Groggy and disoriented, I pushed myself to my elbows, trying to pinpoint what had awakened me.
The rain still poured and the tree still tapped at the window. I sat up and gazed around the small space.
Then I heard it.
Moans. From above.
What the…
My skin chilled beneath the coverlet. I slowly lifted my eyes to the attic door.
It could have been the wind, rushing through the uppermost eaves of the house. Old houses have a lot of quirks, and Granny’s place was no exception. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have sworn I could hear the murmur of voices above me.
Not possible.
I threw back the covers and swiveled to put my feet to the floor. The room had cooled significantly, and goose bumps popped up on my arms. For the second time that night, I tried to hear past the storm, my ear pointed towards the ceiling.
What had first sounded like moans now sounded like… singing?
Maybe my bravery stemmed from the fact that I was still caught somewhere between sleeping and waking, but I stood, crossed to the ladder, and mounted it, determined to open the door and see what was up there. Probably a freaking hole in the roof—just what we needed with Dad laid off.
I’d only ascended a few rungs when the moans intensified. Loud, painful groans that were too loud and too irregular to explain away as sounds of the storm.
Shit! I scrambled off the ladder, landing hard on my feet. Pain shot up my heels and the momentum threw me to my butt. I caught myself on my palms and crab-walked away from the attic door. My heart pounded.
Almost as immediately as it started, the sounds stopped. So did the storm.
In the split second of eerie silence, a scream issued from the attic.
I don’t even remember getting to my feet, but I ran into Dad in the hallway, bouncing off his soft chest in the dark.
He gripped my arms, steadying me. His eyes glittered in the dark hallway as he tried to make out which child he’d almost run over. “Susan Nora Owens! You scared the life out of me. Are you okay? Why’d you scream?”
“It wasn’t me,” I said, pointing back at my room. The light from my lamp slanted on the hallway floor. “I think there’s someone in the attic.”
Dad rolled his eyes and rubbed his hands vigorously over his bald patch. “Sue, there’s no way anyone could get into the attic.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, cold in my tank top. I might have pouted. “I heard moans. And even you heard someone scream.”
With a sigh, he stepped around me and headed for my room, his plaid flannel pajama pants swishing. “I’ll take a look. It’s going to be the wind, and you’re going to feel silly.”
“Whatever, Dad, I know what I heard,” I sighed back, echoing Izzy. It irritated me when my father acted so know-it-all. It was a problem because he had passed it down to the rest of us.
Izzy and Rachel poked their heads from their bedroom as I passed, sleep in their eyes. “What’s going on?” Izzy said groggily.
“I don’t know,” I answered with a shrug, and then stepped back through my bedroom door.
Dad was already mounting the ladder when I entered. His body seemed a bit too large for the flimsy metal pipes. Mom had him on a low-carb thing, though he hadn’t yet figured it out. It was just a matter of time until he realized she’d stopped making homemade bread.
“Dad, be careful,” I told him. “That doesn’t look too sturdy.”
“He’s going to hurt himself,” Rachel said from behind me as she entered the room. She plopped down on my bed, adjusting the glasses on her nose, and tucked her long, pale legs underneath her like a pretzel.
“I am not,” Dad huffed as he reached the top of the ladder.
Another rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. I hoped it was the storm leaving, not another coming in. I was creeped out enough as it was.
I felt Izzy draw up beside me and glanced over at her. She had braided her fauxhawk patch of blonde hair, and there was a deer-in-the-headlights glow to her face.
“Are you okay?” I asked softly.
She shook her head. “Something’s wrong with this house.”
“It’s just a house. Our grandmother’s house,” I reminded her.
“A house she lived in for only, like, twenty of her eighty years even though it’s belonged to her family forever,” Rachel cut in, picking up my teddy bear and waving an arm at us.
“Really?” Izzy wrinkled her nose. “Why?”
I shrugged.
“Because something’s wrong with it,” Izzy shot back. She might as well have said I-told-you-so.
The loud clunk of the attic door startled us, and we turned back to Dad as he grasped the heavy iron handle and pushed.
