Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set

by James M Matheson

  “Yes. Exactly so. That’s about as good a way as any to explain it, I think.”

  A piece of jewelry, one among many, in a random box at an estate auction. “So...you have no idea who it used to belong to? Where it came from or what its history is?”

  He looked at her strangely for a moment, before taking a deep breath. Then he reached over to a shelf beside him to come back with a folded envelope. He set it down flat on the counter, sliding it across to her with one pudgy finger. “This was in the same box. Felt it was important, so I kept it. Got kind of the same feeling as when I touched the brooch. Didn’t have a vision like you did. Just a feeling. A bad one.”

  Katie looked down at it now, at this expertly crafted specimen of brass and ivory. It was heirloom worthy. Someone had put a lot of time into creating it, back in an age when pieces like this were made by hand. Marlin probably could have gotten quite a bit of money for this. If it wasn’t haunted, that is. Although she supposed there would be some people who would pay extra for that feature.

  “So the paperwork tells us who this used to belong to?”

  “The family name,” he said. “Not much more than that.”

  “Who was the family it belonged to?” she asked, even as she accepted the folded envelope from him and opened it up to find the answer to her question was staring her in the face.

  In very neat handwriting, the two sheets inside gave a brief family history of the Norstroms, starting in the 1700s when the first patriarch had settled in the wilderness of the Americas, after sailing here from England. It was a little scant on details, basically just names and dates of birth or death, but whoever had done this had been thorough. There wasn’t a single gap in the dates, right up until 1977, when the list stopped halfway down the front of the second page.

  On the back, in different handwriting, was a note scrawled in looping cursive.

  I am leaving you my mother’s brooch. I don’t want it any longer. Not after what happened. Sell it, bury it, I don’t care. My heart is gone, and I have nothing left to give.

  Katie puzzled over that last bit for a moment and then decided it wasn’t going to do her any good to try and make sense of it. She had too little information to go on. My heart is gone, and I have nothing left to give. Just someone’s declaration of lost love, she supposed. Not all family history was happy.

  The unhappy stuff was what caused things like hauntings, and curses.

  “Marlin, I don’t know how to say this, but I think your piece of jewelry here needs to go back to its rightful owner. The Norstrom family. It um, might be...”

  Haunted, she almost said. It might be haunted. Most people would fit her for a straightjacket and a padded cell if she ever dared to speak that truth.

  So instead, she told him, “It might belong to someone who is missing it.”

  He nodded, slowly, and Katie could tell that he knew what she wasn’t saying. “Why don’t you take it, Katie. I, um, don’t have the time to track down an owner, you see.”

  “Ownah,” was how it came out with his accent. His voice had a tremor in it, too, when he spoke of trying to find the owner. What he had felt from the brooch must have really disturbed him. Remembering what she had seen herself, Katie didn’t blame him. Imagine if he could have seen her vision. How would he have taken that?

  “I’d like to help you out, Marlin, really I would, but I have no idea where to even begin looking. Even with this list, how am I supposed to find the Norstrom family now? I mean, this list stopped in 1977.”

  A little bit of a smile came back to his face. “Well, that’s easy enough. There’s a Norstrom right here in Twilight Ridge. Works over to the grist mill. Connor Norstrom’s his name, as I recall. Keeps mostly to himself, not much of a talker, but not many Norstroms in this part of the world. Willing to bet if you show him that list of names, he’ll recognize a distant relative or two.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s the same family. I mean, there must be other Norstroms in New England, right?”

  “Ayup, sure enough. Never heard of any others round these parts, though. I figure it’s a good enough place to start.” His finger found that place on his neck to scratch again. “I’d take it as a personal favor, Katie, if you’d take this with you when you go.”

  “Favah,” was what Katie heard. “Sure, Marlin. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Can you take the letter, too? I really want these things gone from my shop. Er, yes. Really wouldn’t mind never seeing them again.”

