Spackled and Spooked

3

There was another knock on the door, and I answered Kate over my shoulder as I went to let Derek in. “I’m sorry but I don’t accept that.”

“Don’t accept what?” Derek asked, at the same time as Kate said, “What’s not to accept? You’re not crazy. You’re not having weird auditory hallucinations. Nobody else could have gotten in, and we agreed it wasn’t Derek. So what’s left?”

“What wasn’t Derek?” Derek said, looking from one to the other of us. He was carrying several plastic bags from the hardware store. I ignored him.

“Not that. There has to be another explanation. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” Derek said. Kate turned to him and explained what had happened while he was gone. He shook his head.

“Wasn’t me. I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t have done it, anyway. I wasn’t here.”

“Neither was anyone else,” I muttered. Derek put the bags down on the floor and put an arm around me.

“You OK?”

I nodded. I was fine. “Just a little weirded out. But I guess I must have imagined it.”

Kate snorted but didn’t speak. Derek sent her a look over my head. “I didn’t know you believed in ghosts, Kate. You don’t have any at the B and B, do you?”

Kate shook her head. “I wish. Not that I can complain about the business I do, but things are slowing down as it gets colder, and a ghost or two would be a big draw during the winter months. People love spending the night in a haunted house. I could do special Halloween packages, candlelight tours, trips through the Waterfield cemetery…”

“You could do all those things anyway,” I said. “Just invent a ghost. Nobody’s going to know the difference. It’s not like anyone’s ever actually seen a ghost in one of those haunted inns.”

“We-e-ell,” Kate said, drawing the word out. I waited for her to continue, but when she didn’t, I had to ask.

“Have you seen a ghost?”

“Well… I’m not sure. I think I may have.”

Derek rolled his eyes, dropped his arm from around my shoulders, and bent to pick up his bags from the floor again. “Talk loudly,” he told her over his shoulder as he headed for the kitchen, “this ought to be good.”

Kate shrugged a little sheepishly. “I’ll be the first to admit that I’m predisposed, OK? I’d love to see a ghost. So it’s entirely possible that I may have imagined it.”

“But…?”

“But I don’t think so.” She had sunk her even, white teeth into her bottom lip, but her eyes were clear and guileless. If she was making it up, she was a better liar than I gave her credit for.

“So where did you see this ghost?” Derek asked from the kitchen. He had lined the shopping bags up on the old vinyl counter and was sorting through the contents. Kate glanced from him to me.

“ Vermont. About five years ago, when I was thinking of starting the B and B. I took a couple of days to drive around New England to visit a few B and Bs and inns.”

“Checking out the competition?” Derek asked.

“Pretty much. See how they looked, how they were run, that kind of thing.”

“And?”

“And I spent the night at a place in St. Albans, where they claim to have ghosts. Some guy who supposedly hangs out in the dining room, and a woman named Eileen, who was married to one of the former owners. She died young. Of course I asked to stay in Eileen’s room…”

“Of course.” I nodded. “And what did you see?”

Kate shrugged again. “I think I woke up in the middle of the night and saw Eileen sitting at the dressing table. But of course it was late, and dark, and I had just woken up…”

“Of course.” Derek nodded. I sent him a quelling glance though the doorway and turned back to Kate.

“It must have been very scary.”

She laughed. “Are you kidding? It was great. I told the owners about it when I came down to breakfast the next morning, and they said that a lot of people had reported seeing the same thing. It was an eerie place, anyway. You could sense something not quite right about it.”

“Can you sense something not quite right about this place?” I asked. Kate looked around, her nose quivering like a pointer’s snout. Derek smothered a chuckle.

“Not a thing,” Kate said cheerfully.

“Me, either. It feels like a friendly place, doesn’t it? If I hadn’t known what happened here, I wouldn’t worry at all.”

“And if Lionel hadn’t opened his big mouth,” Derek reminded me. I nodded.

“Who’s Lionel?” Kate asked.

“Some kid who lives down the street. Said he used to be friends with the little boy who lived here. Patrick.”

“And he says the place is haunted? What has he seen?”

I repeated what Lionel had told us, and also my suspicion that what he had heard might have been the squealing hinges on the access door to the crawlspace. “There have been squatters down there, Derek says.”

“Makes sense,” Kate admitted. “But what about the lights going on and off and the shadows?”

“Squatters made it into the house at some point? Or Lionel imagined it? If his friend’s family was brutally murdered here, it’s bound to leave scars.”

“Or he said it to scare you,” Kate suggested.

