Lying by Maggie's head was what appeared to be a human bone, a femur maybe. The dog kept on digging, trying to get to the rest of his find. Gillian had no doubt as to what Maggie had found. It had to be the body of that poor girl. She grabbed Maggie by the collar, snapped on her leash and dragged her back along the path as fast as she could run.
Melanie was already back with the pizza. Gillian burst into the house, her eyes wild with horror. They immediately called 911. Gillian's story was pretty straightforward. The police officer noted her information and told her they would call as soon as they had some news. After they left, the two women returned to the B&B. Gillian took a sleeping pill and was out for the night.
A week later, Gillian got the call. The DNA evidence matched. It was the body of the missing girl. The officer informed Gillian that the girl’s parents had been informed. They were in shock but extremely grateful to Gillian for having finally brought them some closure.
After the great upheaval of the past few months, Gillian was once again back in the city. She and Melanie had moved her boxes of personal belongings but had left the furniture behind. There was no question of going back for a while. She decided to put all that behind her and concentrate on the present, one day at a time.
Another Christmas came and went, another long cold winter. This time Gillian went to a different resort. By spring, she felt she had enough courage to return to the country and finally move her furniture. Melanie wasn't available but Donna offered to help.
They drove to the country house on Saturday morning, taking Fanny Fluff with them. Her brother, who was staying in her apartment for the weekend, was allergic to cats. By afternoon they decided to go to Wolfville for a coffee break. Gillian had already told Donna all the details of her ordeal. They speculated about what exactly happened that fateful night so long ago.
They were about to cross the street when a sudden gust of wind blew Gillian's hat to the ground behind her. As she stepped back to retrieve it, a low sports car careened through the crosswalk, barely missing the people coming the other way. Had Gillian not reached back for her hat she would have been hit! She stood there, hat in hand, staring at the car which was rapidly receding in the distance. As she turned back to speak to Donna, she saw her reflection in the large display window behind her. To her astonishment, she distinctly saw a white shadow swirl around her and, quickly rising, disappear in the sky. Her heart sank! What if her ordeal wasn't over?
Gillian was quiet on the way home. She didn't tell Donna about what she had seen. When they got back to the house, though, it felt different somehow. The chill was gone and she found Fanny Fluff asleep in the blue bedroom. Donna was surprised when Gillian suggested they stay overnight, given all that she had heard. Gillian finally told Donna about the vision in the store window, and understood why she wanted to stay overnight. Maybe this whole nightmare was finally coming to a close.
It took Gillian a long time to fall asleep in the blue bedroom. She was comforted by the presence of Fanny Fluff curled up in the crook of her legs. Just before dawn, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. When she awoke an hour later, chickadees were chirping merrily outside the open window. Gillian stretched out lazily, breathing in the rich aroma of coffee brewing in the kitchen. She slipped on her robe, and slowly made her way down the stairs.
“What's for breakfast?” she asked.
~~~***~~~
My Booots!
Tom Robson
When we moved to Nova Scotia in 1979, I met a ghost.
My first 35 years had been spent in England where, if you believe half the stories you were told, every second dwelling is infested with ghosts. But I was one of life’s skeptics. I never saw or heard of an apparition that couldn’t be explained away. I simply did not believe in ghosts.
I lived many of my English years close to the ocean. I liked having access to salt water and shorelines. After living for seven years in or near Montreal, my wife and I decided to move. I wanted to return to the ocean. Our dream was to become part of a small community beside the sea. Ideally, we would find oceanfront property somewhere in the Maritimes.
There was the problem of finding jobs to replace those which we knew were soon to vanish. We had some Maritime contacts so, as soon as our summer vacation commenced, we threw camping equipment into the car and headed east to explore job opportunities.
Way out on the Eastern shore, within a rural community, I accepted a teaching job. The same afternoon, we found our dream home.
We had been driving around, looking and asking about available properties until we were seduced by a “For Sale” sign at the top of an overgrown driveway. We pushed through tangled alders, and burst upon a storey and a half house set against a backdrop of sunshine, with a sparkling summer sea fronting offshore islands. The opposite bank of the wide estuary shone spruce green on that glorious July day. The house was empty but phone enquiries led to a quickly arranged meeting with a bemused agent. We drove the 100 plus kilometres to Dartmouth. When we marched into her office the next morning, set to buy this long empty property, she must have thought it was Christmas in July. The next day, she followed us down east and showed us round the house and property, on which the sun was still shining. Though overgrown and somewhat faded and neglected, we were still entranced by the prospect of restoring and living in it.
We would be buying seven and a half acres of land, with 500 feet of ocean frontage, set on the fringe of a community where I was to work. Surely, we could gain acceptance and then become integral components of that town.
We were novices in the world of Nova Scotia real estate. The entire transaction took only 10 days. Good deals never happened this fast and easy. We overlooked basic safeguards such as having the property independently inspected. We simply thought we had hit the jackpot. We convinced ourselves that any work that needed doing to make the house habitable and comfortable could be done after we moved in. We’d find any money needed as easily as the real estate agent had found us a mortgage for this “gem”.
