Oak Avenue (Dark Corners collection)

by Brandi Reeds

  Why I would’ve done such a thing—and how I could have possibly forgotten doing something so ludicrous—doesn’t seem to factor into their ridiculous explanation.

  I might think they’re right, that I’m under too much stress to be thinking clearly.

  But none of them can explain the black-and-blue mark on my stomach that’s roughly the size of Edison’s foot. To be fair, I haven’t mentioned the bruise, the proof, to anyone. What good will it do? They’ll only rationalize it, say it happened some other way, and make me feel crazier.

  Still, the rest of the weekend was uneventful. We refinished the door and hung it at the attic access. Suddenly, the hallway upstairs came alive, and I saw the space in the way it was meant to be seen. I know what I want to do: a bright-white beadboard wainscot and above it, a rich navy-blue paint on the walls. Once we have the money, I’ll bring in a trim carpenter to wrap the space with a heavy crown molding.

  “We’ll paint it next weekend,” Ed says. He’s working from home this week so he can take care of me—his words, not mine—but it’s nice to have him home.

  While he’s working in a makeshift office in one of the upstairs bedrooms, I’m unpacking another box. This one is full of framed pictures of our families, which I figure I can place around the house to make it feel more like ours.

  He texts from upstairs: Keep it down?

  I text in reply: Sorry.

  I lower the volume on Sabrina’s show.

  “Zo,” Sabrina says through her pacifier. She happily grips a frame and points to a face. “Mama. Zo!”

  “What do you have there, pumpkin?” I pull her into my lap and look at the picture.

  I smile when I see who’s in the picture.

  “Zozo!” Her pudgy finger presses to the glass.

  I pull the pacifier from her mouth, so I can hear her more clearly. “Who is this, Brina?”

  “Zozo!” She reaches for the pacifier and stuffs it back in her mouth.

  “That’s who you’re always talking to?”

  Sabrina nods. “Zozo.”

  “That’s right,” I say, my fingers a little numb. “That’s my aunt Jolene.”

  She was my favorite.

  She died when I was a teenager.

  I always called her JoJo.

  10

  AUTHORITY

  Despite the fact that I left the stroller in the car this time, Sophie Malcolm blinks at me impatiently the moment I enter the historical society with Sabrina in my arms.

  Looking at me over her glasses, she says, “Your conversation with your father-in-law didn’t go well, I presume?”

  “I’m sure you knew before I arrived. Edison’s parents and I don’t have much of a relationship. But I’m sure they, like their son and the police, assume I’m imagining things. Ms. Malcolm, I’d like to buy your book. If you’d mentioned it the first time we met, I would’ve purchased it then, and the society’s been closed every time I’ve come back to buy it.”

  “It’s out of print.”

  “Then, please, I want to talk to you about the house.”

  She opens her mouth, likely to deny me, but I don’t give her the chance.

  “I’ve asked around. I know you believe in this sort of thing. I need your help before something worse happens.”

  She answers me with a steady stare.

  “Please, I don’t have much time. Edison doesn’t know I’m here. He thinks I’m running an errand. But for my daughter’s sake . . .”

  Her gaze trails for a moment to Sabrina. “I suppose we can talk while I work.” She reaches into a drawer and extracts the same notebook that had occupied her the last time I dared to barge in on her. “What can I do for you?”

  She doesn’t offer me a chair, but I take one anyway and prop Sabrina on my lap. “You said you had it on good authority that the house on Oak isn’t haunted.”

  “I do.”

  “If you don’t mind . . . what authority is that?”

  “By the authority of the president of the historical society.”

  I glance at the gold-plated label perched on her desk, identifying her as the president. Neither of us says anything for a moment. The silence hanging in the air between us, the hum of the air conditioner, and the scratch of her pencil against the paper . . . it’s all practically deafening.

  “This town takes care of its people,” she finally says. “There are hauntings in Parker’s Landing, but they do not occur at the Churchill estate.”

