That was Mel. Not even a near brush with death in a haunted house would keep her down.
Haunted house. Her mother’s ghost was in the house. Katie wanted to scream. She wanted to laugh. Most of all, she just wanted to cry.
Riley had been taken away in a police car. Chief Aikens had told both Katie and Mel that he needed their statements about what had happened in the house. Mel and Katie had exchanged a look, wondering how they were going to explain everything in terms that wouldn’t get them sent to a mental hospital.
Then, thankfully, the chief said the statements could wait until Mel was checked out at the hospital and they knew she would be okay.
“You too,” he’d added, speaking to Katie, and pointing to her face.
Katie had been lucky. No broken nose. Her face was still tender and a little swollen, but she would live to date again.
Still, she’d stayed at the hospital this long to be sure Mel was going to be okay. She felt guilty. She felt like this was all her fault and in a way, she knew it was. If she hadn’t called Mel to come and help her then she wouldn’t have gotten hurt. If she hadn’t suggested doing that stupid séance with the Ouija board then they wouldn’t have been in the freezer at all.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, surprising them both.
Mel found Katie’s hand with her own. She winced, and resettled the other arm in its protective sling. “Chickie, you’d do the same for me. You got nothing to apologize for.” Then she laughed, and licked her lips. “Of course, that might be the pain drugs talking.”
“You don’t need any wine,” Katie told her with a smile. “You’re already high!”
“Don’t be mean to me,” Mel whined, looking for sympathy. “I’m hurt.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Besides. I always need wine.”
“Well sure,” Katie agreed. “Who doesn’t?”
The silence stretched in the room after their laughter died away. Very abruptly, Katie threw her arms around Mel and kissed her forehead. “I’ve never had a friend like you, Mel.”
With a wide yawn, Mel’s eyes drooped. “Nope. Won’t ever find another like me, either. Now, go ‘way. I’m sleepy.”
Katie squeezed her hand one last time before settling it on the bed over the sheets. When she stood up, she saw that Mel was already asleep.
Her stomach rumbled again. There was so much she had to do. The problem with Riley might be mostly over but that was by no means the end of it. The house had to be taken care of and she needed to find a new contractor, the police still needed to speak with her, and she wanted to call Mel’s boyfriend and tell him what had happened.
Plus, she needed to tell Chief Aikens her suspicions about her mother.
Before she could do any of that, she was going to have to find some lunch. Her body had decided that was her top priority, and she found that she was too tired to argue about it.
“Cheeseburger first, and then the house,” she said to herself as she got on the elevator down to the main floor of the hospital.
She remembered saying much that same thing when she first arrived in town. Funny how things come full circle.
The hospital wasn’t actually in Fount Azure. Katie’s hometown wasn’t big enough to have a hospital of its own, so she and Mel had been taken to the nearest facility, thirty minutes away by car. Thankfully Chief Aikens had asked the ambulance personnel to drive Katie’s car over when they went so she wouldn’t be stranded there.
She might have to adjust her opinion of him. Maybe he wasn’t just a dirty old man undressing her with his eyes and comparing her to the teenager he’d arrested for being naked in the lake. Maybe he had a heart, too.
“Stranger things have happened,” she said to her rearview mirror.
She looked for a pair of blue eyes there, but all she saw was her own.
The drive back into town took her past the Over Easy Diner where Lizzy worked as a waitress. She hesitated, realizing how awkward it might be for Lizzy if she was working this afternoon, but in the end her stomach won out. She pulled off Main Street and into the tiny parking lot for the diner, already thinking about the cheeseburger and fries she was going to order.
The place wasn’t all that busy now that it was the middle of the afternoon. Katie had no trouble finding a seat at an empty table.
She was reading the menu--even though she had already decided on what she was going to have--when the waitress came over. She looked up to find Lizzy standing there in her yellow waitress uniform. Her cherry red hair was starting to show the brown roots. The expression on her face was a heavy one.
“Oh, Lizzy. Hi.” Katie didn’t quite know what to say to her. “I didn’t think you’d be working. I mean, after what happened.”
Her shrug was unconvincing. “Like I told you before, a girl’s got to make a living. We can’t all make hundreds of thousands of dollars selling other people’s homes.”
Katie stared up at her. Was that an insult...directed at her? “Lizzy, I know you’re upset over what happened to your brother but you have to know he deserved it, right? I’m sorry it had to come to that but he’s been doing some bad things.”
Lizzy didn’t say anything. Katie wanted to tell her everything, about Marlena, and how Riley had broken into their house twice now, and about her mother--
Okay. Maybe she couldn’t say everything that had happened with her mother. Certainly not about seeing her ghost.
“I’m not mad at you,” Lizzy was saying. “I just feel bad for your mom, you know? She loved Marlena like a daughter. Oh. I didn’t mean she didn’t love you, too.”
There it was again. Just when she was starting to get past the emotions of what Lizzy had told her... Katie felt a hollow pit open inside her as she listened to Lizzy say those things. Her mother had been looking for someone to replace her after she left home. Apparently, she’d found that someone in Marlena.
