Миранда Джеймс - Fixing To Die

Now An’gel wished the woman would leave so she could share her latest interesting bit of news with Dickce and Benjy. She wanted their take on what she had observed.

Perhaps sensing that her presence was no longer desired, Mrs. Pace rose from the sofa. “I have enjoyed chatting with you, but it’s time I resumed my attempts to converse with the spirits here. I am going into the library. Perhaps the spirit who turns the pages in the dictionary will be there and willing to talk to me.” She moved in a stately fashion from the room. A few moments later An’gel heard a door close, and she thought Mrs. Pace had shut herself up in the library.

“Thank goodness,” An’gel said. “I’ve been about to burst to tell you what I saw and heard upstairs right before I came back down. I want to know if you agree with my interpretation of it.”

“Go ahead, then,” Dickce said when An’gel failed to continue straightaway. “I’m dying to hear about it.”

An’gel glanced toward the hall. Perhaps she should go close the door in case anyone happened by. The house was quiet around them. She heard no sounds of activity from anywhere else, and she decided the door could stay open.

She did lean forward in her chair, however, and lower her voice while she related the story to her sister and Benjy. She stumbled a bit over the vulgar word Wilbanks had used but thought that she had managed to convey it well enough without actually repeating it. When she’d finished, she sat back and waited for their reactions.

Benjy appeared briefly shocked, perhaps more by An’gel’s euphemism than by the act itself, she thought. Dickce didn’t appear to be fazed by any of it. She chuckled when An’gel finished.

“That does add some spice to the mix,” she said.

“I’ll say.” Benjy nodded.

“I can’t tell Mary Turner,” An’gel said. “Unless it turns out to have a bearing on the situation here.”

“No, you can’t, not yet,” Dickce replied. “Right now, I have to say, Nathan Gamble is my chief suspect in all this. If the contents of that room are the object of these shenanigans, I figure he’s trying to spook Mary Turner so badly that she’ll agree to let him have everything, will or no will.”

“I would say the same,” An’gel said. “I’m glad to know we’re working on the same assumption here. So far I haven’t been able to come up with any other reason for all this.”

“What if it really turns out to be a ghost, and not some person pretending to be one?” Benjy asked. “What then?”

“Despite what has happened since we’ve been here,” An’gel said after a moment’s thought, “I don’t think I really believe that a ghost is responsible. I don’t have any explanation yet how my dress and my nightgown were moved around in my room. I also don’t have any explanation for what I saw on the staircase this morning. But until I’m convinced there’s absolutely no other explanation possible, I don’t believe the answer is a spirit.”

Benjy nodded. “I agree with you, but I haven’t experienced anything weird yet.” He grinned suddenly. “Who knows what I’d think afterwards?”

“I’m more open-minded than you, An’gel,” Dickce said. “I believe there are sometimes things that we can’t explain in any rational way. We’ve never been able to explain the odd things that happen at Riverhill, you know.”

“Yes, I know.” An’gel grimaced. “But then we haven’t really had anyone in to look at the house. An engineer, I mean, or an architect. There’s probably a perfectly rational explanation for what we’ve experienced.”

An’gel became aware that neither Dickce nor Benjy was paying attention to her. They had identical expressions, a mixture of fear and awe. “What on earth is the matter with you two?”

Dickce swallowed hard. “Look behind you.”

An’gel turned in her chair to see the parlor door closing slowly.

All by itself.

CHAPTER 14

For a few seconds An’gel couldn’t breathe. The sight of the door closing on its own felt threatening in a way that none of the other incidents had done. Were they being shut in?

Benjy jumped up from the sofa and scrambled to get to the door without knocking anything over. An’gel, her breath back, marveled at how light on his feet he was. Within seconds he reached the door, perhaps an inch from being closed, and grabbed the knob. He jerked the door open and stepped into the hall.

An’gel and Dickce waited for him to come back into the parlor. When he did, perhaps thirty seconds later, he was shaking his head.

“There was nobody out there that I could see,” Benjy said. “This is the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.” He stood about a foot from the door, now still, and stared at it. Then he began to examine every section of the door and the door frame.

An’gel and Dickce, after a quick glance at each other to make sure they were both all right, sat in silence until Benjy finished his examination of the door. They watched as he felt along all the edges and then ran his hands carefully over the surface of the door and the frame. After a couple of minutes, he stepped away and shook his head.

“I don’t see anything attached to it or any kind of device that could make it close automatically. I guess maybe the ghost was trying to make us believe it’s real.” He came back to the sofa and dropped down, looking troubled.

“It certainly looks that way,” An’gel said. “Thank you for being so quick to check it out. I confess I don’t think I could have moved even if the ceiling had started to cave in on us.”

“Me either.” Dickce shivered. “Part of me wants to go upstairs right now and pack as fast as I can so we can drive home.”

“I know how you feel,” An’gel said, “but I’m not going. You can go if you want, but I’m staying here. I’m not going to be intimidated by little tricks like closing the door on us.” She stood up and turned around, glancing all over the room. She raised her voice as she continued, “Do you hear me? I’m not going anywhere.”

An’gel braced herself for a response of some kind, but although she waited nearly a minute, nothing happened. She glanced at Dickce and Benjy. “Are you staying? Or are you going to pack up and leave?”

“I’ll stay if you and Miss Dickce are going to,” Benjy said.

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, Sister,” Dickce said crossly. “You know I’d never go off and leave you to face anything like this on your own.”

“I didn’t think so,” An’gel said. “Thank you both.” She walked over to the door and stood there, staring at it, for perhaps half a minute. She wasn’t convinced that the door had been moved by a spirit. Benjy was a clever young man, but there might be something he missed. For the life of her, however, she couldn’t see what it might be.

An idea occurred to her. “I wonder what is beneath us. Is there a basement?”

“I don’t ever remember hearing talk of one,” Dickce said. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, though.”

“I haven’t heard any mention either,” An’gel said. “Another thing to ask Mary Turner.”

“What made you think of a basement?” Benjy asked.

An’gel walked back to her chair and resumed her seat. “It suddenly occurred to me that if there’s open space beneath this room, a clever person could figure out a way to manipulate the door from beneath the floor.”

“Like with magnets?” Benjy’s face lit up. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Yes, exactly,” An’gel said. “There’s enough metal in the door that a strong enough magnet could move it from under the floor, I think.”

“You really don’t want to believe in ghosts, do you?” Dickce laughed.

“As long as there’s a rational explanation, no, I don’t,” An’gel retorted.