Phantom in the Pond

by Dorothy Bodoin

  “I still have to be able to see what’s in front of me.”

  Deer leaping across the road, a dog—

  “I guess so.” She quieted, then asked, “Back there… What did you mean about a tornado?”

  Here in the safety of the car, with Misty standing up on the back seat shaking herself, I remembered. “I stepped into Holly’s body again.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. That is, I think so. My hair was long.”

  It was still wet, dripping down my neck. But it came down to my shoulders. No further. I touched it to make sure.

  I turned on the heater and the windshield wipers, for all the good they did.

  “In Holly’s world, there was a tornado,” I said. “She was trying to save her dog who’d jumped into the pond.”

  “Like Misty?”

  “I didn’t see that part, but it was her collie, Tristan. The phantom in the pond.”

  “What else happened?” she asked.

  “There was a horrible crash. The cupola and the porch came down. I was caught in the explosion.”

  Again, I touched my cheek, still thinking I might feel a trickle of blood. It was wet but still only water.

  “Well, that didn’t happen. The house looks fine now.”

  “That part must have been rebuilt after the tornado,” I said.

  But how did this version of the past mesh with my other vision—of being rescued by Micah Frost who carried me into Brent’s house and laid me on the sofa?

  Annica held her hands in front of the heater’s fan, shaking them. “Is that what happened to Holly?”

  “Maybe, but you’d think if she drowned in the pond, somebody would have discovered her body. Her disappearance wouldn’t have remained a mystery all these years.”

  “And where is it now?”

  “Obviously not at the bottom of the pond. Brent had the pond drained and cleaned. The water is fresh. There are fish… That reminds me. Where are the goldfish?”

  “That,” Annica said, “is the least of our worries.”

  Forty-four

  Finally I was able to drive away from Loosestrife Lane, slowly and carefully.

  After a while, Annica said, “What you say makes sense,” Annica said. “Except for the body. What happened to it?”

  I reached over to turn the heater off. We were still wet, but the initial cold had passed. As I drove through ever-lessening rain, I relived my time in the pond, which had seemed longer than it could have been. I shivered just thinking about it.

  From now on, stay out of the water.

  “If Holly died in the pond, someone must have removed her body,” I said.

  “Someone like who?”

  “Possibly Micah Frost or the other boyfriend.”

  I thought about what I had said. “In that case, though, they’d have told the authorities. Holly would have been listed among the fatalities of the tornado. Her death wouldn’t become a decades-long mystery.”

  “That could be. But let’s go back a little. Why would anyone move Holly’s body and not say anything about it?”

  I couldn’t think of a reason. “Well, that’s another aspect of the mystery. Remember this is all speculation.”

  “And where would they put it?” she asked. “Isn’t stealing a body illegal?

  “We’re getting in over our heads,” I said.

  I slowed, as I turned onto a narrow road, its gravel slippery with water. The rain had tapered off to a drizzle, and I could see the sparkling wildflowers and myriad shades of green shining in the fresh wash. Everything renewed.

  “When a tornado touches down, there’s always a lot of confusion,” I added.

  I remembered my own experience in Oakpoint. My slow realization that the danger had passed, but a tree had crashed into my roof, leaving my house vulnerable to the elements. I recalled my arms around Halley who was trembling in the aftermath of the tornado, recalled thinking that in an instant my life had changed.

  “If Holly died in the pond, I moved out of her body just in time,” I said. “But I don’t think she did. Tristan, her collie, died though.”

  The phantom in the pond. Holly couldn’t save him.

  A curious question remained. If my scenario were true, where was the dog’s skeleton? Annica didn’t ask. Anything could have happened to it, especially if the grounds had been unvisited for a long time.

  We drove on in silence. Without a shred of hard evidence, I felt we were close to solving the mystery of Holly Wickersham’s disappearance. Call it a premonition. Lucy would understand.

  “I want us to get together soon to start assembling pieces of the puzzle,” I said. “We’re running out of time.”

