The Curse of Misty Wayfair

by Jaime Jo Wright

  “Not much.” Rhett’s baritone was practically in her ear.

  Heidi whirled. “Stop sneaking up on me.”

  “I’m not.” He shrugged.

  She edged through the doorway into what once had been the foyer. Her eyes swept the room. There was no furniture, nothing really of any interest outside of the fact the place practically oozed untold history and felt like lingering souls floated in the corners.

  Heidi shivered.

  No. No wandering souls today.

  Her footsteps were silent as she crossed to the middle of the old lobby. Rüger had slipped in and was nosing around in the corner. A mouse probably. Rhett stood in the doorway still, hands in his pockets, patiently waiting for her to do whatever it was she’d come here to do.

  A narrow staircase with walls on both sides led up to the second floor. A long hallway ran to the right of the stairs, with a few doors on each side of it. Heidi looked farther down the hall and saw yet another door at the far end. This one appeared to open to the backyard of the asylum.

  “Weird,” she mumbled. Who would have thought to build a mental hospital deep in the woods, far away from civilization? Why not at the edge of town? Easier access, less—bizarre.

  Heidi moved to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Careful,” Rhett admonished.

  She cast him an exasperated look. “Listen,” she said with a raised brow, “if you’re going to hang out with me, I’m going to need more than just one-word sentences and military commands. Either stay here and leave me be, or come. But if you come, use your big-boy words.”

  His face darkened at her words.

  Eek. Heidi winced inwardly. She sounded lofty and rude, like Vicki. She hefted a sigh and offered a gentler smile. “I’m sorry. It’s just—I don’t know why you’re here. You don’t even like me.”

  Rhett snapped his finger at Rüger. The dog was wandering down the abandoned hall.

  Heidi repositioned her foot on the bottom step.

  “It’s not that I don’t like you.” Rhett reached down and gave Rüger a reassuring pat on the head. Then he lifted his gray eyes, a bit softer now. “I just don’t trust you.”

  “I’m not hurting anyone today.”

  “Exactly my point.” Rhett neared her, and she could smell the repair shop on his shirt. Grease and fresh air. “You’re reckless.”

  “Ahh.” There it was again. The presupposed insults. Heidi bit back a perturbed sigh.

  “You’re cute. Reckless is cute,” Rhett stated blandly. “But it can cause a lot of trouble.” He pushed past her, pounding his foot on the stairs to test their stability.

  Did he just say she was cute?

  Heidi stared after him, even as he was on the sixth step.

  Rhett glanced over his shoulder. “Coming?”

  “Yeah.” Now who was speaking in one-word sentences?

  The upstairs of the asylum felt spooky. Shafts of light escaped into the hallway from the two open doors in the long line of rooms, and also from the far end where the roof and side had caved in and lay open. Debris littered the hall, piles of leaves and sticks, with mud caked in the corners and thick cobwebs that swayed in the breeze.

  Rhett went ahead of her, bouncing on the floorboards, testing the structure to ensure one of them didn’t fall through and plummet to the first floor and break a leg, if not their necks. Heidi peered in the first room to the left. It wasn’t much different from the foyer below. Wood floors instead of linoleum, but the same plastered walls with cracks creating their own road map on the wall. A long window with bars over it. Bars. That was different from downstairs.

  “Do you think this is where the patients were housed?” she ventured.

  Rüger padded into the room and looked around, his tail wagging, long fur brushing the air.

  “Probably,” Rhett replied.

  Heidi nodded slowly. “Why is Misty Wayfair connected to the asylum?” She didn’t ask the second part of her question. Why did Emma seem to think Misty resided here?

  Rhett continued to pound his foot on the floorboards as he made his way to the next room. He stopped and braced his hand against the wall, his eyes scanning the space before him. “They say Misty Wayfair has been sighted on and off over the years. But most of the claims have been disproven. My uncle thought he saw her back in the seventies when he was hunting around here. Turned out to be a homeless woman.”

  That was perhaps the longest stretch of words Rhett Crawford had ever spoken to her.

