by Lourey, Jess
“Thank you. And thanks for making time to see me.”
“Glad to have you. Any press we can get for the Prospect House is good press.”
He led me into the kitchen, which looked and smelled like any farmhouse kitchen, though larger, with a mix of antique vases and modern appliances crowding the cupboards. A moveable butcher’s block stood in the center of the kitchen, loaded with memorabilia. The far wall displayed reproduction postcards of the Prospect House from the early 1900s.
“These are so pretty,” I said, stepping over for a closer look. “Do you have the originals?”
“Thousands,” he said. “When I bought the house, every square inch was packed.”
I thought of Gilbert Hullson. “Were the owners hoarders?”
He pushed his hat back and scratched the top his head before pulling the cap back in place. “I don’t think so, at least not in the traditional sense. Everything was neat and organized. It’s just that the house had become so expensive to heat that they ended up using it more as a storage space than anything.”
“That’s terrible.”
He shook his head. “Best thing that could have happened, really. I don’t have all the rooms cleaned out yet, but the ones that are have given up treasures you wouldn’t believe. That’s why I turned this into a museum. We’ve got Battle Lake’s history here, and a good piece of the Civil War to boot. Unfortunately,” he said, chuckling, “I’m a bit house poor at the moment. I’m hoping to get the place on the Historical Registry so I can save it, but until then, I’ve got to keep people coming through here so I can afford to heat and update it. That’s why I’m offering tours before all the rooms are done.”
“How much are you charging?”
“I ask for goodwill donations.”
“What? How’re you going to make money that way?”
He shrugged and led me into the next room, the dining room. “Anyone who wants to should be able to check out what we have here. Like this—see this rug?”
I glanced down at the gorgeous ruby-red Persian nearly as large as the room and patterned with exquisite golds and greens. I nodded.
“I cleared off boxes and found it underneath, good as new. I had an appraiser here who said it’s a hundred years old.” Every room he brought me into had a similar story of some treasure discovered. My favorite was the master bedroom, where he’d found pearl and jade jewelry from the 1920s that were now lying out on a dresser.
“Can I touch them?” I asked. I was drawn to a carnelian necklace, the stone the size of an apricot pit and set in gold. The chain was cleverly crafted into an interlocking leaf pattern.
“Be my guest.”
I picked up the ornate necklace. It was surprisingly heavy, the gold so bright yellow that I questioned its authenticity. I flipped it over. Tiffany & Co. was stamped on the back of the carnelian’s setting. My breath caught. “You just leave this jewelry lying out?”
“Yup.”
“What if someone steals it?”
“We don’t have the money for locked viewing cases yet. If I don’t set them out, people won’t be able to see them.”
“Can I take photographs?”
With his permission, I began snapping pictures of the jewelry, hand-crafted furniture (some of it original), and delicately hand-painted wallpaper. The building and collections were amazing, stunning, and right in my backyard. I couldn’t believe he let people walk through here unsupervised, for free if they couldn’t afford better. Even if everyone was as honest as Carter seemed to believe, what would stop a child from slipping a shiny bauble into her pocket? That thought spurred a memory. “Can I see the attic?”
He stopped, his hand on the third-floor stairway newel. “Afraid not. It’s sealed off. I just recently cleared out space in the landing that would take you there.”
I called up a picture of the little girl’s face as it had appeared in the attic window on Saturday while I’d been skating. I now knew definitively that it had been a sleep-deprived illusion. Yet …
“Any rumors of this place being haunted?” I asked. Suddenly, the stairway felt like a threat, the shadows malicious rather than quaint.
He kept walking and I followed, tamping down my fear. It wasn’t easy, as I had the feeling he was deliberately avoiding answering me. We’d reached the third floor, which had an Alice-in-Wonderland feel due to the close walls and six-foot ceilings. He pushed a black button in the wall, and a string of yellow lights lit up. He pointed toward a far corner, past desks and tables and boxes and garbage bags. “That leads to the attic. As for haunted, it’s an old house. There’s always been rumors. Most of them center on the hanging.”
