2 The Ghosts Upstairs

by SUE FINEMAN

  She had Eleanor.

  Shaking off his thoughts, he walked into the kitchen to see what Kayla was making for dinner. But she wasn’t in the kitchen. She was outside, checking on the pool. It would take hours for the pool to fill, maybe days, and he didn’t want to see the water bill. Air-conditioning this barn of a house would cost a bundle, too. Everywhere he looked, he saw money going out. What if the real estate market didn’t pick up? What if the insurance policy didn’t pay off? He could be in big trouble before he unloaded this white elephant.

  Billy watched Kayla pull the elastic off her ponytail and shake out her hair. Her dark red curls caught fire in the sunshine. Inheriting the house had caused his life to change, but not as much as her presence had changed it. She’d talked him into giving her a job, and she earned ten times what he paid her. She’d seduced him not just with her body, but with her free spirit and giving nature. But she wanted him to forgive Maggie.

  How could he forgive her? Coming into this house had brought back that part of his life he thought he’d put behind him. The deep-seated pain of rejection had ruined his early childhood, and now it shaped his relationships with people, especially women. While Kayla gave freely of herself, he always held something back.

  He wasn’t the only one who suffered when he was a little boy. Dad took the brunt of Maggie’s venom. She accused him of not making her happy, of not doing enough and not giving enough. It was always about her. Every time she got mad at Dad, she and Eleanor went shopping and stiffed Dad with the bills.

  Billy didn’t own any credit cards. He paid cash for everything. If he didn’t have the money to spend on something he wanted, he waited to buy it. No car payments. No mortgage payments. No credit card payments. And no credit, which could be a problem if he needed to borrow money to fix up this house. The money he’d found in the safe wouldn’t cover it all, and neither would his savings.

  Kayla bent over and plucked weeds from the flower bed behind the pool. He glanced around at the flower beds near the house and realized she’d already weeded them. She worked twelve hours a day every day and never complained.

  He didn’t deserve her.

  Kayla glanced toward the house, and he knew the minute she saw him. She stiffened and looked away.

  Unable to face her, he returned to the kitchen to look for something to fix for dinner. It was his turn to cook. He couldn’t expect her to do everything.

  <>

  Kayla retreated to her room after dinner, and Billy watched videotapes in the secret room. There were several marked John, and he started with the oldest one. It showed Eleanor in the hospital holding a baby wrapped in a blue blanket. Eleanor wasn’t smiling like he’d expect a new mother to smile. There was no sound, and the video was of such poor quality it was difficult to watch. He assumed the earlier videos were copied from old home movies, since they didn’t have VCR’s in those days.

  Another video showed John in his crib. There were none of John with William, probably because Eleanor wouldn’t take them.

  Billy watched several videos of John as a baby and as a young boy, then there was one of John crying when a nurse took his hand and led him down the hallway. He was about five then. This must be when they committed him to the institution. Eleanor wasn’t in the pictures, and he assumed William was taking the videos. Where was Eleanor? Surely she didn’t dump the dirty deed on William.

  The next video showed John growing up. His face and body showed the classic signs of Down’s syndrome. If Billy had been born with a serious birth defect, would Maggie have put him in an institution? Yes, she would, but Dad wouldn’t. Dad had shown him more love than any two parents, probably because he felt bad about the way Maggie treated him.

  The last video of John had sound. John asked, “Daddy, can I come home now?”

  “Mommy is still sick, John,” said William.

  “But I want to come home,” he whined. “I’ll stay in the basement, and I won’t bother Mommy.”

  “You live here now,” said William, and John hung his head. “This is your home.”

  Billy couldn’t watch any more. He turned off the TV and went in search of the basement.

  Kayla followed the sounds of Billy opening and closing doors. “Looking for something?”

  “The basement stairs.”

  “They’re beside the garage door.”

  “I thought that was a closet.”

