Chapter 3 #2
‘Fine. Why wouldn’t it be? Like I said, this may be the opportunity I needed to kick back and enjoy myself more. Who needs a job anyway?’
Hmm. I could only hope she meant it, but I had my doubts.
Personally, I’d felt a lot calmer since I’d had a closer look at our financial affairs.
She’d finally let me talk to our accountant, who’d reassured me that, providing we didn’t go mad, we’d be fine even if Melissa never worked again.
She also reminded me that I had a healthy sum coming to me when I turned thirty, and that we were very fortunate young women.
I wasn’t sure I’d have put it quite like that. Melissa had lost her dad when she was twenty years old. I’d lost mine just before my twelfth birthday. Our mum had died when my sister was thirty-six and I was fourteen. I don’t think ‘fortunate’ was exactly the word.
It had been very unexpected. Mum had gone into hospital for yet another routine cosmetic surgery procedure but had developed complications.
‘We couldn’t possibly have foreseen it,’ the surgeon had assured my sister. ‘It was just one of those unfortunate things. There’s a risk to every surgical procedure,’ he’d added hastily. ‘We made your mother very aware of that, and she signed the consent form just the same.’
Melissa had arrived at my boarding school to break the news and bring me home.
I’d stayed with her for a few weeks as we were both in shock.
Mum’s accountant and solicitor had helped Melissa deal with the practical stuff, and a therapist was on speed dial for her emotional needs.
A few weeks later I was packed off back to school, and life continued pretty much as it always had.
Except we were now both orphans and only had each other.
Melissa had already been married and divorced twice by that point, and had long decided that marriage wasn’t for her. She’d made up her mind that she never wanted children either, so it must have been quite a blow to find herself responsible for me.
Determined to – as she insisted – create the perfect life for us, she focused on her career, hiring staff to take care of my practical needs, while she built a reputation for herself as a reliable and genuine medium, culminating in her contract with HoneyStone Television and a reasonable amount of fame as Madam Mariska on It’s Haunted!
To celebrate her new career, she’d sold the family home and bought one in her dream location, in the popular town of Marlington on the banks of the Thames in Buckinghamshire. It was expensive, but not as expensive as it would have been if it hadn’t needed a lot of work doing to it.
Melissa had thrown herself into the renovations. Not physically, obviously, but she was very good at hiring (and firing) people to do it for her. The house and garden had become something of an obsession with her in recent years.
I suppose the truth is that she’d had nothing else in her life since Mum had died, and that when her ghosts began to desert her it must have been devastating.
Yet she’d never admitted that to me. She’d never even confessed that, whatever gift she’d once possessed, it had gone.
Maybe she hadn’t fully accepted it herself.
Certainly, she’d spent the last four years trying to convince me – and possibly herself – that it was a temporary state of affairs, caused by one thing or another ‘blocking the channels’.
But deep down, it must have really knocked her confidence.
Is that why she’d decided to retire? She’d already been established on It’s Haunted!
when her gift vanished. People trusted her.
Starting over somewhere else would be more dangerous.
She’d have to prove herself all over again.
And since she clearly couldn’t do that, had she decided it was safer not to try?
I couldn’t blame her if she had.
Even so, I couldn’t imagine her staying out of the limelight for long.
She thrived on it. I often thought that people who didn’t know much about us would have assumed that it was Melissa who was Jet’s daughter, because she was so much like him in a lot of ways.
If she’d been with us on that weekend in Whitby, she’d have loved it and would have played to the crowd as much as he had, instead of hating every minute like me.
I poured us both coffee and offered her one of the cupcakes that I’d baked the previous day ready for her return. Melissa threw down The Telegraph in disgust, accepted the cupcake half-heartedly, and reached for the Cotswolds Courier.
She despised most of the newspapers she read and disagreed with everything in them, whether they were right-wing or left-wing, so I had no idea why she still bought them, unless it was to impress her work colleagues with her knowledge of current affairs.
I gazed out of the window and noticed that the leaves on some of the trees were already beginning to turn brown at the edges, and that autumn was on its way. There’d been a bit of a chill in the air for days now. Unusual for early September, which was often glorious.
‘I meant to go to that,’ Melissa murmured suddenly. ‘Can’t believe I forgot. Oh well, I was in Portugal anyway so…’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, more to make conversation than out of any desperate need to know.
She tapped the newspaper. ‘A 1940s weekend in Rowan Vale,’ she said. ‘Do you remember I spotted that piece about it in the Courier last year when I was in the Oxfordshire office, and I said we’d have to go to the next one? Too late now. We’ll have to put it on the calendar for next year.’
‘Hmm.’ I frowned, trying to remember. Something about a living history village as I recalled. Rowan Vale was about an hour and a half’s drive away from us in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, but we’d never visited it.
‘Too many tourists,’ Melissa had said once with a shudder. ‘I’d never get a minute’s peace.’
It hadn’t seemed to bother her when she’d made up her mind to visit the next 1940s event there, though. Besides, celebrities were so common in the Cotswolds these days that you were more likely to get stopped and stared at if you’d never been on television or released a hit record.
‘Oh, wow!’ She sat up straight suddenly and folded the paper to take a better look at it. ‘Now this is interesting.’
‘What is?’ I asked, noticing Honey having a fine time chasing after some leaves that had fluttered off the large horse chestnut tree at the bottom of the garden.
‘A Halloween event is going to be held in Rowan Vale,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Or rather, on the larger Harling Estate. Have you heard of the Wyrd Stones?’
I nodded, vaguely remembering reading something once about the Neolithic and Bronze Age stone circle, barrow and monolith just outside Rowan Vale village itself. I’d thought at the time that I should visit, but I’d never got round to it and had forgotten all about them since.
‘What about them?’ I asked now, half watching Honey with some amusement as she stood, head tilted, staring with interest at a bird in the hedge.
‘There’s going to be a pumpkin path leading through the woods to the stone circle,’ Melissa said slowly, ‘and then a pumpkin carving competition, apple bobbing, and a fancy dress parade for the children, followed by a spooky-stories-by-torchlight event.’
‘Sounds like fun,’ I said with a shrug. ‘For the kids anyway.’
‘Yes. But nothing for the adults…’ Melissa continued reading for a moment then shook her head. ‘Nope. Not a word about anything for the over-eighteens.’
I frowned. ‘Well, does it matter? You wouldn’t want to go to a Halloween event anyway, would you?’
‘That,’ she said, a sudden unnerving gleam in her eyes, ‘depends on what the event is. And,’ she added meaningfully, ‘who it involves.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, hearing Honey’s claws clipping along the hallway tiles and realising she’d grown tired of chasing leaves and watching birds.
‘I’m talking about a great Halloween event on the Harling Estate at the ancient stone circle, featuring Madam Mariska.
’ She got to her feet and threw her arms wide, as if embracing all the sudden possibilities the article had shown her.
‘Pack a bag, Verity. Tomorrow we’re off to Rowan Vale.
I’m going to give those villagers a Halloween night to remember! ’