by Maddy Hunter
A hesitation, then, “Oh, I get it. This is part of the pajama party festivities. You take a painting off the wall and hang it in another place and see if anyone notices.” She lumbered through the darkness with the requested chair and set it down on the outer hearth. “Girls really get off on some pretty stupid stuff. I think getting bombed at the frat house sounds like a lot more fun.”
She stepped onto the chair and braced a hand on either side of the painting, hefting it slightly. “Whoa. This baby’s heavy.” She wiggled it up, down, left and right. “It’s hung up on something.” She wrenched it back and forth several times before she was finally able to free it from its wall hooks and hand it down to me. She was right about the painting being heavy. It had to weigh a good fifty pounds. I leaned it against the stonework and steadied the beam of my Maglite on the youthful figures in the foreground.
“Okay. What do you notice that’s different about this painting?” I asked in my best Sherlock Holmes imitation.
Jackie hopped down from the chair and gave the picture the once-over. “It’s dusty.”
“Besides that. Look at the three children. Do you see anything unusual about them?”
“They’re not fighting with each other. That’s pretty unusual for kids of that age.”
“Their feet, Jack. What’s odd about their feet?”
She hunkered down, studying the composition intently. “Oh, wow. Their toes look like they’re all stuck together. I’ve heard of that condition. There’s a name for it, but I can’t remember what it is.”
“What would you say if I told you Ethel Minch has the same condition?”
“I’d say she probably saved a lot of money not having to buy beach thongs every year. Which reminds me. Do you happen to know what room she’s in? I bet ole Ernie could tell me where I could order classy shoes in extra-large sizes. Most catalogs only advertise up to size eleven.”
She wasn’t getting the point. “Don’t you think it’s a little coincidental that Ethel Minch has the same foot condition as the family in the portrait?”
She hoisted herself to her feet and pursed her lips in thought. “No.”
“But think about it! You heard the conversation at dinner. Ethel’s maternal side of the family has roots in Ireland. The condition is hereditary. The people in this portrait could very well be part of the O’Quigley clan.”
Jackie shrugged. “So what if they are?”
“That would prove Ethel and her family have some connection to the castle.”
“So?”
“So that might lead us to the person who left the bloody footprints.”
Jackie grew very still. “The what?”
“The bloody footprints they found under the maid’s body. The imprint showed it was someone with webbed feet. Probably not Ethel, but it could be someone related to her.”
“A maid died? When did a maid die?”
“Yesterday. In Nana’s room. The custodian died today in Nana’s closet, but they didn’t find any footprints under his body. He still looked like he’d been frightened to death though.”
Her voice rose two octaves. “Excuse me?”
“Did I forget to mention that the castle might be haunted?”
“I’LL SAY YOU FORGOT TO MENTION IT! Bloody footprints? Dead bodies?” She locked her hand around my arm and steered me to the nearest chair. “Okay, Emily. Talk.”
For fifteen minutes, sitting in the pitch black, I told her everything I knew about the star-crossed lovers, the demise of the maid and the custodian, the inexplicable noises and cold spots in the castle, and what I perceived to be Ethel Minch’s connection to it all. When I finished, I fired up my flashlight again to find Jackie’s eyes looking pinched and frightened, her face drawn and sallow. Either I’d really creeped her out, or this was the way she always looked when the makeup came off.
“So that moaning I heard last night wasn’t some old geezer with a six-pack of Viagra? It was a ghost?”
It was my turn to shrug. “Either a ghost, or someone trying to convince us it was a ghost.” I shined my flashlight at the portrait again and regarded it through the dimness, bothered by something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Jackie followed my gaze.
“If those are the O’Quigleys, they certainly looked prosperous enough four hundred years ago,” she observed.
“How can you tell the portrait was painted that long ago?”
“Look at the guy on the horse. I wore a ruff, doublet, and cloak-bag breeches just like that when I had a part in A New Way to Pay Old Bills. The long hair parted in the middle. The small, neat beard. It’s all seventeenth century. You have to wonder what happened to change the family fortunes.”
Her words jarred me. Of course! That’s what had been bothering me. I smacked the heel of my palm against my forehead. “Duh! What was I thinking? This family can’t be the O’Quigleys. The Irish were impoverished during the sixteen hundreds. They couldn’t own a horse, much less land or a castle.”
Jackie leaned back in her chair. “So if Ethel Minch is related to these people, but they’re not the O’Quigleys”—she threw me a long questioning look—“who are they?”
There could be only one answer to that question, and the shock of it had me counting sheep at three o’clock that morning.
I’d finally gotten through to the front desk clerk, who informed me that power outages happened all the time at Ballybantry and electricity might not be restored until morning. So having nothing better to do in the dark, we’d stayed up past midnight, reminiscing about our days in New York and scaring each other with ghost stories. Jackie had rehung the portrait over the mantel, but it would need tweaking in the morning because it was hanging at a disturbing slant.
“It looks like it’s about to fall,” I said, tilting my head in the same direction.
“Trust me. It’ll be fine until morning.”
