by Mari Labbee
The week had started out strong. She had gone out to an antique shop about an hour’s drive in the country. Dana had given her directions and assured her that the Holleys would have what she was looking for. Period authentic, not junk, Dana said, and filled with “pretty impressive pieces and one-of-a-kind items.” So far, Dana had been right about pretty much everything, and she was right again.
A husband-and-wife team, Pete and Rebecca Holley ran the smaller-than-expected shop that was a not-so-secret destination for ardent antiquers. They had an on-site workshop, where Pete did almost all the restoration and upholstery work himself, with the occasional help of a couple of local craftsmen. And Rebecca Holley, it turned out, was psychic. As if reading Bri’s mind, she led her to exactly the things Bri was looking for repeatedly. It couldn’t have been Bri’s inarticulate attempts to describe what she was looking for that had done it.
A long, rectangular table with elegantly turned legs was ideal for the dining room under the emerald chandeliers. It was narrower and longer than a modern table, one meant to accommodate lots of family and friends over leisurely meals. For her purposes, it was nothing short of perfect.
“There are no seams,” Rebecca pointed out, running her hand over the top of the table. “It’s one solid piece of wood.”
A miraculous find. She also had the perfect settee and wing chairs that matched so perfectly, you would have thought they were built to go together, but according to Rebecca, they were at least two decades apart in terms of design. They would need reupholstering and refinishing, which would be done in-house. Bri was elated; they were perfect for the great room. Rebecca mentioned they would be getting a bolt of vintage fabric in the next few days, which she thought would be ideal for the pieces. In the short time Bri had known Rebecca Holley, she came to trust her instincts, so she agreed to the fabric sight unseen. Everything would be delivered out to Jackal’s Head Point once the work was done.
Charlie Cotteral had started on the electrical—just as Matt promised he would—so she finally got around to shopping for appliances. Those would be delivered later in the week. The thought of refrigeration left her giddy. And it would be such a relief not to have to drive into Pegottie just to do laundry.
In town, she was stopped for conversation continually. She always added an extra thirty minutes for chitchat that accompanied any trip to town; no chance of anonymity here. At the drugstore, while picking up her prescription, she caught up with the pharmacist, Bernard, whom everyone called Bern.
“Gets good and breezed-up out there, eh?” he said, ringing up her antihistamine.
Bri laughed, nodding, knowing all too well what he meant. “Yes, but I’m getting used to it.”
He went on to say how he could never live so far away from everything and that he once lived down the road apiece but moved on back to town. Too fahr out, he said.
She caught up with Laura Argis, the sheriff’s wife, and their son, Josh, who did most of the lawns in Pegottie and played trombone in the school band. Sarah, the school nurse, wasn’t looking forward to tick season. And the new mayor was making good on his promise to bring better cell phone coverage to the area, something everyone was very happy about. She was tempted to bring up Matt in casual conversation. Laura Argis knew him, but she was almost afraid of what she might hear, so she left that alone.
She got well caught up on all the goings-on, and then she set a course through the aisles to pick up the rest of what she needed as quickly as possible. At the checkout, she encountered someone new, a girl, tall, a little bony, with straw-yellow hair, and a ready smile. She went on to engage Bri in the familiar friendly conversation that she’d come to expect with one added twist.
“Aren’t afraid of livin’ in a haunted house?” she asked curiously.
Chris Cutter’s story came back to Bri, the one she’d told her that long-ago day, the one she hadn’t thought about since then.
“Nobody really believes in ghosts, do they?” Bri responded.
The girl scanned Bri’s items efficiently: assorted cleaners, a multipack of rubber gloves, bottled water, crackers, wine, without ever breaking her rhythm.
“Ayuh, some people do.”
“Has anyone you know actually seen this ghost?” Bri asked.
“Nobody I know, but they say.”
They say. Yes, they do say, thought Bri. She thought about the night she woke up, dreaming, falling, screaming. No ghost, though.
“Well, some people have big imaginations. So far so good, knock wood,” Bri said, tapping the plastic counter with her knuckles. “No ghosts.”
The girl smiled and shrugged.
When an old abandoned house on a hill, shuttered up for decades, stirs up the imagination, yarn spinning isn’t far off. Bri didn’t mind that the house had a story; actually, she kind of liked it. Once she had it all restored, she would go looking for that story to see if it had any basis at all. It might make for some good marketing.
So it was day nine. And still no word from Matt. He said one week, but he also said there was a chance it might be longer. She could only hope it was longer and that he hadn’t decided to abandon her. She was in the kitchen, on the stepladder, screwing a new bulb into one of the fixtures, when Charlie Cotteral shuffled in. Keeping him on track was almost a full-time job. He loved to talk and did it often, which led to forgetting what he was in the middle of doing.
He was wearing a different toupee than the one he’d started the week with. This one had a bit more color to it but was similarly ill-fitting. Charlie stood about chin level to her, an awkward height, and one that afforded a perfect view of the toupee. She tried to avoid him, just for efficiency’s sake, but he’d found her. Without prompting, he began.
