Spackled and Spooked

2

Two weeks later, the house was ours. By nine o’clock the morning after closing, we were hard at work. I was stripping the ketchup-bottle-patterned paper from the kitchen walls, wielding my handheld scorer expertly, while Derek was putting his muscles to good use yanking up the soiled wall-to-wall carpeting and carpet pad in the common rooms. I’d catch occasional glimpses of him through the doorway and stop for a moment to enjoy the show. The muscles in his upper arms bunched as he hauled on the stubborn carpet, and every time he bent to grab another piece, his faded jeans stretched tight across his behind. I smiled appreciatively. The blinds were off the windows, allowing sharp autumn sunshine to flood in, and the light gilded his hair and outlined all those lovely muscles.

That same sunshine didn’t do so flattering a job on the house itself. There were cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling, faded and peeling paint, legions of dead flies littering every windowsill, and even a mummified mouse on the floor in the smallest bedroom. Derek removed it, along with the soiled stove and ancient refrigerator in the kitchen.

“If Jemmy and Inky happen to stop in at Aunt Inga’s house tonight,” he said when he came back from depositing the unfortunate rodent in the oversized Dumpster we had rented, “try to make them stick around so they can come with us tomorrow. Just in case there are more rodents.”

I nodded, although my chances of holding on to Jemmy and Inky if they didn’t want to be held-and they usually didn’t-were practically nil.

Jemmy and Inky were cats. Specifically, Maine coon cats. The biggest breed there is. Jemmy topped twenty pounds, and Inky was close to fifteen. They had belonged to my aunt, and I had inherited them along with her house. Or they had inherited me, for those rare times when they needed something. Jemmy and Inky don’t cuddle, they don’t care whether I’m there or not, and they search me out only when they want something, usually food. They come and go as they please, through a cat flap in the back door, and as long as there’s food and water in their bowls, I rarely see them. Still, I could try to keep them around if they surfaced this evening. By locking the cat flap after they were inside, for instance, so they couldn’t leave again. Derek would be putting them in the truck in the morning, though. After being kept inside all night, they’d be seriously annoyed, and I wasn’t about to risk my skin. If Derek wanted to bring them, Derek could handle getting them here.

Despite the dead mouse, and the thought that there might be more where that one came from, I was still psyched about renovating the house. It was such a promising place. All it needed was some tender, loving care to come into its own after being ignored and neglected for so many years. It was a friendly house, in spite of what had happened here. I didn’t get any creepy vibes, and if there was screaming going on, we didn’t hear it. Nothing untoward had happened, and so far, we hadn’t come across anything too horrible in the structural department, either. No major wood rot, no evidence of termites or carpenter ants. The plumbing needed work, of course, as did the electrical system, but we’d been expecting that.

“Are you planning to call Lionel Kenefick?” I asked. The young man had, after all, offered.

“I’ll do the electrical work myself,” Derek answered. “If he works for the Stenhams, he probably doesn’t know what he’s doing anyway.”

“That’s a little harsh, isn’t it? He could be a great electrician.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Derek said, and of course he’d never see it, because he was going to do the work himself. I didn’t say anything.

So structurally, at least, the place seemed sound. Or so we thought, until midafternoon, when Derek, now ripping up the vinyl floor in the kitchen for a change of pace, came into the second bathroom, where I was once again wielding my scorer to great effect, stripping wallpaper blossoming with twining vines of roses and thorns.

“Problem,” he said, succinctly.

“What kind of problem?” I climbed off the step stool I’d been standing on and out of the tub, where the step stool was positioned.

“Weak floor in the kitchen. Under the refrigerator and the bank of cabinets where the dishwasher was. There’s probably been a leak at some point, and now the floor’s soft.”

“Can you fix it?”

Derek snorted. “Of course I can fix it. It’s just going to take a day or two. I’m going to have to go into the crawlspace and do it from below. I thought you might want to come out there with me and see what’s going on.”

“To the crawlspace?” I said. “No thanks. There are probably spiders and beetles and other creepy critters down there.”

“At the very least,” Derek agreed. “Maybe even snakes. What I meant was that I thought you might come into the kitchen while I crawled under the house, and we could talk through the floor. I’ll need you to write down some measurements.”

“Oh. Sure.” I could do that. I balanced my plastic tool on the vanity cabinet and followed him into the hallway. “Um… you don’t really think there are snakes, do you?”

He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Could be snakes.”

“Dangerous snakes?”

“Probably not. I’ll shine the flashlight in first, scare anything off.”