  She wanted to help Marlin. He was so upset. Besides, it only made sense, considering that she was going to have to show the brooch to whoever she found at the Norstrom house if she was going to learn anything about it.

  She wanted to know what that vision was all about. A woman begging for help, trapped somehow in that hallway of dark shadows and muted sounds. Asking the Norstrom in Twilight Ridge about the brooch was her only way.

  Was the woman in her vision in danger, or was she perhaps already dead? Katie knew she wasn’t going to get any rest until she found out.

  “Don’t worry, Marlin,” she told him. “I’ll do what I can for you. What are friends for, right?”

  “Sure enough, Katie.” He seemed so relieved that she was going to help him. “It’s good to have friends. I’ll do the same for you someday, um. Well, maybe not the same but I’ve got some wonderful furniture pieces coming in, and I’ll give you first pick. Half off what I’ll charge anyone else, too.”

  Wow. This must really mean a lot to him, Katie thought if he was willing to lose money to make it happen. He was more spooked than she realized.

  Then again, so was she.

  Taking the handkerchief by the corners, she wrapped it around the brooch and picked the bundle up carefully to put it in her pocket. The pages slipped back into their envelope.

  Her maple sundae was just so much mush now. She and Marlin tried to make small talk for a few more minutes, but it was obvious that both of them had their minds on the brooch. Saying goodbye, she left and headed back for the Heritage Inn. Riley would be there, waiting for her.

  He’d be able to help her make sense of all of this. She hoped.

  Chapter 4

  The Heritage Inn was in the middle of a side street in Twilight Ridge. It was two stories tall, with that basement underneath, and she’d done so much work to it that it was almost unrecognizable as the place it had been when she bought it. She and Riley had done months of work to it, both inside and out.

  The plan had always been to get the Heritage Inn set up and operating on its own, hire someone to run the place for her, and then go back to her old life while this place continued to make money for her. Money hadn’t been an issue for her for years, but a steady stream of income had been a nice thought.

  It had slowly become obvious to her that she might never go back to that old life of moving from town to town, state to state, finding places to flip for six-digit profits but having no real life of her own. She and Riley fit into this town nicely. He had his handyman business going on the side. He was basically a self-employed contractor who could do everything from fixing a squeaky stair to rebuild your garage from the floor up.

  And Katie had made friends here who depended on her. Like Marlin McCandry, with his possessed jewelry. There were other friends for both of them, too. Ones who didn’t need help with special problems. This town had become a home for the both of them.

  She found Riley in the front room, behind the check-in counter at the back. He smiled at her, standing at the computer, making notes in the register book as he did. “The Carpenters canceled for next month,” he said to her. “That opens up two rooms. Do we want to call National Grid back and tell them we have availability after all?”

  “Well, I suppose we can do that.”

  Katie said it with less than her normal enthusiasm when it came to renting out their rooms. Sure, it was nice to know that there would be more rooms occupied than rooms empty, but at the same time, this was a quaint New Englan
d Inn, not a chain motel. Corporations like National Grid were looking for rooms where their people could flop down for a night or two and move on.

  While she appreciated the job that NatGrid did for the state by keeping the powerlines intact and the electricity running, she wanted the Heritage Inn to have a different kind of clientele. The people who stayed here should be coming for the charm of Twilight Ridge, or the thrill of its history and rumors of hauntings, or because her Inn was as welcoming as a Norman Rockwell painting. Not, she told herself, just because there were beds in the room.

  Still, money was money, and if she could snag a regular contract with NatGrid, it might be worth tweaking her business model just a skosh.

  ‘Skosh’ was one of those things they said up here in New England. It meant a little bit, or near enough, and it was just one word among several that Katie had adopted into her vocabulary. New England had its own way of speaking and thinking, and it had definitely been an adjustment from the fast-paced life she used to live.

  “Can you make the calls to arrange all that?” she asked him. “I may have been less than cordial to their representative the last time we spoke.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Riley teased her. “I remember you telling them you weren’t running a flophouse and then hanging up on them.”

