Better Homes and Hauntings

by Molly Harper

  Cindy smiled brightly. “If you make that comparison to Deacon’s face, I will give you a shiny nickel.”

  Nina tossed a clump of grass at Cindy, who ducked out of the way. “Not a chance, you career ruiner.”

  “Oh, here’s something. Jennifer sent over pictures from the Whitneys’ first party here on the island, just after the house was completed,” Cindy called to Dotty.

  “It was their first and only party. Catherine was dead within a month,” Dotty responded, not bothering to move from her comfortable position.

  “So what happened at the party?” Nina asked as she raked a small section of dirt clear and prepped it for planting.

  “It started off really well,” Cindy answered, flipping through the carefully printed sheets. “It was a fairy-garden theme. Thanks to Mrs. Vanderbilt’s costume parties, everybody was more than happy to dress up. Women showed up dressed as dryads and nymphs. The men sort of cheated and just wore masks with their tuxedos. Catherine had arranged for photographers to take the guests’ portraits as they arrived, so they would be able to capture the costumes before they could be mussed.” She showed the others some copied photos of stiff, bored-looking women in cellophane fairy wings. “This was a good time to you people?”

  “Even when you’re talking about the rich white sector of the population, I’m pretty sure ‘you people’ is considered offensive,” Dotty told her.

  Cindy frowned. “I will send you some lovely apology flowers.”

  “And yes, believe it or not, these women were probably having the time of their lives. Portraits were just a lot more formal then. They weren’t encouraged to smile.”

  Dotty finally dragged her butt off her towel and crawled over to examine the photos.

  “I’ve read about this. It was a very swanky do. Champagne from Paris and sweets from Switzerland. If guests arrived without costumes, they were immediately directed to a spare bedroom suite, where Catherine had hired seamstresses to fit them in a selection of very chic theme-appropriate frocks. Catherine had even arranged for acrobats to dangle from trapezes bolted into the ceiling of the ballroom.”

  “She let someone drill bolt holes into her brand-new ceilings?” Cindy asked.

  “No, she arranged for the bolts to be built into the ceiling in the first place.”

  “She planned the theme that far ahead?”

  Dotty shrugged. “She took this party very seriously. She knew that her future as a respected hostess among the very rich depended on a successful evening. Also, the plan was that she would hang chandeliers from the bolts later.”

  Cindy grumbled. “Rich people.”

  “Stop it.” Nina poked her in the ribs.

  Dotty slid her sunglasses on top of her head and sorted through Cindy’s papers. “OK, so they’re socializing in the foyer, in front of the grand staircase. Dinner is served, prepared by a fantastic French chef Catherine had lured from some upstart social-climbing family in New York. The dancing started, but Catherine had disappeared. This was unheard of. The hostess always led the first dance. It was quite the scandal.

  “Gerald excused himself to go look for her. Several guests insisted they heard shouting from the garden, and a very pale Catherine rejoined the party to lead the dancing. Gerald wasn’t seen for the rest of the night. The party never quite got back into swing, and the guests left early. It was reported in society pages to be ‘one of the most uncomfortable evenings of the year.’ Catherine was said to be devastated.”

  “So Catherine had the bad taste to leave her own party and meet her lover in the garden, and her husband caught her?” Nina asked.

  “Sounds like it.”

  Cindy pursed her lips. “But Jack Donovan wasn’t at the party. It says here in this gossip-column clipping, ‘Notably absent from the disastrous soiree was Jack Donovan, the architect of this marvel of modern domestic engineering. Several guests were overheard stating that Mr. Donovan was not invited.’ So she couldn’t have been meeting Donovan in the garden.”

  “A second lover?” Nina suggested, eyeing Dotty carefully.

  “No offense, Dotty, your great-great-grandmama was sort of a skank,” Cindy marveled, wincing when Nina whacked her in the shoulder.

  “Maybe,” Dotty said, sliding her sunglasses back into place. “A few weeks later, Catherine disappeared. There was a frantic search, and then her body was found in the bay. Gerald insisted that when he arrived on the island, Catherine was nowhere to be found. The police insisted that he must have arrived earlier, killed Catherine, and then made a big show of arriving at the house and looking for her. Maybe Gerald was just pushed too far. First, Catherine takes up with the architect, and then, a few weeks later, it looks like she has someone else, too? Maybe that was more than Gerald could take.” Dotty swiped at the hot tears gathering at the corners of her eyes.