“This here is one of the best boxes.” He looked down at the electrical box in his hand, turning it over, colorful wires sticking out every which way. “This insulation here,” he said, pointing, “grounds it and keeps it from…”
He went on in detail, but she was only interested in knowing that whatever he was fixing would work when she needed it to. She’d become adept at cutting him off—sweetly but firmly—and leading him back to where he would be of use.
He would always end with, “Well…just thought yah might like t’know.”
She felt a little guilty sometimes. He seemed lonely. He would light up if she asked him to join her for the occasional iced tea break, but she didn’t make that a habit; he’d never get anything done.
The calculator in her head tallied numbers obsessively, calculating what she’d already spent and how much she still needed. It doesn’t all have to be done at once, she reminded herself as she chewed the inside of her cheek. Just the important things for now.
Since Matt’s visit, she had been a woman possessed, working nonstop. The whole interior was wiped down and now, livable. Long-dead bushes were pulled out or chopped down to stubs, and weeds were pulled away to expose the broken flagstone path from house to garden. The windows were cleaned to gleaming, pried open, and the house breathed. There had been no dreams since Matt, just blissful sleep.
She opened the cupboard and pulled out peanut butter and a box of crackers, fully intending to make some kind of dinner out of them, but then stopped. She was exhausted, covered in fluffs of dust, and hungry. Peanut butter was no kind of dinner; she just couldn’t stomach any more of it. There was a Chinese restaurant in Pegottie—she dialed the number.
“Wok Steady, may I help you?”
A short time later, she sat in the small room off the foyer, a thoroughly dust-free zone now. A pint-size container of moo shu pork sat on an overturned plastic bucket with chopsticks poking out of it, and Bri sat contentedly next to it in one of the plastic chairs, drinking wine out of a paper cup. Matt would be proud. She immediately caught herself. That was a weird thought. Why should she care what Matt thought? But she did.
She looked at the fireplace across the room, admiring the beautifully carved mantel and thought about the story Chris had told her.
If there were better Internet, something more than an unreliable hot spot, she would’ve already researched it. But with so many other priorities, it hadn’t been on her mind. Now she wondered. Had a woman who lived here once actually killed herself? How had she killed herself? What drove her to it? Who made that beautiful mantel? The wine flowed through her, and her eyes felt heavy, her limbs relaxed.
Setting her cup on the bucket, she picked up the container of moo shu pork and was about to take a bite when her eye caught a flash of color in the corner of the room. She set the moo shu down and walked to the corner where the edge of the old wallpaper had curled away from the wall. Leaning in, she saw that below the faded paper there was something else. She grabbed the edge and tugged. It fell away easily and revealed vibrant red silk fabric underneath. The room had once been covered with red silk?
“You have got to be kidding!” Bri exclaimed. Excited, she peeled off more. Soon she had peeled off all the paper and was standing in the middle of a red-silk room.
“Wow!”
This was unbelievable, the house was nothing but surprises. She sat back down, refilled her paper cup and smiled, staring at her red-silk walls. She brought the cup to her lips and thought of Ryan and how appalled he would be to see her drinking drugstore wine—out of a box no less—from a paper cup. She giggled and took a sip. She wondered if the reason it hadn’t worked out with Ryan was because of…no, she didn’t want to think about that now, but it was too late—the gatekeeper was drunk.
What was it the doctor had told her at the tender age of sixteen when they removed her diseased ovary, leaving its barely functioning twin behind for her to pin her hopes on? Yes, she remembered now: A 1 percent chance. That was what he had said. There was only a 1 percent chance she’d be able to have children someday. Technically, because she still had the one ovary, no matter what its state, he had given her a percentage, but, really, the percentage was closer to zero as several other doctors confirmed later. Up until then, she naturally assumed that someday she’d have a family, she had always wanted one. Did it matter? Yes, she knew right then that it did. It mattered a lot. The truth was that her chances of having children were the same as finding buried treasure. She remembered how terrified she had been when she told Ryan. But after he digested it, he smiled and told her it would be OK, that they would be OK.
But what was so clear now, what she had chosen to overlook then, was that Ryan hadn’t actually looked at her when he responded that everything would be OK, that they would be OK. She had brushed it off, remaining hopeful that it wouldn’t make a difference, but in the end, it had.
With Ryan, she had allowed herself to believe in soul mates. She let herself fall in love, only to have it all come crashing down. Next time-if there was one-she’d keep her heart close.
She stretched, and suddenly, a thought occurred to her. Chris’s story, if true, meant something horrible might have happened here, maybe in this room. The hairs on her arms rose up in alarm.
At least there aren’t any ghosts, she thought.
Another sip of wine, and she imagined a fire going in the fireplace, a big one that would send sparks flying up the chimney and cast dancing shadows on red-silk walls.
Slowly the imaginary fire’s warmth spread through the room and then through her. She was dog-tired. The shadows danced around her as she slipped away into sleep.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I can see you,” the singsong voice of a child teased.
Bri was in a dark space. Above her, wrought-iron stairs spiraled up along redbrick walls, narrowing, as they rose, to a pinprick of light high above. She was inside the lighthouse.
“You’ll never catch up,” said the little voice above her.
