by Cat Knight
Chapter Sixteen
Rick climbed in to the back seat, Sarah snored lightly in the front. Covering himself with coats he lay down, and stared into space, thanking the God he didn’t believe in, that he would live to see another day. Retrieving his mobile from his pocket he sent an email to himself with the words ‘Waterford Downs’. Next, he flicked through the photos. Peering into the tiny screen, he saw only odd angled walls and the corner of the dollhouse. Rolling to his side, Rick slept.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Bright light and a rolling sensation woke him from his slumber. Bizarre dreams had played on his mind all night and only bits of pieces came back.
But with them the unbelievable memory of Maggie. Sarah smiled at him in the rear-view mirror as he sat up.
“We’re getting breakfast - nearly there. You were so asleep I didn’t want to wake you.” Rick rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. He’d hold off telling her anything till she’d stopped the car.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Sarah, exited the lady’s room and waited for Rick. He’d been frowning the entire time and lost in thought. When he returned to their table he was balancing two teacups, teabags and a pot of hot water. “Croissant OK? It’s on the way.”
Sarah nodded and wordlessly took the teacups, watching his pale, drawn face from under her lashes. He looked more worn out than she had ever seen him, in the entire five years she had known him. A rush of guilt pinged at her conscience again. I’ve been so selfish.
“Rick… I…” her face crinkled up and the tingling in her nose started again.
“Sarah.” Rick sat down and took her hands and cupped them in his. “I went back inside last night, when you were sleeping.”
Sarah’s eyes opened wide and her mouth dropped, she simply stared.
“Trying to catch flies?”
Rick smiled his jokey smile, and then unexpectedly his face balled up and tears came rolling out of his eyes. Sarah kept a hold of his hands, but said nothing, watching painfully, wishing she could do something. Withdrawing a hand, he wiped the tears away, and cleared his throat.
“I saw her Sar… She sat with me at the dollhouse.” Sarah’s face was wide with shock but then crinkled into tiny furrows all along her speckled forehead. Tilting her head, she asked with a childish sincerity,
“You mean…we can all live there now – she’ll sort of – behave?”
“No, it wasn’t like that. I sat at the teahouse to try to get her to calm down and listen, to tell her we wanted to help her. I think she wants us to bring Dean to her.”
Sarah became animated “What did she look like? I haven’t really seen her. Was she still little?” Her voice was racing, excited. Rick nodded.
“Yes, she was a little girl, sort of translucent. Somehow, in the end she seemed sad.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The blue plastic sheeting they bought on the way back to their home would have to suffice to keep the weather out, until they could get a glazier in. Pulling the ladder down from the attic, they tacked the plastic up over the windows. Sarah went into the bedroom and located the chargers to their phones.
“Maggie?” She whispered. “We’re leaving now. We’re going to find him for you. The house was silent and despite the debris that lay around, everything seemed calm.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Waterford Downs apartments was a council block of houses located in Greater Manchester. It would take them a good four or five hours to get there. Weary from sitting so long, once they had pulled on to the M56 they stopped at a service station for petrol and to stretch their legs. Grabbing a bag of chips and some fizzies, they walked around the perimeter lost in thought.
Conversation returned as they wondered what they would say to Dean when they found him.
“You never know, maybe he’ll come willingly.” Sarah’s voice was hopeful. Rick shrugged his shoulders. Sarah gave him a light tap and started walking toward the car.
“So, let’s get going anyway. I’ll get the GPS happening.” She plugged Broughton to map-quest in to her phone.
“What the HELL is that!” Sarah by the slip of a finger had turned on the camera. “My God Rick, Rick. On the camera, on the camera.” Rick grabbed it off her and his face flushed red and then white. It hadn’t been there last night, he had looked. Both of them held onto the phone and looked for a long time before Rick took it from her hands and flicked to the next photos. An eerie glow showed in the next and the next. When you looked closely Maggie’s face could be seen.”
“Unbelievable,” breathed Rick. “We’ve got proof, real proof. Ghosts really exist. We just captured a real live ghost.” Rick picked up Sarah and whirled her around spilling the remainder of his fizz all over her. Sprinting back to the car, as if afraid the images would disappear they sped off toward Broughton.
Chapter Seventeen
“Those photos are for Dean, that’s what I think. She wants him to know. Really know, that she’s still here.” Sarah’s stomach flipped and turned and refused to lie down. Rick didn’t answer, Sarah noticed that his exuberance at capturing the ghost on camera had faded and his face was pulled taught and pale. She guessed that Rick was worried that they would have to force Dean to co-operate.
The Waterford Downs complex came into view and as Rick pulled into the gutter a nervous sigh escaped him.
“How are we going to approach this?” He looked at Sarah, but his eyes seemed to wander and flit around.
“I just think we need to tell him we live at his old home. And then just… go from there.” She reached out and took his hand and felt his sweaty palm in hers.
Wandering along the complex, Ricks memories of the flashes Maggie gave him brought them to the house, familiar now, in some way.
“This is it – it’s show time,” Rick quipped. They walked up to the door and Sarah banged very hard on it.
An elderly small, and thin man answered the door. His posture was slumped.