“Bring a tool, too. Something heavy. With a sharp edge.”

Derek promised he would, and then he sauntered out through the back door while I wandered into the kitchen, over to the area where the refrigerator had been. I could feel how the floor gave a little when I stepped on it, and it looked like it had settled a little, too, toward the wall. I dug a marble out of Derek’s toolbox and put it on the floor. It rolled away from the nearest wall, picking up speed, until it smacked into the opposite wall and bounced back. I stooped to pick it up again and caught sight of something shiny in the debris where the refrigerator had stood. Grimacing as I stuck my fingers into the dust and fossilized crumbs, I picked up an earring. Sparkly rhinestones, shaped like a flower. Very pretty. Very 1940s.

I admit it, it was a little freaky. The earring had probably belonged to one of the dead women, lost under the refrigerator, only to surface now, seventeen or eighteen years later. Long after the person who had worn it was dust. Shivering a little, I stuffed it in my pocket, intending to show it to Derek when he came back inside. Maybe we should give it to the lawyer in Portland to forward on to Patrick Murphy. He might appreciate having it.

From outside, I could hear a screeching noise as Derek pulled open the hatch, giving entry into the crawlspace. We’d have to buy some oil to lubricate the hinges on the doors. The auditory effects were enough to induce night-mares. I wrote “lubricant” on the bottom of a long list of materials Derek had already started, and waited for him to speak. From below, I could hear scuffling noises and then, finally, Derek’s voice, muffled and distant. “It’s a lot better down here than I expected.”

I raised my own voice. “Really? How so?”

“Not as low, for one thing. It’s not actually a crawlspace. More of a walk-bent-over-at-the-waist space. You might be able to walk upright, though.” He chuckled.

“Hey! I am five feet two,” I said, offended, and I could hear another chuckle float through the floorboards.

“The floor’s just dirt. Hardpacked, but at least it isn’t concrete. I can haul a shovel down here and make some progress.”

“Works for me,” I said, since I wasn’t the one who’d have to do it. “So what do you need to make the repairs? I’m ready.”

Derek started firing off items and measurements, and for a few minutes, I was busy writing. “See any wild-life?” I asked, when he had wound down.

“There are some ants and beetles crawling around. And cobwebs. Lots of cobwebs. I’ll need a shower when I get outta here.”

“Anything else? Was the hatch locked?”

The hatch had not been locked, only closed and bolted, and Derek reported a lot of junk sitting around. Ratty blankets, old cans, empty bottles, old insulation, and newspapers.

“It looks like someone might have been hanging out down there,” he said when he came back into the house again, brushing cobwebs and dirt from his hair. “Not for a while, I think, but we should get a padlock and make sure the space is locked up tight anyway.”

I nodded, scribbling it at the bottom of the now even-longer list. “We need a ton of other things, too. I added lubricant, for the hinges.”

“Good idea.” Derek nodded approvingly. “For a second there, I thought I’d stepped on a cat. Do you think the screaming Lionel said he heard was someone opening the hatch?”

I nodded. “Or the front door. But the hatch is more likely, especially if it wasn’t locked. And squatters make more sense than ghosts, anyway. They could have been arguing or something, and that’s what he heard.”

“Sure,” Derek agreed. “So do you want me to go to the hardware store and pick up some of this stuff, then? Or do you want to come, too?”

I hesitated. There was a part of me that wanted to go with him. Or not so much wanted to go as wanted to avoid being left behind, alone. Still, I’m a big girl-in everything but stature-and I know there is no such thing as ghosts.

“I’d love to, but Kate said she’d be stopping by this afternoon. I don’t want her to drive all the way out here and then find nobody home.”

Kate McGillicutty had been my first friend when I came to town. She lived a couple of blocks from Aunt Inga’s house, in the heart of Waterfield, and was the owner of a local B and B, and she was someone who disliked Melissa James as heartily as I did. She also knew and liked Derek and had given us tons of assistance while we were renovating Aunt Inga’s house. Kate had great taste in interior decorating and a way of jollying Derek along, by alternately flirting and big-sistering him, that had been very helpful when he and I weren’t getting along as well as we do now.

“You want me to wait for her?” Derek asked. “That way you won’t have to stay here alone?”

He looked serious, but a hint of amusement lurked in the corners of his mouth. I shook my head. “That’s OK.”

“You sure?”

I nodded bravely. “Positive.”

He chucked me under the chin. “Just stay in the bathroom and work on the wallpaper. If someone knocks on the door, make sure it’s Kate before you open it.”

