Chapter Two #2
She wanted to forget her wrecked love life and her potassium chloride nightmare, start up new flirtations, and focus on her new job and surroundings. Really, she tried to. But her brain stayed stuck in its pessimistic groove.
That afternoon, as she visited her elderly housemates and checked blood pressures and answered medication questions, she found herself thinking that this was it. This was where she would live out her days. She’d be a nurse here for the next fifty years, then break her hip and get transferred into a room and become a resident, and die in her sleep not long afterward. It was hard to see how she would ever meet a decent person and fall in love. Her choices here were practically nonexistent, unless some resident’s great-nephew was visiting. The only eligible bachelor in the house—aside from George Lambert—was Ren, and she could do better than a boy in his early twenties who tidied up an old folks’ home for a living. Even if he did happen to be a crossword genius, magnificently well-mannered, and delectable as a dish of coffee ice cream.
That night, brushing her teeth in the bathroom down the hall from her room, she stared into the mirror and observed her eyelids succumbing to gravity, and was that another gray hair over her ear? She plucked it out, flicked it into the trash can, and let the toothbrush go slack as she gazed at her reflection. Fine. She knew the truth. She didn’t think of herself as too good for Ren. Rather, she feared he wouldn’t be interested. Not that she was interested in him , but it would have been comforting to think herself desirable. He certainly didn’t go out of his way to talk to her. She had passed him on the way up tonight while he mopped the kitchen floor; she remembered glancing in approval at his strong shoulders and lean waist. Now, with a frown, she thought, I can’t even get the houseboy. I’ve become old and boring.
She spat out the toothpaste. Enough of this. Brent may have gotten knocked off his feet and engaged before his last box was unpacked in Atlanta, but that didn’t mean she had to follow suit. Her only task right now was to make the best of her situation and build a new track record to be proud of.
However, forgetting her love life was difficult when the elderly ladies, who made up eleven of the twelve residents, considered it their favorite discussion topic. For instance, at lunch the next day, Betty Carter produced a photo of her youngest son, who was forty-two and divorced and wore a handlebar mustache. “Coming to see me next month!” she said. “He’s a hit with the single ladies. You ought to drop by.”
“I’ll see if I have time,” Lina said.
“Marla’s nephew Gary is closer to her age,” said Ethel Barker. “He’s a sweetie.”
“But he lives way out of town, doesn’t he?” said Dolly Tidd. “I think she should hook up with Ren here.”
Lina shot a look around, but Ren was at a distant table arranging food on a tray.
“That would be my vote too,” said Mrs. B.
“I’m not sure I’m in the market right now,” Lina said.
The way Ren’s hands moved displayed a grace that reminded her of a heart surgeon she’d had a crush on a few years ago. The surgeon had been twice Lina’s age and married, of course, but there was no harm in admiring people.
Ren turned, caught her eye, and smiled. Lina twitched and dropped a forkful of cornbread into her lap. Ren walked over with a plate of orange-and-black-frosted cookies. “Would you ladies be interested in tasting these for me before I do the big batch?”
Mrs. B leaned to squint at the plate. “Ren, that’s lovely of you!”
Lina folded her napkin around the fallen cornbread, took a crescent-moon-shaped cookie, and peeked up at Ren. “Thanks.”
“I want a cat.” Dolly took a cookie that, to Lina’s eyes, was actually shaped like an owl.
“Hand me one,” said Ethel. “I don’t care about shape, just make it a big one.”
Lina bit into the moon while Ren handed cookies around. Orange-flavored frosting melted with buttery shortbread in her mouth, and she nearly melted as well. “Very good,” she mumbled to Ren as she chewed, one hand covering her mouth.
“Delicious,” said Mrs. B, and smiled at Ren. “You’re such a sweet boy. You must have a girlfriend. Are you seeing anyone?”
The other old ladies tittered. Lina felt blood rush to her cheeks. She carefully took another bite.
Ren smiled. “No, Mrs. B, I’m not.”
“Oh, what a shame! Well, I promise you I won’t set you up with my granddaughter, though I’m tempted to.”
“Thank you for the thought, anyway.” He picked up the plate. “I’ll get to work on these cookies.” He returned to the kitchen.
