Spackled and Spooked

5

It wasn’t until we pulled to a stop outside Aunt Inga’s house-my house-on Bayberry Lane that I realized what I had done.

“Oh, my God!” I turned to Derek, my eyes wide, “we have to go back!”

“To Dad and Cora’s?” He put the truck back into gear, and we rolled away from the curb again. “Why? What did you forget? I have a key, if you left your purse there.”

“Not your dad and Cora’s. The house on Becklea. The cats!”

“Oops,” Derek said, his voice a lot calmer than mine. I fisted my hands.

“How could I have been so stupid? The poor things, they must be terrified!”

“Jemmy and Inky are cats, Avery,” Derek said, turning the corner. “They’re used to being alone, they’re safe inside the house, and if you’re worried about the footsteps scaring them, keep in mind that cats consort with witches. They’re used to supernatural phenomena. In fact, they’re probably curled up somewhere, sound asleep.”

“If you think you can talk me into leaving them there until tomorrow…”

Derek shook his head. “I’m driving, aren’t I? All I’m saying is that you needn’t worry. They’re fine. If you wanted to leave them until tomorrow, they’d still be fine, if a little upset.”

Undoubtedly he was right. Jemmy and Inky were used to their own company. They didn’t care much for mine, that’s for sure. Being alone wouldn’t bother them. Nor would the footsteps, if they came back. Being without food was another story. That would make them angry. But they’d survive overnight. Especially if there were mice. Still, Aunt Inga had left me the responsibility of taking care of Jemmy and Inky, and this was how I rose to the challenge?

Fifteen minutes later, we were back at the house at Becklea. Derek turned off the engine and turned to me. “Here we are.”

I nodded, not making a move to get out of the car. “Looks spooky, doesn’t it?”

“It’s just because it’s vacant and unlit,” Derek said, with a look around. “We should turn on the porch light before we leave again.”

“Are you sure that’s all? That it doesn’t look… creepy?”

Derek shrugged. “If it looks creepy, it’s only because you’re projecting. If you didn’t know what happened here, it would just look like an empty house. Or even an occupied house with nobody home. You can’t tell from here whether anyone lives here or not.”

“That’s true,” I admitted. Derek looked at me.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“You mean you weren’t planning to? Yes, of course I want you to come with me. I can’t handle both Jemmy and Inky on my own.”

“You wanna hold my hand, too?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” I admitted. Derek grinned.

“C’mon, then. Let’s get this show on the road.” He opened his car door. I did the same, and we met on the grass beside the truck. “Last one to the porch is a rotten egg.” He took off, laughter trailing after him. I let him run. I was wearing a dress and high heels, and besides, I enjoy watching him move. So while he ran hell for leather toward the front door, I minced across the grass in my pumps, doing my best to avoid sinking the three-inch heels too deeply into the ground.

By the time I reached the porch, Derek had already dug his keychain out of his pocket and managed to fumble the correct key into the lock. “After you,” he said with a bow, taking a step aside as he pushed the door in and fumbled for the porch light switch. I opened my mouth to respond in kind-“No, no; after you!”-because I sure as heck didn’t want to be the first one into the dark house. But before I could get a word out, we both froze where we stood, mouths open, while a scream cut through the air. High-pitched, shrill, terrified. The hair at the back of my neck stood at attention, and goose bumps popped up all over my body.

“One of the cats?” Derek asked, his voice amazingly steady, though not without a faint tremor. My own teeth shook like castanets when I answered.

“Don’t think so.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“Of course not.”

“Somebody’s messing with us.”

I nodded, teeth chattering. He plunged into the house, and a moment later, the dining room chandelier came on. Derek stalked into the kitchen and from there into the den, lights blazing on in his wake, while I stood where I was, trying to force my feet to cooperate but failing miserably.

A minute later he came back into the living room. “No cats.”

“No cats? But… where are they?”

“No idea,” Derek said. “They must have gotten out somehow.”

“Oh, no.” I looked around, not knowing quite what to do or where to start looking. Then something struck me. “How could they get out? We didn’t leave any windows open, did we? And we locked the door, right?”

“Right,” Derek said. “Seems there’s a way out we don’t know about. Either that, or someone else has a key to the place.”

“I’m not sure I like that idea,” I said, after a beat. He looked at me.

