Deader Homes and Gardens

by Angie Fox

  “All right.” Then I was definitely bringing some skills to the job. I turned back to the scene in front of us. “When I’m tuned into the other side, I see what the dominant ghost sees. It’s not always the same as what’s there now.” These were objects that had been in this room during the dominant ghost’s lifetime. This arrangement was a bit macabre, though. “Why display a mummy like that?”

  “Looks like it was for show,” Frankie mused.

  “In Victorian times, they used to have mummy unwrapping parties.” I said, moving closer to the artifacts. “That might be what’s going on here.”

  “I told you this guy had problems,” Frankie said.

  The statues looked old. As in ancient. “So Jack unearthed a lost tomb.” And brought the contents home with him to arrange in creepy ways. “Maybe this setup is an effort to ward off the curse? The early Egyptians were all about ritual. Jack probably would have known that.” Too bad I hadn’t studied deeply enough to know the details.

  Frankie swore under his breath. “Why are we here? Even I don’t mess with ancient dark magic.”

  “If there is such a thing,” I countered.

  Frankie threw his hands up. “You want to take a chance?”

  I didn’t want to admit it was a possibility. That would be a bigger problem than I’d realized.

  But it could explain why the ghosts had closed themselves off so completely. They were scared.

  A stone scarab rested at the foot of the mummy, and I resisted the urge to touch…anything. My trepidation must have showed.

  “I think I’ll wait outside,” Lee said, making a quick exit.

  “You still think you’re getting paid enough?” Frankie said, watching my employer go.

  Lee wasn’t the professional. I was. Besides, it wasn’t all about moneybags and gold bars, despite my enthusiastic search of the packing crates upstairs.

  I ventured farther into the room, past the mummy and the statues. Ghostly tables displayed more fine statues, ancient jewelry, and carvings of small boats. Near the window stood a statue of a cat, its body smooth stone or maybe metal. It might even be gold.

  Any one of these items could change Lee’s situation, and mine.

  If they hadn’t been taken from here more than a half century ago.

  “Maybe one of the ghosts knows what happened to the artifacts,” I said. “Whoever the dominant ghost is down here, they certainly saw the relics when they were in this room.”

  In the meantime, I could try to gather more information among the living as well. If the newspaper articles of the day had reported on the contents of the tomb, I knew someone who could find it. My sister, Melody, worked part-time at the library and was a whiz at research. I’d ask her to look into it.

  “Verity,” Lee called from outside the music room, thoroughly spooked, from the sound of it, “it’s getting weirdly cold out here.”

  I exchanged a glance with Frankie and we quickly joined Lee in the small wood-paneled reception area. It had gone noticeably chilly.

  “This is good,” I told my client.

  “Hear that?” Frankie asked.

  The crying had started again.

  “It sounds like a woman,” I said, moving toward the source of the noise.

  “Same one as before,” Frankie added as we passed the foot of the staircase.

  “We can’t be sure of that,” I said, skirting the death mark on the floor. “I mean, people cry differently, but to know one from the next—”

  “Trust me, it’s her. I can always recognize a woman by her crying. Just a little skill I mastered back in the day. I was never too smooth on the breakup,” he said, with no shame at all.

  I wasn’t going to argue.

  Lee followed close behind as we stepped into the parlor to the right of the staircase. It had been a grand salon, designed to entertain and impress.

  Lee sighed. “Empty.”

  Not quite. At least not on the ghostly plane. I saw embroidered couches gathered in the center of the richly paneled room. Comfortable chairs flanked a marble fireplace crowned with a portrait of a man wearing a handlebar mustache.

  Near an arched doorway, not far from the earthly remains of a potted palm, a ghostly woman wept.

  She wore a black dress and a black lace veil. She didn’t seem threatening like the governess or skittish like the girl. Perhaps she would be the one to talk to me. I sincerely needed a friend in this house and it appeared as if she did as well.

  I approached her with the same care I would for anyone who was grieving. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I ventured.

