by Tim Myers
“Hester always was a tad high-strung.”
I touched my aunt’s arm. “Lillian, stop dodging. There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”
“Jennifer, I knew if I said anything, you’d miss out on a wonderful opportunity. It’s all nonsense anyway.”
“I wish I’d had a choice, but I’m already committed. So what is it you haven’t been telling me?”
She frowned a moment, then admitted, “There’s just one thing I neglected to mention. Honestly, it shouldn’t matter one bit.”
“Come on, Lillian, out with it.”
My aunt scowled, then finally said, “Very well, if you must know, some folks think the place is haunted.”
“The entire house?” I squealed. Great, that was just what I needed, moving into Amityville. Suddenly my apartment didn’t seem all that bad.
Lillian shook her head. “No, the rest of the house is fine. It’s just your apartment that’s said to have a ghost.”
And that was the first time I’d ever heard of Frances Coolridge’s demise.
“So now I’m living in a haunted house?” I tried to keep my voice from shrieking, but it was tough to do.
She frowned, then said, “It’s all nonsense, Jennifer. Honestly, I expected you to be more levelheaded about the whole thing.”
“Well, I expected my aunt to look out after my best interests. The world’s just full of disappointment today, isn’t it?”
Lillian took a deep breath. “Let’s discuss this as we walk by the lake. The air has such a soothing quality to it.”
I stood my ground. “I’m not taking another step until you tell me what this is all about.”
Lillian frowned, then said, “I know you; you won’t quit until I tell you, so you might as well hear it all at once.”
I planned to stand right there until she told me, but Lillian had other ideas. If I wanted to hear why my new apartment was haunted, I was going to have to follow her as she walked down the path toward the lake.
“Jennifer, first of all, you must know that I would never put you in harm’s way. Will you at least give me that much credit?”
I wasn’t ready to give her anything, but I knew until I threw her some kind of bone, I was going to be doing laps around the lake until my shoes wore out. “I know you wouldn’t do it knowingly,” I said grudgingly.
She paused, glanced at me for a second, then nodded. “Fine.” Lillian’s step faltered a moment, then she said, “Frances Coolridge was a friend of mine in another lifetime.”
“Oh please don’t tell me you’re going to say you two shared a past life. Who were you, Cleopatra?” Some folks around town thought my aunt was eccentric, but I’d always stood up for her. It was starting to look like I’d been a tad hasty in my support.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Do you want to hear this or not?”
I was beginning to wonder that myself. Maybe I should just trot over to the library and look it up in the archives. Then again, the newspaper would report just the facts, and I knew I could count on Lillian to supply the backstory, and that was often more telling than what found its way into print. “Sorry, I’ll try not to interrupt again, but I’m not making any promises.”
“As I was saying,” Lillian continued. “Frances and I knew each other a lifetime ago. We were locker mates in high school, and the very best of friends.”
“Then how come I never heard of her until today?” I asked. “You think I would have, if the two of you were so close.” I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I couldn’t help myself.
Lillian chose to ignore it. “We had a falling-out at our graduation party. I should have apologized to her, but I kept delaying it until the issue became bigger than it really was; all the while a wall built up with every minute our conflict continued.”
This was getting good. “What did you do? It must have been something huge.”
“Jennifer, the details aren’t important. All you need to know is that we became estranged that night.”
“Aunt Lillian, there’s not a chance in the world I’m letting you off that easy. Tell me what you did.”
She stopped and looked at me long and hard. “I told you, it doesn’t matter.”
“Then I don’t want to hear the story,” I said as I turned around and started back to her car. She was stubborn, but I’d gotten my mulish streak from her, so I knew I could outlast her if I put my mind to it. Sometimes it was hard to get Lillian to talk about herself, but once she got started, I knew she’d have a tough time stopping until she finished.
I was twenty steps back up the path before she said, “I danced with her boyfriend one night.”
“When you say ‘dance,’ what exactly do you mean?”
