by Bryn Donovan
Andi finally dragged herself out of bed and looked at the clock. Nine twenty-three a.m. Crap. Well, she could always work late.
She recalled a bad dream, but the details had burned away. Something about David—no surprise, after the turmoil of yesterday. Just as she finished getting dressed, her cell phone rang. She dashed over to snatch it from the nightstand and saw his number on the screen.
God only knew how this would go. Maybe he just wanted to ask her why the hell she wasn’t at the site already. She pressed the talk button and answered with a casual, innocent, “Hello?”
“Andi, it’s David.”
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“Listen. You don’t need to come to the house today.”
Irritation washed over her. “Are you still mad I suggested the psychic? Can’t we just be adults about this?”
“What? No.”
“We can’t be adults about this?”
“No—I mean, I wasn’t even talking about that. Look, Andi, I’m sorry I got so mad yesterday. I don’t know what got into me.”
She softened. “It’s all right. I think I overreacted.” She knew she was very sensitive when it came to her freaky imagination and her weirdo past.
“You were fine. But we’re good now, right?”
“Yeah.” Arguments happened. She was happy not to dwell on them. If anything, it almost came as a relief to have the first disagreement out of the way. Having had a few boyfriends before, Andi knew that quarrels came with the territory. Not every guy could apologize when he was wrong though, and it comforted her to know David could.
“But I still don’t understand,” she said. “Why are you saying I shouldn’t come over?”
His exhale caused static on the line. “There’s been a snag. A big snag. You know I had that structural engineer out yesterday…he says that the back parlor is lacking in load-bearing walls.”
“What?” This was bad. You couldn’t sell a house if one of the main rooms might collapse at any moment.
“Yeah. He thinks the room used to be two rooms, and someone took the wall out.”
She pictured the space in her head. “You know what? I don’t think so.”
“What makes you say that?”
“All the wooden panels are exactly the same. If they took the wall out, you’d probably have half of one kind and half that were different, added later.”
“They could have had the same panels in both rooms,” David pointed out. “Or they could have done a really good job of matching.”
“Maybe. But the wood treatment isn’t the same in any other two rooms in the house. A lot of these Victorians, they liked to do every single room differently.”
“Huh. So you think it was always one big room?”
“I kind of do. The only place it’s strange is in the middle, where there’s one shorter panel on both sides.” Andi had considered staining the wood just a shade darker in that room, to better disguise the odd seams in there. “I bet they took out a structural beam. I mean, it could have been a wall, but I doubt it. Was there a beam when you lived there?”
“No. If there was a wall or a beam, somebody took it out a long time ago. I guess all this time that house has been unstable as hell. We’re lucky the house didn’t fall in on us.” He snorted. “Or maybe unlucky.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Andi thought of the time an old lady at the parish had asked her father to check out her home’s foundation. Her father had broken the news to her that her house didn’t, in fact, have a foundation. But it had stayed standing for sixty years. It took a lot to bring some houses down.
“The engineer said he could tell me where to put a wall back in,” David said.
“I really think you should find out first if you just need a beam. People are going to like that bigger room.” Andi yawned.
“Yeah, I called Gloria last night and that’s what she thinks too. Should I hire another engineer? Get a second opinion?”
“I wonder if there’s a way to get the original plans for the house.”
David stayed silent for a moment. “Actually, I bet there is.”
“Really? Where?”
“Cook County Historical Society. The place is on the register of historic places, so they probably have documentation on it. They might have the house plans in a file somewhere.”
Scruffy put his paws on her knee, letting her know he wanted to go outside. She scratched him behind the ears. “Can you just go in there and look through the files?”
“Yeah, I think so. My friend Scott researched his family tree once, and they just let him in there.”
“That’s great! We can check it out and see what they had there originally. Do you want to go today?”
“You’re saying you want to go with me?” David asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, that sounds exciting for you.”
* * *
The lady at the desk didn’t know whether the documentation on the Girard House included the original house plans. She gave them several files apiece, along with strict orders not to tear or damage anything.
“Let’s just see what they’ve got,” Andi said.
Several letters and forms didn’t interest her in the least: tax adjustments, re-zoning.
“I’ve got about a dozen documents about the city water supply,” David grumbled. “So that’s helpful.”
Andi turned to an ancient newspaper article. Although she knew she should look for the architect’s plans, her eyes and brain came to a stop on the headline: Irene Girard Missing.
Irene. Andi’s stomach fluttered. She kept her voice casual as she said, “Hey, David, this lady was born in eighteen eighty-seven. Irene Pennington Girard. Was she your great-grandma or something?”
“I wouldn’t know.” David looked over at it. “What is it, an obit?”
“No. It’s about her going AWOL.”
“What?”
“Yeah, it says her husband George asked the police to look for her. They lived in the house. One morning she was gone, along with some of her clothes.”
David snorted. “If George was anything like my dad, she was a smart lady.”
