Katie’s laugh tasted as sour as the whiskey on her tongue. As someone who had used Ouija boards in the past, she knew they really could be used to talk with spirits...although, she’d never let Satan into her heart because of it!
Not that she knew of, anyway. Thinking about her altered reflection, the face of Dorathea Snidge staring back at her from the mirror, gave her pause for thought.
No. That was the crazy talk. No more crazy talk.
She cleared her throat. “But I mean, witches are just fantasy. Those women were accused of things, stoned to death, all because the town was too scared to think rationally. I saw in one photo that they were all buried in the cemetery?”
Maggie nodded as she took another sip. “Yes. All in that one side of the graveyard by the fence. It’s one of the most popular tourist attractions in our town, actually. The graves of the five sisters, is what people call them. Not that they were really sisters, you understand. I suppose they called each other sisters in the same way that nuns do. Just, you know, the opposite way. A sisterhood of witches. We’ve had all sorts come just to look at those graves.”
“I can’t say that I see the attraction.”
“It’s part of our history, good or bad. It makes for nice photos. People even say they can feel an energy there in the graveyard. Like the sisters aren’t really gone.”
Katie shivered. She was glad she wasn’t going to go anywhere near the cemetery while she was here.
“How did they get a...a...” Katie stumbled for the phrase. “A Christian burial? I thought witches were buried in potter’s fields or something.”
Taking the bottle, Maggie poured herself another drink. “Those five men were the richest and most powerful men around. If they wanted their wives buried in the town cemetery, with proper headstones, then no force in Heaven or Earth was going to stop them.”
That made sense. Katie thought about it as she drank some more, the heat from the whiskey spreading through her insides, right to her brain. It eased her headache, and it was replaced with a sort of hazy illumination around the corners of her eyes. She looked at the bottle, and there was a halo of light wavering around the label. Her skin glowed. Everything had an inner light.
Whatever brand this was, this was good stuff.
Around her, in that haze, she saw the Inn changing. That wall she had wanted to move was suddenly gone, replaced with an open archway to a room full of decadent furniture and rich tapestries. Candles lit the gloom. The smell of freshly stained and treated wood reached her.
This was the past. This was what things used to look like here, in this house...
“This was a home,” she heard herself saying. “This was Ebenezer’s home.”
From a great distance away, Maggie’s voice answered her. “Why, yes it was. I hadn’t gotten around to telling you that yet. How did you know?”
She knew, because it was her home too.
Dorathea Snidge. This had been her home, before she was stoned to death.
From inside, where the whiskey had lit a fire in her belly, something rushed up, swept over her, overtook her, and then everything was going black.
The floor reached up to smack her in the face, and she passed out.
Chapter 16
Sometime later, she woke up.
At first, she couldn’t figure out which way was up and why the hell her muscles ached so much, until she realized she was on the floor, lying on her stomach, and up was that way. She’d been lying here on this hard, unforgiving surface for God alone knew how long.
She remembered the fall. She remembered...something else, but it was all hazy.
“No more whiskey,” she muttered to herself. “Just give me five more minutes. That’s all I ask.”
She wasn’t going to have a few more minutes.
Her hands felt sticky and warm. She was laying on her stomach, with her arms stretched out over her head, and for the life of her she couldn’t figure out where she was. The dining room. Right. The dining room. She didn’t dare open her eyes because the headache had returned with a vengeance, no doubt fueled by the liquor, and she just wanted to curl up into a ball and go to sleep.
Except she couldn’t because her hands felt sticky and warm.
Katie opened her eyes.
She wished she hadn’t.
On the floor in front of her was Maggie Harper. The woman’s eyes were fixed and staring. From underneath her motionless body, a pool of blood had spread out across the floor tiles until her fingers were soaking in it.
Her hands were being bathed in blood. Maggie’s blood.
“No,” she heard herself whisper. “Oh, no, no, no no no!”
This couldn’t be happening. It was a delusion, she told herself. Like seeing Dorathea’s image whenever she looked in a mirror. Just a delusion brought on by this place and the whiskey and the pounding in her head that still would not go away.
She couldn’t have done this. She didn’t know what had really happened or why Maggie was dead, but she was sure she wasn’t a killer.
But she was the only one here.
Wasn’t there another guest at the Inn? She didn’t know anymore. She hadn’t seen anyone else here for at least a day and now it was just her and Maggie and Maggie was dead and what in the hell was happening!
She pushed away from the floor, wobbly on her legs, eyes fixed on Maggie’s face the whole time.
A bubble of blood rose out of Maggie’s lips, and slipped down her chin.
In a panic Katie ran upstairs, to her room, and threw the door closed behind her. She had to wash up. That’s what she needed to do. She could get cleaned up first and then call the police because they weren’t going to believe her if they showed up and she was covered in Maggie’s blood.
They weren’t going to believe her if she said she didn’t know what happened, either.
