Close to Home

by Lisa Jackson

  Guiltily, Sarah wondered if she’d unwittingly engendered both. She certainly hadn’t been particularly kind about her mother, and she too had thought she’d seen an unhappy spirit in this very house. Had she unwittingly said as much to Gracie and exacerbated her younger daughter’s fears? Whereas Jade had always been independent and outspoken to a fault, Gracie had been more introverted and experienced difficulty making friends. Sarah crossed her fingers that this move would be a positive change for not only herself but her girls as well.

  At the landing she paused. She’d been through all the rooms on this floor and had decided that, once again, the bathroom would have to be taken down to the studs; the master bedroom needed total refurbishing too. The entire house could use new wiring and plumbing, insulation and an overhaul of the heating system.

  It would cost a fortune.

  “But it’ll be so worth it,” she reminded herself as she passed the room where her sister had lived. Her footsteps slowed a bit. “Later,” she told herself when she had more time. Right now she had to face her own damned demons, so she made her way to the door at the end of the hallway that led to the narrow passage upward into the attic and beyond.

  As she stepped through it, anxiety elevated her pulse. Since childhood she’d avoided these stairs, refused to step foot into the attic, but she could do so no longer.

  Get a hold of yourself, There is nothing evil in the attic, Nothing,

  She flipped on the light switch at the base of the stairs. It clicked loudly, but that was it. The steps and gaping area above remained dark. “Of course,” she muttered and clicked on the flashlight of her cell phone to illuminate the stairs. Feeling her neck muscles tighten, she forced herself to climb the steep flight and ignored the beating of her heart and the fear that slid through her veins.

  The temperature dropped as she stepped into the attic, where gaps in the shingles caused the wind to whistle and wail and allowed rain to slip inside.

  She remembered being up on the widow’s walk that night she’d gone to the attic. Frigid rain pelted from an obsidian sky. Her nightgown was soaked, her skin was wet, and a bitter wind cut through her as she shivered. But it was more than winter weather that caused the icy fear in the pit of her stomach. There was something malevolent out there, horrifying enough to make her mind block the memories.

  But sometimes bits came through.

  She knew that Roger had been here with her.

  Or was that later? Had she been delusional, as Arlene had repeatedly told her?

  But even now she thought she could recall the calluses on her half brother’s hands, fingers that were work-roughened as they closed over her arms. He’d been in his late teens, then, nearly a man, and he’d whispered into her ear. “Everything will be all right.” But it had been a lie.

  Remembering his hot breath against the shell of her ear, she shuddered. Fear pulsed in her brain. She needed to remember, yet that same mind-numbing dread kept the memory at bay, or so the psychologist she’d seen years before had explained. “It’s your subconscious, Sarah, your brain’s way of keeping you safe,” Dr. Melbourne had said in her soft, dulcet tones. “It’s protecting you.”

  “But I need to know!” she’d insisted as she’d sat on a corner of the couch in Melbourne’s office, two rooms in an old house made to look homey, as if in hopes of giving her patients the illusion of a safe haven. Subtle lighting, comfortable furniture, even a hand-knit afghan and a quietly ticking clock, created a feeling of home and hearth. Still she hadn’t felt safe and had clenched her fists as she’d tried hard not to hyperventilate. “I have to know what happened to me before I get married.” She was desperate not to take her fears into her marriage to Noel McAdams.

  “The block will erode. When you’re ready. Trust me,” Dr. Melbourne had said.

  “But I need it gone now,” Sarah had insisted.

  The doctor had been unable to offer any further assurances, however, so she’d entered into her marriage with Noel, still unclear what her brain was trying to save her from. Since then she’d decided Dr. Melbourne’s theory was just so much bullshit . . . until recently, when she’d decided to return to this old house, and a few tiny bits of recollection had begun to break through.

  Now she wondered if she were ready for the truth. “Better than not knowing.” Or was she kidding herself? Steadying herself at the top of the staircase, she fought the urge to run back down, to close her mind to that dark night.