  She turned away, as if to conceal her face, and then she disappeared.

  “No!” I burst out. I’d lost my chance. She was gone. I turned to Frankie, who frowned. “What really happened here?” I asked. “How can I help if nobody will talk to me?”

  My outburst had startled Lee. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I’d forgotten for a moment that he couldn’t see her. “There was a ghost here. A woman in black, but she’s gone now,” I added, trying not to let his relief get to me.

  “I’ll bet it was Annabelle, Jack’s wife,” he said solemnly. “She died a few days after he did.”

  “I was so close to making a connection.” I could feel it in my bones. She hadn’t hidden from me. Or attacked.

  No, she just disappeared when you tried to talk to her.

  Perhaps if we kept going, we’d find the little girl. Hopefully, she’d be less guarded, more willing to talk.

  We ventured deeper into the house and I noticed Frankie lingering close.

  “No offense,” he said giving me the side-eye, “but you’re coming off a little desperate.”

  “That’s because I am,” I told him plainly. There was no shame in it.

  This house and its inhabitants weren’t giving up their secrets as easily as I’d imagined. And I was even more surprised when we passed through an arched doorway and into a scene out of an Egyptian palace. It wasn’t on the ghostly plane, either, but as real as I was.

  Hieroglyphs climbed the gold-painted walls. Plush benches set into the walls hid beneath rotting tentlike curtains of purple and gold. Two tables occupied the center of the space, displaying wooden board games I’d never seen before. They weren’t ancient, like the objects we’d found upstairs. But they were strange. One had what appeared to be a checkerboard, only with scattered X and O pieces. If they were trying to play tick-tack-toe, they had way too many board spaces. The other game featured a similar game board, with colored pieces and sticks.

  “Is this something spiritual?” Lee asked, taking one of the long sticks and studying it closer.

  “I believe these are reproductions of ancient Egyptian board games,” I said. “Your grandfather must have been a fan.”

  “Maybe these are valuable,” he said, snapping a picture with his cell phone.

  “I also saw dolls and toys upstairs,” I told him.

  He went pale. “I’m not touching any of the little girl’s toys until we’ve made peace with the ghosts in this house.” He reached out toward one of the board games and stopped just short of it. “The more I think about it, I shouldn’t take anything.”

  “You’re probably right,” I admitted. Carting off the ghosts’ possessions certainly wouldn’t help us find common ground.

  A dark shadow caught my eye. It had jagged edges and slunk like an animal along the back wall. “Stay back,” I said, putting myself between it and Lee.

  Frankie cursed under his breath as we watched the entity slip into the next room.

  I eyed him. “What was that?”

  My buddy worked his jaw. “Hell if I know. I ain’t your ghost whisperer.”

  “Throw me a bone, Frank.” I didn’t expect him to make contact. I’d do that. “Have you seen something like this before?” He’d been dead for more than eight decades. “I’m counting on your expertise here.”

  The gangster let out a low chuckle. “You think I we
nt ghost hunting for kicks and grins before now? I see what you see.” He held up a hand. “Killing people might be in my wheelhouse, but dealing with dead people sure ain’t. I used to go to parties, I’d play cards, have a few laughs, you know, like normal people.”

  Before I’d started dragging him along on adventures.

  Yes, but I didn’t believe the afterlife was all speakeasies and poker games. “Surely you’ve met some questionable ghosts.” He’d told me to stay away from the dark creatures at the very first haunted house we’d visited, and it had sounded like he spoke from experience.

  “I got good instincts,” he said, “which means I turn around and leave when I’m not welcome.”

  Well, we didn’t have that luxury now. Still, this was my hunt, not his. “Guard my back while I take a look,” I said, moving toward the door where the shadow had disappeared.

  The room lay dark. I dug the mini-flashlight out of my bag and clicked it on before entering the wood-paneled study. The air hung heavy with the smell of dust and old books.