  She followed him down the basement steps. As she expected, it was partly finished. A big game room had a pool table in the middle and a bar on the side. It didn’t look like it had been used in a long time.

  Billy sneezed. “I’ll bet no one has been down here since William died.”

  She ran her finger over the pool table cover and pulled away a bunch of dirt. “Looks like no one has cleaned down here since then.”

  Kayla found a bathroom and flushed the scummy toilet. The door beside the bathroom had a padlock on it, but it wasn’t locked. “Billy, what’s this?”

  He opened the door and walked inside. A single mattress sat on the floor in the corner, and there were a few toys scattered about on a rug in the middle of the bare concrete floor. Otherwise, the room was empty. “It’s John’s room.”

  “Oh, my God. They locked a little kid in this hole?”

  Billy rubbed his hand over his face. “Poor kid. He must have been terrified.”

  Right now it wasn’t the kid she was worried about. This had shaken Billy to the core. She put her arm around him and pulled him close. “I wonder how long they locked him in here.”

  “Until he was five, when they put him in the institution. John was a grown man in the last video I watched, and he said he wanted to come home. He said he’d stay in the basement and he wouldn’t bother Mommy, if he could just come home.”

  “Was Eleanor in the video?”

  “No, she wrote him off right after he was born. He wasn’t perfect enough to please her.”

  “I had a vision of William feeding the baby. In another vision, Eleanor was feeding Maggie, but I didn’t see her around her son.”

  “There’s one tiny window with bars on it, no lights, nothing but a bed and a few toys. And she locked him in here.” Billy snatched a toy off the floor and hurled it against the wall. It bounced away in pieces.

  Kayla grabbed him before he self-destructed. “It’s over, Billy. Whatever happened in this room, it’s over now.”

  “I know he must have been hard to handle, but he was a human being, and he deserved to be loved like any other human being. The people he trusted the most did this to him.”

  The emotion in Billy’s voice caught at her heart. He didn’t know John, yet he identified with him on a deep level. She rubbed his back. “No one’s life is perfect. Can you imagine how disappointed they must have been? I don’t think there was much help for mentally retarded kids in those days. Not like there is now. John needed someplace safe to live, where he could be watched around the clock. Could Eleanor and William do that?”

  “They could have hired someone to help.”

  “Maybe they tried. You don’t know what happened. Maybe Eleanor had post-partum depression and couldn’t handle him herself. William had a job, didn’t he?”

  Billy sighed like all the air had gone out of him. “Yes, he had a job.”

  “That means the baby was left alone with Eleanor, and from what you and your father say about her, John wasn’t safe alone with her. He needed special care, special schooling, and someone with a whole lot of patience. He’d get that in a place with other mentally handicapped kids.”

  Billy pulled back and stared at her as if he didn’t know her. “You’re defending what they did?”

  “I’m trying to find an explanation. They waited five years, long enough to know if they could handle the responsibilities of parenting a kid with special needs. Don’t you think they agonized over the decision?”

  “I don’t know. I just know no kid deserves to be locked up in a hole like this. I don’t care how hard h
e was to handle, he didn’t deserve this.”

  Kayla felt the cold and knew one of the ghosts was present. William, she assumed. She glanced around. “William, is that you?”

  He appeared by the door and then vanished. Kayla took Billy’s arm. “I think he wants us out of here.”

  “He told John Mommy was sick.”

  “She probably was.” Heartsick for sure, and maybe mentally sick by then. Sick to lock up a fragile little boy in the basement and put a padlock on the door so he couldn’t get out. Sick to deprive her son of her love. Sick to treat Maggie as a possession rather than a human being. And sick to manipulate Maggie into thinking a baby would ruin her life.

  Kayla pushed Billy toward the stairs. “You’re not watching any more videos tonight.” She’d clean the basement while he was at work and carry the bed up to the nursery playroom. The next time he looked in the basement, everything in that room would be gone, including the padlock.