A draft rushed down from the ceiling, blowing my hair back from my face. It was frigid. I could hear the wind a lot better without the insulation of the door.
Dad’s head disappeared into the dark rectangle. “Sue? Get me a light, will you?”
“I’ll do it,” Izzy murmured, fleeing.
“What do you see, Dad?” Rachel called, scooting to the end of my bed for a better look. I found myself rooted to the floor right inside the room, fearful of going any closer.
“Can’t see anything yet. Iz? Where’s that flashlight?” he yelled, his head ducking back down so he could peer out over the bedroom.
Izzy rushed back into the room and offered the flashlight up to him. “Here.”
Dad heaved his body up through the hole in the ceiling, the beam of the flashlight dancing through the opening until it disappeared. I stood in silence, my face to the attic door as I waited with my sisters.
There were a few moments of silence, then my father’s awed murmur came from the abyss above us. “Dear God in heaven.”
Chapter 3
Okay, so I’m a little bit of a wuss.
I backed towards the door, ready to make a grand escape if Dad started screaming, while Izzy high-tailed it from the room.
Rachel was the first up the ladder, her ‘nosy’ bell ringing. “Oh,” she said, her feet still on the top-most rungs and her head through the gaping hole. “Wow.”
“What is it?” I asked, inching closer.
She pushed herself through the hole without answering, one more family member disappearing into the nothingness beyond the ceiling.
From just outside the doorway, Izzy sighed—a little noise that sounded like, “Crazy.”
“Sue, you gotta see this.” Rachel’s voice was muffled.
Fighting off the shudders, I mounted the ladder.
It was terribly cold—definitely more so than it should have been in a Floridian attic in mid-June. I pulled myself through the attic door and slid on my butt across the dusty floor, shivering. “Why is it so frigid?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Dad said, shining his flashlight on me so that I winced beneath the bright light.
Shielding my eyes, I asked, “What’s up here?”
As I got to my feet on the warped floorboards, the beam of light panned away, illuminating a wall covered with built-in bunk beds. Then a second wall of beds, and a third. There were no covers or mattresses—simply shallow boxes built into the walls. At the head of each bunk, heavy chains hung from the wood, rusted with time. Each of the chains ended in unlocked shackles; the kind of steel wrist cuffs found in a medieval torture chamber.
I had to slump to keep from hitting my head on the low ceiling. In the darkness of the attic, I made my way over to where my dad and sister stood.
“Jesus,” Dad swore. His large hand appeared in the flashlight’s beam and touched one of the posts of the bunk beds. It was deeply gouged, presumably by the chains.
“What kind of pressure would have caused that?” Rachel murmured, tracing a long, nail-bitten finger over the dark scratches.
“What is this, Dad?” I asked softly, disturbed by the abundance of a thick, reddish-brown substance on the shackles—the color was a bit off for
regular rust. I shivered to think what it could be, what that stain at the bottom of the stairs could be…
“If I’m assuming correctly, I think this was once slaves’ quarters,” Dad answered. He was using his I’m-bothered-but-trying-to-keep-it-from-my-daughters voice. The last time I heard it was when Granny died.
I shivered, the hair on the back of my neck crawling. I was fascinated by that…sludge on the chains. “They…shackled the slaves? To the beds?”
My father cleared his throat, his face invisible in the dark. “I imagine to keep them from running, Sue. They probably locked them in at night.”
“Why would anybody leave those things on there?” Rachel shuddered. “Like some kind of macabre artifact.”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. When the Civil War ended, I’m sure no one ever came up here. Maybe they just got forgotten.”
“I’m going back down,” I choked out, turning to head towards the light of my bedroom and away from the darkness hidden in a small attic room above my bed.
How the hell was I supposed to sleep in the room below?
*
When I awoke the next morning, both my lamp and the lamp I had requisitioned from the living room were still burning merrily. The sun was big and bright outside my window, illuminating the room to leave no trace of the night’s storm. With all the brightness, I felt like I was under a giant magnifying glass.
