Chapter 13 #2
“God bless that thing. Lived to be sixteen, can you believe it? I heard her ears swishing all over the floors, the couch.” Meredith’s mouth turned firm. “What I mean to say is, there isn’t anyone haunting that place, Landry. It’s just grief. And that’s normal.”
Just grief. Those two words clanged down from my nape, all the way to my knees.
My eye twitched. Well, I might not have had a dead chihuahua scratching at my bathroom door, wanting to shred the shower curtain, but I had a something that slithered from the linen closet that wasn’t really a linen closet.
But if I said that, I’d be the next candidate for an inpatient program.
“Who did Aunt Cadence use for researching the place? Was it the town records, or—”
“Please don’t use those people. Go to the Hemlock if you do.” She gave me a hard head shake for emphasis, then started back toward the store entrance. “Those clerks are absolute”—a wide-eyed, raised-brow glare that told me the workers were anything but—“peaches. Don’t even waste your breath.”
Well, it wasn’t much, but it was something.
There wasn’t much reason not to. So before four o’clock, I drove out of town.
Hemlock was the same to Stetson as twins were to each other—the same word, just a slightly different font. The thought occurred to me that I could have done a search through the library, but starting with something solid—like a name on a deed—felt more enticing.
Much like Stetson, Hemlock had one stoplight that blinked every thirty minutes and three antique shops per street corner.
Where Stetson nestled against a railroad track, Hemlock teetered on the edge of the Wasleck River, which eventually bottomed out into the marshes before reaching the Atlantic.
Roads were crowded with heavy live oaks blanketed with Spanish moss and the promise of acorns.
In the near distance, sea oats danced in the river breeze.
Side to side, like a woman’s skirt—almost tempting enough to wade through.
If you did, you’d get a few feet out. Before you’d know it, you’d be drowning.
I parked across the street where the shops had already gone dark for the day. My reflection followed through the windows as I crossed, then beelined for the clerk’s office. Like everything else, closing time was in six minutes.
Hopefully it took six minutes to get a deed.
There was a burst of cold along with the scent of dingy brown carpet when I opened the courthouse double doors. The only sound was the air conditioning humming overhead.
I headed to a sliding-glass window halfway down the hall. A seating area waited, empty, with one magazine resting on a tapioca-colored coffee table. Likely a year-old copy of People.
A woman glared at me as I approached. Slender glasses perched on the end of her nose; the chain around her neck swayed as if I’d caught her mid-task.
“Hello,” I breathed. As if she couldn’t see me already.
She didn’t speak. She also didn’t open the glass window. Only, pointedly, moved a stapled stack of papers from one side of her desk to the other.
I waited. Pushed a smile.
Seeing I wasn’t going to leave, she sighed and slid the window open. “Can I help you?” The mole under her eye moved with each chew of her gum.
“I need a deed record,” I said. “For my property.”
Her nostrils flared. Penciled in eyebrows, arched like two rainbows, inched to her permed hairline. She turned to her computer and started typing, fingertips first. Her wrists didn’t rest on the desk. “County?”
“Colleton.”
A grunt. A fat butterfly pin glinted against her purple turtleneck.
Minutes, maybe eternities, passed.
Then, to my relief, she spun in her chair. With a huff, she pushed to stand, vanished around the corner, then returned with a sheet.
She pushed it through the window. “Fill this out. Ten dollars.”
Once I’d signed, stamped, and promised my firstborn child, she disappeared again and then returned with a folder.
“What dates?” Her seat sighed when she sat down.
I stared, mouth slightly open. I didn’t know what today’s date was, let alone when Hadrian was alive. I probably should have asked, but I could almost hear his excuse while I came up with a guess: My age? Oh, dearest, that was a long time ago.
How long is a long time?
Long enough, he’d have said.
“I’m not sure of a date, but is there a Hadrian listed on any of the deeds?”
She shot me a look over the rim of her glasses. Okay, then.
“Last name is Belf—”
Before I finished, she made a noncommittal noise and licked her thumb and flipped through the pages without looking down, only watched me while flicking the sheets.
Because having her glower at me wasn’t unnerving enough as it was.
More importantly—how was she reading the names if she was staring at me?
I took an awkward step to the side. As if that would somehow redirect her attention. She looked like one of those women that sniffed fear.
“Last name.”
My mouth pursed. “Belfaunte.”
With an indistinguishable mumble, she exhaled through her nostrils again—this time it whistled—before slamming a page down into the copy machine, punching a green button, and posting on her armrest.
We stood there in silence as the copy machine whirred. Strained. Then spat out a paper.
She rolled back over to me and shoved it through the window.
“Hadrian Belfaunte. You and that Irene Blankenship, I swear,” she spat. “Is that all? It’s four o’clock and we’re closed.”