  “You and me?”

  “All of us who’ve experienced oddities at Brent’s house. We can have dinner. Something simple like pizza.”

  “I’ll bring dessert from Clovers, and we’ll compare notes,” Annica said. “Five heads are better than one.”

  “And Misty will be there,” I said. “I wish she could talk.”

  ~ * ~

  Dinner couldn’t have been simpler or more appealing: Two large pizzas, my salad, and strawberry meringue pie from Clovers. Even if we didn’t end up with any breakthroughs, it was a pleasure to sit together and concentrate only on the mystery.

  “All I want is a house that’s quiet and doesn’t push people down the stairs,” Brent said. “Is that asking too much?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I hope you’ll have it.”

  “When the unhappy spirit is at rest, so will the house be,” Lucy said. “I give you the case of the ghost in the wildflower field.”

  She referred to the ghost in white who had materialized to help herself to the flowers Brent and Annica had planted on the site of the burnt-to-the-ground pink Victorian. “You haven’t seen her lately, have you, Annica?”

  “No,” she said. “Not since Jennet figured out who she was. Does that mean she’s at rest?”

  “I assume so. Let’s do the same for Holly Wickersham.”

  “I don’t think Holly was murdered,” I said.

  “Why not?” Brent asked. “We have the perfect villain—a jealous boyfriend.”

  “As a motive, it’s weak. Who kills his girlfriend because she finds another man? Or because he resents her success?”

  “What if they had a lover’s quarrel?” Annica asked. “It could have been an accident. He struck her, she fell and hit her head on one of the stones around the pond. He panicked and hid her body.”

  “Annica may have a new career as a fiction writer one day,” Lucy said.

  “What about the man Holly was driving up to Mackinac Island to meet?” Annica asked.

  “We don’t have any information about him, only his first name,” I said. “Besides, the tornado struck on the day she planned to leave, so she probably didn’t go.”

  “Or she did go—and got caught in the tornado somewhere on the road between here and there.”

  “In that case, she could have been thrown out of her car into the woods,” Brent said. “We’ll never find her. But I hold with the idea that she was murdered.”

  Annica cut a dainty piece of her pizza, carefully removing the mushrooms of which she was always suspicious. “Finding a modern day killer is hard enough. When we’re dealing with a cold case, hard becomes impossible.”

  “Not necessarily,” Crane said. “It’s been done.”

  “What difference does it make, after all?”

  “I’m surprised you’d ask that, Annica,” Lucy said. “We have a haunted house and a soul that isn’t at rest.”

  “Don’t forget my dream,” Brent added. “A house where old collies can have a new home and happy caretakers who won’t be spooked by spirits and—things. Now that I’ve found the perfect couple, I’m eager to move the collies in.”

  “Those people may never experience what we have,” Lucy pointed out.

  “I can’t count on that.”

  “I don’t see Micah Frost as
Holly’s killer,” I said, “and I couldn’t locate Jane Wickersham. I’ve read all Holly’s books and her journals. There’s nothing more in the attic. All we have to go on is…uh…what we have. Which isn’t much.”

  I was missing something, but what? The explanation for the doughnut thief was most likely a vagrant who’d taken advantage of a door carelessly left ajar. Jane Wickersham had either moved out of the state or passed away. As for the eerie sounds in the house, like the unexplained scratching, there could be a logical explanation for it. The house was old. Didn’t all old houses squeak and sigh and groan every now and then? Maybe the answer was simpler. Brent’s house had mice that were good at hiding themselves.

  I chose to slide over the cry the wall had uttered when Annica had pounded the nail into it. Logic held no explanation for that phenomenon.

  There comes a time in every mystery when there is no other place to look, no other road to follow.

  I glanced at Crane. He was breaking off a piece of pizza crust for Candy. I couldn’t see her. She must have sneaked under the table. In any event, he looked nicely distracted.

