“There’s nothing we can do tonight. We don’t even have a solid point of reference as to where the murder took place. Foggerty has trapped all over that land and he said he’s seen nothing.” Sheriff Dunst’s words brought no comfort to Ivy as she rested her ear against the door. “We won’t be able to find any evidence in the dark.”
“She was by Foster Hill House—start there maybe—baby out there alone.” Joel’s words were broken, his voice less booming than the lawman’s.
“I walked through the house after we transported the body here. I didn’t see anything. No child. It is likely that it’s safe and tucked away with the girl’s family and her death is random and unrelated. She may not even be from these parts. To go out now would be like searching for a ghost we aren’t even sure exists.”
At those words, Ivy’s actions were swift. Swiping her wool coat from the hall tree and shrugging it on, she snatched a lantern off its cast-iron arm where it hung on the wall. The cold air that hit her face when she opened the door was the exclamation mark on the reality that a baby left abandoned could not survive another night.
Ivy’s shoes crunched in the snow as she hiked down the road toward Foster Hill. An owl swooped overhead, the girth of its wingspan draping over the path ahead of her. She squinted her eyes as she lifted the lantern so the light spread into the woods on either side of the road. The uneasy gnaw of reality ate at her calm. A young woman had just been found murdered, and Ivy was very much alone in the dead of night. Unreasonable? Completely. But Gabriella had been dead well over a full day and night. The likelihood was the killer had already fled. If not . . . Ivy stifled her fear as the image of a baby shivering and crying in the cold urged her forward. Someone had to be proactive and assume the worst, and evidently that responsibility fell to her. It didn’t appear the men of the law shared her sense of urgency or the sacredness of fighting for the baby’s life.
She prayed the sheriff was right, that the baby was secured with its extended family somewhere. But she wasn’t going to bed that night beneath covers and quilts if there was any possibility Gabriella’s infant was in such desperate need. Maybe the sheriff didn’t understand what it was like to have that desperation tighten every muscle in your body, shorten your breath, and incite your cries for hope. But Joel did. Ivy blinked and cleared her vision that suddenly teared. He knew it, and was ignoring it. Again.
She paused at the base of Foster Hill, by the skeletal tree that had been Gabriella’s momentary burial place. In the moonlight that reflected off patches of snow and dark shadows of earth, Foster Hill House gave the appearance of evil. Even the lantern light was a dim glow. The rickety fence that bordered the abandoned house tilted, its rotting slats wobbling in the wind. Windows reflected black, like eyes staring down upon her.
Prayer wasn’t something that came naturally to her anymore, but Ivy breathed one anyway. For the baby, for herself.
If it’s here, help me find it. Then let her flee home to the safety of a locked door where she would triumphantly embrace the rescued child and glare at the stunned faces of the sheriff and Joel.
Ivy passed by the fence and an iron lamppost. Her shoes were quiet against the wooden steps that rose by four to the porch bordering the front of the house. The front door loomed in front of her, with stained glass intact and brass knob tarnished to a dull black.
She turned it and met little resistance. That must be what happens when houses stand empty for years. Locks erode and barriers vanish as it becomes an empty tomb. Ivy perched in the doorway, ears straining to hear the tiny whimper of an infant, a sniffle, a cough. Sheriff Dunst may have been here earlier, but he hadn’t been focused on finding a baby. She braced her hand on the splintered doorframe as she let the lantern light wash across the vast entryway. A staircase climbed to the second level, doors gaped on both the east and west walls, beckoning her to search the rooms beyond. An old chandelier hung precariously from the ceiling, which she hoped didn’t come crashing down on her.
Rumors long abounded surrounding this place. Lights seen flickering in its rooms in the dead of night, piano music filtering through the air only to cease abruptly. Ivy tiptoed to the first room on the right. There was no solace that the lantern light revealed the very piano she’d just been considering. With a sweep of her gaze around the room, Ivy approached the piano, its warped keys a pathetic reminder of the damage of the passage of time. A piano cover draped over the top in a shroud of white lace grayed by spider webs and dust. Sheet music was propped up.