She started for the bathroom, and then stopped.
The bedsheets and her pillowcase were smeared with blood.
From her nosebleed, she realized. Only it couldn’t be because they had been clean when she woke up earlier. She remembered looking. They had been clean.
They had been clean!
Now, they were streaked with blood.
Outside, through her window, she saw the sun as it was starting to set, heading toward the horizon at the end of the day.
It had been nighttime when she went downstairs. It had been fully dark when she was talking to Maggie. It had been night!
Now it wasn’t.
Had she been down there for a whole day? No. That was impossible. The blood on her hands--Maggie's blood--had been warm on her hands. Like it had just been spilled. It wouldn’t be warm after a day.
She didn’t feel like she’d been on the floor for a whole day either, without food or water. Shouldn’t she feel dehydrated if she’d been unconscious for that long?
It hadn’t been that long.
But outside her window, it was still daytime.
She went to the sink in the bathroom and turned on the water as hot as it would go, and started scrubbing at her hands over and over as the water washed down the drain in a frothy pink.
Katie gagged. This had to be a dream.
More like a nightmare.
When her hands were clean and no spot of red showed anywhere, not even under her nails, she looked up into the mirror. It was smashed. Cracks radiated out in circular patterns from where the glass had been struck.
When did that happen?
Katie had a vague memory of punching the mirror but she couldn’t remember why, or when.
She stepped back into the bedroom and shakily sat down on the bed. She had to think.
A knock on the door made her heart leap in her chest.
The knock came again. Her frazzled brain thought of a million different scenarios. The police. No. A neighbor had heard something and come asking questions. No. Riley had come to save her from this madness.
Of course not.
It was Maggie, up from dead,
come to take her revenge...
No.
“Don’t be stupid,” she grumbled at herself. “Damn it, Katie, get a grip.”
She got up from the bed, and took a step, and then another, reaching out for the door.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
Katie jumped and stumbled backward until she fell against the wall and then she stood there with her hands pulled up against her chest because she knew whatever was waiting for her on the other side of that door would kill her if she let it in.
She gathered her courage and her breath to shout, “Go away!”
There was a silence, a long, drawn-out pause where there was no sound except her own breathing.
Then, there was a voice.
“Katie? Are you okay?”
Mason. It was him at the door and it was him she had just shouted at to go away. Only, she didn’t want him to go. She wanted someone here who she felt she could trust. She’d only just met this guy but there was something about him that was almost magnetic. Something that drew her to him and made her believe that he was genuinely interested in helping her.
And Riley wasn’t here, but Mason was.
Right now, that was good enough.
“I’m here,” she blurted out, rushing to the door now. “I’m all right, I’m here.”
Hand on the doorknob, she stopped, because it occurred to her that he must have seen Maggie’s body downstairs. There was no way he could have missed that as he came in.
What would he be thinking?
She couldn’t avoid it. She would just have to explain what happened...and how she didn’t actually know what happened. Then she would just ask for his help.
Right. It was going to be just that easy.
Her hand started to shake. Slowly, she opened the door.
He smiled at her.
“Hey,” he said, “I brought this back for you.”
In his hand, he had the plastic bag with her new ceramic dishes in it. He held it out for her to take.
She did. “Um. Thank you. Is this...is this why you came here? I mean, no other reason? Nothing else?”
His grin turned lopsided. “Well. I did want to spend some time with you. For the article, I mean. Unless you had something else in mind?”
Katie swore to herself. He thought she was flirting with him. All she wanted to know was how come he wasn’t even mentioning the very dead owner of the Inn downstairs.
One way to find out.
“Sure,” she told him, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice even as her head started to throb again. “Let’s go downstairs and sit. We can have some coffee.”
He made a little shrug with one shoulder. “We could do that. Or we could go for a little walk around town. I’ve been here long enough to find some really quiet spots to just enjoy the scenery.”
A walk around this town was the last thing she wanted. If anything, she wanted to burn rubber out of here and forget this place even existed.
But she couldn’t.
She needed to know what was going on, with Maggie dead downstairs and a history of witchcraft saturating Twilight Ridge. She needed to know.
And Mason had been here, in town, for a while now. Plus he was a reporter. They knew things that other people didn’t even know to ask about. He might have at least some of the answers she was looking for.
“Sure. Let’s go.” She even managed a smile as she dropped the bag to the floor and closed the door behind them.
Her legs threatened to buckle out from under her as they went downstairs. As they got closer to where Maggie’s dead body lay. Mason was talking about something, going on and on and on, but she didn’t hear any of it behind the pulsing in her skull.
As they got near the bottom of the stairs, her eyes were drawn to the entryway of the dining area.
She cringed, bracing herself for the sight of Maggie lying there in her own blood.
Only she wasn’t there.
The floor was clean and everything was neatly in its place. There was no body. No blood. Nothing.
