Chapter 7 #2
It was a biting comment. I wasn’t used to Allison being that sharp and I eyed her. But Allison just looked exhausted. She hadn’t even wanted to return to the gala and now it was creeping up on midnight.
“We can head back to Midnight House now,” I said. “Is everyone okay with that?”
“Yes, please,” Allison groaned.
Taylor was asleep in a wrought iron chair, his chin resting on his chest. Reginald gave him a hard thump on the upper back. “Wake up, man. The train is rolling out.”
Taylor jumped and snuffled. “Train? What?”
“Just get in the van,” Vivienne said, rolling her eyes.
Hollis found me on our way out, and his hand landed briefly at the small of my back. He guided me toward the door with more familiarity than the situation strictly called for and it felt as unexpected as Hyacinth burying her bracelet in a flower bed.
“Go home,” he said. “Lock the doors. I’ll come by in the morning.”
“Locking the door to my house does nothing, remember?” It seemed like every time I turned around Midnight House coughed up another key from the annals of history and people let themselves in.
“You terrify me,” he said, shaking his head.
“It’s not like I passed the keys out myself!” I protested.
His mouth had gone soft at the corner again, and for one suspended second, it almost felt as if we were alone and something was brewing between us. Almost.
“Giddyup, girl,” Taylor said, gesturing for me to move out of the way.
Now he was wide awake?
I rolled my eyes and stepped out of Hollis’s personal space.
The drive back to Midnight House was quiet.
A mixture of deep thoughts and exhaustion, most likely.
Taylor was snoring lightly. Allison kept opening her mouth like she wanted to start theorizing and then closing it again, apparently deciding even she had reached her limit for the night.
Vivienne reviewed her footage in the dark, the little screen throwing blue light across her face.
Reginald stared out the window, arms crossed, saying nothing at all.
Teddy, curled in his travel bag on the passenger seat, slept through the entire drive like none of it concerned him in the slightest. Which, technically, it did not. He wasn’t a member of the Magnolia Society.
I pulled into the driveway a little after twelve-thirty, the second time that night I’d parked in that exact spot with a car full of shell-shocked gala attendees, and I found myself hoping that we could all just retreat to our rooms.
The house had other ideas.
The porch light was off.
I distinctly remembered leaving it on. I always left it on, ever since Aunt Odette’s day, a habit so ingrained I didn’t even think about the switch anymore, my hand just found it automatically on the way out the door. But the bulb over the front steps was dark.
“I hate changing that bulb,” I murmured. It required a ladder and core strength I didn’t possess. But then I realized that wasn’t the only light out. So was the one in the front hall, visible through the sidelight windows, and so, as it turned out, was every other light in the house.
My stomach sank. I walked gingerly, my feet now fully rebellious against the high heels.
“Did you have a power outage?” Reginald asked, climbing out of the van with careful, joint-testing movements.
“The rest of the block has power,” Vivienne said, nodding at Hollis’s porch light glowing warm and steady across the side yard, and at the streetlamp on the corner doing its regular business.
“Oh good,” Allison said. “Just us, then. That’s so much better.”
The slightly hysterical quality to her voice confirmed for me that Allison was done with the night. One more incident and she was going over the edge, that was clear.
I unlocked the front door with unsteady hands, and the foyer that greeted us was dark and cool. Inside, the air had the flat, still chill of a house that had been closed up without any HVAC running.
“Harper,” Taylor said, sounding more sober than he had since noon, “why is it forty degrees in your foyer?”
“It’s not forty degrees.”
“It’s definitely bracing,” Reginald agreed.
I found the light switch by memory and flipped it. Nothing happened.
I sighed. Of course tonight would be the night that the power went out. Not that any night would be a good night.
“Breaker,” I said, with more confidence than I felt, and made my way toward the kitchen, one hand trailing the wall, while behind me I heard the unmistakable sound of four adults deciding, without discussion, to walk very close together.
The chandelier above the staircase flickered to life on its own before I ever reached the breaker box in the room off of the kitchen. Just for a second, before it went dark again.
“That’s the wiring,” I said, to the room, to myself, to whoever needed convincing most. “That chandelier has always done that. It’s original. It’s temperamental.”
“It did that for Vivienne on the first night too,” Allison said. “She has it on camera.”
“Exactly. Old house. Old wiring. Nothing to see here.”
“I thought you had ghosts,” Allison commented.
She sounded genuinely scared. Even in the dark, lit only by my phone’s flashlight, and Vivienne’s, Allison was clinging to Taylor’s arm.
From somewhere upstairs came the long, slow creak of a floorboard, the specific one outside Room Two that always announced itself, followed by the softer, more distant sound of a door easing shut, gently, deliberately, the way a person closes a door when they don’t want to wake anybody.
Nobody was upstairs.
Every single person currently in this house was standing in a tight, nervous cluster in my dark kitchen.
My joke to Hollis came back to haunt me. Haunt me. Hah. I cracked myself up. Or I would if I wasn’t suddenly very nervous.
Teddy, still in his travel bag, began to chitter. He was spooked.
“Harper,” Reginald said, and for the first time all night, the composed preservation architect sounded genuinely, thoroughly baffled, “does your house do this often?”
“Only when there’s a full moon.”
“There was no full moon tonight.”
“I was joking.”
I found the breaker box, flipped the switch, and the light flooded back through Midnight House. Every lamp, every fixture, every bulb blazing on at once as if the house had simply been waiting for an audience.
The kitchen was empty.
We all disbursed, heaving a collective sigh of relief.
“I’ll be asleep in thirty seconds,” Allison said.
“I might already be asleep,” Taylor joked.
Taylor might be a tippler, but he did appreciate humor, which I appreciated.
The floorboard outside Room Two, when I looked, showed no evidence of anyone standing on it. There was no dust disturbed, no footprint on the runner, nothing at all.
“Just old wiring and maybe ghosts,” I assured everyone, as they all opened their respective guest room doors.
“Ghosts don’t scare me,” Reginald commented. “People do.”
With that, he shut his door and locked it firmly behind him.
Wiser words had never been spoken.