This book is entirely a work of fiction. All characters are entirely fictitious and do not represent any persons living or dead. Product business location names used remain the property of any all trademark holders and do not represent an endorsement or association of any kind, either expressed or implied.
Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Repka All Rights Reserved
A HAUNTING AT HENSLEY HALL
BY
MERABETH JAMES
PROLOGUE-Forty Years Earlier
The horned moon did little to light the area beyond the scattering of mercury vapor lights. The last two had been out for weeks and no one had bothered to fix them. Not that it mattered. Nothing ever happened in the dullest town on earth, she thought, heaving one of her prolonged sighs that quite irritated her mother. Unrolling her waistband, she pulled down the skirt she’d hiked up to micro-mini status after leaving the house, then pawed through her shoulder bag until she found her car keys. She shouldn’t have parked so far from the others, but she wasn’t exactly great at parking. Last time she’d put a dent in her mom’s car she had to pay for it herself, which had pretty much ruined her entire summer!
She shivered. Something didn’t feel right. She looked around nervously. Nothing….no one…just a whole lot of dark. Maybe she should have waited till the others were ready to leave, but she’d be grounded for a week if she got home late again on a school night. No one else’s parents seemed to give a damn! Just her luck! She had to be born to the one family in the whole town that did! She opened the car door and slung her shoulder bag into the passenger seat. She was just about to follow, but it was already too late.
He had been waiting for her under her car. Reaching up, he grabbed her ankle and slammed her to the ground. Stunned, she lay there for a long precious moment, then opened her mouth to scream, but she was too late again. She could feel the sharp, cold edge of a blade against her throat just before a crushing blow knocked her into oblivion.
She was on the edge of returning awareness, when he dropped her on the hard dirt floor. It was cold and uneven…a stone pressed painfully into the side of her jaw. The smell of decay and wet earth and something else she couldn’t name was overpowering. No one would ever find her here, she thought. Not that any of this could be for real! This was all some prank gone horribly wrong. It had to be, didn't it? Things like this couldn’t happen to her, could they? Something moved in the darkness…something slithery and wet, but then, mercifully, she lost consciousness again.
She awoke, gasping. Her chest heaved, nostrils flared, as she tried to suck in what air she could. Panic swallowed her whole. She wanted to tear away whatever sealed her mouth, but realized she couldn’t feel her hands. Flexing her fingers, she felt the pins and needles of returning sensation and discovered her hands were bound tightly above her head. She was no longer lying on the dirt floor, but staked out on some sort of platform? Her fingers explored the edges as far as she could reach. It felt like an old door. Whatever. It didn’t matter. At least she wasn’t lying on the floor with the slithery things.
The fierce pounding headache that she had awaked with intensified, as she struggled briefly with her bonds. It was no use. No use at all. There must be a way out of this, she thought, but her head hurt too much to think clearly and her stomach felt queasy…not a good thing under the circumstances…so she lay still, listening to the dark until she drifted away again.
She didn’t know how long she’d been flickering in and out like a loose light bulb…days…weeks even? There was no way of knowing. She only knew she was bone deep cold, thirsty, hungry, and frightened. She hadn’t believed anyone could be so scared and not crazy. At least she hoped she wasn't. Her reality had shifted so completely there was little she could be sure of any more.
He didn’t come often and, strangely enough, she found she preferred his company to the darkness filled with her own imaginings. He allowed her to toilet in the corner…fed her bits and pieces…dribbles of water…just enough to keep her alive.
She had pleaded with him, “Just let me go. I’ll never tell anyone. I don’t even know who you are. Please, please I’m begging you. Why are you doing this to me?” and wondered for the hundredth time why he hadn’t raped her, if that was what he wanted. He seldom bothered to answer and when he did his voice was little more than a husky whisper.
Sometimes he sat silhouetted against the light that fingered its way through the cracks in the doors above…his face always in shadow…as he watched her for the longest time, studying her like an insect stuck on a pin, as she blinked in the bright circle cast by his flashlight.
Sometimes he stood over her, savoring her, as though she was some prize he had craved, stalked and captured. Though she couldn’t see his face, she knew he was smiling, as his warm finger stroked the contour of her cheek and trailed down her neck, tracing the delicate bones that grew more pronounced as time passed.
Then one day, or night, she couldn’t tell one from the other, he woke her from a dream. She had been sleeping in her own bed…her mother calling her to breakfast. How often had she filled the long dark hours with snapshots like that? How many times had she called for her mother, begging her to hear?
Now she was angry. She wanted that dream back…needed it back, but it was gone like smoke. Above her, a lantern dangled from the low ceiling. As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she looked around slowly. It was an old cellar just as she’d thought…maybe an abandoned farmhouse? How many of those could there be?
Then he moved then into her field of vision and, for the first time, she saw him. He was dressed all in black, his head covered in a ski mask, but she could see his eyes glittering darkly. And his mouth. She could see that, too. He was smiling. Just as she knew he would be.
“How long do you plan on keeping me here,” she whispered hoarsely around a tongue that seemed too big for her mouth.
“Till you no longer amuse me,” he murmured.