“It says this is their wedding picture.” The bride wore a flowered hat, not a veil, over her light curls. She had narrow eyes and a heavy chin. Still, Andi thought, she probably would have looked sort of pretty if she’d been smiling.
David held out his hand and Andi gave him the article. He scanned it. “She was married once before. A widow. Her first husband started a bank…she must have been wealthy.”
Andi had to tell him. “David, remember when Carlos attacked me?”
He looked at her. “Do I remember?” he repeated. “What about it?”
“Earlier that day, he kept singing this song, over and over again.” It creeped her out now. “It was that old one that goes…” She felt a little embarrassed but sang a few lines quietly anyway. “Irene, good night, Irene, good night—”
David slammed his hand down on the table.
“What?” she asked.
“Seriously?”
Why was he glaring at her? “I’m just telling you what happened. I know…it’s kind of a weird coincidence, your ancestor being named that.”
“It’s not just that.”
“Then what?”
He shoved a hand through his cropped brown hair, absently messing it up. “My dad sang that song before. A lot of times.”
A shiver went through her. “What?”
“Yeah. When he…when he was drunk.”
Andi swallowed. “That’s disturbing.” And why would Carlos sing the same thing?
David snatched up the article again. “So Irene, my great-grandma, disappeared. Did they ever find her? Where would she go?”
Andi shook her head. “She could have gone back to live with some relatives—something like that? I don’t know. We could look into it.”
“I can’t believe I never heard anything about this before,” he said
.
“What, you mean from your dad? Did he talk to you about anything?”
“Not much,” David conceded, grabbing the file. “What else is in here?”
They sorted through the documents with more focus now. Andi found an obit of an infant girl who died of something called pertussis. She was David’s grandfather’s sister, as far as they could figure out. Nothing remarkable there.
For a while, they scanned pages without talking, and then David said, “Here’s something about the builder.”
Andi straightened. “What?”
“Okay, wait a minute. I knew my great-great-grandfather Edgar built the house. But it looks like he didn’t build it for himself.”
“You mean it was for his wife?”
“No, this was before he was married. He designed and built the house for his friend, Clarence.”
Andi peered over his shoulder. “God, how can you even read that?”
“I’m used to fine print. Look. This is about the house getting finished, in eighteen eighty-three. Clarence Boyd, railroad tycoon, is in New York on business, and until he returns, Edgar has possession of the estate.” He looked at Andi, bewildered. “I thought Edgar always had possession of the estate.”
“Are you sure? Wait a minute, let’s look at some of those old tax things again.”
It took a while, but they found the tax records from the first several years of the house. “Here’s eighteen eighty-four, eighty-five, eighty-seven,” David said. “All paid by Edgar.”
“Wait, wait. Birth announcement. Eighteen eighty-eight.” She held it out to him. “George Harlan Girard, born to Edgar and Martha Girard, at…the Girard House address.” She looked up at him. “Edgar never left.”
“So where the hell was Clarence?”
“He stayed in New York?” Andi ventured.
“And nobody knew where he was? And he never sold his mansion for the money?” David shook his head. “Clarence goes out East and never comes back. George marries a rich widow, who also disappears. It’s a little suspicious, don’t you think?”
“You think they were killed?”
“Maybe.”
Oh, crap, Andi thought. The man on the stairs! “I think Clarence got killed in the house,” she blurted out.
“What?”
“I think I saw him.”
David’s gave her a blank look. “You saw Clarence.”
“I saw a man in a black suit. He looked like he could have been from a long time ago…he had this moustache that curled up at the ends. His head was bashed in. I saw him on the stairs.”
“What was he doing?”
“Staring up at me.”
David cursed and rubbed his hand over his face. “When?”
“A little while ago. It was the day after we first…you know.”
“Then?” His jaw went slack. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why do you think?”
“No, I mean when we were talking about you seeing…my mother.” His voice quieted at the mention of her.
Andi sighed. “I don’t know. You never saw a man in a black suit. I didn’t want to freak you out with my hallucinations.”
He nodded, his brow furrowing. “Do you think now that…none of it was hallucinating? The whole time you were growing up?”
“I don’t know what to think. Sometimes the meds made it go away.”
“Huh. Who knows,” David said. “So, this man. After you saw him…what? You just kept on working on the stairs?”
“Yeah. Well, he disappeared.”
David gave a low whistle. “I’m impressed.”
“What?”
“That’s pretty brave.”
“Thanks. But I’ve dealt with this stuff before. It doesn’t seem quite as scary now that I’m a grown-up, you know?”
“I guess. I’m kind of surprised you’ll go anywhere near old houses.”
“I’m always sort of drawn to them,” she said, half to herself. She flipped through the pages of another open file then stopped. “David! Here are the plans!”
He peered at the curious, almost scientific representation of the front of the house. “Is that drawn by hand?”
“Well, they didn’t have CAD.”
“What?”