  Heidi nodded. Maybe if she was quiet, he would talk more. She followed Rhett into the room, which was almost identical to the last one. She moved across the floor and grasped the bars at the window, tugging a bit. Funny. The bars were still solid, even though the patients’ screams had long since drifted away.

  “They also say Misty Wayfair was attached to someone who once lived here. No one knows who.” Rhett stood next to her, and they stared beyond the bars to the front yard below. Heidi could see the truck, and Archie too, still curled up on the dash.

  “No one ever cared to find out?” Heidi asked.

  Rhett shrugged. “Why? The woman is dead.”

  “But she lived.” Heidi turned a surprised gaze on him. “Why do people dismiss the dead so easily? Once you’ve passed, you’re no longer important?”

  Rhett eyed her.

  So much for not talking and letting him talk.

  “Do you even know who Misty Wayfair was?” she whispered.

  Rhett met her stare. “No.”

  At least he was honest.

  “And you don’t care?”

  Rhett was silent for a long moment. Finally he said, “If you care, then I care.”

  She was stunned. It didn’t add up. Didn’t make sense.

  “But you don’t even like me,” she told him.

  “I never said that.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Nope.” He shook his head.

  “You act as though you don’t like me.”

  He nodded. “That’s fair.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Because you hurt Emma.” Rhett’s eyes drilled into hers. Honest. Open. Confident.

  “Yes,” Heidi nodded, tearing her gaze away. “I said I was sorry.”

  “Then you hurt her again.”

  Gosh. He was relentless. But then she’d goaded him into this.

  “So . . . about Misty Wayfair,” Heidi said, hoping to distract him.

  Rhett’s elbow nudged hers. She met his eyes again.

  “The difference between you and Misty Wayfair is that she’s beyond saving. Whatever happened to her, whoever she was. But you’re not.”

  An emotion Heidi couldn’t explain awakened in her. The stunning kind that told her someone had, perhaps for the first time, read one of her fears correctly. In this particular case, that she was just like Misty Wayfair. Wandering, alone, misguided, and left to herself as though everyone were afraid to discover the real her. The real person behind the flippant, coy responses, the impulsiveness, and the deep-rooted anxiety buried beneath it all.

  Heidi couldn’t acknowledge his comment. It was too personal. Too frightening to let someone in. Someone who just moments before she’d compared to the Incredible Hulk.

  A crash from below startled them both. Heidi ripped her eyes from his, and they both started for the door. Rüger let out a series of barks that said danger was near, and then the dog took off ahead of them.

  “Rüger!” Rhett’s command echoed through the empty building.

  They both hurried toward the stairs, and just as Heidi moved to descend, Rhett put out his arm.

  “Hold.” His voice was quieter now. Rüger stood at the bottom of the stairs, the fur on his back standing up, a low growl coming from deep in his throat.

  “What is it?” Heidi froze in compliance with Rhett’s command. Happy to let him control the situation. Well, at least she hoped he was in control.

  Rüger took a tentative step forward, then launched out of s
ight. The wall blocked their vision. Rhett took deliberate steps down the stairs, and Heidi felt no shame in cowering behind his solid back. At the bottom, Rüger had disappeared. The foyer was silent.

  “What was that crashing sound?” Heidi whispered.

  Rhett held up his hand, demanding silence. He listened. Pointed.

  Rüger came padding back into the room from the hallway.

  Heidi looked down the hall to where he’d come from—the back door stood open, swaying in the wind, slamming against the doorjamb. “How’d that get open?” she asked.

  Rhett didn’t answer. Instead, he stepped slowly down the hallway, glanced into the rooms whose doors were open, and checked the closed ones. Arriving at the far end, they came to a door that opened into a back room. Old hooks hung from the walls, most likely where employees once hung their coats and jackets. An empty milk can lay overturned on the floor, but not recently, going by the dirt and leaves packed on top and around it. The windows here were filthy and hard to see through, some of the panes cracked or missing.

  Heidi opened her mouth to speak, but Rhett’s hand on her forearm stopped her. He squeezed and pointed with his other hand.

  The wall opposite them, in the corner, was crumbling whitewashed plaster. Red letters, fresh, dripped down the broken pieces of plaster and onto the floor, painted in haphazard swaths.

