Chapter 31
Minnie Tipton
Ambrose Fields, Pennsylvania
If fear took human form, it would be a ghoulish creature.
It would have talons for fingernails with serrated edges that ripped your soul if you tried to extricate yourself from those hooks.
It would have eyes of black. Deep, soulless eyes that sucked you into them and swallowed you whole until trembling was all you knew, and gasping for air was futile but necessary nonetheless.
Minnie shut the book, clutching it between her hands. The bedcovers pooled around her waist as she sat up in her bed in the semidarkness. Gaslights illuminated her bedroom, but the effect was soft, the shadows deep.
The book she was reading had engulfed her with its imagery.
She eyed the name of the author: Victor Barringsworth, Esq.
An obscure English author who had penned these words around the same time that Edgar Allan Poe was creating his own prose of ravens and dead men trapped beneath floorboards.
Few remembered Victor Barringsworth’s writings.
A person had to be a patron of books to discover his one 581-page tome.
Minnie slipped the book beneath her pillow and questioned her choices once again. The gruesome and the dark held a haunting mystery over mankind, this Minnie knew. But at half past midnight, she once again questioned her reasoning for reading it before she burrowed into her bed to sleep.
Though she was nearing thirty, a spinster who cared for her ailing father, she had the stamina of someone half her age when it came to horror.
And Victor Barringsworth, Esq. had done more than write horror.
He had emoted it. He’d penned words that saturated Minnie’s spirit and begged her to be afraid with him as he explored the long sleep of death.
If she allowed her romantic side to awaken, Minnie imagined she would have traveled to London in 1859 and engaged in conversation with the then-alive Victor Barringsworth. Instead, it was over fifty years later, and she was a husbandless female falling for a dead man and his writing.
She slipped from beneath the linens and padded barefoot across the velvety carpet that covered the scuffed wood floors of her room. She paused at her bureau and poured water from a pitcher to a washbasin, then splashed some on her face to awaken her senses.
There were no ghouls waiting outside her bedroom door.
Her new home had been built in the late 1700s as part of a colonial plantation.
A large addition had been designed and built by others in the 1840s, which included a second floor and attic.
But while the century-old homestead might hold interesting secrets and lore, it didn’t house any ghosts.
Minnie dried her face with a towel, lowering it to stare at her image in the mirror. Large brown eyes. Dark blond hair that hung well past her shoulders. White nightgown with a ribbon of blue at the scooped neckline.
No. Ambrose Fields didn’t hold ghosts, at least not the spirits some of Minnie’s acquaintances attempted to call upon as they socialized with spiritualists.
Or the spirits they claimed moved the piece on the Talking Board they used as a parlor game.
Despite her fondness for a thrilling read, Minnie avoided that game with an unease that told her there was more to the board and its alphabet than met the eye.
Minnie reached for her reflection, extending the fingers of her right hand toward the mirror. There wasn’t anyone else at Ambrose Fields to confide in. Just Papa, who was not of sound mind, and Mrs. Pickston the housekeeper, who’d come with the place as if she were an inherited piece of furniture.
Minnie lowered her hand and moved to turn off the gaslights. She returned to her bed in somber silence.
Victor Barringsworth, Esq. was correct, Minnie determined as the remaining light dimmed at her touch and night’s darkness conquered the room.
Fear was an all-encompassing emotion. But it was an emotion, after all, and if Minnie had learned anything, it was that emotions could be wicked, unreliable.
They doomed a person to shame, to assumptions larger than life, and to grief that overtook you.
Emotions were not something to be followed or even believed.
Emotions led one astray from the truth, from what was right and what was real.
They betrayed you. They betrayed others. Just like Mama had betrayed Papa.
Minnie slipped beneath the covers and stared at the ceiling. “Don’t be like your mother,” she whispered.
In the darkness a scoffing laugh brushed over Minnie like a distant cold wind. Her mother’s laugh. The one she heard every night in response to Minnie’s whispered mantra.
And the vaporous words that followed were: And yet you are. You’re just like me.
Triss Bellamy
Ambrose Fields, Pennsylvania
May, Present Day
“And through here . . .”
More doors opened, this time a set of French doors, with panes of sparkling glass framed by dark mahogany. The floors were also made of wood, and Triss Bellamy’s footsteps echoed on the wood, making her wish she’d worn her leather mules instead of heels. But she’d wanted to make a good impression.
The woman in front of her was shorter, rounder, matronly. She spread her arms wide as if announcing the pièce de résistance of the entire estate. And Triss couldn’t argue with that.
The bookshop at Ambrose Fields Homestead Estate was magnificent indeed.
Triss took a moment to drink it all in. To her right, large paned windows overlooked the south-facing lawn.
Two of them boasted a window seat covered in lavender cushions and patchwork pillows of yellow, purple, and green hues.
Two cats lay curled in the sun, claiming the window seat as their own.
A black cat barely six months old and a smaller kitten, a silver tiger with white-rimmed yellow eyes.
“Emmy and ZoZo.” Mrs. Nickle introduced the cats to Triss. “They come with the bookshop,” she added with a laugh.