I’d slipped into some walking shoes and ventured into the bathroom to retrieve Jackie’s clothes and my toiletry bag with my anti-itch cream. Using the dull beam of my Maglite for illumination, I picked some larger chunks of glass off the floor and disposed of them, but I could still hear the crunch of shards and slivers and other substances under my feet, so to be safe, we closed the bathroom door and set a chair in front of it to remind ourselves not to go into the bathroom without shoes on our feet. Having experienced numerous power outages in our collective lifetimes, we also remembered to turn off the switches of the bedside lights that had been on when the power went out so we wouldn’t be blinded by them if the power came back on in the middle of the night. We’d thought of everything to ensure ourselves a peaceful night’s rest.
So how come I couldn’t sleep?
I turned over on my side and punched my pillow, knowing exactly what was keeping me awake. The portrait.
If the people in the painting weren’t seventeenth-century Irish, they had to be seventeenth-century British. And if they were British, the reason their picture was hanging in Ballybantry Castle was undoubtedly because they had once lived in the castle. If my hunch was right, the family in the portrait was the same one that had emigrated from England to Ireland and commissioned the castle to be built. The original owners of Ballybantry. And if that were the case, one of the fair-haired children in the picture had been disowned and suffered a grisly death in the dungeon, and after four hundred years, might still be walking the halls of the castle.
And Ethel Minch was related to her.
She wasn’t Irish at all. She was English. But why had she lied? Was she playing a role in the hauntings? And if she was, what was in it for her?
I flopped over onto my other side and hit the illumination bar on my travel alarm: 3:05. I groaned, then, feeling a sudden chill, pulled the bedclothes up to my nose. I knew the furnace was off for the season, but even given that, it seemed inordinately cold in here.
Hrrrrrmmmm.
I lifted my head off the pillow, listening.
Hrrrrrmmmm.
The whirlpool. Th
e power must have come back on again. Great. We’d turned off all the lights, but we hadn’t thought to turn off the power switch on the tub.
Hrrrrrmmmm.
I buried my head under the covers and clapped my hands over my ears. I wondered how many minutes were left on the timer. I curled up into a cozy ball, waiting for the time to run out. I didn’t have to worry about the noise disturbing Jack. He always slept like the dead.
“How long are you planning to listen to that damn thing before you decide to get up and turn it off?” rasped a groggy Jackie from the opposite bed.
I poked my head out of its makeshift cocoon. “What are you doing awake? You used to be able to sleep through anything.”
“Yeah. That was one of the benefits of being a guy. I could sleep through a nuclear blast. Not anymore. It must be estrogen related. So are you going to kill the tub?”
“It’s too cold in here to get out of bed. Besides, what’s wrong with you killing the tub?”
“With all that glass on the floor? Get real, Emily. You’re the one with the rugged shoes. Mine are open-toed.”
I burrowed deeper under the covers. “I don’t want to move.”
“It’s your room. If I wasn’t here, you’d have to turn it off yourself anyway.”
Not true. If Jack wasn’t here, Etienne would have been, so I’d have asked him to do it. And I probably wouldn’t be so cold right now either.
Hrrrrrmmmm.
I grunted my disgust with the situation, then, feeling completely out of sorts, threw off my covers, jammed my feet into my shoes, and stomped across the floor in the dark.
“Don’t bump into the chair in front of the door,” Jackie called out helpfully.
“Yeah, yeah.” I shoved the chair out of the way. I opened the door.
WOOOOOSHHHHH!
“EEEEEEE!” I screamed as a tidal wave of wet, frothing goop smacked into me full force, knocking me to the floor. HRRRRRMMMM went the whirlpool. “EEEEEEE!” I screamed again, flailing at the slop that was enveloping my body. “Help me!”
I heard Jackie’s feet hit the floor and pound toward me. “What’s—EHHH!” She hit the slop at full throttle, skidded out of control across the carpet, and landed in a heap beside me, whacking the slime with hands and fists. “What is this?” she shrieked. “Feel it. It’s alive. It’s breathing.” THWACK. SPISH. “It’s eating my foot!”
HRRRRRMMMM!
It oozed around me like quicksand. “It’s some kind of secretion,” I said, swatting it away. “I hope it’s not intestines!”
Jackie raised herself onto hands and knees. “Whatever it is, it sure smells good. What is that? Lavender? Lavender is supposed to be very good for headaches, you know.”
Lavender? I stopped swatting and started sniffing. It was lavender. I squinted in the direction of the bathroom. Uh-oh.
HRRRRRMMMM!
I struggled to my feet and slogged my way through the billowing goop to the bathroom door. I flipped on the light.
Bubbles were spewing out of the tub like lava out of a volcano. Frothing. Gushing. Swelling. “What did you do?” I cried over the roar of the motor to Jackie. I plunged through the knee-deep foam and batted clouds of bubbles away from the tub.
“What do you mean, what did I do?” she shouted back.
HRRRRRMMMM! I dug through the spume like a dog after a bone, located the power switch, and snapped it to the OFF position.
