Chapter 9
“Hello!” Annabelle waved at Yasmin, who stared at the sudden ghost, eyebrows folded into a tight V.
“Yasmin, Annabelle,” I said, doing halfhearted introductions. “Annabelle, Yasmin.”
Yasmin didn’t yelp or fall on a sofa and insist she was dead, so she was already beating me in the reaction department.
Instead, she adjusted her glasses on her nose and peered at Annabelle in close concentration.
To my horror, she dug a pencil and notepad out of her skirt pocket and started taking notes.
“I have nine questions to start,” she said.
“Stuff them for now, please.” I turned to Annabelle. “Marley, you said you know why Agatha willed the house to me. Why?”
And why the hell didn’t she tell me earlier?
She pursed her lips and wrung her hands, like she actually didn’t want to tell me. “It might be easier if I show you what’s in the shed.”
Yasmin and I looked at each other, then at the shed in the corner of the garden. It sat in the late afternoon sun, its siding and wooden trim innocuously rotting away with the passage of time.
“There’s nothing in there, though.” I opened my laptop and found the listing of Agatha’s possessions from my lawyer.
“I got a detailed list of what was in the house. The documents say the shed is empty. Agatha’s inheritance included the house, the furniture in the house, the appliances, and her books. ”
Annabelle cleared her throat.
“Sorry, Annabelle’s books.”
“We have to open it, then.” Yasmin bounded up from the table and across the deck, but didn’t get very far. She stopped, probably realizing she wasn’t the owner of this house and didn’t have the keys.
I unhooked them from my belt loop and was getting up to join her when Nate the electrician stepped outside.
“Oh, I’m sorry to bother you, ladies.” He pointed to the new electrical panel that he’d helped Pete install. It still had wires sticking out every which way and wasn’t switched on yet. “Just need to check something.”
He went to the panel, looked at one of the wires, then nodded to himself. Nate didn’t seem to realize or was unfazed by the fact that one of the women wasn’t quite as solid as the others.
“Right.” I crossed the back deck, heading for the mysterious shed.
Maybe, just maybe, whatever was in there would explain why Agatha chose me for her successor.
Or maybe there was a rotting corpse. Or a pot of gold?
Mature savings bonds? I tried not to get my hopes up.
Whatever it was, I’d be happy if it convinced Yasmin that I was the rightful owner of the house so she would leave me alone.
Then this whole thing—and all these people—could get out of my life for good.
“Ack!”
I turned to see Yasmin’s foot had fallen straight through a plank on the deck.
She grabbed for the nearest thing to hold on to, which happened to be Nate’s meaty shoulder. “Ow, ow, ow.”
“Are you all right?” Nate held on to Yasmin’s arm and helped her disentangle her foot from the rotten wood. Where she’d stepped was now a footlong hole.
“I’ll be okay,” Yasmin said. “It kind of wrenched my ankle, but I don’t think it’s broken. Maybe a little sprain.” She carefully rotated her foot from side to side, still holding on to Nate. Then she gingerly put her weight on it, wincing slightly. “Mostly it scared the stuffing out of me.”
Nate nodded. “You should really fix that hole. It’s a hazard.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, clearly.”
But my sarcasm and terrible attitude rolled off the burly electrician’s apprentice like water off a duck’s back.
His expression was entirely earnest. “I can fix it for you. Just need a treated two-by-four. I might even have one in my bike pack. If not, I’ll run down to the hardware store and get one. It’ll be no trouble.”
I opened my mouth to decline, not interested in having people in my haunted hazard house for longer than necessary.
But Yasmin turned to me with an expression I could only describe as half pleading, half thirst. She silently communicated “Please, Gibson, I need to watch this man fix a deck, and I will hate you forever if you deny me the opportunity” with only her eyebrows and the set of her mouth.
Swallowing my stubborn distaste for good-natured people who wanted to help me, I said, “Sure. That would be excellent of you, Nate.”
“Cool!” He helped Yasmin into a deck chair, keeping one hand on her arm as she walked and carefully sat down. As soon as she was seated, she moved her ankle with no problem. Satisfied of her safety, Nate grinned. “I’ll go get my tools!” He practically jogged around the side yard.
When he was out of sight, Yasmin exhaled. To me, she said, “Thank you.”
I grinned. “Anything for you, cuz.”
Yasmin’s good cheer evaporated. “That was weird. Don’t ... don’t call me that.”
I chuckled, definitely planning to call her that.