  “Uh, sure, maybe I said something like that.”

  “You may possibly have sworn at them, too. Like, a lot.”

  He laughed at the memory of his girlfriend blowing her stack and Katie wanted to be mad at him, but she just couldn’t make herself do it. He looked so damned cute when he smiled. If Ryan Gosling had a younger, cuter brother, it would be Riley Harris. He’d let his hair grow a little longer in the past few months, and his hued chestnut bangs swept rakishly across his forehead. Even without working full time as a contractor he maintained that amazing body that her hands loved to explore at night.

  He was a dream, and he was all hers.

  Riley had gotten her through some very bad times. There had never been anyone like that for her before. He was the sort of man she could picture herself being with for the rest of her life.

  “Did you finish the errands?” he asked, breaking into her thoughts.

  “Yes, I did. Plus I also stopped to see Marlin McCandry.”

  “Oh yeah?” He tapped out a few more keystrokes on the computer, no doubt pulling up the contact information for NatGrid. “How’s Marlin?”

  “Well, not so good actually.” She wondered if there was a way to ease into this conversation but then decided that there was nothing for it but to jump right in. “He has a problem.”

  “Oh?” Riley said as he reached for the desk phone next to the computer, one finger pointing at the screen where he’d found the number he wanted. “What sort of problem is that?”

  From her pocket, Katie carefully removed the bundle of cloth wrapped around the brooch, making sure to touch nothing but the handkerchief. She really hoped that Marlin had washed this before he used it.

  She set it on the counter in front of Riley. He eyed it suspiciously, and then glanced back up at her.

  “Go on,” she said. “Open it.”

  One of his eyebrows rose in response to that, but he did what she asked. He peeled the handkerchief back, holding it by the corners, to reveal the brooch. The woman in ivory looked like she was staring directly at him when she was revealed.

  “Hey, cool,” was Riley’s reaction to seeing the piece of jewelry. “My mother used to have one just like this--"

  He stopped as his fingers touched the image, his eyes narrowing and his lips peeling back from his teeth, and the color draining from his face. Then he pulled his hand back like the brooch was a hot burner instead of a cool piece of metal jewelry.

  Katie quickly took his hand in hers, touching each finger, making sure the thing hadn’t actually hurt him somehow. “Oh wait, you felt it too, didn’t you? What did you feel, Riley? What did you see?”

  His eyes were wide as he shook his head. “It was just a little shock. Like when you touch a loose wire in an outlet. That was all. I didn’t...I didn’t see anything. Did you? Is that why you asked me that?”

  Katie kissed his fingertips and gave him back his hand, her thoughts tangling on themselves once more. How come she was the only one to see something when she touched the brooch? She understood why Marlin didn’t. He wasn’t sensitive to seeing the dead like she was.

  But Riley did have the same gift--for lack of a better word. He did see ghosts. He did hear the things that went bump in the night. He carried a cross in his pocket just like she did to ward off evil spirits. His was wood, hers was metal, but they were both expressions of their deeply held belief that the spirit world could reach up and screw with them at any moment if they weren’t prepared.

  She’d had a vision when she touched the brooch. A red-haired woman in trouble. That woman hadn’t shown herself to Riley. Was she calling for help specifically from Katie?

  Thinking about stuff like this could make her head hurt.

  “I take it,” Riley asked, “that this is what Marlin wanted to talk to you about? This brooch, and whatever it is that you saw?”

  “Yes. He said he bought this brooch at an estate sale, and he got the same sort of bad vibe from it that you did. Although, Marlin didn’t say anything about feeling an electric shock when he touched it.”

  “He’s not a contractor,” Riley guessed. “He doesn’t have any reason to know what an electric shock feels like, because he doesn’t have the experience with electricity that I do.”

  “That’s true.” Katie studied the brooch again. This time, she eyed it with suspicion.

  “I have to tell you, Katie,” Riley said, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “I have to wonder if it wouldn’t just be sensible to drop it into the nearest deep body of water and forget we ever saw it.”