I swallowed hard. “What hanging?”
“A black man hung himself on the grounds near the end of the Civil War. Didn’t know if he was from the North or the South, didn’t know where to send his effects. It was the landowner’s daughter, an Offerdahl, who found the body. She was staring up at it, if the stories are true, and she was mute from that day forward, until she died a year later.”
I felt the devil walk up my spine. “I think I’ve seen enough up here,” I said.
“Then let’s go to the basement!” His eyes danced. “That’s where all the Civil War memorabilia is.”
Two hours later, I had my head full of Civil War facts, dreams of vintage jewelry, and a nagging sense that I was missing an obvious connection. Maybe food would help. I stopped at Mrs. Berns’s downtown apartment on my way home to see if she wanted to join me, but no one answered her door. I popped into the Turtle Stew to purchase tater tot hotdish with a side of green beans to go. My stomach growled as I waited. Had I eaten lunch? Could I drive and eat hotdish at the same time?
When the waitress handed me the Styrofoam square, it had a satisfying weight. I took a big sniff, enjoying the smell of crispy, salty tots layered over a creamy blend of mushroom soup and ground turkey. I may have moaned a little. I wanted to race home to eat it but decided to stop by the library to pick up a copy of After the Battle, so I could further research the Prospect House from the comfort of home, my animals by my side, my belly protruding as it happily digested two pounds of hotdish like a snake with a rabbit.
Unusual for me, my strategy unfolded exactly as planned. An hour later, I’d licked out the inside of the Styrofoam, settled onto the couch with Luna at my feet and Tiger Pop on my lap, and was paging through After the Battle, an open notepad at my side. I turned the pages slowly, sucked into the history of the town against my will. The book contained photographs of downtown Battle Lake in the 1800s looking exactly like a Little House on the Prairie set, and copies of newspaper articles a hundred years old with titles like “America’s Answer to Humanity’s Challenge.” There was even a photo of Richard Nixon visiting Glendalough State Park in 1956.
I eventually made it to the page devoted to the Prospect House, which I’d read before but not with the same perspective as I had now. Unfortunately, it didn’t offer any new information, so I read through the newspaper articles looking for anything related to the House. This is the first I found, a near identical recounting of the story Carter had told me:
“Young Offerdahl Girl Finds Negro Hanging in Woods”
Poor Elizabeth Offerdahl, who lost her mother the day she was born and whose father died a hero in the war, has been dealt another blow. In a gruesome discovery, she found the body of an unidentified man, believed to be a recently freed slave, hanging from an oak tree in the woods behind the Prospect House. The body was in a serious state of decay, leading authorities to believe he had been hanging there for at least two months. He was dressed in a black jersey sweater, a collared shirt, gray or brown trousers, and new black shoes. The rope he hung himself with was new and much better preserved than his clothes or flesh. He was dangling nearly three feet off the ground, and it is surprising his body was not found earlier, as it was in a well-traversed area, thou
gh it is winter.
Unless identifying information is found in the effects or someone comes forward, the hanged man’s identity will probably never be known. Elizabeth is currently under the care of her uncle, Hugh Offerdahl, and his wife, Adelaide Offerdahl. She is being treated by Dr. Olson for debility.
The article was dated March 7, 1865. I read it twice and could still not process the focus on Elizabeth Offerdahl over the poor man whose life had been lost. I realized it was different times, but the reminder of just how different left me unsettled. I continued to page through the newspaper section of the book, hoping for a follow-up article. My search seemed fruitless, I thought, as I flipped one page after another and scanned the headlines. Then, I turned to the final page, and there it was: “Scarlet Fever Epidemic Claims Its First Victim: Elizabeth Offerdahl.” Below that was a photo of an eight-year-old girl with haunted eyes and the exact same heart-shaped face I’d seen in the attic window of the Prospect House.
