Donna swerved to her. “Unless--?”
Katie licked her lips. “We observe something inexplicable, of course.” She looked up at me. “Elliot, did you arrange for a motel yet?”
“I was just about to.”
Katie shook her head, sloshing her cup. “Never mind. We’re staying here tonight.”
Donna looked at Byron. Byron looked at Donna.
Donna said: “In the house?”
Katie shrugged. “Well…or the garage, or whatever you’d like us.”
Byron finally flicked off Wolf Blitzer to join us. “And you’d be more than welcome,” he said, “normally. But both guest rooms are upside down and filled with sawdust. A major part of my refurbishing project.”
“This coffee’s delicious, Donna! What’s your secret?”
“Thank-you,” Donna smiled, eyed her husband uneasily.
“Katie--?” from me, still standing, arms crossed.
“There’s a room on the third floor down the hall from the master bedroom,” she informed us.
Byron shook his head. “That’s just a small smoking study—“
“It has a fold-out couch,” Katie told him, “It’ll do. And it’s close to the nursery.”
Donna blinked a moment, turned to look at me, then back at Katie. “And Mr. Bledsoe?”
Katie slipped the rest of the cookie in her mouth, dusted her hands, patted the divan cushion beside her with approval. “Nice and soft!”
Winked at me and smiled companionably at Donna. “All it needs is a blanket!”
SIX
“All it needs is a blanket.”
To this day I don’t know whether Katie was referring to the divan or to me.
One thing I did know was that she had her mind made up about sleeping at the Sandersons’. And when Katie Bracken gets her mind made up…
So I slept downstairs.
The Sandersons slept in their big master bedroom, the children were tucked neatly in their nursery cribs, and Katie slept three doors away from them in Byron’s little smoking study.
The house was quiet. Sort of.
Did I mention that Byron collected clocks?
And, as with the cameras, the wine and beer, the antique movie projectors and the early American pedal cars, there were dozens of them.
All over the house.
Remember that scene in Disney’s Pinocchio when a newly arrived Jiminy Cricket is trying to sleep through the night in the clock-filled woodcarver’s shop? It was something like that. If there was a free mantle, table, cornice or cranny, Byron had filled it with old-fashioned clocks of all shapes and sizes, all countries and time zones. The enormous eight-foot grandfather in the foyer with the smiling moon face was the loudest, even though it was some distance from the divan. After the first ten or fifteen minutes of this it began to feel like every ticking stroke was coming from my cerebral cortex. Which might have worked if they’d all been in rhythm or even of similar audio levels. They weren’t. Instead I was subjected to a jumble of mechanical twitches and clunks morphing into a cacophonous whole, like sand being poured into one ear and out the other. Finally, I thought, stuffing wads of Kleenex in my ears, I can fully appreciate the finer points of the Chinese dripping water torture. The Sanderson ticking torture.
But thankfully only ticking. There were no sounds of cuckoos or chimes on the hour or half hour. Those Byron had (quite reasonably, I felt) presumably shut off, lest the ensuing, simultaneous thunder shake the pictures and pottery from the walls.
And in all fairness I couldn’t really stuff my ears fully with dampening tissue; I was supposed to be listening for an unusual sound from Donna’s work station computer in the next room.
In the near darkness of the living room, the big house seemed even vaster. It seemed a little like trying to sleep in the belly of a whale. I laid there beneath my blanket under the dim glow from the street light outside the front windows, craning about for Geppetto and Figaro, the only sound within the vast catacombs of halls, nooks and floors louder than the roar of the clocks, the distant occasional rattle of the third floor bathroom pipes Donna had mentioned.
Poor Donna.
