by Tamara Berry
Liam’s low whistle says it all. “Are you sure you want to get caught in the middle of that?”
Even though he can’t see me, I shrug. “From what I’ve found so far, I’m almost certain I’m dealing with a typical domestic squabble. You know how families can be.”
Liam falls silent. Although I’d hesitate to call it a sixth sense, I know, without the need for speech, what he’s thinking. For Liam, any mention of a typical family is a reminder that those ordinary arguments and cheerful disagreements are something we’ll never have.
See, for me, Winnie never really went away. Like a phantom limb, I can feel that she’s still a part of me. Of us—of Winifred and William and Eleanor, siblings united by blood and bone, separated by something much less tangible than that. But for Liam, the loss has always been final. Unlike me, he can’t stomach the murky in-between where life and death intersect.
I’m the only one who likes it here, who thrives here.
“I know I don’t say it very often, but I’m proud of you, Ellie,” Liam says. He sounds so serious, so solemn, that a shiver runs down my spine. In the burst of melancholy that follows, I’d almost say the house shudders with me.
“No, you’re not. You think I’m one step above a con artist.”
“Um, I think you’re exactly on par with a con artist.” He hesitates. “But you take good care of her. I appreciate that more than you know.”
“Well, it’s only fair, since you take good care of me,” I reply somewhat mistily. Then, because I can’t bear to end on such a somber note, I add, “Which is why I’m taking you with me to Mexico when this is over even if I have to drug you and stuff you in my suitcase to do it.”
Chapter 11
My late-night visitor is much quieter the second time around.
I’m not sure what causes me to awaken—if Xavier makes a sound or nudges my sleeping form, or even if my own unease after Liam’s phone call causes me a more restless night than I’m used to—but my eyes pop open while the moon is still high enough to cast luminous rays through the gap in the curtains.
My first thought is that the flittering, filtered light is beautiful in an otherworldly way—the kind of moonlit darkness that can only exist miles away from a large city. My second thought is that it would be a lot prettier if there weren’t a man standing at the foot of my bed, watching me sleep.
“Nicholas?” I bolt upright and jump to my feet, taking the sheet with me. It’s a maidenly gesture—and one that’s not in the least necessary, since I’m wearing shorts and a T-shirt—but there’s something about strange gentlemen sneaking over floorboards at night that calls for a little Victorian flair.
It’s not Nicholas, though—or, if it is, he doesn’t intend to answer to his name. With a start of surprise, the man steps to the other side of the bed and disappears.
There’s no flash paper this time, no moaning sounds or the hurried footsteps of the entire family coming to my aid. Just a brief moment, a shadowy figure, and then nothing but the ringing silence of my solitude.
“Where did he go?” I turn and reach for my space-age lamp, yanking the cord and scattering illumination to all corners of the room. There’s no sign of anyone, shadowy or otherwise, as I whirl in a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree rotation. The next logical step is to check the window to determine if the man is hiding behind the floor-length curtains.
He’s not, and in the process of investigating, I set off my own tripwire.
The window alarm is set as pigeon sounds, since it seemed the most apt at the time. Almost instantly, the sounds of coos and clucks fill the air. It’s followed soon thereafter with my own muttered curses.
“Clumsy, foolish, where’s the stupid off button for this thing?” I demand. The first two I have no excuse for, but I eventually find the alarm button on my phone and press it. Once again, the room plunges into silence. I’m prepared for it this time, and I hold my breath, hoping to hear retreating footsteps or the muffled thumps of someone hiding in the wardrobe.
Nothing.
Sound alone isn’t enough to convince me that my guest has departed, so I follow through by checking inside, underneath, and around every piece of furniture in the place. It’s a dusty search and a fruitless one.
Still nothing.
Once again, I’m entirely alone in the room, left with nothing but what appears to be an overactive imagination and the half-fog of sleep. Instinct urges me to put up another hue and cry to see who comes running—and the direction from whence they come—but I notice a scrap of paper peeking out of one of the weathered floorboards and stop.