Like it had never been there in the first place.
At the bottom of the stairs she hesitated, her hand gripping the railing tightly and her knees locked to keep from falling over.
What was happening to her?
“Katie?” Mason asked her, putting his hand gently on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t think I am.”
His hand felt nice where it was resting on her. She wished Riley was here, only he wasn’t here, and Mason was.
It was nice to have a friend.
“Come on,” he said to her. “Let’s go for that walk. The fresh air will do you good.”
Chapter 17
Instead of feeling better as they walked around town, Katie found herself starting to shiver. It was hard to say if the gentle breezes were actually cold or if the chill was still in her blood from what she had experienced at the Harper Inn.
Ebenezer and Dorathea used to live there. The Inn had been their home. Maybe it had been changed several times since then, refitted to have individual rooms instead of the grand spaces that she had seen in those flashes or visions or whatever, but now that she knew those two had lived there it made everything worse.
Maybe, she thought, that was why everyone in town seemed to be so afraid of the place. Maybe they knew on some level that the Inn itself was tied to the dark history of the town.
Ghosts inhabited the spaces where they had lived. She’d seen it several times now, and she just didn’t know if she was strong enough to go through it again.
She was being haunted by Dorathea’s ghost. That would explain a lot.
Was she really though? Was she actually seeing a ghost or was she just expecting it so much that she was creating phantoms out of shadows? Was Dorathea Snidge still hanging around to seek vengeance on the people who had killed her, not realizing that all of those people were already long dead now?
Or, maybe Katie was just crazy. After all, why would Dorathea even still be here? Why pick her to haunt? She didn’t have any connection to that woman other than a striking resemblance. There was no one left who had a connection to her, as far as she knew.
Well, there was that one mention in the library’s books about Dorathea having a son, and her being accused of trying to raise him from the dead, but who knew what part of that was real and what part of it was made up by the author. People believed what they wanted to believe. They saw things cast in the light of what they thought they knew.
If the writer of that book believed witches were real, then they would think anything strange was witchcraft.
Wasn’t Katie guilty of the same thing? She wanted to see ghosts, so she was seeing ghosts.
She put her hands up to the sides of her head and pressed into her temples. If only this damned headache would go away then maybe she could think and figure this out!
That book was just the crazy rantings of a town full of unreasonable and superstitious people. There might never have been a son at all. Or, he might have died. Or he might have gone on to live a very long life and have lots of kids who never even knew about their ancestry.
It was hard to tell when you were dealing with people who believed women could be witches.
Katie did not believe that. She believed in ghosts. She believed there were things beyond what she understood. She did not believe in witches.
Damn this headache why wouldn’t it just go away!
Mason saw her shivering and rubbing her hands up and down her arms. He moved closer to her as they walked along a sidewalk, putting his arm around her shoulders. It felt nice, and he felt warm, and she allowed herself to relax into him.
“You’re a nice guy,” she told him. “I have to wonder if I was meant to find you on this trip.”
He laughed out loud. “There aren’t too many people who would say I’m a nice guy. Journalists don’t always have the best reputation.”
“You must be the exception, then.�
� As the heat from his body began to soak into hers, she dropped her arms and stuffed her hands into her pockets, and let her head drop against his shoulder. “Oh, this whole trip has just been so messed up.”
“Really? How so?”
She hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but now that she had, she didn’t regret it in the least. She needed to talk to someone, and explain all the crazy things in her head before her brain exploded. Mason was right here, willing to listen.
Time to take a leap of faith and trust someone.
“Okay, this is all going to sound pretty weird. Just promise me that you’ll keep an open mind?”
“Isn’t that what reporters are known for?”
She nodded to herself. Maybe it really was time to let someone else in on her little secret. “I think...wow, it even sounds crazy to me. Only, I know what I saw.”
“All right,” he offered. “Why don’t you just tell me what it is?”
“Because you’re going to run screaming for the hills if I do. Or, you’ll write up a nice article about the crazy woman from Oregon and what loons we all are back there.”
“Hey. It’s okay, Katie. Whatever it is I promise to hear you out and not judge you.”
“And if I come across as completely insane?”
“Then I’ll be sure to drive you to the nearest mental hospital myself. I’ll even promise to feed you pudding while you’re wearing one of those straightjackets.”
She looked up into his eyes, and saw the humor written in them, and it allowed her to laugh at herself and relax, and she just felt so safe and warm in his arms. It made everything seem like just maybe it could be all right.
She really wanted Riley to be here, but maybe she’d found another man she could trust. A man and a woman could be friends, after all, without going that extra step.
Which was the last thing she should be worrying about now. Screw it. If Mason wanted to hear what was going on then she would tell him. Straight up, no edits.
“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath to let it all out in a rush. “I think the ghost of one of the first settlers of Twilight Ridge is still here and now she’s haunting me.”
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 43