Aside from the felines who had already claimed Triss’s heart, it was the bookshelves that drew her attention. They ran floor to ceiling, also of mahogany, with not one inch to spare between the hundreds of volumes to squeeze in another title.
Two smaller, double-sided shelves stood in the middle of the floor, with framed photographs of prior occupants of Ambrose Fields displayed on their tops.
Strategically placed piles of vintage books were piled in a far corner to the left of a Victorian desk.
On the desktop was a laptop, and on the wall behind the desk hung an impressive portrait of a pretty lady with large dark eyes, pale skin, her hair swept into an updo reminiscent of the turn of the century.
Triss didn’t inquire as to who the woman was. She would find out soon enough. If she got the job, that is.
“And that’s the main house here at Ambrose Fields,” Mrs. Nickle said, concluding the tour of the sprawling estate home with its numerous rooms and hallways, so many that Triss had lost count.
“As I mentioned before,” Mrs. Nickle went on, “the east wing was built in 1790 when Rutherford Ambrose erected it. The rest of the place was added in 1856, less than ten years before the war broke out.”
Triss nodded. Civil War history was much talked about in this part of Pennsylvania with Gettysburg less than an hour’s drive away.
Mrs. Nickle leaned against the desk and crossed her arms over her ample chest. “It’s been said that Rutherford Ambrose was a superstitious man who dabbled in .
. . well, witchcraft. The estate was passed on to his nephew and was eventually sold to someone outside the Ambrose family in the early 1900s.
” Nickle craned her neck to look over her shoulder at the lady in the portrait.
“That’s Minnie Tipton, daughter of Bertram Tipon, who purchased the estate.
It stayed in their family for several decades until it was willed to the village of Whipple Hollow and turned into a historic site and a museum. ”
That was it in a nutshell. Triss met Minnie Tipton’s luminous eyes, which held something in their depths that would never be revealed now that she had passed away.
“I do love history.” Triss attempted to be convincing, which wasn’t hard when she was telling the truth. “And I adore books.”
“Wonderful!” Mrs. Nickle, general manager of the estate and very friendly, seemed just a little bit desperate to find a manager for the museum’s bookshop.
“My previous bookshop manager left rather abruptly. With tourist season already in swing and with the Memorial Day holiday fast approaching, I must say you’re a gift in heels.
” She shot a glance at Triss’s navy heels.
“Feel free to be a tad more casual when working here. We try to offer a relaxed and warm atmosphere for our guests.”
With that, Mrs. Nickle pushed off the desk and held her hand out to Triss.
“The job is yours. You’ve plenty of bookstore experience, and your aptitude for history will come in handy.
The job won’t make you wealthy, but we do offer a basic health benefits package.
No dental, though.” She shot Triss a worried look.
“That’s okay,” Triss said. She’d figure out her dental work when the time came for it.
“Good!” Relief was expressed in the form of a quickly expelled breath.
They concluded their handshake, and Mrs. Nickle eyed the two adolescent cats in the window seat.
“You will need to care for them also. Their litter box is in the side room there.” She pointed to a door that was mostly hidden to the left of the desk.
It was built into the bookshelves with shelves in the door itself, and the only way a person would know it was there was that it was cracked open, probably to allow the kittens access to their bathroom facilities.
Mrs. Nickle clucked her tongue as she eyed the felines.
“I do like cats, but I’ve no idea why I ever told the previous bookshop manager she could have them inside.
If I’d known she would up and disappear a few months later .
. .” She let her sentence hang as a shadow crossed her face.
Waving it off, Mrs. Nickle met Triss’s gaze.
“Sometimes people vanish. Lazy, no-good people who want to make twenty dollars an hour to sit around and do nothing.”
Triss had a feeling that the prior bookshop manager hadn’t been all that lazy. Not with the bookshop so tidy and in order. But the word vanish captured her attention. It was a word Triss had despised for years and had come to Ambrose Fields to get away from.
Vanish.
Apparition.
Ghost.
Specter.
She came from a family of superstitious ghost hunters, and she wanted to put as much distance between her and them as she could.
Triss neither liked nor believed in ghosts.
She was more pragmatic than all that. She believed in history.
In truth. Not in fiction and fanciful ideas.
In fact, she’d always wondered why she’d never been that good at mathematics because the calculation of numbers aligned with Triss’s desire for order, predictability, and logic.
But, she supposed, sometimes a person inherited things from their family they’d rather they hadn’t. And so, in the true form of someone who’d grown up with Bohemian parents and a brother who saturated his life with apparatuses to capture evidence of the spirit world, Triss had made herself vanish.
She’d left her family.
She would reinvent herself here. At Ambrose Fields. In a bookshop inside a historic home that boasted ninety-nine doors. With two cats who now sized her up from their window seat, yellow eyes unblinking, and furry faces begging to be nuzzled.
Yes. Vanish was now a word that Triss had left behind.
The bookshop, with all its doors and history and cats, was far more preferable. A dream really. Triss’s dream. She dared anyone, or anything, to haunt it.