Unusual Suspects: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy

by Dana Stabenow

  She’d brought one of those plastic milk crates with her, too, and set it on the ground under the little wood-box door. She stepped up on it and pulled the door open. AJ and I followed her inside.

  The dusty footprints went all over, from our number of trips there. Bee took shots of everything: the peeling wallpaper, the dust-choked chandelier, the kitchen, the dusty books on the shelves.

  Near the kitchen door we had found a narrow door leading into the basement, where the cool air smelled of mildew, next to an equally narrow door leading upward. “Which way do you want to go first?” I said. My voice echoed against the bare walls.

  “Let’s go to the top first and—did you see that?” Bee’s voice went tight, and AJ and I whirled around to see what she was looking at. But there was nothing there, not even a doorway, just the corner of the dining room: a wall, a length of surviving curtain, and a window too dirty to see out of.

  “Something outside?” I asked.

  “No, it was like… I don’t know what it was, just some reflection I guess.”

  “If you’re going to start on the ghost stories,” AJ said, “I’m going home.” His voice sounded a little tight, too.

  “Probably a bird,” I said. “Come on, let’s see if the stairs hold us.”

  We took the stairs up, narrow and steep and so thick with dust, you couldn’t see the color of the wood. There was a small landing, then a doorway at the next turn: we opened it and looked out, into the second-floor hallway. I commented that the stairs had no carpeting, unlike the wide, dignified staircase near the front door.

  “Servants’ stairs,” Bee said, and took a photograph.

  “You’d think they would put carpet on them, so they didn’t have to listen to the servants going up and down.”

  “They probably made them go barefoot,” AJ commented. He was standing practically on my heels and kept taking things from some crackly packet in his pocket and putting them in his mouth.

  “Do you have to chew right in my ear?” I snapped at him. Bee gave me a look and continued up the stairs.

  The rooms at the top of the house—Bee said they were the servants’ quarters—were stifling hot, and so dusty they could have been the set of some horror movie. Bee went to the tiny window between a pair of narrow, rusty bedsteads and worked to slide the latch, then pushed at the wooden frame. I didn’t think she’d have any better luck than I’d had with the windows I’d tried in the rest of the house, but maybe they hadn’t bothered painting the window frames in the little room at the top of the house, because it creaked and went up.

  Immediately, the air began to move, rising from the house below to push out of the window. The temperature dropped five degrees in a few seconds.

  “Well, if there had to be one window in the place that would open, I’m glad it was that one,” I told Bee. She was still at the window, both hands on the window frame, her chin tucked in, looking down, and I realized that she hadn’t moved a hair since the window had slid up. “Bee?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Who’s who?” I asked, and moved quickly to join her.

  There was a man in the garden some thirty feet below, looking up. He was dressed in a plaid shirt and baggy pants held up by suspenders, with dirty boots and a battered hat. Automatically, Bee raised her camera and took a shot of him.

  “Damn!” He had to be one of the people working on the renovation project, sniffing around to make sure the place hadn’t fallen down. “Busted.”

  “I don’t think so,” Bee said, her voice kind of distracted sounding. “Look at him.”

  So I looked at him, but I was looking through two layers of dirty glass and he wasn’t exactly clear, so I squatted a little to be more on Bee’s level, and looked through the open space below.

  Somehow, I didn’t seem to be seeing him much better. He was still… fuzzy, like, around the edges. I rubbed my eyes, wondering if the dust had gotten in them, and when I took my hands away from my face I saw the man taking his hat off, as if he were trying to see us better, too. I stepped back, pulling at Bee’s shoulder, but she shook me off and just kept staring down.

  There was nothing to do but go back to the window and look. Without his hat, in spite of the problem with my eyes, he was younger than I’d thought, maybe only twenty or so. But his clothes were old, and somehow old-fashioned, as if they’d been made by hand. His hair was blond and touched his shoulders, standing as he was with his head tilted back, and his eyes were a bright blue. He stared up, Bee and I stared down, and we might have stood there frozen until darkness came and obscured everything except that AJ joined us, on Bee’s other side. He took one look at the garden, gave a sort of squeak of fright, stumbled backward, and fell straight into the metal bedstead, which shouted out a chorus of metallic groans and squawks under his weight. Bee and I turned to pull him to his feet.

  When we looked back in the garden, the young man was gone. And although we tiptoed downstairs with our hearts in our throats, he didn’t appear, nor did we see marks of any big boots on the dust of the floors.

  Outside, Bee went directly around the house to where we’d seen the man, but there was no sign of him and no sign that either of the house’s doors had been opened.

  Thoughtfully, Bee retrieved the milk crate and stashed it under a bush, so if anyone came into the garden, they wouldn’t see it against the hidden door, and we walked in silence down to my house.

  It was, as always on one of those trips, later than we would have expected, and Mom wasn’t pleased at the unplanned addition of two mouths for dinner. But they couldn’t leave, not without us talking things over, and so they phoned home and Mom put a frozen pizza in the oven, and after we’d made ourselves eat we went into my room and shut the door.

  “Okay,” I started. “What did we see?”

  “A guy in the garden, and we were damned lucky he didn’t see us,” AJ said.