“Jennifer, don’t be vulgar. It was one dance, no more and no less. Frances was in the powder room, and Herman asked me. I still don’t know why I said yes.”
I couldn’t hide my smile. “You had the hots for a guy named Herman?”
Lillian said frostily, “He was rather dashing, as I remember him. Now do you want to hear the rest of this or not?”
“You’ve got my undivided attention,” I said.
At least Lillian dropped her plan to circle the lake. She stood there and continued. “Frances never spoke to me again, a difficult thing to do in a town this small. She moved away soon after high school, but came back here to live after her parents died. They were quite wealthy. The family fortune started with a gold mine in North Carolina, but they quickly branched out into acquiring properties all over the South. After that, they started buying up businesses here and there as a hobby. The rumors around town were that the family barely left anything to Frances, choosing a charity in Richmond to receive the bulk of their wealth instead. The only things Frances inherited were a pair of doorstops, a swamp in Georgia and some other equally worthless things, or so the story goes.”
“So why is she haunting my room? How did she die? And why didn’t I ever hear about this?” It was hard to believe that someone could die in Rebel Forge without the entire town knowing about it.
“Frances’s dead husband was related to the Dunbars, and the owners of the newspaper weren’t about to let one whisper of the scandal out. For once, something happened here that no one else knew about. As for the rest of it, you’ll have to get the details from your brother.”
Great. Grilling Bradford was the last thing I wanted to do. “Lillian, you started this story; now finish it.”
“Bradford really should be the one to tell you. After all, he was the one who cut her down. You see, she hanged herself.”
A feeling of dread swept over me. “Please tell me she didn’t do it in my beautiful living room.”
“Of course not,” Lillian said, and I felt instantly better. Then she added, “There probably wasn’t a good place to attach the rope in there. That’s why she used your bathroom.”
So there it was. I was going to be taking a shower in the middle of a place where someone died. How in the world did Lillian think that would be better than my old apartment? “I never should have signed the lease,” I said. “At least no one ever died in my old apartment.”
“Not that you know of,” Lillian said.
“Why, what have you heard?”
She shook her head. “Jennifer, I assure you, there’s no such thing as ghosts. You’ll be fine living here, I promise.”
“If you’re so sure, then why don’t you move in with me?”
Lillian looked shocked by the suggestion. “I have my own place, my dear girl. Besides, there’s no room for both of us up there.”
“Okay then, I’ll move into your house and you relocate here. The cats will love romping around in your big old house.” My aunt had converted one bedroom of her rambling old house into a closet, and I knew her clothes alone wouldn’t fit into the attic.
Lillian said, “Jennifer, you’re delusional. I’ll tell you what I will do, though. Spend one week here. If you absolutely hate it, you have my bles
sing to move out and I won’t hold it against you.”
“Do you honestly expect me to stay here for a full week?” I looked up at my room and saw the curtain fluttering in the breeze. There were just two problems with that: there wasn’t the slightest whisper of wind in the air, and that window had been closed when I’d left it.
She said, “Oh, pooh, don’t be so dramatic. Now let’s get back to the card shop. You really shouldn’t leave it unattended this long.”
I didn’t even know how to respond to that. While it was true I was eager to leave my apartment, I hadn’t expected to go someplace worse. Still, Lillian had paid for two months there, if I could stand it for a week, maybe I could get used to rooming with a ghost.
Honestly, how bad could it be?
Chapter 2
At least I had a few days before I had to move. I probably should have spent more time fretting over my new domicile, but Custom Card Creations took up most of my conscious thought. Lillian and I were back working half an hour later. Unfortunately, the mob of customers clamoring to get in was more in my dreams than my reality. From the look of things, no one had even noticed that we’d been gone.
I was restocking some of our stickers when Lillian approached me. “Jennifer, this new gizmo came in yesterday. Would you mind showing me how to use it?”