It wasn’t a hallucination. She was haunting the House.
A greasy cold crawled down my spine. I suddenly had a strong urge to lock my door, even though that would be little protection against ghosts. Still. It couldn’t hurt. I gently lifted Tiger Pop off of my lap and stood, glancing over my shoulder and all around.
“Hey, Luna, come to the door with me.” It was all of seven feet away from where I’d been sitting on the couch, but that suddenly seemed a great distance.
She was game, though, and stood, tail wagging. I smiled. “Thanks—”
Before I got out her name, her ears flattened to her head, and she growled, a low, primal sound that scared my last wit, the one that had been holding strong. She was staring at the front door. Her scruff stood in the air, and she crouched. The room was charged with a buzzing energy. I was soul-terrified, prickles of heat and cold alternating across my skin.
Just when I thought I’d lose my mind in that humming, horrifying waiting space, a knock struck the front door like Death’s knell.
Twenty-Two
I squeaked and dropped to the ground. Where that instinct came from, I didn’t know. Maybe a fainting goat as a distant ancestor?
I considered my situation from the crouch on the floor. I had been standing in front of the sofa when the rap on the door came, facing the bay windows which were jungle-thick with green plants, the closest I could get to gardening in the winter. The plants and my attention on the book explained why I hadn’t noticed the person walk to the door, right? For sure it wasn’t because my guest was actually an invisible ghost who could reconstitute herself enough to knock when she returned to feed on living souls.
I listened to my shallow breath, the nub of the carpeting digging into my sore knee. I’m sure there was a perfectly safe, normal, live human on the other side of my door.
Still, all instincts said a dark closet was the best place to be right now.
I was in mid-scurry, pointed toward the bedroom, when the front door opened. Kennie popped her head in, her glance immediately going to me on all fours scuttling across the room.
“Yoo-hoo! You said to come in, didn’t you? What’re you doing down there? Did you drop something?”
Only my heart and about five pounds of chicken fat. “What are you doing here?”
Kennie cocked her head like a curious bird, an effect enhanced by the feathered Mardi Gras mask she’d pushed to the crown of her platinum hair. She was otherwise sedately dressed, for her, at least the parts of her I could see peeking inside the door. She wore a brown fur stole around her neck, matching gloves, and a black cloth coat. “I told you I was going to stop by, silly. To counsel your pets and your plants?”
Luna amped up her growl, but at a blinding smile from Kennie, she switched to a whine and hunkered down on the ground next to me. I felt bad for her. She was a smart dog, but like most canines, she didn’t know she could prevent many things from happening to her. For example, me putting sunglasses over her tail and taking giggling pictures of her “gonzo face,” or turning her ears inside out and telling her I could see her brains. Tiger Pop, on the other hand, took advantage of the open door to slip outside and away from Kennie.
I stood and brushed off my knees. That’s when I noticed that her fur stole was wiggling. Luna observed it too, and she growled low in her throat. I put my hand out to comfort her.
“Are you wearing Peter?”
Kennie’s face brightened, and she stepped fully into the house, closing the door behind her. She reached around her neck to pull the alert wiener dog off and into her arms. “I sure am,” she said, nuzzling his pointy nose. “It’s easier than carrying him when he has one of his spells. So, where should I start?”
Resistance only makes it stronger. “I don’t have many plants, just these in the window,” I lied. “And Luna.” Tiger Pop would surely not return while Kennie was still around.
“Perfect.” Kennie set Peter on the floor. He wiggled over to Luna, and they sniffed noses. Luna placed her big German Shepherd paw on Peter’s side and pushed him gently to the ground. Peter stayed there, feet in the air, tongue lolling out. Luna smiled back at him, then went into the kitchen to drink some water.