  “I went back to the house yesterday,” I said. “I took Misty with me. We stood at the pond for a long time. I fixed my thoughts on that last vision I had. Nothing happened. Then I stood on the landing. Again, nothing. My memory was like a screen gone dark.”

  “Perhaps the story ends there,” Lucy murmured. “At the pond.”

  “You should have called me,” Annica said.

  “Wrong.” Crane looked up. “Neither of you should have gone. Haven’t you had enough warnings?”

  “It appears there’s nothing else to know,” Lucy said. “I could go back myself—”

  “No,” Brent countered. “You’re too vulnerable, Lucy. Not until we’re settled in, and I’m sure it’s over. Then we’ll have our housewarming.”

  “Nothing else to know,” I repeated Lucy’s words. “But what if there is and we give up too soon? I hate not knowing what happened to Holly.”

  “Let it be a literary mystery,” Annica said. “I’ll bet we’re the only ones who care about it. Does anyone have any brilliant ideas?”

  “I do.” Brent picked up the server lying in the empty box. “Let’s open up the other pizza.”

  And that was it.

  ~ * ~

  That night I lay awake, thinking. Crane slept at my side. Halley and Misty guarded the doorway as usual. All was peaceful and calm, except for my runaway thoughts.

  If I were never to have another glimpse into Holly’s life, if indeed she had died on the day the tornado touched down in Foxglove Corners, I had to make sure to wring every ounce of significance out of the last look I had.

  Reaching in vain for her collie, feeling the churning water closing around me/Holly, hearing the mighty crash as the cupola and the small porch beneath it broke apart, its pieces swept up by the killer wind along with all the other debris that blew in the air of Foxglove Corners that day.

  A sharp-edged piece, possibly glass, had flown into Holly’s face.

  And the winds tossed her skyward as if she were a part of the cupola, flung her up and up—

  And down again.

  Forty-five

  The cupola. That was the answer.

  It had been destroyed in the tornado. At some point, repairs were made and a new cupola erected complete with a porch underneath which had always seemed purely ornamental without a door leading from the house. In time, the few people who lived in the neighborhood and the occasional passerby would have forgotten that it had been replaced.

  Misty had shown an inordinate interest in that part of the property, sniffing, wanting to dig a hole in the bed of dandelions and impatiens that flourished at the foundation of the porch.

  She was trying to tell me something.

  Suppose the tornado had thrown Holly away from the pond, toward the house. Suppose as the cupola disintegrated, she had been caught in the maelstrom and it buried her in the wreckage? By the time the debris was cleared away, perhaps Holly’s body would have been lying in a huge depression in the earth well hidden from sight? And never discovered.

  It could have happened that way. Repairs completed, all traces of the original removed, and no one aware of the body buried deep in the ground.

  By then Holly would be dead, her passing and her grave a mystery never to be solved, her fleeting hold on fame forgotten, all the terror of those last moments trapped in the walls of the house.

  It did happen that way. Without a shred of evidence, I was certain I was right. Well, fairly certain. I needed proof if I were to convince anyone else.

  I almost reached for my phone to call my friends back. In doing so, I glanced at the time. It was almost midnight. I’d have to wait until tomorrow.

  Should I wake Crane? He wouldn’t thank me. But this was important. I touched his shoulder lightly, then reconsidered and withdrew my hand. I would tell him tomorrow. He’d be more receptive to what he would no doubt call one of my wild ideas when he was full of pancakes and bacon.

  I had someone else to convince. Someone who could help me prove my theory or shoot it down. Would Brent be amenable to having a part of his house torn down to search for a decades-old skeleton?

  Maybe. He could afford it. He was congenial and fond of me and committed to giving the house everything it needed. Still, there were limits, even to Brent’s good nature.

  I couldn’t guess what he might say, but I was going to find out.

  ~ * ~

  “Have you gone completely crazy?” Brent demanded. “I can’t have heard you right. You want me to do what?”

  I set the last piece of strawberry meringue pie in front of him and poured him a cup of fresh hot coffee.