  “You OK, hon?” Cindy asked, rubbing her arm.

  Dotty nodded, pasting on a smile. “I’m going to get something to drink,” she said, her voice shaking as she stood and dusted off her cutoff shorts. “You girls want anything?” She didn’t wait to hear their answer, taking off across the lawn.

  Nina turned on the blonde. “You’ve got to stop making fun of rich people, Cindy.”

  Cindy gave an apologetic shrug. “Old habits die hard.”

  DOTTY SAT ON the foot of her bed, her headphones firmly clamped over her ears. She hadn’t been able to rejoin the others for the rest of the afternoon, not even for dinner. She needed some alone time, which was spent scanning the recording of her talking to the girls in the attic. She’d listened to it at half-speed. She’d listened to it on fast-forward, making them all sound like chipmunks. And she hadn’t heard one single syllable beyond their own conversation. Not an ominous groan. Not a menacing whisper. No guttural Get out. Nothing.

  As a believer in all things otherworldly, she felt an utter failure. She hadn’t heard anything. She hadn’t seen anything. She hadn’t even smelled the telltale rose water that was supposed to linger in Catherine’s rooms. Still, the concrete details she’d learned about Catherine and Gerald so far were disturbing enough. She’d come to accept the idea that Gerald had murdered Catherine, but seeing his motive, laid out in black and white in the diaries, was just awful. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know any more. She didn’t want to sympathize with Gerald for what he did. She was sorry she’d ever started this project. But she’d be damned if she would be the one to tell Deacon that she wasn’t finishing it.

  Dotty lay back, switching the headphone jack to her iPod. She closed her eyes. Her meditative bell tracks did their usual trick in relaxing her. Minutes later, she was half-dozing. She felt the foot of her bed dip under unexpected weight. Her eyes snapped open.

  Her room was dark. What had happened to her lamp? She propped herself up on her elbows. A dark shape sat hunched at the foot of her bed, shoulders slumped as if the weight of the world was resting on them.

  “Deacon?” she whispered. “What are you doing in my room? Are you OK?”

  The figure didn’t move.

  She nudged at the figure’s back with her foot.

  Her foot met with no resistance.

  The figure twisted, turning until the inky shape became a distinct set of shoulders and a head, looking back at Dotty. She screamed, or she would have, but her throat constricted, trapping the sound. It undulated toward her. She tried to scrabble up the mattress, but the weight of the shadow on her bedspread trapped her feet. Dotty flopped onto her back as the shape crawled up her bed, trapping her. She fought against it, kicking and thrashing under the blankets, only to feel her feet go numb under the cold, heavy pressure. The sensation spread up her legs to her hips, and her body was forced still.

  What if it didn’t stop? What if it settled over her face and smothered her? She whimpered, panicking at the thought of the thick black mass seeping into her nose and choking off her breath.

  The head crossed into a beam of moonlight shining through her window. The surface of its skin was c
onstantly shifting, viscous and iridescent as oil, so that the features were indistinct. All she could make out were hollow silver eyes and blinding white teeth against the black, curving up in an exaggerated Cheshire-cat grin that grew wider as it slithered along her body.

  It was so pleased with itself.

  As the weight moved over her covers, Dotty closed her eyes. She wouldn’t see this. She’d been so wrong, pouting because she was the only one who hadn’t experienced anything paranormal in the house. If this was what the others felt, she wanted no part of it.

  Fingers clenched around the blanket, she tried to focus on something besides the fear that kept her paralyzed. Whoever this spirit was, it couldn’t hurt her. Not really. The pressure and cold? An illusion. It couldn’t hurt her. She wouldn’t allow it. She had to find a touchstone. Something positive. She had to think of something else.

  Deacon, she thought. Deacon, who loved her so much. Deacon, who shared her blood. Deacon, who would hear her screaming for help, even if she didn’t make a sound. Deacon, Deacon, Deacon, Deacon.

  She felt a hand slide along the sheet over to her throat. Rage and humiliation bubbled up from her belly, replacing the fear and unlocking her throat so she could scream. “DEACON!”