How was she supposed to feel about that?
“What are you going to do now?”
Lizzy’s question caught her off guard. Now? Right now she felt like climbing under a rock and staying there until she could forget everything that had happened here. The man who may have killed her mother was in police custody. The woman who had replaced her in her mother’s household was dead.
And Katie felt like a stranger in her own hometown.
Setting the menu down on the table Katie stood up. “I’m sorry, Lizzy. I guess I’m not hungry after all.”
Putting her order book away, Lizzy shrugged. “I understand. You’ve got a lot on your mind. No time for us small town folks anymore.”
“Lizzy, that’s not--”
“Sure, sure. Maybe you should just go, Katie. Back to wherever you came from. You’ve got better things to do then spend time with an old friend like me.”
She was about to turn away when Katie said, “No, really. I tell you what. Why don’t you stop by my mother’s house later? We can order in some food and catch up on old times. Really, Lizzy. I’m sorry about your brother. I’d like to talk to you about it. It’s just...there’s things I’m just not comfortable mentioning in a public place like this.”
Lizzy tilted her head to one side, considering. “I could do that. If you really want me to?”
“Sure I do. I was just thinking earlier how I don’t have very many real, true friends. I’d like it if you and I could be that.”
It surprised Katie to realize she meant those words. Sure, she had Mel, and they would both do anything for each other but outside of her and a couple of other acquaintances Katie had never made time for friends.
If this business with Riley had shown her anything, it was how much she needed to depend on her friends when things got rough.
“Sure,” Lizzy said to her. “I’d like that. I get off work in another hour. Want me to come by around six?”
“That would be perfect. I’ll see you then.”
“I’ll bring the pizza,” Lizzy offered. “I know the best place in town.”
Katie was pretty sure there was only one place in town that made pizza, but that was fine with her. It was good that Lizzy wouldn’t be coming over for another couple of hours, too, because she still had to clean up the mess those flying photographs had made, and there was something else she wanted to do, too.
It seemed to her that she needed to have a good talk with her mother’s ghost. There were things that needed to be said. Hopefully, her mother was going to be in a talking mood.
“See you then,” she said to Lizzy, turning to leave.
“Sure thing. Oh, and Katie?” She stepped closer, leaning in to whisper. “Thank you. Seriously, you don’t know how much this means to me. Let me package you up a piece of lemon meringue pie to go.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Katie started to protest, but Lizzy wouldn’t hear it. So, with a piece of pie in a styrofoam box in her one hand and her car keys in the other, Katie left the restaurant and went back to her car.
On the way home, the things Lizzy had said came back to her. Guilt welled inside of her again. Maybe she had helped to capture the man who took her mother away from her, but that hadn’t fixed anything. There were still too many questions.
Most important among them, why would Riley Harris want to hurt her mother? Katie barely knew Riley, and she had to believe that her mother barely knew him either. That dream she’d had, about her mother waiting for someone to come and visit with her. Sitting all alone at the kitchen table, not realizing that the person she let in would be the person who killed her. How had they gotten so close, her mother and Riley?
Lizzy had said the person her mother was closest to was Marlena. How come none of this was making sense?
Katie talked to herself as she drove. “Was it Marlena who killed you, Mom? Did I get this all wrong? Maybe that’s what you were trying to tell me. This person you loved more than me--”
Her emotions choked her and it was a long moment before she could finish that thought out loud.
“Did you welcome Marlena into your home and get killed for it?”
Then why was Marlena dead now?
Why would Riley kill her?
She was pulling into the driveway of the house now. This house that she had thought was out of sight, out of mind. How wrong had she been about that!
Staring at the house, the place that used to be full of happy memories for her, Katie slammed her fist down on the dashboard. If she got her mother’s ghost to talk to her, what else would she find out about her mother--and her own past?
She got out of the car and approached the house like she was on a mission. The police were waiting to talk to her, but they would just have to keep waiting.
She needed to talk to her mother first.
Chapter 12
Glass crunched under her shoes in the front hallway. All of these pictures needed to be picked up, and the broken frames swept up and tossed out. That freezer door...she needed to take the lock off that door at least. Of course it had been Riley pushing the door closed all these times, of that she had no doubt, but she still didn’t trust it.
She still couldn’t shake the feeling that the freezer was alive somehow, and out to get her.
Shuddering, she walked past the kitchen entryway and started rebuilding her mental list of things the house needed done to it. She’d been overwrought before, emotional and scared, and the decision to give up on selling the house had been a hasty one. Now she regretted it.
She wanted this place gone.
There was no way she could continue maintaining this house anymore. It was too much of a burden on her both financially, and mentally. The house needed to go.
All of that would have to be done some other time though. For now she just wanted to get the house cleaned up for when Lizzy came over. She would try making a new friend before she left Fount Azure for good. Then, afterward, she could worry about the rest.
And all of it was going to wait for a conversation with her mother.
“Mom?” she called out. “Mom, are you here?”
She felt something. It reminded her of the sensation she’d felt at the cemetery, when she’d seen her mother’s ghost tending to her own grave. It was an odd sort of twist that she felt deep in her chest, and it let her know that her mother really was close by.