“Beethoven.” Ivy breathed the name as her fingers traced Opus 27, the Moonlight Sonata. A vague memory returned to her. Andrew, years before, whispering in strict confidence to her and to Joel that on one of his nighttime escapades, he heard Beethoven’s haunting melody floating across the wind from Foster Hill House. They’d teased him mercilessly for his superstition, while being equally as intrigued. But after three nights of repeated sneaking off to the tree line to listen, the music wasn’t heard again.
Ivy drew her hand back as she stared down at the keys. Odd. There was no dust on them. Their ivory, though chipped, was clean. As if played recently.
She shivered. Now she was imagining things. Memories of Andrew were never a good thing. She lost herself in them, in the days before he’d drowned beneath the pond’s crust of ice, and with them lost her sense of reality.
Ivy retreated to the foyer and paused. If only there were a sound. She’d give anything to hear the baby’s wail. But Foster Hill House was still in the horrible darkness. She drew a deep breath and adjusted her grip on the lantern. Bedrooms would be up the stairs. If Gabriella had abandoned her baby, Foster Hill House would provide shelter and a bedroom might provide blankets—if there were any left over from the Fosters, whose abrupt move decades before left the house half-furnished but never lived in again.
The steep staircase to the second floor drew Ivy up its steps. Ribbons of spider webs and dust hung between the rails of the banister. Her hand pushed away a thick layer of time’s collection as she ran her fingers along the old walnut wood.
A bat swooped from the mouth of the unknown second floor, its wings millimeters from Ivy’s head. She ducked with a stifled shriek. Her lantern hit the wall, and the glass chimney protecting the flame shattered. The scent of kerosene filled Ivy’s nostrils, and she squinted into the darkness that wrapped its chilling arms around her body. The lantern flame had surrendered, plunging her into faint, pale light. Only moonlight from the foyer windows below lit her steps now.
Turn back. Go home.
Ivy could hear the voice of warning in her mind. Maybe Sheriff Dunst was correct. What could be found in the dark? And there wasn’t evidence to tie Foster Hill House to Gabriella anyway. She hesitated. No. She was here now. The danger was more than likely passed, and if there was even a slim chance a baby was here . . .
Ivy took another step, her foot sending an echo through the house.
When she reached the top of the stairway, a long hall stretched ahead of her. Dim shafts of light cast their shadows from doorways to rooms that held more mystery. Ivy passed two of them, both opening into empty voids. A quick perusal showed bare wood floors and nothing else.
Ivy approached the third door. Its knob was clean, almost shiny in the night’s faint light. She reached out to grasp it, but her hand hovered. Clean. Shiny. A doorknob in an abandoned house should be grimy and dull. Here was another sign of life. Someone had been here before her. Her heart lurched with sudden hope. The clean piano keys, a smooth doorknob . . . if Gabriella was the one to have cleaned them, that meant her baby might lie beyond this door. Ivy closed her eyes. Please, God. She wasn’t afraid of death. Her journal was page after page about those who had passed on. Yet, there was something horribly different considering it might be an infant.
Not willing to let her fear become bigger than the moment, Ivy pushed the door open. The hinges offered a momentary creak before losing their voice. A lone bed was pushed against the far wall. Its curved wooden
headboard held more evidence of spiders. But it was the scarlet velvet blanket draping off the side that gripped Ivy’s attention. Plaster from the ceiling had fallen to the floor, onto the mattress and blanket. She hurried to the bed, hope colliding with disappointment. Empty. She splayed her fingers over the soft velvet. Yes, it was empty, but it was further evidence to support that someone had inhabited Foster Hill House in secret.
On the other side of the bed was a closet. Ivy hurried to it and flung the door open. Her sigh of relief broke the stillness. No one was hiding inside to leap out at her. Just an empty, boxlike room.
