Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set

by James M Matheson

  “That so? What is it you’re looking for? Got your eye on any new properties to buy? I could help you with that, if you like. I know some folks in town who are really down on their luck and selling their house would get them standing on their feet again.”

  Katie tried not to frown, but that was something that she definitely was not looking for. Buying people’s homes out from under them never ended well. Someone always got hurt, tempers flared, and the money a family got for their house was never enough to start over with. The few times Katie had done something like that she’d ended up feeling horrible about it.

  No. That was not how she did business.

  “Actually,” she said, trying to change the subject, “I’m curious about someone who used to live in town. Maybe you’ve heard the name. Boris Vykroft?”

  Marlin made a grunt. “Where’d you hear his name?”

  “It was on a gravestone out in the cemetery. I take it you know who he was?”

  “Ayup, I know that name. Everyone around these parts does. He’s responsible for the biggest disaster in this state, right here in Twilight Ridge.”

  “Really?” Her curiosity was definitely piqued. “Who was he?”

  “Well, he was a doctor here, back in the early part of the twentieth century. 1912, I believe he arrived. Ten years later or so he burned his house down, and the fire caught the house next door, and so on. There weren’t any fire departments to speak of back in those days so more than half of Twilight Ridge was lost. People died. The town was years coming back from that. Big uproar, that was.”

  Big uproah. Katie drummed her fingers on the table. “And yet he’s over in the town cemetery like he was a favorite son, or something. It makes me wonder who was in charge of the cemetery in those days. Seems to me there’s several non-Christian types getting laid to rest out there.”

  “Money decided, that’s who.” Marlin rubbed his thumb and forefinger together to demonstrate what he meant. “If you had money back in those days, you got pretty much whatever you wanted. Including a preacher standing over your grave to send your soul to Heaven after you’d killed two dozen of your neighbors in a fire.”

  “Two dozen?” Katie’s eyebrows shot up. “It was that many?”

  “Ayup. Like I said, it was a big disaster.”

  Disastah. “But what about--"

  A book whumped down next to her elbow on the table. It was a heavy, leather-bound volume with a cracked spine. Folding his spindly arms, Franklin the librarian nodded at the book with his chin.

  “This is the book you want.”

  Then he turned and walked away, to go and sit behind his counter again.

  Katie noticed for the first time that Franklin’s accent was definitely not New England-ish. She wondered where he was from, originally.

  Leaning as far over the table as his bulk would allow him to, Marlin lowered his voice even further as he said, “The man knows his books, but I would hate to meet him in a dark alley.”

  Katie felt the same way, even if it wasn’t nice to say it out loud.

  The book’s title was stamped into the cover in gold lettering. A Brief History of New England Disasters. Katie thought that was an oddly specific title, but she supposed that this was New England, so copies of this were probably in every library up and down the coast of the St. Lawrence River.

  “You know,” Marlin said, folding his newspaper with dramatic slowness. “I happen to have a pipe that belonged to Boris Vykroft in my shop. It’s a very peculiar item. I believe it’s real ivory, and you can see the impressions of his teeth in the bit. I could let you have it as a display piece for your Inn for say...two hundred dollars?”

  Dollahs. Katie knew a hustle when she heard one. Still, if it really was what Marlin claimed it to be, she might be able to put up a historical display in one of the corners with information about Twilight Ridge and its history, including this fire. She could do the same with information about the witches. This was what people were coming to her Inn to hear about, after all.

  “Let me think about it,” she finally told Marlin. “I want to come over and look through your furniture one more time, if that’s all right?”

  “Of course!” He seemed honestly excited about that. “You’re always welcome. No invitation needed. Especially after you bought that apothecary shelving unit from me. Such a beautiful piece. I hope you’ve given it a nice home.”

  “I have. It’s in the kitchen where everyone could see it.”

  “Ah, perfect. Well, I have other pieces of furniture you’ll like, I’m sure, but I also have several antique necklaces that I think would look stunning on a woman with your neckline.”

  She caught him staring a little too low on her chest. Snapping her fingers, she brought his attention back up to her face. “My eyes are up here, Marlin. I’ll be over tomorrow or the next day to look at your furniture. How’s that sound?”

  He levered himself out of his chair, and gave her a passable bow as his belly jiggled. “That sounds good. I’ll leave you to your book, then.”

  “Marlin, wait.”

  “Hmm?”

  She’d decided this on the spur of the moment, without really thinking it through, but... “If I brought you something to your shop, do you think you could appraise it for me?”

  “Sure could. Appraisals are free, ‘specially for good customers such as you.”

  Customahs, such as you.

  The floorboards creaked under his feet on his way out.

  Katie smiled at how different the people in Twilight Ridge were from the people back west where she was from. Kindness toward your neighbors was a way of life out here.

  She was still smiling as she opened to the first page of the book.

  Chapter 9

  Doctor Vykroft was not a nice man, as it turned out.

  He was a Bulgarian immigrant who came to the United States at a time when it seemed the whole world was crossing the ocean in search of a better life. The doctor from Europe easily found himself a position in a small New Hampshire town who welcomed him with open arms.