I inspected the floorboards during my initial poke-fest of the room, even going so far as to test each edge to see if I could lift them. It seems excessive, I know, but I once found a hold containing a family’s hidden cache of heirlooms this way. They’d been missing for months and presumed to be the work of a ghost’s kleptomaniacal leanings. In reality, the credit for its loss went to the woman of the house, who showed a marked tendency to overdo it on the Vicodin and vodka and who, when under the influence of this dangerous cocktail, gave in to her hoarding tendencies. I also found a wallet in the deep freezer and several sheets of collector’s stamps behind a family portrait.
This slip of paper pulls out easily, secured along one edge by a brittle, yellowing piece of tape, and it reveals no such hiding place underneath. I try to leverage the board up with my fingernails and even a pocket screwdriver I carry in my bag, but it doesn’t budge. The hole, if it can be called such, is just the natural gap between boards of wood.
And Xavier was trying to secretly extract the paper from it? I wonder. The timing doesn’t feel right, as he’s had ample opportunity to take it out of this room without fear of being caught. Besides, his activities weren’t that of a sneaking, slinking intruder. He’d just been standing there, creepily staring at me.
Since it seems the most obvious course of action, I unfold the paper and scan it. From the soft, feathery texture and the heavy creases, I’m assuming it’s old. The handwriting is old, too, slanted and flowery in a way that few people bother with in this day and age.
The Dead walk at Night.
The Spirits ever fight.
Those who Betray will step into the Light.
I turn the paper over, wondering if there’s any other relevant information to be found, but there’s nothing. No address, no date, no names—definitely not a lock of hair I might be able to send in as DNA evidence. Just a bizarre misuse of capital letters and a feeling that someone is setting me up to be duped.
“Oh, come on,” I say and give the edge of the paper a healthy lick. As I expect, it tastes like tea. Earl Grey tea, to be exact, eerily similar to the cup offered me by Nicholas yesterday morning. It’s the oldest trick in the book, aging paper with tea.
Not to mention, whoever affixed it to the edge of the floorboard—no matter how old they made the tape look with dirt and a heat gun—failed to take into account the fact that Scotch tape wasn’t invented until the twentieth century.
Honestly, it’s as if Xavier isn’t even trying at this point. I’d call him the biggest hack known to man- and ghost-kind—except for the fact that he managed to get both in and out of this room without my knowing it. That makes at least one mystery worth figuring out.
And figuring it out is exactly what I intend to do.
Since I’m no stranger to prowling dark corridors in the dead of night, I decide to take advantage of my rudely awakened state. Of course, I have to get dressed first, since it won’t do to get caught snooping in my street clothes.
Ellie Wilde, peering around corners in a T-shirt and yawning into her fist, is nothing more than a bad houseguest. But Madame Eleanor Wilde? Sleepwalking in a trancelike state, clad in a floating white nightgown with her dark hair streaming behind her?
That, my friends, is exactly what these people are paying for.
* * *
My transformation takes no less than half an hour to accomplish. By the
time I’m appropriately attired and my hair has the texture to make it look as though I recently climbed out of a well, the moon has slipped behind a cloud.
I couldn’t have staged it better if I tried. Darkness envelops every inch of the castle, making the shocking white of the vintage nightgown I’m wearing stand out like a ghostly beacon. It’s never my primary goal to run into anyone else while running a nocturnal investigation of this sort, but it can happen. And in this instance, I halfway hope it does.
If someone thinks I dropped the ball by not making it to the pigeons before Xavier did, then he’ll have much to be sorry for. Especially if he’s the one who was hovering over the foot of my bed and planting fake notes in the floorboards.
I click open my door as quietly as I can, but any sound seems loud in the quiet tomb of the castle. The silence has the benefit of heightening my other senses, but it’s still difficult to see around me—mostly because the only light I’ve brought with me is a single lit taper.