  Forgotten in a place of madness. You will be too.

  Chapter 22

  All right. Let’s get some warmth in us.” Connie eased onto a chair opposite Heidi, pushing a hot cup of tea toward her. The kitchen table between them, Heidi had the album, the note, and a blank notepad in front of her. A mug of lukewarm coffee sat nearby, neglected. Heidi wrapped her hands around the fresh cup of tea and let her mind calculate the events that had unfolded since the fright at the asylum ruins.

  Rhett hadn’t been able to get a call out from the asylum to the police. So they’d made their way back to town and stopped at the station. They filed a report and were reassured that the police would be sending out officers to look at the vandalism. Maybe they’d find fingerprints or some DNA and match them with a name in their database. But it was all so ambiguous, Heidi wasn’t holding out hope.

  Rhett drove her back to the Crawfords’, where Heidi curled up on the couch next to Emma. She’d tried to hide her tremors, but as soon as Rhett left the room, Emma helped Ducie to stand and encouraged the dog to lie down on the floor next to Heidi. Emma had waited with expectation. It didn’t take Heidi long to drop her hand and curl it into the fur of Ducie’s neck. The dog nudged her arm. Sensing. Knowing. Emma settled on the floor beside her dog, just below where Heidi rested. Three comrades. Different struggles. Common hearts.

  An hour later, Heidi heard the sound of a vehicle pulling up the Crawford drive. She peeked out the window to see Rhett—he’d returned her car. He still had her keys from when he’d swiped them earlier. It was a simple deed, but thoughtful. Still, she’d had no desire to return to Lane Lodge. To Vicki. To the room where the first blood-red message had appeared on her mirror.

  Returning home about the same time, Connie rescued Heidi from just such a thing. She warmed up venison stew for supper and whipped up a batch of biscuits to go on the side. Never having eaten venison, Heidi hesitated. More trauma was not going to help her collect her wits and keep from an all-out panic attack. But, it was good—like beef—and Heidi sensed some awareness flooding through her internalized anxiety with the uplift of protein and her blood sugar.

  Connie’s husband, Murphy, came home too, but then he snatched up a plate of food with a grin, gave a quick peck to Connie’s cheek, and escaped out the back door on his way to the workshop. With Rhett, Heidi supposed. Or maybe Rhett had gone back to his place? She assumed he had his own home and didn’t live with his parents.

  Nope. She was wrong. He was still here.

  A soft, brushed-wool blanket settled over her shoulders, breaking her focus away from what had happened and returning her to the present. Casual, as if it were commonplace to do so, Rhett tucked the blanket around her neck and then pulled out a chair by his mom. Emma followed him and sat in the fourth chair. Heidi looked at each one of them, and they all met her eyes.

  “Wh-what are you all doing?” Heidi didn’t understand. The blanket. The three people opposite her. The photo album between them. The sense of . . . family.

  Emma tilted her head and gave Heidi a smile. “We’re going to help you.”

  It was so simple. So sincere.

  Heidi gnawed at the inside of her lip. She glanced at Rhett, who reached for the album while nodding at Connie’s gentle smile.

  The older woman reached across the table and took Heidi’s hand. “You’re not alone, honey.”

  Heidi swiped away a rebel tear.

  Not alone.

  Vicki had walked away from this. From her. But the Crawfords had not. They were rallying, and she didn’t deserve it.

  She muffled a watery chuckle as even Ducie limped into the room, three-legged, tendering the one Heidi had inadvertently broken. The dog wrestled himself to the floor beside Emma, a groan escaping his jowls.

  As they were all laughing at the sight, the back door opened and Murphy entered, his gray hair ruffled, his ginormous shoulders, so much like Rhett’s, lifting the load of an antique trunk. Leather handles on both ends, he hefted it down to the floor.

  He smiled, his beard tickling the collar of his flannel shirt. “Figured we may want to rustle through this thing too,” he said and broke the silence as they all stared at him.

  A smile broadened across Connie’s face.