Sarah stared, she had not been expecting someone that seemed so… insignificant. She took a step back in her surprise. In her mind, Dean was looming, black hearted and sinister. This man didn’t seem to fit the bill.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Rick remained stone faced. This was the man. He recognised him. Rick towered over him in height and with his muscle mass, compared to this wizened old man, Rick was a goliath. Sarah began to understand Rick’s fearfulness. It would have been easier for Rick to get angry with a big man. Argue and even fight with him. But this was a geriatric frail man, a shadow of the man that killed his daughter. She blinked involuntarily and swallowed.
“Hello, Um. Would you be Mr Jackson?” Sarah’s voice was lilting, almost musical, trying not to scare the old man. Part of her wondering if it was a mistake. Perhaps Rick had gotten the house confused.
The old man squinted at her through faded blue eyes, and felt for the glasses in his top pocket. Once they were placed on his face he gave them a long hard stare. The faded eyes slowly sharpened before her, and something seemed to click with him.
Sarah wondered if he was going to shut the door on them. Then abruptly a decision registered on his face. He ushered them in with a toss of his head toward the hallway.
Rick and Sarah looked at each other and stepped into his home. Mr Jackson led them to a modest living area. She watched Rick staring at him, summing him up. The old man’s eyes showed a glint, a hardness that belied his age.
Even tough old cops get old and weak, but he’s shrewd. Somehow the knowledge made Sarah feel better.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Take a seat. I haven’t got much here, but I can offer you a cuppa.” Rick and Sarah shook their heads as one.
“No, but thank-you.” Sarah smiled through her anxiety, wondering what would come next. An awkwardness filled the room. He broke it.
“I haven’t gone by the name Jackson for a very long time. How did you find me?” His voice grew gruff and his manner that of a harder man. Sarah’s confidence continued to grow. Somehow it didn’t seem so bullish to co
nfront this harder version of the old man. His weakness was physical, but his mind was sharp.
“It was Maggie, she showed us.” Jackson’s face was as hard as granite. He stared at them with-out a blink. Sarah was disappointed she didn’t get more of a reaction from him. She sighed in an exaggerated and deliberate manner.
“Look, I’m sorry if you don’t believe us. We bought the house – recently - but it’s more than that. I’ve lived there before as well, not too long after Maggie… died. Maggie never left Mr Jackson, she’s still there. We’ve come to bring her peace.”
More silence. “We’ve got proof. Rick caught her on camera.” Her voice trailed away as the old policeman, wary and suspicious surfaced in full force.
Jackson seemed to visibly grow taller in his chair and he regarded them with unabashed contempt.
“So, you thought you’d hunt around some old newspapers and come and wheedle an old man out of his money, for the sake of a chance to talk with his dead child?” Contempt fell with every word.
“No. No. It’s not like that. You know it isn’t. YOU KILLED HER.”
“You better be careful what you go accusing a person of. There’s laws against people like you.” A nasty snarl crept into his voice.
“And people like you.” Rick leapt to his feet and stood between Sarah and Jackson. “Just listen to her. Hear her out before you decide to throw us out. We don’t want any money we don’t want anything. Maggie does. She’s your child, at least she WAS your child. Don’t you owe her at least a hearing?”
Rick flung the mobile at him.
Chapter Eighteen
The eerie glow of Maggie sitting by the old doll house stared back at him. The old man’s eyes went wide with fright. He opened his mouth to speak but his jaw trembled and no words came out.
Sarah’s face had contorted into a furious scowl mixed with indignation. It seemed they were in a vacuum of ideas about what to do next so Sarah took the chance to speak.
“She’s always been there. I used to play with her. At first it was just appearing to people and giving them dreams, and I used to see her clearly, because I was little too. And we always played dollhouse. But she’s lonely and it got so as that she wanted my mum and dad. It scared my parents, and we had to leave.” Jackson’s posture slumped. He was again, the diminutive man that met them at the door.
At these last words, he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. Sarah continued, “And then, when Rick and I got married, we bought the house. I tricked Rick. He didn’t know about Maggie, but I wanted to help her so much and I promised her I’d come back. So, when we did… well she’s changed Mr. Jackson.
She’s not so harmless anymore. When she’s angry she can move things, and she seems to get energy from storms.”
Mr Jackson was now visibly trembling, his face fixed in twist. Sarah continued “We have to help her, she’s dangerous but she wants so much to be free. Rick played with her at the dollhouse and took those pictures.”
At the words Jackson broke down and sobbed. His howls tore at his wizened frame as he rocked back and forth in the chair. Sarah went to go to him but Rick put his hand on her arm. After a while the old man was all cried out. He blew his nose hard on a greyish hanky and looked them square in the eye.
“I did it. I killed my own daughter. I might not have meant to, if I was sane at the time, but it’s my fault she died that night.” He stopped talking and looked into a distant past.
“Mr Jackson?” Sarah prompted, “Will you tell us what happened to Maggie?”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
He looked at them with frank honesty.
