Chapter 4
Chapter Four
“You’re lying.”
“I am not,” I hissed.
Emma fisted two paper shopping bags. “Where was it?”
I’d been standing on the front porch for fifteen minutes. I didn’t care if someone drove by and questioned my intentions. Because why would someone who owned a home stand on a front porch, in the dark? But I was not about to stand in that house without Emma home. The idea made my skin prickle.
I could hear the chaotic laughter from Sayer already. I told you! I told you it was haunted!
There could be a logical explanation for the light to turn on and off by itself. Maybe the bulbs were finally biting the dust. Maybe it caught headlights as they swept by, but that wouldn’t make much sense with the curtains closed. Or the distance from the road to the house.
I pointed in the direction of the room. “In Aunt Cadence’s office.”
The two of us stared at each other on the porch, nothing but the crinkling of paper bags and the call of tree frogs to break the monotony.
“And it was just—” She shimmied her shoulders. “You know.”
“Turning on and off,” I finished. “It’s probably the batteries.”
A delicate excitement flickered in Emma’s eyes. “Did you check them yet?”
“No.”
“Then let’s,” she said with a grin, and immediately bounced passed me. She dumped the groceries onto the foyer table, right next to my purse, which I eyed suspiciously.
I knew I’d turned my phone off.
Maybe I hadn’t. I wasn’t sure. At the moment, I wasn’t sure I cared.
Emma backpedaled to the office, flipped the light on, and I trailed after her.
Aunt Denny never married. Instead, she’d made a spouse out of collecting—for a season it might have been artwork, then knitting, then first edition copies of her favorite childhood stories.
There was a brief love affair with golf, but she’d tried smoking a cigarette while swinging a club in the backyard and ended up with a broken window and a patch of burned grass.
Golfing hadn’t been as appealing after that.
Before the heart attack, it had been books. Specifically on travel.
Now, the irony was weighted. She’d never left Harthwait—I never asked why, though if I’d been a good niece, a thoughtful niece, I might have asked. She’d been a human with a life, and maybe she’d had plans to leave. But that thought was even more disheartening than if she hadn’t.
Emma zeroed in on the book nook. She waved her hand in front of it. The miniature alleyway remained dark.
“Hm. Maybe it is the batteries.” Disappointment.
My chest lightened. “I’m sure there are some AAs around here.”
We shuffled through a few drawers. Sticky notes, pens, and printer paper tumbled and sifted about. By the time I made it to a cluster of cabinets behind Aunt Cadence’s desk, my eyes wandered.
Photographs perched in welcome on almost every shelf.
But there—a lone black frame at eye level.
My high school graduation. The only picture with everyone together after the divorce.
Vince stood on my right, my mother on my left, Aunt Cadence at Mom’s left.
Mom looked like she’d swallowed a persimmon.
Aunt Cadence, all smiles and curls. Emma hovered beside my dad, with her brothers Mason and Dawson in the background, both with arms extended upward in a wave.
With Mom and I standing side by side, it was hard to overlook the similarities: both of us auburns that neared burnt browns and freckled cheeks. But my structure came from my father. Everyone mentioned it—even my mother.
His hair was a rich chocolate, near black. His blue eyes were mine. His roman nose and full lips also mine, just like the cheekbones. Even his chin, which looked masculine on him, reigned feminine on me. If I held weight, I’d imagine I might have looked more like his mother than I would my own.
“Did you spill something?”
I blinked from the photo. “What?”
She bent and touched the floor. One of the boards was stained a different color, like it’d been replaced at some point. She pulled a splintered corner up and twisted it off. “Never mind. Thought it was sticky. It’s just a splinter.”
“I say we call it a night and go watch SNL reruns,” Emma said. She pushed herself up from a crouch behind Aunt Cadence’s desk with a wince. “I’m too old to be crawling on the floor this late without purpose.”
At least I knew I’d need to add batteries to the store list. “What else would crawling entail?”
An eye roll was her response. “You know what I mean. I just want to eat pizza in peace.”
“A simple creature,” I teased. “Pizza or a slew of casseroles. You can take your pick.”