  “Riley we can’t. I told you what I saw. We can’t just turn our back on that. You can’t be serious!”

  “Yes, I can. I’m very serious. Why should we be responsible for this?”

  “Because,” she said, “if not us, then who?”

  “Someone else. That’s who.”

  Katie was just about to say...something to that when the front door opened.

  “Greetings, one and all!” a booming voice rang out through the Inn. “Such a glorious day in our sleepy little town, wouldn’t you say?”

  Katie recognized the voice right away, even before she turned around to face their visitor. It was hard not to remember this man, with his larger-than-life presence and his larger-than-life body and his larger-than-the-whole-wide-world view of life itself.

  Pastor Jim Sutter had come to Twilight Ridge just two months ago. He oversaw the rebuilding of the church, and he’d made friends with everyone he met.

  Katie and Riley had been avoiding him, only mostly on purpose. He was a nice guy, and Katie liked him, but whenever she was around him, she still felt guilty about the way the last town pastor had died. He’d been beaten to death right here in this Inn, downstairs, by a ghost. If Katie and Riley hadn’t asked him to perform an exorcism, he might still be alive today, and there would have been no reason for Jim Sutter to ever come here to Twilight Ridge.

  They didn’t talk about that. To anyone. They’d even stopped talking about it to each other, although Katie could tell that sometimes the memory of it hit Riley. Her too, sometimes.

  But if they couldn’t bring it up with each other, they certainly weren’t going to talk about it with Pastor Sutter.

  Not that she had anything against the man. Katie had never been much of a churchgoer, or Riley either for that matter, but she thought it was nice to see such a spiritual man living in a town that had such deep, dark secrets. Lots of people needed to turn to God, or some other form of belief, to find answers. The more “good guys” there were in town, the better, as far as she was concerned.

  Besides, it was hard not to like Pastor Sutter.

  He was a large man
, tall and broad and muscled like Michael Clark Duncan had been in the prime of his life. In fact, he looked a little like Duncan, with the same rich skin color and the same wide face. His hair was thick and curly though, and his teeth were just a little bit crooked when he smiled. Sutter never would have made it in the movies.

  Lifting a hand, palm out as if he meant to give God a high five, Pastor Sutter said musically, “May the Lord shine His light down upon this place, and keep it safe and prosperous for my friends, Katie and Riley.”

  Katie had a feeling there was supposed to be more to that blessing, but under their feet, the building shook.

  The pastor’s eyes narrowed with an unspoken question.

  Riley cleared his throat. “The furnace has been acting up. I need to have it looked at before the snow settles in.” He laughed like it was nothing more sinister than that. “I’m a very good general contractor, but even I’ve got my limitations.”

  Sutter laughed at that. “A man’s got to know his limitations, that’s for sure.”

  Riley sighed, relieved that he wasn’t going to have to explain any further. “Oh, I totally agree. Where’s that from, anyway? The Bible?”

  “Nope,” Sutter chuckled. “That’s a quote from Dirty Harry. One of Clint Eastwood’s best films, in my opinion.”

  Katie relaxed. That tremor had definitely not been the furnace, which was in perfect working order. This building still held secrets. Secrets and ghosts hiding in the walls, and she had no doubt that Sutter’s well-intentioned prayer had agitated some old wound.

  The ghosts had been mostly quiet for a while now. She didn’t want them stirred up. Not with guests upstairs, and certainly not with Halloween just around the corner.

  “So what brings you here?” she asked, trying to keep from sounding like she was showing him the door already. She thought that she probably succeeded.

  “Well,” Sutter said, clearing his throat, “I just stopped by to see how everyone was this morning. Halloween is coming up, and as you know, that means we have a special All Hallow’s Eve service. It’ll be in the afternoon so all the kids can still have plenty of time for trick or treating. Just wanted to stop at all the businesses in town and invite everyone to...oh, Lord.”