  Murphy explained, “It’s that trunk we bought at the estate sale. When we picked up that photo album. Haven’t gone through it yet, but who knows? If you’ve a dead girl who looks like you in there”—he nodded toward the photo album—“maybe you got more stuff in here that’ll help it make sense.”

  “Great idea!” Emma looked between her father and Heidi.

  Rhett leaned back in his chair. Content, it seemed, though Heidi noted he gave her a few glances now and then as if doing some internal assessment to make sure she was truly okay.

  She wasn’t.

  Not in the least.

  Everything about today was foreign. Frightening. And now, enticing.

  Heidi was on unfamiliar territory. Where the asylum had turned into a nightmare, the Crawfords were turning into a dream.

  Either way, she would have to wake up at some point. And real life had already proven it held very little promise for her.

  The trunk’s contents were strewn across the Crawfords’ kitchen floor. Emma sat in the corner, a vintage newspaper open, her finger tracing the lines as she read, her mouth moving silently in forming the words. A few newspaper clippings, yellowed with age, perched on her knee. She was lost in another world, set in 1908 Pleasant Valley.

  Rhett was studying the photograph of Heidi’s deceased doppelgänger.

  Murphy sat in a chair nearby, his legs stretched out, work boots on, and a cup of coffee balanced in a brawny hand.

  Connie lifted another item from the trunk as Heidi pulled the blanket Rhett had given her tighter around her shoulders. She tried to reconcile with today’s events. Events that had sent her anxiety into full-fledged panic mode but now were counteracted by a calming peace. Regardless of cryptic words painted in blood-red on an asylum wall, despite that they matched messages which seemed to be pointed at Heidi, everything felt right.

  Everything felt . . . safe.

  Heidi chose to allow herself to relish it. For now. She knew it wouldn’t last, but no matter. Tonight she would accept it.

  “Interesting!” Connie opened the lid to an antique cigar box, its top embellished with a faded color image of a woman in a ball gown and a man in an evening suit and top hat. An envelope lay inside. Just one. Also faded and weathered-looking with its edges yellowed.

  A name was scrawled on the front.

  Dorothea Reed.

  “That name sounds famil
iar,” Heidi muttered.

  Connie scrunched her lips in thought. “Hmmm, it does to me too.” She flipped the envelope over and slid out its contents. “It’s definitely a personal letter. I wonder why it was saved?”

  “What’s it say?” Murphy asked. He sounded like Rhett. Direct, almost commanding, and yet when Heidi gave him a hesitant look, she found warmth in his expression.

  “Let me see if I can make it out,” Connie answered. “The handwriting is very thin and cramped.” She examined the page for a moment.

  Emma discarded her newspaper and slid across the floor next to her mother. “I can read it,” she stated plainly.

  “Go ahead then,” Connie laughed. “I can’t make head nor tails of it.”

  Emma took time to carefully smooth the letter’s edges and creases, handling it as a precious gem of history. She cleared her throat, and her voice was even as she read.

  “Dear Thea,

  You were twelve when we took you in. It was our Christian duty. Looking back, I’m uncertain as to whether it was a wise decision, but as I lie on my deathbed, I find I must give you what little resolution I can. Mr. Mendelsohn will not be kind to you once I am gone. He is a brusque man. While he will not harm you physically, I fear he will become spiteful. You may wish to leave him. Please do not. In exchange for knowing you will care for my husband until he too passes into the hereafter, I will give you what I know of your history before you came to the orphanage.”

  “Well, that sounds menacing!” Connie inserted.

  Murphy grunted his agreement. “Hope she left that Mendelsohn guy.”

  Heidi exchanged glances with Rhett while Emma waited, an impatient look on her face for having been interrupted. She dropped her gaze back to the letter and continued.

  “All that is known of your parentage is your mother’s name: P. A. Reed. You were left at the orphanage at four years of age. They told us your mother had traveled from the Pleasant Valley, Wisconsin area, which of course is significantly north of where we are currently. You were left with little belongings. A dress, a nightgown, and a knitted hat. You said few words for the first year and thereafter became a friendly child. That is, unfortunately, all I know. But perhaps a name and a place may be all the tools necessary to assuage any curiosity as to your parentage should you wish to appease it.