“I’m sure I don’t. Let’s go. We’d better see if we can find them.” He brushed past me, and headed down the stairs to the yard again. I was just about to follow, more slowly, when I heard a door slam.

“What in blazes is going on here?”

I minced down the stairs to the grass. Derek was halfway across the lawn by now, but he turned so we were both facing Venetia Rudolph’s house.

It was going on eleven P.M., and the older woman must have been all tucked up and ready for bed. She was wearing plaid pajama pants under a dark dressing gown, and on her feet were mannish slippers. Her gray hair was standing out around her head, and she was obviously annoyed. “What is the meaning of this?” she added.

I glanced at Derek, who said politely, “The meaning of what, Miss Rudolph?”

“That… that… squealing!” She looked from one to the other of us.

“One of the cats,” Derek said, at the same time as I asked innocently, “What squealing?”

Venetia Rudolph snorted. “Bad enough that you’re carrying on inside the house all day, but do you have to do it outside, too? At night?”

“We weren’t carrying on,” I said.

“We just came back to make sure that everything’s all right,” Derek added, obviously loath to admit that we’d forgotten the cats earlier.

“And when Derek opened the door,” I finished, “we heard a scream. It was probably one of the cats.” It hadn’t sounded like one of the cats, but they made a handy excuse. I only wished we hadn’t oiled the hinges on the door, or I could have blamed it on that instead. “It wasn’t me. I swear. I don’t squeal. Ever.”

“Sometimes you squeal,” Derek said, his voice soft. I flushed and hoped the night was dark enough to hide it.

“It didn’t sound like a cat,” Venetia Rudolph said. “If you didn’t squeal, who did?”

I shrugged. “No idea. I haven’t seen anyone else around. It wasn’t you, was it?”

She sniffed. “Certainly not. And if you are going to be insulting, young lady, I’m going back to bed.” She did, her back as straight as if she’d swallowed a broom handle.

“Huh.” I turned to Derek, after the door had slammed on the house next door. “Do you think it was her?”

“Could have been.” He walked up the steps to the front porch again. “I don’t suppose you could tell where the scream came from, could you? Inside or outside?”

He was inspecting the door jamb, running his fingers over it, his nose a scant two inches from the wood in the dark.

“I’m afraid not,” I said, hugging myself. I tried to make believe it was because the night was chilly and I wasn’t dressed warmly, but I was spooked. The darkness, the wind rustling the dry leaves on the trees, and the wispy clouds skittering across the moon like ghostly fingers-it all combined with the memory of that bone-chilling scream, which hadn’t sounded like it came from anywhere in particular; it was just all around me… “Do you see anything?”

“It’s too dark,” Derek said in disgust, straightening. “We’ll have to get a new bulb tomorrow. There’s nothing obviously rigged here, and if someone set something up, to make a scream go off the next time one of us opened the door, they did a pretty good job.”

“Maybe it was a coincidence,” I suggested.

“Huh!” Derek responded darkly. He slammed the door shut and locked it, his movements crisp and annoyed. “Let’s go home. I’ll have another look in the morning. We’ll be back here all too soon.”

“You can say that again,” I muttered. “What about the cats?”

“They’ve probably found their way back to Miss Rudolph’s catnip. This way.”

He headed around the corner of the house. I followed, balancing carefully on my high heels, while I thought unkind thoughts about Jemmy and Inky.

They were right where Derek had predicted, and as soon as they recognized us, they came trotting to wind themselves around our ankles, complaining loudly about being left behind. Derek snagged Inky, while Jemmy sat down in front of me to grumble. I bent to talk to him. “I’m sorry, Jem. In all the excitement of changing and getting to Ben and Cora’s house on time, I forgot that you were here. You were probably curled up in a spot of sunlight somewhere, sleeping, weren’t you? Sorry about that. It won’t happen again. Tomorrow you can stay home.”

Jemmy spoke again, a whiny note in his voice. Maine coon cats, for all their imposing size, have rather soft, kittenish voices. I reached out and carefully stroked his head. When he didn’t object, I ran my hand down his back and under his belly, to scoop him up. He stiffened for a moment and then allowed me to tuck him under my arm and carry him away from the enticing catnip.