“Hate to break it to you, but unless it has four different types of cheese, I don’t want it.”
Soon enough, the two of us sat settled on the couch, windows shut, curtains drawn, and an SNL rerun flitting across the TV.
By the time I’d picked the majority of the peppers off, leaving the bacon bits and the sausage, a looming pressure took a seat on my chest. I’d agreed to dinner.
I could have said no. I could have refused.
But then that would bring attention to me, to the issue, and I’d rather act like I was normal than explain the sense of dread surrounding me every time I looked at food.
Control. I wanted control.
To numb all the things I didn’t want to feel.
A mixture of heat and condensation had left the bottom of the plate soggy. I alternated hands before feigning a bite.
“I need some napkins,” I said. I pushed to stand, taking my pizza with me. “Be right back.”
Emma peeled off a section of crust and dipped it in melted cheese sauce. “Can I have a Coke?”
“Cup or bottle?”
“Bottle’s good.”
I kept my back to Emma as I fumbled in the pantry for her drink. Then, when she wasn’t looking, I tossed the slice in the trash.
The tension released from my neck first. Then down, down to my empty stomach, and the hollow bones of my shins.
There. The pressure released. For another night, I looked normal. I controlled the situation. I removed the source of anxiety.
At least—at least, I could still control this.
Problem solved.
Drip, drip, drip.
That night, I sat bent over my notepad, renovation ideas scribbled inside.
My bedside lamp washed the room in soft light, somehow amplifying the neon green of my digital clock as it crept closer to midnight.
Years ago, the vanity across from me had been a beauty desk for a little girl.
Stained and chipped from dress-up games and makeup testing, it was now sanded and refinished, the memories erased.
Forgotten. The dolls still dangled over the top of the bookshelf to my left, waiting for me to remove one and start a game of dress-up all over again.
And now you, Miss Patty, I told the little redhead with freckles, because she’d looked the most like me, I can tie your hair up to keep it away from your eyes while I put eye shadow on them.
The bread tie was still in her hair, which wasn’t more than a single tuft that pointed straight to the ceiling, just like a unicorn.
I rested my chin in my palm. Would I erase all my memories from this house by the time the reno was done? Or only a few of them?
But I wasn’t. I wasn’t erasing. I was updating, while keeping character. The little bits of Aunt Cadence and the little fragments of history—like the family crest molded to the ceiling in the office, or the blocked-off servant staircase in the corner of the kitchen—would still be here.
I took a deep inhale. Blinked away my blurry vision.
“You’re doing your job,” I told myself, because no one else would. I arranged the heavy notebook in my lap. The quilt felt alive, like it skittered over my bare legs.
I pressed my index finger and thumb to the bridge of my nose. Then I counted the knobs on the front drawers. Two for each drawer. Eight total.
That’s what I’d forgotten—I needed to order the knobs for the kitchen drawers.
If I went with the sage color I had in mind for the walls, gold accents would match better than the existing brass fixtures.
Some things I could spray paint, but I’d seen a vintage-inspired set online that would look much better.
Instead of the dull, smooth, minimalist ones I usually found in stores, these were twirls of leaves as handles.
“For only two payments of twenty-nine ninety-nine, you can get …” the TV hummed.
I’d heard of people needing a fan to sleep—white noise, something to calm the mind. I needed voices, mindless chatter that resembled incoherent, meaningless thoughts. Most nights, I left the local infomercials on since they ran through the night. If not, lulls of nothingness jerked me out of sleep.
The digital clock flickered to a quarter after midnight.
My room, nicknamed the Blue Room, faced the back of the property.
Emma was down the hall, in the opposite wing, in the Austen Room, because she said the aesthetic reminded her of Pride and Prejudice.
Which was good for her, because the frills and lace of dresser runners and nightstand doilies made my skin crawl.
I started a new column, wrote price? before jotting out a few ballpark numbers beside each prospective item.
I’d start my renovations with the kitchen, which would be easy.
A new light fixture. Remove the rest of the roosters to show that the appliances were, in fact, new, and I could move on to the—
“No, Momma, no, please don’t let him.”