The candle isn’t, as it first appears, for aesthetics. While the picture it makes is spooky enough to appease the most exacting of haunted house connoisseurs, the flame has the additional benefit of catching every draft that whistles down the empty hall. Somewhere in this godforsaken wing, there’s a secret doorway that leads to my room. Since I doubt that door is hermetically sealed, it will create a draft where there should be none.
With this in mind, I begin a slow shuffle back toward the far end of the hall, where the rest of the family is sleeping. I pause at every painting, every fixture, every inch of molding—if it could feasibly be pulled aside to reveal a portal, I refuse to leave it unchecked. As a result, my progress is necessarily slow. A good fifteen minutes of steady, unwavering flame-bearing passes before I reach the area outside Nicholas’s door. I pause at the threshold, my ears alert for any sounds of movement within. Nothing but the gentle crackle of my candle reaches my ears.
Well, if he’s in there, he’s not a snorer, I’ll give him that much. Tempting as it is to try my hand on the brass doorknob and examine his room, I dare not risk it. I might be able to convince Vivian or Cal that my nocturnal wanderings are done on a subconscious level, but Nicholas would never buy it.
I turn on my heel and lift the candle, prepared to resume my search. At first, I think that the shadow cast on the opposite wall is a trick of the light. It’s not at all what I expect it to be—flat and oblong and like, well, a normal shadow. Instead, the light is broken off in several directions, glints of it like shards of glass. With a gasp, I realize that shards of glass are exactly what I’m looking at. A broken mirror, to be exact, smashed to pieces and hanging askew on the wall.
Broken mirrors are a great way to spook a family—people who believe in ghosts also tend to believe in superstitions like seven years of bad luck—but I didn’t touch this one. Unless, of course, you count the fact that one of my pinhole cameras had been installed directly above it.
“Oh, no,” I say, a moan caught in the back of my throat. I run my fingers over the now-familiar artichoke wallpaper, not stopping until I hit the snag in the plaster that had once housed my thousand-dollar pinhole spy camera.
It’s gone.
I whirl, holding my candle aloft, but there’s nothing to see but empty hallway in either direction. Mindful of the effects of broken glass on bare feet, I make a beeline for the other locations where I planted hidden surveillance devices.
They’re not there. In each spot where I installed a camera, there’s nothing left but crumbling plaster, ripped wallpaper, and a hole where my equipment should be. With each new discovery, my mental calculator goes higher and my heart sinks lower—especially once I take my investigation downstairs to the main floor.
The tape recorder in the parlor? Smashed to pieces.
The camera at the front door? Crunched under foot.
Even my useless black pentagram boxes have been smashed open and laid to ruins, splinters of black-stained wood scattered all over the cavernous foyer.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I say, sinking to my knees. It’s melodramatic, I know, but this is one time the situation really calls for it. That’s ten thousand dollars’ worth of damage to my equipment, at the very least, and it’s not as if I have any of it insured. There’s not a big business for covering high-end spy gear. Insurance companies tend to want to know why you’re outfitted like James Bond getting ready to take over a safehouse—and the answer is rarely what they want to hear. Which means I’m looking at years of my savings, months of Winnie’s care. Gone, just like that.
Snuffed like this candle. Or a human life.
“The kitchen,” I announce to the empty room, my voice echoing over marble and stone. For the first time, I don’t delight in the atmosphere of it. Maybe whoever did this forgot to get the one I installed down by the back stairs.
It’s the only hope I have of finding any information about the perpetrator of this particular crime, so I lose no time in heading toward the dining room. There’s no light to speak of, but my rage provides an inner glow that moves my steps along. If it weren’t bad enough having a fake ghost creep into my bedroom at night, now it’s destroying my personal property, too. Nicholas never said anything about that in the job description.
“He’ll have to reimburse me for every penny,” I mutter, my words echoing hollowly off the walls. I yank open the door and start descending the staircase. “Plus damages. Substantial emotional damages.”