  “Well, it’s the Clementine place now. And my husband is one of you, and so is my daughter. So even if you don’t want to help me . . . help them.”

  She looks at me with a raised brow. “Will that be all?”

  “No. I’m sorry if that annoys you, but you have to know what’s been going on.”

  “I’ve heard quite a bit about what’s been going on with you and our town’s most eligible bachelor.”

  “I’m married.”

  “It might serve you well to remember that.”

  “I know you don’t like me very much—”

  “Nonsense. Why wouldn’t I like you?”

  “Because I’m an outsider. Because I pushed my stroller across your marble floor. Because I insist on interrupting your day, and I’m sorry about all of that. But strange things have been happening in my house . . . the house you insist isn’t haunted.”

  Her sigh is so exasperated I almost second-guess my decision to come.

  “I’m sure you’re very busy,” I say. “But . . . this morning, my daughter found a picture of my dead aunt JoJo, and she knew her by name. I haven’t seen the picture in years—it’s been packed away so long—and it isn’t like Ed and I discuss my aunt even rarely.”

  “She was special to you, this aunt?”

  “We were very close.”

  “She looked out for you?”

  “When I was a little girl, yes.”

  “Well, then, let it be a comfort to you that she’s looking out for your daughter as well.” She sniffs and glances up from her notebook. “But unless she rooted down here at some point or another, your dead aunt has nothing to do with this town. Have a nice day.”

  “It doesn’t concern you that there’s something in the house to warrant protection from?” I let it sink in a moment, despite her lack of a reaction.

  I continue: “Sabrina was across the room one day when a door inexplicably tipped over against the floor right where she was playing. Do you think Jolene got her out of the way?”

  “Perchance. But that’s nothing to be afraid of, so much as grateful for, now is it?”

  “Something is happening in that house. Ever since that one Thursday.”

  Her pencil lead snaps. “A Thursday, did you say?”

  “It happens all week, like a slow build from Monday morning, and peaks Thursday nights, on the cusp of Friday mornings . . . They’re the worst.”

  “If you’re experiencing something—and that’s a big if . . .” She clears her throat. “These things, if they’re unexplained, are usually triggered by an accompanying event. Did anything else happen on the particular Thursday when the activity began?”

  “I’d noticed a few things before—nothing outright malicious—but the real trouble began the day I first came to see you.”

  “The Thursday Bill began to cut down your trees.”

  “He came to service the trees and remove the rotten ones, yes.”

  “You ought to plant fruit trees to make up for those you’ve taken out. Or a cedar, maybe.”

  “I plan to. But aren’t you interested in what happens inside the house? It started with little things. There’s a door in the upstairs hallway. It opens on its own.”

  The color drains from her face.

  I swallow hard. “And even though it’s been positively balmy outside, the breeze coming down from the attic . . . it’s—”

  “Frigid?”

  “Arctic, some days.”

  “And Eddie?”

  “Like I said. Ed does
n’t believe me. He thinks I’m imagining things.”

  “And how is his health? Is he feeling well?”

  “Most of the time, but if I’m being honest . . . these days, he’s just . . . I don’t know . . . He has moments when he’s—”

  “Not quite himself?”

  It seems a breach of marital trust to admit it, but it’s true.

  The bruise on my stomach pricks with pain just then.

  “Ms. Malcolm, what do you think—”

  “My dear, that old catalpa tree . . . did it come down?”

  What is it with this woman and trees? “If Parker’s Landing has statutes about tree removal and replacement, they ought to be published. Of course I took it down. It was rotten,” I explain. “And we’re going to plant new trees just as soon as—”

  “You dug up the roots?”

  Small towns. Everyone has to know everyone’s business. “Yes.” I rake through Sabrina’s hair, brush it from her forehead.

  The old woman offers a curt, if not reluctant, nod.

  “It’s the most gorgeous door,” she says.

  I freeze.

  “An original,” she says. “A five-panel masterpiece with an iron grate.”