Three weeks later, with our belongings following in the moving van a couple of days behind us, we hot footed it back from Montreal, to our idyll.
It was raining and the wind was blowing onshore when we saw it again. The faded, black painted house, with grass, alders, weeds and bushes threatening to consume it, was less inviting. Inside, the wind whistled through the shingled walls and rattled the doors and windows.
We had two days to find the necessary tradesmen to get the well water flowing and electricity functioning. My real job didn’t start for more than a month. We naively assumed that would give us ample time to make our 100-year-old dream house comfortable.
For the two nights before our belongings arrived, we decided to camp out on the floor of our new-to-us house. That first night we snuggled in our sleeping bags in the living room, safe from a summer storm, dreaming our delusions and planning to resurrect our estate.
With all our ever-changing schemes, and the growing list of problems playing on our mind, sleep was impossible.
My wife and I bedded down on the pine planked floor of the dark and isolated house. Its silence contrasted to the city sounds and lights outside our former Montreal apartment window, with which we were so familiar.
Few lights worked in this gloomy, distressed house. There were no outside lights. The infrequent traffic noise and passing headlights were muffled by the 100 metres of scrub between us and the road. We even heard the waves break on the shingle shore 50 metres in the other direction. The diminishing wind still seemed to find cracks and crannies, through, which it whistled into and under the house.
And then there were rustling noises and scratching sounds that disturbed the wind-whistle isolation. The house had been empty for two years. Other than a crawl space where the well pump and furnace were housed, the post and beam building rested on a beach stone foundation from which many stones were absent. Who knew what wildlife was under our floor, in the walls, or under our roof?
The new
problem of identifying noises was more fodder to stimulate our tired but overactive minds. Eventually, exhaustion defeated my meandering thoughts and I slept.
I was awakened from a deep, but too brief sleep, by frantic whispers from my wife, her mouth mere inches from my ear. My surprised, awakening grunt was quieted by the urgency of Barb’s, “Ssshhhhh!” and her hand covering my mouth.
“There’s somebody upstairs! Listen!” she whispered.
She was right. There were shuffling footsteps over our head; they weren’t from a stocking footed field mouse or squirrel. Someone—or something—was moving in the empty bedroom above.
My watch glowed 3:15. If someone was up there, they must have known that we were in the house. Our car was parked feet from the back door.
“What do we do?” asked my wife, clinging to me, with fear in her stifled voice.
“I don’t know!” I whispered back, clutching her tightly, as much for my reassurance as hers. “We’ll wait to see what happens.” That was my decisive plan of action.
Scarcely breathing, we waited. Even when the footsteps began to shuffle down the stairs, we waited. They turned down the hall towards us. The door from that hallway to the living room was already open. We were on the floor to the right of it, safely ensconced in our sleeping bags. I got ready to spring into action if our visitor turned towards us.
But, still in the pitch dark, our visitor turned right, into the kitchen, a 25-foot long add-on to the original storey and a half. As the footsteps shuffled the length of the kitchen, across the worn, linoleum floor, I thought I heard a male voice say just two words: “My boooooooots!”
“Boots” was drawn out into a long, plaintive enunciation, as though he was so emotionally attached to them that he was mourning their loss.
Then there was a metallic creak as a door opened, followed by a clanging noise.
Again: “My boooooots!”
At the far end of the kitchen was a door leading to the outside. It was closed, and we had no key for its lock. I’d been unable to move it earlier in the day. But, in the dark hours of that morning, we heard it open. And then it closed. The shuffling footsteps were no more.
Barb and I breathed again. We were still too scared to move, even though both our bladders beckoned us, most urgently, to go up those stairs to the bathroom.
I quietly scrambled for a flashlight that I’d laid somewhere near my pillow. “Don’t turn it on yet!” urged Barb. “It may still be outside!”
“It?” I whispered. “Didn’t you hear the voice? That was a man!”
“Sssshhhh!! Let’s wait five minutes. Then you can check things out!” volunteered Barb. “What do you think that clanging noise was?” she asked. Her nervousness was making her more talkative than usual.
I’d already speculated that it was one of the doors on the very old wood stove and range that stood at the far end of the kitchen.
A while later, full bladders, insatiable curiosity, and a wife who wanted me as a super hero compelled me to turn on first the flashlight and then the few house lights that worked. The front, back, and the jammed door at the far end of the kitchen were all locked tight.
There was one open door. The wood stove had an oven door hinged at the bottom. The clanging and the metallic creak had been the result of that door being opened. I closed it. The door had been securely fastened with a latch. There was no way that it could’ve fallen open on its own.
There was a joint expedition to the bathroom where we flushed with water from a bucket, hauled earlier from the well. Both bedrooms were empty, as were the closets. There was nowhere for anybody to hide.
We didn’t check the dark outside.