  “He did see us. Bee and me, anyway.”

  “Then why didn’t he come and kick us out?”

  “He couldn’t,” Bee said.

  “What, you mean he was trespassing as well? Jeez, that was sure lucky.”

  I didn’t think that was what Bee meant, but she didn’t seem willing to go any further, and frankly, I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to go there, ever again.

  “I hope you got enough for the report,” I said, “because I don’t want to go back inside. Ever.”

  “No?” Bee asked, surprised.

  “Really no,” I said.

  “Is Braddy scared?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Bee. What if that guy’d been a psycho? What if he’d had a gun? Where would we be now, huh?” Jeez, I thought: Girls are supposed to be even more careful than boys, these days. And she was fourteen, a little older than AJ and me—she should know that.

  I could see her thinking about what I meant, and to my relief, she sort of deflated a little. “Yeah, I guess you could be right.”

  “I am right. We’ve got plenty to do our report on. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Still, I wish I knew who that man was.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t you see the way he was dressed? He must have been some kind of reenactor, dressed in period costume.”

  When she said that, I realized she was right—if the guy had been just checking the pipes or working in the garden, he’d have been wearing normal work clothes like jeans, not baggy cotton pants held up by suspenders.

  “He was probably just a hippie,” I said, sounding more sure than I felt. “Runs one of those organic farms and plows with horses.”

  “Even that would be interesting,” she said, and I could see that it gave her an idea. Which was good, because she might forget about the house if she was out talking to horse-plowing organic farmers.

  AJ’s mom came then, to take him and Bee home.

  “E-mail me those pictures,” I told Bee, as she was leaving.

  “Sure. See you Monday.”

  But she didn’
t e-mail me the pictures. And she wasn’t at school Monday morning.

  Before first period, I borrowed AJ’s cell phone and texted Bee. When I saw him after second period, he hadn’t had an answer. At lunchtime, I used his phone again and called Bee’s cell and home phones, but there was only the recording. At the end of lunch, I couldn’t stand it, and went to the office.

  “Beatrice Cuomo? No, I think she’s absent today.”

  “Did anyone call in for her?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “It’s just, we were supposed to get together and talk about an assignment, an important one, and she’s never flaked on me before. It’s not like her.”

  There wasn’t much the secretary could do except put Bee’s name on the home-call list, which she’d already done. Her father wouldn’t get the message until he got home that night.

  I nearly took Bee’s bus that afternoon, but then I thought about my answering machine at home, and my e-mail, and how stupid I would feel if I got myself stuck clear across town and there was a message from her waiting for me.

  But there was no message. And she didn’t answer her phone, or her e-mail, or anything.

  I must have been nearly in tears when my mother drove up, because she looked shocked at my face. But she didn’t argue, just got back in the car, tired as she was, and drove me to Bee’s house.

  I didn’t tell her about the Weirdman House, just that I was worried about Bee.

  Bee wasn’t home. Her father drove up twenty minutes later, and let us in. We watched as he listened to his phone messages, from the school and from his sister, who was flying in from Miami later in the week, and that was all. There were no messages in Bee’s room, no indications of where she’d gone, no nothing.

  Nothing, but her digital camera.

  When we got home, I told my mother about the Weildman House.

  And while she was making phone calls, trying to find the detective in charge of Bee’s case, I went to my room and downloaded Bee’s camera into my computer.

  She’d put in a new memory stick for the trip to the house, so it started with AJ and me in the garden. Photos of the dusty living room, the dusty library, the dusty kitchen—I kicked through them fast, looking for the one she’d taken from the top room.

  It was there, the bar of the window cutting at an angle across the top, and the garden was clear, but there was no young blond man looking up.

  I went forward, and back, thinking she’d taken some that I hadn’t noticed her taking, but that was the only one of the garden from above, and there was no one there.

  No one.

  And when I called AJ to tell him about it, he started to cry and said he didn’t remember, that he’d tripped and fallen and hadn’t seen any man in the garden.

  Over the next days, a full investigation rose around us. I was questioned, and AJ, and Bee’s father. Bee had left her house Sunday morning, telling her father she was working on a school project, and had walked off into the blue. Two people had seen her, on a line drawn between her house and mine—or, between her house and the Weildman House.

  A week later, someone at the police department figured out Bee’s password and opened her computer. They found the Weildman House photos, which was a relief because I’d begun to feel that I really would have to admit to taking the camera. They also found a diary, where she wrote, among other things, about her father. They picked him up, but didn’t arrest him—without evidence, who was to say a young girl’s stories about her father taking a belt to her weren’t fiction? But people talked, and in the middle of the night a few days later, a brick went through the front window of his house.

  But he wasn’t arrested. And the police went over every inch of the Weildman House and found no evidence that she had gone back on her own. They found no evidence that a young blond man in old-fashioned clothes had been there. And two weeks later, some kids broke in, on a dare, and started a fire in the big fireplace to keep warm.

  The glow of the flames woke me before the first sirens started up.

  Bee vanished, as if she had never been. The school talked about holding some kind of memorial, and grief counselors prowled the halls with stuffed bears for a few days, but when no body was found, no one quite knew what to do. Kids did run away, after all, although not usually so spectacularly, involving a rich abusive father and a haunted house.

