Ghosts from the Past

by Bonnie Elizabeth

  I filled the extra-large mug all the way up, thankful that it was as large as it was, and went back to dig into my breakfast.

  Nathan was still snacking on toast and fruit. Rachel had a bunch of sausages which she was cutting into tiny pieces. It surprised me because watching her eat last night I had thought she was a vegetarian. Perhaps she just didn’t like chicken.

  “When you’re done, I’ll take you to the library,” Nathan said. He didn’t seem like he was in any hurry. In fact, when I was mostly through my oatmeal, he got another large mug of coffee and sat down to have some more.

  The caffeine helped me wake up, at least a little.

  “There’s going to be fog later on,” Rachel announced.

  “How do you know?” I asked. There were no windows in the dining hall. It wasn’t as if I could go look out.

  Rachel shrugged. “Sometimes you just know.”

  “Are you from this area?” I persisted.

  Rachel gave me a long look. “I’m from Chicago, although I often spend time wherever I’m needed to authenticate antiques.”

  “It must be very interesting.” I was trying to be pleasant.

  Rachel shrugged and then pushed her plate away. “I’ll be working on the second floor of the main wing. I’ll meet with Bethany around four. She can let you know what sorts of assistance I’ll need then.” She was clearly talking to Nathan and acting as if I didn’t exist.

  Nathan nodded at her. As Rachel exited the door through the far end, the one that lay in shadow, Jonathan came through the kitchen door. He nodded at us before going straight for the coffee urn. He was already carrying a mug, although his looked different from those here. I suspected it was a personal cup.

  I finished my breakfast and leaned back to enjoy the coffee. There was little conversation. Clearly the people here were not morning people.

  As I drank the last of my coffee, Nathan said, “Shall we get started or do you need another cup?”

  “I’m good but I think I’d like to go out to my car. I seem to be missing my phone,” I said.

  “I’ll go with you and then we can go to the library,” Nathan said.

  Nathan led the way back through the kitchen. Pat and Bob were busy at the sink, their backs to us.

  “How long has Bethany been working on the estate?” I asked.

  “She officially inherited at the end of last year. Audra had died probably six months before that but the tax people wanted a general valuation of the inheritance,” Nathan said.

  I nodded, wondering how that worked. We reached the outer door. Nathan pushed it open for me and then stepped back.

  “Now she wants to know what’s here and what’s still in good condition. Audra let the place fall to ruin. She suffered from depression most of her life, although it was only in the last few years that anyone diagnosed it.”

  Interesting.

  “You’ll be cataloging things and making specific valuations on each book. I’ll have paperwork for you from the estimator that came through for the taxes. He was valuing the collection as a whole. You’ll be going book by book and then cataloging them into some sort of order. There may be several collections. There’s a lot of books and all of them are old. I’m sure there are those that can be repaired, those that are in good condition and are interesting, and those that need to be tossed,” Nathan said.

  I shuddered in horror at the thought of tossing out books, although I knew that sometimes you had to. In a place like this, mold was likely to be an issue.

  The gravel crunched under our heels. The air smelled fresh, the way it does after a storm. The sky was light and bright but off in the distance I saw more clouds. I wondered if they were coming our way.

  “Later on, if it doesn’t get foggy, it’s a lovely walk down that path.” Nathan pointed out a narrow trek that I hadn’t noticed when I parked. It seemed to circle around nothing at all, but generally heading away from the Manor. It looked rather barren to me and not terribly inviting.

  I got to my car. The box Jimmy had left was still in there. I had my keys. I opened the door and looked in the front. My phone was nowhere to be found.

  I stood up, looking perplexed.

  “What’s wrong?” Nathan asked.

  “I thought, in fact I was sure, I had my phone in my purse when I came here. But it’s not there and it’s not in the car,” I said.

  “Let’s look a little harder first,” Nathan said. I opened the passenger side and we searched around the floors and under the seats. As expected the phone wasn’t there, though I did find a few stray French fries, which were probably the reason for the odor in my car. I looked under the backseat, moving around the one lone box, but still nothing.

  I stood up shaking my head. Nathan looked troubled.

  “I hate to think someone would have stolen it. They’d have to have had a key, wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t recall leaving the door unlocked,” I said. “And I was there except when I went down to dinner.” I didn’t mention that I’d taken a shower, not liking the idea that someone could have slipped in and taken something.

  Nathan rubbed his chin but nodded. “We’ve had a few tools go missing but it always seemed like something being misplaced. Well, and the art restorer before Jonathan lost his phone as well. That’s when we upgraded the locks on the doors.”

  Nathan paused for a bit, staring off into space. Finally he added, “Did you have a case so you can describe it for me?”

  I gave him the make and model and then described the case I had, colored in Clemson orange and purple with the Tiger on the back.

  We had walked back to the door. “That should stand out,” Nathan said. “I’ll call for Maggie and see what she says.”

  We went inside, Nathan picking up the walkie-talkie that sat by the backdoor. I noticed he had one in his pocket but chose not to use it. I glanced in the kitchen. Pat and Bob weren’t anywhere to be seen.

