“When we first bought this place, no one told us anything about ghosts. Ghosts weren’t uppermost on anyone’s mind then. This was in 1999. This house, well, this whole block had been a nuisance and an eyesore for decades. It sat vacant for several years before becoming a haven for hobos, hookers, and then junkies. I think all three of those groups managed to coexist at one point.”
Julie was, inconveniently, stuck on the phrase “haven for hobos” for a moment. Partly because she rarely ran into anyone who used the word hobos and also because she just liked the sound of “haven for hobos.” It had a resort-like feel to it.
“No one mentioned ghosts when we came to check this place out. The neighborhood was ripe for revival, we were told. Get in on the ground floor and all that. Our original idea was to renovate the place and then flip it. But as we worked on it, we grew to love this place.
“We saw right away that the house would need some renovating, lots of renovation. When we started the renovations, that’s when we noticed things happening. It was just small things at first. Objects moved from where we’d placed them. You know, like a hammer I left on a workbench in the garage showed up in the upstairs bathroom a few minutes later. At first, I thought Kate was moving stuff, just picking things up and then putting it down some place different and vice versa. But then we realized that things were moving when there was only one of us in the house or when neither one of us was home. We both thought we had early-onset dementia. We just couldn’t remember moving stuff.”
Julie could see how that would drive anyone crazy. Whenever she couldn’t find her car keys, she’d panic, wondering if senility was already starting. She wondered how Richard made the ghosts his muses and how that turned sour and most likely deadly.
“We asked our neighbors, but they were no help. They were just as new to the neighborhood as we were or newer, so off to the library we went. We spent a couple of hours there rooting around in the local archives collection. We learned that the Stephenson sisters—Eleanor, Rosamund, and Madeleine—once lived here. This was their house, well, their father’s house before them. They never married. Or maybe one of them married and was widowed. I can’t recall now. They lived here and died here. That much I remember.”
“A ghostly, sisterly trio. Sounds delightful,” Maya said.
There was an odd smell creeping toward Julie’s nose. It was getting stronger.
“I suppose he found them delightful enough to enlist their services as muses,” Julie said. “At least initially.”
“So, Kate and I were in bed one night in 2002. It was December. It was the night that confirmed that the whispers we’d been hearing, the strange shadows, they were ghosts. We’d returned late from a friend’s Christmas party. We stayed up for about half an hour after getting home to wind down a bit. Things had been quiet for a few weeks. What I mean is we hadn’t had any problems with things moving around the place, you know? So we go to bed. I don’t know how much later it was, maybe a couple of hours. I wake up because it’s gotten so cold in the room. I see the curtains moving like the window was open, so I get up and go over there. The window isn’t open. None of the windows are open, yet it’s colder than a witch’s tit.
“I thought maybe the furnace had gone out, so I decided to check it out. I put my hand on the doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge. Katie woke up and asked what was going on.. She asked me why it was so cold. She noticed the curtains moving and waving around and she asked if the window was open. I didn’t answer her because I was freaking out about not being able to open the door. She got out of bed to check the window and was shoved back onto the bed.”
“That must have got Kate’s attention,” Maya said.
Julie felt a shiver up and down her spine.
“Katie screamed and swore like a sailor. I kept trying to open the door. Kate kept saying my name, trying to get my attention. I finally said, ‘What?!’ I looked at her. She was pointing at her closet. To be more precise, she was pointing at a spot just above the closet door. I looked to where she was pointing and saw a sort of cloud. I thought it might be smoke and that something was on fire, but it didn’t smell like smoke. The cloud gradually got bigger until I could make out three faces in it. They were indistinct, but I could still see three faces. They were women, the faces, but then they’d change and the faces looked like little girl faces before changing back to women. The cloud dissipated a moment or two later. The cold left. The curtains stopped moving around. I was shocked.”
