by Etta Faire
Chapter 2
The Trouble With Unicorns
The six-foot-wide, glittery unicorn hanging above the front door of the Purple Pony was laughing at me again. My boss, Rosalie, claims the thing is good luck. She painted it years ago after she and her long-time boyfriend broke up just after college. She says it symbolizes new beginnings, strength, and courage to find your path in life. To me, it symbolizes an unnatural love for glitter and a minimum-wage job.
And right now it was mocking me for working here. Something my mother and the unicorn had in common.
Rosalie called to me from the back room when she heard me come in. I snaked my way around the racks of brown suede fringed dresses and turquoise beads to get to her voice. She was sitting at her desk, holding her calendar.
“Did I tell you about the seance we have coming up?” she said, tapping at the paper in her hand.
“The one at the bed and breakfast?”
“I did tell you.”
“Nope, but my dead houseguest did.” I hugged her hello. The large 60-year-old woman with graying dreadlocks and a wrinkle-free complexion was my boss but she was more like a second mom.
“Damn. If we sold tickets to your life, we’d make a fortune.”
I loved Rosalie. She was all about us making a fortune off my freak show.
I didn’t tell her the part where Bessilyn was my first client. Rosalie didn’t approve of me channeling with ghosts, especially not for free. She didn’t think it was worth it to be paid in secrets. I looked down at my cheap boots currently cutting the circulation off from my toes. She might have had a point.
I looked up. Rosalie was handing me a thick white book with nothing but two photos on its cover: a vintage black-and-white aerial shot of total dirt on the left and a current colorful one on the right of dirt and a few buildings. It was titled Landover County: Then and Now
“The new owner of the bed and breakfast loaned that to me. Turn to the page on her house. She wants us to be familiar with Bessilyn Hind.”
“I’m very familiar with the suffragist,” I said.
“Let me guess. Your dead houseguest. Why am I not surprised?” She pulled out the seance box from under her desk, which was just a regular cardboard box with some moons painted on it. She plopped it on her desk and pulled out its contents: a crystal ball, candlesticks, a deck of cards…
“If you can believe it,” she said, gesturing with her EMF reader. “Paula wants us to come over to her bed and breakfast and confirm that this ghost is Bessilyn Hind after we close up shop today. As in, she will only pay us for the seance once we sign paperwork confirming what ghosts will be there. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Have you? What do you think she’s up to?”
I shrugged. “That’s weird. How much are we making off this?”
“Two hundred.”
“A piece?”
“Total.”
“There’s no way we can know what ghosts are going to show up to a seance. Not for two hundred.” I laughed. “That’s not even worth pretending.” I flipped through the pages. The paper was glossy and thick and smelled like ink.
“Nice book,” I said.
“Should be for what Mildred Blueberg paid for it. She’s the author. Went with one of those vanity presses. Poor thing had to purchase a ton. They still take up the whole garage at her lake house in Landover, and she self-published that thing ten years ago. I heard her family has to spend the good part of a day moving those boxes around just so they can get their boat out at the start of summer.”
“How do they survive?” I asked, not really caring about the problems of the rich. I thumbed through the pages of the old photos from the early 1900s when Landover and Potter Grove were just being developed. The houses and buildings were all labeled alphabetically with a description of each along with their now photos.
Of course, Gate House looked the same, down to the bushes.
I sat down at the stool by Rosalie’s turquoise-painted metal desk that was stacked full of papers, books, and half-finished paintings, and took my cute boots off, allowing my feet time off for good behavior.
Rosalie looked over my shoulder. “Mildred went around and took most of those ‘now’ photos herself, interviewing folks, and jotting down the stories they told her. And she’s not a young woman,” she added, like I thought a woman named Mildred might be.
Why hadn’t I been interviewed?
I went straight to the bed and breakfast page next even though I wanted to look at the write-up and pictures of Gate House more. I’d look later.
