by Angie Fox
Perhaps he’d been right to worry.
Tobias glanced out toward the gazebo. “He said he needed to see Charlotte immediately, which was strange. He’d never paid attention to the child before. He said she’d touched something she shouldn’t.” Tobias drifted along the scrubby brush near the edge of the cliff. “That poor child,” he mused, wandering away. “We must fix her daisies.”
A chill settled over me from behind. I turned and saw no one.
“Tobias?” I called as I felt a sharp shove between my shoulder blades.
Chapter 14
I stumbled forward, arms flailing, finding only air.
This must have been how she felt.
Rocks jutted from below. I dropped to my knees on the hard ground at the edge of the cliff. Dirt and rocks tumbled over, and I could be next.
A harsh wind whipped past me, down the cliff face, tangling my hair in my eyes. My fingers dug into scrubby grass that came up in my hands.
Shaking, I back-crawled one inch at a time while I watched a small avalanche of ground fall headlong into the abyss.
I glanced back and saw the little girl, Charlotte, standing by the gazebo.
She stood, arms at her sides, serenely watching as I nearly fell to my death.
I edged back as quickly as I dared from the soft soil at the precipice, focusing only on the ground in front of me and the distance I was putting between myself and the drop-off. I made it several feet before attempting to stand, my knees weak and my legs unsteady.
I turned to face the little girl, but she had disappeared.
“Verity!” Lee emerged from the tangle of gardens between his house and the gazebo. He ran toward me, shock etched across his face. “I saw.” The loose bottom of his gray work shirt flapped out behind him. He tried to catch his breath, his cheeks red. “Are you all right?”
That was up for debate. “Did you see who pushed me?”
His eyes grew wider. “There was no one.” He swallowed. “No one that I could see, anyway.”
The shove had been hard and vicious.
“Charlotte was here.” I hadn’t seen her push me, but who else could have done it? Tobias, the gardener, had been too far away. He’d deemed her to be a sweet child, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a vengeful ghost.
Or had the governess been angry at my exploration of the former arbor?
I scanned the area for Tobias. He’d certainly disappeared in a hurry.
“I’m so sorry, Verity,” Lee said. “I never should have brought you into this.”
“There was no one behind me. No one alive, anyway.” That was the truly frightening part. “First the professor. Now this. How can we fight back against something we can’t see?” Even with Frankie’s power, I couldn’t protect myself. If anything, it made me more vulnerable.
If I’d been standing a few inches closer to that drop-off, we wouldn’t even be here discussing it.
“It’s too much,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s not worth your life. It wasn’t worth the professor’s.” He ran a hand over his face. “We have to end this now. I’m so sorry I even called you.”
“Lee,” I began. It was bad. I knew that. “I didn’t mean we should quit.” That wouldn’t solve anything. “I get that this is freaking you out. Believe me, I’m in that boat too.” I was the flipping captain. “But if we don’t stop this, more people are going to die at Rock Fall.”
I refused to be responsible for that. This ended. Now. With us.
“Fine. Then I’ll lock it up, barricade the road,” Lee said, going sixty miles an hour in the wrong direction.
Like that would stop the curious. As soon as Ovis wrote about the artifacts—and he would—Lee would be inundated. “We’re too far into this to stop.”
He kept going. “If this is about vegetables, I can give you more. If it’s about your reputation as a ghost hunter—”
It went far beyond that. “You called me because I have experience with this and let me tell you plain: it’s extremely dangerous to get the ghosts riled up and then leave. If we were going to do that, you’re right, we should have never started at all. But it’s done now and we need to see it through.” Besides, he wasn’t the one going in there. I was. “I’ve handled plenty of tough situations before.” Although nothing like this.
From Lee’s expression, I could tell he had his doubts.
“We don’t have a choice,” I said. “I need to go into the house anyway. I have Charlotte’s doll.” If I gave it back, maybe she’d stay away from me. I didn’t like seeing her near the cliff. Or in my car.
He gave me a long look. Grudgingly, he dug in his pocket and handed me the key. “I hope I don’t regret this.”
So did I.
I still had to visit the little girl’s bedroom.
He sighed. “If something happens to you, I’ll never forgive myself.”
“I’m being as safe as I can,” I assured him. “Believe it or not, that was me being safe on the cliff back there.” I’d maintained a distance from the edge, or I would have gone over with that powerful shove. I knew how to be smart about this. It gave me a fighting chance.
“You can return the doll,” he said, glancing at the copse of trees that hid the house. “After that, I’m not making any promises.”
A cell phone rang and it took me a second to realize it was mine. It sounded from the bag I’d left on the ground back by the cliff.
Lee seemed a bit startled. “That’s a police siren.”
“It’s my ringtone for Ellis Wydell,” I said, fetching the bag and the phone.
Ellis had used his police cruiser to pull me over more than once. I figured it fit.
Lee eyed the cliff while I answered.
“I thought you’d want to know,” Ellis said, “they’re calling Dale’s death a heart attack.”
“You don’t sound like you believe that.” I didn’t either. It was too convenient that he’d visited the cursed house and then suddenly succumbed despite his otherwise good health. I was sure Rock Fall had something to do with it.