The bright light of morning did nothing to shed more light on the problem of the scream. Derek went over the door, the jamb, and the surrounding area with meticulous attention-if he’d been in possession of a magnifying glass, I don’t doubt he’d have whipped it out-but without finding anything that didn’t belong there. No unexplained wires, no switches, no hidden speakers. He was grumbling angrily when he gathered up his heavy-duty gloves and his rented hole digger, which looked like a giant corkscrew with a handle, and headed for the crawlspace.

I got busy in the bathroom. While we worked on Aunt Inga’s house together, the structural improvements had been Derek’s domain, while the design was mine. Naturally I’d taken a hand in tearing out or painting or spackling or anything else he let me do, and he helped implement the cosmetic touches I wanted, but since I’m the one with the design background while he’s the one with the hands-on experience, the division of labor made sense. While he crawled under the house, digging holes and pouring concrete, I got busy planning what to do with the main bathroom.

As blank canvases go, it wasn’t bad at all. When we started out, there’d been a molded plastic tub on one wall, a toilet and sink base on the other. The tub had been torn out yesterday and was currently reposing in the Dumpster, but we had left the toilet and sink intact for now. The sink base was your basic fake oak with two doors that didn’t quite meet in the middle, under a top of molded white plastic. The toilet was a toilet: also basic white, with the wood-grained seat and lid that were so popular in the ’80s. The floor had been covered by sheet vinyl, black and white, but now only the subfloor was left, and the shredded vinyl was with the tub, in the Dumpster. The floor around the toilet was rotted, and Derek would have to replace it before I could start doing any serious decorating. Still, I could take measurements and plan what I wanted to do.

I was thinking of doing something retro and funky, and I hoped to figure out a way to incorporate those Mary Quant daisies I’d thought about the other day. Gluing them, three feet tall, to the wall in the hallway might be a little too mod for most people, but I could still use them, scaled down. A house with three bedrooms would likely appeal to families with children, and this bathroom would be the kids’ bath, seeing as the master bedroom had its own attached bath with a tiled shower. So this hall bathroom was the perfect place to add some funky touches. I had visions of bubblegum pink, but I supposed I could use banana yellow or pale green instead-something that would appeal to boys as well as girls, and to older children and adults, too. The rest of the bathroom would be bland to the point of being boring: plain white tile on the floor and around the tub to go with any color we decided to paint the walls. The fixtures would also be gleaming white, with bright chrome faucets and handles, and we’d install a slender pedestal sink instead of the clunky cabinet that was there now. Or maybe one of those vessel sinks that looks like a salad bowl. If they weren’t too expensive. If they were-and I thought they might be-maybe I’d just use a salad bowl instead…

I’d been at it for maybe forty-five minutes when I noticed, almost subconsciously, that the constant humming of the hole digger had ceased. No sooner had I realized this, than the back door opened.

“Avery?” Derek’s voice called. It sounded strained. My heart jumped in my chest, and I scrambled out into the hallway.

“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

He was standing inside the back door, jeans and boots dirty. And he shook his head in response to my worried question, but of course he’d do that anyway, even if he had cut off a limb. It’s the manly thing to do.

“Are you sure?” I probed. “You don’t sound like you’re OK. What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Not to me. But we have to call Wayne.”

Chief of Police Wayne Rasmussen? “Why?”

“Because I found a human bone,” Derek said.

“Oh, my God. Are you sure?”

“Left ulna,” Derek said. “Elbow bone. Medial lower arm.”

I did a mental duh! Of course he was sure. He was a doctor. He probably knew the name of every single bone in the human body and could identify them all by smell. Still, I felt I had to try one more time. “Are you sure it isn’t just the… um… femur of a dead dog or something?”

Derek looked upset. “Yeah. I wish that was the case. But it’s definitely human.”

I gave up. “Fine. I’ll take your word for it. Where did you find it? Under the house?”

“Yeah. I drilled a hole, looked down into it to make sure it was deep enough, and found the bone. The hole digger must have cut it in two.”

“Are there more?” I asked.

“It’s not as if someone could lose an ulna and not notice. It isn’t something you can take off and leave laying around, like that earring you picked up the other day. I didn’t see any more, but if there’s one human bone down there, they’re all there, believe me. The whole kit and caboodle. Now do you see why we need Wayne?”

I nodded. I saw.

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