A Darker Shade

by Laura K. Curtis

  “I do wonder why the spirit tried to shove her down the stairs, though. And why now.”

  I swallowed. “I was in the billiards room looking at information your father had about contacting the dead.”

  “Contacting the dead? My father? I hardly think so.”

  “Well, maybe the texts have been there since before your parents took the house, before he used it as his office. But there’s an extensive collection of information on spiritualism way up on the top shelves. If that poses a threat to the ghost for any reason, she might have considered Jennifer’s accusation a way to get rid of me before I could get any further.”

  “What led you to the billiards room?”

  “Your father’s book. The one about the history of Maine. Matt said that while researching it, he’d come across information about the people who built this house. I thought it might have a hint as who the spirit is. If she’d come from your family, you’d know about her. Or I assume you would. If your great aunt or someone had died horribly here, you’d have spoken up at Adriana Livingston’s.”

  “True enough.”

  “Which means that she died before your family took over, or at least long enough ago that your family doesn’t talk about her anymore. I hoped your father might tell her story as part of his history.”

  “You really don’t want to attempt to get through that book. I’ve tried multiple times.”

  “I don’t need to read the whole thing. Just the section about Wilton Pond and the house. I can’t help feeling that my fall into the pond wasn’t an accident. Which means she’s strong out by the water, just like in the house.”

  “I’ll get the book.” Nathaniel looked from me to Liza. “I must be losing my mind. But I’ll get it. I want this over.”

  He rose stiffly and left the room, all his usual grace gone. We’d stolen that from him along with his faith in the world and his assurance that he knew real from imaginary. He had seemed superhuman when I’d first seen him standing in the hall of Rook’s Rest and now I missed that strength and surety.

  He was gone only a moment, and when he returned he handed me a hefty hardcover. The cover had been designed to look as if it had been torn into four pieces, each showing a different person—a Native American, a French soldier, a British soldier, and a man in a dressed as a sailor, though I had no idea whether his clothes indicated a particular nationality. The rather dry title told me why Jenn, Matt, and even Nathaniel had avoided reading the book—Maine: Seafarers and Settlers through the Civil War. Still, I thanked Nathaniel for bringing it to me.

  “I have to go up and talk to Jenn. We’ve been friends all our lives and I can’t let her leave like this.”

  “It occurs to me that Hailey saw the ghost, too. We thought it was a dream. But the first night I was here, she saw a woman in her room. It might make Jennifer feel better if she knew that Hailey had been touched by the spirit, that she didn’t come up with the ladder sabotage on her own. I suspect that once she takes Hailey home, that corruption will pass since she was never the true object of the spirit’s anger.”

  His dark eyes studied me but I could not read their expression. “You’re very generous.”

  “It’s no more than the truth.”

  He nodded. “I’ll be back down when I can. I doubt we’ll be having a sit-down dinner tonight. If you get hungry, fix yourself a bite. That goes double for you, Liza. You’re getting too skinny.”

  She flung herself at him and hugged him fiercely. For a second he was too shocked to respond, but then he wrapped his arms around her and rocked her. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, baby.”

  She sniffed a little and pulled away. “It’s okay, dad. I should have kept trying.”

  “We’ll both do better next time,” he said. “Now, you stay here with Molly while I go upstairs.”

  The room seemed colder when he left, so I built a fire. It took me a few tries to get it right, but soon enough the fatwood starters were popping, their sweet, resinous scent filling the air.

  “I’m going to look through here and see if I can find anything about an unnatural death on the property,” I told Liza. “Do you want to go upstairs and grab a book or your crochet?”

  “Do you really believe she’s in there?”

  “Do you disagree? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  She shrugged, glancing away.

  Despite the fire, ice rippled over my skin. “Have you been talking to her?”

  “She’s waiting for me. I can feel her. It’s like she’s kind of hanging over my shoulder all the time.”

  “Don’t talk to her, Liza. Please.”

  “Why not? It would be easier than reading that old thing and hoping you find a clue.”

  Fear clutched deep and hard and I struggled to articulate my reasons. “The easy way isn’t always the right way. Adriana Livingston said that the spirit was attached to you. Talking to it, to her, might gain us information, but at what cost? It might strengthen her attachment to you. We want to sever that if possible, to send her to her own people, so we have to be very careful how we proceed.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and for a moment I thought she would argue. But then she turned her back on me and left, returning a few minutes later with her crochet. We had to tease out a few knots that had formed in the yarn and frog back two rows to a mistake, but at last she settled quietly beside me on the couch, leaving me to study Nathaniel’s father’s book.

  The sun sank in the sky and I had to get up to add new logs to the fire twice as I read.

  I had no clear idea what I was looking for, so I could not skim nearly as quickly as I would have liked. Despite the wealth of texts in the billiards room, Prescott disposed of the spiritualist movement in a single chapter. He did refer to three of the pieces I’d seen upstairs, but mostly to scoff at them with an academic’s superiority.

  Although the book spent far more time on Native American history and culture than my own American History textbooks had, the Indian schools were given short shrift as they were not particular features of Maine’s history. Instead, Prescott explained, Maine’s abuse of the Native population had taken the form of forcing children into the foster care system. This anomaly made me even more curious about the single Canadian book I’d seen upstairs.

