Shades of Summer (The Haunting Ruby Series Book 1)

by Joy Elbel

  “That was different—I didn’t actually see anything that night. And it’s not my house.”

  “What? Are you blind?” There was no way she could have missed it—of that I was sure.

  She gave me a funny look. “I didn’t see anything…did you?”

  “Of course I did! I saw it go right through you!”

  She was horrified. “Really? What did it look like?”

  I described the entity to her as delicately as I could because I was afraid she actually might wet herself.

  “OMG! I don’t want to talk about it. A girl in a red dress—that I think I can handle.”

  Knowing that Rachel didn’t see it that night bothered me. I convinced myself that she must have closed her eyes—it was the only possible explanation. “Let’s just look for Scarlet, okay?”

  Rachel squinted into the mirror like she was staring at the sun. “I don’t see anything now. Do you think we should wait a while to see if she comes back?”

  “Sure—it’s worth a shot.” I plunked down onto the floor and stared at the spot.

  “Do you think she saw you too?” Rachel asked as she lowered herself onto the floor beside me.

  “She did and she didn’t. It’s kind of hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  “It was weird. I looked right at her, and our eyes met, but she didn’t acknowledge me. It was like the lights were on but nobody was home.”

  “A residual haunt,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “A what?”

  “A residual haunt. They were talking about them on the episode of Ghost Stalkers that Boone and I watched last night. I paid more attention to the ghosts and less to Damon for a change. Boone usually hates that show, but for some reason he didn’t mind it last night.”

  I laughed to myself. Apparently Rachel had no idea that Boone only hated how much she liked Damon and not the show itself. “So tell me wise one—what’s a residual haunt?”

  “It’s a ghost that appears in a place where they spent a lot of time before they died. They go about their business with no concept of where they are in relation to time. They can’t interact—they’re just like images on a movie screen.”

  “My ghosts definitely interact, though—I’ve had the bruises to prove it!” The whole situation was so depressing. “Are you telling me I have three ghosts?”

  “No, not really. Scarlet could be here as an intelligent and a residual at the same time. And besides, it wouldn’t matter if you had a thousand residuals—they can’t interact, remember?”

  I stared into the mirror, remembering the dancing corpses from my dream. I certainly didn’t want to look into the mirror and see them—residual or not.

  I laid back and stared at the ceiling. “We have to find something today. I can’t take it anymore! I can’t even kiss my own boyfriend for heaven’s sake! Uggghhh!” I beat my feet against the wooden floor in a flamboyant show of frustration.

  “That’s it! Get up!” In one swift movement, Rachel was on her feet. “Whatever you saw here last night is gone now. Let’s look somewhere else. Damon was explaining last night that ghosts can be attached to objects. If we can find what these ghosts are attached to, maybe we can send them into the light or wherever it is they’re supposed to be.”

  I sat up grudgingly. “What if the object is Rosewood itself? It’s not like I can burn it down or anything!”

  “We at least need to try.” She cocked her head to the side and said with a smile, “You do still want to kiss my brother, right?”

  I was up and on my feet so quickly I surprised even myself. “Where do we start?”

  Since we were already on the second floor, we chose to start there and work our way down. We didn’t really know what we were looking for but we didn’t let that stop us. We searched every room and every closet for something that looked old enough to have been in the house since the 1800’s.

  It didn’t take as long as we thought. Most of the rooms were completely empty. Devoid of furniture, devoid of personal affects. We poked our heads into the cellar long enough to see that there wasn’t anything there but cobwebs. We trudged back upstairs and decided to go outside for a little fresh air.

  We sat by the fountain to re-evaluate our plan of attack. Zach sent me a text as we were dodging the webs in the basement, so I figured I better get back to him before he got too worried and rushed over like a white knight. And just in time too.

  “Worried bout u. Do I have 2 save u again? Find anything?”

  I was about to text back the single word “no,” when Rachel had an ‘ah-ha’ moment. I could almost hear the light bulb as it switched on inside her head.

  “If you wanted to hide something in this house—hide it where no one would ever think to look—where would you put it?” She smiled at me like she had the biggest, juiciest secret ever. One she didn’t seem to want to share with me.

  “I don’t know. In my room, I guess.” I didn’t know where this game was going.

  “Okay, pretend it’s not your house. Now where would you hide it?”

  “I don’t know…the attic I guess. That’s where people hide all of their junk, right?”

  “Exactly! The one place we haven’t looked yet.” She had a smug look of satisfaction on her face. I almost felt bad bursting her balloon. Almost.

  “I hate to break it to you, Rachel, but I’ve been in the attic about a million times. That’s where my room is, remember?” Was the summer heat having a negative effect on her mental capacity?

  “Not the whole attic.” Satisfaction gave way to full blown excitement and she nearly vibrated as she spoke.

  “What? I don’t get it?” Now I was starting to feel more like the stereotypical dumb blond. And I didn’t like it.

  “Don’t you see, Ruby? Look up! What you call the attic is really only just a small portion of it. There are windows up there that aren’t in your room. Where’s the entrance to the rest of it?”

