I ate a cracker she’d spread with cheese and put half an olive on top of, and waited for her to finish.
“He did take the silver.”
We laughed together. So much for old age and no heirs. I ate four more of the cracker things. “You almost seem to know the man personally.”
“True,” she said, spatula paused in midair. “I feel like I almost know what he looks like. And I seem to know a lot about this house. I’m beginning to think my father told me a few little white lies.” She paused a moment. “And maybe one or two whoppers.”
I thought about what she was saying. Her father had said they’d lived in Cole Creek for only a short time when Jackie was “very young,” but she seemed to remember too much for that to be true. And what “whoppers” was she referring to? Yeow! Her mother? “You think your mother could be alive?” I asked, trying to sound causal.
She took a moment before answering, but I could tell that she was working hard to get her emotions under control. “I don’t know. I do remember that they fought a lot. I think maybe he kidnapped me, and that maybe the reason we spent our lives moving from one town to another was so she and the law wouldn’t find us. He didn’t have a copy of my birth certificate and whenever I asked for facts, he became vague.”
“Interesting,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted. I had an idea she’d just told me more than she’d ever told anyone else. “Maybe my next book will be about a young woman who finds her origins.”
“That’s my book,” she said quickly. “You’re here to find the devil so you can talk to him about your wife.”
Damn! but she could cut! I had a cracker at my lips when she said that, and it was as though my heart stopped beating. Not even in my own mind had I let myself think of the truth of what she’d just said.
She was standing absolutely still at the stove, her back to me, spatula paused. I couldn’t see her face, but the back of her neck had become three shades darker than normal.
I knew that what I replied would set the tone for our future relationship. About two-thirds of me wanted to tell her she was fired and to get the hell out of my life. But I looked at that candlelit table and the last thing I wanted was yet another evening alone.
“Only God would know anything about Pat,” I said at last. “The devil would say, ‘Never heard of her.’”
Slowly, she turned to look at me, and there was such gratitude on her face that I had to look away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes I say things that—”
“Are the truth as you see it?” I asked, not wanting to hear her apology. Truthfully, I think that my first idea about the project had been about Pat. Maybe I’d thought that if I could find out how one became a ghost, I could figure out how to bring Pat back in spirit form. Or maybe a witch could cast a spell to bring her back.
But as I started reading, the project itself had begun to interest me. For one thing, several states claimed the same stories. Did that make them folklore rather than truth?
We were quiet for a while as Jackie served some kind of chicken casserole that was quite good. She seemed to be a vegetable fanatic because she put three kinds of vegetables on the table, plus potatoes, plus more vegetables in the casserole.
At first we ate in silence, then I started telling her how close she’d been in her assessment of why I’d started on the ghosts and witches, but that I’d changed.
“Maybe I’m being romantic, but I’d like to find out if there’s any truth in those old stories. Or maybe I’d just like to give the readers a bloody good read.”
“Better to want a good story than to ask the devil for anything,” she said as she began to clear the table.
Since there was no dishwasher, I washed and she dried. After the kitchen was cleaned up (except for the mold growing over most surfaces) we went upstairs and started on the bedrooms. She laughed when I complained about the hideous wallpaper in my bedroom. It was dark green, magenta, and black. The bed was dark walnut, as were the other thirty or so pieces of furniture in the room. Between the wallpaper and the furniture, the room was as light as a tunnel at midnight.
“How about if tomorrow I call an auction house and get rid of the excess furniture?” she asked. “Actually, you could get rid of all of it, then buy new.”
When I looked at that ugly old bed, the thought of buying something new made me smile. White maybe.
But then I caught myself. I was not going to be living in this tiny throwback of a town. I was going to do some research here then move on to—Well, I had no idea where I was going, but it would be far away from this horror-movie house.
Jackie and I put new, but unwashed sheets (an ancient washer and dryer were in the pantry, harvest gold, sixties vintage) on my bed, then we went to her room to do the same.
“You know,” she said slowly, “I saw a Lowe’s just down the hill from the grocery.” She stopped tucking in her side of the sheet and looked at me as though I was supposed to read her mind. When I said nothing, she told me that if you buy new appliances at Lowe’s, they take your old ones away. When I realized what she was saying, we looked at each other and laughed. Some poor, unsuspecting appliance movers would take away that refrigerator whose smell could pollute outer space.
“What time do they open?” I asked, and we laughed some more.
An hour later, as I snuggled down in bed (and vowed to get a new mattress) I felt better than I had in a long time, and I finally allowed myself to think about the devil story that Jackie had told me in the car. I don’t think she had any idea how unusual her story was. For the last couple of years I’d been reading regional ghost stories, and for the most part, they were quite mild—so mild that I couldn’t remember any of them an hour after I’d finished the book. There was so little meat in the stories that the writers had had to embellish them with long phrases about the beauty of the people, or add some sinister aspect that had nothing to do with the real story. You could feel that the writer was just trying to fill up pages.