“I want to take a closer look at the study where he died,” Ellis told me. “Care to join me?”
“I’m standing in the gardens with Lee right now,” I said, eyeing my reluctant employer. “I’m going in with Ellis,” I said to Lee, who didn’t appear at all relieved that he’d have two people inside the house instead of one.
“Get in and get out,” Lee said. “This doesn’t change how I feel.”
Yes, well, maybe finding that canopic jar would.
As he walked me to the front of the house, I saw no more sign of Tobias or the little girl.
I was running out of chances, and time.
Ellis arrived soon after, slamming the driver’s side door of the police cruiser before making his way to my side. He wore a dark gray sheriff’s department T-shirt, but I could tell from his jeans that he was off duty.
“What happened?” he asked, seeing the way Lee and I stood together. The man could read body language like nobody’s business.
“I’ll let her tell you,” Lee said before directing his next comment to me. “Be careful.”
Ellis shot me a questioning glance as the older man returned to his garden, and on the way up to the house I told him about Lee’s doubts. I didn’t have a chance to talk to him about the cliff. Truthfully, I didn’t want to relive it so soon after. Besides, we’d already made it to the door of the mansion, and rehashing my fears would only complicate what we had to do.
I slipped the key into the lock. “If Lee decides to end this and close the house for good, this may be my last opportunity to fix things.”
He nodded. “Show me the study.”
Sunlight streamed through the windows of the mansion, but the atmosphere inside felt tense, as if a gun had been cocked.
The parlor stood formal and empty, with no sign of the weeping mother. Ellis tensed when I led him into the Egyptian room. The statues lining the wall appeared to watch us as we passed. I put t
hat out of my mind and focused on the shadows they cast over the wooden game tables.
Yet I couldn’t help but glance to the far right corner of the ceiling, at the irises cut into the ornate plaster molding.
“What’s up there?” Ellis asked.
“Nothing.” No jagged shadow like before. “This is Jack Treadwell’s study,” I added, bringing Ellis to the threshold.
He stood for a moment at the entrance, observing. “This is where you found the jars.”
“Three of them, as well as Jack’s journals.”
He stepped into the room. “Show me what Dale Grassino was doing when he died.”
I edged past him toward the stack of books I’d seen the professor hand to Lee moments before we left the room. “These are all the books we’ve found so far. We were bringing Professor Grassino to see them when he came across the jars.”
Ellis nodded, observant, careful not to disturb anything. It was a far cry from how we’d conducted ourselves in this room before.
“We were looking for the fourth jar, the one with Imseti on it,” I said. “It would be about twelve inches high, and the face of a woman would be painted on the lid.”
Ellis stood over the professor’s death spot. I could still see the wisps of white light as they spun toward the heavens.
“He died holding the jar with the head of a falcon on the lid,” Ellis said. “Investigators found it under his body.”
“The falcon is Qebehsenuef,” I said.
Ellis glanced at me. “What does that mean to you?”
“Nothing sinister.” At least not that I could recall. “Qebehsenuef represents the west. The jar contains the remains of the intestines. He’s protected by Serqet, who represents animals, medicine, all good things.”
Professor Grassino had taught me well. He’d cared about me and about all of his students. He was a good man.
Ellis stepped over a pile of papers toward me, shaking me out of my thoughts. “What about Imseti?” he pressed.
“Imseti represents the south and is protected by Isis, goddess of nature and magic.”
Ellis thought for a moment. “Does Imseti contain the heart?”
I saw where he was going, with Jack dying of a supposed heart attack. “Imseti contains the liver. The heart stays with the body.”
“Which you saw in the music room, but is now gone,” he finished.
“I could probably still see it,” I told him. “It’s on the ghostly plane. Where it is on the mortal plane is another matter.”
Ellis nodded. “Police searched the kitchen, the dining room, every room in the house. They found empty crates in the attic, but no artifacts besides the three jars.”
Dang. “So there’s no basement.”
“The rock makes it impossible.”
“I see the police took Qebehsenuef with them,” I said, noting the falcon-headed icon missing from the collection.
Ellis stood over the desk. “So if we have a killer—living or dead—and they’re not after artifacts, what do they want?”
“I have no idea,” I said, moving to the journals. “Maybe the professor discovered something in one of these,” I said, picking up the one marked April 1910.
“Did the professor show a special interest in any journal in particular?” Ellis asked.
“We looked at the later volumes, but he didn’t have much time to read them before he…” I didn’t want to say it.
Ellis scanned the desk. “Perhaps he set a book apart from the rest.” His gaze fell on the whiskey bottle. “There’s no dust on that bottle.”
“Lee and the professor were handling it,” I said. The glass next to it appeared clean as well. “It’s old scotch,” I said, reaching for the glass.
“Don’t.” Ellis blocked me just as I caught myself.
“Wait,” I gasped. “I saw Jack’s ghost drink it. It might have gone bad since then. It’s more than a hundred years old.”