“I just had enough. I’d stayed out longer than usual that night. You see I wasn’t in my right mind after Margaret died and the fact is, I never truly bothered with Maggie. I only agreed to have her for Margaret. Margaret was the one that was supposed to look after her, I left Maggie to her.” He stopped and bit his lip till it bled. “And Margaret died for Maggie, that night she was hit and killed, she was getting Maggie off from the road. Maggie had run off and was running down the middle of it, she had a bit of a habit of doing that. A wayward child Margaret called her.”
The sighs that came from him were those of a traumatised man.
“I resented her so much after Margaret died. I should’ve been there for her, but I couldn’t.”
Jackson seemed to be remembering. His face was a mesh of pain. Then in an instant it turned back to a stone mask and in a startling matter of fact tone he revealed the rest of his secret.
“I did it alright, I ended that poor child’s life. I started drinking more and more. I knew I should stop but being a cop, I got away with a lot of things. We looked out for each other, covered each other’s backs. They thought I’d come right. But every night I came home to a cold bed and a grizzling kid. The housekeeper couldn’t wait to get done for the day because Maggie was such a handful.
I sunk to a level no man should ever let himself go, but with a bottle of whiskey by my bed, I made it there. There’s no excuse in the world for it.”
Sarah made to speak, he held up his hand to stop her “And I’m tellin’ you all of it, so let me go on. That night, she went ballistic on me. I don’t blame her, but I was rolling drunk. She was upstairs playing with her dollhouse when I got home and the housekeeper left. But not before telling me what a drunk I was, and how Maggie was suffering. Maggie heard it all, poured my whiskey out and she said she hated me and wished I had died and not mummy.”
He stopped talking for a moment. His jaws flexed and Sarah could see the old man steeling himself for what was to come next.
“So I rolled up the stairs cursing her, I said things no man should ever say to a child. I told her it was her own fault her mother was dead. Well small as she was she flew at me and started kicking me. I picked her up and threw her off me, and she went down the stairs.”
Rick’s face was grey. His eyes burned black but his voice was controlled. “But you lied to the police. You told them you picked her up to greet her and fell down the stairs with her.”
Dean sat shrunken in the chair, if Rick had wanted to hit him, he couldn’t have. Dean nodded. “Yes, I lied in a panic to protect my own sorry skin. And afterwards it didn’t take much to convince myself that’s what really happened. Once I sobered up, it was hard to know what was true and what wasn’t. I lied to myself as much as I lied to anyone. But the older I got, the harder it was to keep the truth away, and eventually, it all came back.” A wall of silence descended until Rick cleared his throat to break it.
“Maggie still exists in some form.”
Sarah joined in with Rick. “She needs something from you Dean. I don’t know what it is, but she can’t leave… and we found where you were living because of the visions she gave Rick.”
“Well I don’t know what use I can be. If I give myself up, then I’m the only one who gets justice. And prison can’t be any worse than all these years living with what I’ve done. If only I could tell her how sorry I am, for all of it.” Dean sat crushed in the chair, his old face devoid of the tough man mask, etched in pain. Rick looked up from under his brows.
“Maybe it’s time you did. We can take you to her.”
Chapter Nineteen
The drive back to Fairview House was silent. No cheery chitchat lightened the atmosphere. Sarah knew that Rick was as concerned as she was about what Maggie’s reaction would be when Dean walked through the door. Dean was scared to death she could see it. He should be.
It was close to midnight when they arrived. All three stood in front of the house, looking at the blue plastic, now blown across the yard and billowing in the wind. Sarah gulped hard, Maggie had seemed quieter, calmer when they left. Perhaps she was just expectant and that was the calm before the storm. What now? Dean stared the house, In the moonlight his old face seemed scarred with sorrow and anxiety. Sarah had a moment of empathy. His voice cracked and he tried to make light jokes.
“My feet are frozen solid to the spot. They won�
��t move at all. Do you think the welcome mat’s gone away?” Sarah gave a weak smile. As much as she wanted to comfort him, she could not. There was no guarantee what Maggie would do. And if the torn plastic was any indication…
Looking at Rick for comfort, she took one of Dean’s arms and Rick took the other and they began a slow march to the front door.
“I feel like a man about to walk the plank. Ahh, it’s no more than I deserve.” Rick pulled the key from the bunch in his hand and unlocked the door. Dean put his hand on the door knob and turned it. “I used to live here, you know.” Ricks eyebrows creased to a worried line as Dean turned the handle and the door swung wide. Rick flicked a switch on the side of the wall and electric light flooded the entrance way.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Oh Shite.” Sarah’s hand flew to her mouth. Through the entrance to the kitchen door she could see the windows to the left of her were smashed, glass covered the benches and the floors. The breakfast bar stools lay on the sides and not a picture remained on the walls.
The house had a curious dampness, which could have been caused by the storm, but the smell was not of a fresh rain. Mustiness saturated the house.
Guided by Sarah and Rick, the three of them reached the stairwell where Dean balked and stopped moving, Rick fought the urge to say what he was thinking. You created this. They waited a moment until Dean was ready, Rick didn’t dare to let him go and remained with his own arm looped through Deans as Sarah did on the other side.
“Come on mate – we’ll do it together.” Sarah glanced at Rick, and for a brief instant he forgot his fear. Sarah was proud of him, he felt ten foot tall.