  “At the top,” I confirm. “You’ve seen it.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen it, all right.” Her voice is practically a whisper. “I’ll never forget that door.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  She stands, so I stand.

  “I’m the one who ordered that door to be buried under that tree.”

  My heart bottoms out in my gut. It wasn’t an accident. That door wound up in the ground very purposefully. “But . . . why?”

  “You unearthed quite a bit more than a door, Mrs. Clementine.”

  11

  EDISON

  “Tell me what I’m dealing with.” The airy foyer of the historical society is as cold and silent as the matron in charge of it, uncomfortable in every aspect, but I don’t budge.

  “The door . . . it’s back inside the house?” Ms. Malcolm asks.

  “I’m a restoration specialist, like I said. I want the house to be all it used to be.”

  My phone pings with a text from Ed: Trying to work.

  Ed: Turn down Sabrina’s music.

  I turned the music off before we left. I return: We’re not home yet.

  Ed: haha.

  He thinks I’m kidding.

  Ed: Turn

  Ed: It

  Ed: Down!!!!

  “Something is happening in the house.”

  “It happened in the seventies, but it doesn’t happen anymore.” Sophie Malcolm’s stare is faraway, as if she’s looking beyond me, into the distant past. “A perfectly respectable man—a Churchill, no less—turned into something no one recognized. He’d never had trouble with the drink but suddenly couldn’t stop.”

  I think of the dozens of wine bottles I cleared from the crawl space, and I imagine a faceless Churchill guzzling down alcohol and chucking bottles where no one could find them. “Ed is drinking too. Believe it or not, before we moved here, I rarely saw him take a sip.”

  “The trouble began with the renovation.”

  My throat tightens; we’re planning to undergo a major rehauling of the place in the next few years. I wonder if I jump-started trouble myself.

  “When you begin to disrupt what’s been sleeping for decades,” she continues, “there’s no foretelling its mood when it awakens.”

  “When what awakens?”

  She leans toward me. “Mrs. Clementine, listen to me. You and your daughter . . . it’s residual, an imprint of history left in the air of that place. It’s not there, not real. It happened once, but you must refuse to believe it’s happening again. By reacting, you’re giving it permission to persist.”

  An icy chill darts through my veins. I press a kiss to the top of my daughter’s head and hold her a little closer.

  “I said the house isn’t haunted,” she says. “But I didn’t say it had never been. There hasn’t been any activity since the bicentennial, since the Churchills called on me to bury the trouble.”

  “What did you do to bury it?”

  My phone buzzes with another text: Turn down that damn music!

  “I closed the door on it, so to speak. Churchill succumbed to violent episodes when he drank,” Ms. Malcolm says as she walks through the historical center lobby, turning off the lights in display cases. “Always built up all week and hit the height on Thursday. Has Eddie ever hurt you? Or the child?”

  Tears well in my eyes. I sniffle and confirm with a single nod. “I can’t go through that every Thursday.”

  “It will only get worse if you don’t stand your ground.” She pulls a book from one shelf, then meanders to the next shelf over.

  “But whatever’s in the house . . . you took care of it once before. Will you help me take care of it again, Ms. Malcolm?”

  “I’ll help the house as best I can.” Her lips pucker, and her glance travels over me from top to bottom and back again. “But whatever you allow to happen inside the house, the changes you must make . . . only you can help that.”

  “Can you tell me why? Why is this happening? What awakened this . . . this whatever-it-was in the seventies? Why is it stirring now?”

  She pulls another book, this one small and leather, from a shelf—“I won’t betray the Churchills”—and casually drops both books on the small table near the door. “Good day, Mrs. Clementine.”

  Her back is turned to me as I near the door, purposefully, as if she doesn’t want to watch me take the books, although that’s clearly what she intends. I scoop them up as I leave.