  I searched the floor for the shadow, and then up the walls to the ceiling. My beam skittered over bookshelves on the right wall and the left. There was no sign of it.

  I took another step into the room and let out a small cry as my foot encountered something hard. I jumped back and shone the light on a stone statue of a laughing boy. Or perhaps he was screaming. It was hard to tell.

  “Are you hurt?” Lee called.

  “No,” I said, forcing myself to breathe normally. Just spooked.

  I shone my light over a large desk stacked with papers. More bookshelves lined the left wall. When I was satisfied nothing was going to jump out at me, I ventured all the way into the room, dodging stacks of books and papers. When I made it to the musty velvet curtains covering the entire rear wall, I heaved them back, revealing a multipaned bay window.

  Sunlight streamed into the room and over the absolute mess of an office.

  Crates full of rolled-up maps lined the walls in front of the bookcases, and stacks of books and papers swamped the large wood desk in the center of the room. Behind it, a standing globe fought for space with a wooden filing cabinet stacked with more papers.

  Frankie stood at the door. “Did somebody trash the place?”

  “I think this is how Jack kept it,” I said, easing past a pile of books stacked as high as my waist. None of the objects had been tossed around, just creatively sorted.

  “He organized like I do,” Lee said, easing into the room. “I can’t find anything in file cabinets.”

  He reminded me of some of my art teachers. Their desks had been crowded with papers, but also works in progress and objects to display. “Is this Jack?” I asked, removing a photo frame from a small assortment huddled precariously under a leaning stack of books.

  Lee looked over my shoulder. The sepia-toned photo showed two men in brown boots, light pants, and white shirts, posing in front of a tomb entrance cut from a rocky hillside. “That’s Jack,” Lee said, pointing to the older, mustached man on the right. “The other is Robert, his brother-in-law.” He appeared quite handsome and sure of himself, judging by the way he posed with his shirt half-buttoned and his foot up on a rock. He grinned at the camera. “Jack used to take him along on adventures. Jack’s wife, Annabelle, was Robert’s sister.”

  “Excavation fun for the entire family.”

  Now I was starting to sound like Frankie.

  “Robert died in the house as well,” Lee continued. “He saw Annabelle’s lifeless body and keeled over.”

  “From the curse,” I finished.

  “Probably,” Frankie agreed.

  I had to stop letting him get into my head. Speculating did us no good. We needed to focus on what we saw and heard here in the house. I scanned the office.

  “Strange that there are no artifacts on Jack’s desk or on his shelves,” I said, “not a desert rock or even a paperweight.” Even the statue by the door appeared to be from Jack’s time and not another.

  “Who knows what’s in here,” Frankie said, passing straight through the maps to get to the desk.

  Jack would have been proud of his finds. He would have displayed them in prominent places. “I don’t see anything. Not here or on the ghostly plane.”

  That meant Jack probably wasn’t the dominant ghost in his own office.

  “Maybe the stories of his discoveries are exaggerated,” Lee said.

  Doubtful. “We found an attic full of empty crates,” I said, easing past an old-fashioned cocktail cart in order to study the books on the shelves. “And you said yourself that your father didn’t want anything to do with the artifacts in the house.”

  I took a quick look at the texts on the shelf. No surprise they were volumes of Egyptian history and mythology. Then I saw a stack of leather-bound journals. “Check it out,” I said, lifting one from the top. I opened it and large, scrawled handwriting stated: Jack Treadwell, September 1909.

  I showed Lee. “Let’s see if we can find one from May 1910, when they would have left Egypt with their find.” The crates upstairs arrived in the United States in June. It would have most likely taken them about a month to get back home in those days. “Let’s also try to find some journals from the months before, during the excavation.”

  The September 1909 book was pretty neat in itself. He’d inserted hand-drawn maps of dig sites, from previous trips, most likely. There was a rough illustration of a skinny, smiling boy carrying a water jug. I paged through notes about who had gotten which dig permits for the upcoming winter and spring excavation season and what other archaeologists had discovered.

