7
Demi
Beaumont Manor is definitely haunted.
It’s been two weeks since I moved in, and I haven’t once escaped the feeling of being watched.
Things are often moved from where I put them, nothing extreme, just shifted slightly.
In an effort to rid the house of the dusty scent of disuse, I’ve been burning a lot of candles and incense.
If I leave the room for just a moment and the candles are still burning, I return to find them blown out, and I have to relight them.
Mittens follows shadows around and meows affectionately at empty spaces.
Whoever is haunting my house seems to have at least won over my cat.
To be fair, that isn’t hard to do. Mittens is a giant baby and loves most people.
Except Owen. She’s been with me for fifteen years, and he’s the only person she’s ever growled at.
She hates him, always has. I should have taken that as a red flag, but I thought it was a fluke.
That’s another thing. Owen keeps calling from unknown numbers.
If my phone isn’t on my person when he calls and it’s sitting on a table or my nightstand, it will turn off completely after the first ring and restart on its own.
Maybe I just need a new phone, but at this point, I’d be willing to bet my ghostly housemate doesn’t like my ex very much either .
It’s the first weekend of September, Labor Day, and I’m exhausted from charming tourists into buying vinyl and books for three days straight. My feet hurt, and my social battery is entirely depleted.
I sit out on the porch, wrapped in a blanket and sipping on a whiskey-spiked Cherry Coke. Mittens is curled up next to me on the surprisingly sturdy porch swing, taking up way more than her fair share of space.
New England is now in the blessed limbo between Summer and Fall.
The days are still warm and sunny, but the nights and early mornings bring an autumnal chill like a promise of what’s to come.
The night sky is a blanket of stars, and the crisp air smells like a bonfire. I close my eyes and breathe it all in.
Earlier this week, I found a stack of old, worn photo albums on a shelf in the library. I hadn’t had time to look through them because of how busy it’s been at the shop. But now, I have the stack sitting on the wrought iron patio table in front of me.
The first one I page through is filled with black-and-white photos of a couple in what appears to be the late 1940s: a wedding day, a honeymoon at Niagara Falls, a baby, and childhood Christmases at Beaumont Manor. When I reach the last page, I set the album aside and pick up the next one.
The cover creaks when I open it, and what I see inside steals the breath right out of my lungs.
Janis Joplin’s face greets me, singing from the stage at Woodstock.
The photo appears to have been taken from the side of the stage.
It’s beautiful, printed in a creamy, well-preserved black-and-white.
Janis sings with her eyes closed, her arms outstretched, and her long hair blowing in the wind.
I’d bet my life that this is an original, taken by someone who was there that day.
I turn the page and find more familiar faces from Woodstock: Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, The Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival… Then, it’s not just Woodstock. They're photos of live concerts from the seventies, many of which have vinyl recordings in my shop that are worth hundreds of dollars each.
My chest is buzzing with excitement. I’m holding pieces of history in my hands.
Someone was at ?all of these iconic shows, photographing them.
Where did these albums come from? Who took these photos?
I want to pull them out of the album and frame them in the shop, but even the thought of that feels somehow sacrilegious.
Here’s Joni Mitchell, whose album Blue is my sister’s namesake, crooning dreamily into a microphone. There’s Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones. The Eagles, Queen.
I carefully drag my fingers across the cellophane covering a photograph of my favorite band of all time, Fleetwood Mac.
“Stevie fucking Nicks,” I say out loud.
Mittens peeks up at me, then tucks her face back under my thigh and goes back to sleep.
Where did these come from, and how did they end up here, at Beaumont Manor of all places?
Flipping to the last page, I find a pocket filled with backstage passes from all these shows. At the bottom of each is typed: “Photographer. Tristan Beaumont.”
I know that name. A full-body chill starts at my scalp and moves its way down to my toes in a violent rush. Tristan Beaumont was the last owner of the Manor before it was placed in a trust, which kept it empty for all these years.
Tristan Beaumont died in this house. That’s the only thing I’ve ever known about him, the only thing anyone in Ivy Falls talks about when it comes to him.
It hits me that this person had a whole, and apparently very-fucking-cool, life once upon a time, but all he’s remembered for now is his death.
The realization fills me with sadness. A whole life reduced merely to its end.
I pull out my phone and Google his name.
The top search results are a handful of articles about the fire, a story I’ve heard repeated over and over.
The Halloween storm of 1978 ravaged Ivy Hollow, destroying several historic buildings on Main Street and knocking out power to the whole town for a week afterward.
Lightning struck Beaumont Manor, igniting an attic fire.
Nobody seems to know how it happened, but Tristan Beaumont was trapped in the attic at the time.
The rain was so heavy that it put out the fire before it could destroy the rest of the house, but the damage was done: Tristan was dead.
Most of the articles are from regional newspapers, but there’s a headline from Rolling Stone ?that catches my attention.
“Rock and Roll Photographer Dead at 30.” I click the link, and it takes me to a tiny, one-paragraph blurb about Tristan, name-dropping some of the bands he photographed and detailing an abridged version of the fire. But there are two photos.
My heart does a funny thing in my chest.
One of the photos is a close-up of a man in profile.
He’s wearing aviator sunglasses, and his wavy hair is loose and hanging around his shoulders.
Even though the picture is black and white, I just know his hair is brown–probably chocolate brown with a hint of auburn in the depths.
A short, dark beard circles his sharp and sturdy jaw.
There’s a pensive, broody pinch of his eyebrows above the sunglasses.
He’s wearing a button-down shirt, open at the chest, that exposes the line of his throat, the ripple of his Adam’s apple, and the light scattering of hair below his collarbones.
“Damn, Daddy,” I say.
Is it weird to be lusting after a picture of a dead man? Probably. Either way, I take a screenshot, just in case.
The other picture of Tristan is a full-length shot of him on the side of a stage, holding a camera.
His hands are so big. He looks tall and is built strong.
He’s wearing a white T-shirt that showcases the veins and muscles of his forearms. A pair of bellbottoms is slung low on his hips, showing the tiniest hint of his abdomen in the stripe of skin between the hem of his shirt and his belt.
His long hair is pulled back into a thick bun at the nape of his neck.
He’s not wearing sunglasses this time, and he’s grinning.
A wide, toothy smile that reaches all the way up to eyes that are both gentle and a little mischievous.
That smile could make a girl want to sin.
I take a screenshot of that picture too. Again, just in case.
Then, my phone buzzes with a text message, and all of the excitement from the past few minutes plummets.
Unknown: Demi, stop ignoring me.
Unknown: I don’t know why you’re acting like this. I just want to talk.
It’s hard to remember why I even liked Owen Parker, but we were serious enough that we lived together.
Maybe that’s when it started to fall apart, when I saw the true Owen instead of the persona he puts on in public.
In public, he’s good at making his arrogance look like charisma.
In private, he’s the type of man who leaves his laundry next to the hamper instead of in it.
The kind of man who gets fired from his job as a bartender for selling liquor to the nineteen-year-old girls he was trying to flirt with.
The type of man who drinks too much, too often, and says really nasty shit to the woman he claims to love.
Unknown: I’m serious. Stop fucking ignoring me.
That strange mixture of cold and warmth washes over me, an energy shift that makes me feel as if I’m being watched, as if someone is right next to me but in another plane of existence. I shiver.
The keyboard on my phone lights up and starts writing a message in the reply bar—all on its own.
Are you safe? It types.
Holy shit.