by Susan Vaught
Silence dropped around us instead, pressing like fists into my ears. My fingers curled into the red rubber tip of my joystick. I had wanted to get inside this house for as long as I could remember, but now the sound of my own fast breathing sent chills up the back of my neck. The air smelled like lemon and wood, like somebody had recently used furniture polish.
“Has the cleaning crew been here this week?” I asked Ms. Springfield.
She glanced around. “Not that I know of. Next week, I think. Looks pretty dusty in here.”
It did. But, weird. The place really did smell like lemon-scented cleaner. Underneath that, though, there was something else. Something . . . wet. A little dank. It reminded me of the one time I had to go to a funeral with Toppy and hang out at the cemetery while they finished burying the guy who died.
Lemon-scented grave dirt. Wonderful.
My breathing got even faster. My eyes darted left and right, looking at the wooden floors and paneled walls, at the light fixtures added sometime after electricity became common. Cobwebs strung between the hanging lights, jiggling gently in some breeze I didn’t feel. I got a shot of the cobwebs and sent it out, but I couldn’t help thinking maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe some serial killer was hiding in the closet, waiting to separate us and chop us all to bits. Or maybe there really were ghosts, and one of them would start pitching books at our heads.
“So, Chief Brennan.” Mayor Chandler put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “If you’ve never watched a ghost hunter show, how did you know they talk about cold spots?”
Toppy eyed her sideways, narrowing his gaze and frowning as his bald head turned even more red. And just that fast, I could breathe normally again. Lavender giggled, as did her mother.
“Fine,” Toppy snarled. “I’ll check the top floors and the turret. Lavender, you and Max take the ground floor with Maggie. Joy, if you wouldn’t mind, have a look at that cave-in area, but be careful. Nobody break anything, nobody fall into anything. Got it?”
I sighed. “People always separate in scary movies, and that’s when the zombies eat them.”
“Well, if the Walking Dead get a few of you, it’ll cut down on the chatter.” Toppy stalked off without waiting for anybody to agree or disagree or yell at him for suggesting it’d be great if we became zombies. He headed out of the foyer and to the left, and a few seconds later I heard the squeegee of his rubber-soled boots on creaking wooden stairs.
He was halfway to the next level when Ms. Springfield said to Mayor Chandler, “Maggie?”
Mayor Chandler sniffed. “It’s an old nickname. He was the only one who—he always—well, never mind.”
Ms. Springfield left us, smiling as she walked off to the right. “The kitchen and the door to the basement are this way,” she called over her shoulder. “It’s more like a cellar, really. Just stay out of the central living room. It’s roped off so nobody falls in the hole where the floor rotted through. There’s a set of temporary metal steps the city put in. I can use those to get a closer look.”
“Okay,” Mayor Chandler said, “Let’s start in the west wing, girls. This way, past the main stairs. We’ll have lights, since the power’s on, but obviously, the heat’s only set to engage if it gets below freezing inside, to save the pipes.”
She started walking, and I pushed my clown-nose forward. My chair whirred, the lights on the control flickered, and it shut itself off.
I came to a hard stop.
“What the . . .” I picked up my hand and frowned at the darkened panel. Dead. Nothing.
Lavender came up beside me. “Did you forget to charge up last night?”
“I never forget to charge my chair,” I said. “Not ever.”
Mayor Chandler came back to us and tapped the side of my chair controls. My heart thudded as I bit my bottom lip. My chair had never ever broken before, unless I was messing with it to enhance something. Not the propulsion system, anyway. If it wouldn’t turn on, we could switch it to manual, but it was hard to roll. And how long would it take to fix? My throat went dry and my eyes blinked really fast. I could try a manual chair again, but my shoulders were so weak I didn’t think I could roll it by myself. If it took a long time to get the electric chair repaired, people would have to push me—and if I didn’t have somebody to push me, I’d just be stuck wherever I was, and that had happened to me once before, and—
Cringing, I hit the green circle for on.