***
Yasmin iced her ankle for a few minutes, but once Nate was assured that the injury wasn’t lethal and she promised to stay off it as soon as we were out of the shed, we approached the innocuous building as a group.
Annabelle hovered at the back, looking more nervous than I’d ever seen her, wringing her hands.
She was so see-through that she was almost invisible.
We crowded around the door to the shed, jostling into position like we were on a reality competition show about storage units.
I turned the key and heard the tumbler turn. But when I pushed on the door, it wouldn’t budge. I shoved my shoulder against it, but nothing happened. “It’s locked from the inside. Or blocked by something seriously heavy.”
“How do we get in?” Yasmin said.
“I have a circular saw ...” offered Nate.
Annabelle shouted, “No!” She waved her arms and jumped up and down to get our attention. “There’s no need for that!”
She flowed past me and walked straight through the solid door.
“Whoa,” said Nate. “Cool.”
I smiled, feeling a sort of vicarious pride swell in my chest. “All right in there, Marley?”
“Just fine, dear!” came the response.
From inside the shed, there were several loud bangs.
A moment of silence, then it sounded like a large piece of furniture was dragged across the ground.
Something fell, shattering on the floor, and Annabelle said, “Oh, drat” in a soft voice.
There were three metallic clanks as deadbolts were shoved open from the inside of the door.
Then Annabelle reappeared, with dust covering her shoulders and her hair in a disarray.
“There,” she said, “try it again, please.”
I shoved the door, and this time it slid open with a groan.
The air inside was stale and intensely humid, with the only circulation coming from an unmoving fan in an evaporative cooler unit mounted in the window on the back wall.
The shed was wired, but Old Pete and Nate were still working on the power, so the only light that came streaming in was from the one window, and now, the door.
If I wasn’t 100 percent sure that Agatha was interred in the Mackinac Island Cemetery, I would have expected to find her here with spiders crawling on her decaying face.
“Spooky,” Nate said, summarizing my thoughts nicely.
Yasmin turned on her phone’s flashlight and held it over my shoulder, illuminating the contents.
Inside, the shed looked like one that might appear on television, either as a tragic example of hoarding or a potential treasure trove of items worth millions at auction.
With my luck, it would be the former. Spiderwebs happily spread all over the interior.
The shed wasn’t that large, but the walls were covered by tapestries with mysterious symbols, newspaper clippings, and maps with pins in places that seemed random.
Bookshelves built into the walls held dozens of rotting books, making the place look and smell like a librarian’s tomb.
“What is all this?” I said, not expecting an answer. I entered the shed, turning on my phone’s flashlight and sweeping it over the eclectic collection of items.
Yasmin and Nate entered behind me. Nate had abandoned his electrician duties, finding treasure hunting in a garden shed with my attractive cousin more appealing.
“Oh my god,” said Yasmin quietly, “this is amazing.” She was standing next to a shelf that held a row of jars.
Some were regular mason jars; some were old clay pots.
Of the ones that had legible labels, I could recognize about only a quarter of the items inside.
Things that looked like plants included adder’s-tongue, coltsfoot, and jimsonweed, along with more disgusting items like eyelashes and toenails.
“Old Agatha really was a witch!” Nate had his hands on his hips, looking around in awe. “Cool. I always thought it was just a stereotype cuz she was an older woman living alone.”
“She was definitely a witch,” I said, pointing to a large book open on a small desk near the window. “And that’s her book of spells.”
Yasmin bustled over to see what I was pointing at, then gasped. “It’s her grimoire.” She reached out as if to touch the book, then withdrew her hand. “My mother assumed it was buried with Agatha since ...” She glanced at me briefly. “Since it wasn’t left in the will to her.”
“ This is what you really wanted?” I asked, incredulous. “A dusty old book?”
“It’s more than a dusty old book! This is Agatha’s true legacy.” Yasmin looked around the shed in awe. “This, and the house, of course. I’ll need time to catalog everything that she has here.”
“You think it’ll change the value of the estate? Oh, come on! I let you in here in good faith, even though you’re suing me.”
“I’m not suing you. That’s not how any of this works. And besides ...”
Yasmin kept talking, but her words were lost to the stuffy, unbearably hot and humid air of the shed.
Everything else faded as I spied a familiar shape in the gloom.
Sitting on top of a precarious stack of rotting magazines was a decrepit case.
I carefully opened the clasps and found the most beautiful guitar I’d ever laid my eyes on.