  Boris was married, but the book didn’t say anything about children, so it was just him and his wife. Anna. He was considered an odd man, with odd habits that were alternately described by the people of the time as “proletarian” and “disturbing.” She had no idea what that first word meant. The second one was self-explanatory.

  At parties hosted at his house, Boris would consume the blood of pigs. When he was out on the town he would never shake hands with anyone, explaining he had an intense phobia of contracting diseases away from the sterile environment of his home office. One account further down the page was from a shepherd who swore that the doctor could be seen by the light of the full moon, dancing naked through the fields.

  Katie had scratched her head at all of that and chalked it up to the naïveté of the people of the time, or just idle gossip. Boris couldn’t have been that bad. Or, maybe he was and it was Katie who was being naïve. Either way, Doctor Vykroft was the only doctor in town, and people would go to him, even after rumors of him taking liberties with the female patients, or a story about him removing a man’s hand to solve the issue of a festering boil.

  It was also very well known that he was unfaithful to his wife.

  As she turned the page, Katie found an entire section that told about his reported prowess with the prostitutes in town. Supposedly he was at the local brothel more nights than not, spending his money on women whose job it was to sell their comforts to a man.

  Why were there never any male prostitutes in these stories, Katie wondered? Was that not a thing back then? Katie was just trying to puzzle out in her mind where this whorehouse of Twilight Ridge had been located when she turned the page and there, under a photo of what was obviously her Inn, was the caption “Brenda’s Bordello.”

  “Oh, for the love of God,” she muttered to herself. “My Inn used to be a whorehouse!”

  From his seat behind the desk, Franklin looked up at her, and then
slowly turned away.

  Katie knew that the Inn had gone through several different owners, and been used for several different things over the years. Apparently, in World War One, the Heritage Inn had been a mental asylum. In the 1960s it had been a boarding house. Maggie Harper had owned it before her, and while running it as an Inn she had also used it to lure travelers into the basement and kill them. And of course, it had started out as the home of Ebenezer Snidge and his wife Dorathea, the witch of Twilight Ridge. Katie had learned all of that while doing research for the renovations.

  What she had not heard, until now, was how her nice, family-friendly Inn had once been the brothel where Doctor Boris Vykroft had spent most of his free time.

  Damn it. Wait until she told Riley about this.

  She turned another page and found the tragedy that had ended the life of Doctor Vykroft’s wife.

  In the Spring of 1921, a fire started at the doctor’s home. He and his wife had both been there. Although reports of how the fire started were sketchy at best, what was known was that Boris’s wife never made it out alive. She was the first victim of the great Twilight Ridge Burning.

  The fire had raged over the town’s north end, claiming buildings and lives alike. Men, women, and children died in the blaze before it could be stopped with buckets of sand and water thrown by volunteers. It all sounded very dramatic, and Katie could see why it would be considered one of the worst disasters in New England history.

  Shortly after the fire, the story of Boris Vykroft simply ended. There was nothing more than a footnote that the residents of Twilight Ridge had given him an honorary gravestone in the cemetery after it became obvious that he was gone and wasn’t coming back. They’d picked the year of the fire as the date of death, and by all accounts, they were happy to be rid of him.

  “So he’s not even buried in the graveyard...” Katie wondered what that could mean. Obviously, Anna’s ghost would be the one to have a grudge. If her dream was a warning, that another haunting was coming, no doubt it would be Anna’s ghost. What had happened to this monster Boris or where he was buried was no concern of Katie’s.

  Still, it made her wonder.

  The story of the fire ended with more speculation about the cause of the fire. Although the general consensus was that it was accidental, some believed that the doctor had set it on purpose in an attempt to kill his wife. They had grown distant over the years, and letters sent by Mrs. Anna Vykroft to her family had become increasingly erratic and deranged. Living with Boris had obviously taken a toll on her.

  To my loving husband. May you rot in Hell. Now the inscription made sense to Katie.

  Yes. This had the makings of a disgruntled ghost if she’d ever seen one. She was sure of it now. Someone--or something--was warning her about this Anna Vykroft’s ghost.

  From the landline phone in the library, Katie had called Riley back at the Inn. He sounded out of breath, and he explained that the new deadbolt on the cellar door was in place. He had a key for her when she got home.

  Good, Katie thought. One less thing to worry about. She told him that she was out on an errand still, and asked him to start lunch for the guests. He didn’t even hesitate. The man had several talents. Cooking was just one of them.

  Smiling to herself as she thought of his talents between the sheets, she wondered again what he was going to think when she told him he was living in what used to be a den of prostitution.

  Included in the book’s story was a photo of the doctor’s house, and another of the aftermath of the fire. Paying Franklin ten cents to use the copier, Katie made a photocopy of the first photo, where all the houses on the street were still standing pretty in a row.

  She knew the general location of where the doctor’s house had stood from the description in the book. Now, picture in hand, she was walking up and down the streets on the north end of town trying to find the exact spot.