I’d only seen the b&b in an occasional postcard at the Shop-Quik or when I’d pass it on my way to the university every once in a while whenever I had time to go the scenic route in college.
Jackson never wanted to stay there. “Staycations are for people too poor to go on real vacations,” he’d say. “And, Gate House is much nicer than that awful bed and breakfast. There’s no reason to stay at someplace subpar.”
I never understood how in the world Jackson thought Gate House was much nicer until I saw the “then” photo of the bed and breakfast in Mildred’s book. The b&b was also a Victorian, but it had originally been painted a dark color with bright contrasting trim, probably intended to look like a fun “gingerbread” kind of house. But the reality was a little more grim. A huge clown-like mouth seemed to form among the flourishes and swirls, complete with dead eyes and an imagined murmur in the background that said, “Good children get free lollipops…”
The after photo was a little better, only because the owner had painted it a consistent butter-nut yellow. It still looked like it was offering up stranger-danger candy, though.
In its heyday, the Landover Bed and Breakfast was the epitome of high society in Landover County. Built in 1877, it was originally owned by the Hind family, a family best known for the popular nineteenth-century treat Hind’s Canned Yams. The family went into unexpected turmoil following the suicide of their oldest daughter, women’s rights leader Bessilyn Hind.
Ms. Hind shot herself in the heart in 1906 during her 35th birthday celebration over a break-up with Sir Walter Timbre. The house was sold the following year, eventually becoming a bed and breakfast in 2002.
The Landover Bed and Breakfast is believed to be haunted by the suffragette’s ghost with many saying they can hear Bessilyn roaming the halls calling out for Walty.
“They certainly make me out to be desperate and sad, don’t they?”
I didn’t even jump when I heard her behind me, reading over my shoulder. I was getting way too used to ghosts nowadays. I mouthed to Rosalie. “She’s here.”
Rosalie turned away, pretending to be interested in the stack of old paranormal books on her desk, probably trying to find some sort of all-important article on the detriments of channeling. The little hand on the EMF reader was going crazy, though.
Bessie turned to me. “As soon as you figure out who murdered me, I want you to write to the author of this book. I’m sure she will want to correct the bed and breakfast’s chapter.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Because Mildred Blueberg didn’t spend enough on these. She’s probably dead now anyway. This was published ten years ago.”
“No, she’s alive,” Rosalie chimed in then looked down at her EMF reader. “Sorry to interrupt.”
The suffragette didn’t hear me, anyway. “Tell Mildred Blueberg I did not shoot myself in the heart. And I most certainly do not walk the halls of Landover Bed and Breakfast, pining for Walter, yelling out the name ‘Walty,’ of all things. For heaven’s sake. I led the suffrage movement here in Landover. I wrote literature on it, made sure every man, woman, and child knew. I braved the winter in ridiculous dresses and tiny narrow boots designed by men to be prim and proper and stifling.”
I thought about my own narrow boots I’d just taken off. Now, women stifled themselves, for a savings.
She went on. “Horribly stifling. Corsets so tight, if we coughed or laughed, we fainted. They were large and cumbers
ome and we had a hard time marching, but we did it. Time and time again. And I tell you one thing, I did not do it so I could have my death listed like that. I should have a better reputation than that drivel.” Her voice rose at the end like a drill sergeant.
“I will try. But I can’t make any guarantees.”
Why did everyone want guarantees from their mediums nowadays?
“If we get a customer…” Rosalie finally said after a full minute of pretending not to notice me having a conversation with air. “Just maybe refrain from talking to anyone, you know, not really here.”
I pointed my finger at Bessie. “Don’t ride with me anymore,” I said, even though it was my own fault for talking to a ghost in public.
Someone coughed behind us. I turned my head. It was Justin Fortworth. The deputy of Potter Grove, and my ex-boyfriend.
He looked me up and down, his dark eyes scanning the room as he held in a smile. “Who were you talking to just then?” he asked. “And do you always come to work in socked feet?”
