The Bell House

by Lori Titus

  “Are the ghosts bound by a curse?”

  “No,” Constance said. “It’s the anger that keeps them here. And the more tragedies that happen in one place, the more wedded they are to the spot. Helena told us that negativity breeds more of its own, drawing all around it in. Travis was the one who actually believed in it as a curse made by magic. And that was because his experience was different than Helena’s.”

  “Why did he believe that?”

  Constance sighed. “Travis believed he was cursed. He had never seen the dead before Vietnam. He was injured by shrapnel in a bombing. They say he was clinically dead for twelve minutes before he was revived. All the years of saying that Helena was lying, and then when he came home, he was surrounded by his dead, unwanted kin.”

  Jenna shuddered.

  “You know your father was the kind of man that got an idea in his head and never let it go. He believed the Sight was a punishment for something that he did wrong and that he would be condemned to go the way of the others when he passed.”

  “You still haven’t told me what happened to Patricia Bell.” Jenna pressed.

  “I know,” Constance said. “I will tell you. But you have to promise me something first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not safe for you go back to that house tonight. Let me pray with you. Whatever this thing is that I sense around you, it’s not good.”

  AFTER AN EVENING OF talk about the past and the ghosts of the Bell family, Constance hadn’t needed to push Jenna very hard to spend the night.

  Sitting on the bed in her cousin’s guest room, Jenna was - close to tears.

  It was times like these that made her miss Stephen. She wanted to call home and hear his voice across the line.

  Instead, she picked up her cell phone and dialed Amanda’s number.

  Her friend picked up on the second ring.

  “I need a favor,” Jenna said. “How would you like to do a little research for me?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  San Francisco

  Several Years Ago

  Jenna remembered clearly the moment she first knew that she was in love with Stephen.

  It was a Sunday morning, and they were in his apartment in San Francisco. It was raining, and they were in bed.

  The relationship was still new, but they had made love before. Something was different that time. The gentleness in his touch. She watched his eyes in the dim morning light, his slow movements as he caressed her. She felt her breathing slow, her heart skip a beat. Everything stopped. No rain, no sound. Only the rhythm of his heartbeat against her chest. The pleasure that flooded her body was so intense that she saw only darkness for a moment before his face floated back into view.

  She was breathing too fast. Lightheaded, she smiled as tears spilled from her eyes.

  “Baby!” he growled into her ear, and collapsed at her side.

  She stared at the ceiling for a while. Stephen was smiling. She could tell without looking. It took a few moments before her breathing was even. The sound of the rain came back. She could hear it against the roof and the windows. She felt her blood slow, her heart kick into a more normal pace.

  “You don’t have to go home,” Stephen said.

  “Hmmmm?” Jenna replied. “I . . . I wasn’t going anywhere soon.”

  “No, you don’t understand what I mean,” he said, turning towards her. He laid his hand on top of her bare stomach, which sent butterflies moving through her. “I want you to move in,” he flashed her a dirty grin.

  She paused for a moment, because she didn’t want him to know that she was willing to give him anything he asked for. But her answer was still the same, and tumbled past her lips with more enthusiasm than she liked.

  “Yes. Yes. Soon.”

  He looked at her, and she saw worry cloud his eyes. “Are you scared?” he whispered.

  How could she tell him? Her deepest fear had always been falling in love with a man and losing him. Maybe it was the specter of her parent’s disastrous marriage or just the fact that she thought of herself as hardened enough not to need anyone else. Either way, she felt there was good reason to keep a man at a distance, to not get too close.

  Looking in his eyes, she realized that it was already too late. She loved him. And someday, she would be without him. It was just a matter of how and when. The dye was cast.

  Stephen drew her into his arms, unaware of the little war Jenna was waging in her mind.

  “I can promise you one thing,” he said. “I am going to make you a happy woman. You won’t regret it.”

  DIANA BELL SEEMED TO be doing better.

  Dr. Perry, the psychiatrist assigned to her case, was pleased with her progress. She admitted that she had hurt herself, that she had walking daydreams, delusions of her dead father, essentially. Over a period of five days she had remained calm. The mix of anti-psychotics she’d been prescribed seemed to be working nicely.

  She did not reveal that her sister had told her about Henry’s death.

  If Dr. Perry had known Diana better, he would have recognized that her lack of comments about Jenna or her grandchildren was uncharacteristic.

  Diana asked to have the restraints removed. In light of her recent behavior, he found this to be a reasonable request. Much to her dissatisfaction, he told her that she would need to remain in the hospital for a time—for observation.

  She gave the doctor a distant smile. Just beyond him, hanging in the shadows of the corner, Travis waited. He gave his girl all the encouragement that she was going to need.

  “MAMA,” TALEYA SIGHED.

  Raquel turned and looked into the wide brown eyes of her daughter. She stood only inches from her face, and her unblinking stare made her laugh. “Come here, pumpkin,” she said, opening her arms. She knew that her girl wanted to get in bed and cuddle with her, and she had no intention of turning her away. For the first few nights after they came home, she’d had both her babies sleeping in bed with her, and this was the first night she’d actually put them in their own room.