Back in our welcoming sleep spot, we lay there forever, speculating on what we’d heard. It was so country dark that we had seen nothing. But what were those sounds? Who had been in our house? How did he get in and out? Had he been hiding upstairs? What exactly had he said?
The questions were stilled as we snatched a little more sleep.
There were no answers for the mysterious noises when we woke to sunshine a few hours later. We searched the dilapidated shed and newer barns. We even checked the two-seater outhouse, a building we would probably have to employ until we could get water flowing from the well.
But there was much work to be done and many people to find before our belongings arrived the next day. Investigating our mysterious, wee-hours visitor was a low priority.
Of necessity, we met many new people that first full day in the community. Without exception, they identified us as the people who’d bought that house on the road to Temperance Island. It was variously identified as “the Crozier property”, or “Mrs. O’T’s house” or “The Strawberry Farm”. The confused chronology and history of its previous owners was not clarified until late in the afternoon.
The local plumber, Frank, an elderly, garrulous fellow, arrived late afternoon to assess the well and pipes. After he’d checked the pump to see what parts were needed, he said he’d be back the next day but first suggested that we pour a jug of Javex down the well.
He was a keen conversationalist. When asked, he told us that the family that had long occupied the property was named Crozier. They had eventually sold it to a retired sea captain who grew strawberries there in the sixties. The last owner, Siobhan O’Toole, was a local teacher. She’d rented the place to people who had neglected and abused it before leaving. It had been empty for at least two winters.
He added, “You’ve got a load of work ahead of you here!”
We’d already come to that realization. We enquired about the age of the house.
“I don’t know, but Isaac Crozier runs the local store. Ask him. He was born here so he should know,” volunteered our friendly plumber.
“We thought someone was in here last night,” Barb told him. “About three o’clock, we heard someone come down the stairs and go out the kitchen door.”
Our talkative and knowledgeable plumber was, for the first time, silent. Eventually, he suggested we mention that event when we talked to Isaac at the store.
Before settling down on our hard, floorboard “bed” that second night, we thoroughly checked doors, windows and closets: upstairs and down. Earlier in the day, we’d even scrambled up into the uninsulated attic. Nothing there, either, except a primitive bootjack. Our first, sleepless night, followed by a hectic day, meant that we should sleep soundly, kept safe by the child’s night light we’d bought. The only working power point where we could plug it in, though, was in the kitchen.
By 10:00 p.m. we were both sound asleep. I woke, with a start, to a voice whispering, “It’s back!”
He was!
Again, he was shuffling down the stairs, though Barb had already heard him moving above our heads, as I snored. As before, he came towards our sleeping place, then turned away into the kitchen, moaning “My booooots!! My boooooots!!!!”
I sneaked a look past the door into the nightlight lit kitchen. I saw a man in a long sleeved shirt and coarse woolen pants tucked into his socks. He stopped at the stove and opened the oven door, which again creaked and clanked.
“My booooots!!!” he uttered. He turned, easily opened the jammed tight door on the ocean side of the house, and left.
Barb, too, had glimpsed this man, though neither of us could distinguish his features. “Was that a ghost?” she asked.
When I didn’t respond, she added, insistently, “It must be!”
“Unless someone has a key to that door!” I replied; as always, I was looking for a logical explanation to discount a ghostly apparition.
The oven door was still down. The door through which our visitor had left was, again, jammed tight when we checked.
We lay there between 3:30 and 4:00 o’clock, trying to make sense of the strange events of the successive nights. Barb was too scared to sleep. I racked my skeptical brain for the explanation that continued to escape me. Perhaps it was a ghost. Was it time to change my belief?
How could we
find out about our “visitor”? Hopefully, Isaac, the corner store owner would have an explanation.
On waking, we again decided we had more pressing matters to deal with: urgent and practical situations for which we hoped we could find solutions.
For some time, we were preoccupied with the lengthy task of getting water to circulate through pipes that didn’t leak. The house needed a thorough cleaning, too. Later in the day, our belongings had to be unloaded and sorted. We had also negotiated to have the house rewired once we learned that the old wiring was a fire hazard.
The ghost, if that's what our uninvited guest was, hid in the back of our minds once we began sleeping upstairs in our own bed, on that third night. He didn’t appear. Or maybe he did, but he no longer disturbed us.
A few days later, on errands in the harbour, we had to stop at the store. I asked the man who served us if he was Mr. Crozier. He was, so I introduced us as the new owners of his old family property.
“I heard that someone from away had taken it on,” he responded. “So it’s you! I haven’t been near it for years, not since I bought strawberries there. I hear it needs a lot of work.”
“Frank’s working on the plumbing and the electrician starts the rewire tomorrow.” I shared.
“What about the insulation?” he asked.
I gave him a blank look.
“Better check that. Unless it’s been changed, there’s dried seaweed in the walls, and it’s probably all sunk down to the bottom of the spaces. There’s nothing in the top five feet of any outside walls. And the attic was bare, as I remember. No insulation up there.”
The good news kept rolling in.
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