Better Homes and Hauntings

  Deacon cleared his throat. “Moving on. I haven’t seen anything.” He cleared his throat, tugging at the collar of his T-shirt. “I’ve had some weird dreams, but I think they’re just stress or . . . heavy psychological suggestions from my cousin over there.”

  “What kind of dreams?” Nina asked. “Are you making a bed in yours?”

  “Uh, no,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Well, good, because it would probably be a little weird for you to dream about being felt up behind by a guy with sneaky hands.”

  “That would be weird,” Deacon agreed.

  “Wait, are you having multiple weird dreams or the same weird dream over and over?” Dotty asked.

  “The same one over and over,” Nina said. “I’m wearing an old-fashioned dress, making a bed here in the servants’ quarters. A man comes up behind me and gets handsy. Everything changes, and I’m outside on the roof. I can’t see his face, but the hands run up my neck and start to choke me. The next thing I know, I’m underwater, and I’m sinking.”

  “Anything else?” Jake asked.

  “My flesh melts away, and I become a skeleton,” she added, through pursed lips.

  Cindy shuddered. “Gross.”

  “You asked!” Nina exclaimed.

  “Jake asked,” Cindy countered.

  “Jake asked!” Nina amended, throwing up her hands.

  “So you were choked and then thrown into water?” Dotty asked. “That sounds an awful lot like how Catherine died. But would Catherine be making beds in the servants’ quarters?”

  “Well, she was awfully happy to be making beds there, which seems unusual for a high-society wife,” Nina said. “But at the same time, the sleeves on the dress I was wearing looked pretty fancy. Embroidered blue muslin, definitely too nice for a maid’s dress.”

  “So unfair,” Cindy muttered, still bitter about her own “flashback” experience.

  “Did you say embroidered blue muslin?” Deacon asked. “With silver at the sleeves?”

  Nina nodded.

  Deacon flopped back into the chair. “Oh, hell.”

  “Why ‘oh, hell’?” Cindy asked.

  “Because I’ve been dreaming about a woman in a blue dress with silver embroidery at the sleeves. Catherine Whitney. She’s standing up on the roof. I come up behind her, I’m about to kiss her, but instead, my hands close around her throat, and I choke her to death.”

  “How often would you say you’re having this dream?” Dotty asked.

  “A lot,” Deacon said. “A few times a week.”

  “And you?” Dotty asked Nina.

  “Once or twice a week. More when I get stressed out.”

  “So you’re dreaming that you’re Catherine,” Dotty asked Nina, before turning to Deacon. “And you’re dreaming that you’re Gerald. Several times a week. And you didn’t think you should mention it?”

  “It could still be the power of suggestion, all of those stories and theories you fill our heads with day in and day out,” Deacon protested. “Maybe Nina and I both saw a picture of Catherine wearing the same blue dress.”

  “Deacon, I’ve seen every picture of Catherine Whitney ever painted or photographed. There are no pictures of her in a blue muslin dress with silver embroidery at the sleeves,” Dotty insisted. “And if you and Nina are having what sounds like the same recurring dream from different perspectives, several times a week, that has to mean something.”

  “I’m not sure that makes it better,” Deacon said. “There’s a considerable creep factor in choking your own great-great-grandmother several times a week. Especially now that I know that Nina is inside her body while I’m doing it. Sort of.”

  Jake raised his eyebrows. “So you’re admitting that you may be part of all of this supernatural woo-woo crap?”

  With a lingering look at Dotty, who was smirking enough for three triumphant Whitneys, Deacon growled, “No! Damn it. Maybe.”

  “Which means I win!” Dotty crowed, making Deacon thunk his head against the table.

  While Dotty did a little victory dance, Cindy sent Jake a significant look. He shook his head. Cindy narrowed her eyes. Jake hesitated, dropped his fork onto his plate, and leaned back in his chair. “Fine. Cindy and I had an incident this afternoon.”

  “Aha!” Cindy crowed. “So you admit it!”