She was like a mother lion struggling between her affection for Katie and her nascent instinct to protect her children. I knew she didn’t want them back in the nursery, knew especially she didn’t want them in there again with the imposingly heavy nursery door closed. I knew Katie knew it too. But Katie was the leader here. If you didn’t see it in her confident, almost-officious bearing, you certainly felt it in her aura. Katie was used to doing things she didn’t like, things that frightened other people and probably, somewhere down deep, even frightened her a little. She was also used to getting her way. Because she nearly always got results. I think both Donna and Byron realized that instinctively. And realized just as assuredly that they had no one else to turn to.
There was something wrong in this house.
Nobody wanted to actually come forth and admit it, but everyone felt it. Including me.
It was a stunningly beautiful home, made even warmer by the Sandersons’ presence.
And every newel post, gable and cornice shouted ‘get out of here!’
It wasn’t a house that invited company or whose rooms compelled you to linger.
Especially if you were alone, as I was now in the cavernous darkness of the first floor, huddled against the divan cushions like a caveman before his meager fire, waiting for the sleeping bear somewhere in the stony galleries to waken…
I saw the woman at 2:12 a.m.
I know because I still wore my watch, ever ready to scratch down and time any unusual events on the coffee table note pad before me, as Katie had instructed.
I did this silently and quickly with a modicum of movement so as not to disturb my intruder. Katie was a firm believer in the Heisenberg Theory: nothing can be entirely accurately observed if even the molecules in the air are disturbed by the observer. Still, she insisted on notes, the exact time of a phenomenon’s occurrence, and any perceptual changes in the surrounding air.
I did as I was told and looked up not more than a heartbeat later to find the figure had vanished.
I waited rigidly in darkness, heart thumping, ears straining. In a moment I was rewarded: footsteps again on the main staircase.
What to do now? Note the footsteps and try to go back to restless sleep, or follow them?
Every centimeter of every fiber of my being opted strongly for the former. But my mind—and I knew, my partner’s—insisted on the latter.
I drew back the blanket silently, threw my legs over the cushions and, in boxer shorts and Tee, headed half-blindly for the stairs, certain the painful hammering in my chest was audible and would alert whatever walked the night.
The feeble window light guided me (more or less) to the foot of the stairs. I placed a hand on the curlicue art nouveau newel and gazed upward. The stairs were devoid of movement or figures, living or dead.
And then they weren’t. On the last few steps leading to the second story she reappeared from slanting shadows, more recognizably female by her gait than anything else in the infuriatingly poor light. At the top she turned left, started down the hall and vanished again in black shadow.
Go! my mind cried. Hurry, while she’s still in sight!
Only I couldn’t seem to get my legs to agree to the idea, and my bare feet felt encased in tar.
By the time I finally mustered the courage to will myself upward to the second story, the figure was gone, of course.
I followed the stairs to the third floor anyway, wishing I’d remembered to bring the scratch pad and pencil in the event that more notes were necessary. They weren’t. The darkened corridors and suddenly nerve-shattering rattle from the plumbing were spooky enough, but I encountered no one else on the hallway’s cool wood planking.
I came abreast of Katie’s study door and found it closed. Should I wake her, tell her about the event?
To what end? The figure was gone now a
nd I had my notes and time downstairs. I was turning from her door when something caught in the periphery of my vision at the end of the dim hallway.
The nursery door was standing open.
I hesitated, mind racing.
Donna or Byron wouldn’t have opened up, not against Katie’s wishes, I was sure. They still had the audio baby monitors in their bedroom. Maybe Katie herself had opened it at the last moment so she could hear any untoward events more clearly…
I stood rooted indecisively for several moments. Until I heard the sound.
It issued from within the nursery, a sort of low creaking.
I stood there in a vortex of indecision, one hand twitching toward Katie’s doorknob. She needed to hear this. But what if the sound of opening the small study door and awakening Katie interrupted the sound inside the nursery? I’d be left like poor Donna before Katie’s revelation on the hard drive had vindicated her: left with only my word as proof.
Without a second thought I strode purposefully for the open nursery door, moving on the balls of my feet as quietly as possible. The squeaking sound grew steadily in volume. I drew a breath and step through the nursery door.