I promised I would, and then I followed him to the front door. When he was gone, I locked and bolted it behind him and attached the security chain before I headed down the hallway to the back bathroom again.

The house was laid out very nicely. The front door opened into an L-shaped living room-dining room combination, with the eat-in kitchen behind the dining room and the den behind the living room. The hallway leading to the bedrooms and bathrooms was in the den; there was a full bath with a combo tub-shower on the left and a small bedroom on the right. At the end of the hall, there were two more bedrooms: the master with an attached three-quarter bath-shower only-on the left, and another biggish bedroom on the right. Although it was the last thing I wanted to dwell on, I couldn’t help thinking that the little boy must have slept in the small room across from the big bathroom, closest to the den, while his grandparents had shared the bigger room at the end of the hall. That would have allowed him to sneak out undetected while his father murdered his wife and in-laws.

I tried not to think too much about any of that, though. Instead, I focused on what I was doing, running my scorer up and down the walls, its tiny serrated wheel punching long lines of tiny holes in the wallpaper, making a soft scratching noise as it went. Tomorrow I’d bring a radio to keep me company while I worked. Without Derek here, the place was eerily quiet. I started humming but stopped when I realized I was singing the theme song from the Twilight Zone.

I’d been at it for maybe ten minutes when I heard a sound. And then another. Footsteps. I stopped, holding my breath. What the hell?

“Derek?” I tried. “Is that you?”

But no, how could it be? I’d put the security chain on the door; he couldn’t have gotten in. So who was coming down the hallway toward the bathroom?

Maybe he came through the back door, I thought, grabbing at the possibility like a drowning woman grabs at a life raft. Yeah, he could have come through the back door. I’d watched him lock it after he came in from investigating the crawlspace, but there was no security chain on that door, just a dead bolt. That must be it.

“Derek? If you don’t stop scaring me right now, I’ll kill you!”

A little ribbing is OK-I’d come to expect that from him-but this was going too far.

“Derek? Dammit, say something, OK?”

Nothing. And yet the steps kept coming closer. Soft, inexorable steps on the fluffy carpet in the long hallway. Any second now, whoever was outside would be visible through the open door. I turned to face the opening, my legs stiff. The last time this had happened to me, in Aunt Inga’s house, the footsteps belonged to a man who had come to kill me. He had done his best, and might even have succeeded if Inky hadn’t tripped him as we struggled at the top of the stairs. With that fairly recent memory in mind, I could be excused for expecting the worst. I gripped my wallpaper scorer so tightly that my fingers hurt, and prepared for battle.

The steps reached the door and kept going. I stared at the doorway, but didn’t see a thing. No shimmer in the air, no shadow on the opposite wall, nothing. Yet the steps continued, toward the back bedrooms. I held my breath. Goose bumps popped out all over my body. I wondered insanely if I’d hear shots. Phantom shots, from a gun fired seventeen years ago. And then the screams of the victims.

Nothing happened. The steps stopped, as if they were shut off, and everything was quiet.

I admit it, I had to force myself to move. All I wanted to do was stay where I was and pretend that nothing had happened. My knees were shaking when I scrambled off the step stool and into the hallway, cautiously looking both ways before stepping from the bathroom onto the worn carpet of the hall. There was nothing to see in either direction.

I made myself walk down the hallway to the empty rooms at the end. There was no one there, either, not that I had expected anyone. I’d been looking straight at the doorway when the steps went past, and they weren’t made by a living person. Which left me with four options:

1. I’d heard the steps of a ghost,

2. someone was trying to freak me out,

3. my ears were playing tricks on me, or

4. I was losing my mind.

All right, so between us, I’ll admit to a certain shamefaced fascination with ghost stories. I’m a rational woman, so I know they’re not true-can’t possibly be true-but I enjoy them. As entertainment, I mean. I certainly wouldn’t want to ever come up against an actual, real-live ghost. (Which I hadn’t just done, because there’s no such thing.) And I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to scare me like this. Derek has a sense of humor, true, and one that often extended to making fun of yours truly, but in a sweet manner, that said that deep down he really likes me and just enjoys tweaking my tail. He’s not malicious. So whereas he might have enjoyed making me think he was a ghost for a minute, the joke would have ended with him appearing in the doorway with a “Boo!” and a kiss. He wouldn’t have carried the joke this far.