  She opened her eyes to see the face hovering just inches over hers, the silver eyes boring into hers as the mouth opened, revealing rows and rows of razor-sharp shark’s teeth. Screw you, she thought. Screw you all the way back to hell.

  Before those fangs could sink into her, the overhead light flicked on. The figure whipped its head toward the door and dissipated like smoke. Dotty launched herself out of the bed, throwing off the covers, only to get tangled in them and land on her ass. She flopped back against the bedframe.

  “Ow.”

  “The hell?” Cindy said, blinking blearily into the well-lit room.

  Nina, who had flipped the light switch, gawked at where she’d seen the spirit fade away. Lips pressed in a tight white line, she crossed the room in two strides, curling around Dotty, who sank into her friend’s embrace.

  “You OK?” Nina asked as Dotty rested her head against Nina’s lap.

  “No,” Dotty said, her voice clear but very, very soft. “I am just about as far away from OK as I could possibly be right now.”

  CINDY TOOK UP vigil on Dotty’s other side, awkwardly patting her back. She hadn’t had enough experiences with “girlfriends” to know the proper protocol in comforting your friend after the bogeyman makes untoward advances.

  “Was this how it was for you?” Dotty asked, shivering against the warmth of Nina’s body. “This weird, alien, ‘that couldn’t have just happened’ feeling?”

  “Yes,” Nina said. “Only I can see how what happened to you would be more scary because it was more of an external thing, rather than being inside someone else’s head.”

  “Deacon, calm down!” they heard Jake yell from the hallway. Deacon came barreling through the door, with Jake stumbling in behind him.

  “What happened?” Deacon demanded.

  “You heard me yell all the way across the building?” Dotty sat up, wrapping her arms around Deacon’s neck.

  “I think people heard you in Jersey,” Jake told her, leaning against the doorframe.

  “Dotty, are you OK?” Deacon asked quietly. “You sounded so scared. I’ve never heard you—You’re never the one who gets scared.”

  “It was on my bed,” Dotty told him, shivering. “I could see it, crawling toward me, on top of me. It was smiling at me, like it was enjoying itself.”

  “What was on your bed?” Deacon asked.

  “What the hell do you think, Deacon?” Cindy shouted, advancing on their boss. “A freaking ghost.” Cindy grabbed Deacon’s Dinosaurs vs. Aliens T-shirt by the collar and gave him a hard shake. “You’ve humored us up to now, looking down your nose at us, grumbling and groaning when Dotty talks about the haunting, because you’re just too smart to believe and commit to the idea. Well, guess what, it’s real. And this house is getting stronger. It’s sending these things after us in our beds. It’s scared the absolute shit out of your cousin. And I just realized I am shaking my boss, and I should stop that now. But I can’t seem to get my hands to stop moving.”

  “If we can please move beyond the hysterics!” Dotty exclaimed as Nina pried Cindy off Deacon’s neck. Nina pushed him across the room, out of range. The force of her shove looped his arms around her waist, and neither seemed to notice when they remained there. “It was a pretty distinct shadow figure with a very defined head and shoulders. It turned its head toward me, and it was smiling. Like scaring the hell out of me was the most fun it had had in years.”

  “You keep calling it an it,” Jake said. “Wouldn’t it be a who?”

  Dotty shook her head, her streaked hair falling over her shoulders. “With all of the other ‘encounters,’ we’ve known who the people involved were because we were them. We don’t know who the hell that thing was.”

  “It was Gerald, don’t you think?” Cindy suggested. “I mean, who else would it be?”

  “But I’m his descendant. Don’t you think he would maybe sense that?” she said, rubbing at her arms, desperate to get warm. Cindy draped a spare blanket around her shoulder. “I mean, there are boundaries there that shouldn’t crossed, even by the dead.”

  “But you’re Catherine’s blood, too,” Nina noted. “So maybe some part of Gerald wants to hurt you, because it’s like hurting Catherine all over again.”

  “Well, that is a horrifying explanation that makes more sense than it should,” Dotty said, shuddering.

  Nina looked up at Deacon. “What are we going to do now?”

  Deacon only shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  Jake adjusted the basketball shorts he wore as pajamas. “Well, I’m wide awake. Being jolted into consciousness by bloodcurdling screams will do that.”