The old ladies broke into laughter. Lina glanced at Mrs. B and shook her head.
“Well, now you know!” Dolly said.
“I didn’t need to know.”
“He never used to offer us special cookies before you arrived,” said Mrs. B. “You just think about that.”
The trouble was, she did think about it. Ren didn’t have a girlfriend— what was the story there? Could he be a comrade in bad breakups? Might they commiserate with each other some late night in the kitchen? His reticence made him interesting. She suspected he was bright, and obviously he was kind, so what else was under the quiet surface? He was still undoubtedly too young, but Lina considered it good that she was even thinking about another man. It showed she was moving on with life.
On the other hand, she didn’t want to be like her mother, who went rather overboard when it came to moving on to the next guy and being devil-may-care about his age. Lina’s parents had been divorced for fourteen years, and her mom had gone through at least ten boyfriends, and possibly as many hair colors, in that time. Most of the men were either much younger or much older than her—not that Lina actually discussed it with her mother.
But Ren wasn’t like those men. He was clearly more appealing. It wouldn’t hurt to get to know him, would it? She needed a friend. Her former colleagues at Everglade Hospital had already trailed off in their communications with her, as she had predicted. Though she missed feeling part of a group, she didn’t miss the people themselves. They seemed part of another life already, as if Drake House had swallowed her up into its strange self-contained world.
And it was indeed a strange world, as she learned a few days after tasting Ren’s “special cookies.”
While on her rounds, Lina ate an English muffin as an afternoon snack. As she passed Mrs. B’s open door, the old lady called out to her.
“Come in for a moment!” Mrs. B leaned forward from one of her lavender armchairs. “Do I have a Halloween story for you!”
“About what?” Lina sat down in the opposite armchair, careful not to scatter crumbs on it.
“I had a long talk with Jackie this morning. That woman has some interesting stories, all right.”
“Oh, you got something out of her?” Lina took another bite of her muf-fin.
“I certainly did. It seems in the 1930s, when Jackie was a sorority girl here, there was something of a murder-suicide in this house.”
Lina was startled enough to stop chewing. “A…murder?”
“Manslaughter-suicide, actually. The first death was accidental.”
At the word “manslaughter,” Lina’s stomach went into a tailspin. She forced down her bite of muffin and nodded for Mrs. B to continue.
“You see,” said Mrs. B, “Jackie’s best friend Julia was seeing one of the houseboys. His name was Sean. The girls had a formal dance coming up, with a fairy-tale theme. It was on campus somewhere. Julia wanted Sean to go with her, but he wasn’t comfortable with the idea, because in those days the girls weren’t supposed to date the houseboys. He was afraid he’d lose his job. But Julia just couldn’t live without him taking her to this dance, so she and Jackie cooked up a scheme.
“She got Sean to agree to a private evening at the house while the other girls were at the dance. But what she really planned was to slip him some sleeping pills in brandy, and then while he was asleep she was going to call a taxi, have the driver help haul him into the car, and take him to the dance. Then she was going to revive him there—like Sleeping Beauty, you know, only he would be Sleeping Beauty and she would be Princess Charming.”
“Oh, no,” Lina breathed. She winced at the mention of mixing sleeping pills with alcohol. The manslaughter was even medication-related. She felt sick.
“That’s right. I guess whatever she and Jackie studied at U-Dub, it wasn’t medicine.”
“So he died.”
“Here at the house. They never did make it to the dance.”
“Oh. Oh, gosh.” Lina’s gaze traveled up to the ceiling as she wondered which of these rooms had been Julia’s—and whether she ought to put her head between her knees until the dizziness passed.
“After the funeral,” Mrs. B said, “Sean’s family brought charges against Julia. She didn’t say a word. That night, when everyone was asleep, she went into the garage and started the housemother’s car with the garage doors closed, and killed herself with the exhaust.”
“So she knew about carbon monoxide.” Lina’s medical background provided an automatic answer, which was good, since otherwise it would have been hard to answer coherently during her panic attack.
“Isn’t it funny, the little gaps in people’s knowledge?”
A new thought darted across Lina’s mind, and she clutched at it for support. “Then Jackie saw Ren, and thought he was the houseboy?”
“I guess so. She said he looks just like him. But really now, it’s been seventy years. I imagine being back in this house made her think so. In any case, it gave her a shock.”