  Lee lifted a huge stack of journals from the shelf for sorting. He smiled at my surprise. “Gardening builds the muscles.”

  “Hold on a sec,” I said, reluctant to lose my place in the book.

  I cleared a space on the desk, just wide enough for Lee’s stack. “You keep reading,” he said. “I’ll look for the early 1910 books.”

  I felt bad. I wasn’t here to ogle old excavation journals. But the one I had was gorgeous. The next one as well. Lee and I began looking at them together, with Jack’s carefully drawn maps of rivers and cities, with names like El Kharaga and Mothis. And then there were handwritten notes in a large, boxy scrawl that might as well have been hieroglyphs.

  “He really loved this,” Lee said.

  We could tell by the carefully transcribed entries. Still, even though I could browse the journals all day: “I have no idea what we’re looking at.”

  Lee sighed. “Me neither.” He ran a finger over a page detailing an ancient stone gateway in a city neither of us could begin to place. “But these books might tell us more about what happened to Jack and his family,” he said, closing the book, “or at least more on what Jack was looking for or what he found.”

  “I might know someone who can help,” I said, not sure I should promise. “His name is Dale Grassino and he taught my Egyptian history class at Ole Miss. He retired only a few towns over.” I’d house-sat for him the summer before I graduated, when he’d gone out of the country on a dig. We hadn’t spoken in a few years. I’d graduated with my art degree and he’d kept on at the university for a while. “I can give him a call.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Lee said, growing hopeful. “And who knows? After you fix things with the ghosts, we might have something priceless here with these books.”

  Neither of us wanted to admit it, but the artifacts could be long gone. And even if Lee did decide to sell the dolls and games we’d found, I doubted they would be worth enough for him to be able to restore both the house and the grounds.

  But these books…it was a possibility. There sure were a lot of them.

  “It’s a plan,” I said, leading him out of the study, back through the Egyptian room and the parlor. Heavens. It must have taken these people all day just to get around their big house. I hesitated. “I’ll bet there’s a dining room in the back. And then there’s the kitchen, where the governess die
d. We should probably check that out, too.”

  Lee appeared stricken at the thought. “I don’t think my heart can take much more.”

  “I looked in the kitchen and the dining room while you two were playing junior librarians in the study,” Frankie said. “Nothing happening in either place, by the way.”

  Even if Frankie found King Tut’s tomb, I doubted we’d get Lee back there. At least not this afternoon.

  “Did you see anything valuable?” I asked the ghost.

  “Nothing,” he groused. “The whole dining room is cleaned out. And the kitchen is just the kitchen. I’m so glad I didn’t bother breaking into this place.”

  I relayed his information to Lee and saw his shoulders slump.

  “We’ll keep looking,” I assured him.” We continued into the parlor. “I just wish I’d found the little girl.”

  “It’s getting cold again,” Lee said, speeding up his pace.

  I hurried after him, goose bumps prickling my arms.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” I assured him, and myself.

  Although when Lee opened the door for me, I was mighty relieved to step out onto the porch—until I nearly tripped over a bundle just outside.

  It was a doll with a chipped porcelain face.

  I froze.

  “Hey, that looks just like the doll from upstairs,” Frankie said.

  That was because it was.

  I looked out to the yard and saw the white figure of a little girl standing just beyond the gnarled bushes lining the walk.

  All right. I’d asked for this.

  Slowly, I reached down, not wanting to touch the doll, but not seeing any other options. I took hold of her around the silken waist.

  The little girl smiled.

  I offered her the doll. “Is this yours?”

  She nodded and vanished.

  I held the doll, unsure what it meant, wishing the girl had spoken to me. She was the only one who seemed as if she might be trying to communicate.

  “That doll looks like you,” Lee said.

  “Not really,” I said automatically. I couldn’t think that. I wouldn’t. Sure, it had blond hair and a yellow flower stuck in its dress…