All the lights flickered. One at a time, the panel areas lit up. “Thank you,” I said to nobody in particular, so relieved I almost wanted to lie down and take a nap. Only not in a cold haunted house.
I made sure I was in drive mode instead of recline, and double-checked that I was set on level two of four, to move around inside a building. Then I gave the joystick a little bump to be sure it wouldn’t turn off again. The chair bucked forward and auto-stopped, just like it was supposed to.
The mayor raised her eyebrows. “Good to go?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I breathed a few times, to make sure I still could, then honked the clown-nose.
“What happened to it?” Lavender asked.
“No idea,” I said, even though my mind was shouting GHOSTS!
Mayor Chandler pointed to the hallway. “Let’s try this again.”
My watch beeped, and I nearly jumped straight to the ceiling. But I held it together, shifted my weight, and we headed away from the door, the mayor leading the way, Lavender following her, and me rolling behind them, guarding the rear flank and staring at my controls every three seconds. In between control checks, I tried to take good photos of the house. Dust drifted in dull clouds around us, and cobwebs jammed the cracks and corners.
Mayor Chandler ran her fingers along a table, leaving a trail in the thin gray film. “Guess the cleaning crew doesn’t dust much.”
Outside the foyer, the narrow main hall hugged the side of the stairwell on the right. The slowly upward-sloping wall of the stairwell was covered in ancient black-and-white framed photographs, the kind that looked burned around the edges. No fixtures hung above, and light from the windows barely reached us, leaving shadows across the whole stretch of boards, the pictures dim under their layers of dust.
Lavender pointed at the pictures. “Daguerreotypes. These are the oldest kind of photos.”
The daguerreotypes were framed with fading, flaking bits of gold paint accenting carved bramble designs. The gaunt figure of Hargrove Thornwood stared out at us from all of the shots, his dark eyes hooded, his lips pulled into a perpetual stern frown. Seeing him close up gave me the shivers. Somehow, pictures on websites didn’t seem as personal as looking right into a still shot of his blank stare. The black-and-white photos made everything seem twice as chilled and bleak. And seriously, that man’s eyes really did seem to follow me whichever way I leaned, especially the eyes in the largest photo, the one right in the middle, with a life-size version of his face. The glass seemed oddly clean compared to the rest, and the way it was positioned, it was like he was staring into every room on this side of the hallway, all at once.
Mine, his expression seemed to say. It’s all mine, and I’m not sharing. I got a picture of him, but I knew the iPad camera couldn’t capture that level of creepy-creep-ness.
“Who are all those men he’s with?” Lavender asked, pointing to a big cluster of photos of bunches of guys wearing suits and tall black hats. “Was his family that big?”
“Those aren’t his family members.” Mayor Chandler stopped and turned to the dozens of antique photos. “They’re businessmen and politicians. These pictures, they’re from when he first got here, and they’re all about status, not memories. Making business relationships, getting people to take out loans and invest, give him permits to build whatever he wanted to build—my late husband would have approved.”
I squinted at the grainy pictures. “All things obey money?”
“Something like that,” the mayor agreed. “These are just plain spooky, like shots from an old Dracula movi
e.”
“I’ve coooome to drink your bloooood,” I said in a croaky-crow voice that sounded way too loud.
Lavender cringed. “Ew. No vampire references.” She inched away from the full-size version of Thornwood’s face and rubbed her fuzzy purple arms with her fuzzy purple mitten-hands. “I had nightmares for weeks after I saw the original Dracula. And didn’t Mr. Creepy make any pictures of his wife or his kids and grandkids?”
“No,” Mayor Chandler said. “There are some oil portraits of his wife, though. One of them is right in there, in the main study.”
We moved farther into the mansion, which seemed thoroughly cold, with zero “spots” of one temperature or the other, no matter what those ghost shows tried to get us to believe. As I rolled away from the big picture of Thornwood’s face, it was hard not to check back and make sure his eyeballs weren’t swiveling to glare at me.