A deep breath in and out helped steady Lina’s heart rate. She rotated the last bite of English muffin in her fingers. “Why would she want to live here again, after going through something so awful? I wouldn’t want to move back into the house where my best friend died.” Nor would Lina want to go back to Everglade now, and she hadn’t even been friends with Mr. Ambaum.
“She said she had fond memories after that—she and the other girls bonded and had some good times. Anyway, it’s a lovely house.”
“True.” Lina tucked the muffin piece into the pocket of her lab coat, thinking about the dark, small garage where Marla and Alan’s car now sat. She had been there just the other day, setting out on drugstore errands with Marla. Now she doubted she would ever enter the garage again without remembering what had taken place there. No wonder the basement gave her the creeps. No wonder people said there was a—
She looked at Mrs. B. “So that’s the ghost?”
“Who? The houseboy, or the girl?”
“Either. Maybe both. Do you think it—oh, what am I saying?” Lina wiped her hands on her lab coat. “I don’t know if I believe in that stuff. It’s just things sometimes…never mind.”
“Move around by themselves?”
“Well…yes. Like you said the first day.”
“Yes, I said so, but it sounds to me like you’ve seen something.”
Lina tried not to picture the ghost of a slain youth turning off the lamp in her bedroom, or slamming the laundry room door. “I can’t prove it wasn’t a living person. Or me being forgetful. Or faulty wiring, or a draft.”
Mrs. B chuckled. “Always a rational explanation. You’re probably right.”
Lina’s dizziness receded, but her mind remained a muddle. She rose. “I better go. I need to see Gertrude about a prescription. But I’m glad you told me.”
“I’ll see you at dinner, Lina dear. If you see that ghost, just jump into Ren’s arms. He’ll protect you!”
Lina smiled weakly and left the room with Mrs. B’s laughter bubbling behind her. Not a half-bad idea, really. Sheltering in Ren’s arms sounded lovely. Too bad it would require seeing a ghost.
* * *
An hour before dinner, Lina encountered Ren in the kitchen mixing dough—cookie dough, to judge from the bag of chocolate chips beside him. Mrs. B’s comment returned to her mind and brought a much-needed smile to her face, finally allowing her to set aside thoughts of manslaughter and tormented spirits.
Ren glanced up and smiled back. “Lina Zuendel,” he said, with perfect pronunciation. Must have heard her surname from Marla. “How’s your day going?”
Lina rested her forearms on the bar. “Not bad. By the way, I think Mrs. B solved the mystery of why Jackie attacked you.”
“Oh?” Ren’s shiny red spatula worked the dough off the edges of the bowl.
“A houseboy was killed here in the thirties. By one of Jackie’s friends.”
“Accident, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Lina faltered, a bit deflated. “I guess Marla told you.”
“Marla’s grandma was the housemother here when it happened. I heard about it a long time ago.”
“Everyone knows two kids died here, and no one said anything?”
Ren shrugged. His jaw muscles flexed; apparently he was chewing gum again. “Well, it was seventy years ago.”
“But what about the…the ghost?” Though the question struck her as absurd, curiosity did nag at her. For one thing, the tale resonated with her own demons. And for another—well, everyone liked a good ghost story.
One side of Ren’s mouth quirked, in what could have been amusement or thoughtfulness. He went on working the spatula. “People been telling you stories?”
“Kind of. A couple of the residents said the house was haunted, but I didn’t really believe them. Then one night my lamp switched off by itself, and another time the laundry room door slammed shut…” She pulled herself upright. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”
He scraped the spatula on the rim of the bowl. “Haven’t been bitten by one of those spiders, have you? Remember, they can cause hallucinations.”
Lina smiled. She watched him seal the lid onto a plastic tub of baking powder. “You’ve worked here a few years, right?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever seen anything? I feel stupid just for asking. I don’t believe in these things. Or at least I didn’t before.”
He plopped the dough onto a sheet of waxed paper, then set the bowl aside and wiped his hands on his apron. “If you mean, have objects moved by themselves, then—maybe. I swear sometimes I set something down, look the other way, and then turn back to find it flipped over or arranged differently. If you mean, have I seen transparent figures roaming the house, or met any headless horsemen in the alley, then no.”
