by Bryn Donovan
Morning fog blurred the mansion and the trees around it. She remembered David growling, It’s a hellhole.
With a shiver, she walked toward the front gate.
A man stood further down the sidewalk, close to the corner of the property. Carlos? No—this man had a full head of silver-gray hair, with a neat moustache and short beard. He gazed at the house, his hands in the pockets of his barn jacket.
A curious neighbor, Andi thought as she unlatched the gate. She hurried a few steps up the walkway. When she looked over toward him again, he had turned his back and was walking away into the mist.
Andi found the door open. “Hello,” she called out as she came in.
No answer. The back of her neck prickled.
The whine of a power saw came from a back room. Andi set down her toolbox to switch on the hall light, and when nothing happened, she remembered a few of the lights were on the fritz. God only knew what had happened to the wiring.
Andi walked toward the sawing noise. She found Carlos hunkered over the fireplace in the back parlor. “Hey there,” she called out.
He jumped to his feet and whirled around. Andi flinched, and some of her latte sloshed over her hand.
Carlos glared at her. “Try not to sneak up on me, okay?”
“Sorry,” Andi said, but she felt a little annoyed. “Is David here?”
“He doesn’t usually hang around a job site. Why, you need something?”
Andi shook her head, ignoring her own disappointment.
A tall red votive flickered on the mantel. A prayer candle, like the ones they sold in the little grocery store near her apartment, with pictures of saints on the sides of the glass. She herself had never bought one, though she remembered her mother telling her that her grandmother, whom they’d called Busha, always had pictures of saints in the apartment.
Andi wondered whether it might be a candle of Saint Joseph, the patron saint of real estate. Andi’s father wouldn’t have dreamed of listing a house without burying a statue of Saint Joe in the backyard.
“You’re putting in the new tiles today?” she asked Carlos, venturing closer.
“Yeah,” he said, sounding merely gruff instead of nasty. “Hope to get it done by lunch.”
The candle wasn’t Saint Joseph. It didn’t seem to be a saint at all. El Anima Sola, it read across the top, and a white graphic depicted a woman with long hair, her face anguished. Chains bound her hands over her head and flames engulfed her naked body.
She thought about asking him about it then decided not to pry. “Well, I’m going to get started.”
In the entryway, Andi opened the front door to get better light so she could start stripping down the carved paneling.
Maybe we should leave the house alone. The wood covered with paint, the walls sealed up in old wallpaper. Some things shouldn’t be messed with. God only knew what else she might uncover.
She shook her head at herself, then kneeled down in front of the paneling and got to work. The heat gun made the paint curl and go a little brown on the edges, and then it could be scraped off more easily.
What if she uncovered that face again, in the grain of the wood? The face of an evil old man?
The night before, when she’d been getting ready for bed, the image had haunted her. She’d tried to pay attention to everything else, to brushing her teeth, to listening to the news on the television in the next room, but the face had loomed in her imagination, staring her down.
Of course she hadn’t seen anything. It was the kind of trick that people’s minds played on them all the time.
She uncovered several inches of raw wood. There was nothing strange there. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said the black walnut was beautiful. Thinking about what it would look like when she was all finished made her feel better. Andi continued heating and scraping.
The patient, steady work gave her mind the freedom to wander to less disturbing topics. It swirled back to her encounter with David Girard.
When he’d first insisted that she couldn’t work on the house, she thought he was being a dick. But once she got him to discuss the job, he didn’t seem disrespectful at all. He seemed to understand that she knew what she was talking about.
She thought of the way he’d looked at her. There was something between them. She hadn’t made it up.
He was a good person. She was sure of it. Something was bothering him. A lot.
She imagined herself taking his hand. Whispering to him, You can tell me.
Oh, God, she thought. What was she, thirteen years old? She was here to do her job, and that was plenty to keep her occupied.
* * *
She came home that evening with the familiar, pleasant feeling of having done a good day’s work. Lissa wasn’t home yet, so Andi sang in the shower, improvising nonsense syllables when she couldn’t remember the words. The hot water soothed her stiff muscles. She lathered up her bath puff with the cherry blossom shower gel she’d just gotten the other day. It smelled delicious.
After drying off, she pulled on her old terrycloth bathrobe, a gift from her great-aunt Marta. She wished she had her slippers, because the worn hardwood floors of the apartment were dirty. But her slippers were dirty too, in the laundry basket on the floor of the bedroom closet. Oh, well. Later tonight she would get the place clean.
She padded into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich. After adding some baby carrots and a handful of potato chips to the plate, she took her food and mug of coffee into the living room and turned on the TV. Tonight was the night they played back-to-back episodes of Ghost Investigations. She was in the middle of watching the men check out a haunted train station when Lissa came in the door.
“Hey sweetie,” Andi said to her. “You’re home kind of late.”
Lissa sighed, tossing her big bag in the corner. “I’m getting the room ready for parent-teacher conferences.”