My pen froze, hovering over the paper. Gooseflesh pimpled up my arms.
For a heartbeat, I thought I’d imagined it. Glanced at the TV, which danced to my left on the dresser by a window, angled toward the bed. A new commercial, maybe? But the channel hadn’t changed and neither had the murmuring ad for a new vacuum.
All right, maybe it hadn’t been my TV. Maybe Emma was still awake and watching something down the hall. Or this was my signal to go to bed.
I shook it off and bent back over my list. The living room would be next—
“Please don’t, Momma. I don’t like it when he—”
My head jerked up.
“Free shipping if you order in the next fifteen minutes!” the husky voiced, mountain of a man on TV told me. I stared at the TV, watched the ad all the way through. There was no way it had been that guy—his voice was too deep. Too adult.
It sounded like a child. Distant. Maybe outside.
My thoughts buckled. Had we left the doors unlocked?
Had a kid gotten lost and somehow ended up on the property?
Or was it a dare—kids always made up stories about old homes and tricked the meek into stepping on the haunted grounds.
Ding dong ditch, then run for the hills.
I would have knocked on a haunted house door for approval.
“I dare you to step on the porch, Fanny-Lanny,” Sarah would have snarled with her buck teeth and slicked-back pigtails. “Or you’re a baby.”
“Momma,” the voice cried—faint. Either breathless or far away or both. “Momma, please.”
I detangled myself from the quilt and stepped onto the cold floor. I didn’t bother to grab a sweatshirt—I braved the hallway in shorts, a T-shirt, and no bra. That’s how much confidence I had that I was just tired and hearing things.
I poked my head out into the hall. Listened. Emma’s door was shut, the lights off beneath the door crack. The longer I stood in the doorway, the more the shadows seemed to settle. Like they wouldn’t move until I turned away. Still, no voice came.
I counted the ticks of the grandfather clock. Three minutes. The refrigerator whirred downstairs, twice, before I stepped back in the room. My hand grazed the doorknob and I slowly pulled it closed.
An inch from clicking shut, I heard it.
“Please,” the voice whimpered.
I opened the door again. The hallway was still empty.
A cold sweat dewed along my neck. Hundreds of possibilities trampled through me. A kid, like I suspected. But to plead like that? Why?
Then, that other option, the one I’d convinced Sayer wasn’t true: The house was haunted.
Could this—could this be what Aunt Cadence was talking about? That teasing nursery rhyme she’d made up, that warned us not to stay at night. Was it real?
I wiped the sweat at the back of my neck and edged down the hallway. The air hugged, tight and cold, against my bare legs, sending shivers over every open inch of skin. Blood pulled from my extremities, making my hands and neck clammy.
“Momma, no,” the voice cried.
I hurried to the stair landing. It sounded far away, but not too far, like the voice came from the first floor.
Through the darkened entryway downstairs, a shadow hovered on the other side of the front door. The hazy silhouette shifted from side to side. Short. Like a child.
I was right.
I needed to call the police, I needed help—I needed to wake up Emma. I kept my eyes on the door, hands gripped white-knuckled on the banister rail, and started, “Hey, Em—”
“Momma, no.”
The voice was everywhere and nowhere, so close I could almost breathe it in.
This child needed me. Right now.
A sick, twisted feeling exploded in my gut. There it bubbled: fear. Fear of what might happen if I didn’t open the front door, or worse, if I did—what I might find on the other side.
My feet moved on their own accord. There was no time to wake Emma.
In a possessed hurry, I tripped down the stairs, gripping the railing the entire flight. There was a child on the front porch, and he needed help. Someone could be hurting him. He needed me right now—
I yanked the front door open.
That child needed help—they needed—
The door opened so fast it hit the wall behind it.
Nothing but empty porch and cool night air stretched in front of me.
The rocking chairs sat as still as sentinels. Not a breeze could be felt; not a cricket chirped. The vicious urgency within me vanished like a gasp, there one moment, gone the next.
No one stood on the porch. It was quiet, like I’d imagined it all.