Ivy cast a glance over her shoulder at the open doorway. The room, the bed . . . everything about it made her skin crawl. She didn’t know if the absence of Gabriella’s baby relieved her, or frightened her.
A book lay overturned on the floor beside the bed, its hard cover collecting dust. Great Expectations. Her fingers traced the inset black letters on the cover as she squatted beside it, her eyes now adjusted to the light that glowed through the bedroom’s lone window. She knelt and picked up the book, turning it over. Some of the pages were intact, others ripped from the binding and missing.
Ivy thumbed the pages still there. A musty smell tickled her nose, but the pages were clean. Old but clean. A tiny ink scribble laced the margins. She squinted to try to read it, but she couldn’t make out the words. The light wasn’t enough, and Ivy wished she hadn’t broken her lantern.
Still kneeling on the floor, she held the book up and turned it toward the window. She sucked in a breath, finally able to make out a few words in feminine script.
All houses hold secrets, and I am one of them.
Rough hands yanked Ivy backward and upright, and the book fell from her grasp. Her scream bounced against the windowpane and echoed in the room. Her shoulders slammed against a burly chest. Wool sleeves scraped her face as her assailant smothered her mouth with his arm.
“Scream all you want.” The words were a hiss, the voice unrecognizable but hot in her ear. “None to hear you. None to care.”
She wasn’t about to give in. Terror provoked her instinct to survive. The image of Gabriella’s bruised neck and face flashed before her eyes, and Ivy buckled her knees, slumping toward the floor. The movement caught her attacker by surprise and he tripped, crashing down beside her.
“Where’s the baby?” she demanded as she scrambled for her feet. But he was quick and grabbed at her ankles.
“What baby?” he growled.
Ivy sidestepped his grip, yet his hand caught the hem of her dress. It ripped as she struggled to get away. She managed to stumble to her feet, clutching at the doorframe for balance. His fingers clawed at her hair, dragging her back into the bedroom.
“No!” She would not die.
Ivy’s scalp stung as she jerked away. The man’s grip took hair with it as he lost his hold on her. She ran from the room to the stairway, and her foot caught on a warped floorboard. Her shoulder slammed into a framed portrait that tilted on impact.
For an instant her eyes met the black, empty gaze of a woman. She spun away from the portrait and sprinted for the stairs. Her hand gripped the banister just as her assailant grabbed her shoulders. He jerked her back against him, his arm around her throat, squeezing. Ivy clawed at his hold as spots floated in front of her eyes.
“You shouldn’t have come here.” His words chilled her. Then there was nothing solid beneath her feet. He shoved her off the top stair, and she twisted as she fell. The blackness of Foster Hill House engulfed her.
Chapter 5
Kaine
Kaine stood in the parlor of the dilapidated house, staring up the staircase that disappeared into the second floor. She frowned and spun on her heel to face the front entrance and reassess the doorless frame. It was a sorry sight. Not to mention the walls. Ugh. Wallpaper that screamed 1960s peeled from the walls, its garish pattern providing splashes of mustard-yellow nosegays. Oh yes, and the cobwebs. Horrible, fluffy traps of eight-legged fiends. She blew a huge breath through her nose and looked up at the ceiling. It had been patched, the original plaster repaired with more plaster a few decades old now. It appeared there was an old fixture where a chandelier may have once hung.
“Probably full of asbestos.” Kaine stuck her tongue out at the ceiling, because sometimes she felt better when she acted juvenile. Who knew what other problems she would find?
Oh, Danny.
When they first married, she’d been fresh out of college and he was a dreamer. It was an attractive quality. He wanted to flip houses someday, old houses. With character, he’d said. Kaine hadn’t wanted to leave California, her job, the people she was ministering to, and of course Danny supported her. Like he always had.
I’m so sorry.