  I could hear my own light bulb turn on as I realized she was right. There were no other stairways leading up there, so the only possible entrance was from somewhere in my room. I added a few more letters to my text.

  “Not yet.” I hit send and we raced each other back inside the house.

  Rachel and I hit the landing to the third floor at the exact same second.

  “You really should go out for track with me, Ruby. Not to sound conceited or anything, but I’m one of the best runners on the team. If you can keep up with me, you’ll leave everyone else in the dust.”

  If I didn’t know her so well, I would have thought she was just messing with me. Me getting involved in sports of any kind was never even something I would have considered in Trinity. I was a math-lete, not an athlete! But it was the second time she mentioned it and she had me thinking.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said through panting breaths. I opened the door to my room and we stepped inside. Even though my room was the scene of so many horrors over the last couple of months, I never gave consideration to the fact that it could also hold the answers I sought. I looked around through the eyes of a stranger, trying to see the room from a different perspective.

  Rachel ran to the window near my desk. She pointed down to the ground. “There’s the fountain down there. When I was sitting there I counted. There were three windows on either side of the stained glass window.” She motioned to the window near the kitchen, “That’s one, this is two and the one in your bedroom is three. What we’re looking for is on the other side of that.”

  I stepped into my bedroom. “The only thing on that wall is my closet.”

  “Then we need to look in your closet.” She opened the double sliding doors and inhaled sharply.

  “What did you find?” I took a step back, fearful of what she may have discovered. “Do I need to text Zach and have him come over?” My fingers flew like lightning across the keyboard on my phone then I hesitated before I hit send.

  “Only if he wants to see the best shoe collection this
side of Bloomingdales!” She turned around clutching a pair of boots in her hand. “Please tell me you wear a size nine!”

  I quickly deleted the S.O.S. text to Zach and shook my head. “Sorry! Size eight.”

  Rachel stamped her foot on the floor. “Curse me and my damned big feet!”

  I wrestled the boots from her hand while she mused aloud about Chinese foot binding and I tossed them into the corner. “When this is all over, I’ll buy you your own pair. Right now, let’s see if there’s a hidden doorway in there.”

  She gave the boots one last soulful look and pushed all of my clothes to one side of the bar. The back of the closet didn’t look strange in any way. I thought maybe we had it wrong—maybe there was another staircase hidden in the house somewhere. Then Rachel started to knock on the back panel of the closet. When she got to the right side, the sound echoed back hollowly.

  “Right here. There’s a break in the wall on the other side. But I don’t know how we get in there.”

  I crawled into the closet beside her and pushed on the panel searching for something that would release it. If life were like a movie, it would have popped open in my hands. But it isn’t and the panel refused to budge. I pushed and pried at it until I chipped nearly every one of my fingernails. Sinking back on my knees, I gave up.

  “Now what?” We couldn’t get this close and come up empty handed—we just couldn’t.

  “We just need a hammer—we can pry one of the boards loose and then the rest should be easy. You can hide it from your parents until we can get Zach over here to fix it, can’t you?”

  “They’ll never even know it happened. I’ll be right back with a hammer.” The tool box Zach used the night he put together the cat tree was still in my bathroom because I’d never returned it to the garage. For the first time in my life, laziness was paying off.

  With claw hammer in hand, I returned to the closet. My experience with tools was limited so I turned it over to Rachel. “You can have the honors.”

  “Here goes nothing.” She wedged the tip of the claw into the seam on the panel and applied pressure. The panel lifted slowly at first. Then with a loud pop, it sprang free and a narrow passageway was visible.

  “You may be able to fit in there, but not me,” I remarked as I sized up the newly formed opening.

  “Yes you will, Ruby. I may be taller—and have bigger feet—but other than that we’re basically the same size.”

  I glanced down at my chest. “Really?”

  “Oh…I forgot you aren’t flat chested like me. Here, we can loosen one more board and you should be able to slide in perfectly.” Rachel took the hammer and swiftly pried up the next board.

  Loosening the second board would be enough to allow me comfortable access to what lay beyond. Long veils of cobwebs floated freely on the other side of the opening. If it weren’t for my desire to be with Zach, nothing on the face of this earth would have been worth going in there for. But for Zach, I would do anything.

  “You first.” Rachel stepped aside and waved me in.

  “Thanks. That’s very kind of you,” I said sarcastically as I pushed the sticky mass aside and ducked into the passageway.

  “Don’t mention it.” Rachel snuck in quickly behind me before the webs flew back into her.

  At the end of the hallway, we found ourselves in a large space that smelled of dust and mothballs. Cardboard boxes and old furniture filled the area. A dress maker’s dummy stood near the window, eerily headless. Rachel screamed when she saw it.

  “Rachel, it’s just a dummy,” I said as I punched it in the gut. Clouds of dust flew into my face sending me into fits of coughing.

  “It serves you right! Those things are creepy—I don’t care what you say. I’ve been afraid of those things since I was a kid.”

  “Really? Why?” I brushed at my face to clear away the dirt.

  “When Zach and I were younger, our dad used to take us for a ride on Sunday afternoons. We just drove around town, but to us, it was a huge adventure. One day we saw one of those things in the window of some house. We thought it was a ghost—scared us both silly. But I guess we liked being scared, because every week we would look for it. We looked for years but we never saw it again.”

