Jennie Bentley - Spackled and Spooked

Derek told him we would, and Lionel stood for another second, shuffling his feet. “Place is haunted, you know,” he said at last, without looking at either of us. Derek quirked an eyebrow.

“Have you seen anything spooky?” I wanted to know. Lionel shrugged.

“Not much to see. Lights go on and off sometimes, is all. Shadows moving. I’ve heard ’em, though. Late at night. Screaming.”

I felt a chill go down my spine. “Screaming?”

Lionel nodded, his pale eyes catching mine for a second then sliding away. “He shot ’em in their sleep, you know, so they didn’t have time to scream. Guess they’re making up for it now.”

He stood for a moment while the blood drained out of my head, then he walked away, across the grass to the gravel edging the road. I kept my eye on him while Derek inserted the key in the lock and made sure the house was secure.

“That was interesting,” he said when he turned back to me, his voice deliberately light. I nodded with a last look at Lionel, who was just turning into his driveway. The house he lived in was another brick ranch, like all the houses on the street. This one was a dull gray in color, with overgrown bushes in the front yard. Just before he disappeared, Lionel turned around once and stared at us.

“I’m not sure if interesting is the word I’d choose, but yes, I guess it was. Do you think it’s true?”

Derek shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care. He’s probably just yanking our chains.”

“But what if it’s true?”

He answered my question with one of his own. “Are you planning to spend the night out here, Tinkerbell? No? Then I don’t think you have anything to worry about. If the screaming comes at night, we’ll just make sure we’re gone by sundown. Ready?” He put an arm around my shoulders and guided me down the steps toward the car.

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.