“Hm.” Lina dragged a paper napkin around on the countertop with one finger, unsure whether his words were reassuring or disquieting. “Still, don’t you think it’s odd that you look like this dead houseboy? To someone who knew him?”
“Like I said, it’s been seventy years. Memories get fuzzy.” He began forming the dough into long rolls.
“A tragedy like that must have been in the newspapers. Maybe I’ll look it up at the U-Dub library.”
Ren pulled the waxed paper to the edge of the butcher’s block and tore it off. He folded it over one of the dough rolls and twisted the ends. “If you think it would help,” he said, but he sounded dubious.
* * *
Lina took her research idea only as far as a half-hour internet search that evening. She didn’t know enough about the incident to be able to seek specific names—for instance, Julia’s or Sean’s surnames—and thus had to resort to strings like “Seattle Julia manslaughter suicide Gamma Eta Omicron.” Gamma Eta Omicron had been the letters of the sorority. Lina had spotted them on a dusty set of awards in the file room in the basement. Her web search didn’t turn up anything relevant, which was understandable considering how long ago the deaths had taken place.
She then tried the UW library homepage, since Julia and Sean had been university students, and if anyone had carried the story it would have been the school newspaper. But she needed a university log-in and password to access most of the materials, and as she was no longer a student she had no such thing.
She gave up for the night and blinked at the dark window past her screen to ease her eyestrain. She figured when she had a free afternoon she would walk over to the library and do the research in person. As Ren had pointed out, there was no rush. It was difficult to make an urgent case out of the fact that seventy years ago two people had died.
“But now I’ve got some idea what you’re all about,” she said to her empty room, “and believe me, I understand.” She stretched her arms over her head. “And thanks for giving me an excuse to talk to my own cute houseboy.”
She smiled and got up to prepare for her night shift. Tonight was one of the three nights per week when she was on call. In a house with only twelve patients, all of whom were in fair or good health for their age, the graveyard shift was usually quiet, and she could sleep between calls. A pager, handed off to whoever was on duty, would wake her up. Lina had never received more than two calls per night so far, and they were never medical emergencies—just discomforts like leg cramps, insomnia, or gas. Marla covered two of the remaining nights each week; and Consuela, a nursing school student currently working in the kitchen, covered the other two, dozing on the sofabed in the Drakes’ quarters while waiting for calls.
Lina changed into a long-sleeved T-shirt and a soft pair of yoga pants with a drawstring waist, and set her lab coat and slip-on leather shoes beside her bed. She put the pager in her shoe and fell asleep within ten minutes.
The beep woke her. She squinted at the clock—half past midnight— knuckled her eyes to clear her vision, and picked up the pager. The electronic display read Ethel B . Slipping her feet into her shoes, she reviewed in her mind where Ethel’s room was: second floor, toward the end of the L-shaped house. The back staircase would be the best route.
Lina put on her lab coat and shuffled out into the hall. Only half the corridor lights were on, leaving shadowed patches in between. The back staircase, which only had lights on every other landing, was especially dim. Cold, too, she thought, folding her arms and shivering as she padded down the carpeted steps. She paused at the window between the third and second floor, but spied only a black, drizzly night and the bare arm of a tree raking at the glass. The window must have been badly insulated, because the cold was pouring into the stairwell at refrigeration strength. In fact—she puffed out a breath to test—she could actually see her breath.
She turned to the stairs again. She didn’t know why she felt afraid—only a tree tapping the glass, only an autumn storm making it cold—but as she stepped forward to descend to the second floor, her heart started pounding. She took hold of the handrail but couldn’t make herself take the next step. She hadn’t even been reading Stephen King lately. Why was she scared?
As she stood gripping the rail, the end of an orange crepe-paper streamer, stuck to the wall as Halloween decoration, untaped itself from the paneling and lifted into the air. It swung and rippled as if someone was standing there playing with it, just as Mrs. B had said about her door. Lina watched, paralyzed. The streamer swung once more and then dropped. Light footsteps thudded on the stairs in front of her, where no one was standing; she felt the floor vibrate.
“Why didn’t you get to your patient in time?” she imagined some lawyer asking. “Why did you let poor Ethel Barker die?”