I’m so caught up in my plans of vengeance—I’ll create a real ghost, destroy the castle’s value from the ground up, leave a bad Yelp review about the village museum like you wouldn’t believe—that I don’t notice the broken step until my bare toe hits it. Since I’ve been moving at an angry, stomping pace, it catches me at full speed. The slice of a splinter stabbing under my toenail is second only to the feeling of weightlessness as my knees buckle and I go flying the rest of the way down the coarse wooden steps.
So this is what it’s like to die, I think, right before the world comes crashing down around me.
Okay, so I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I come crashing down to the world, but the idea is the same. There’s gravity and there’s pain in equal proportions.
There’s also something at the bottom of the steps to break my fall. At first, I’m unsure what it is—a large, knobby bulk, both hard and soft at the same time. And warm, but that could just be my own body’s reaction to realizing what the object is.
Not what, Ellie. Who.
It’s the same voice from before, the one that called me silly and told me the house was shivering in anticipation of my arrival. As before, my instinct is to push that voice away, to refuse to yield to the idea that this world is made of anything but hard, callous facts.
But I don’t.
Maybe Nicholas was right about that. Maybe I do still believe in magic and miracles. A bizarre thing to realize when I’m lying on top of a dead body, but then, I’ve always walked a little on the dark side.
I jolt to my feet, my movements jerky as I push myself as far from the body as possible. It’s impossible to tear my gaze away, though. As the voice suggests, I have no idea who it is—he’s a stranger in an even stranger place—but there’s no mistaking the odd twist to his neck or the way his blank eyes glaze upward.
“Xavier?” I ask, my voice coming out thin.
I don’t know if I expect an answer or not, but I don’t get one. Not a voice, not a laugh, not even a whisper of a breeze tunneling down the kitchen stairs. I’m alone with a dead man. For some reason, I find that worse than the idea of sharing the space with an unknown entity from beyond the grave.
Despite the lack of breeze, I shiver. I also turn on my heel and, throbbing toe notwithstanding, flee back up the stairs to find someone—anyone—who can help me.
Chapter 12
One of the nice things about working in the realm of paranormal fantasy is that nothing can scare me. All mysteries have a reasonable explanation; all ghosts can be subdued with
common sense. There’s nothing in this world—or the next—that can rattle me.
Or so I thought.
“But he was just here!” I cry, staring at the spot where the body had lain less than fifteen minutes ago. In place of the crumpled form of a complete stranger, there’s nothing but empty flagstone. “For the sake of everything that’s good and holy, this is exactly where I found him. He broke my fall.”
Cal makes a show of searching the immediate area for the body, as if it were a mislaid earring rather than an entire human being.
“The sake of everything good and holy?” Nicholas asks, watching me. “Are you certain you should be taking such liberties?”
I turn to glare at my host, but it’s difficult to stare down a man who’s wearing monogrammed silk pajamas. “Laugh all you want, but I’m telling you, there was a body here.” I stab my finger at the step above Nicholas’s head. “He must have tripped on the broken stair on his way down. He broke his neck. I saw it.”
“You saw him break his neck?” Cal asks and begins his search anew. When he once again comes up empty, he says, “Are you sure he didn’t just . . . sprain it?”
Nicholas’s mouth twitches, but I don’t find much to be amused at about this situation. Both of them had been sound asleep when I’d gone upstairs to summon assistance of the strong, male variety. No one had been up making secret breakfast meat, and no one had seemed alarmed when I told them what I’d found.
“Couldn’t you have found a body after three o’clock in the morning?” Nicholas had asked with one bleary eye on the clock. It had been a short-lived bleariness, though. For all his languid annoyance, he’d gotten up and joined me in the hallway after only a brief pause.
Cal’s room had been my second stop, and a much lengthier one it was, too. He hadn’t wanted to disturb the huddled, sleeping Fern next to him, so we’d been asked to wait in the hall while he got dressed, located his phone, donned his favorite slippers, and finally emerged to join us.