  “Is Maya asleep?” she asked.

  “Yeah, she sleeps like a rock,” Taleya confirmed. She climbed in and made herself comfortable, laying her head against Raquel’s shoulder.

  Having her daughters back was bliss. Raquel was spoiling them rotten and was certain she would pay the consequences later. She let them play video games at all hours, have pizza for dinner, sleep when they felt like it. Her kids had been apart from her for so long. She nearly wanted to cry every time she looked at them. They would be going to a new school soon enough. Once again their days would be spent away from her.

  “Something wrong, honey?” she asked. Taleya was too quiet.

  She shrugged, unintentionally jabbing Raquel in her chest. “It’s so quiet here. It makes it hard to sleep.”

  “What do you mean, baby?”

  “Back at Grandma’s house, there was always someone talking. Like her daddy. He’d come stand under the oak tree. Or one of the others. Sometimes I would just hear them and not see them. That was even scarier. Because when you can’t see them, you don’t know where they really are. I didn’t realize how many there were until I got someplace quiet.”

  Raquel sat up. “Honey? Who told you that? Did Gramma say something?”

  “No. I told Gramma what I heard. She said it was our secret—that I couldn’t tell anybody.”

  “Taleya, you can tell me anything.”

  Taleya looked down. With a lock of curly hair round her finger, she seemed to be trying to decide what she should say.

  “Gramma says they want Aunt Jenna.”

  “Aunt Jenna? You mean someone wants to hurt her?”

  “Mama, they said Jenna has new life inside her, and they want it.”

  THE COFFEE SHOP WAS full of customers the next morning, but their cheerful banter did little to lift Jenna’s dour mood. She looked up every time the door opened, only to be disappointed each time she saw a stranger enter.

  A
small woman in a hoodie and jeans came in with a backpack slung over her shoulders. Jenna almost didn’t recognize Amanda. She looked frazzled, and the wrinkled clothes that she wore looked like she might have slept in them.

  “Damn, Jenna,” Amanda said in a whisper as she slid into the booth across from her friend. “I have seen you get yourself into some shit before, but this takes the cake.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Amanda sat back and took a breath, attempting to organize her thoughts. “I’m not even sure where to start. But I have to know. What exactly prompted you to have me look up this information? Did you know what I was going to find, or did you just have a feeling?”

  “Both. Look, go ahead and order some coffee,” Jenna suggested, despite the fact that Amanda already seemed amped up.

  It was really just a way to get a few more minutes to figure out what she was going to say. When she called Amanda the previous night, she hadn’t figured out how she was going to explain the rationale beneath her thinking. Amanda still had connections at the local newspaper, and Jenna knew that she would be able to get information about the Bell property more quickly than she could, especially without the benefit of having her computer to work from.

  Amanda seemed a little calmer when she returned with her coffee. She sat down and, pulling the hoodie back, and made an attempt to smooth her hair down with one hand.

  “I hope you didn’t stay up all night,” Jenna said, looking into Amanda’s red-rimmed eyes.

  “I have never been one to believe in these kinds of things,” she began. “But I won’t lie to you, this gave me the creeps.”

  She pulled out her laptop. Turning it towards Jenna, she began to explain.

  “First off, I am surprised Diana doesn’t have that house roped off and declared a historical haunting site. There’s money in it, and I don’t doubt that she’s the type to squeeze money out of anything that she can.”

  Jenna shrugged. “Well, she’s hardly in any shape now.”

  “Click on that folder at the top that says Bell House.”

  Jenna followed her instruction. The document pulled up an old, grainy black and white picture. The caption beneath the photo read Bell House, 1921.

  “As it turns out, the house that you’re living in was the site of the original Bell home. Of course, the plantation was destroyed during the war with the North, and it was never rebuilt to the grandeur that it had before. But that was the spot where the owners lived, right at the edge of the creek bed. There have been several houses that were built on that land. The most recent is the version where you live now, which was constructed in 1960. The previous houses there were all destroyed by fire.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me right,” Amanda said. She took a sip of her brew and winced. Grabbing a dispenser, she poured sugar into her coffee. “There have been five fires there since the 1800s. It’s hard to say if any of them were suspicious. One report says a fire was started when a lantern was tipped over. Another news story in the 1950s faults poor wiring. I’d say that happened a few too many times to be coincidence. Each time the house was a total loss.

  “I’ll start just with the things that have happened in modern times. In 1921, a couple named Marjorie and Roderick Bell moved into the house. They were newly married and doing fairly well. Roderick worked construction and had moved to Chrysalis from Virginia to take advantage of the family property. Marjorie went out one afternoon and was not heard from again. It took days before they found the body. She was found dead in the woods. There was no proof, and no one was caught, but people at the time believed it was a Klan killing. Roderick Bell went home and three days later shot himself in the head. He died in the upstairs bedroom.”

  Jenna felt a shiver, like cold fingers running up her back. The man had died in her bedroom.