  Billy slept with Kayla that night, only he didn’t sleep well. Visions of a lonely little boy locked in the basement kept invading his dreams. The more he thought about it, the more angry he became. He hadn’t been treated that badly when he was a little boy. Dad made sure he had someone besides the mother who didn’t want him. Pop and Grandma took care of him when Dad was at work, but John didn’t have anyone he could rely on when William was at work. Was that when Eleanor locked John in the basement?

  Careful not to wake Kayla, Billy got up and pulled on his jeans. He grabbed his shirt and pushed his arms through, leaving it hanging open.

  Buford walked outside with him to check the water level in the pool. Billy sat beside the steps, bare feet dangling over the edge, and let the cool night air flutter over his bare chest. He kept seeing a round-faced little boy sitting alone in that dark little room in the basement, waiting for his daddy to get home from work to let him out. It was like putting a dog in a cage, only John wasn’t an animal. Eleanor’s neglect had probably set back his development, both mentally and emotionally.

  How bad was John’s mental retardation? What was he capable of doing? Did he learn to read? Had he led a useful life? In the video, he seemed unhappy at the institution. He wanted to come home, but was home really better than the place he lived? Would living with Eleanor be preferable to living with other mentally handicapped kids? He probably made friends there. Here, in this luxurious mansion, he had no one but William.

  What happened to John after William died?

  He looked back at the house and saw a glow in Maggie’s window. Did anyone tell Maggie about John? Eleanor wouldn’t have told her. She didn’t want anyone to know.

  Billy hadn’t quite figured out William. He visited John, maybe out of guilt, and he probably provided financial support. He made excuses for Eleanor’s absence in John’s life the same way Dad had made excuses for Maggie.

  He glanced at the water slowly filling the pool, stood, and walked back into the house. He had to go to work in the morning, and he needed to sleep.

  <>

  Kayla had a shopping date with Hannah at one, but she wanted to spend the morning in the basement, cleaning that dark little room with the padlock on the door and poking around to see what else was down there. They hadn’t seen half the basement before they found John’s room.

  After Billy left for work, Kayla took Billy’s big flashlight, a trashcan, and cleaning supplies down to the basement. Some of the lights worked, but the bulbs were so dusty, they didn’t give off much light.

  She stood in the middle of John’s room, closed her eyes, and waited for the vision to come through. It didn’t take long. The little boy must have been about three when Eleanor put him in here in the vision. John cried for a long time and then crawled on the mattress, his wet diaper burning his sore behind. He stared at the light coming through the small window near the ceiling, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and huddled in the corner, shaking with fear. It might have been minutes, or it could have been hours before William found him there.

  John didn’t understand why his mother put him in the basement. He’d tried to be a good boy to please her, but he was always doing something wrong. She’d smack him for crying, or spilling something, or for getting his clothes dirty, or just because she was having a bad day.

  Daddy never smacked him, but John felt his father’s frustration at trying to teach him something he couldn’t learn. Then one day Daddy said Mommy was sick, and to leave her alone. A nice lady came to stay with them, and she took care of John, but when the nice lady wasn’t there, Mommy put him in the basement until Daddy got home. Kayla could almost taste the little boy’s despair.

  The vision ended and she opened her eyes. She gathered the meager collection of old toys and tossed them into the trash can. The backing on the rug had stiffened with age. It cracked as she rolled it and stuffed it into the trash with the toys. After dragging the mattress out to the stairs, she returned to the small room, swept the spider webs down from the ceiling, and swept the floor. When she finished, she closed the door and tossed the padlock into the trash. If she had a screwdriver, she’d take the bracket off the door and throw it in there, too.

  William appeared before her, put his hands together, and bowed. He was probably as glad to see that room gone as she was. “I don’t want Billy to have to see that room again. It upset him, William. You know how Maggie and Eleanor treated him, and seeing how John was treated really upset him.”