Silence.
I looked around the room. There were bubbles everywhere. Crawling over the vanity. Oozing out of the toilet. Slithering down the walls. I heaved a sigh before turning around to regard Jackie, who was standing calf-high in soapsuds in the doorway. “Bubble bath!” I wailed. “Lavender bubble bath! Didn’t you read the label? You’re not supposed to use bubble bath with the whirlpool!”
“I didn’t touch the bubble bath!”
“Then how did this happen?”
“How should I know! Unless…” I watched her expression change from stubborn denial to conceivable guilt. “Hmm. Do you suppose I knocked the container off the ledge when the lights went out?”
“You knocked everything else off. Why not the bubble bath?”
“Hey! It was dark in there!”
“HHHHRRRRRRRRHHHHH…HHHHRRRRRRRRHHHHH!”
I looked at Jackie. Jackie looked at me. I stood riveted to the spot, chills needling up and down my spine. “What’s that?” I whispered.
Jackie poked her head into the bathroom and studied the ceiling as if the answer to my question lay imbedded in the porcelain tile. “That’s the same noise I heard last night. The orgasm heard round the world. I bet it’s Gladys Kuppelman. She probably drinks pureed kelp to enhance sexual potency.”
“It’s a sad sound.” I cocked my head, listening. “I think she’s crying.”
“Maybe Ira launched his torpedoes early. Premature ejaculation is no laughing matter.”
“Hhhhrrrrrrrrhhhhh…Hhhhrrrrrrrrhhhhh!”
“Where’s it coming from?” I puzzled. “It sounds like it’s right inside the room.”
Color drained from Jackie’s face. She looked suspiciously left and right, then swallowed with apparent difficulty. “Oh, my God. This is what you were talking about. The legend. The hauntings. The cries are from that dead girl who’s looking for her husband. Those are the sobs of the ghost, aren’t they?”
“Somebody’s sobbing. I think we need to find out who.”
Jackie stiffened. “We?”
“Hhhhrrrrrrrrhhhhh…Hhhhrrrrrrrrhhhhh!”
“If we don’t find out who’s crying, no one will ever get a good night’s sleep in this place.”
She wrung her hands nervously. “It’s not so bad. Earplugs would probably help. Do you have some I could borrow?”
I sloshed past her through the disintegrating bubbles. “Here’s the deal. We can either lie in bed and listen to this all night, or we can try to find the source.” My shoes made squishy sounds on the carpet as I flipped on the overhead light.
“Why are you being so brave?” She chased behind me as I armed myself with flashlight, matches, and the aerosol spray can from my shoulder bag. “You said the ghost may be responsible for the death of two people! What if she sets her sights on us? I’m not ready to die! There’s too much I haven’t experienced yet. Regular sex. Make-up sex. Childbirth.”
I stopped dead in my tracks. “Childbirth?”
“Hhhhrrrrrrrrhhhhh…HHHHrrrrrrrrhhhhh!”
“Okay, since I’ve remembered I don’t have a uterus, that could be a stretch. But there’s always surrogacy. Which reminds me, when Tom and I decide to start a family, would you be willing to consider carrying our baby for us?”
I sucked in a mouthful of air and tried not to choke on it. “ARE YOU NUTS?”
“Maybe you need time to consider. You’re probably under a little stress right now.”
“I…You…Aargh!” I threw my hands into the air and stormed to the door.
“Is that a no?” she called after me.
The corridor was illuminated by a series of frosted-glass wall sconces that shot naked light upward, toward the ceiling, and muted light downward, toward my sodden Joe Boxers and cotton top. I cast a long look down the hall toward the lobby area. I wondered if the desk clerk could deny hearing this. I jogged to the front desk and looked around. No one on duty. No wonder they never heard anything. I hit the Please Ring Bell For Service bell and waited. Nothing. Shaking my head, I struck out in the opposite direction.
“HHHHRRRRRRRRHHHHH…HHHHRRRRRRRRHHHHH!”
The cries were louder in the hall than in my room. I scrutinized the celery-and-cream-striped wallpaper and darker green wainscoting that lined the walls, my finger poised on the nozzle of my air freshener, ready to spray the hell out of the first thing that moved. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but I was hopeful I’d recognize it if I saw it.
I listened for telltale sounds beneath numerous pictures of grazing sheep and crumbling abbeys that were suspended on w
ires from the crown molding. Nothing. I snooped around vases of fresh flowers that sat atop marble stands in shell-shaped niches cut into the wall. Nothing. I was standing outside Etienne’s room at the end of the corridor, wondering if I should enlist his help, when I heard a sudden “Pssst!” Since I wasn’t smelling strawberry shortcake, I was pretty sure I hadn’t misfired the air freshener. When I heard the sound again, I looked over my shoulder to find Jackie running barefoot down the hall toward me. She was wearing my satin wrap over her babydoll, which wasn’t much of an improvement over her nightie except that at least it wasn’t see-through. “What?” I called out in a stage whisper as she approached.