Andi felt guiltier about neglecting her share of the housework. Not that it was so bad, but Lissa had very high standards of neatness. “I’m going to do the laundry and the floors in a little bit,” she promised. “I’m just taking it easy first.”
“That’s cool,” Lissa said. She went into the kitchen, returned with a full glass of red wine and peered at the TV screen. “Are you watching that ghost show?”
“Yeah. They’re in this train station, where there was a shootout.”
Her sister frowned. “Do you think it’s really healthy for you to be watching this? It’s kind of a weird show.”
“Hey, give me a break, okay? I’m just trying to relax here.” She already had one mother. She didn’t need another one, especially in the form of her younger sister. “It’s not that weird,” she added. “Thousands of people watch this show. I don’t know, maybe millions.”
“Yeah, but I bet most of them, when they were kids, didn’t think there was a girl in the mirror crying at them.”
Andi stilled.
That was one of the most frightening episodes of her childhood. It had been when they lived in the house on Troy Street. Several times when she’d looked in the dresser mirror in the bedroom she and Lissa shared, she’d seen that pale, bird-boned girl, consumed in a terrible grief.
Andi never knew when the girl was going to be there. A few times she tried keeping the mirror covered up with a sheet, but her mother always took it down again and asked why in the world she would do such a thing.
Andi confided in Lissa, who told their parents. They had a talk with Andi about real things versus imaginary things, but that didn’t help at all.
The apparition scared Andi so badly that eventually their mom and dad had switched bedrooms with their daughters. Andi worried about her parents, in there with that weeping girl. She tried to get them to buy a new dresser, one without an attached mirror. On Sundays, she looked through the furniture store ads and pointed out bargains.
That was when they started taking Andi to doctors about her problem.
“How do you even remember that?” Andi asked.
“I remember! Plus, Mom and Dad talk about it.”
“Still?”
Lissa shrugged. “I don’t know. Not for a while, I guess.”
“Well, it was a long time ago!” She knew she was being a hypocrite, saying that after her mind had played tricks on her the other day. But if any house would start your imagination going again, it would be a place like that, as beautiful as it was. She knew better now than to tell other people about these phantoms in her mind. “Have I done anything weird lately?” Andi demanded.
“No,” Lissa admitted and added, under her breath, “Thank God.”
“You know, the thing about Ghost Investigations is, they never see anything. I mean, the most that ever happens is a knock on the wall. Or they think they pick up a voice on some equipment they’ve got, but it’s never at all convincing.” Andi was lying there, too. She found it very convincing. “But they never catch anything on camera. Never once do they have solid proof of ghosts. So, you know, it’s like good therapy for me.”
She suddenly realized what she really liked about the TV show. None of the ghosts ever seemed hostile.
“I guess,” Lissa said. “I can see that.” She looked back up at the screen. “Hey, who’s that guy?”
“Um, he’s kind of new to the team.”
“He’s cute.”
“Hey,” Andi teased her. “Aren’t you getting married soon?”
“I’m engaged. I’m not dead. Whoa, is he British? Turn it up.”
* * *
The next day, when Andi showed up for work, she learned that she’d just missed seeing David. Maybe she would start getting there earlier.
She didn’t know how long she’d been working when Carlos came out and said, “Hey. How’s it going?”
“Slow.” She smiled up at him from where she was kneeling on the floor. “But I don’t mind. It’s just a slow job.”
“Yeah,” he said. He coughed. “Listen, um, Andi. Sorry I snapped at you the other day.”
“That’s okay. I startled you.”
“I don’t know.” Carlos looked around them. “This place kind of creeps me out, I guess.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He chuckled. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
He was half-kidding, but Andi’s throat tightened up at the question. Buried memories rose up and shone and flickered through her mind.
Not just the weeping girl in the mirror.
Also the man with the black braids.
And the Ouija board planchette, under her and her sister’s small hands, gliding to Yes.
All specters of her imagination…nothing more.
“No,” she said, smiling. “I haven’t believed in ghosts since I was a kid.” Andi heard a cell phone go off, from another room. “You need to get that?” she asked Carlos.
He shook his head, frowning. “Mine’s right here.” He patted his back pocket.
“Well, it’s not mine.” The ringing stopped. “Maybe David left his behind?”
Carlos snorted. “Doubt it.” Still, he took out his phone and dialed. The phone rang again. They followed the sound to the kitchen, where it sat on the counter. “It’s not like him to forget something,” Carlos said. “But he seems kind of out of it on this job.”
“Out of it how?”
“I don’t know. He’s been really grouchy.”
“He isn’t usually?”
“Eh, he can be,” Carlos said. “But he’s been grouchier than usual.”
“I’d better call his place and tell him it’s here.” She paused. “Where does he live, anyway?”
“A condo downtown. But he doesn’t have a land line.”
“Oh. Well, he’s coming back, right?”
“He wasn’t planning on it.” Carlos rubbed the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “He’ll probably be back when he realizes he left it, though.”