“Kate got up and opened the door. We went back to bed and didn’t sleep much that night. The next morning, we decided we needed to do more research on the house and learn more about the sisters, but there wasn’t much to learn. They were unremarkable.”
Julie made a mental note to do her own research on the Stephenson sisters. Unremarkable they may have been, she needed to learn more about them if they were going to solve this case.
Maya asked, “Hmmm. But does he say why he wanted them to become his muses?”
“Let’s see.” Julie began skimming pages. A few pages later on she found out more.
“The fright they gave us that night helped jumpstart my writing. Before that, I’d been stuck, really stuck. After that night, I realized that I had nothing to be afraid of. The sisters did me a favor. They showed me that there are worse things than writer’s block,” Richard wrote. “Writer’s block is such a first world problem. They helped me see that. They’re my muses because of that.”
Julie was getting a picture of Richard from his journal of a man who would never fully admit that he’d sought or received the help of spirits, even in the privacy of his journal. She looked at Maya who shrugged.
“Come on. Let’s go fill Lily in,” said Maya. A gust of wind pulled the door shut behind them as they left the study.
They found Lily sitting at the kitchen table engrossed in her tablet computer.
“So, what do you think?” Lily asked.
“We think we can help you, but we’ll need to bring in our colleagues to assist us,” Julie said.
Maya added, “It’s only a few more people, friends and family.”
Julie said, “My little brother is one of the crew.”
“All in the family?” Lily smiled.
“Indeed. We found these in the study.” Julie held up Richard’s journals, “Can we take them with us? We’ll only use them for the investigation and return them to you.”
Lily stood and held her hand out to Julie. “Can I see one?”
Julie handed her one of the journals. Lily opened it and flipped through the pages before settling on one to read. When she finished, she looked up.
“Yes, take them with you if you think they’ll help. Are you leaving now? What happens next?”
If Julie wasn’t mistaken, she thought Lily sounded a little disappointed.
“We’ll be back tomorrow,” Maya said cheerfully. “We just need to do some research.”
As Julie drove them away, she asked, “Did you sense anything when you were in there?”
Maya nodded. “I did, but it was hard to get a read on it. It was like whatever was there didn’t want me to know it was there, know what I mean? Like they were trying to hide.”
Julie willed herself not to look at Maya. She needed to keep her eyes on the road. “I’m not convinced Lily told us everything, but something will happen, especially once our crew shows up. Most ghosts like showing off.”
They drove the rest of the way to Maya’s building in silence. Maya said a quick goodbye before getting out of the car. Julie watched to make sure she got in safely even though it was broad daylight. Maya didn’t look back or acknowledge her in any way. Professionalism all the way. I can do that, Julie thought.
Chapter Five
Learning about the sisters
Later that day at home, Maya did a little research. According to what she found on the internet, Richard was correct, in a way. The Stephenson sisters were unremarkable in the sense that they did a lot of what was expect
ed of middle-class white women in the Midwestern United States of the early 20th century. They were members of local women’s clubs. Eleanor was the one who founded the local garden club, and the sisters kept a stranglehold on the garden club’s executive positions for a few decades. They volunteered at their local church and other do-gooder organizations, including the local Friends of the Library.
Madeleine, the youngest of the sisters, had a facility for languages, learning French and Spanish in school and teaching herself German. She was one of more than 200 women recruited and trained by the U.S. Army to work as telephone switchboard operators during World War I at the front in France. This seemed to be what sparked her desire to travel after the war ended. Her sisters joined her. They traveled widely between the world wars, with Egypt, India, East Africa, and Argentina among their favorite places. One of the sisters married. Rosamund married a man, an engineer named Erich, whom she met when the sisters visited Colombia. Maya could find little about him, and it seemed they were married a short time, less than a year, before he died of some sort of wasting disease he’d contracted in South America. Rosamund must have changed her name back to Stephenson after he died. She could find no indication that either Eleanor or Madeleine ever married.