Kaine had cheated him out of his dream. Maybe not intentionally, but now that he was gone, it felt that way. As silly as it seemed, if she could make amends here, and start a new life, it would all be worth it. She needed to fix her eyes ahead, or on Jesus, as the Scripture stated. But it was so difficult when memories surfaced of Danny, of his suspicious death, and even of the events that shaped her into who she was by the time she married Danny. Events she had spent years learning to forget. All of it God could heal. Kaine tugged at the hem of her sweater. If she knew how to let Him.
Kaine moved into one of the side rooms. A bathroom. She stared into a cracked mirror hanging crooked over the sink. Her brown eyes stared back at her, doubtful and questioning. What was she going to do with this place? The gas-station lady, Joy, may have relieved Kaine of her initial panic over the daffodil, but the history around this house was far too parallel to her own story.
“God, maybe you could say something right about now?” Kaine’s whisper shattered the silence in the ancient house. She gripped the sides of the porcelain pedestal sink and eyed the oxidized copper pipes that rose from the back of the old toilet and into the wall. The plumber had just left. It would do for now, he’d said, but eventually the pipes would need replacing.
“The plumbing was supposed to be updated,” she whispered, still praying out loud as if God would respond. Apparently “updated” meant when it was last installed in 1983. “At least the toilet flushes.” She pulled the toilet handle, and water rushed into the bowl. High in iron, the orange water stained the bowl. Gross. If the toilet water was that orange, she would most definitely need to buy bottled water to drink until the well was tested and a filtering system put in. Which required money. Her savings was going to dwindle faster than she’d planned.
She needed to get Wi-Fi asap so she could log on and complete some of her deadlines for her new position as a virtual assistant for Leah’s husband. It helped that she could do his law firm’s blog from states away. It didn’t help that she was going to need to market herself and get at least four more significant paying clients to make ends meet. Trying to pass herself off as a capable blogger, someone with skills in writing employee manuals and social documents for private companies, was going to be tricky. She’d minored in business, but social work had taken precedence for the last eight years.
There were times she missed the job she’d fled. But now it was mostly because of the money and not the people. In fact, she’d cut herself off from everyone back home, with the exception of Leah. Her passion in life had taken a horrible swing toward surviving, and the pendulum didn’t look as if it’d find its way back in the other direction where Kaine had once served broken hearts. It was hers that was shattered now. Shattered and very alone.
Kaine exited the downstairs bathroom and made her way to a room that was far more intriguing than a bathroom with nasty pipes. It had been a study at one time, or a library. The built-in shelves held only blankets of cobwebs and dust that had collected in the corners and reached down to touch the shelves below.
A mouse nest of bundled straw, droppings, and dust bunnies piled in the corner of the bottom shelf. Mice. Spiders. Murder and mayhem in its history. Her own stalker. The only thing missing was that dog
she’d promised herself.
Kaine pulled a dustcloth that hung from her back pocket. Well, this room was as good as any to tackle. It might be one of the only rooms that didn’t need major renovation. Besides, cleaning off the bookshelves would just feel good. There would at least be a sense of accomplishment on her first day here. She’d finish this and then go back into town, grab some dinner, and afterward head to the motel to get some paying work done.
Kaine spent the next hour wiping and sneezing. With a few more swipes of the now-black dustrag, she knelt on the floor by the shelves closest to the bay window. The bottom molding of the shelf jutted out, warped by time and wear. She pressed on the wood and, as she expected, there was no give. The walnut molding was tough and aged into a permanent warp. She wouldn’t be able to just pound a nail in and tighten it that way. Pound a nail? She didn’t even own a hammer.
She ran her hand along the molding one more time, trying to draw hope from its aged beauty. She wanted to imagine the house as it could be instead of as it was. Her future needed to take on some sort of hope or Kaine might well lose her mind.
Her fingers played with the end of the trim piece and edged into a gap behind it. She frowned as her index finger slipped up to her knuckle into the cavity.
“If I scream,” Kaine spoke aloud to only the mice, “it’s probably a gargantuan spider eating my finger, so go get help.” Kaine’s admonition to the hiding rodent and its eight-legged friends didn’t leave her feeling hopeful.
The House on Foster Hill Page 4