“Yeah, I think that’s—”
She pushed the window shut and yanked a beaded metal string. A set of blinds fluttered down between us. My reflection gaped back at me.
What a lovely, lovely woman.
I could only imagine how peachy the Stetson office workers were if Meredith had recommended this one.
I took my ten-dollar deed and exited the double doors.
I didn’t look at the paper until I climbed back in my SUV and rolled my windows down to let the heat escape.
I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, cursing the ninety-four-degree weather, and stole a glance at the page in the passenger seat.
I stilled.
Fearing the paper might fly away, I lifted it. It crinkled between my fingers. The date—the numbers were so close to each other.
I read over it once, then twice, my breath growing shallow.
By All Men Verify
Colleton County hereby grants Hadrian Belfaunte the property of Harthwait House / parcel 12 of 1252 acres by * death of Father, Howie Belfaunte dollars in the month, day, and year of our Lord: June of the 15th of one thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight; designated by the number of …
The copied deed’s edges were worn with rounded edges, tiny creases and tears throughout. The document’s decorative boarder was faded in places. What hadn’t faded was the penmanship. The delicate curves and swoops of pen lines held strong.
At the bottom, a star.
Right below it, it read:
*Father—deceased
Recipient of passage, no assets, building good condition
Granted by Stetson Treasurer Office, witness Sherriff Jonathan Kimbal and Judge Marshal Yearly
Water filled my lungs. Slowly, it filled my throat, my ears, and pressed deep against my brows. My palms began to itch. Deed still in hand, I cranked the ignition. Hadrian had existed. He was real. And I, inadvertently, was not hallucinating. This was the validity I’d wanted, right?
But it wasn’t enough.
I wanted more. I needed dates, pictures, and words on paper. Because a deed only proved that Hadrian had at one point been a real person. Solidified the man I’d seen in the maze of briars as he’d smiled at me.
What about his life? What did he do? How long had he lived? Did he have a job, did he live in the house until he died, or was he stuck there for other reasons?
A thought occurred to me. The other name the clerk had mentioned.
In my phone, I searched: Irene Blankenship.
A job profile appeared, one for the Wasleck library on a recruiting website, the other for one of the university’s research committees.
Then, something further down—a Reddit thread by a user named IreneBlanketMonster178 that started with, “So I’ve worked at the library for a while and …
never heard of something like this before. … thoughts? …”
I did a U-turn in the middle of the street and started for the Wasleck library.
I opened the Reddit post in the library parking lot out of sheer nosiness. It might not have been the same person. I might have been jumping to conclusions or getting ahead of myself. Preconceived notions never did anyone any good, and that’s exactly what I was falling victim to.
I guess I didn’t care.
I opened the thread.
I don’t believe in ghosts but I’ve got a problem?
u/IreneBlanketMonster178: [MOD] 2.5 y ago
So I’ve never believed in ghosts, right?
As a child, my parents were always very up front with my sisters and me.
(No Santa, Tooth Fairy, Boogeyman. Our childhoods were fairy dust-less and Magic of Christmas No More.) So ghosts were piled into that category.
We didn’t play with Ouija boards because, in our minds, lame.
We only did Halloween for the candy and to time how fast each of us could run through a haunted house.
Life moved on. I graduated college. Parents moved out for a one-level home because knees started to hurt.
I kept the family house. Got a job at the library while doing research, because money.
Then this one lady came in—she came in religiously, always checked out four fiction books and one nonfiction book.
She owned an older home somewhere near the marshes.
We started talking about ghosts somehow one afternoon.
Then she let everything spill. She said she’d been hearing a child crying at night, and a woman would hover near her bed at least once a week.
Said she’d seen the apparition of a dog in the backyard, all that fun stuff.
And scratching on the walls? Said she couldn’t have family over because it happened at night all the time.
We got to talking about it, and she asked if I could come check out something she’d found at the house to see if I could tell where it might have come from.
(No, I didn’t ask for pictures, but I should have at the time, I see the err in my ways, because she could have been a serial killer and lured me in so easily.)
I knew of the house from a few of the land directories. But when I stepped inside, the vibe changed. I’m talking I could feel the little hairs on my arms go up. Then she took me upstairs.
Not going to lie. I thought I was gonna get murdered (by her, not a ghost).
Anyway—upstairs on the second floor, some wall was torn down.
The place was probably built in the late 1700s?
Idk. Think creaky. The house moans on its own, kind of thing.
Then she showed me what she’d found on the inside of the wall she’d pulled down.
Said she was taking off the “ugly beadboard” and spooked herself.
[attached image]
An electric current lurched through me. I knew, without opening the attachment, what it would be. My eyes jumped to the end of the thread:
I’ve never seen those symbols before? From any religion? And from where the house is, I went through all of the local info and couldn’t find anything about any cults in the area out of the ordinary? Does anyone know what it could be? Any leads helpful.
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