Chapter 14
Fourteen
The last thing I expected when we got back to the house was to see Allison bent over a ouija board in the parlor. I was astonished.
"Allison."
She startled so hard the planchette skittered clean off the board and landed in her lap. She looked like a woman who'd been caught doing something she really, really shouldn't have been doing.
"Harper! Maggie!" She pressed a hand to her chest. "You scared the life out of me."
"That makes two of us," Maggie said, eyeing the candles ringing the parlor rug like she expected one of them to shoot ten foot flames at any second. "Is this a séance? Did we miss the good part?"
"It's not a séance." Allison scrambled to gather the board and slide it under a throw pillow, which was somehow worse than if she'd just left it out.
"It's research. For a book I’d like to write now that the current one may be DOA.
I needed to get the details right, the way it would feel, the language, all of it, so I thought I'd just experience it. Firsthand. Method writing, sort of."
"Method writing," I repeated.
"Like an actor."
"Sure," I said, in the exact tone Hollis used on me approximately four times a day.
I looked at the candles again. Nine of them, in a rough circle, burned down to different heights, which meant she'd been at this for a while. Longer than the time it would've taken us to say our goodbyes to Dorothy and drive home. She'd started this before we'd even walked out the door.
"Can we blow those candles out?” I asked. “Being that close to the rug is stressing me out.”
“Oh, sorry! Of course, of course.” Allison dropped to her knees and industriously blew them out one by one.
“I thought you had a migraine," I said. We both knew that wasn’t true. But I didn’t know if she knew that I knew it wasn’t true.
The words came out light, conversational, but Allison's face did something complicated in response, a little flicker of guilt crossing it before she smoothed it back into placid concern. I really didn’t care. I didn’t blame her one iota for skipping Evelyn’s Celebration of Life.
Now I wished I had faked a headache too.
"I did. I do. Had. It's better now." She rubbed her temple for good measure, a beat too late to be convincing. "I rested for a bit, and then I just couldn't sleep, and I thought, well, might as well be productive."
"That does sound productive."
Maggie's flat delivery seemed to fluster Allison even more.
I remembered at brunch Allison practically bouncing in her chair at the idea of a séance.
We should have conducted a séance last night and asked Evelyn who killed her.
She'd said it like a woman proposing a fun little parlor game, delighted at her own cleverness, and Taylor had shut her down with a poppycock and Vivienne had gone somber about forces we don't understand, and Allison had let it drop.
Hadn't pushed. Hadn't mentioned it again.
Until she had it all set up alone, in secret, on the one night she'd manufactured an excuse to stay behind.
That was the part that felt weird. Not the ouija board itself—a lot of people probably had a ouija board somewhere in a junk drawer, right next to a deck of cards and some dice.
It was the timing. The privacy. The fact that a woman who'd been so eager to make a game of it at a table full of witnesses had waited until she had the house entirely to herself.
"Did you get anything?" I asked, keeping my voice easy. "Spiritually speaking."
"No." The answer came too fast, the kind of no that arrived before the question had even finished landing.
Then, softer, like she'd heard herself. "Nothing that made sense.
It just kept spelling the same letters over and over.
Gibberish. I think I was moving it myself without realizing.
That happens, apparently. The ideomotor effect. I looked it up."
"What letters?"
"I don't remember exactly." She stood, gathering her laptop off the side table with hands that weren't quite steady, and I noticed a legal pad tucked half beneath it.
Lines of handwriting, a few words underlined twice.
I couldn't read it from where I stood, and I wasn't about to lunge across my own parlor to try.
"I should really get some sleep. It's been a night. "
"It has," I agreed. “There was an accident at the Celebration of Life.”
“Good grief,” Allison said, pressing her palm to her chest. "Is Hyacinth going to be all right?"
"I certainly hope so." I was already plotting my fake relationship with her to get information from the hospital staff tomorrow morning. I wasn’t going to be able to relax until I knew she was okay.
“Such a shame,” Allison clucked. “Goodnight, you two."
She was up the stairs before either of us could stop her, if stopping her had even been the plan, which it hadn't been.
There was no plan.
Other than washing my arm and changing our clothes. We did just that, me lending Maggie some sweatpants and a T-shirt. She changed while I scoured blood off my skin. It wasn’t that much. It just felt like I’d starred in a Stephen King novel.
