Chapter 8 #2
An old man barged inside as soon as it was open wide enough to admit him.
“Where’re yer boxes!” he bellowed into the hallway.
“Excuse me?”
“Fuse boxes! We haven’t got all day.” The pile-of-rags man from the bar the other night wandered into the living room and set a filthy toolbox on the bloodstained sofa. It was a metal square that looked as old as Annabelle.
A young man nervously stepped over the threshold after him. He was tall and broad, with sandy hair that flopped over his eyes in a way that made him look like he belonged on a TV show for teens. “Excuse us,” he said, “we’re the Switchfinder Army?”
“Is that a question?” I shut the door behind him and put my fists on my hips.
“Um, no.” The young man radiated a nervous, harmless energy. Like a puppy or a third grader on a field trip. “We’re the electricians? I’m Nate.”
“Fuse boxes!” the older man shouted. “Oh, never mind, I’ll find ’em myself.” He stomped off through the hallway to the kitchen, grumbling the entire way.
Meanwhile, Yasmin passed him in the hallway, carrying her tea and looking confused. She stopped short when she saw me and the hunky assistant.
To Nate, I said, “I’m Gibson, this is Yasmin. Ignore her scowl and let me know if you need anything. If you need to destroy the house, start with the room upstairs with the rose wallpaper.” I smiled sweetly at my cousin. Or whatever she was.
She gave me a withering look, but it didn’t last long. Her eyes kept drifting toward Nate. She stood awkwardly next to him and said, “Um, do you want tea?”
Nate looked equally as awkward, putting his hands in his pockets, then removing them and folding them across his chest. He shook his head. “No, no, I couldn’t take your tea.”
“Oh.” Yasmin looked down at her cup sadly.
Unable to bear the awkward heterosexual mating dance any longer, I said, “Well, I’m going to check on ...”
“Old Pete. He doesn’t mind if you call him that,” Nate said, still staring anywhere except Yasmin’s blushing face.
“Got it.” I grinned at Yasmin’s flustered expression. “You two carry on.”
***
Old Pete and his bumbling assistant would need to work on the house for several days, according to the strange, brusque electrician.
He showed me his quote for the work, handwritten on a stained yellow legal pad.
It was much cheaper than I expected, so I let him be and took my laptop out on the deck to answer emails for as long as the battery would last.
Midway into editing a brain-numbingly boring white paper, my phone vibrated with a text.
A picture was attached, and my eyebrows hit the top of my head when I saw it: Brooke wearing nothing but a string bikini and cowboy boots.
She was holding a Corona and posing on a beach with some people I didn’t know, making a kissy face.
Her skin was bronze and shiny with sweat.
My eyes lingered on the little swell of sideboob sticking out the side of her barely there top.
I was just starting to convince myself that the photo was meant for someone else when another text came through.
“miss u bitch, when coming bac?”
I licked my lips and set both my elbows on the table, holding the phone with both hands and swiping my thumb across the screen. Brooke would call me a boomer for that move, but it’s not like she could see it. Unless I took off my own top and snapped a photo to send to her ...
“Are you all right, Gibson?” Annabelle appeared at my elbow, causing me to fling the phone down on the table before she could see Brooke’s photo.
“Of course!” My voice was too loud, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“I heard you arguing with your cousin earlier ...” She looked chagrined, casting her pretty eyes down.
Shit—maybe she heard me say I didn’t want the house after all.
“It sounds like she’s a very determined young lady,” Annabelle said. She pulled out the other chair and sat beside me. “And did you say that your parents died in a vehicle accident? That’s terrible.”
I smiled, putting on my let’s-not-talk-about-that expression. “It’s fine, Marley, it was a long time ago.”
“Hmmm.” She didn’t look convinced but didn’t press the matter.
After a few moments of silence, I assumed she wasn’t going to continue, so I turned my attention back to my computer. But then she said, “My father died before I was ready to let go of him.”
She was also wearing a placid expression, one that didn’t reveal much. It was almost a smile. If you didn’t know Annabelle, you might think it was real, but I knew her now, and I could tell that she was hiding something. A deeper pain than she was willing to show me.
“He did?” I carefully closed my laptop and spoke softly, not wanting to disturb her. Annabelle was extremely reluctant to share, and I wasn’t even sure how much she remembered of her past, so this felt special and rare.
“Yes. Shortly after we arrived on Mackinac. I was his only surviving child, and he was my entire world.”
“What was he like? Do you remember?”
Annabelle’s smile turned fond, but sad. “He was kind.”
I had the urge to place my hand on hers but knew it would just go through it to the surface of the table.
“He wasn’t alive for my wedding, and I know he would’ve wanted to be there. But sometimes I wish he could see me now instead.”
Wedding? I snuck a quick glance at Annabelle’s hand—surely I would’ve noticed if she wore a ring.
Her hand was bare. I felt like the world had shifted a few degrees to the left, but I stayed quiet, hoping she would continue.
The fact that Annabelle might’ve been married, or even had children, never occurred to me.
I felt incredibly selfish all of a sudden.