  I needed to talk to him, to get the details the book merely hinted at, to find out what he’d discovered in all those texts about spiritualism and why he wanted to know about the Native boarding school experience. Nathaniel had called his parents “Puritans,” so I couldn’t very well tell them our theory, but there had to be a way to get the information because I could almost taste its importance.

  Nathaniel had not yet returned by the time I went to bed. In the quiet darkness of my room, I drifted off.

  And woke with my breath trapped in my lungs, hands of smoke wrapped tightly around my neck, lifting me from my bed. I tried to pry them loose, but my own fingers felt nothing against my skin, though the pressure never ceased. I grabbed for the nearest object, found the lamp on the bedside table. Threw it hard against the wall, where it shattered. At the explosion, the stranglehold eased slightly, dropped me, and in that instant I gasped in a single gulp of air before the invisible grasp choked me once more. More objects followed. The ghost book, the mirror hanging on the wall. With each crash the thing that held me flinched, but I was losing the battle. Each flinch was shorter, each breath I managed smaller, and I was blacking out.

  Far away, I could hear Liza screaming, though I could neither see her nor make out the words. And then the thing was gone, and I was on the floor, choking on thick, brackish liquid, and my room was full of people. I sat up and tried to speak. Failed. Spat out more liquid. Tried again.

  “How did you get rid of it?” I choked the words past the sore scratch of my throat.

  Nathaniel moved to help me up, then shifted me to the bed. “I have no idea.”

  “Good God,” said Matt, visibly trembling and slightly green. “What wa
s that?”

  “The reason we called you. The reason Jenn and Hailey shouldn’t be here.”

  Both Jennifer and Hailey, I noticed, stood off to the side. Hailey was crying, her face pressed into her mother’s breast. Of all of us, Liza seemed the least shaken.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  Matt answered. “I’ve never seen anything like it outside of a horror movie. And if you put it in a horror movie I’d have called it unrealistic.” He picked up a chunk of the mirror I’d thrown and handed it to me, tilting it to show my neck, where a long, coiling, snake-like welt was rising.

  “There was nothing there,” he said. “But you were…hanging. Swaying like someone was holding you. Your feet were about an inch above the floor and we could see the pressure on your neck. An indentation.”

  “That’s how she died,” I croaked. “Our ghost. Has to be. That’s what Hailey saw. Isn’t it? That nightmare you had, where a woman was in the corner of your room?”

  “Stop it!” Jennifer shouted. “Just stop! Leave my daughter alone!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right. She’s traumatized enough.”

  “You can’t stay here,” Matt said to me. “For God’s sake, Thane, none of you can stay.”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “I told you. It’s not tied to the house. It’s tied to us.”

  “To Liza,” Jennifer corrected.

  In that moment I hated her as I had never hated anyone. More than I hated the faceless thug who’d shot my father or the cancer that had stolen my mother. More, even, than I hated the spirit who’d just attempted my own murder.

  She sighed and ran a hand across her face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I don’t understand this. I don’t know how to act.”

  “No one expects you to,” said Nathaniel gently. “We’re all off kilter here.”

  “I still don’t understand. If I was…as you say…what did you guys do get rid of her?”

  “Nothing,” Matt said. “And I doubt I’ll ever forgive myself for that. Liza kept screaming ‘get away from her,’ and I half thought she was talking to me, but Thane went over and grabbed you and you fell down on the floor. You weren’t breathing. The indentation began to fade, but you didn’t wake up. So he gave you mouth to mouth. Then you spat up weird, swampy water and woke up.”

  I shuddered. I still tasted that water, the unpleasant, dirty flavor with the faint coppery aftertaste of blood. And it made no sense, even in the context of the nightmare landscape we inhabited. I had felt the hanging as clearly as if I were awake when it happened. It had to be how the spirit had been killed. So how was the pond involved?

  Nathaniel’s next words yanked me back to the present. “Matt’s right, though. Molly, you should pack your things. You can leave with them at first light.”

  “No—”

  He overrode me. “No one goes anywhere alone until the sun’s up. We’ll spend the rest of the night downstairs as a group.”

  “I have to change,” said Jennifer. Her sheer, flowing white gown, combined with her blond hair and pale skin, painted the very picture of a traditional fleeing spirit, utterly unlike the object of terror currently working its will on us.

  “I’ll go with you.” Matt flicked a glance in my direction, then looked quickly away. A shudder passed over him and I realized he feared being alone with me. Feared me. “Come on, Hailey, let’s help your mom. You should put on a sweatshirt over your pajamas, too. It’s chilly downstairs.”

  They hurried from the room, leaving me alone with Nathaniel and Liza. I wanted to change, too. Not because my sleeping scrubs were inappropriate, but because sweat had soaked them and now they stuck, clammy and uncomfortable, to my chilly skin.

  “Can you stand?” Nathaniel asked.