But Jackie’s story was different. The first version, the so-called “factual” story, the one she said her mother had told her, was interesting, but it sounded like several small town legends I’d read.
I didn’t want Jackie to know it, but it was her second story that interested me. I’d already seen that she was a good storyteller, but her dramatic telling of the devil story had given me the creeps.
Jackie started by describing the woman who’d been murdered. She told of a woman who was kind to everyone, who loved children, and who always wore a smile.
Jackie said that the woman used to take long walks in the woods, and, one day, she came to a beautiful house made of stone and a man was there. Jackie described him as “nice looking, like Santa Claus, without the beard.” I wanted to ask her how she knew this, but there was something so odd about the way she was telling the story that I didn’t interrupt her.
She said the woman had gone often to the house, and Jackie told about food the nice man and nice woman had shared, how they’d laughed and talked together. She told about the pretty flowers that grew all around the house and how the inside smelled like gingerbread.
After a few moments, I realized what was odd about her storytelling. There were two things. One was that Jackie related it as though she’d been an eyewitness, and the second was that she told it in the manner of a very young child. When she came to the part where the townspeople saw the couple, she said, “You could see all the people through the bushes…” “How many people?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t, and as she spoke, it occurred to me that the child who saw this may have been too young to know how to count. If I’d asked Jackie how many people were there, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d said, “Eleventy-seven.”
She said some “grown-ups” had seen the woman but they couldn’t see the man because he was invisible. Jackie said the townspeople had shouted at the woman but Jackie didn’t seem to know what they’d said, just that they were “shouting.” When the woman had backed up, she
’d fallen, and her ankle had been caught between some rocks. “She couldn’t get out,” Jackie said in what seemed to me to be a child’s voice. “So they piled more rocks on top of her.”
When Jackie told the rest of the story, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It seemed that after the townspeople left, the woman hadn’t died right away. Jackie said she’d “cried for a long time.” What really got to me was when Jackie told of “someone trying to get her out” but “she” couldn’t lift the stones.
I didn’t say anything then and I tried not to think about it, but I couldn’t help speculating. From the first I’d been told that this pressing happened many years ago. But after hearing what Jackie said was a “made-up version” of the story, I couldn’t help but wonder if it had happened in recent times. And was it possible that Jackie had seen this horrible thing? Had Jackie been a child and seen some adults put stones on a woman, then leave her to die a slow, agonizing death? Had Jackie the child crawled out of her hiding place and tried to get the rocks off the woman but failed?
Jackie told me that her father had taken her away from her mother on the night he’d found out that his wife had told the devil story. Looking at it from an adult point of view, I wondered if her father knew his young daughter had witnessed the murder, and when his wife told their daughter about the murder and said it was “right,” the man had been driven over the edge.
When Jackie finished her story, I’d been quiet, thinking about it all. I wanted to ask questions, but at the same time, I didn’t want to ask them. It was my guess that Jackie had been much more involved than she knew—or wanted to know.
As I settled myself more snugly under the sheets, I wondered if I really wanted to write about this story. If my theory was correct, maybe I should find something else to write about. Something that wasn’t recent and didn’t involve living people.
As I fell asleep, I knew I was being torn in half. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but at the same time, for the first time in years, I was excited by a story. A true story. What I was good at.
The next morning, I was awakened by sounds over my head. When I opened my eyes and saw that wallpaper, I jumped, but then I remembered where I was, and sighed. House of Horrors. I lay there for a while, listening. My watch, on the heavy marble-topped table beside the bed, said it wasn’t even six yet and I could see that it was barely daylight out. It could be robbers making the noise upstairs, I thought, hope buoying my spirits. Maybe they were looking for hidden jewels in the attic. Maybe in their search they’d take away some of the trash in this house.
I heard a loud sneeze. No such luck. Little Miss High Energy was already upstairs moving boxes around.
Reluctantly getting out of bed, I shivered. The mountains of western North Carolina were quite cool in the morning. I took my time taking a bath (at least the hot water tank worked well) and getting dressed before I went upstairs to see what was going on.
Opening doors, I looked around before going to the room where I heard the noise. There were a couple of bedrooms and a bath that I was sure had been servants’quarters. The bleakness of the rooms was depressing; they were lightless, airless, and colorless.
At the front of the house was a fairly large room with a big window. I can write in here, I thought as I looked out the window. I could see over the shorter houses across the road to the mountains beyond. The mountains were in the distance, blue and misty, and so beautiful they made me draw in my breath and hold it.
I stayed that way for a while, then looked at the giant oak desk that set at an angle to the window. I could sit there and write and, when I needed to think, I could turn and look out at those mountains. In the far corner of the room, where there was now some hard little sofa that looked as though it was covered in horsehair, I could put a real couch, something soft, with wide arms that could hold papers.
A loud noise from down the corridor brought me out of my reverie, so I went to see what my industrious little assistant was doing.
She was in a big room that looked like the quintessential attic from every old movie ever made. I looked around for the discarded dressmaker’s dummy. There was always a discarded dressmaker’s dummy.