  Why had she been up here? What had she been doing with Roger?

  Murky images slithered through her mind, like picture frames that moved too quickly to catch.

  “Sarah,” Roger had whispered, his voice tight, “don’t be frightened . . .”

  But she had been. Not just scared, but virtually paralyzed with fear. He’d been too close. She’d smelled him, the sweat, the maleness of him underlain with a hint of alcohol. He’d held her near, and his beard had scraped her cheek as his hand found their way under her legs to carry her . . .

  Dear Mother Mary . . .

  Now, she tried to grab hold of something, anything that would help her remember, but the images that had been blooming quickly withered into the void once more.

  “Son of a bitch,” she whispered. She couldn’t let this cripple her. With an effort, she pulled herself together and tamped down the feeling that something evil had happened on the roof that night.

  “Come on, Sarah. Get over it,” she said and shined her phone’s tiny beam over decades worth of junk stored under the eaves, where she suspected bats roosted and who knew what else called home. This dark area with its peaked, dripping ceilings, rough rafters, and dusty floors was a perfect hiding spot for all kinds of rodents.

  Her skin crawled a little, but she kept on, fanning the beam over old trunks, piles of forgotten books, broken furniture, crates, and stains on the floor that indicated where the roof had leaked.

  Picking her way carefully, she made her way to the final stairs and upward, into the cupola. Two of its glass sides were cracked, which was no surprise, but she tried the door and found it swollen shut.

  She almost turned back. The old fears had returned, and the excuse that it was a little nuts going out onto the widow’s walk in the rain and the dark had a lot of appeal.

  But she’d come this far.

  “Just do it,” she told herself, her hands clammy, her nerves stretched tight. She intended to step outside, onto the widow’s walk to stand in the very spot where Angelique Le Duc Stewart had stood nearly a hundred years earlier when, as legend had it, she’d faced her attacker and they’d both fallen to their deaths, their bodies never recovered.

  It was the very same spot where Roger had sworn he’d found her, wandering and delirious in the storm. He’d carried her downstairs to the living room, where her father was seated before the fire. Sarah had been five at the time. A child. She’d vowed she didn’t remember how she’d ended up there, and her father had been kind, holding her close in his big La-Z-Boy while the rapid click of Arlene’s heels on the wooden floor announced her arrival.

  “What were you doing up there?” Arlene had demanded as she’d furiously scooped Sarah away from her father. “You know better!” She’d given Sarah a quick little shake, then, catching herself, yanked her daughter close as she’d started to cry. “You scare me, Sarah Jane,” Arlene had choked out, her voice cracking, her eyes gray. “Don’t you know, you scare me to death!”

  She’d smelled of some kind of perfume tinged with the scent of smoke from a recent cigarette. She’d dropped onto the couch, still clutching Sarah as if she were afraid the girl would disappear. “What were you doing up there?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah answered truthfully.

  Arlene hadn’t believed her, but Sarah had insisted she had no memory of how she’d ended up on the widow’s walk.

  Finally her mother gave up. “Well, thank the good Lord that Roger found you!” Arlene had said into her daughter’s wet curls as Sarah shivered. “I hate to
think what would have happened to you if he hadn’t. Now, come on, let’s get you in a hot bath to warm you up. Then we’ll get you some dry pajamas.”

  Had she seen a ghost that night? It seemed so. Or had it been something more terrifying, something more visceral? The experience had been terrifying, traumatic, and never resolved, so here she was, in the attic years later, feeling those same cryptic emotions claw at her, even though she’d told herself over and over that whatever had happened up here was long buried.

  Arlene, who refused to even consider a resident ghost or anything unexplained, insisted whatever had scared Sarah was all in her mind—the result of a fever or bad over-the-counter drugs coupled with a child’s overactive imagination.

  Until today Sarah had never passed the door to the upper staircase without the skin on the back of her arms breaking out in goose bumps, a visceral warning, while a tenebrous childhood memory shifted in the nether regions of her brain.