My aunt Lillian had become a card-making fanatic since she’d come to work for me—something I was grateful for most times—but it was a tendency that could drive me crazy when I had work to do at my card shop. Still, I couldn’t expect her to help customers if she didn’t know how to make cards herself, so I put the stickers down and took the box from her. We’d just received a new embosser, and I needed to run it through its paces, trying papers from my supplier and some samples I’d made myself, before I’d recommend it to my customers.
I pulled out the tray, pegs and stencils, then quickly set it up for her, explaining as I went along. “It’s the simplest thing in the world to use.” I held one of the stencils up. “See the cutouts? These will end up embossed in your paper.” There were swirls, curlicues and leafy vines cut out of both pieces of the hard plastic. “You put the base stencil down, then the top one above it. Pin it with a peg, slip your paper in, pop a few more pegs in to hold it all together, and you’re ready to go. Think of it as a plastic sandwich with paper in the middle.”
She studied it a moment, then asked, “But how do you get it to emboss? Is it some kind of press?”
I held up a burnishing tool, a gizmo that looked like an ink pen with a little silver ball on either end. “Press this into each opening. No, not like that. Trace the pattern. Don’t worry about filling it in, just go around the edges.”
She worked at it a few minutes until she’d traced every opening, then frowned. “I must be doing something wrong. This looks terrible.”
I fought to hide my smile as I pulled out the pins, took off the top stencil, then handed the card stock to Lillian and waited for her reaction. While I hadn’t used that particular brand before, I had embossed quite a bit myself, so I knew the process.
Lillian studied the results closely, then said, “That’s absolutely incredible. Now this is what I call elegant,” she added as she held it up for me to see.
“The pattern’s a little ornate, wouldn’t you say?” I said as I took the card stock from her. Lillian had used every shape on the pattern sheet, raising nearly every square inch of the paper. I couldn’t see how anyone could add the simplest greeting to it.
“Oh pooh, Jennifer. Not everyone likes your simple stylings. You really must unleash that inner artist and let yourself go.”
I took the embosser from her and said, “Okay, no more self-help tapes for you. Have you been listening to them while you walk again?”
“Scoff if you must, but they truly work.” She gently took the embossing stencil from me. “I’d like to try one of the other sheets, if you don’t mind.”
“Knock yourself out,” I said. “I’ve got to finish restocking these collage stickers.” The sticker set images came in everything from wedding gowns to teapots to floral bouquets. They were an easy way to make an elegant card quickly, and regardless of what Lillian thought, I could make an ornate card with the best of them. I was just finishing up when the front door chimed. Not only was it not a customer, as I’d sincerely hoped; it was someone I really didn’t want to talk to at the moment.
“Jennifer,” my brother, Bradford, said, “have you lost your mind completely?”
“Sometimes I wonder,” I said. “What’s got you in an uproar now?”
Decked out in his full police uniform, my brother spun his cap in his hand, a sure sign that he was truly angry and not just posturing. I could usually tell how mad he was by the velocity of the cap. Judging by its current blurring motion, I was guessing he was pretty steamed. “You moved into a place where someone died,” he said.
“Would you like to field this one, Lillian?” I asked.
“No thank you. Goodness, look at the time. Jennifer, I have to dash, but I’ll be back anon.”
She was past me before I could grab her arm. So much for family loyalty. There was a real friction between my brother and our aunt, and I was guessing she’d just turned up the heat another notch. Well, if she was going to bail on me, I was going to return the favor and sing like a mockingbird in love. “I rented the place before I knew about its dubious history. Lillian told me about it.”
“Just tell me you didn’t sign a lease,” he said.
“I could, but you know how I hate to lie to you.” My brother was used to respect and consideration from nearly everyone in Rebel Forge, but I was one of the lone exceptions. He might be the law in our town, but he was still my brother, first and forever.
“Grab your jacket,” he said as he stormed toward the door. Only when he saw that I wasn’t following him did Bradford stop and turn back to me. “Why aren’t you coming?”