  “Of course.” When I slipped from the bed, however, my knees wobbled and tears threatened. I grabbed for the bedpost, but Nathaniel came to my rescue and wrapped a long arm around me. My whole body sagged for a moment and the intensity of my own desire to simply fold up into him scared me nearly as much as the idea of facing a ghost. I pulled away and managed a stiff smile.

  “Thanks. I guess I’m a little shakier than I realized.”

  He crossed his arms and regarded me with that inscrutable expression. “One could hardly expect anything else. Take it slowly.”

  I plucked at the front of my top, pulling it away from my skin.

  “Molly wants to change, Dad,” Liza said. “She’s all gross.”

  He looked blank, as if he didn’t understand the words.

  “I’m fine.” How many times had I said those words since my arrival in Maine? Had they ever been true? Even once?

  He shook his head, clearing it. “No, of course you need to change. I’ll be right outside. Liza, you stay with Molly. If anything happens, holler.”

  Chapter 20

  Nathaniel stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut. Why would he leave her with me? Her dark gaze was as impenetrable as her father’s.

  “Are you holding up all right?” I waited for her to nod before I drew my top over my head and ran it behind my neck to wipe away the sweat gathered beneath my braid. Liza sucked in a sharp breath and my fingers went to my throat where the thick welt rose. “That bad, huh?”

  She nodded, and two tears slipped down her cheeks.

  “Oh, honey. It’s okay. Really. We’ll get through this.”

  “It’s my fault,” she whispered. “I wanted her to come. I wished for her to come. I wanted everyone else to go away. She’s only doing what I asked for.”

  I pulled a sweatshirt over my head to give me a chance to collect my thoughts. “You know my mother died a few years ago, right?”

  She nodded.

  “I was much older than you. But I still had all those same feelings. I love my sister. Adore her. But right after mama died I wished she wasn’t around. Not that she’d die, or that she’d never been born, but that I could just be alone with my memories of my mother, without being responsible for anyone else.”

  “You did?”

  “I did. Trust me, I wouldn’t lie about something as terrible as that. And then, of course, I felt guilty for those wishes. Which made me angry. Which made me wish she weren’t around so that I wouldn’t feel guilty. It’s absolutely natural, and doesn’t make you in any way at fault for what’s happening here. You didn’t say ‘hey, ghost, shove my aunt down the stairs,’ did you?”

  I meant it as a joke, but she shook her head somberly. “But I didn’t tell her not to. Aunt Jenn wanted to send me to an institution. A crazy place. She told Hailey.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.” Actually, I knew Jenn planned to hide Liza away somewhere, but I refused to believe she’d told her daughter so.

  “Hailey was right about her mom wanting to marry my dad. And it would have been easier with me out of the way.”

  “Even if that’s the case, your dad would never let it happen. And she’s leaving now, so it’s irrelevant. You didn’t want your father to get married again. That’s not the same as hiring a ghostly assassin to push your aunt. We all have feelings we’d rather not. We all think uncharitable thoughts. We’re only responsible for how we act, not how we feel.”

  Those owlish eyes regarded me long enough that Nathaniel knocked on the door and asked whether we were okay.

  “Out in a minute,” I called. Liza’s bony fingers reached up and I let them touch my neck. “Not your fault, honey. And guilt doesn’t help. I felt that when my mother died, too. Like if it hadn’t been for me, she would have had insurance. Would have gone to a doctor sooner. But you can’t fix the past. You can only fix the future. Don’t waste your energy on guilt—and I do understand I just told you we can’t help how we feel—but don’t let it hobble you. If you spend all your time worrying about what you did wrong, you won’t be able to help us make things right. And we need your help. Yours above anyone’s because without you, we have no way to connect to her.”

  She straightened from her
slump.

  “You mean that?”

  “I really do.”

  When I opened the bedroom door, everyone had gathered in the hall. Two hefty suitcases sat at the top of the stairs, and Nathaniel was promising to send Jennifer the remainder of her possessions once she and Hailey had found a place to settle.

  A bit of color had returned to Matt’s cheeks, but he did not meet my eyes when Liza and I joined the group. Instead, he lifted the bags and started down the steps. The rest of us followed.

  In the living room, Nathaniel built a fire and Matt poured himself a large glass of bourbon.

  “That seems like a great idea,” Jenn said. “Get me a vodka tonic, will you?”

  “Sure. Anyone else?”

  I shook my head. Nathaniel offered to make hot chocolate for the girls, both of whom agreed.

  “Not by yourself,” I said when he stepped toward the door. “You were the one who insisted we go nowhere alone.”

  “Right. Of course.” He hadn’t meant himself. In typical male fashion, he considered himself invulnerable. The rest of us needed his protection, but he did not need ours.

  “I’ll come with you,” I offered.

  “Come on, then.” He did not stop to see whether I obeyed and I followed those stiff shoulders down the shadowy hallway and into the kitchen. He poured milk into a small saucepan and glanced over at me. “You want a cup?”

  I remembered the last time he’d brought me hot chocolate, the thick, sweet comfort of it, and nodded. He poured more milk in and set the heat to low. Rocky whined in his crate, but when no one came to take him out, he settled back to sleep. The book I’d bought said dogs could often sense spirits; either the author lied or Rocky lacked the sensitive gene.