  Now, she pressed her forehead to the cool glass of the cupola and closed her eyes for a second, taking in a deep breath.

  Forget it, Let it go, You’re a woman now, A mother, Not a scared little girl,

  With renewed determination, she tried once again to open the door to the roof.

  “Come on, come on,” she said, pushing hard until at last the door burst open and she fell forward, catching herself before she did a face plant on the slick widow’s walk.

  The air outside was heavy and moist, with rain falling and wind rushing through the gorge that surrounded the river far below.

  Using her flashlight, she examined the roof tiles and railing, but it was much too dark to make a valid assessment.

  The roof around the flat widow’s walk was pitched and gabled with steep dormers and chimneys, and the dome of the cupola spiked upward. Venturing to the railing, Sarah stared across a sloped area of the roof to look straight down to the cliff on which the house was mounted. Though it was too dark to see the Columbia River, she heard it roaring as it pursued its swift path westward.

  What had happened to Angelique Le Duc Stewart that night nearly a hundred years earlier? Her body had never been found, nor had anyone seen her husband, Maxim, again. There were rumors of a horrible fight, a story said to have started with Maxim’s daughter, Helen, who had witnessed a horrifying struggle between them on this very roof.

  It had been theorized by the townspeople of Stewart’s Crossing, and confirmed by Maxim’s children, that Angelique and Maxim, locked in a stormy marriage, had clashed in their final battle high on this rooftop, only to fall to their deaths in the icy, furious river.

  Sarah’s skin prickled again at the thought, her blood turning cold. She understood about fury within a relationship, anger and fear and, yes, even violence, with those you most loved, but still she felt a darkness in her soul, and when she looked westward, following the river’s swath through the gorge, her mind’s eye saw Angelique and Maxim, wrestling here—each with a weapon, according to legend—fighting on this slippery rooftop with its short railing.

  According to stories passed on by generations, Maxim had been after her with an axe, had chased Angelique ever upward until she had nowhere to go but over the edge. Had she jumped for her life? Tried to escape? Or been thrown over the railing and fallen to her death?

  She heard a scrape of something—a footstep?—over the howl of the wind and looked back to the open door to the cupola. No way. She was alone up here. No sane person would want to be up here in the storm, though of course she’d climbed those last few steps, hadn’t she?

  Nerves strung tight, she glanced over the nightscape of the roof and, of course, saw no one. No person. No ghost. Nothing.

  Get over yourself, Sheesh! No reason to be jittery,

  Blinking against the rain, she peered over the edge of the railing and squinted, searching for the river she could hear and smell but, in the pitch-black night, could not see.

  She envisioned a beautiful woman tumbling through the darkness, white dress billowing around her, dark hair flying wildly, the roiling water below ready to swallow her—

  Bang!

  The loud sound ricocheted off the roof.

  Sarah jumped.

  Her feet slipped.

  Biting back a scream, she caught herself with one hand on the top rail.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw a flutter of white, that very same billowing white dress!

  The ghost! Again! Just like before . . .

  Pulse pounding in her ears, she turned, half expecting to catch a glimpse of a specter disappearing like smoke into the darkness.

  “Mom?” Gracie’s scared little voice reached her just as she recognized her daughter shivering in the rain—just as she had done thirty years earlier.

  Oh, sweet Jesus, Sarah nearly collapsed, the sense of déjà vu overwhelming.

  “Gracie?” she whispered, having trouble finding her voice. Gracie’s face was ghostly white, her hair in wild, wet ringlets. “What’re you doing?” Sarah’s voice was a little sharp, an edge of panic to it. She hurried toward her daughter. “Let’s go back inside.”

  “What’re you doing?” Gracie echoed. She was in her nightgown, her feet bare, again, much the way Sarah had been nearly thirty years earlier.

  “Checking out the roof.”

  “In the middle of a storm? At night?”