They may not have moved mountains, but they lived full lives, most of it in the house the Vinnettes eventually bought. Rosamund outlived Eleanor by ten years and Madeleine by three. Maya wondered what it must have been like for Rosamund to live in that house alone, the only people who knew what she meant when she spoke of the old days gone forever. Or maybe they weren’t completely gone. From what Kate had said, it was the three of them who were haunting the house.
“What’s up?” Penny asked. She was supposed to be at her girlfriend’s but was home for some reason. She paused to lean against the door jamb to Maya’s room.
“Looks like we have another gig,” said Maya, turning away from her laptop and the web page of the Springfield Heights Historical Society. “What are you doing here?”
“Jess and I had a misunderstanding which led to a fight.” Penny came into Maya’s room and flopped down onto the bed.
“Oh no! Trouble in paradise?”
Maya would have liked a girlfriend, although she recognized that Julie was not a possibility, no matter how cute she was. It had been months since she’d broken up with Charlie. Every fight Penny and Jessica had made her happy for the single life until Lily’s beautiful face inconveniently popped in her head.
She’s a client. Not happening, she thought before returning her focus to Penny who was flipping from one side of the bed to the other and from back to front.
That girl never can sit still, Maya thought.
“Nah. It’ll be okay,” said Penny as she landed on her front and faced Maya. “We’re taking some time away from each other to cool off. It’s just stupid. I mean, it just happened, like, half an hour ago, and I can’t remember what the fight was about. Or that could be the tequila I drank.” She sprang up from the bed. “Eggs. I need scrambled eggs with lots of hot sauce right now. Do you want any?”
“Yes, please,” Maya shouted after Penny, who was already marching into the kitchen.
As the eggs steamed in front of her, Maya told Penny that she’d done a little research on Richard Vinette.
“He was what’s known in the publishing business as a midlist author, which means his books aren’t mega-sellers, but they sell enough to get his next book published.”
Penny shook more hot sauce onto her eggs. “Would I be familiar with his books?”
“That depends. Have you read any books about a wizard and a dragon who solve crimes together?” Maya smelled the plate in front of her. She wasn’t drunk or even tipsy, unlike Penny, but it was dinner time. She was hungry.
“Again. I think tequila is interfering with my comprehension. A wizard and a dragon solve crimes? That’s this guy’s book?”
“Yep. Several of his books, actually. He got a whole series out of it. I read the first four in the series. The first three were fun, really good. The fourth one was okay. It was so middling that I didn’t bother reading any more of them.” She took a bite of her eggs and then another.
Penny snorted with derision. “Maybe he deserved to be haunted.”
“I don’t know,” said Maya. “The ghosts either came with the house or he called them forth. Either way, he tried to use them and then they turned on him.”
“Oh, yeah. This is going to be fun,” said Penny.
Chapter Six
Divine inspiration
Julie’s brother, Jason, came over to her place after she texted him about their latest gig.
“So, this dude thought he had divine inspiration, and it went to shit,” he said as he lay sprawled on the sofa in her living room with a bag of cheese puffs between his legs.
Julie sat on the floor nearby, tapping on her laptop. She was reading the information on the sisters that Maya had just sent her. Richard had been dismissive of the Stephenson sisters in his journals, but it sounded like they had led interesting lives, albeit within the limits of their time and place.
“Yep, and there was something wrong when we were there. And I’m not convinced Lily told us everything.” She started writing a reply to Maya’s email, confirming that she’d meet her at the Vinettes’ house the following day.
“So how’d it go with Maya?”
“I told you. We went to the house. We talked to the niece.”
Jason chucked a cheese puff at his sister’s head. “Not that. How was it being around Maya now? You know, after that bad date.”
He swept a hank of his thick, dark hair out of his eyes with the hand he was using to throw cheese puffs at his sister. Julie wondered how long he’d let his hair get before he’d cut it this time. He’d joke sometimes that he didn’t like cutting his hair because it was the source of his strength, like Samson. Julie always rolled her eyes at that one.