I came back into my room from my ensuite bathroom and picked up a bottle of hand lotion. I needed to cover myself with floral scents in some sort of attempted comfort.
Teddy watched from my bed, sniffing my pillow with a touch of disdain.
“What was up with the ouija board?” Maggie asked, sitting on my bed and scratching Teddy. “That was weird.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes she seems flighty and scattered, other times calculating.”
“Statistically, now many people play with a ouija board solo? It has to be very low.”
"You sound like Reginald."
"I'll take that as a compliment, since he seems smart enough." Maggie pushed her Doc Martens out of the way when she stood up and held her hand out for the lotion. "What's your take on all of this?"
“I don’t know.”
We went back downstairs. I sat down in a club chair.
“Should we order food? I never got to try the divine shrimp.”
“Good idea.”
I looked at the candles, which gave me anxiety all over again when I thought about the possibility of the house catching on fire. Lighting candles on a rug seemed like a very distracted and idiotic thing to do, frankly. Not something an intelligent research buff would do.
What was in Allison’s notebook? Had the board told her something? I tugged it out from under the pillows. “Where the heck did this even come from?”
“My guess is .” Maggie started scrolling through her phone. “Mexican or Thai?”
“Thai.” I thought about Allison, the way Aunt Odette used to say you had to sit with a thing before you trusted your first read of it. "She's scared of something. I don't think she's scared of ghosts."
"Scared how?"
"I don't know yet." "But I don't think she was talking to Evelyn tonight, Maggie. I think she was looking for something. I just don't know what."
Teddy chittered his agreement, or possibly his disapproval of the smell of extinguished candle wax, and trotted off toward the kitchen, tail high, business concluded.
“Maybe Hollis is right,” Maggie mused. “Maybe we’re just trying to connect the dots on things that aren’t connected at all. Maybe Evelyn committed suicide. Maybe Hyacinth has low blood sugar. Maybe Allison has a dead husband she’s trying to chat up.”
Except that night someone had been searching the house.
The night the power went out. The chandelier had flickered and the floorboard outside Room Two had groaned under a weight that shouldn't have been there, because every single person under my roof had been standing together in a tight, spooked cluster in the dark kitchen when it happened.
At the time, I'd chalked it up to old wiring and a house that liked to perform for an audience, the same story I'd been telling guests for ten months because it was true often enough to be useful. Nobody was upstairs. I'd said it myself, out loud, like a fact, like a comfort.
But nobody being upstairs and nobody being in the house were two very different sentences, and I'd let myself collapse them into one because it was easier than the alternative.
What if somebody had been in the house. Not us.
Not a spirit. A person, moving through my home in the dark while five sets of eyes were fixed on a breaker box, cutting the lights on purpose, buying themselves a room-by-room window with nobody watching, because who watches an empty hallway when the power's out and there's a skunk chittering?
It was, I had to admit, a genuinely elegant piece of misdirection.
Better than the crushed mint on the napkin.
I was certain that one had been aimed at the police, to suggest poisoning.
This one had been aimed at us, specifically, and it had worked, because I'd spent that whole night thinking about ghosts instead of thinking about why there would be a stranger creeping through my guest rooms.
I went and got my phone and pulled up the notes app, where I'd typed out, in a fit of self-important amateur-detective energy, everything I remembered about that night.
Chandelier. Floorboard. Door closing softly, deliberately, the way a person closes a door when they don't want to wake anybody.
I'd written that phrase myself at the time and hadn't once stopped to ask what kind of ghost cared about waking the living.
A ghost didn't worry about waking anybody. A ghost had never once, in almost a year of me running this B&B, closed a door quietly out of consideration.
A person would. Not out of consideration but from a need to not be caught.
“Get me chicken Pad Thai,” I told Maggie. “I need to check something.”
I climbed the stairs slower than usual, feeling for every creak underfoot like it might mean something now, and stopped outside Room Two in the dim glow of the hallway sconce.
The floorboard was right where it had always been, three feet shy of the doorframe, worn pale from a century and a half of feet finding that exact spot without meaning to.
I crouched down and pressed my palm flat against it, testing.