  “Not my smartest move. Come on, let’s get out of the rain.” She decided that she wouldn’t mention anything about facing down her own fears, not just yet. After shepherding Gracie inside again, she yanked the door to the cupola shut behind them, then followed her daughter down the spiral staircase leading to the attic. “You’re soaked,” Sarah said, one hand on Gracie’s shoulder as they followed the bluish beam of the flashlight through the maze of clutter in the cold garret.

  “So are you!”

  “I’m wearing a jacket.”

  “Big deal.”

  “Hey, it’s something.” Over Gracie’s shoulder, Sarah shined her bluish beam from her phone down the next steep flight downward. “You don’t have a flashlight?” Her panic was subsiding, the spike in her adrenaline declining. She finally regained her equilibrium as they reached the steps to the third floor.

  “Nah.”

  “How did you find your way? It’s a rabbit warren of junk up here.”

  Gracie lifted a shoulder. “Dunno,” she said as they stepped onto the worn floorboards of the upper hallway and, after Sarah secured the door to the attic, started toward the main stairs. That’s how it always had been with Gracie. Sometimes it was as if she possessed some kind of heightened precognition; other times she was a regular kid.

  “You’ve got to be freezing,” Sarah said, trying to usher her daughter toward the main stairs.

  But Gracie stopped dead in her tracks at Theresa’s room and grabbed the doorknob. “Something happened in here.”

  Sarah’s newfound equilibrium took a hit. “Of course things happened in there,” she said. “Just like in every room. The house is nearly a hundred years—”

  “I mean something bad happened in here.” Gracie was shaking her head.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure.” She turned the knob, and as the door creaked open, she stepped into the bedroom.

  “Gracie, no. Let’s go,” Sarah said, wishing her kid wouldn’t do this kind of thing, that Gracie would just play soccer, or be attached to her smartphone as if it were a lifeline, or hang out with friends . . . just not be such a loner. “Have you talked to your dad? Told him about the move?”

  But her daughter wasn’t listening. Nor did she bother to snap on the overhead light. “It’s cold in here,” she whispered, and her breath actually fogged a bit.

  “Of course it is. There isn’t any heat and you’re soaked.”

  Sarah flipped the switch, and pale light filtered from one of the two bare bulbs from the broken fixture overhead. “And the window doesn’t seal, and the damper in the fireplace is probably broken, causing a draft.” />
  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Sarah paused, then gave up. “Yeah, I know.”

  Biting her lower lip, Gracie walked to the fireplace and touched the mantel, her gaze traveling to the cracked mirror. “What happened here?”

  “I really don’t know. It was my sister’s room.”

  “But not Dee Linn’s, right? She was on the second floor with you and Uncle Jake and Joe.”

  “That’s right.” They’d discussed some of this before. “It’s Theresa’s room. You never met her, and I don’t really remember her, either.”

  “Huh.” Gracie picked up a small figurine, a statue of the Madonna that had been standing alone on the mantel for decades. “Kind of weird.” Gracie blew the dust from the tiny statue. “And no one knows what happened to her?”

  “Everyone says she ran away.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know what to believe. Mom says she’s alive somewhere, that Theresa ran away because she couldn’t follow the rules of the house, that my father was too strict.”

  “Was he?”

  “Not with us, but he might’ve been different with Theresa and Roger. They were older, his stepkids.”

  “Where was their dad?”

  “Dead. He’d died a year earlier, I think. Mom was a widow when she married Dad. We can talk about this downstairs, after you’re changed.”

  But Gracie seemed a million miles away as she rotated the little statue in her hands.

  “Honey?” Sarah prodded, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room.

  “You think she’s dead?”

  Oh, Lord, “Maybe. I hope not.” Feeling as if she were walking across her sister’s grave, Sarah crossed the short distance to Gracie and plucked the ceramic Madonna from her fingers.

  “But, Mom, something happened here, didn’t it?” Gracie pressed, turning her white face to her mother. “Something really bad.” Sarah’s blood turned to ice, as her words from a world away echoed in her mind.