  “Yes, yes, I admit it,” Jake grumbled. Cindy’s lips quirked into a smile. Perhaps he wasn’t as rodent-like as she’d thought. Jake turned to Deacon. “I saw it, clear as day, Whit. They were as solid as you or me, and she looked just like the pictures of Catherine. Unless you’ve been experimenting with some sort of hologram technology or some extremely committed reenactors snuck onto the island along with Nina’s crazy ex-boss, I don’t have an explanation that involves real, live humans.”

  “Et tu, Jake?” Deacon scrubbed his hands over his face.

  “Me tu, bud. You know how much this house creeped me out when we were kids. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to you.”

  Deacon groaned.

  “Well, I hate to add to your ghostly stresses, but I don’t think the shadow-woman I saw on the roof was the result of seasickness meds,” Nina told him. “Especially when you consider that I saw her again on the main staircase the day Dotty showed up. I didn’t see her full body that time, just the bottom of her skirt and her waist.”

  “Ghosts don’t usually show up as full apparitions with features and distinct clothes and all that,” Jake told her. “You usually see a partial body or a shadow.”

  “How do you know that?” Deacon asked.

  Jake’s face flushed deep pink again. He sighed and pulled a copy of Hauntings for Total Morons from his laptop bag. “I bought it when I was hired. You know what kind of reputation this house has!”

  “Keep that book away from Dotty,” Deacon said, staring at the orange-and-white softcover manual as if it was an explosive device.

  “I’m a little upset that I haven’t had an experience yet,” Dotty said. “I’m a wide-open channel and the most creeped-out I’ve felt so far was when I found that picture of our great-great-aunt Bernice.”

  Deacon and Jake shuddered simultaneously. “Not a handsome woman,” Jake explained to Cindy.

  “I do think it’s interesting that Jake and Cindy are seeing the key figures—Catherine, Jack, Gerald—from the outside, as observers. But Deacon and Nina are experiencing things from the key figures’ points of view. Maybe the house or Gerald and Catherine are trying to tell you two something,” Dotty said.

  Nina pondered that for a long moment. “Well, that is . . .”

  “A singularly horrifying thought,” Deacon finished for her.

  Nina pointed a finger at him. “Yep.”

  “I think we need to keep track of who feels or sees what and when,” Dotty said. “It would help, I think, as I’m writing.”

  “Oh, I know!” Cindy ran to Deacon’s room and dragged his whiteboard back to the table. “We’ll come up with a list of phenomena, type up the notes, and keep a record of what happens while we’re here.”

  Jake chuckled. “You really can’t help the organizational thing, can you?”

  “Wait, we should have s’mores when we tell ghost stories,” Nina insisted, perking up at the thought of caramelized marshmallows and melty chocolate. “Do we have the makings for s’mores?”

  They all shook their heads.

  Nina frowned in a way that made Cindy want to give her a pony or something. “Maybe next time.”

  Cindy cleaned the board and drew a rough timeline structure with a dry-erase marker. “OK, so who felt something first?”

  “That would be Deacon,” Dotty said. “He had nightmares for years about the—”

  “Dotty!” Deacon exclaimed, shaking his head.

  “Deacon, you haven’t talked about it since we were kids. Pretending it away won’t work. You have to talk about it.”

  “I was a kid!” Deacon protested. “I didn’t know what was happening. I could have been having
an asthma attack.”

  Dotty countered, “You don’t have asthma.”

  “Whit, I think she’s got a point,” Jake said quietly. “I thought the whole point of coming back here was to prove that the house couldn’t scare you anymore.”

  “I thought the point was to prove that your family’s fortunes have been recovered,” Nina said.

  “There are several points!” Deacon exclaimed. But when faced with the knowing looks on both Dotty’s and Jake’s faces and the confused expression on Nina’s, he sighed and finally said, “When I was a kid, I hated coming here. And not just because it was boring and there was no Internet connection. This place scared me. Mom and Dad would leave me in the entry hall while they skulked around the house, looking for silverware or art or—the holy grail of grasping Whitneys—Catherine’s hidden stash of jewelry. I never felt safe here. I never wandered, because nothing about this place screamed, ‘Hey, come explore!’ But one afternoon, I walked up the grand staircase, looking for my mom, calling for her, trying to get her to come closer so I wouldn’t have to walk farther into the house. I didn’t notice how cold it was getting. I made it to the third landing, and all of a sudden, it was like I was walking through Jell-O. I couldn’t move my arms or legs as fast as I should. And I was so busy panicking about that, that it took that much longer to register when something grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. It was holding me from the front, but I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t breathe. I was only ten, but I could feel how much it hated me. It wanted me dead. It wanted to toss me down the stairs like a rag doll and break my neck. And I think that if my dad hadn’t poked his head over the railing to check on me, it might have. But I was also a scared kid with an overactive imagination. I didn’t see anything. I only felt it. And yes, part of the reason I started renovating the house was to prove that it can’t scare me anymore.”