Andi worked a little more then got some fast food for lunch. When she came back, David still hadn’t returned, and she wasn’t quite in the mood to get started again. She took a walk around the grounds.
The skeletons of overgrown shrubs and upstart trees choked the iron fence along the back. The yard had gone almost as wild as a prairie, all bleached, dried weeds under the cold, colorless sky. Andi walked away from the house then paused when her foot hit something harder than half-frozen earth. A brick. Stooping down, she saw that there were several, nearly hidden in the overgrown lawn.
Pushing weeds aside, she figured out there had once been two paths here, of equal length, intersecting one another like a cross. She found one bundle of thorny tangled sticks and then several more: tea roses, but bare of blooms. It had been a garden.
She stood there, as if trying to listen for something. When a crow flapped near her to land on a nearby sapling, she jumped. It was closer than she expected crows to get. It let out a belligerent croak.
The wind lifted a swirl of dead oak leaves. They spiraled across her path, seeming almost like one living entity before the gust turned back into a breeze and they settled onto the earth again.
“Time to get back to it,” she said aloud.
She worked at the house for hours. Around five o’clock, Carlos came to ask her, “You ready to take off?”
“I think I’ll do just a little more. I can lock up. But hey—do you think you should take David’s cell to his place?”
“Nah. Anyway, my kid’s got a football game.”
“Well, I might take it to him. He may really need it. Do you have his address?”
Carlos gave it to her. “I wouldn’t bother if I were you, though,” he said.
After he left, Andi wondered if he’d remembered to extinguish the votive candle in the back parlor. She went back and saw it still shone red. Not looking in the mirror, she walked over to the mantel and blew out the flame.
A scratching noise came from beneath her shoes. She jumped, her pulse quickening.
Old houses made all kinds of noises, especially this time of year, when it was getting colder.
The scratching came again, louder. It was something in the basement.
Andi considered hightailing it out the back door.
The thought of it made her angry. She’d been afraid enough in her life. She didn’t need any more of that. Steeling herself, she marched back to the foyer and grabbed her flashlight out of the toolbox. She went through the kitchen and past the swinging doors to the basement stairs.
As she descended, step by step, she forced herself to be analytical. If it were under the back parlor, it would be on the left side of the basement.
At the bottom of the stairs, she turned to the left. Her response had gone from flight to fight, regardless of the fact that she’d never been in a fight in her life. She was ready to kick someone’s, or something’s, ass.
She swept the light over the basement floor littered with rusty cans, scrap wood and rags, over the mottled cinder-block walls.
Right over her head, something creaked. Andi snapped the flashlight beam up to the rafters.
She shrieked.
Chapter Three
“You want anything to drink?” David asked Gloria as she sat down on his leather sofa.
“Mm, I can only stay for a minute,” the real estate agent said. “But sure. Just a diet anything.”
David went into the kitchen. His River North loft was typical of a lot of the newer constructions: sleek, outfitted in granite, dark wood and stainless steel. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room, the Chicago skyline glittered.
“Your fridge looks like you’re still in college,” Gloria commented, looking over. “Hardly anything but beer and takeout. I don’t know what you need that big kitchen for.”
“I told you I didn’t need a kitchen at all, but you didn’t listen.” He returned, handing her the glass of soda, and sat down in a club chair. “So, you look great.”
A black woman in her mid-forties, Gloria looked sharp as al
ways in a red jacket and gray trousers, her short hair and makeup flawless. Before helping him find this place a few years before, she had sold three of his properties, and they’d become friends along the way. David didn’t make a lot of friends. It wasn’t surprising to him that one of the times he did was through business.
And even then, he sometimes neglected to be social. It had been a while since he’d seen Gloria. He asked her, “How are Michael and the kids?”
“Ah, they’re good. Marcus just got the lead in the high school play, so he’s all excited.”
“Nice.”
She fingered the gold cross necklace at her throat. “What are you selling now?” she asked. “I don’t know if anyone told you, but it’s not a great time to flip.”
“Yeah,” David said. “Turns out my dad died.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.” He hadn’t told Gloria much about his father—he hadn’t told anyone much—but he had let a few things slip at that party of hers last year. He’d been a little drunk. He hated Christmas.
David learned about his father’s death a few weeks ago. The old bastard had been in Paris, evidently.
“Anyway, he left me the Evanston house.”
Gloria set her glass down on the coffee table with a hard clink. “What? That big mansion you grew up in?”
“Yeah.” He had pointed it out to her once.
“Okay, hold up.” Gloria raised her hands in an echo of her words. “How was the Evanston house even his to give you? Didn’t you say he sold it? And why would your father leave you anything?”
“Apparently he bought the house back a few years ago. Didn’t do anything with it, just bought it.”
“That’s weird. Why he would do that?”
“No idea.”
She frowned. “Does anyone else have a controlling interest in the property, according to the will?”
“No. I’ve got sole possession.”
“Did he leave you anything else?” she asked.
“Hell, no. Left the other houses, all the money, to some second cousin in New York. I guess he was already dead, so his wife got it.”