Justin Fortworth drove me crazy the way he always seemed to sneak up on people without even trying. He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair as he waited for me to answer. The sleeves of his uniform were rolled along the curves of his upper arms, revealing the tattoos that also drove me crazy, in a different way.
“What’s going on, officer?” I asked, ignoring his questions about the socked feet and the ghost I had been talking to.
Sheriff Caleb Bowman came up behind him. Caleb was Jackson’s cousin, a lanky man with a sunken face and a bushy goatee that was about three shades darker than the men on the beard-dye commercials.
“The whole police force is here at once,” Rosalie said hardly looking over. “This must be serious.”
Caleb flipped open his notebook. “It’s not. Just crazy Delilah Scott again. Did either of you see or hear anything weird today?”
Rosalie and I both looked at each other. “Define weird,” she said.
Caleb scratched at his goatee. “Delilah Scott is sure something was stalking her while she was gardening this morning, about two hours ago. She told Christine she got the feeling she was being watched by something evil. Her words.” He chuckled.
I got the feeling from the chuckle and the smirk on Caleb’s face that he didn’t believe her words. Delilah Scott was one of the oldest residents in Potter Grove who was still very active at the women’s club because her mind was as sharp as a 30-year-old’s.
The woman also lived in one of my favorite houses in Potter Grove, a storybook cottage just down the street from the Purple Pony, which was probably why the police were continuing their report over here. I didn’t really know Delilah, though, except that she spent most of her time on safari or touring Europe, hiring guides to take her around.
She was also a Donovan, one of the founding families of Potter Grove.
Caleb continued. “I tried to tell Christine that Delilah was batty, but she insisted we come out here and make a report. Christine’s just playing up to her mother-in-law again.” Christine ran dispatch for the police department. Her mother-in-law was a member of the women’s club, same as Delilah.
Caleb shook his head. “And all this because Delilah Scott said she heard something growling and rustling through her trees.”
“Probably nothing,” Justin interrupted. “We checked, but we didn’t see anything unusual.”
The whole incident made me remember a similar one two months earlier, though. I’d heard a strange growling, too, in the alley behind the Starlight Lounge. I told Justin about it at the time. I wondered if he remembered.
I opened my mouth to mention the incident, but he raised an eyebrow at me, making me stutter over my words and stop.
“Call me if you see or hear anything suspicious,” Justin said, handing me his card, like I wouldn’t know how to contact the police department in my city. Our hands touched for a second when I reached for it, and a jolt of electricity rushed up my arm, making me wonder why we broke up in the first place. I shook it off.
I knew from the recent channeling I’d done with Jackson that the way you remembered something in life wasn’t always the way it went down in real time. We tended to put negative or positive spins on our fuzzy memories. And right now, I was only remembering the good times with this man, probably because Justin Fortworth was gorgeous and I hadn’t technically had sex in years, unless you counted Mrs. Bellman’s son, who I regretfully let my mother set me up with last year in a moment of weakness. I didn’t count him, figuring my official sex count should only include men who didn’t ask me to sneak out before their mothers woke up in the morning.
“Keep your eyes open,” Justin said on his way to the door. He stared at me a little longer than I thought he would and I looked away, reminding myself there was no way I was going out with Justin Fortworth again. Not after the way things ended almost twelve years ago when I broke up with him to be with Jackson. He’d told everybody it was because I was a gold digger.
As they were leaving, Bessie appeared by my side again. “He’s your Walter, huh?” she said, motioning toward the deputy who was looking back at me.
“If that means one of the jerks in your life you regret dating, then yes,” I said. She was right, though. Justin was the kind of man I wouldn’t want anyone thinking I cared enough about to walk the halls, calling out his name.
“We need a plan to prove Bessie’s presence at the bed and breakfast,” Rosalie said when the officers left.
“She’ll come with us” I replied, gesturing to where the ghost was still hovering. “What better plan than the truth?”