Mayor Chandler steered us through a door on the left, and I rolled into another paneled room, this one lined with bookcases and dominated by a huge fireplace surrounded by the expensive pink marble Tennessee is famous for. The scent of cleanser seemed to get stronger the farther we went. Mayor Chandler switched on the lights.
Immediately, I stared at the fireplace to see if it had been cleaned. The inside seemed oddly polished, but the outside—nah. Just as dusty as the rest of the place, even if it smelled like Lemon Pledge and Windex.
Hanging over the pink fireplace was a huge cobweb-laced painting, its bright colors standing out from the rest of the house. A beautiful woman in a red-striped gown with a wide, round bottom—hoop skirt, I think those were called—looked down on us, smiling ever so slightly. Her brown hair was swept to one side in a tight up-do, but curls spilled under her bright red bonnet and tumbled down one shoulder, almost reaching her waist and brushing the tops of what looked like red velvet gloves.
I had never seen this picture before, not on any of the Thornwood sites. My mouth came open as I studied the vivid reds and blacks and browns. “Is that Thornwood’s wife, Mayor Chandler? Is that Vivienne?”
“Indeed. Her parents were French, but they moved her from New Orleans to Tennessee when she was only eight.”
“She’s beautiful,” Lavender said. “And she looks smart. So why would she marry a jerk-sicle like Thornwood, then stay with him until it killed her?”
Mayor Chandler’s expression grew distant. “Women in the past didn’t have many choices, and sometimes they didn’t have a say in who their parents chose for them to wed. Or maybe she loved him.”
“But he was awful.” I couldn’t quit looking into the eyes of the painted woman, green like my mother’s, with the same sort of distant, unfocused expression Mom usually had. At least I thought it was similar. It had been a while since I had seen Mom in person. Did her eyes actually look like that?
“People in love look past lots of faults,” Mayor Chandler said. “Sometimes you love people even when you see they have bad problems. And I think that back then, people tried even harder to care about people they were supposed to love, since they couldn’t really leave each other.”
Frowning, I tucked my iPad between my leg and the chair arm. People they were supposed to love—and people they weren’t supposed to leave. Like husbands and wives. Or parents and children. My mom certainly didn’t have a problem leaving a child behind. Eight years since the disaster, and four years since my daughter pawned off her disabled kid on me . . .
The hacker had a few things right. Maybe too right. I so did not want to think about my mother, but her face kept popping into my head. Tears clouded my vision, and I ground my teeth. The beautiful Mrs. Thornwood gazed down her pretty nose at me, her green Mom-eyes so piercing, smiling like she might feel sorry for me.
My chair whirred as I pulled on the joystick and rocketed back across the threshold, retro-pulsing into the hallway. My anti-tip wheels, little plastic spinning things that stuck out behind the real wheels to keep me from flipping backwards on big hills, crashed into the paneling at the bottom step, and a big crack echoed through Thornwood Manor.
Two little spots of light danced on the wall in front of me, like Thornwood’s eyes had turned into lasers, threatening to sizzle through the wood paneling. Any second now, they’d swivel to me and roast me alive for hurting the house. For real, I felt like somebody was staring at me, and hard.
My chair switched itself off again. I let go of my controls. “Crud!”
I was stuck now.
7
Max?” Lavender said from the study, still standing underneath the portrait of Vivienne Thornwood.
The dots of light on the wall vanished.
“I heard that crash,” Toppy yelled from somewhere above me. “And I know who did it. What part of ‘Nobody break anything’ did you miss, hotshot?”
“That sounded like thunder and lightning over my head,” Ms. Springfield yelled from underneath the floor where I was sitting.
“Sorry,” I said. “I banged into stuff, but I don’t think anything broke.”
Mayor Chandler came over to where I was sitting, just as I switched the chair back on again. After it powered up, she helped me ease the chair away from the wood paneling. “Little nick on the bottom step. That’s all.” Her eyes met mine. “No harm, no foul. Let’s check the next room.”