“He wouldn’t understand,” she continued.
“The world is a very different place. People are allowed to be different now. I might be allowed to ...” She glanced down at herself, her body about three-quarters visible.
“He might never understand me. But I like to think, perhaps, that he might see me more.” Annabelle finally looked at me, her eyes full of yearning.
What she was yearning for, though, I didn’t know.
Old Pete slid open the door and stepped outside. He was out the door before I could ask Annabelle to disappear. He stomped across the back porch, not seeming to mind that he was interrupting an intimate conversation or the fact that there was an extra woman that wasn’t completely visible.
“Shit, Marley—”
“It’s okay. Hello, Pete,” Annabelle said, waving cheerfully to the surly man. Her wistful mood had dissipated, her sunny mask back in place.
Pete waved her off, grumbling, “Away with you, spirit! I’m working.”
I jerked my thumb at the electrician. “He knew?”
Annabelle nodded. “He doesn’t like me very much.” She shrugged, seeming unconcerned.
“Okay, I guess.” I found it hard to believe that anyone wouldn’t like Annabelle but didn’t say that out loud. “Does everyone on this island know you live here? I’m beginning to think that literally everyone on this island knows who you are.”
“Of course not, silly.” Annabelle smiled broadly and made a motion as if she were slapping my shoulder. Her hand went right through me, but she made her point.
***
“No, Mom, she’s not cooperating.” Yasmin’s voice drifted through the second-floor window. She must not have realized it was open. Or she did and she had more balls than I gave her credit for. “Yes, I showed her the letter!”
I chuckled, then shut my laptop. The internet would be installed as soon as my new pals Old Pete and his lap dog Nate were finished with the wiring.
And Seymour Anderson would be showing up the day after tomorrow to “chat” about the property.
Unfortunately, my lawyer responded to my distress call with bad news.
Agatha’s will was clear: I was the sole named inheritor of the property.
However, she’d done several other big financial transactions around the same time, and it wasn’t long after she was moved into a higher level of assisted care.
In other words, since they may have benefited from the will before it was changed and Agatha may have been in an unstable mental state at the time she changed it, my annoying relatives might have a case.
Or enough of one to fight me in court. That was the last thing I needed to deal with on top of sexy ghosts and a pack of ambitious punks in New York waiting to take my role in the band.
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose, listening to the drone of construction equipment from somewhere nearby. Annabelle had grown tired of watching me type and disappeared.
“I’m trying, Mom!” Now Yasmin sounded upset. Her voice pitched up, like she was a teenager trying to convince her parents to let her stay up past curfew.
I thought the sound of a young woman arguing with her mother might bring up painful emotions, but nothing came.
All those feelings had burned out long ago.
They were torn out of me through screaming fights with my mom, kicking and shouting until I was hoarse and the walls had holes.
Not to mention ripping my clothes and cutting my hair and sneaking out to blast my brain cells on cheap beer and bad weed.
But that was so, so long ago. Now there was a hollow feeling in my chest where I once used to rage.
Playing guitar still brought the fire out of me.
I used to play out my pain, now I played to find it again.
The back door creaked open, and I heard Yasmin’s hesitant steps on the wooden floor. She plopped down in the spot where Annabelle’s chair and sighed.
“Tough day at the stealing-other-people’s-houses factory?” I said, feeling like an asshole for the second time that day and not letting that stop me from being one.
Yasmin had the book with her, as always.
She flipped to a page that showed a woman with two smiling children.
They were standing in front of Abaddon Cottage, which looked much better than it did now.
A man stood next to the house with a hammer in his hand.
Hovering in the garden was a figure in black.
The person was only half facing the viewer, though, so it was impossible to make out their face.
The drawing wasn’t a professional rendering but it had been done by someone with talent and some artistic training.
Yasmin pointed at the woman. “This is supposed to be me.”
The page was dated 1954.
“How can it be you? You weren’t even born yet.”
She shook her head sadly. “When our family has visions, they’re not wrong. I mean, sometimes they’re not exactly right , but broadly speaking, they’re not wrong. If I can’t get this house back, I won’t just be failing me, but my mother and my entire lineage both backwards and forwards.”
I flipped the page. On the next one, there was a recipe for Dark Mother Bread and an advertisement for the Cartwright Women’s Issues Mercantile and Apothecary circa 1899. I smiled at the snake-oil promises on the page.
“If your vision is so accurate, then why would Agatha leave the house to me, then?” I said, setting aside the book.
“If she knew how much this house, and the continuation of whatever weird witchcraft thing you guys have going on, means to your side of the family, then why would she leave it to me? She wrote my name. Not just my birth name—my actual name. Gibson, not Veronica. How would she even know that name?”
“I don’t know.” Yasmin shrugged, but her voice was sincere.
“I think I may have an answer to that.” Annabelle popped up out of nowhere, as visible as she was able to be, wringing her hands.
Yasmin’s head snapped to the side and her jaw dropped.
I pointed at the ghost who’d appeared at my elbow. “Oh, and by the way, the house is haunted.”