Chapter 3
Dreadful
The bed and breakfast smelled like fresh roasted chestnuts when Rosalie and I stepped into the lobby after work around 7:00. Several comfy red floral couches were positioned strategically around the main fireplace with a crackling fire already going, even though it was warm for an evening in September. Large watercolor paintings hung on all the walls, some of random dogs being washed in metal tubs and others of garden parties with Victorian women in long dresses made from ridiculous amounts of fabric.
Rosalie motioned toward a large museum-quality display case at the back of the room with a sign above it labeled Bessilyn Hind. It held a headless mannequin wearing a faded champagne-colored gown, exactly like the one Bessilyn’s ghost wore.
I stared at it a second; it seemed all too real now. Here was the exact gown, in the exact place she wore it. It still had beige splatter on it that I assumed was one-hundred-year-old blood along with what looked like gunpowder residue.
As if that wasn’t enough, on the pedestal at the foot of her gown, was a gun with a sign that read. A Gift to Regret: James Hind gave his daughter this gun in 1906 after she received death threats related to the suffrage movement.
To the left of the gown was another pedestal. This one held a single glove. Found on the side of the house during the chaos surrounding Bessilyn’s untimely death. This driving glove was believed to have belonged to one of the distraught guests.
The glove was floppy and huge, not like the ones Bessilyn wore as a ghost. A tan color with grease along the tips of its fingers. On the back wall, behind the display were two blown-up, grainy, black and white photos. One was of the glove on a rock next to a champagne glass. The other was Bessie with what I guessed was her family.
Bessilyn’s eyes looked swollen and she was barely smiling in her party dress next to her sister, mother, and father. She was also very modestly dressed. The rest of her family dripped in jewels and broad smiles.
“Does anyone else think this is a little gruesome and tacky,” I whispered under my breath to Rosalie.
“I’ve been in this bed and breakfast a lot, and I don’t remember this,” she said back.
“It’s new. Got it a couple days ago,” a booming voice said from across the room. I turned, almost jumping. A squatty woman in her forties with short, spiky, platinum-blonde hair and a pale complexion stood in front of the
check-in counter near the front door. “Paula Henkel,” she said, extending an arm and racing across the room with it. I shook her hand as soon as it got to me.
“Carly Taylor,” I replied.
“Oh, I know all about you,” her voice was gruff and confident. She looked me over like I was a car she might want to buy. “So you’re the medium with the special powers?”
I shook my head. “Nope. I can see and talk to ghosts, but I don’t have powers over them or anything. No power to see the future, read minds, or make things appear out of nowhere. Sorry.” It had become a pat answer now. I was getting asked about powers a lot lately.
She nodded slowly while her eyes still scanned me. I wasn’t sure she heard a word I’d said. “Rosalie probably told you about the seance.”
“Yes. I hear you want us to confirm your ghost is Bessilyn Hind before we agree to anything.”
“Before I agree to anything,” she corrected me.
I pointed to the display case with Bessilyn’s dress. “I see you’re a huge fan of hers.”
“I’m a huge fan of money,” she said. “Let’s get that straight. I’m pretty skeptical about the rest of this malarkey, all the ghost stuff. But Bessie Hind is a name. And I’m selling dark history and death here. People stay at my bed and breakfast for a chance to see a historical ghost roaming the halls.” She looked around her living room like the woman might be roaming right now. “I’ve spent a lot of money restoring this house to its original state, for the most part.”
I nodded. I could see why “for the most part” didn’t include the old scary paint job on the exterior.
She went on. “You’re the most credible medium in the county, or so I hear. Can you do whatever mystical mumbo-jumbo you people do, and confirm Bessie’s presence so we can move forward with the seance?”
I tried to tell her that wasn’t how things worked. Ghosts came and went as they pleased. She put her hand up. “Just do it, or don’t do it. But I haven’t got time for excuses. My time is money, so if you can’t do this seance, I’ll find someone else who can.”