“Um, okay,” I said as Lavender caught up to us. My face felt hot, and I knew I had to be blushing. I honked the clown-nose on my joystick, hoping nobody would notice my bright red cheeks.
Without saying much else, we moved through several other rooms attached to the hallway—a bedroom, a small storage room, and another sitting room, this one with no fireplace or books. We tried the door to the closet under the stairs, but it was locked. A few minutes later, we made it through the kitchen with its closed range and very literal icebox with the door where the giant ice block should go standing open, and its thick chopping block boasting carved brambles on all four legs.
“Nothing looks out of place,” the mayor said.
“I’m not sure I’d know if it was,” Lavender said, “but I don’t see anything weird, and this part faces the field and your house, Max.”
I grunted, then realized that sounded way too much like Toppy. Even though I didn’t want to, I kept thinking about Mrs. Thornwood, and how maybe she loved her husband even if he was a total barf-head.
Did my mother actually love me? Was there something wrong with me that I didn’t automatically love her back?
Maybe I did love her. Maybe I didn’t. Mostly, I didn’t want to be thinking about her, but it kept happening, and at really bad times.
That jerk hacker. This was all his or her fault.
I hit my joystick and eased my chair out of the kitchen into the huge dining room. It had four floor-to-ceiling windows with green drapes, and hardwood floors with expensive-looking rugs decorated with swirly green and brown designs. The big table in the center, which I managed not to bash into, had a thick green velvet tablecloth, and the table had been set with fragile-looking gilded china, complete with little etchings of the Thornwood Owl in the center.
Mayor Chandler stayed in the kitchen. “I forgot about all this 1840s cooking stuff,” she said, sounding fascinated. “This family had the best of everything from that time period.”
Lavender wandered into the dining room and got absorbed by the table settings, running her finger along the edge of the china. Her nose wrinkled. “It kind of stinks in here, like wet dirt.”
“It smells like fresh graves,” I mumbled.
“That’s seriously morbid, Max,” Lavender said.
“Did you notice we’re in a haunted house?” I followed the scent to the far door in the dining room, but when I pulled it open, I found myself looking at a big yellow X made out of caution tape.
Past that, there was about ten feet of solid floor, followed by broken boards and a collapsed hole in the center. A set of metal stairs with handles had been lowered into the hole.
Moving the tape to one side, I
inched into the room. The boards under my chair popped and creaked.
“Careful, Max,” Ms. Springfield said, her voice rising up through the opening. “I’m right underneath you. The edges of the room are still supported by a beam, but you really don’t need to be in here. There’s nothing down here, anyway. It’s just four walls with no doors.”
“Okay.” But I had to look, at least once. Craning forward, I gazed down into the cellar, and my eyes widened when I realized it wasn’t made out of dirt. Instead, the floor looked like slabs of solid gray rock, all smooth and polished under its coating of dust, like—
Headstones.
Ms. Springfield stood dead center in a maze of her own footprints, gazing up at me. “It’s limestone,” she said. “From the same quarry used to get the limestone for the state capitol building. If somebody shined it up, it’d be impressive.”
“But what is it?” I asked. “It makes no sense that there’s no way in or out.”
Ms. Springfield shrugged. “No idea. A hiding spot, maybe.”
“It’s like a priest hole,” Lavender yelled from the dining room. “Or maybe a safe room in case of fire or armed robbery.”
“Priest hole?” I shook my head. “You’re making that up.”
“Lots of old British houses have them,” Lavender went on, like just everybody should know about priest holes. “Back a long time ago, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne in England, you could go to jail or get executed for being Catholic. Priests snuck around to give people communion and stuff, and soldiers tried to catch them. So Catholics built priest holes to hide the priests in case of raids. Pretty cool, except the soldiers caught on and started finding them—and a bunch of priests suffocated waiting for searches to end.”
“Nice,” I said, and I instantly imagined piles of priest bones right underneath my wheels.