That left numbers three and four. There was nothing wrong with my ears that I knew of, and if I was insane, it had happened quickly. I’d been perfectly normal when I got up this morning, and I must have acted rationally throughout the day, or surely Derek would have remarked on it. When I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, I looked perfectly sane. A little pale, maybe. The freckles across the bridge of my nose stood out like a sprinkling of cinnamon over rice pudding. But under the circumstances, that was probably a sign of sanity rather than the opposite. Surely anyone in their right mind would be a little jumpy after something like this.

A knock on the front door startled me, and I made a face at myself in the mirror before heading out to open it.

“Wow!” Caitlin McGillicutty said when I’d gotten the door open. “This is a great place!”

I nodded, stepping aside to let her push past me and into the living room. “Haven’t you been here before?”

She shook her head, causing curls the color of molten copper to dance around her face. If I can’t have straight hair-and I can’t-I’d love to have big, bouncy curls like Kate’s. But no; I’m stuck with kinky strands of reddish-blond crimps.

I’d take Kate’s figure, too, if it came to it. She could give Marilyn Monroe a run for her money, whereas my figure is, if not exactly dainty, at least not swimsuit model material.

“I’ve never had occasion to be here, no,” she answered, her native Bostonian accent underlying her words. My father was from Boston, and listening to Kate always reminds me of him. “I’m not the type to go gawking at crime scenes. Especially crimes that happened ten years or more before I moved here. I’m not from Waterfield, remember?”

I nodded. I remembered. “I just thought maybe you’d been curious and had driven by before or something. You are dating the chief of police, so it wouldn’t be surprising if you took an interest.”

“ Wayne wasn’t chief when the shootings took place,” Kate said, abandoning the subject to turn in a slow circle, hands in the pockets of her sherry-colored corduroy jacket. The weather outside was just thinking of turning from summer to fall, and there had been a distinct snap in the air this morning. I had pulled out a jacket myself to wear over my jeans and T-shirt. Mine wasn’t a prosaic, single-colored corduroy, though; it was an old denim jacket with strategically placed appliqués and patches, and pink and white polka dots on the collar and pocket flaps, trimmed with white rickrack, and a row of small, pink elephants marching along the hem all the way around. Did I happen to mention that before I inherited my aunt’s house, I was a textile designer for a furniture company in Manhattan? My boss-and boyfriend at the time-had been on the traditional side, preferring his fabrics to be classical and elegant, so I’d had to exercise my creativity in my wardrobe instead, on my own time.

“Lots of potential,” Kate remarked after her leisurely overview of the living room and dining room. “The floors aren’t even that bad. They’ll probably just need a light sanding and a coat or two of polyurethane, and they’ll be good as new.”

I nodded, glancing down at the warm, honey-colored oak floors stretching throughout the common areas. “Derek was very happy when he saw them. Less work for him if he doesn’t have to sand everything multiple times.”

Kate sent me a commiserating look. “He still won’t let you operate the sander, huh?”

“He says it’ll run away with me. And he’s probably right. Although he’s getting better about letting me do things. He’s still a bit of a control freak, but…”

“But so are you.” Kate nodded. I shrugged. She added, looking around, “Speaking of Derek, where is the boy?”

Derek was thirty-four, hardly a boy any longer, and Kate was thirty-eight or thirty-nine and certainly didn’t have many years on the “boy,” but I declined to comment. Their relationship was about equal measure easy flirtation-they’d dated a few times when Kate first moved to town, just after Melissa left Derek-and half sisterly indulgence on Kate’s part, half brotherly exasperation on Derek’s. It worked for them, and I wasn’t about to get in the middle of it.

“He made a run to the hardware store. I knew you were coming, so I stayed behind.”

“And you weren’t afraid of being here by yourself?” She grinned and made woo-woo gestures with her fingers.

“I wasn’t. Although something creepy happened just before you knocked.”

“You’re kidding. What?”

I told her about the footsteps and watched her eyes widen as she took in the possibilities. “Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with your hearing,” she opined after I had finished my story, “or for that matter your sanity, so I guess you didn’t imagine it.”

I shook my head. I didn’t think I had imagined the footsteps, either.

“And I don’t see why anyone would want to play tricks on you. Or how anyone could, without a key. Unless it’s Derek, but it doesn’t seem his style, somehow.”

I shook my head again. “I’m going to ask him when he comes back, just because I want to cover all the bases, but I don’t think he’d do something like this.”

Kate nodded. “I could see him stringing you along for a minute, and then startling you when he shows up in the doorway, but I agree that he wouldn’t carry it this far. You know what that means, don’t you?”

I made a face. Did I ever.

“Ghosts,” Kate said.