  There were times when she wished she could control the psychic powers she’d been given. Granny could call up things at will, but Kayla didn’t know how to do that. Sometimes she could close her eyes and clear her mind, and the vision would come through, but it didn’t always work. Other times, when she was supposed to know something, like the missing boy Billy pulled out of the river, the visions popped into her head quickly and clearly.

  Every now and then she saw things she didn’t understand, like a tiny little piece of a big jigsaw puzzle. Then she’d see another piece or several pieces, but when she tried to put the pieces together, they didn’t always fit. John was like one of those puzzles. She was seeing pieces of his early life. Billy had other pieces of the puzzle on those videos, but it wasn’t enough to know what happened to that sad little boy.

  Kayla cleaned as much as she could of the basement before she had to get ready to meet Hannah, then carried the old mattress up to the garage. She thought she could put it in the nursery playroom, but the mattress had been sitting on the basement floor for so long, the bugs had invaded it. She didn’t want it inside the house.

  <>

  “I plead guilty, your honor,” Benton said. “I want to apologize and ask for mercy.”

  He heard his mother sob behind him as the judge gave him a suspended sentence on the condition he go to Atlanta to face charges there.

  The judge here was passing him off because he didn’t want the city to get stuck with his medical bills. Someone would get stuck with them, because Benton couldn’t pay them himself. If he was to survive, he’d need open heart surgery, exercise, a special diet, medication, and follow-up care.

  Before Benton was taken to a jail cell to await extradition to Atlanta, he kissed and hugged his mother goodbye. “Thank you for being here, Mother. It means so much to me.” She loved him or she wouldn’t have come. “I love you.”

  “Oh, Benton, I love you, too.”

  As he stepped from the courtroom, an intense pain clutched his chest and brought him to his knees.

  Someone yelled, “Get the paramedics,” and then everything went black.

  <>

  Kayla and Hannah went to several department stores before Kayla threw up her hands in frustration. “Why can’t I find gray drapes?”

  Hannah talked about having drapes made, and Kayla refused. “I don’t want to spend any more than I have to. If I had time, I’m make them myself, but I don’t have that kind of time.”

  Hannah fingered a set of dark red drapes with silver bands. “What if we use these? With the new blin
ds, the drapes won’t have to cover the entire windows. Just a strip of red down each side of each window. We can use a silver pole and silver cords for tiebacks, and silver candlesticks and a silver-framed mirror over the fireplace. Would that work?”

  “Yes, that might work.” It wasn’t what she’d pictured, but it should look okay.

  It was nearly dinner time when Kayla got back with her purchases. She’d spent a significant amount today, but she’d bought a lot. Even if she didn’t get all the bedroom suites painted and decorated, a nice looking living room would help sell the house.

  Billy didn’t say two words to her. “Something wrong, Billy?”

  “I just got a phone call from my attorney. He said the life insurance policy William bought is no good because the death certificate lists the cause of death as suicide. Since there’s a suicide clause in the policy, there’s no way we can take the insurance company to court and make them pay.”

  “William killed himself?”

  “That’s the official cause of death.”

  “Oh, Billy. I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “So am I. How am I going to pay for all this work?”

  “You were counting on that insurance money?”

  “Hell yes. I have to pay taxes on my inheritance, property taxes on this house, utility bills, maintenance—”

  “But when the house sells—”

  “If it ever sells. If it doesn’t, I’m screwed.”

  “You could rent out the suites. Isn’t there a college in River Valley?”

  “Yes, but college students can’t afford to pay what I’d have to ask for rent. I wouldn’t get a zoning variance in this neighborhood anyway, and who’d rent or buy this place with Maggie and Eleanor here?” He slapped his hand against the wall in the foyer. “I wish I’d never seen this damn place.”

  Billy could sell the house as is, but he wouldn’t get as much as he would if he fixed it up before putting it on the market. Buyers would see a fixer, a home in need of a lot of work, and that would be reflected in their offers. If he got any offers. Would anyone want to come in the ugly front door to see the inside of the house? Would the ghosts interfere?