  “Which it totally does.”

  “Shut it, Dotty. I’m a rational person, a numbers guy,” Deacon said. “I believe in the things I can see and hear and touch. It’s hard for me to admit that I’m scared of a feeling.”

  “And you haven’t had any ‘feelings’ since you came back here?” Nina asked gently.

  He cleared his throat and shook his head. “No.”

  Meanwhile, Cindy had started her timeline, titling it “Perception” and marking the earliest known activity in the group, “Deacon (age ten)” with terms such as “Unexplained cold spots,” “Sensation of being squeezed/shaken,” and “Difficulty breathing.” She drew a line to her spot on the timeline, which was also marked “Sensation of being strangled, difficulty breathing.” She drew a separate timeline for “Visual” and noted Nina’s shadow-woman sightings and the vision she and Jake shared. When she turned around, the group was staring at her, all wide-eyed.

  “I like order,” Cindy said, her tone defensive.

  Dotty managed to wrestle the dry-erase marker from Cindy’s hands. “Well, Cindy’s compulsive tendencies aside, I think there are two components to the haunting.”

  “Do we have to call it a haunting?” Deacon whined.

  “Yes!” the others chorused.

  Dotty scribbled “Manifestation” and “Curse,” in a crooked, loopy scrawl that made Cindy wince. “Hauntings work on a couple of different levels. All buildings absorb a certain amount of emotional energy expressed by the people within their walls. Some buildings—whether because of their location or because of traumatic events or because someone with strong psychic ability lived or lives there—absorb more energy than others.”

  Cindy nodded. “The Stone Tape theory, right? It’s why hospitals and prisons are more likely to be haunted than other buildings.”

  The others turned to look at her.

  “Yes, the pretty girl can read. Moving on.” Dotty continued her lecture. “Sometimes a haunting can be residual or cyclical, where there’s not really a spirit present. But some event, whether it’s traumatic or happy, gets imprinted on the space and plays out over and over like a record. And other times, it’s an actual spirit, which is a more interactive, intelligent haunting and tends to scare people a little more. And then the most malevolent haunting is demonic. It has nothing to do with the history of the house or the people in it; some negative force just takes up space in the house like an unwanted renter.”

  “The paranormal equivalent of a drummer sleeping on your couch.” Cindy nodded sagely.

  “So you’re saying we have a demon squatter?” Deacon asked skeptically.

  “No, I think we’re dealing with residual and spiritual hauntings. It sounds like Cindy walked into a memory pocket when she saw the vision of Catherine and Jack on the lawn. Those are residual, but everything else? Spiritual.”

  “Do you think that if we resolve the issues, Catherine and her ghostly entourage will go away?”

  “I don’t think Catherine is the ringleader,” Nina said quietly.

  Jake’s brows rose. “Why do you say that?”

  “Cindy, when you had that vision of Catherine and Jack, where were you?”

  “Gerald’s room.”

  “OK, so if you saw Catherine and Jack arguing like a couple of not-terribly-discreet teenagers, then perhaps Gerald saw them, too. It would certainly explain the heavy, angry footsteps on the third floor, near Catherine’s room. Who wouldn’t be angry when he realized his wife was sleeping with someone he was paying large amounts of money? That’s a double whammy. And with him being suspected of strangling his wife, the ‘difficulty breathing’ bit makes a lot of sense.”

  “She makes a good point,” Jake said.

  “If there are spirits in the house, I think Gerald is the one we have to worry about. Can we make him go away?”

  “I don’t know. We could have a priest come out to the house and bless it.”

