Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
UNKNOWN
THREE WEEKS LATER…
I’d been dead a long time; surrendering to the afterlife with nothing more than a pen in my pocket and lies to my name.
You got used to carrying things like that when you were a card-toting member of the afterlife. Time stretched. Guilt settled. Anger festered. Year over year, this house, my house, learned my moods.
But there came a time when a proverbial breath of fresh air entered your existence for the first time in decades.
It happened the moment Margaret Fontaine’s realtor friend had unlocked the front door and walked in a few days ago, and the phenomenon had repeated itself, only stronger today, as they returned with two vehicles filled to the brim with boxes and assorted housewares.
“Are you sure about this?” Alice asked as she set her box down onto the front porch, taking Maggie’s smaller one to free up her hands so she could unlock the front door.
“I know you think I’m crazy,” she said.
The moment the tumbler turned, I drifted down the staircase banister, translucent hand skimming the carved oak.
The air shifted, dust motes lifting like they were curious.
I watched as she stepped inside with that mix of awe, excitement, and nerves people got when they’d bought more history than they bargained for.
The floorboards sighed beneath their feet, or had it been my new roommate?
“There’s just something about this place. The minute I set foot in here,” Maggie murmured, keys still clutched in her fist, “it felt like I was in the right place, at the right time. Like I belonged. It’s kismet.”
Maggie didn’t even flinch when the entryway’s chandelier flickered. No one had turned it on.
She smells of coffee, old paper, and late nights. Add to that the short notes I’ve seen her jotting into that notebook of hers, and the mention of her editor on her last visit, she must be an author or a writer of some sort, I thought to myself as I came to stand next to the two women.
It wasn’t until I’d eavesdropped on them discussing Maggie’s latest failed relationship that I found myself attached to my house’s new owner.
Loss and its accompanying grief had a way of binding people, and so it had us; she just didn’t know it yet.
Combine that with the minuscule kernel of hope that still lingered inside me after a century, and my mind was made up.
Margaret Fontaine, or Maggie as she seemed to prefer being called, would be the one to unveil the truth.
She’d be my ticket to freedom.
MAGGIE
“Are you sure about this?” my best friend, Alice, asked with a note of repulsion in her tone as we strolled up the stone walkway to the rundown-and-in-much-need-of-tender-loving-care stone Tudor house that towered before us.
She set down her box and grabbed mine as I stuck the key into the front door and turned.
The amount of money and work it would take to restore this beautiful, albeit ramshackle, cottage manor-esque structure and its sprawling acreage would be significant, but the thought of letting this piece of history to be demolished and forgotten felt sacrilegious from the moment the realtor that Alice had dealt with had told me what would befall this home should a serious homebuyer not come through.
“I know you think I’m crazy.” I turned the knob and pushed inward, turning to smile at the woman who’d been along for life’s ups and downs since we were in kindergarten.
“There’s just something about this place.
” I stepped over the threshold with a wide smile, something deep inside me settling.
“The minute I set foot in here,” I sighed, breathing in the musty air, and enjoyed the play of dust motes over the sun streaming from the uncovered, albeit dusty, windows before adding, “it felt like I’m in the right place, at the right time. Like I belonged. It’s kismet.”
“You and your fancy English.” Alice rolled her eyes, but followed me inside, and cringed as she worked to get the front door to stay latched closed behind us.
That’ll be the first thing I fix, I told myself.
Next, I would need to clean the back bedroom, my soon -to -be main suite, followed by the kitchen, and one of the bathrooms, too.
I’d never been more thankful for Alice and her massive list of trade contacts.
An hour after she and I had carted my first few boxes into the house, I had a locksmith looking after my front door.
An hour after that, I’d been given my first restoration specialist contact after I’d announced my plans to bring my old-but-new home back to its original splendor.
Or at least to a more modernized semblance of it.
It had taken Alice and me the better part of the morning, the entirety of the afternoon, and a few hours beyond a dinner of pizza and a six-pack of local beer from one of our favorite microbreweries before my best friend left me to myself and the ramshackle, just-over-five-thousand-square-foot house that I now called home.
In that time, we’d managed to scrub the wooden floors, cleaned the windows, and washed the floor and ceiling of what would be my bedroom for the foreseeable future.
The kitchen surely showed its age and would need a massive overhaul, as would all the bathrooms, but the spaces were livable for now.
It wasn’t until a little after one in the morning, sore muscles, exhausted body, and depleted mind, that I collapsed onto the crisp, clean sheets of my four-poster bed.
It had been Alice’s most noteworthy object of frustration for the day, as it had taken us and two movers to assemble it.
The thing was a massive antique I’d refinished some years ago that had taken up residence in Elijah’s guest bedroom up until nearly a month ago.
With the fresh linen smell filling my nose, mixing with that of the detergents I’d used on the flooring, baseboards, and walls, my lids drooped as the weight and excitement of the day settled over me.
And sleep pulled me under…