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t get down there,” she would say. “I thought there was a ghost on the stairs.”
She had to go forward. But she could not.
The footsteps approached, faster now, and closer, until with a rush of air they passed her, rustling the streamers. Cold breath blew down the nape of her neck. Lina shrieked and jumped back against the window. She held the pager raised in one fist, ready to strike anyone who appeared.
All went still. The other residents were playing tricks on her, she thought, throwing her gaze around the stairwell. They cooked up the story about the houseboy and the sorority girl, then paged her at midnight to catch her here, and then somehow made a streamer dance by itself in the air, and made the stairs shake…
New footsteps padded up from below.
She was not going to stand around and wait for that to happen again, no way. She bolted forward, thundering down the last flight to the second floor landing, and ran smack into someone.
She screamed. The person said something, startled. They untangled their arms and stepped apart.
“You okay?” Ren asked. He still wore his houseboy uniform: white button-up shirt, black trousers, and shiny black shoes. His breath smelled of wintergreen gum.
“Oh. Hello,” she said. “Was that you? No, I guess…I don’t see how you would have…”
“What happened?”
“Hah. I understand. This is what you do to new people, right? Good job. Had me scared. How did you do the cold air? Got a window open up there?”
He frowned up the stairs. “None of these windows open.”
“But it’s cold, it’s really cold. Isn’t it cold?” Her shivers had turned into full-on shakes.
“It’s cold.” He put his hand on her arm and brought her into the second-floor corridor. “Did something happen?”
“Only, um, footsteps—other than mine—and decorations coming unhinged, and I, I’m supposed to be seeing…”
“Where were you going?”
“Answering a call. Ethel.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Thank you,” she said, grateful he offered without her needing to ask.
Ethel, in a voluminous purple nightgown, blinked at her from her lilac-scented pillow. “I’m so sorry to bother you, honey. My electric blanket isn’t working, and it’s positively freezing tonight.”
“You’re right about that.” Lina folded up the faulty blanket and found a new one in the closet.
“Was that you thumping down the stairs and shouting?”
“Yes. Just me. I…tripped.”
When she had gotten Ethel reheated and tucked in, she said goodnight and closed her door.
Ren leaned on the wall in the corridor. “All okay?”
Lina nodded. “Thanks for coming with me. I’m a little spooked. I don’t know what happened.” She turned toward the main staircase, avoiding the back stairs for now.
He walked with her, gazing at the light fixtures.
After a few seconds, she added, “I notice you’re not saying, ‘It was just your imagination.’”
“People don’t like to be told that. I could say it anyway. Want me to?”
“I guess not. Hallucinating isn’t much better.”
“Still, after hearing the old stories today…”
“It could have been my imagination,” she finished. “I hope. Kind of.”
They climbed to the third floor. “These night shifts are never popular,” he said. “Even with Marla. But don’t tell her I said that.”
“It was the same at the hospital. It got spooky. Only there was always someone around. Someone visible, I mean.” She glanced at him. “How come you were up, anyway?”
“I don’t sleep much. Just one of those people.”
They reached her door. “So next time I have a night shift, if I scream again, you might come running?”
“I will if I hear you.”
She opened her door and flicked on her overhead light, bright though it was in the middle of the night. “Well, I doubt I’ll sleep any more now.”
“You should try. I think it’s over.”
She looked at him. “What’s over?”
He hovered outside the door frame, gazing down, lips pressed together as if he regretted opening them. “Just…these things, they tend not to last. It should be quiet now.”
“So you don’t even believe it was my imagination.”
“I’d put it out of your mind. Try to relax and sleep.”
“Are you in on this? Really. I won’t be mad, just tell me. Is this a trick for the new nurse?”
He sighed and folded his hands behind his back. “No. We like you and want you to stay. It’s an unusual house, that’s all.” He sounded as if he was choosing his words carefully.
“Cold air breathing down your neck, things moving by themselves, that’s unusual, for sure.”
He smiled at his feet. “Well, call if you need anything. Don’t worry about waking me up. My room has an extension, it’s on the list on your wall.”
“Fine, but—”
“The rest of the night should be quiet. I really think so. Try to sleep.” He bowed his head to her like an Edwardian English butler and walked away.