“As flattering as your invitation is, I’d like to know where we’re heading before I’m willing to leave.”
“I’ll tell you exactly where we’re going. Hester Taylor is going to tear up that lease if I have to throw her in jail to get her to do it.”
“Then I’ll just have to sign another one,” I said, standing my ground. If Bradford had approached me in a calmer manner, I might have taken him up on his offer of support. In fact, if the oaf had left me alone a few hours, I most likely would have hunted him down and pleaded for his assistance myself. What I wasn’t about to stand for was letting him make my decisions for me. Suddenly I knew that I was staying at Whispering Oak, whether my brother or Frances the ghost liked it one bit.
He stared hard at me, something I was sure made criminals quiver down to their socks, but I returned as good as I got. Finally, he said, “I never thought much of our aunt, but she’s really crossed the line. I can’t believe she’d do this to you.”
I didn’t feel much like defending her, but I wasn’t about to let Bradford take that swipe at her. “She thought she was doing what was best for me.”
“I can’t imagine how,” he said. Then I saw a grim smile on his face.
“What’s that all about? What are you up to?”
He shrugged. “Me? Sis, I’m not going to say another word. I’m just going to mind my own business.” He glanced at my clock, then said, “Sorry I can’t stay and chat, but I’ve got a date for lunch.”
“Are you taking Cindy out? Good, your wife deserves a break from the library.”
He shook his head. “No, she’s volunteering at the school today. I’m taking Sara Lynn to lunch.”
“Bradford, don’t bring her into this.”
He tried to look innocent and failed miserably. “Jen, she’s my sister, too. If your name comes up in the course of our conversation, it’s perfectly natural that I tell her your latest news.”
I could see it now, the two of them ganging up on me after they had a quick bite to eat. It was time to stop his schemes now. “I’m moving to Whisperin
g Oak. It’s settled. You can tell Sara Lynn that, and I’ll tell her the same thing when you both casually ‘stop by’ here after lunch.”
I could tell by his flinch that I’d wrecked his plan, which did my heart good. I love my brother, but sometimes I have to step on him a little harder than I want just to get his attention. Touching his cheek lightly, I said, “Bradford, I know you love me and want to protect me, and I appreciate it, I honestly do. But I’m a grown woman. I’ll be fine, I promise you.”
He grunted, uncomfortable as always with exhibits of emotion. “You’d better be. If anything happens to you, I’m holding Lillian responsible.”
After he was gone, my stomach grumbled, and I realized that I was alone. The only way I was going to get anything to eat myself was to shut the card shop down, and I couldn’t afford to do that. I rummaged through my purse and found a few peanut butter crackers, then grabbed the last Diet Coke from my minifridge. If my questionable nutritional practices didn’t kill me, how much luck could a ghost have?
Lillian came back to the shop soon after Bradford left, and I wondered if she’d been waiting in the shadows for his departure. I didn’t care. She had a bulging bag from Granville’s Deli, a new sandwich shop that had opened where Carly’s House of Style had recently been. We were all accustomed to watching shops come and go on Oakmont, but I’d hated to see Carly’s shut down. Contrary to its name, the boutique was run by an older man named Georges, who had better taste in clothing than I ever had. We’d become friends since I’d opened my place, but Georges couldn’t afford to stay in business and he’d shut his doors, a prospect that haunted my dreams nearly every night.
Lillian handed me a sandwich, and I took it eagerly from her. “Don’t you at least want to know the choices?”
“If it’s not still moving, I’ll eat it.” I took a single bite and discovered that I’d chosen a club sandwich, one of the worst ones I’d ever had in my life. The bacon was still raw, barely warmed, while the bread was at least as old as I was. If tomato and lettuce were present, they were hiding from that bite. The rest of the meat was frozen into a solid block. Lillian at glanced at my expression, then wisely examined her sandwich before sampling it. Without a word, she is wrapped her sandwich back up in its paper. “Give that to me,” she said, gesturing to mine.