Do-It-Yourself - Spackled And Spooked Part 2

"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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sistance 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 h.e.l.l?

"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 crawls.p.a.ce, 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 s.h.i.+mmer in the air, no shadow on the opposite wall, nothing. Yet the steps continued, toward the back bedrooms. I held my breath. Goose b.u.mps 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 circ.u.mstances, 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-s.h.i.+rt. Mine wasn't a prosaic, single-colored corduroy, though; it was an old denim jacket with strategically placed appliques 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 cla.s.sical 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 relations.h.i.+p 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.

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. n.o.body 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. n.o.body'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 compet.i.tion?" 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 crawls.p.a.ce. "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?"