  “Anyway, I didn’t make the whole thing up,” he continued. “Some of it was true. The police were after Ted for a hit and run. He’d laid some poor young man up in the hospital after running him over. Ted was also the town drunk, you see. But before the cops could arrest him, Ted fell asleep in the cabin while smoking tobacco and the whole place went up in flames. Ted made it out alive, somehow. Served some time for the hit and run and then died of a heart attack a few years later. So you see, I only embellished the part about his wife and that ghostly scarf for your entertainment, Cinny Bee.”

  I looked at him skeptically.

  “Honest — that’s the whole truth. I’m not pulling your leg anymore.”

  “Well, it’s a heck of a thing to do since I’m going back up there to Juniper Hollow later and spending the night,” I said.

  The old man raised his bushy white eyebrows.

  “Come again?”

  “You heard right. Daniel and I are going to stake it out tonight. Ashcroft asked for our help, and we’re going to help him. He doesn’t know if he’s going crazy or if there really is a ghost, but he asked if Daniel and I could watch the cabin and see if Lorna Larimer appears.”

  “And Daniel’s going along with this tomfoolery?” Warren said.