  Crane’s frosty eyes twinkled. “Jennet knows how to persuade a man, Fowler. She and I have a bet going,” he added. “I’d like to win, so think carefully before you decide.”

  “Tell me again why you want me to take my house apart?” Brent said.

  “Not the whole house. The cupola and the porch beneath it. That’s where we’ll find Holly’s body or, rather, her bones.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Do you believe what I experienced at the pond yesterday?”

  “I believe you believe it.”

  In a bid for time, he cut into his pie and took a long swallow of coffee, grimacing as he complained. “That’s scalding. Are you trying to take me out?”

  “Let it set for a while. Summarize what happened for me.”

  “Let’s see. Holly heard the tornado siren. She ran out of the house and saw her dog in the pond. She went in after him. Did I miss anything?”

  “No. What do you think happened afterward?”

  “Holly might have died on the spot, drowned, or hit her head on the concrete and lost consciousness.”

  I nodded. “Anything can happen when a tornado touches down,” I said. “And that one did, with the house right in its path. Last year I read about a family whose dog ended up all the way in the next town. After the earth settles, rescuers find the victims scattered far and wide.”

  “That makes a nice story,” he said. “But I still think Holly’s boyfriend or that other guy did her in. Her death didn’t have anything to do with the tornado.”

  My version of the past tragedy was infinitely more credible. How to convince him?

  “Well, I believe what I experienced. Did I mention Misty’s attachment to that part of the house? Misty, my psychic collie?”

  Hearing her name, Misty padded over to me and leaned her head against my leg.

  Brent sighed. “Have you talked to Lucy about this?”

  “Not yet. The idea just came to me last night.”

  “If I do what you’re asking, it would mean another delay in opening the house,” he said. “I’ve waited long enough.”

  Ah, he was beginning to bend, a hardy plant swaying in a strong wind.

  “It shouldn’t affect the rest of the house,” I said. “Think of it a
s rebuilding a damaged porch. In the end, you’ll have a brand new addition to the house.”

  “It’s a lot of trouble and expense,” he said. “Maybe for nothing.”

  “Do you really want to move people and collies into a house that sits on a grave?” I asked. “Don’t you want all the disturbances to subside?”

  He nodded slowly. “That’s true.”

  His dessert dish was empty. Unfortunately, so was the pie plate. I should have baked another pie.

  “Drink your coffee,” I said. “It should be cool enough by now. Think it over.”

  “How about this?” Brent said. “Couldn’t I have some of my men dig down deep all around the porch?”

  “If we’re going to investigate, we should be thorough.”

  He drained the cup. Quickly I refilled it. “I want to know what Lucy thinks about this.”

  “So do I. I’ll call her.”

  He fell silent. Finally he said, “Damn, Jennet. Now that you’ve put the idea in my head, I’ll always wonder. I can’t have the ghost of Holly Wickersham rising out of the ground and walking through the house. How sure are you that that’s what happened?” he asked.

  “Ninety-nine percent,” I answered promptly.

  “You’ve always been right before.”

  Except for Crane’s discreet cough and Misty’s heavy breathing, the kitchen was silent.

  Brent said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  Success! “You won’t be sorry,” I assured him.

  I hoped I wouldn’t be either.

  “It would be giving the house a fresh start,” I said. “A clean slate.”

  “It looks like Jennet wins the bet,” Crane said. “I didn’t think you’d cave, Fowler. I hoped you wouldn’t.”

  “What did you guys bet?” Brent asked.

  I glanced at Crane, suppressing a triumphant smile. “If I lost, I’d have to give up all potentially hazardous activities. But I won. The show goes on.”

  ~ * ~

  Brent claimed he’d have to find the right company to accomplish the demolition safely. “It won’t be easy. What we’re about to do is dangerous.”

  As it turned out, one of the men who had worked on the house was the former owner of a demolition company in the south. He had reduced scores of buildings to powder. He referred to the job as a piece of cake. The contract was signed and the date set for the following Friday. I waited impatiently to see if I was right.