“Okay.” She knew Jason would not be satisfied with that answer. She felt another cheese puff hit her head. “Stop it.”
“Then you stop it. Say you don’t want to talk about it, but don’t just say ‘okay’ in that fake nonchalant way. I know it didn’t go the way you wanted it to just from that ‘okay.’ Tell me to shut the fuck up and I will or tell me what happened.” He threw another cheese puff her way. This one she caught and popped in her mouth.
Julie finished typing her response to Maya and hit send before looking up at Jason.
“It wasn’t that bad of a date, but I fucked it up, Jase. We were having a great time. But when it came time for things to go to the next level, I whiffed. I whiffed so hard. Now, she acts like we’re just business partners, which I guess we are.”
Jason ate a couple more cheese puffs before setting the bag aside. “Well, that sucks. I know you really dig her. You’ve got to get Gabi out of your system. She’s a block. Do lesbians use the phrase cockblock?”
“No, we don’t,” said Julie desperately wanting to change the subject.
Jason did not oblige.
“Your hand-wringing about dating Maya is so stupid. She likes you. You like her. Go for it. Forget that Gabi chick.”
It wasn’t often that Jason, her decidedly straight brother, showed much interest in Julie’s love life. On the occasions when she mentioned that she was dating someone new or had broken up with someone, he’d listen politely, but otherwise offered little commentary or advice, although he did offer some comfort. This was the most she could ever recall Jason saying about her love life at all. She was a little pleased, largely because what he said was true. The Gabi nonsense had to stop. They were broken up. Julie needed and wanted to stop having sex with her. Thing was, she doubted that Maya would be the one who’d help her get over her, especially after how their last date had ended.
“By the way, this new client, the niece… She cute?” Jason asked.
“Oh, Jason. Sorry to break it to you, dude. She’s one of us.”
Jason’s face fell. “Wh
at? You mean—?”
“Yep. She’s playing for my team.”
Chapter Seven
How Lily met the ghosts
Lily felt better about things now that she’d met Maya and Julie. They struck her as competent and knowledgeable. Meeting them also helped her feel a bit less unnerved about continuing to stay in the house alone. She loved her Aunt Kate, but she wished she’d been able to stick around longer. Lily should have known her aunt wasn’t going to spend more time than she had to in the house after Uncle Richard died. At the wake, the funeral, and afterwards, Aunt Kate had seemed on edge. Lily doubted it was just grief and the ongoing police investigation. It was at the wake that Lily met Owen, Kate’s boyfriend. He was about fifteen years younger than Kate and owned a landscaping business. That was how the two of them had met. As Uncle Richard had chortled a few months before he died, “He trimmed her hedges.” He had thought that was funny.
Kate had done such a good job at keeping the Owen part of her life separate from the rest of her life that few people actually knew who he was. Most people assumed he was a relative of Richard’s or even Lily’s brother. Kate didn’t do anything to clear up the confusion. Owen didn’t move in after Richard died, but he did start spending more time at the house. They seemed happy together. Lily had gone home for a couple of weeks after the funeral before coming back to spend Thanksgiving with Aunt Kate. When she arrived Thanksgiving morning, she noticed a change. There was a sense of urgency that hadn’t been there previously. Kate seemed tired. Owen was solicitous of her and seemed worried. He also seemed spooked. They told her over dinner that the ghosts had come out to play a few days before, and a fourth ghost had joined them. They suspected the fourth ghost was Richard.
They had already decided to leave for the winter. For Kate, there were too many memories in this house. And they wanted to really start their lives together. She and Owen had rented a house in Florida. They left the first of December. Kate asked that Lily house sit while she was gone and look after Abner and Athena. Lily, who lived in a cramped apartment with two roommates, jumped at the chance to have some space of her own, even it was only for a few months. She had even offered to start getting things straightened up while Kate was gone, so they could sell the house when they got back in the spring.
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