  After I get Sabrina buckled into her car seat, I see that the first book is none other than the one Ms. Malcolm penned. I scan over the table of contents, then flip to the section concerning the Churchills. The house was built in 1898 . . .

  My finger rapidly follows the typewritten lines until my eye catches something I didn’t know: Churchill, the town’s first lawyer, left in December of 1918, for an event in the state capital. He never returned. It was presumed he lost his way in the ensuing blizzard and died of exposure. His Model T was never recovered.

  I open the next book, which appears to be a journal. The first page boasts, in flourishing handwriting, that the book belongs to Mrs. Richard Churchill.

  I scan through the pages, all handwritten, but thoroughly read only bits and pieces:

  Richard is out again. I do wish he’d spend some time with the children and me . . .

  Richard can’t imagine how lonely I am in this godforsaken town . . . a girl has to talk to someone, hasn’t she?

  He refuses to listen to reason, won’t hear a bit of the truth. We’re in this predicament because he’s forever leaving me on my own.

  Richard has barricaded us in. I informed him of my intention to take the children away, and he is keeping us prisoners here. I might lose my mind.

  This afternoon’s wedding celebration carried on well into the night, and not a soul asked of my whereabouts, or the children’s.

  And the last entry:

  He has left town. I suspect we’ll never see him again.

  I slam the cover shut.

  It seems this house has a history of usurpation and abuse. A past as ugly as its current décor. And Sophie Malcolm insists it’s been stirred up again because I’m giving it permission.

  Edison texts again: Where are you? Please come home.

  I suppose I can’t avoid going back to the house on Oak forever, but I take the long way home, through town, past the Crescent Moon Café, where Cody Granger waves as he exits.

  The town is quaint at first glance; its secrets are buried beneath the surface. Will even my husband tell me the truth about what happened here so long ago? Or is it possible it’s such a firmly guarded secret that even he doesn’t know?

  I pull up to the house.

  I get out of the car and open the back door to unbuckle Sabrina. I hesitate, my hands go
ing still on the straps of the baby seat, but then gather her into my arms and remember what Sophie Malcolm said. It’s residual. The energy in the house isn’t real. We can’t let it influence us. We can’t be hurt if we don’t react. I walk into the house, which is dark; all the curtains are drawn.

  “Ed?” I pull a drape aside, and a beam of sunlight illuminates a path to the dining room, where Edison sits at the table, his back to the door.

  “Ana.” His head is in his hands, and he appears to be sobbing. His shoulders shake. I reach for him, place a hand on his shoulder. There’s a kitchen knife on the table, and while he isn’t touching it, I assume it’s there because he’s scared. He saw something, heard something, felt something he couldn’t explain. Maybe now he’ll believe me.

  “Ed?”

  He looks up at me, grinning a maniacal grin. Laughing, not crying.

  I take a step back. Sabrina huddles closer and murmurs, “Zo.”

  “Come upstairs.” His laughter sends shivers up the back of my neck. “I want to show you what’s in the attic.”

  “No, I think we should just—”

  “Come on.” For every step he takes toward me, I take another back.

  “No.”

  “Ana.” He’s closer now, even as I stumble backward. “I’m the head of this household, and I said—”

  “No.”

  “What did you say?” His fingers close around my biceps.

  Sabrina wails, and in a flash, I’m tumbling down, clutching my child, screaming.

  In an instant, everything is black.

  12

  EMERGING

  “Sabrina.” My head aches at the temples, and the light is so bright it’s difficult to open my eyes. But the last thing I remember flashes in my mind—Edison, the knife on the table, the attic—and I sit up with a gasp. “Sabrina!”

  “All right. It’s all right.” The voice is deep, male. “I’ve got her.”

  I blink hard, and when I manage to focus, I see my daughter resting her head on Cody Granger’s shoulder, asleep. There’s a quilt covering me; I throw it off.

  “No, no, no.” When I try to stand, I teeter and fall back to the sofa and try again. “We have to get home. This . . . God, this doesn’t look good. How did we get here?”