If it weren’t for the single, pitched bay window I’d never have seen the figure.
A female, I somehow knew, even with the lack of details.
A female moving eerily to and fro between the two silent cribs. My first thought was of the mother. Donna, unable to sleep, unable to agree to Katie’s rules of having everything as it was the night of Nathaniel’s disappearance, had grown tired of watching the study ceiling and come to watch over the children.
Except Donna had long, sun-bleached blonde hair.
This woman’s hair was darker, cut shorter.
She turned her head, invisible face to me, as I approached. “What are you doing here?” she whispered sharply.
“Katie?”
“You’re supposed to be downstairs! Listening for anything unusual from the monitor!”
I began to breathe again. “I know. I was. I sure as hell wasn’t getting any sleep. I saw something walk past my divan.”
The creaking rocker hesitated. “’Something’?”
“A woman. I couldn’t see her clearly but it was a woman, I’m sure. She headed for the stairs. I followed her up here.”
“That was me.”
“You? Just now?”
“I was getting a glass of water.”
I sighed, stared hard, trying to make out her features. “You were checking on me!”
“That too. Have you heard anything? From the computer monitor, I mean.”
“No. What are you doing in here, aside from breaking your own rules.”
“Don’t give me that Heisenberg shit, Elliot, there’s something wrong with this house.”
“You think? How hugely observant of you!”
“Shh! Keep your voice down, the kids!”
I sighed, suddenly tired, maybe tired enough to actually sleep. “I know, and the baby monitor.”
Katie remained silent.
“Oh, Christ. You turned it off, right?”
“I was afraid they’d hear the floor squeaking.”
“That’s extremely unfair, Katie.”
“All’s fair in love and investigation. Anyway, it’s just for tonight. Tomorrow we’ll have infrared monitoring equipment, day and night, and highly sophisticated audio devices. Go back to sleep now.”
I sighed, turned leadenly. “I haven’t been asleep yet.”
As I neared the door, she called softly, “And stay away from Byron’s liquor cabinet!”
“Why? I could use the relaxation.”
“Not here. Relaxed is the last thing you want to be in this house! Good-night!”
* * *
Easy for her to say.
As far as I was concerned this was worse than the plane flight.
I’d been spooked before, during my first outing with Katie in that creepy little Louisiana town chasing down that little girl’s ghost, but this place was different. Self-contained. With its own sense of self-contained dread. Like it had you.
Back downstairs I passed the divan and trudged toward the kitchen for a glass of water, hoping maybe to stumble across some cooking sherry.
I was passing by Donna’s work station when I heard the sound from the computer.
A light thump.
Light but unerringly discernible and of this world.
I leapt to the monitor screen.
In the camera’s shadowed lens, Katie was vaulting up from her rocker.
The kids appeared to still be asleep but something was different about the nursery.
Then I saw what: something on the floor—some smallish object—was lying between Nathan’s crib and the rocker. Katie was heading for it, her posture a mix of curiosity and trepidation.
Without another thought, I turned and bolted for the staircase again.
* * *
I could hear Natalie’s wailing cry before I reached the second story landing and, a few seconds later, Nathaniel’s ear-piercing scream joined the rhythm section. This last, I confess, was something of a relief to me: the kid may have been scared miserable but at least he hadn’t vanished again into the ethers.
It could only have taken me seconds to reach the nursery but the lights were on and Byron and Donna had already arrived in pajama bottoms and nightie. Donna (in the nightie) looked more like a centerfold than a mother as she coddled and rocked a kid in each arm, cooing and shushing. Byron stood before Katie, bare-legged under red Met’s jersey, as she held something up to him…something small and round and swathed in what looked like one of her white hankies.
I smiled at Donna on my way in, hoping for and receiving a friendly smile back, squeezed her arm, tickled Nathaniel’s tear-stained chin and joined Katie and Byron near the rocker.
“—a what ball?” Katie was asking.
Byron smiled, reached into her hand and drew back a smooth round marble sphere--slightly larger than a pool ball, decorative black stripes over deep, glossy yellow—almost a fashion statement without the pool ball number. Byron held it up.
“A carpet ball,” he said, juggling the clearly heavy sphere in one hand. “Good-morning, Elliot!”
“What’s it for?” I asked, holding out a hand. Byron dropped it into my palm. It was heavy.
“It’s for carpet ball,” he reiterated. “It’s a Victorian parlor game still somewhat popular today, a lot like pool. Only the table is long—about 12 to 15 feet—and thin. Both ends hold a trough in lieu of corner and side pockets. The idea is to knock your opponent’s balls into his trough. Used to be fairly common in summer camps in the 1970’s.”
I turned the ball curiously in my hand. “Never heard of it. So it’s a kind of tamer form of pool?”
“Not tamer. College kids often get pretty rough with carpet ball after a few beers. It’s a pretty rough game, especially when a ball comes careening at you off the table. I got this one at an estate sale. Cost me twenty bucks, which I thought was a steal until I learned how relatively plentiful even the old ones are.”
“Had it appraised?”
Byron took back the ball, snorted. “Yeah. It’s a genuine antique all right—early nineteen-hundreds maybe—but not worth 20 bucks.” He shook the ball at me in mock admonishment. “First rule of the professional collector--always know an item’s value before you purchase it!”
He chuckled and tossed the ball into the air once, then turned to replace it on the wall toy shelf. “But what the hell, I thought it was cool-looking!”
He turned back to us. “Sorry it woke you, Katie. Must have tumbled off the shelf. Thought I had it wedged better.”
Suddenly Nathan eyed us stubbornly, hand out. “My ball!” he wheezed through his tears.
His parents ignored him. “Thought you were going to buy a Lucite case for it!” said his sour-faced wife. “What if it had hit one of the children?”
Byron smiled, took a still-sobbing Nathaniel from her.
As Nathan reached for the ball proprietarily, Byron nimbly lifted it above his head. “The cribs are over there, my darling, the toy shelf is clear over there. The ball is solid onyx—doesn’t bounce!”
She gave him a mirthless smile. “Bounces loud enough to wake the kids.” She pretended to reach for it, juggling Natalie. “I wonder how it would bounce off a man’s skull…”
Byron traded Nathan for Natalie, making Natalie grin a bubble. “Is she terrific or not, Elliot?”
Donna tried to suppress a happy smile. “Elliot probably thinks I’m a terrible mother.”
“Elliot is probably thinking how great your ass looks under the gauzy nightie!”
Donna shoved away from him with feigned disgust, clicked off the overhead nursery light. “Men! It’s all you think about! Is Elliot like this, Katie? Oh, forgot—you’re not married.”
“Hasn’t stopped me yet!” I replied cheerfully.
“In your dreams,” from Katie. And she crossed the hooked carpet, took my arm and pulled me toward the nursery door. “G’night, all! See you on the morrow!”
Donna turned from placing Nathaniel back in his crib. “Elliot? Are you comfortable enough on the divan?”
I waved from the door. “You kidding? Sleeping like a baby! ‘Night, guys!”
“Sweet dreams,” from Byron, lowering Natalie into the crib opposite.
In the hallway beside me, Katie said: “Elliot…what did you hear down there? What made you come running upstairs?”
“I was passing right by the computer when I heard a kind of…thumping sound. Then I saw you jump from the rocker. Why?”
She walked in silence a moment, thinking. “Anything else, beside the thumping sound?”
I shook my head. “No. Don’t think so. You?”
She sighed heavily. “I was sort of drifting. I might have been the thump that woke me…”
I looked at her. “Or--?”
She bit her lip. “I could swear I heard a chiming noise. Like a clock. The one on the kid’s mantel behind me, maybe.”
I made a face. “I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure Byron or someone turned off all the chime mechanisms on the clocks.”
NIGHT CHILLS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery Page 6