“MacKinlay’s is only going to get better with age,” Ellis said, crouching in front of the bottle. “But if Jack drank it and died, and now Dale might have drunk it and died…” He glanced up at me. “There are poisons that mimic the symptoms of a heart attack.”
“Oh, wow.” I took a closer look and I could see the traces of a drink at the bottom of the glass, and it wasn’t one-hundred-year-old dried, either. There was no dust on top of that film of scotch.
“Detective Marshall should have seen this,” Ellis said grimly. I didn’t comment. Pete Marshall had never been my favorite person in town, nor I his. “I’m going to bag it,” Ellis said.
He had supplies in the car. I joined him while he collected the evidence and waited with him while Duranja drove out from the station to pick it up.
“You okay?” Ellis asked as the other officer left down the path.
“I think so.” It would be good to know what happened at least. But if my professor had been killed by a hundred-year-old murder plot, then the question remained: who killed Jack? “If Jack wasn’t killed by a curse, that means an actual person had to have done it. But that person would have to be dead by now,” I reasoned. “Perhaps we’re not dealing with a curse but a vengeful spirit. Maybe that’s who tried to shove me off the cliff earlier.”
Ellis’s mouth slacked. “When were you going to tell me that?”
“Believe me, I wasn’t looking forward to it.” The shove near the gazebo had scared me out of my wits. “All the spirits here have problems, but do you think one of them was a murderer in life? That ghost could still be here.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” he said. “We’ll stick to the facts. That said, until we find whatever ghost or—” he paused “—whatever force tried to kill you, Lee is right. This place isn’t safe for visitors, or us.”
I couldn’t believe it. “So we’re just supposed to lock up and leave when the answers could be waiting inside the house?”
“Dale is dead. Someone tried to kill you. We can’t stay here.” He held out a hand. “Give me the key. I’ll lock up for you.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, brushing past him. I’d have to come back later, without Ellis or Lee. “While you’re here, I’ll show you the cliff, the burned-out arbor, and the carriage house.” Maybe Ellis would see something I’d missed.
Inside the house, I heard weeping.
I stiffened. “It’s the mother.”
“Is she saying something?” Ellis asked, opening the door.
“No. She’s just crying.” I stepped inside. “It’s coming from one of the upper floors.” Not from the parlor, as before. Her voice floated down the main staircase, sad and forlorn.
Ellis joined me at the bottom of the stairs and we exchanged a glance. I was about to suggest we check it out when the front door slammed closed behind us.
Chapter 15
What the—” Ellis strode to the door and tried to open it. “Look outside. See who closed it.”
I had a feeling it wasn’t anybody he’d be able to see.
I peered out the window in the parlor, and just as I’d suspected, no one stood on the front porch or on the lawn. “I can’t see anyone, dead or alive.”
Ellis inspected the hardware. “It’s locked,” he said, letting go of the knob, not bothering to mask the surprise in his voice.
“All right.” I tried to ignore the hair rising on my arms as I returned to the front door and inserted the key. It slid into the lock easily, and for a second, I thought we were okay. But it wouldn’t budge when I tried to turn it. The handle didn’t turn, either. “This is not ideal,” I concluded, in the understatement of the year.
“Let me try,” he said, taking my place at the door.
I let him have it. “There has to be another way out.”
Grim faced, Ellis continued the struggle with the lock. “There’s one door at the back, barred shut. Duranja called the fire marshal when he was in here yesterday.”
“Well, then.” I began to feel a bit claustrophobic. “I suppose a window will d
o in an emergency.”
Ellis kept working while I tried to figure out how to pry open a parlor window that appeared painted shut.
We both jumped when a door slammed closed upstairs.
“Did you hear that?” I hissed, rubbing my aching fingers.
He had. Ellis’s hand went to the small of his back, where he kept his gun. “Stay here. I’ll check it out.”
He went for the stairs, leaving his gun holstered for the moment.
“Wait.” It wasn’t like he could use a firearm against a spirit. “Let me go first.”
I’d come here in order to make contact with these ghosts. They could be trying to tell us something.
I placed a hand on the bannister knob, straight into a spiderweb. I stifled a screech and snatched my hand back, rubbing it on my dress as I rushed up the two steps to Ellis.
He moved slowly, cautious, which was A-okay with me.
There was something up there, and it knew we were coming to see it.
I removed the doll from my bag, her chipped porcelain visage staring up at me with dead eyes, her blonde hair tangling around my wrist. “We’ll return this at the same time.”
“All in a day’s work,” Ellis murmured, taking in every detail of our surroundings.
Torn strips of yellowed wallpaper cast strange shadows. Spiderwebs clung to the occasional framed photograph of an unsmiling ancestor. Others had long disappeared from the wall, leaving only faint outlines and nail holes.
Ellis and I ascended the stairs side by side, and I fought the urge to take his hand. We had to remain alert.
“This place creeps me out,” he said, lifting his hand to avoid a fat black spider scurrying down the bannister.
“Bet you’re wishing we were back at your house, picking out curtains,” I murmured.
The corner of his mouth lifted. “You’re right. At least here I don’t have to decorate.” He glanced down the stairs behind us. “You know, I still have both curtains hanging—the moss and the light green one.”