Kennie ignored both animals, instead focusing on my aloes, jade tree, ferns, ivy, African violets, and ficus. She introduced herself to each one of them and gave them a chance to say a little something about themselves. At first I was sure it was one of the craziest things I’d ever seen, but then I started to feel a bit jealous. What if they liked her more than they liked me? Or worse, what if they revealed some of my secrets? Oh my god. Crazy is contagious.
“Will this take long?” I asked Kennie.
She slipped off her coat, revealing a dress constructed of green, purple, and yellow Mardi Gras beads. “Not too long, love. I have a party to go to.”
“Mardi Gras isn’t until February.”
“Mmmhmm,” she murmured, staring at a jade tree I’d grown from a clipping as if it were telling her its life story. “It’s not a Mardi Gras party.”
Underneath the dress, she wore fishnet stockings and four-inch black heels. I had to admit, she had killer legs. I was positive I didn’t want to know any more about the party, however. I knew for a fact that Kennie did things behind closed doors that should never see the light. In fact, I’d stumbled upon a house full of such activities last May. “Are you almost done?”
She ignored me, staring fixedly at the plants as if her eyes were the sun. I began to clean my kitchen, slamming cupboards a little louder and running water a little longer than necessary. It made me itchy having Kennie in my house, and particularly watching her bestow attention to something besides herself.
“Know anything about Gary Wohnt?” I asked when I couldn’t bear her silence any longer.
“He gets out of the hospital tomorrow,” she said. “He’ll be behind the desk for a while, but he should be fine. As far as I know, they still have no idea who shot him.”
“How about the body in the ice? Do they know any more about him?”
She turned to face me. The lamplight reflected off the lip of her perched mask, giving her eyes a deep-set, glittering cast. “Maurice Jackson had two gunshot wounds in his chest, but they don’t think that’s what killed him. He had water in his lungs. You know what that means, right? Somebody shot him and then shoved him in the lake to drown.”
Twenty-Three
My restless, fretful, under-bed sleep was fraught with nightmares of pink piñata pigs dressed in Mardi Gras streamers and strung from the ceiling, getting whacked with sticks shaped like wiener dogs. The night before, I’d ejected Kennie from the house in less than an hour, but the damage to my psyche was likely permanent.
I rolled out from under the bed and padded straight to the shower, not even bothering to brush my hair. Standing under the hot water, I focused on sending all my stress to the skin level so it could wash off like dirt. Maurice, the
man who had saved me from the whangsters, had been murdered, and I hadn’t been able to locate any information about him beyond the Chicago Public Library card. The next day, Police Chief Gary Wohnt had been shot in what appeared to be a routine pull-over. In his drug-induced haze, he’d called me beautiful, which was about as desirable as finding a bug crawling in your underwear.
That was followed by one of the whangsters tossing me a copy of an obscure, cryptic letter that I didn’t know what to do with. On the Operation Offerdahl side, I needed to locate Eric, who was somehow tied to the Prospect House. In addition, I still owed Ron Sims an article on the House, something was up with Mrs. Berns, and Kennie Rogers had spent the better part of an hour cooing to my plants and sending “healing chi waves” into poor Luna’s brain. Did that just about cover it? Wait—almost forgot. I now slept under my bed, and I liked it. The only normal thing in my life was Johnny, and I hadn’t seen him in two days. It was too much. My head was ringing.
And ringing.
It wasn’t until the answering machine clicked over that I realized it was actually the phone I was hearing. Let the machine get it. I stretched my arms under the steaming stream of water. I had a stress knot the size of a tangerine between my shoulder blades.
I listened for the sound of a voice through the bathroom door, but none came.
Must not have been important.
The ringing began again almost immediately. I didn’t want to abandon the hot shower for the brisk morning air. Didn’t want to dribble all over the floor. Didn’t want to face the day. This internal whining kept me through the next cycle of ringing, which ended as soon as the machine clicked on and started up the second my voice recording stopped. Whoever was calling was not going to be deterred.