  “You liked being scared? I guess you both came to the right place then!” At least I had come to a point where I could joke about my situation. Sometimes anyway.

  Rachel laughed. “I guess you’re right. You know I love a good mystery and Zach, well Zach loves you.”

  He hadn’t said it himself yet, but hearing it from someone else’s lips still gave me chills along my spine—the warm, tingly, “I want to kiss him now” kind of chills.

  I looked around the room and at all of the boxes we would have to search. “Where do you want to start?”

  “Over here looks good.” She was obviously pointing in the opposite direction of where the dummy stood. Choosing not to tease her for once, I agreed.

  Box after box was a disappointment. Most of what we found were old newspapers and magazines. None of them even came close to being from the 1800’s, so the search progressed quickly. When a large spider popped out of one of the boxes, I thought of Shelly. She would be very disappointed to find out that salt really didn’t repel spiders.

  “You are seriously testing the bounds of my friendship—I hope you realize that,” she said as the spider ran across the top of her shoe and into a crack in the floor.

  “Every step of the way!” I quipped and she tossed a magazine at me jokingly.

  “You’re lucky I love my brother, because if I didn’t….” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “You’d still be here helping me, you know you would!”

  “You’re right. Let’s just hurry up and find something before it gets dark.”

  One quick glance out the window and I realized we didn’t have much time left. It was much later than I realized and the sun was already starting to set. I didn’t want to be in there after dark either. We started to dig faster.

  The last rays of daylight disappeared as we checked the last box and came up empty handed. Nothing. Not one single thing.

  “That’s it, Rachel. It’s over. We’ve gone through every box. There’s nothing left.” The thought of Zach’s disappointed face made me want to cry.

  “Wait. What about that desk over there? I didn’t go through it, did you?” She pointed to a large wooden roll top desk in the far corner.

  “No, I thought you did—didn’t you?” Despite my better judgment, my hopes soared through the roof. Could that desk contain what we were looking for? It certainly seemed old enough. Why were we stupid enough to not search it first?

  I approached it slowly. If what I needed was in that desk, it would make me the happiest girl in the world. But if I opened it and there was nothing inside, I would be crushed. The future of my relationship with Zach lay inside either way.

  “Just open it already!” Rachel peered impatiently over my shoulder.

  I gripped the handle and wrenched it open. It was filled with books. My heart sank into my stomach for an instant. Then I noticed that each one was marked with the same three letters on the spine—SRB. Scarlet Rose Baker.

  “Scarlet’s diaries! That has to be what these are!” I reached for one of the volumes, turning it over in my hand. It was leather bound and the pages looked ancient. I opened the front cover to find an inscription.

  “For my beautiful daughter, Scarlet. May these pages be filled with nothing but happiness. From your loving father.”

  The answer was in my hands, I could feel it. I couldn’t wait to share our discovery with Zach. Rachel was of the same mind. She emptied a spider-free cardboard box and placed the books inside.

  “Found it! On r way 2 ur house.” It didn’t matter that I was covered in dust and cobwebs—I knew he would be too excited to care. Just like I was.

  32. Read Between the Lines

  Zach met us at the car the second we pulled in. He was wearing a tank
and shorts and looked like he just came from the gym.

  “Sorry I’m so dirty. I was going crazy waiting to hear from you, so I went downstairs to blow off some steam. I was down there half the day.”

  His body glistened with sweat but it made every one of his muscles stand out from the rest. It figured—he could even make dirty look hot! Unfortunately, I didn’t have that ability and I was suddenly aware of how nasty I must look.

  “No need to apologize. We’re disgusting! You have no idea what we’ve crawled through today.” I combed my fingers through my hair in a hopeless attempt to look half as good dirty as he did.

  “No, I don’t. So tell me—what did you find?”

  “Just the clue of the century—the nineteenth century to be precise!” Rachel hauled the box out of the back seat of her car. “Who’s up for some light reading?”

  Zach inspected the contents of the box. “SRB? Is that who I think it is?”

  I proudly nodded my head. “Yep. These are the diaries of Scarlet Baker herself.”

  “Sweet! Where did you find them?”

  Rachel began to excitedly recount the story of how she realized there had to be an entrance to the other part of the attic. She made it sound like she rescued a dozen orphans from a burning building.

  “Oh and we need you to fix the panels in the back of Ruby’s closet, too. I tried to get away with only removing one of them but she couldn’t fit her assets through that narrow of a space.” She cast a sly glance at my chest and Zach’s eyes followed hers.

  He gave me a big wink. “More than worth it, Ruby. I’ll fix it tomorrow.”

  I was already hot and sweaty, but his reaction to Rachel’s comment made me feel like someone cranked the thermostat up another hundred degrees. The last thing I wanted to do was blush but I knew that was impossible.

  “And you’re absolutely adorable when you’re embarrassed, by the way.” He smiled and carried the box to the house.

  “Thanks…I guess,” I answered awkwardly. Would there ever come a day when he didn’t have that effect on me? I still wasn’t used to his compliments and frankly didn’t think I deserved half of them.