  Katie held the photo up in front of her face again, trying to match the location. The problem was that when all of those houses and buildings burnt to the ground, everything had been rebuilt. None of the houses were the same anymore. She was beginning to think that even the street had been moved.

  No. Wait...

  Katie backed up three steps, and held the copy of the photograph up again. If that was the river over there, and if that was the same mountain in the distance over the housetops, then right here should be where the doctor’s house stood before it burned.

  Yes. That had to be it.

  Only what she was looking at was an empty field.

  The houses all along this street were built practically on top of each other. They all had tiny yards in the front and back and in some cases she was pretty sure neighbors could shake hands through their side windows, the houses were that close together.

  But no one had claimed this one empty lot. It was like somehow people knew to stay away from it. Katie had felt evil in places before. There were houses she’d stepped foot in that made her feel sick to her stomach, until she left again. Standing here, looking at this grassy plot of ground, she felt...nothing. It was just an empty space in the middle of the town.

  So why wasn’t anything built here?

  Obviously, no one knew what the historical significance of this spot was. It would be on the list of tourist sites for the town if they did, like the cemetery or the supposedly haunted well where that boy drowned in 1969. Katie had never bothered looking into that one because it just seemed so silly.

  This was turning out to be the same, in a lot of ways. Just a rectangle of dirt and grass. An empty space of nothing. Tossing her hands up helplessly, wondering what in the world she was wasting her time for, she stepped off the street and onto the grass.

  In the next step she was inside a home. The polished tile floor echoed with her footsteps. The walls snapped into reality around her, painted white and adorned with paintings and yellow-tinged photos in glass frames. Oil lamps burned in sconces. The smell of coals burning in the fireplace mixed with the salty tang of a roasting ham in the kitchen.

  Katie stumbled to a stop, staring wide-eyed all around. This was impossible. There was no house here. Yet, here it was.

  Where was she? What in the hell did she just step into, and where was this...

  She turned around, looking for the door to get out, and that was when the woman in the long black maid’s dress walked right through her.

  Katie sucked in a breath, feeling like she’d just been violated in her body, and soul.

  Her voice was shaky and tight when she finally found her breath again.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Chapter 10

  There were people all around her. Servants in black and white with intense expressions on their faces, afraid that if they didn’t do their jobs just perfectly then someone was going to punish them severely.

  It was like being in the middle of Downton Abbey, a place out of time where she should not be.

  But here she was.

  She watched the bustle of the house, the servants going about their work, and at first she stepped out of everyone’s way because she did not want to be stepped through again by people who weren’t really there.

  Or was she the one who wasn’t here?

  She quickly realized that none of these people could see her. She shook her hand in front of their faces, and stuck her tongue out at them, and none of them even so much as flinched.

  Then another servant who was rushing through with a load of dirty laundry ghosted right through her and Katie lost her breath.

  “Hell,” she whispered again. She’d felt that. Like a cold wave of water rushing through her and out again. It didn’t hurt it was just...weird. Were these ghosts? Was that what was going on here?

  Oh, dear God, was she in the house of--

  “Boris?” a woman called out. “Boris Vykroft, are you to home?”

  Wide-eyed, Katie let that sink in. Boris. She had somehow stepped backward in time and now she was in the home of Bo
ris Vykroft, the bastard who had killed all those people by starting a devastating fire.

  Right here, in this very house.

  She watched as the woman swept down the stairs in a puffy black dress with lace around the neck. She had a hawkish nose and mousy brown hair pulled back tight from her scalp. Eyes that were bright and sharp speared across the room, staring right through Katie and she knew what was going to happen next.

  There was no time to move out of the way as Boris Vykroft himself walked up from behind her and then right through her.

  Damn it, she was starting to get very tired of that.

  She recognized him from the pictures in the book at the library. He was a tall man, and burly strong, and the scowl on his face told everyone around him that he would just as soon kill you as heal you, even if he was a doctor.

  “Ah, there you are, my husband.” The woman held up a small wooden box in her hand, tied up with a red ribbon. “Do you know how much I hate you, my dear?”

  Boris sighed heavily. Katie saw his shoulders slump. “You remind me every day, my love.”

  The woman--Vykroft's wife--smiled at him triumphantly, as if she’d won some verbal sparring match. “Then here, my husband. Happy Birthday. May you not live to see another.”

  She tossed Boris the box before turning on her heel and stalking away through the halls, humming to herself as she went.

  Boris stared at her for a moment and Katie saw a mix of emotions on his face. Pain, and hatred, and a deep sorrow that had built up over a long, long time. He looked at the box in his hands and then tore the ribbon away.

  Inside was the same watch that Katie had in her closet at the Inn. He turned it over in his hands and read the same inscription that Katie had.

  To my loving husband. May you rot in Hell.

  As Katie watched, tears sprang to Boris’s eyes. He tossed the gift box aside and clutched the watch so tightly that his knuckles turned white. Servants scattered in the face of their master’s anger. Cocking back his arm he prepared to throw the watch across the room, where it would no doubt have smashed against a wall, destroying it forever.