I lay in bed and stared at the peeling, white paint of the attic door. In the harsh and unforgiving light of day, it was even more disturbing. How many men and women—and ohmygod children—had lived in that tiny room? Had they bled beneath the metal as they struggled to get out of those cuffs? How old was that blood?
It’s possible I set a new world record on dressing. I flip-flopped down the stairs in my blue jean cut-offs and Guinness T-shirt in a whopping two minutes, leaving both lamps on in my bedroom.
Mom stood over the stove wearing her favorite bright pink apron, stirring eggs in a saucepan.
“Did our bags come?” I asked. I’d watched her pack the apron in a box back home, and said cardboard box was open in a chair at the table.
“Yes.” She shot me a relieved smile. “Your father and brothers are outside helping the movers unload. You should go give them a hand.”
I ignored the request. On purpose. “Shouldn’t you be using a skillet?” I asked her, dropping wearily into a chair at the worn-out kitchen table. The clock over the cabinets read much too early, and I was tempted to go crawl back in bed. I probably would have if I weren’t so freaked out by my room.
“I would be using a skillet, except your grandmother apparently didn’t have one that wasn’t rusted all to hell.” My mom laughed, pulling the pan from the stove and dumping the eggs on a plate. “You want some? The boys have already eaten and your sisters are still asleep.”
I accepted the plate gratefully. I hadn’t eaten since Orlando yesterday afternoon. “Did Dad tell you about the attic?”
Mom put the pan back on the stove and turned her skinny behind to me. As she cracked another egg in, she replied, “Yes, he told me. Don’t let it bother you, sugar. All these old plantations had slave quarters. That was just life back in those days.”
The eggs were a little tasteless. We kept chickens back home in Kentucky, but instead of carting them to Florida, Mom swore we’d invest in new ones once we settled. Until then, we were stuck with grocery-store eggs. Just another little detail about my life uprooted. “Did Gran’s family always own this farm?”
Mom’s back stiffened. She shot a glance over her shoulder at me. “They sure did, sugar.”
“So our family kept slaves?” Of course, it was implied, but the optimist in me wanted verification before I lumped my ancestors in with the devil and mass murder.
“Seems that way.”
A generic Mom answer. What else was new?
The appearance of the twins, loud and obnoxious, stifled any further conversation. By the bright greeting she gave Matt and Sam, it didn’t seem Mom was upset about the interruption.
*
“For the record, you have too much stuff,” I huffed out between breaths as I held one end of an inordinately heavy box and Izzy held the other.
“I do not. You’re just a weirdo who owns nothing.” She stuck her tongue out.
I couldn’t stop staring at her platinum hair—it was short on the sides with a long top that she usually brushed to one side like a punk rock star. The look was still new, done only the day before we moved—probably some hipster way of protesting. So far, it had usually hung curled over one side of Izzy’s head, but today, she’d decided to gel the top into a weird kind of faux-hawk. Combined with the usual heavy eyeliner and blood red lipstick, I couldn’t look away. The girl was so weird. I couldn’t be too sure she was even my sister.
“I’ve moved like four times in the last two years,” I griped, taking another step. “Having less crap is easier.”
“You’re boring.”
I narrowed my eyes at her over the top of the box as we navigated the turn on the landing. The sun spilled through the window, setting the staircase—and Izzy’s wild hair—on fire. “Exhibit A. All of my boxes are already in my room.”
My little sister rolled her eyes, shifting the box’s weight on her skinny arms. “Matt and Sam got most of my crap upstairs.”
“Exhibit B. I got all my crap upstairs on my own. Like a big girl.”
“Wanna cookie?” Izzy drawled, glancing behind herself to gauge her first step on the second half of the staircase.
“What do you have in here?”
Izzy shrugged—not a good move while holding a box that weighed a hundred pounds. We wrestled with it for a moment, heading off the box’s downward trajectory, and then she answered, “Umm. Stuff?”
“You don’t know, do you.” A statement. Not a question. The blonde in her hair had permanently seeped into her brain.
“Suck it, Sue.”