“No computers,” she paraphrased. “Sheesh, there’s a lot of details here. Look at these notes about the roof…and he planned out where that fence went, and the trees in back and everything.” She flipped through the pages. “Check it out,” she breathed. “It’s the first floor.”
David leaned closer. “Can you tell anything about that main parlor?”
“Give me a sec.” She studied the carefully rendered boxes, the crabbed handwriting. “Yeah, okay. He’s using this double-score line for the walls. I was right,” she crowed, looking up at him. “There was a just a beam there.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Look, he wrote about it in the margins. I can’t make out every word, but it’s something about the carving for that beam being Ionic.”
“Ionic? Sounds high-tech.”
She snorted. “It’s a kind of Greek column.”
“Ah.” He peered at the plans again. “So, you’re sure it was a support beam, not a wall.”
“Yeah, absolutely. You can make a copy for the engineer if you want, but he’ll just tell you the same thing.”
“I believe you,” David said. “Gloria will be relieved.”
Andi nodded. He’d said before that his agent was worried about him spending too much money on the rehab. She had probably about flipped when David told her he might put in a new wall.
“You still need a new joist in the dining room,” she added.
“You know what? If you say so, good enough for me.” He looked down at the folders. “There’s a lot of stuff here. I’m just going to have them make copies of everything. My whole family history, and I have no clue about it.”
Andi wanted to help him look into it, but it also scared her. He had hardly learned anything about them yet, and something told her that if he did learn more, it wouldn’t be good. She felt by poking around in these ancestors’ pasts, she was just encouraging them to hang around, watching her as she worked, waiting for the chance to show themselves again… She shuddered.
“You all right?”
She looked up at him and nodded. “Yeah. I just… Your family is scary.”
His mouth set in a hard line. “I’ve been trying to tell you that all along.”
“But it’ll be good to find out about them,” she said. “Maybe if we know why they’re there, we can figure out how to make them go away.”
“Maybe.” David didn’t sound convinced.
Making copies wound up taking quite a bit longer than Andi had expected. By the time they had them in hand, they were both ready to get out of there.
As they walked out to the parking lot, David said, “We’re still on for tomorrow night, right?”
“Tomorrow night? Yeah. Definitely.” She had almost forgotten about their date.
Now she remembered that she still needed to crack the dress code. That was the reason she’d suggested Friday in the first place, to give her time to figure that out.
“Hey, David?” she asked. “What are you going to wear?”
“Eh, it’s a suit-and-tie kind of place.”
* * *
Standing in front of her closet, a song from the ’80s playing on her iPod deck, Andi thought, I am so screwed.
“What do you think, Scruffy?” she asked the dog, who tended to follow her from room to room. “What would be good for a fancy restaurant?” She wasn’t sure she had any better idea than the dog did, but after quickly flipping through the hangers, she at least knew this much: she didn’t have it.
Well, she needed a dress for Lissa’s rehearsal dinner, too. The thought switched her out of panic mode. She would just buy something nice to wear to the family event, and hopefully it would be okay for a romantic occasion, too.
She had a real da
te. It made her happy. And David was starting to open up and tell her things. Even though the little information they’d found about his family seemed ominous, she was glad he could at least talk to her about it. She would help him out in any way she could to get the house fixed up and clear away whatever dwelled inside.
Ghosts. Echoes. What harm could they really do? She and David were alive and real. Shadows were no match for them.
Now if only she could get that damn Irene song out of her head.
She turned her music way up to drown it out.
Chapter Ten
Lissa regarded herself in the three-way mirror. “I don’t know. Do you think it’s a little too sexy for a wedding dress?”
“Hmm?” Andi glanced up. “No, it’s fine.”
A lady at a nearby rack of dresses said, “Sweetie, look at the side view. You want to save some of that for the honeymoon.”
Lissa frowned and turned to check out the bodice of the white satin gown from the side. “Ohh, you’re right,” she said, seeing how much of the side of her breast it exposed. “Thanks.”
“No problem. I always say, a wedding dress doesn’t need to be too revealing. I mean, everybody there’s going to be imagining you making babies anyway.”
Lissa’s mouth turned down. “Ew. Really?”
“Honey, please,” the lady said as she moved to another display.
Andi giggled.
“Well, we’re not going to be making any babies right away,” Lissa grumbled, folding her arms in an apparent attempt to cover up a little. She glared at Andi. “You’re not even pretending to pay attention.”
Andi sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re thinking about David,” Lissa accused. “I’m getting married and buying the most important dress of my life, but you know what? Just sit around and fantasize about your bachelor of the year.”
“I wasn’t thinking about him like that.”
“Then what?” Lissa flounced back into the dressing area.
Andi rolled her eyes but followed her sister, who said, “Look, Andi. I don’t mean to sound like a bridezilla, but I just want a little bit of help.”
“No, you’re right.” Andi closed the door behind them and unzipped the dress for her. “You know what? You should really do ivory instead of white. It looks nicer with your skin tone.”