  Deacon leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. “And then a news story runs on the wire under the headline ‘EyeDee CEO hosts exorcism at haunted mansion.’ No, thanks.”

  Cindy frowned. “OK, in movies and books, you find out what’s bothering the ghost, and sometimes that ends it. But I don’t know whether that’s for literary license.”

  “I suppose that Gerald’s problem is that he only got to strangle his wife once?” Jake asked. He cast a contrite look at Deacon. “Sorry, man.”

  “Actually, that brings us to the other issue.” Dotty pointed at the word curse.

  Cindy tried to commandeer the marker. “Let me just—”

  Dotty smacked her hand away.

  “Dotty, there’s no such thing as the Whitney curse,” Deacon told her, on autopilot.

  “I’m asking a little bit much from you in terms of acceptance, huh?” Dotty nodded. “And by the way, there is a curse.”

  Attempting to steer the conversation back on track, Nina interjected, “So, say for argument’s sake that at some point, during the last hundred years or so, someone uttered some sort of incantation, did some sort of blood-letting ritual, or just looked really hard at a picture of Ralph Fiennes, while thinking, ‘I do not like the Whitneys very much. I don’t wish them good things,’ what do we do to break the curse?”

  “Ralph Fiennes?” Deacon frowned.

  Nina scowled. “He’s shifty.”

  Dotty ignored them. “Usually, it involves bringing some hidden truth to light.”

  “Maybe Catherine’s spirit wants us to prove without a doubt that Gerald killed her?” Cindy suggested.

  “It doesn’t seem to make much sense that Catherine cursed her own children and descendants,” Jake said.

  Dotty said, “They bore the name of the man who strangled her. It wouldn’t be too far off to think she had a little anger bottled up when she died. That kind of energy carries.”

  “OK, well, how do we prove a one-hundred-year-old crime without a doubt?” Jake asked.

  Deacon cried, “This is ridiculous. We’re not detectives!”

  “No, but we’re intelligent people who have access to the only evidence left. This hous
e. The grounds. Who knows what’s hidden up in the attic?” Cindy said. “We should be on the lookout for ledgers, day planners, household books, anything Catherine or Gerald might have doodled on. Dotty, you’ve been looking at Catherine’s diaries. Have you read anything interesting so far?”

  Dotty dashed back to her room, retrieving a few of the journals and the notebook she used for notations. Nina cleared the table, and Deacon attempted to help her, hoping to avoid this ghost discussion by hiding in the kitchen, but Dotty dragged both of them back for her presentation. She had several journals spread out on the long table. She explained that Catherine was from Albany originally. But her family moved to New York when she was a teenager to take advantage of the thriving economy. Gerald and Catherine met at a ball, one of the first of her debutante season, in an age where a very young girl marrying a much older, established businessman was considered a coup, rather than sly tabloid fodder.

  “The first journal starts on the day of her wedding in 1894. She doesn’t write like someone who’s terrified of her future husband,” Dotty said. “She sounds happy, hopeful, excited about her future, just how you’d hope your daughter would write on her wedding day.”

  Dotty pulled out a tintype portrait of Gerald and Catherine. Catherine had a sweet, open face, with wide, light eyes and elegantly twisted blond hair. Her delicate little hand rested on Gerald’s arm as she smiled at the camera. Gerald looked so stern, Nina thought. Stern, no-nonsense, and cold. Handsome in a dignified, unmussed way but not exactly a guy you could see spooning someone on a couch under a comfy blanket.

  Jake suggested, “Maybe because it was early days yet?”

  “Could be.” Dotty shrugged.

  “How does she feel about Gerald?” Nina asked. She stared at the wedding portrait. Something about the photo was . . . well, not bothering her but bringing back that niggling, I should remember this sensation in her brain.

  “Fond,” Dotty said. “Not quite in love, but she talks about him being handsome and distinguished, funny and affectionate when they’re in private. Not exactly an ogre. Our gal Catherine was a prolific writer. Some of her journals only cover a few months. It’s why there are so many of them. I’m having a little bit of trouble putting them in order, because a few seem to be missing. But I did find an interesting entry dated about two years before the house was completed.” She read aloud: