by Deb Baker
Everyone nodded.
“But they don’t put that part of their plan in writing. John Swilling apparently purchased space for four coffins. That’s the extent of what we’ll ever know.”
They were driving back to the street when Gretchen returned to wondering if the grave had any possible significance. “What if Allison crawled over to that particular grave for a reason? What if that was a clue?”
“She was trying to escape,” April said. “It was random that she happened to die on that particular grave. Where she died doesn’t mean anything.”
“I’m with Gretchen on this one,” Nina said.
Gretchen stopped the car beside Nina’s car. Tutu glared at her from the backseat.
“Allison Thomasia left a clue that will lead to her killer,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
18
Gretchen arrived home physically and mentally drained of energy. Nimrod had fallen asleep inside her purse on the way, exhausted from his fun time at doggy day care. The almost full-grown black fur ball was only the size of a stuffed animal and weighed about the same amount, next to nothing. She gently laid the pup on the sofa, poured a glass of red wine, and made a beeline for a lounge chair near the pool, where she wasted no time kicking off her shoes.
The sun was setting behind Camelback Mountain in a giant blaze of orange when Caroline joined her, favorite scotch cocktail in hand.
The moment should have been perfect, with Wobbles purring away under Gretchen’s massaging hand. But the sky wasn’t dark enough yet to mask the way her mother sat down gingerly next to her. Caroline turned her entire body stiffly to set down the cocktail. Gretchen smelled the minty odor of a muscle ointment.
“What happened to you?” she said. “What’s wrong with your neck?”
“I had a car accident today, but I’m fine now. I took two pain pills and the Bengay is working.”
“You look like you’re in pain. Did you see a doctor?”
“Not yet. Maybe tomorrow, if it gets worse.” Caroline rubbed the back of her neck. “If that’s the extent of my injuries, I consider myself very lucky.”
“Let’s hear it. The whole story.”
Gretchen felt her stomach churning as Caroline gave her the details of the accident.
“I assumed you had a fender bender,” Gretchen said, horrified. “This is terrible. You crawled out of your car after rolling over and then attempted to assist a dying woman?”
“I couldn’t believe I was alive.”
“You might have been killed.” Gretchen felt tears welling up. She felt scared, relieved, and angry at the same time. “Injured bodies everywhere, including yours, one person dead? And you didn’t think about calling your own daughter?”
“Everything happened so quickly and others needed my help. I simply reacted. Afterward, I realized that I wanted you to hear the details from me and not before you could see with your own eyes that I was perfectly fine.”
“You aren’t fine.”
“Please.”
“You should have called.”
“Really, Gretchen, I don’t know what you want from me.”
“You know what I want? I want my mother to stop thinking she’s invincible.” Gretchen found herself on her feet, tears flowing freely. “I want her, just once, to reach out to me for help. I want my mother to say she needs me as much as I need her.”
“I’ve had to depend on myself for so long. This is all new, having you living with me.”
The two women came together, hugging, crying, apologizing. “If you’d known about it you would have come there, seen the destruction, and it would have started all over again. I was only trying to protect you from more nightmares,” Caroline said. “I didn’t want that to happen again.”
What her mother said was true. Still, they’d been through these same arguments before. “You hurt me the most when you keep things from me,” Gretchen said. “When you don’t include me in your life. This is the same issue we had during your chemo.”
Caroline took Gretchen’s hands in her own and squeezed. “We still have a lot to learn about each other.”
Gretchen sniffed. “We have some catching up to do,” she agreed. “We spent too many precious years disagreeing.”
She was grateful that they had worked out their differences. She’d witnessed too much hostility between other mothers and daughters instead of love and friendship.
“Cancer,” Caroline said. “The disease that I thought would take my life away brought me a gift beyond anything I could have imagined. It gave back our life.”
“We have to stick close together. We’re all we have.”
While Gretchen blew her nose, she caught sight of her aunt, standing behind them, a camera slung over her shoulder. “What about me?” Nina said, coming closer. “Don’t I count in the equation?”
“Of course you do,” Caroline said, redirecting her next hug to include her sister. “We’re three of the toughest, smartest women in Phoenix.”
“Good genes count for a lot of it,” Nina said, taking a good look at them before frowning. “What’s with you two? You both look a mess. Have you been crying?”
Gretchen shook her head. “A little, but we couldn’t be happier at the moment.”
After Caroline repeated her experience for Nina, mother, daughter, and aunt had another good cry.
“I love fuzzy moments,” Nina said, blowing her nose into a tissue as the threesome walked into the house. “But it’s officially nighttime, and I have an important mission to carry out. Care to come along?”
“Sure,” Gretchen said, feeling closer to her family than ever before. Why did most special moments like this come only after near disaster?
“Don’t you want to know what the mission entails before you sign up?” Caroline asked.
“Nope, I’m in. As long as it’s family, you need only ask. What about you?”
“Okay, then, I’m in, too.”
“Are you sure you’re up to going out?” Gretchen asked her mother. “You’ve had a really bad day.”
“I need to get my mind off the accident. My sister’s always a great distraction.”
Nina rummaged through the hall closet. “Caroline,” she said, “where do you keep your walkie-talkies?”
“Now I’m curious,” her sister said. “What’s this mission we’re on?”
“We’re going to the museum,” Nina replied. “To gather indisputable evidence to support my claim. A disembodied soul lives in the house.” She patted the camera case hanging against her side. “And we are going to prove it.”
19
Antique cloth doll bodies were usually homemade. Every household had a sewing machine and a woman who knew how to use it. Creating a cloth body was a simple task. Fabrics included muslin, pink sateen, felt, and printed cloth. Before polyester, bodies were stuffed with straw or excelsior, a strawlike material made from fine wood strips. Cloth dolls and bodies are still popular today. Patterns and fabrics can be found at doll shows, doll shops, and at online doll stores.
– From World of Dolls by Caroline Birch
Be careful of what you wish for, Gretchen thought.
She’d made a wish and it had come true. Hadn’t she wanted to work in the museum or join Nina in her ghost hunt instead of directing the play? Here she was, at the museum, working on a ghost project. But she wasn’t sure she wanted it any longer.
“John and Emma Swilling had one child, a girl named Flora,” Nina said while Gretchen unlocked the door to the home they were converting into a museum. “Emma died giving birth, as we thought. John raised his daughter alone. After he died, Flora, who must have been in her midtwenties by then, kept the house, moving her own family into it in the fifties and raising two children of her own, Richard and Rachel.”
Gretchen turned on an entry light. Learning the names of the house’s former inhabitants made them come alive for her. What these walls could tell her if they could talk!
“How do you know so many details
?” Caroline asked her sister.
“It was amazingly easy, considering how hard it’s been to find out who the latest owner is. I called the historical society. They dug through the records and gave me the information over the phone. I called as soon as we left the cemetery.”
“Cemetery?” Caroline said, bringing up the rear, shutting the door behind them and rubbing her neck.
“Eternal View,” Nina said.
Caroline glanced at Gretchen. “Why would you go there?”
Gretchen turned on another overhead light. “It’s a long story,” she said. “April promised Bonnie I’d take them to the murder sight if Bonnie could make it through her lines without messing up. And she pulled it off.”
“She’ll tell Matt about the outing,” her mother said. “How will he feel about you and his mother following his case?”
“She promised not to.” At least she was hanging out with his mother. Matt should appreciate that.
Caroline rolled her eyes. “Good luck.”
“Tell Caroline about the grave site,” Nina said, plopping a tote bag on the counter.
“We located the cemetery plot where the couple who built this house-John and Emma Swilling-are buried.”
“And you’ll never guess the rest,” Nina said, unable to resist taking over the story.
“I’m too tired and achy to guess,” Caroline said.
“It’s right where Allison Thomasia’s body was found, right on top of John and Emma’s graves.”
Caroline was quiet while she processed the news. “That’s not good,” she said. “If Allison’s murder is connected in any way to the past owners of this house-”
Gretchen cut her off, suddenly worried that her mother would want to halt work at the museum. “Maybe it has nothing to do with the Swillings. Just a creepy coincidence. Remember what Matt told me, that she crawled a distance before she collapsed?”
Nina was busy emptying the tote. She pulled out items and placed them on the counter: paper, pen, flashlights, extra batteries. “Gretchen doesn’t really think it was a coincidence that the murdered woman was found on that grave site.”
“I don’t either,” Caroline said. The Birch women, in spite of their differences, had a few shared beliefs, one being that interrelated occurrences weren’t coincidences. “These events align,” she said firmly to Gretchen. “Therefore they are connected.”
“I was only trying to eliminate possibilities,” Gretchen protested.
“If the cemetery was a game board and you tossed a coin over it,” her mother said, “what are the chances that the coin would fall on that particular grave?”
“Not good,” Nina said. “I’d bet against it.”
Her mother wouldn’t let it go. “Exactly,” she said.
Nina picked up a flashlight and handed it to her sister. “Gretchen had a bad reading, yet she refuses to redirect. Therefore, we must make friends with the house ghost,” Nina said. “The spirit might decide to help us. But we can’t make contact if you two keep talking.”
She handed a flashlight to Gretchen, then distributed walkie-talkies. “First we need to establish rules and duties.”
“Have you ever done a ghosting before?” Gretchen asked. She felt excited but scared, too. She wasn’t exactly sure that she believed in ghosts, but she preferred to err on the cautious side since she was in a dark house. If this ghost existed, should she be stalking it?
“Stop with the lights,” Nina hissed when Gretchen turned on yet another light. Nina followed behind her, turning them off until Gretchen could see only the narrow beams of flashlights and ghastly facial shadows.
“Who is the ghost?” Caroline asked Nina. “Emma?”
In shadow, Nina’s teeth appeared long and pointy like a vampire’s. “Flora,” she said without a bit of doubt. Her teeth seemed to stretch out even longer.
Gretchen had heard stories of vampire ghosts. Didn’t they attack people and leave visible bites on their victims’ necks?
“Let’s get started,” Caroline said.
Gretchen felt the hairs on her own neck stand at attention.
“Our mission is to locate the ghost,” Nina said. “And to find out what it wants and how we can help it accomplish its goal.” She spent several minutes going through the procedure. They would stay close enough to hear each other and make individual observations, which they would compare later.
“Why the walkie-talkies,” Gretchen asked, “if we’re staying together?”
“In case.”
“In case what?”
Nina didn’t acknowledge her. “No detail is too small to log,” she said instead. “Caroline, you’re the official note taker, and I’ll snap photos with my digital camera.”
“What’s my job?” Gretchen asked. “Screaming in horror?”
“You do look a little pale. Want to wait outside?”
Gretchen shook her head.
“If the apparition starts speaking to us, I’m out of this building.” Her mother was beaming her light along the walls, illuminating doll displays, which morphed into horror dolls.
Gretchen was having serious second thoughts. One wrong sound and she’d beat her mother to the door.
Nina snapped her fingers. “That’s what I forgot. I knew there was something. I forgot an audio recorder.” Nina produced a heavy sigh of regret.
“Please, let’s get started,” Gretchen pleaded.
“The first thing we want to do is walk around so the spirit can feel our presence.”
After a pass through the lower rooms without anything unusual occurring, they gathered at the circular staircase. Gretchen shone her light up but saw only the empty steps.
“Everybody calm and relaxed?” Nina asked.
“Sure,” Gretchen lied.
Caroline nodded.
“Here we go.”
They slowly climbed the stairs to the second floor, guided by the flashlights’ beams. Nina puttered with her camera, taking pictures in the low light. Pictures of nothing, as far as Gretchen could tell.
They entered the storage room where Nina had first encountered her ghost. The doll travel trunk was lying open where they had left it.
Gretchen moved closer and shined her light toward it, aiming the beam directly at one travel sticker, then moving it to another, forgetting briefly about the ghost mission. Vintage stickers, faded with age, represented places Gretchen had dreamed of visiting. Cairo, London, Rome, Zimbabwe, Jericho. How romantic it must be to visit such exotic, historical cities. Especially for a young girl in the 1920s. Had Flora, her doll, and its trunk really been to all these places? Or did someone bring back the stickers for her?
Gretchen was fascinated with the little girl from the photograph, but she was completely mesmerized by the doll and its wooden trunk. Her imagination soared every time she thought of the travel stickers.
“Come on, Gretchen,” Nina said, bringing her back to the moment. “We’ll walk slowly through the second-floor rooms. I’ll take a few pictures here and there if I have an overwhelming sense of otherworldly motion, then we’ll use this room as a base for the rest of the night.”
“The rest of the night?” What was Nina thinking?
“This is a mission,” Nina said. “Not a lark.”
They wandered through the dark house, staying close to each other. Floorboards squeaked underfoot. Shadows swirled just outside their beams of light, forming into nocturnal creatures-bats, wolves, clawed animals. Gretchen was getting edgier by the second.
When she found herself lagging behind and alone in one of the rooms, she almost panicked. That’s when she decided to get a better grip on her runaway emotions. She wasn’t going to let a ghost reduce her to a babbling ball of blubber. Even if this house contained an authentic spirit, what could it do to her? It had no substance. It couldn’t pick up a vase and break it over her head.
She was in a large room, obviously the master bedroom at one time. A triple armoire with a beveled mirror loomed directly ahead, taking
up most of the space on the wall. On her left was a king-size bed with a heavy wood frame. The mattress was protected with a dustcover. Beneath her feet was a faded Persian rug.
Gretchen peered out a set of French doors that led to the balcony overlooking the street. The ground seemed far below.
Two beams of light in the hallway assured her that Nina and Caroline were right outside. Nina’s husky voice floated on the air, speaking to her mother. Another assurance that she wasn’t really alone.
With a rush of nervous excitement, Gretchen realized that she did believe in ghosts. Why else would she feel this frightened by the prospect? Could she communicate with it?
Gretchen focused on reaching out to the apparition.
If you exist, let me feel your presence.
She listened.
Nothing.
She had conveyed doubt with her thoughts. No ifs.
Let me feel your presence.
Gretchen waited.
Nothing.
Come on. Help me out. Show yourself.
She strained to hear sound. Was there a chill in the air? She’d heard about cold spots.
Silence.
Then a sound.
A noise, like a mouse. An old house like this could have nests of them. Rats, even. Gretchen hated insects and rodents, and Arizona had especially nasty ones, poisonous things with stingers and teeth. And pack rats.
The sound again, coming from over by the wall near the armoire.
She shined her beam of light directly into the mirror. Her reflection was distorted. She looked pale, as Nina had said. Ready to flee. At least nothing stood behind her. Wouldn’t that be frightening? To look in the mirror and see something not quite human behind her?
She opened the armoire doors and peered inside, finding nothing but emptiness and a faint smell of cedar.
“There you are,” Nina said from right behind her. Gretchen gave in to her fears and let out a scream.
“Shhh,” her aunt scolded. “You’ll frighten the spirit.”
