Jennie Bentley - Spackled and Spooked

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.

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.