“Mom, can we talk?” She felt so foolish doing this. How did one talk to a ghost? Was there a guidebook for this sort of thing? “Mom, I don’t know if I’m doing this right. I just...I just need to talk.”
Behind her in the hallway, glass chimed and chinked as something unseen stirred the broken pieces of the photo frames.
There was her answer. “I’m going to take that as a yes.”
Katie had stared down ghosts before. Some of them had been, well, dangerous. Homicidal was a good word. Even though that had been her experience with spirits from beyond the grave before, she didn’t feel worried now. Not with her own mother.
Then again, her mother had thrown those framed photographs at her.
And she had pulled her back into the freezer by her ankles when she’d tried to escape.
Her mother had loved another woman like her own daughter.
Maybe she didn’t know what to think.
“Mom, can we just talk? Please?”
All the photos in the hallway fluttered, all at the same time. That was no answer.
“Mom!” She tried to take a deep breath and calm herself down because she knew from experience that yelling at ghosts never worked. “Mom, please. Talk to me.”
From down the hallway, from the far end by the stairs, a heavy piece of brown board came spinning across the floor, easily sliding on its smooth flat side until it spun to a stop, lettered side up, just touching Katie’s toes.
It was he Ouija board.
She remembered now. She had been carrying the board but then she dropped it in their mad rush to get away from Riley. It had laid there, at the back door, all this time. She had to wonder what a bunch of hardened police officers had thought of that when they came in to arrest Riley. Then she decided she just didn’t care.
Her mother’s ghost had tossed this at her. She’d asked her mom to talk to her, and this was her answer.
Her mom wanted to talk, too.
“Can’t we just talk?” she asked. “Like we used to? Before I left, I mean.”
The board fluttered at her feet again. It was going to be this way, then. Fine. She looked around for the planchette.
She couldn’t find it.
Frantically, she ducked into the living room, and then the kitchen, looking everywhere for it. Where could it be? It had to be here, didn’t it? Mel loved this thing. She had taken such good care of it all these years. The only reason it had been left behind today was because of all the excitement--and because Mel was hurt.
Where was it?
Whether Katie believed in the science, or the voodoo, or the paranormal activity behind the use of a Ouija board or not, she’d seen it work. Plus now her mother was reaching out to her. She wanted to talk to Katie, and Katie needed to hear whatever she was going to say.
Why wouldn’t her mom just talk to her without using the board?
“This is what you wanted, wasn’t it Mom? Me as a captive audience, coming to you for the answers?”
She hadn’t meant for that to sound bitter but with everything she had learned from Lizzy and from her dreams, it felt like her mother had given her over for someone else. Treating Marlena like a daughter...she could understand her mother’s need for company. After all, she’d been an old woman all alone in this house.
But she had a daughter. She didn’t need another.
“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked out loud as she continued looking for the planchette. “Sure, Mom, I didn’t call you enough but you could’ve called me. You always had my cell phone number.”
From somewhere in the house there was a loud thud. Katie stopped, and listened. The sound didn’t repeat itself.
“What kind of answer is that?” In
frustration she through her hands in the air. “I can’t find the other part of the board, Mom.” She’d had searched the kitchen, and the living room, and the hallway, and there was nowhere else it could be.
Except inside the freezer. The last time she remembered seeing it was when she and Mel were in there.
Katie took a step that way. Then she stopped, and took a step back. “Nope. Not doing it. I’m not going in there again until I get that lock taken off. You hear me, Mom? If we’re going to talk there has to be a way that doesn’t involve me following you to your grave--”
A little motion maybe five feet away from her on the floor, caught her attention as one of the photographs that had completely broken loose from its frame came flapping like a giant ungainly insect. It flew up to her face, the edges of it slapping at her cheeks, until she swatted it out of the air.
It landed at her feet.
She picked it up, and stared at the photo. It was the one of her and her mother standing on a beach. She was what, twelve? Katie had just built that amazing sand castle there. It had taken all day, and the water had washed it away twice before she figured out how to build a moat to protect it. Her mom had been so proud of her for sticking to it, and building this...
Katie held her breath. Looking down at the image of those younger versions of her and her mother, she thought she knew what her mother was telling her to do.
It took a little doing, and a little creativity, but Katie finally got the photograph to fold into a decently shaped triangle. The two sides were longer than the third, giving it a definite top point. There. She’d just made herself a planchette. Because of how she had creased the picture, her mother’s smiling face was on the top, right next to hers in her one-piece bathing suit.
A real planchette would have a circular hole to view letters and answers through but she couldn’t bring herself to tear a hole in that picture. Her mom would just have to deal with pointing at things with the tip.
She took the board into the living room with her origami pointer and set them down on the little table in front of the couch. When her and Mel had done this she had suggested going into the freezer to be closer to her mother’s spirit, but no way was she doing that again. This would be good enough if her mother really wanted to talk to her. She took a seat, and settled her fingertips on the sides of the folded photograph.
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 33