  Dotty ran her fingers through her hair and gave a forced, cheerful smile. “We’re playing Vodka Pursuit!”

  Nina asked, “What is Vodka Pursuit?”

  “It’s like Trivial Pursuit, only with more vodka. It will cheer everybody up, trust me. It will help.” Dotty jumped off the bed and went scampering down the hall, yelling for Stolichnaya and pie pieces.

  Jake glanced at the clock, which read 12:42. “This is not going to end well.”

  Temporary Supernatural Reprieves

  THEY HAD TO get off the island, even for just a little while.

  The fact that Dotty was shaken by what she’d wanted so badly—to finally have some sort of paranormal experience—scared the hell out of Deacon. What she saw must have terrified her. That combined with Cindy and Jake’s overblown reactions to each other and Deacon’s sudden spiral into full-on, hearts-and-flowers infatuation with Nina had Deacon beginning to suspect something was “off” about the house. Whether it was physiological, psychological, or parapsychological, living at the Crane’s Nest was making their emotions go haywire. Everything they felt seemed to intensify tenfold. How else could he explain his initial overblown jealousy of anyone Nina paid attention to?

  What worried him was all of his other feelings for Nina. What if his affection for her was a manipulation? It seemed impossible that any one woman could be sensible, snarky, and sexy all at the same time. Could he be seeing her through lenses colored by isolation and paranormal interference?

  It wasn’t so much that he wanted to test his feelings for Nina off-island. That would be crass and shortsighted. He just wanted to see how they interacted in the real world. If they were still talking to each other when the Crane’s Nest project was over—assuming one of them hadn’t been possessed Exorcist-style—would they be able to spend time together? Date? Or would they drift apart without the stresses and intrigue of this place to throw them together?

  He’d made a few calls and made arrangements with Dotty, and before he knew it, the six of them were gathered in the men’s common room, all dressed up with somewhere to go. He’d planned to attend this
sure-to-be-dull-as-dirt reception for the charitable boards supported by EyeDee’s benevolent foundation by himself. But now he might actually stand a chance of having an interesting conversation at one of these things. Dotty had managed to sneak over to the mainland for appropriate clothes for the others, having snaked one of Deacon’s credit cards out of his wallet.

  He chose not to think about where his cousin had picked up her lockpicking and pickpocketing abilities.

  Besides, despite the questionable “special skills” section of Dotty’s résumé, Deacon trusted her shopping judgment. Although she did get distracted by a shiny pair of shoes every once in a while. And then there was that time with the car.

  Even if Dotty did suddenly decide to buy a Prius, it would be worth it to hear genuine excitement in Nina’s voice for the first time. She was so sincerely and sweetly thrilled by the idea of a night out. Deacon thought he could make out the barely restrained urge to twirl and make the short skirt of her dress bell out. Nina’s delicate forest-green dress was a frothy confection of gauzy leaf appliqués frayed at the edges, giving her the illusion of being covered in leaves. She had, however, fought tooth and nail against the matching sky-high platform heels and persuaded Dotty to let her wear her trusty flats. And his suspicions that Cindy had something to do with the intricately twisted hair and unprecedented makeup were confirmed when Nina thanked her for working “fairy godmother” magic on her.

  “I don’t have to do much to you,” Cindy assured her, sliding her hand along her own vaguely pinup-style red dress with draped short sleeves and plunging neckline. “And I still think you should have gone with the red. To heck with your hair clashing.”

  SMILING TO HERSELF, Nina plucked at the skirt of her dress, swaying so she could watch the hem of the skirt swing back and forth like a church bell. She was usually a homebody. Fancy, crowded, expensive, crowded, tense—and had she mentioned crowded?—parties were not her scene. One of the very few functional aspects of her working relationship with Rick was that he had volunteered for the schmoozing while she focused on her plants. When Deacon announced he was taking them to a “reception” on the mainland, her instinct had been to make some excuse and try to get out of it. But Dotty had gone to such trouble to make sure they were all well-dressed for the evening, and frankly, she hadn’t taken the time to make herself this pretty in, oh, maybe ever. So she was going to attend this shindig with a smile on her face and a solemn internal promise that she wouldn’t do anything to embarrass Deacon in front of his most likely very rich and/or very smart friends. Nor would she wear the red dress, because she would never be that brave.