“Why would he do that?”

She shrugged. “For fun? Some people are like that. You probably turned pale and shaky, and he had a good laugh when he got home.”

“He didn’t look like he was planning to laugh,” I said, with a shiver, remembering that last look Lionel had directed over his shoulder at us. It had lasted a second too long and had been what I could describe only-at least from a distance-as penetrating. “More like he was trying to see through my head into my brain.”

“Or maybe he was just checking you out,” Derek added, with a grin. The thought didn’t seem to bother him. I wondered if it had bothered him when other men looked at Melissa. And then I wondered whether I should care. “He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who gets to see naked women all that often.”

“For all you know, he might be married,” I said.

Derek shook his head. “Not a chance. I’ve seen his type before. He lives with his mother, and she cooks his meals and washes his clothes.”

“Or he has a wife and a couple of kids. Or a swinging lifestyle up at the Shamrock on weekends.”

“I’ve seen the mother. Puttering around outside their house,” Derek said.

“Oh.” That figured. “In that case, I guess you’re right.”

“I’m always right,” Derek said, with an infuriatingly smug look on his face.

“So let me see the rest of the house,” Kate said, and I abandoned Derek to show her around and get her opinion on what she thought we ought to do as far as sprucing the place up.

Kate stuck around for the rest of the afternoon and helped us scrape wallpaper and pull nails and in general make the house as much of a blank slate as possible. Most of her time was spent scooting around on her butt, helping Derek pull up tacking strips from around all the walls where the wall-to-wall carpets had been fastened. We all ended the day doing the same thing. It doesn’t take long to rip out the carpets themselves, rolling them up and tossing them in the Dumpster; it’s yanking up all the tacking strips and staples that’s time consuming. So by the end of the day, with Kate’s help, all the stained, tan carpet was gone from the hallway and bedrooms as well as the common rooms, and tomorrow, Derek would start ripping out the kitchen cabinets.

“By Wednesday morning, I’ll be able to go underneath the house and put up some supports,” he explained while we were driving home in the gathering dark. “That’ll have to be done before we can start putting in the new kitchen cabinets. The floors have to be level.”

I nodded. As my experiment with the marble had shown me, the floors were anything but.

Remembering the marble reminded me of the earring I had found, and I dug in my pocket and pulled it out. “Look at this. I found it in the dust where the refrigerator used to be.”

The rhinestones caught the headlights of the cars passing by and reflected them around the car. Derek glanced at it and turned his attention back to the road.

“Earring? Must have belonged to one of the women, I guess. Mrs. Murphy, or her mother.”

“That’s what I figured. Do you suppose we ought to send it to the lawyer in Portland? Just in case Patrick would like to have it? He might not have much else left from his family.”

Derek hesitated. “We could, I suppose.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“Don’t know if I’d want to be reminded, if it were me. He sold the house, after all.”

“That’s true,” I said. “How about I put it away, and we wait awhile? If we give it some time, maybe you’ll think differently.”

“Works for me,” Derek said, with a shrug. “So what do you want to do for dinner tonight? You feel like cooking? You want me to?”

“I could go for some pizza,” I said, knowing my own culinary limitations only too well and becoming increasingly familiar with his.

“There’s a place called Guido’s just over the hill there. A place to hang out for the Barnham College kids, mostly. Is it OK if we stop?”

“Sure,” I said. With a name like Guido’s, the pizza was probably pretty good, and I’m not so old yet that I feel out of place with the college crowd. Plus, it’s always fun to watch the coeds make eyes at Derek, who has casual, scruffy charm down to a science.

Guido’s turned out to be everything I thought it would be and more. A low-slung cinderblock building with a neon sign outside, blinking “HOT-HOT-HOT” like a donut shop. Or a strip club. The parking lot was full of trucks and economy cars with student parking stickers and-often-out-of-state license plates. Inside, there were low ceilings, booths around all the walls, and tables crammed cheek by jowl in the space between. Every table had a red and white checkered tablecloth on it and an empty bottle of Chianti anchoring a flickering candle. Sinatra was crooning from speakers in the corners, although it was hard to hear him over the buzz of voices. The place was packed to the rafters with college students, sitting, standing, and hanging from the lamps like monkeys. Or if they weren’t, that was the impression they gave.

There was no such thing as a hostess on duty, so after a moment’s hesitation to survey the terrain, Derek took my hand and pulled me after him down the two steps to the concrete floor and through the madding crowd. We ended up at a small table for two tucked into a corner by the door to the kitchen, where Derek put me out of harm’s way and risked his own life and limb sitting with his back to the room and the swinging door.