We turned the corner at the top of the stairs, Izzy angled her bottom down the hall in the direction of our respective bedrooms, and she stopped short, eyes on the floor. I followed her gaze to find a dark substance on the rug.
Izzy cringed. “Someone got mud all over the Oriental. Mom’s gonna freak.”
“Well, the movers were in and out all morning.” I stepped forward, urging her to move. “And it rained all night, so it’s no big deal. We’ll clean it later when it dries.”
Izzy continued backwards. “Yeah.”
Izzy and Rachel’s bedroom was twice the size of mine, with turquoise paint and dark hardwood floors. Matching twin beds flanked the walls—newer than my piece ‘o crap—and were already made up with hideous floral-patterned duvets.
“Please tell me you’re replacing these,” I huffed as we not-so-gracefully released the box onto Izzy’s bed. It bounced twice, something inside shifted with a clink, and then came to rest. I dropped to Rachel’s bed and stretched out.
“Yeah, we’ve got our comforters from home.” Izzy slid a finger beneath the packing tape and jerked. Nothing happened.
“Wimp.” I joined her at her bedside and ripped the tape off with a cocky grin.
“Suck it, Sue.”
“You’re going to have to be more original than that, Isabella.”
I helped her pull various belongings from the box—bubble-wrapped ballerinas, an old softball signed by her coach, a couple of raggedy stuffed animals, and…
“Really, Iz?” I held up the paperback I’d given to her for Christmas. “The spine isn’t even broken.”
She cringed. “Don’t kill me.”
“You need to read more.” I tossed the book on her pillow. “It’s good for your mind.”
Izzy stuck her face over the box. “So is painting.”
“I won’t argue that,” I said, sighing. “But, Iz, come on. Do yourself a favor and be cultured.”
“I like Monet! That’s culture.” She tugged an old, ratty afghan from the box and draped it over the bed.
“No, that’s fuzzy, unfocused flowers sitting on ponds.”
We unpacked in silence for a moment longer before my little sister asked in a quiet voice, “Susan, why have I never been here before? To Gran’s house.”
The question caught me off-guard. I set Izzy’s alarm clock on the bedside stand, slowly unwrapping the twisty-tie until the cord could dangle to the floor. I finally caught her eye, making a face. “I don’t really know, Iz. I mean, I’ve heard that she didn’t really like this place. You know she left when she was a teenager, right?”
“Yeah. And she met Papaw.” Izzy circled the bed and crouched to plug in her clock.
“Right. They had Mom, and then Papaw died when I was little, and Gran moved back here for a short time. Very brief. Like five years. But she left again, and didn’t come back until her mom died.”
“At like ninety-eight, right? So hopefully we’ll all live that long,” Izzy joked.
“Please, I hope not,” I said with a laugh.
Izzy shrugged as she stood back up and dusted her hands off. “I’ve heard the story before.”
“Then why are you asking?” I turned my back to her to dig into the box.
“Because I want to know when Great-grandma Joyce died and Gran inherited the house, why did she never invite us down? She always came to us.”
“She only lived here five years before…” I trailed off.
“Cancer. Yeah.” Izzy silently offered me her eyeglass case, and I slid it into the top drawer of the nightstand. Unlike Rachel, who always wore glasses and never contacts, Izzy refused to wear her glasses and opted for contacts. I thought it said a lot about the differences between my sisters.
“So, maybe she just never got around to inviting us.”
“Yet she came to see us once a year,” Izzy retorted.
I opened my mouth to tell her to take her obnoxious—and for me, unanswerable—questions to Mom, when our mother’s displeased voice came through the open doorway. “Oh, for Pete’s sake!”
I don’t know about Izzy, but my hair stood on end. It was Mom’s irritated voice; I’d heard it a lot. It usually accompanied the last few moments before someone in the household was grounded.
Izzy and I looked at each other, and I shrugged. We crossed to the door and looked out into the hall.
Mom stood over the long line of footprints on the runner. Her hands were planted firmly on her tiny hips, and her bright red sandal tapped on the floor like some kind of movie mother-slash-housewife.
May I Go Play? Page 6