Since she was still more angry than scared, she hurled at him, “Screw you!”
He laughed without humor, his teeth flashing whitely. “Still have a touch of willfulness, do you? I thought I'd taken care of that by now. That outburst may have just cost you precious minutes of your life. You should try being more amenable."
She shivered and closed her eyes, willing herself back to her dream, but, of course, that didn’t work. When she opened her eyes again, he was closer….much closer. He was humming…his mouth was close to her ear…his voice a soft seductive insinuation.
She shivered again. Ticking him off had been a bad mistake. One she might pay dearly for. Best to humor him…play his game. Do whatever he wanted, if it meant he would let her go. She began to cry, though how her dehydrated, emaciated body managed to produce tears some part of her couldn’t help but wonder. Alone in the darkness, she had thought she had squeezed out every tear left in her.
“You are mine, you know,” he whispered silkily, running his hand along her throat, pausing at the carotid artery that throbbed weakly beneath his fingertips.
“Yes,” she replied, struggling between horror and a strange tingling fascination.
“You will let me do anything to you that I want.”
She didn't like the sound of that at all, but she managed to say, “Yes.”
His finger circled her breast, lingering on the nipple that hardened reflexively at his touch. “I have something I want you to wear. You will put it on for me.”
“Yes,” she replied, "whatever you want."
“And you will not condemn me in this life or the next for what I am about to do?” he
asked, pinching her nipple almost painfully.
She whispered a very reluctant, “No.”
“Louder! All of it…say all of it! You will not condemn me in this life or the next! Say the words!” he hissed.
"I will not condemn you in this world or the next!" she told him, as loudly as she could.
"There. That wasn't so hard was it? Now open wide. I have something to ensure you keep your word," he said so very softly.
This is all some horrible mistake, some remote part of her mind wanted to scream at him, just before she slipped into unconsciousness again.
Which turned out to be the only mercy she found.
CHAPTER ONE
Charlie slammed the phone down with a sigh. She’d been expecting it….the call from Meg. It was time again to drop everything and rush to the rescue, just as she had been doing for as long as she could remember. Last year it had been Rayne…her half sister and product of her dad's late life crisis. Or late blooming ‘adventurous streak’ as he preferred to call it. Rayne had been in trouble and, for the first time in her young life, unable to bat her eyes and talk her way around anything in pants. This time the ‘pants’ were blue and worn by the local cops, who had arrested her for murder. Forensic evidence hadn’t been their forte. It had been up to her to find it and drag it under their noses. When it was all over, she had thought it might have been a lesson learned for her often impetuous sister, but apparently not. .Rayne’s confidence had been shaken, but she bounced back quickly and was headed for New York the last time she’d seen her.
And then there was Allyn…her baby half brother with the affability of a puppy and a lot less intelligence. At least in her opinion. He had been caught between the cross hairs of two angry Texas women who threatened to kill him and ended up shooting each other. But not before she had gotten him safely out of the way. To this day he had no inkling of how close he had come to dying. “You should have let me handle it,” had been his parting offhand remark, as he drove into the sunset. Maybe she should have, but once you’re dead it limits your options.
She sighed again. The entire family must be cursed. There was no other explanation. Things….weird things….just seemed to happen to them and around them. And she was always the one to pull them to safety…usually kicking and screaming all the way. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered, but, of course, she knew. She loved them, every impossible, aggravating one of them.
She stood up and pulled back the drape. The late afternoon sun was gilding the trees in the little park below. It was one of her favorite times to take a break from her writing and go sit on the bench beneath the 200 year old oak, where something historical had happened, as it seemed to have done all over the little town she had settled down in for the past three years. That was a long time for her. As a freelance travel writer she had been all over the world, but settling down to write a book, third in a series, had given her a sense of place, even if it was only a tiny one-bedroom walk-up with a kitchen straight out of the fifties.
Today it was Meg who needed her and she would throw what she needed in a bag and head to Shrewsbury in the old Ford pickup that had taken her all over the country. It was the fastest way to get there and driving all night should put her at her door by early morning. Meg had finally had enough. Enough of her drunken husband, who asserted himself with his fists. Enough of trying to change him into something he would never be…a decent man who loved her as much as she loved him. It had taken fifteen years for her to come this far. It was time to bring Meg home. Way past time as far she was concerned.
***
The door banged open hard enough to bounce off the wall. “Tell me he’s here, Margaret Ann, so I can shoot him for you,” Charlie said with a quiet calmness that didn’t fool her sister one bit. Charlie was always calm, when she was at her most deadly.
“He’s been gone since just before I phoned you yesterday,” Meg called from the couch, where she was lying in a pile of cushions, covered by one of the bright afghans she was always crocheting. One eye was purple…the other red and puffy. A large bruise darkened her jaw.
Charlie felt her heart turn over. Some part of her wanted to shake this sister of hers for not calling sooner. Some part wanted to hug her fiercely and that was what she did.
Settling next to her, she pulled her into her arms, brushing the matted tangles of dark blonde hair off her face. “We’re leaving this place together. I don’t want to hear you’ve changed your mind again. This is the third time we’ve gotten almost this far. No, he won’t change and a million apologies from that sorry ass won’t alter that fact. Got it?”