  In the end, the question of Bee Cuomo was more set aside than faced openly. Mrs. Dender decided that the local history project might as well go ahead with the trip to the museum, although she rescheduled it, thinking maybe it wasn’t in good taste to go and have a fun outing when this… thing was still raw. AJ and I dropped any mention of the Weildman House—he wrote an essay on the technology of the horse-drawn wagon, I did one on poisonous plants of the Central Coast, thinking all the while of how to get one into Mr. Cuomo’s dinner.

  I nearly didn’t go to the museum. I sure didn’t want to, because all I could think of was going there with Bee, but by that time, she’d been gone nearly a month, and I had half convinced myself that she’d run away and joined a commune or something. And my grades had slipped and Mom was worried, because it would mean I didn’t get into the advanced classes in high school in September, and Mrs. Dender said we’d get extra points for doing the trip, so… I went.

  And to my relief, it was okay. Bee had taken me there back in September, when we’d known each other only a few days, and the building had changed a little since then. The kitchen had a bunch of new gadgets, another upstairs room had been opened, and there were more people in the place than there had been when the fair was going on a quarter mile away.

  It was one of those historical museums made to look like the people had just stepped out for a minute—pans on the stove, a half-written letter with an ink pen in its holder, some pretty lame toys in the kids’ room, a bunch of really lumpy-looking beds. The museum docent was dressed in an old-time dress and starched white apron, with a bonnet on her head that looked pretty uncomfortable, and she talked about life in the early twentieth century and how much work it was.

  I stayed at the back, sick with thinking how Bee would have eaten all this up. I missed her, all the time, and the hole in my mind that came with wondering what had happened to her only seemed to grow bigger as time passed.

  Then the docent said something about the Weildman House, which acted like a slap across my ears.

  “This house you’re in was once standing across the field from the Weildman House, and was donated to the historical society to move here. You can see it in the pictures on the wall of the study, along with the family members.”

  To my horror, I felt my eyes prickle and turned my back on the others to study an arrangement of strange kitchen tools. When they moved on, I lagged after them and felt Mrs. Dender’s hand brush my shoulder in sympathy. The class went outside to visit the pigs, but I went back into the rooms we’d already come through, to look at the photographs.

  Sure enough, this place appeared in the background of a photograph of the Weildman House, taken when the gingerbread was sparkling and all the shingles were straight. The garden looked like the bones of what I had seen, what now lay crisp and blackened by the fire, and a blur of a walking figure could be seen at one side.

  I made my way down the line of sharp, black-and-white pictures, of the Weildman House, the town in the distance, the hills rising in the background, just like they still did. Then came a half dozen photos of local landmarks, the old hotel, the train depot that no longer had trains stopping there, a big building I’d never seen before that the description said was the library.

  Then came a photograph that kicked me in the gut.

  It had been taken inside the Weildman House, in the room with the big fireplace and the chandelier. Only now the chandelier was sparkling, the wallpaper fresh, the furniture crowding the room. And there were people.

  Three men and two women, posed to stare at the lens without moving, so the photo wouldn’t blur. To the left sa
t an older woman with a man standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder. To the right was a small sofa, the kind they call a love seat, with two prim women in high-necked dresses. The one on the right had been moving her head when the shutter clicked, and her features were unclear. But behind her, perched on the arm of the love seat, was a face I had seen before.

  He could have been the same man I’d seen standing in the Weildman garden looking up. Only in the picture he was a little older, and he was wearing a suit, a high-collared white shirt, and a necktie. But the same blond hair, the same light eyes, the same intense focus that he’d shown looking up.

  The man in the garden must have been a descendant of the Weildmans, returned to the family home.

  And then I saw the last picture, and the framed letter beside it.

  Mrs. Dender found me. She thought I’d had a fit of some kind, since I was sitting on the floor against the wall, staring at the photographs and unable to speak. She called 911, they called my mother from the hospital, all kinds of questions and tests and poking went on, and I just sat and nodded.

  They decided in the end that it was the shock of the terrible coincidence that had made me go gaga for a while, and I never argued with that. It was a shock, all right, although I don’t think coincidence had much to do with it.

  The last picture on the wall had shown the blond man again, in a different room. He had been sitting on a similar seat, with his hand resting on the shoulder of a young woman, a gesture of great affection. She, too, was looking at the camera, no blur this time, although one foot of the infant in her lap had been kicking, and the white blanket had stuttered onto the film.

  The caption below it read:

  Marcus Weildman (30), Beatrice Weildman (24), and baby Bradley, taken in the studio of local photographer Ralph Kurzen, May 20, 1909. Marcus Weildman was killed as a soldier in France during World War I. Beatrice (maiden name Collins) arrived in town as an unclaimed orphan in 1899 and married Marcus Weildman in 1905. Their children were Bradley (whose plane went down over the English Channel in 1943), Arthur John (who moved to Spokane in the thirties), and Bonnie. Beatrice Weildman lived in the family home until her disappearance, as mysterious as her arrival, in 1957. She was 72.