“So now you show up to help,” Jackie said, sounding angry.
I started to snap back at her, but then I saw her face. She looked awful. Her eyes were sunken, with dark circles beneath them. At my age I looked like that every morning, but at her age, she was supposed to look dewy-fresh. “So what’s wrong with you?” I asked in the same tone she’d used with me. “Ghosts in your room?”
To my horror, she sat down on an old trunk, put her hands over her face, and began to cry.
My first impulse was to run away. Second was to rent an apartment in New York and stay away from females forever.
Instead, I sat down on the trunk next to her and said, “What’s wrong?”
She took a couple of minutes to get herself together. I didn’t have any tissues nor did she, and the only cloth in that room would be so full of dust it would probably have suffocated her. So she sniffed a lot.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “You’ll never believe this, but my dad said I never cry. Not even as a child. It was a joke between us. He used to say, ‘What kind of tragedy would it take to make you cry?’ Of course I bawled my head off at his funeral but—”
When she looked up at me, she saw that this was more than I wanted to hear. I had enough grief inside me. I didn’t need to add anyone else’s.
“I had a dream,” she said.
I looked toward the door. Had I been insane to invite this stranger to live with me? Was I now condemned to daily recitations of her dreams? Was she prone to nightmares? Was she going to wake me in the middle of the night screaming?
Then I’d have to comfort her and—I looked at her. She was more cute than pretty and she seemed to fluctuate, at random, from being nice to having a tongue like a razor blade. However, she also had a beautiful voice and a round little fanny that was quite nice. And yesterday at a pit stop she’d started doing some contortions worthy of a performer at Cirque du Soleil.
“What was your dream?” I heard myself ask, which annoyed me because I hated dreams so much that when I was reading novels that told of the hero’s, er, ah, protagonist’s, dream, I’d skip the passage.
“It was—” she began, then stopped. Getting up, she opened an old box that had ancient, dried-out tape on it.
I think she meant not to tell me, but she couldn’t stop herself. Turning, she sat down on the box and I heard something inside rustle, like old leaves crunching.
“It was just so real,” she said softly, “and I was so helpless.” When she looked up at me, her eyes were hollow-looking, and I was silent. I’d never had a dream I could remember past breakfast, much less one that upset me this much.
“You and I were in your car,” she said, “driving along a mountain road, and when we rounded a sharp curve we saw an overturned car. Four teenagers were standing by it, and they were laughing. You and I could see that they were happy because, even though they’d just been in a wreck, they were safe and unhurt. But the next second the car exploded and pieces of it flew everywhere.”
Putting her hands over her face for a moment, Jackie looked back at me. “You and I were safe in your car, but those kids were…They were cut apart by the flying pieces of steel. Arms, legs, a…a head went flying through the air.” She took a breath. “What was so horrible was that we could do nothing to save them. Absolutely nothing.”
It did seem like an odd dream. Weren’t most people’s nightmares about something that was trying to get them? But Jackie had been perfectly safe in her dream. Sure, flying body parts were horrible, but she’d been upset because we could do nothing to help those poor dismembered kids.
I don’t know why but it pleased me that she’d said “we.” It was as though she believed that I would have helped if I could. In her dream she didn’t think I was the kind of person who’d see an exploding car and think
only of getting myself to safety.
I’m sure it was awful of me, but her dream kind of made me feel good.
I smiled at her. “How about if we have breakfast, then go buy some appliances? Refrigerator, washer, dryer, microwave. You want a new stove? Hey! How about some air conditioners?”
Sniffing, she looked at me with an expression that made me think I’d said something wrong. “Window air conditioners?” she asked.
I played dumb. “Sure. We’ll stick them out the windows and paint them purple to match the house.”
Her eyes widened for a second, as though she believed me, then she relaxed. “Why don’t we tear out that big colored-glass skylight over the stairs and put in an air conditioner up there?”
“Great idea,” I said enthusiastically. “Think they carry them that size locally?”
“The Victorian Historical Society carries them,” she said, smiling.
“You just tell them what you plan to do and they take care of you.” She made her hand into a gun as though some Victorian-loving zealot would shoot me.
When we laughed together, I was glad I’d been able to take her mind off her bad dream.
“Come on,” I said, “I’ll make you an omelet.”
I didn’t cook, but I set the table and cut up some fruit per Jackie’s directions, and she told me about what she’d seen in the attic. There were old clothes and boxes of broken toys, and costume jewelry from the fifties plus lots of old phonograph records.
“There are some nice things up there,” Jackie said, “and someone, somewhere, would like to have them. Even those old magazines in the hall are of interest to somebody.”
“EBay,” I said, my mouth full of an omelet filled with green and red peppers. No ham. At the grocery, Jackie had made such a fuss about the high fat content of ham—all while glancing down at my stomach—that I’d not bought any. “Hey!” I said. “You take photos, so why don’t you photograph all this”—I waved my hand—“and auction it over eBay?”