Meg hiccupped and sighed simultaneously. “Got it. This time I’m not changing my mind. This time he went too far.”
Charlie's eyes widened in alarm. Tipping her sister's chin up, she looked her right in the eyes. “Too far? What does that mean? I’m taking you to the hospital and then we’re going to the police no matter what you have to say about it,” she told her fiercely.
“No…no…I’m fine other than what you see. Mitch hurt him. He threw him against the wall. I screamed at him to stop, but he just laughed so I went after him. I hit him as hard as I could and kept on hitting him, again and again, so he wouldn’t have time to hurt him any more. But he’s okay and that’s what’s important! I saved him,” Meg told her with a touch of pride.
Baffled, Charlie shook her head. “What…who…are you talking about?” she managed to ask around the angry tears that tightened her throat.
Smiling, Meg pulled aside the afghan. There nesting in the crook of her knees was a small shaggy white dog. He was trembling slightly…his brown eyes wary but hopeful. He looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and a lint ball, Charlie thought, as she reached out to pet him. His tail thumped briefly, as he gave her hand a quick lick, before he burrowed deeper into the couch cushions.
“He’s still kind of scared after what happened. He’s a rescue dog I adopted from the animal shelter. You know how I am about animals. It was Christmas Eve and I didn’t want to spend another Christmas with just Mitch, me, and his bottle. The sign above his cage read: One white dog. He looked so sad and lonely, just like I felt, so I brought him home. Mitch pitched a fit when he saw him. Said he was ‘good for nothing but peeing, pooping and eating’ so that’s what he wanted me to call him. Goodfor. But I named him Freddie.”
“That Mitch! The soul of a poet, ” Charley said with a mixture of venom and sarcasm, thinking it should be legal to put a bullet in him! “How about we get you and your pup out of here…now. I’ll help you pack. If Mitch comes back and I have to kill him, things might get messy and they’re quite messy enough already.”
“You wouldn’t really shoot Mitch, would you?” Meg asked almost hopefully.
Charlie answered with a very dark smile.
***
Charlie looked out the window, as she haphazardly misted the ragged Schefflera that had hung in there with her for the past three years. Across the street she could see Meg sitting on her bench with her dog ‘Freddie’ lying next to her. She smiled. Meg often sat there or went for long walks, trying to give her the time and quiet she needed to work. The book had pretty much stalled to a stop. Maybe that was inevitable. There had been a lot of adjustments on all sides, when they returned to her tiny apartment.
But it had been almost a month now and Meg was still walking on eggshells….always apologizing for the silliest things, as though everything in the world that went wrong was her fault. Sometimes she just wanted to scream at her to knock it off, then reminded herself it was a deeply learned behavior from fifteen years with the incomparable Mitch. That and being left to the not so tender mercies of their uptight mother, the self-styled “iron fist in the velvet glove”, after their dad left for California to begin a new life with dark, elfin Sage Farley…the visiting New Ager who had sat in on his mathematics lecture…stayed to argue the merits of Numerology and captured his heart as well as other parts of his anatomy, judging from the arrival of 7lb12o
z Rayne less than eight months later. Strangely enough, or maybe not so ‘strangely’ Sage had proved a blessing in many ways.
Charlie sighed. Today she would have her say, before she bit the end of her tongue off. Patience never being her strong suit! She went back to her computer and looked at the last thing she had written...and rewritten…and rewritten again, but it was no use. Her muse was still stubbornly shirking her responsibilities no matter how hard she tried to court her. She rose and crossed to the window for the third time in ten minutes. What was she going to say? How do you tell someone like Meg…gentle, sweet Meg… that she was a royal pain in the butt? She heard footsteps and the scrabble of claws on the steps and sucked in a deep breath.
Meg opened the door and followed Freddie inside. Unsnapping his leash, she straightened and looked around, surprised to see Charlie, standing by the window, looking as if she had just swallowed a whole dill pickle. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked, her pale blue eyes rounding in surprise.
“I have something to say to you and I’m going to say it even if it’s around the size nine foot I’m about to shove in my big mouth. You really don’t have to be nice every minute, Meg. No one’s going to hit you if you’re bitchy once in a while, though I wouldn’t make a habit of it or you could end up like me. No more apologies for every little thing! And, most important of all, stop being grateful to me all the time. If I hear you say one more time ‘how good it was of me to do this or that’ I’ll scream this place down around all our ears. I am your sister. Big sister at that! I love you very much and we are beginning a new life…you…me…and Freddie. Got it?”
Meg's "I'm sorry. I didn't" earned her the thorough misting the Schefflera could have used.
***
Things changed after that. Meg seemed to shed her old self like a cicada leaves its worn out shell hanging on a tree. She smiled more. Even laughed. Bought some new clothes, hired a lawyer and took back her maiden name. “I’ll punch him where it will really hurt that SOB,” she told Charlie. “His wallet!” The worry that Mitch would come knocking some day, changed to a ‘just let him try’ kind of attitude.
A Haunting at Hensley Hall (A Ravynne Sisters Paranormal Mystery) Page 1