  “In 1935, a woman named Charity Bell lived in the house. She was one of Roderick’s sisters. She died in childbirth, but her son survived. She died in that house as well.”

  “I do remember hearing of her before. She would have been one of my father’s great aunts, but I had never heard about how she died or that she stayed in my house.”

  “It’s not just that these people died. There are documented hauntings.” Amanda turned the laptop back around, pulled down a second document, and pushed it back towards Jenna.

  “So the guesthouse was used as a rental property to bring money in back in the 1960s,” she said. “There were rumors about the house being haunted, and the Bells couldn’t keep any tenants in the place more than a few months. This is an article about a woman who lived there until she woke up one night and saw a strange man staring at her from the foot of her bed.”

  “Roderick?” Jenna asked.

  Amanda nodded. “Yes. There’s more. I am supposing that you’ve heard the story of the Weeping Willow?”

  “Well sure, I grew up hearing that story. It was a campfire tale kids used to tell each other. A young girl killed herself when her boyfriend left her. She hung herself from a tree. And her ghost supposedly hovers there, waiting to see if she’ll have a chance to kill him when he passes on the road.”

  “The real Willow’s last name was Branom. She lived in your house for a short time. As it turns out, she and Jeremiah Bell were engaged to be married.”

  “Jeremiah was my dad’s older brother,” Jenna mused. “So, he left Willow, and she committed suicide . . . ?”

  “Yes. She died not far from your house. According to this story, it would have been on the family property, about an acre or so from your house.”

  “How is it that no one knows this . . . ?”

  “Well, maybe people don’t like to talk about it seriously except for behind closed doors,” Amanda offered. “It does sound crazy . . .”

  “Dad never talked about Jeremiah. As far as I know, Dad never told my mother any of these stories.”

  “Okay, so here’s my next question, even though you didn’t bother to answer the first,” Amanda narrowed her eyes. “How much of this does your sister know about?”

  “Maybe she’d heard the stories up to that point but didn’t believe them. I can’t imagine that she would have let Ahmad live there if she thought there was anything wrong with the place,” Jenna paused. “You know that Diana’s mother was institutionalized, right?”

  “Yes. And before you even ask, she stayed in the back house too. I checked the dates. She lived there for about two months before she had her breakdown.”

  “The last time I talked to Diana, she admitted that her mother was talking about seeing ghosts and that she didn’t believe her back then. What about Diana’s house? There are no stories of anything strange going on there?”

  “Well, she’s lived there all her life now. You see she’s fucking crazy,” Amanda said. “Maybe that’s proof enough.”

  JENNA REMEMBERED ASKING her mother about the house her father grew up in.

  “Mama, how come we never lived in Dad’s family house?”

  Louise looked at her twelve-year-old daughter with a frown.

  “I wanted someplace that was just ours to live. You know, when you first get married that’s an important thing—a home that feels like your own. I refuse to live somewhere and feel like I can’t change the curtains or have the rug pulled up.”

  “Much good it did,” Jenna mumbled.

  “I heard you,” Louise said over her shoulder. They were in the kitchen, and Louise was packing her glassware, rolling each item carefully in newspaper.

  “Did you know any of them? Daddy’s family?

  Louise put her hands on her hips.

  “A few. I met his mother and Helena, of course. You know Constance and I always got on well. Why are you asking me?”

  “Because I could ask Daddy, but he’s not going to tell me.”

  “Hmm. You have a point there. Hand me that box, will you?” she pointed at a carton beneath the kitchen table, and Jenna handed it to her.

  “So what was his mother lik
e?”

  Louise had a far-away smile. “Would it sound odd to say she was the female equivalent of your dad? Kamila was a tiny, skinny thing like Helena was, and very intense. Not a person that you wanted to get into any kind of argument with. She was truly was the ruler of her own realm, and everyone that met her knew it.”

  “And his dad?”

  “Travis’ father died before we met. He passed away from a heart attack when your dad was still a teenager. What I do know about him is from the local rumor mill. I will say that Travis and his dad were never close, so there was probably more than one reason he didn’t talk about it. The old man could be brutal, and Kamila wasn’t much better if you want my opinion. He never mentioned that to you?”

  “No. See what I mean? He just doesn’t tell me things.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. You’re not alone on that score.”

  Jenna moved to her side and started to pack another box with plates. They worked in silence for a while. When Louise spoke again her voice was soft, almost a whisper.

  “Kamila was the kind of woman that was very protective of her sons. Honestly, I don’t think she liked me very much, but she was happy to see me on the scene, because I was a distraction from another girl that your dad was interested in.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Some girl named . . . Willow,” she said. “She was dating Jeremiah. Thing is, I don’t see where he could have stood any kind of chance competing for a woman against your father.”

  “His brother’s girlfriend? Wow. That’s nice,” Jenna’s upper lip twisted in distaste.

  “I didn’t find out about that until after we left Chrysalis. When I think about it now, really, I wonder if that’s not why he took the job in North Carolina. We didn’t come back here until a few years later.”

  “Whatever happened to Willow?”