Jennie Bentley - Spackled and Spooked

“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.”