  Behind me, Nathan was talking to Maggie. I couldn’t quite hear what was being said on her end. There was a lot of static and I had to wonder where she was.

  “Maggie said she’ll have the housekeepers keep an eye out for it,” Nathan said. “And everyone else.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I hate to think that someone here would steal something.”

  “I was hoping it would be in the car,” I said. “Then it would have been a non-issue.”

  “I suppose if Jimmy saw it on the ground and picked it up, it could be somewhere else in your room?”

  I thought about it, but couldn’t imagine where he’d have put it. I’d gone through my suitcases. I’d even looked in a couple of the boxes on the top. It didn’t seem very likely.

  “Well, let’s go to the library, then.” Nathan set off through the dining hall. Bethany gave us a wave and then went back to her meal. Jonathan was still there. Now, instead of coffee, he had a big plate of food in front of him.

  We exited through the far door which took us to a wide corridor covered, like everything else, in dark wood paneling. There were lights here but they struggled to hold back the shadows. It wasn’t a place I’d want to walk through in the dark. It was bad enough walking through it in the daylight.

  The corridor ended in a narrower hallway which, to our right, opened into the main entrance. The cheap doors I had noticed before looked even more out of place in here. There was plain drywall around them, as if someone was working on changing things but hadn’t finished. The white paint on them was just too bright in comparison.

  “The old doors were twice as tall and we were having a hard time finding something to replace them. Audra had let things get so deteriorated that water was coming in the front when the storms blew in from the sea,” Nathan said. “We had to do something for now. Bethany and her designers are trying to decide the best option.”

  Across from the doors, past a large open space that would have held the average living room, spiraled a long stairwell. The entry was open up through the next two floors
and an old chandelier hung there. It was high enough that I wasn’t sure if it had lights or candles. The wooden rail on the stairwell had been painted white once but was now chipped and poor looking.

  “The stairs are solid, although the rail isn’t in very good condition,” Nathan said. “Bethany worries it’s an accident waiting to happen, and she’s right, but we haven’t decided how accurately to portray the entry. Originally it was all dark wood, but in her younger years Audra had this idea that she’d paint things white and brighten the manor up. She got through the stairwell and that was it.”

  It made me sad to think of a woman who had lived here all her life making plans for something that never happened, just giving up. Of course, I had sort of done that myself and if not for Tessie, perhaps I’d still be doing that.

  A shadow flickered off to my left but when I turned in that direction, I saw nothing there. A moment later, the room got very chill. I felt my arms break out in goose bumps as I pulled my sweater closer around me. Nathan shivered and then walked quickly across the hall.

  “One of those moments that Rachel talked about,” he said. “We’ve got to install better heating.”

  “I don’t see any radiators here,” I said.

  “There’s an oil furnace that runs the main wing,” Nathan said. “It’s actually up to code. Audra lived mostly in six or seven rooms on the second floor of this wing.”

  I had this desire to go see those rooms, to see how that woman had lived. I didn’t ask though my curiosity about her was aroused.

  We’d crossed the great hall and were in another large room. This was clearly the library. It was lined with books on dark wood shelves and there was a second floor catwalk that lined the room. A metal spiral stair waited in one corner for those who wanted to reach the higher shelves. A couple of dark wood ladders leaned against the walls, on a track so it would be easy to move them. In the center of the room were a dozen or so low shelves all filled with books. There was no carpet here, although in the corner I saw something rolled up. I wondered why that had been done. I hoped it wasn’t because of dampness.

  Mold is the bane of old books, and archivists hate it the way other people hate spiders. The only thing worse was fire, but at least fire was quick. Mold was a slow death for a book.

  Against the wall to the left, looking out to the front of the Manor, were two long windows with floor length drapes in heavy dark velveteen that had gone nearly black through the years. After all, who would want bright colors anywhere in the house? Audra didn’t seem to be the only one who was depressed in the family.

  “Let’s go upstairs to Audra’s library,” Nathan said.

  “Her library?” I asked. I had been told she had a personal library, but I was thinking of a few shelves. Suddenly, that seemed rather naïve.

  “You’ll see,” Nathan said.

  He led me up the great staircase, staying close to the wall. I followed suit, just to be safe. At some point this place had been beautiful, and I hoped that Bethany was able to make it beautiful again. She’d started work there, clearly. The wood had been sanded, though not redone. It appeared that someone had pulled down wallpaper as there were spots of it here and there.

  “We need to redo wiring before we can redo the walls,” Nathan said. “But the electrician has to plan out where to put lights. We had to work hard to get him to sort out the rooms we’re in in the east wing.”

  When we finally got to the top of the stairs, I smelled rotten food. It was just a whiff and then it seemed to be gone.

  Nathan led me down a hallway that led to the left. Audra’s library was only a few doors down and faced the back of the manor. It had two large windows looking out and no curtains. The floor here had been sanded down and from the looks of it, boards had been replaced, recently.

  The walls here were lined with shelves in dark wood. Small stools sat around the room and there was a large overstuffed sofa in a heavy tapestry-type upholstery. It was gray with age, though I could see faint traces of patterns that suggested there had once been flowers. A matching chair sat next to one of the windows. A spot on the floor suggested there had been a table there.