It wasn’t long before a gum-popping coed in a skin-tight T-shirt and low-riding jeans wiggled her way over to our table. Her name was Candy, and she was at our-or rather at Derek’s-service. She looked at him when she said it, and for all the attention she paid me, he might as well have been there alone.

I rolled my eyes but hesitated to assert ownership. For one thing, I wasn’t sure just how firmly cemented our relationship was-four months ago, I hadn’t known this guy existed-and besides, she’d probably just look at me down the length of her perfect nose and smile pityingly. So I kept my mouth shut and my teeth firmly clenched while Derek ordered a pizza with everything, a Diet Coke for me, and a Moxie for himself.

“Be right back,” Candy promised, making sure to swish both her hips and her ponytail as she sashayed away from the table. Derek turned to me and opened his mouth, but before he could get a word out, another female hip bumped him companionably in the shoulder.

“What are you two doing here? Hi, Avery.”

The hip was attached to a tall, ultra-feminine body with a milky white complexion and long, mahogany red hair. At almost twenty, Shannon McGillicutty had her mother’s centerfold figure, and tonight, it was set off to full advantage in jeans and a cropped, white sweater. In her ears were dangling rhinestone earrings, very similar to the one I had in my pocket. Shannon adored Derek, whom she’d had a bit of a crush on when she was younger, and she seemed to like me well enough, too. Any crush she’d had seemed to be a thing of the past.

“Eating,” Derek answered. “What are you doing here?”

“Same thing.” Shannon smiled at him then hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “Josh and Paige and Ricky are at a table over on the other side. We’ve got room for two more, if you want to join us.”

Derek glanced at me. I glanced at the rhinestones in Shannon ’s ears. “Sure. It isn’t like we’d have much privacy as it is.”

“This definitely isn’t the place for a romantic tête-à tête,” Shannon agreed. “C’mon.” She grabbed Derek’s arm and hauled him to his feet. He waited until I’d stepped out from the corner before he took my hand and towed me through the crowd again, this time toward the far wall.

In a big booth built into the far corner sat Shannon ’s friend Paige. The petite blonde was flanked on either side by tall, dark-haired young men, and appeared dwarfed by them both.

The young man on her left I was familiar with. His name was Josh, and he was the son of Kate’s boyfriend, Waterfield Chief of Police Wayne Rasmussen. Josh had his dad’s lanky height of six feet four inches or so, and dark, curly hair. He also had round glasses and a healthy disrespect for authority, unless that authority happened to be his best friend’s. Shannon had him firmly wrapped around her finger. I wondered if she knew that he was crazy about her, and that was why he put up with her bossing him around. He didn’t make a big deal of it, but if I had figured it out just a few weeks after moving here, it didn’t seem likely that Shannon hadn’t. Yet, if she knew, she gave no sign.

The other young man was a stranger to me. He looked like he might be a couple of years older than the others, in his early twenties rather than hanging on to his teens by the skin of his teeth, and he was broader in the shoulders and chest than Josh and a few inches shorter, wearing a denim shirt, collar open and sleeves rolled up to show muscular forearms.

“Ricky, this is Derek and Avery,” Shannon said, sliding into the booth next to Josh. Ricky nodded shyly, a pair of bright blue eyes peering out at us through curtains of dark hair. “Ricky Swanson, you two. You remember Paige, of course.”

I nodded. “Hi, Paige. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I’ve been busy,” Paige murmured, with a surreptitious glance at Ricky.

“So what are you two doing out this way?” Josh wanted to know. “Not exactly your usual haunt, is it?”

“So far from the bright lights of downtown Waterfield, you mean?” Derek grinned.

I snorted, and he put an arm around my shoulders and laughed. Waterfield is a very small, sleepy town, with no bright lights to speak of. No nightlife beyond the Shamrock and places like Guido’s, and very little excitement. Melissa James was doing her best to change that, with her petitions to the city council and zoning board to be allowed to develop more land, build more houses, and bring in more business, but Waterfield still clung to its small-town atmosphere. When I first moved here from Manhattan, I thought it was the slowest, most somnolent, boring place on the face of the earth. Now that I’d been here a while, I’d developed an appreciation for the slow pace and friendly folks, although it must be said that I hadn’t tried to stay through a winter yet. Derek had warned me that the downeast winters could be brutal, and I’ll readily admit I wasn’t looking forward to it.

I turned to Ricky. “Did you grow up around here?”

“ Pittsburgh,” Ricky said.

“He transferred in at the beginning of the semester,” Paige explained. “Professor Alexander asked Josh to show him around.”

I guess she was trying to explain what he was doing with their tight-knit little threesome.

“Oh. Too bad. I hoped you might be able to tell me whether there’s any truth to the rumors that the house on Becklea is haunted.” I tried to make it sound like I didn’t care much, but I didn’t succeed very well.

Josh replied for the group. “We were very small when the murders happened, Avery. Shannon wasn’t here yet. And I don’t remember hearing anything about ghosts when I was growing up. You, Paige?” He looked over at Paige, who shook her head. “By the time we got to high school, though, some of the older kids would dare each other to go over there and spend the night.”

“Really?” I said. Ricky ducked his head for a sip of Coke. Derek and I still hadn’t gotten our drinks. I guess maybe our change of tables had flummoxed the nubile Candy, and she was wandering around looking for us. “That’s a dare I don’t think I’d take. We met one of the neighbors, and he said he hears… um… noises at night.”

“Noises?” Shannon repeated. Ricky peered sideways at me through his curtains of hair.

“Screams,” I said succinctly, and then changed the subject, looking around. “Do you suppose Candy is lost? I want my Diet Coke.”

“I’ll go look for her,” Shannon said readily, getting up. I opened my mouth to argue-I was sitting on the end and could just as easily do it; in fact, it was part of the reason I had suggested it-but she added, “You’re not familiar with this place, Avery. Just let me find her, OK? I have something to say to Candy anyway.”

“Sure,” I said, sinking back down. It was a small cinderblock building, no likelihood of my getting lost, but if Shannon wanted to talk to Candy, she was welcome to.

“Screams?” Josh repeated when Shannon had walked away and he could no longer see her.

So much for changing the subject. I sighed. Derek nodded. “We think maybe he heard the hinges on the basement door. It sounds like a cat in heat.”

“And I heard footsteps this afternoon,” I added. “When nobody was there.”

“Cool!” Josh said. “Can we check it out sometime?”

“How are you with a palm sander?” Derek answered. Josh was in the midst of explaining just how wonderfully handy he was when Shannon slid back into the booth next to him. Hard on her heels was Candy with our drinks, followed by two other ponytailed coeds carrying pizzas.

We got busy eating, and for a minute or two, nothing in the way of meaningful conversation took place while we all filled our plates and our mouths. After a break, I looked over at Shannon. “I was looking at your earrings earlier.”

She tweaked one of them, causing prisms of light to play across the wall. Her nails were polished and tinted pale pink. “These old things? Josh gave them to me for Christmas a few years ago.” She grinned at him.

“Four,” Josh said, his mouth full of pizza.

“They were all the rage back then. Every girl in school had a pair. You did, too, didn’t you, Paige?”

Paige nodded. She was carefully dissecting a piece of pizza, blotting off as much of the sauce as she could reach with a napkin. “Josh got a pair for me, too. But then I lost one.” She shrugged.

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever been inside the house on Becklea?” I said.

Paige shook her head.

“You found an earring in there?” Josh said, interested. I nodded, digging in my pocket. He extended his hand across the table, and I dropped the shiny thing into his palm. He turned it over and showed it to Shannon. “Looks just like yours, doesn’t it?”

She nodded, her head practically on his shoulder. He tilted his head, and I could see his nostrils flare as he breathed in.

“It has to be older than four years, though, Josh.” She looked up at him, then she straightened before she added, “Nobody’s lived in that house for seventeen years, at least. Right?”

“That’s true,” Josh admitted. Ricky extended a meaty paw, and Josh passed the shiny trinket over to him. Ricky ran the tip of his finger over it, hunching so far forward that his hair totally obscured his face.

“We figure it probably belonged to the mother,” Derek said. “Or maybe the mother-in-law. I’m sure they had these kinds of earrings back in the 1980s, too.”

“No doubt.” I held out my hand, and Ricky placed the earring on my palm. I stuck it back in my pocket. “We’re considering sending it to the lawyer in Portland. The one the Murphy kid hired to help him sell the house. Just in case the boy would like to have it.”

“Sure,” Shannon said. Josh nodded, although he probably would have agreed with anything Shannon said.

“Of course,” my mother said a couple of hours later, after I’d changed into my jammies and was curled up on the newly upholstered loveseat in Aunt Inga’s front parlor talking on the phone. “I remember the Murphy murders. They made the news all up and down the East Coast. We lived in New York at the time, but it happened in Waterfield, so I took a special interest. Whatever would possess you to buy the old Murphy house, Avery?”

“Well,” I said. “Derek went out and made an offer on it while I was away in New York. We had just talked about going into business together. It’s taken all this time to come to an agreement with the owner. I mean, he showed it to me before we closed, and told me we could change our minds if we wanted to, but I could tell he really wanted it, so I couldn’t really tell him I didn’t want it, you know.”

“That seems a little inconsiderate of him,” my mother sniffed.

I heard a noise on the porch, like a footfall, and glanced toward the window. Was it Derek coming back for something he’d forgotten? “I do like it, and it’s going to be a ton of fun working on it, but I guess we could have discussed it more…”

Mother agreed. “But from everything you’ve told me about Derek, he doesn’t sound like an inconsiderate jerk.”

I shook my head. “He’s not. He’s actually a very nice guy. Much nicer than anyone else I’ve ever dated.” I kept my eye on the window but couldn’t see anyone.

“You did have some bad luck with the men you got involved with in your twenties,” mother agreed diplomatically. “And then of course there was Philippe…”

“Don’t remind me.” Lying, cheating, philandering-and that was without counting how he’d made me totally subjugate my creativity to his in business. “Derek isn’t like that. He values my input. He may not agree with it all the time, but when I suggest something he doesn’t like, he tells me why it won’t work or why I shouldn’t do it, instead of just putting his foot down or trying to make me feel stupid.”

There didn’t seem to be anyone on the front porch. It had probably just been one of the cats walking across the wooden boards. I had noticed before how Jemmy, with his roughly twenty pounds, could make himself sound remarkably like a human. Nevertheless, I unfolded myself from the sofa and padded toward the front door on bare feet, extolling Derek’s virtues as I went.

“He’s talented, and intelligent, and has a great sense of humor, and he was confident enough to follow his dreams and walk away from a medical career to be a home renovator instead, even if it meant possibly upsetting his father and although it definitely meant that his wife would leave him, not that she was much of a loss; things were already pretty rocky…”

I had to stop to take a breath, having talked myself into a semantic corner anyway. The outside light next to the door was lit, and I peered out, seeing nothing that shouldn’t be there. Carrying on, I said, “And he’s really good-looking, although not in a flashy way; you know, the way Philippe was…” My ex-boyfriend favored skin-tight leather pants and flowing poet-shirts open halfway down his tanned chest, while his replacement spends most of his time in threadbare jeans and soft, faded T-shirts that make me want to snuggle closer. “And although he likes it when I dress up and look nice, he doesn’t expect me to be perfect all the time, either. It’s very relaxing, actually.”

Away from the porch, down in the yard, a shadow moved. I leaned forward until my nose hit the glass in the carved front door. It was impossible to see who-or what-was there; the darkness distorted size and shape until all I was looking at was a slightly darker blackness, something sliding along the white pickets of the fence before slipping through the gate and out into the street. It might have been a cat or a dog, or maybe a raccoon or a fox. We see them occasionally. I let out a breath I wasn’t aware I’d been holding.

“Something wrong?” my mother asked.

I straightened up. “Nothing.” She was on the West Coast, clear across the country; there was nothing she could do about someone or something in my yard. Nothing except worry, and there was no point in that. Whoever or whatever was gone anyway.

“Oh,” mother said. “Well, I’m looking forward to meeting Derek. I don’t suppose you two have any plans to come out to California anytime soon?”

“None, I’m afraid. What about you? Any plans to come back east? There’s still a lot of Aunt Inga’s stuff sitting around for you to look through, just in case there’s something you’d like to have.”

I fully expected her to say she had no plans whatsoever of coming back to Waterfield, so I was surprised when she hesitated. “Between you and me, Avery, I’m trying to convince Noel to go to Maine for Christmas. I miss the snow, and being a native Californian, he’s never experienced a true New England winter. But it isn’t a done deal yet. I’ll let you know how it turns out.”

“I’ll put Derek on alert,” I said. Mother giggled, and we finished the conversation by making plans. It wasn’t until I was in bed, listening to the yowling complaints of Jemmy and Inky, who didn’t want to be locked in the utility room instead of stalking prey in the night outside, that I once again remembered the shadow in the yard. But by then I was so tired that all I had time to do was wonder who or what might have been sneaking around in Aunt Inga’s yard in the middle of the night, before I fell asleep.