Girlish laughter followed as the sound of little feet racing up the steps echoed around them.
“I am catching up.”
Bri was startled. The second voice had come from her, but it wasn’t her voice. It was a child’s voice.
Then above her, a small face peeked out over the rail. “No, you won’t. You’ll never beat me.” Little fingers belonging to a small hand gripped the railing. Bri looked up, and just as quickly as the child had appeared, she disappeared. The footsteps above resumed but this time faster.
“I’m catching up,” Bri’s disembodied voice said again. “Wait for me!”
Bri felt her feet hitting the iron steps as she ran up the steps. Her chest rose and fell as she breathed hard. She was following the sound of the footsteps above her when they suddenly stopped.
“No, you won’t. You will never beat me.”
It went dark again, and all of sudden, Bri was falling, the pinprick of light above receding as she fell backward into space. Then everything stopped, and darkness engulfed her. A moment passed, and then another, and finally-pain-like nothing she’d ever known, was all she could feel. It felt as if every bone in her body was broken and her head had exploded.
A faraway giggle, soft and muffled, traveled down to where she lay. Slowly the fog began to lift. Far above her, a cherub’s face looked over the railing. A beautiful child with glossy black curls and eyes like emeralds looked down at her. The child smiled and Bri started to smile, but then she saw.
The cherub’s eyes were hard. Something cold lived in them, and malevolence danced behind the lupine smile. There was something strange about this child. Bri wanted to get up—get up and run away—but she couldn’t move. The child looked at her unblinking, the corners of her little mouth curled up in a smile.
The back of Bri’s head throbbed, and she was shot through with pain. The child laughed again and did not move to help. She continued staring down curiously. Even from this distance, Bri felt the stare of those eyes, and she felt fear.
Fear? Of a child? Yes. Bri had the distinct impression that this child had the worst of intentions.
A man’s voice called out, and in that instant, the child’s expression changed to alarm. The man called out again. This time he was closer.
From where she lay, Bri saw the child’s shoulders sag and drop, and it occurred to her that she had been holding something. Something she was about to drop—something heavy—meant for her. If the man’s voice had not interrupted, she had no doubt that whatever the child had been holding would have come shooting down to crush her already wrecked body.
The child called out, her eyes wide and pleading.
“Papa, we were just playing, and then she slipped. I tried to hold on to her, but she fell anyway.”
A tall bearded man appeared. He looked down at Bri and then looked up at the cherub still on the stairs high above them.
“You have provoked me for the last time!” he boomed.
Bri felt a heavy but gentle hand on her forehead.
“Can you hear me?” the man asked. His weathered face was severe, but concern was etched in every wrinkle. His eyes were kind, and his voice was soft as he spoke to her. He called her by a name, but Bri couldn’t make out what it was. The green-eyed child had descended the steps and now stood behind the man.
“Can you hear me?” the man asked.
Again, Bri could not make out the name that he called her. And she wasn’t able to respond to him, either. The child, meanwhile, looked on, clinically, as if she were looking a bug that she had just squashed underfoot and now watched to see if it was still writhing. Her eyes were that of an animal’s and penetrated to the core. She was as frightening as she was beautiful.
The man continued talking, but his voice began to fade. In the distance, Bri heard laughter, faint at first but getting louder. Neither the strange child nor the man seemed to hear it. Bri’s eyes darted about, looking for the source of the laughter, but there was nothing. The child continued watching, the odd little smile frozen on her face.
The laughter reached a deafening pitch, and Bri wanted desperately to get away but was paralyzed and could not move. Suddenly she was thrown into darkness again; just as abruptly, the fog lifted—just in time for Bri to see churning water rushi
ng toward her as she fell from the lighthouse.
Bri jerked awake in the chair, arms flailing, knocking the bucket over, sending wine and moo shu pork flying. Her heart pounded, as it tried to escape its confines, and she gulped mouthfuls of air fast and shallow. Gradually she calmed down, as her mind acknowledged that it had been a dream. It was just a dream. Only she had never had a dream like that before. And falling into the sea, she remembered seeing those images before. Her stomach tightened into a knot. She’d been reasoning away the sleepless nights on stress, but that wasn’t the reason. She knew that now. She was having dreams, the same dream—nightmares, to be more accurate—and she could never remember them, until now. What is going on?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Bri almost missed the delivery truck delivering her appliances. It was rumbling away down the driveway when she heard it, and she came running out of the house to chase after it, still in pajamas. It had almost reached the highway by the time she reached it, completely out of breath.
“We knocked, lady. A couple of times.”
The driver leveled her with a withering look, and she apologized profusely but hardly thought it was that big a bother to turn the truck around. She had to get that doorbell installed soon; this was bound to keep on happening.
The delivery men wedged the unwieldy refrigerator and stove into their spots, she tipped them, thanked them, and they were on their way in just under an hour.
Back upstairs she started to pull on jeans but changed her mind. The digital clock on the floor by the bed flashed 7:10 a.m. and 80 degrees. Her t-shirt was already sticking to her back, it would be a blistering day. Shorts were a better option. She piled her hair on top of her head and covered it with a bandanna.