  “It’s much smaller, but still a good number of books,” Nathan said.

  I agreed. The room was probably ten feet by twenty, and the walls, except for where the windows were and the main door, were lined with books. There was no fireplace in this room and if I recalled, I didn’t remember seeing one downstairs. Clearly whoever cared for the books was afraid they’d burn if there was a fire around.

  “And there’s the schoolroom.”

  Nathan smiled as I was mentally calculating the numbers in here.

  We went back out and climbed the stairs to the third floor. I heard someone pounding on something, probably a worker. It was distant.

  “More work on the east wing,” Nathan said. “It’s a bit easier to work with as it’s more modern. That way Bethany can have people staying on site as they continue to work on the main wing.”

  We went across a catwalk that looked down over the stairs to the entry and passed a closed door on my right. The next door we came to, Nathan opened.

  The schoolroom. This was done in a lighter wood. The paneling had darkened with age but at one time it had been a knotty sort of pine. Perhaps cheaper and easier to replace. I couldn’t be certain. It was packed with boxes, and from the openings I saw books.

  “This is where they’d started packing up the old books they didn’t know what to do with,” Nathan said. “The boxes closest to the door are old paperbacks that Audra probably purchased. As you go further back, you start seeing older books.”

  I nodded. In addition to mold and mildew I started to think about mice and insects. This was going to be a mess. The books in these boxes could take me years to catalog, and they wanted me to have it done in six months to a year. I recalled something about a few boxes. How could anyone misrepresent this huge room full of boxes as a ‘few’?

  Looking at all of them, I started to feel a bit like Cinderella.

  Chapter 7

  Nathan led me back down the stairs and to the library. I was going to need a map for all the places we’d been. At least the library didn’t smell quite so moldy. It smelled drier, although whether that was a good thing or not remained to be seen. If the books had absorbed all the moisture I was smelling earlier, that could be a bigger problem than I expected.

  The rolled-up carpet worried me. Nathan saw me eyeing it.

  “It wasn’t wet,” he said. “It was just stained and worn. We need to get someone to pull it out of here.”

  That made me feel slightly better.

  Hidden at the far end of the library was a large desk. Nathan showed me notes from the estate appraiser. Below and around the desk were boxes from various office supply stores full of sticky notes, index cards, pens, and even some paper. There was a surprisingly new-looking working computer on the desk along with a printer. Extra sticky labels sat beside it.

  “You’ll find software on the system that catalogs books,” Nathan said. “It’s probably not university standard or anything, but it should work for what we need. If you need to upgrade it to something more, please come and talk with me.”

  I nodded. “What about the internet? I know there’s poor connectivity here.”

  “This is on a buried cable which we had installed, and it cost a fortune. If any computer can get out, this one can.”

  “What about a password to the internet in case I want to work up in my room?”

  Nathan wrote down a string of letters and numbers on a piece of paper. I took it and put it in my sweater pocket near my walkie-talkie and thanked him. We talked for some time about the job and the expectations. The building creaked and groaned around us but other than that it was silent in that part of the Manor.

  Nathan left, leaving me alone in the large room, which was suddenly too silent. It was like the house was checking me out, all the creaks and groans paused while it did so. If I had my phone I
could put on music, or at least I hoped I could put on music. Perhaps there was something on the computer.

  I entered the credentials I’d been given by Nathan a few moments ago and the computer came up, a pleasant and familiar sound in the waiting silence. I heard scratching from behind me. I turned while the computer finished its booting, looking around. There were books there. I considered pulling them out to see if there was a rat behind them or if there was damage to the walls, but I didn’t want a wild rat running out at me.

  My fingers sort of itched at the thought of the creature jumping out and scaring me like in some horror movie. The scratching sound stopped as quickly as it had started. I turned back to the computer.

  I looked at the name of the catalog software. It wasn’t one I was familiar with, so I got online, which was easy enough, and started reading up on it. It was primarily for home use or small libraries. I could argue that this wasn’t a small library but likely it would work for what we needed.

  I took a moment to send an email to Tessie so she wouldn’t worry if she didn’t get a phone call from me. Of course, she’d probably worry because my phone had been stolen. I was worried about that.

  While Nathan might hold out the thought that it was an innocent mistake, I was fairly certain someone had purposely taken my phone. I just didn’t know why.

  It occurred to me that I didn’t know that much about Audra Schilling. I’d looked up Schilling Manor online before arriving to find out about the family in general, seeing I’d be working for them. I knew they’d made most of their money in coal. They hadn’t run any of the big coal mines that had given rise to the main towns. Instead they’d run a couple of smaller finds, one of which had run out within a year of opening.

  Still, the investment in coal had paid off well enough that they had money to invest in railroads, owning a piece of every railroad they could buy. They had investments in shipping as well. There were a few rumors that not all of the fortune was above board, particularly when Audra’s father, Mitchell Schilling, had been in charge, but there were no specifics, at least not in my cursory search.