Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Oscar looked automatically to Dr. Lawson, who didn’t seem surprised. She must have already heard this.
“You mean her ghost?” Nigel asked, a trace of skepticism in his voice that made Oscar flinch.
Montague spread her hands apart. “Perhaps. I’m not a medium, so maybe it’s not her.
Maybe it’s simply that I’m an old woman now, with unfinished business weighing on my shoulders, and only a few years left in which to complete it.
But in my dreams, she’s trapped here. Still bound to this place, rather than passing on to the next world. ”
Nigel blanched at that. No doubt he was thinking of his childhood friend, whose spirit had been caught in the moment of his murder, reliving it again every night of his afterlife. Thankfully they’d been able to free the boy’s ghost, let him find peace.
“Of course.” Oscar put as much compassion into the words as he could. “We completely understand.”
“I haven’t had any dreams.” Dr. Lawson sounded almost jealous. “But then, why would Robin come to me? I’m not the one with the money to finance a researcher and a ghost-hunting team.”
“You were the one who taught Dr. Taylor,” Montague said, putting one wrinkled hand on Dr. Lawson’s. “You already did your part. It was up to me to bring everyone together.”
“How long have you known about Ms. Montague’s dreams?” Nigel asked.
Lawson’s mouth thinned. “Only since she invited me back here. At least now I know why she was interested in ghost hunting again after all these years.”
She was obviously unhappy about it, though their relationship up until recently had been somewhat antagonistic.
“Thank you for trusting us with this,” Oscar said, to head off any brewing argument between the women.
“I can only imagine how important this is for the two of you. Did you bring Robin’s journal? ”
He’d read selections from the journal, provided by Dr. Lawson. Only ones that would help him learn how to use his own talent, nothing truly personal. If he had access to her thoughts and findings here, it might help them clear any lingering spirits, including Robin’s own.
But Dr. Lawson shook her head. “No. Robin forgot to bring it with her when we came here in the ’80s. She was upset about it, but I told her it didn’t matter, she could summarize the investigation when we got back to Durham.”
Which Robin never had, at least not as a living woman.
“That’s why I brought the tapes,” she added, pointing at the box beside the TV and VCR.
“We used a video camera to document the investigation. Most of them are hour after hour of nothing happening, punctuated by a few minutes of activity. But there are interviews with the family that might be helpful.”
Montague turned to look out the window behind her.
“There are only a few hours of daylight left. Why don’t you explore the first floor and pick out a command center while there’s still enough light to set everything up?
The house has no electricity other than what the generator supplies, as you might imagine, and it would have cost a great deal to have new lines run. ”
“That’s for the best. Otherwise, the live wires might interfere with our EMF readers.” Nigel took a step in the direction of the door. “Shall we?”
The four of them trooped out of the trailer and into the hot summer sun. The humid air lay over them like a blanket, and Oscar was sweating within minutes.
“I’m not looking forward to sleeping without any AC,” Chris muttered.
“You can have the bunk inside,” Tina started, but they shook their head.
“You’re the one with the bad back. It makes sense for you to take the bunk.”
Though most of the house was made out of wood, the porch, foundation, stairs, and tower were constructed from stone blocks.
A small iron chandelier hung over the entryway, though there weren’t any bulbs in it.
The sturdy front door bore an ornate lock and a knocker shaped like an animal’s head—a wolf or a dog, it was hard to tell which the artist had been going for.
Above the door was a grimy transom set with stained glass.
They opened their backpacks and gear cases on the porch, taking out head cams and flashlights for their preliminary exploration of the first floor.
The sun rode high in a cloudless sky, but houses that had been shut up for a long time could be gloomy even on the brightest days.
When everyone was ready, Oscar reached out and put his hand on the metal doorknob.
It felt cool under his fingers, though that might simply be because its location kept it shaded throughout the day, rather than subjected to the blazing hot sun.
The hinges shrieked, and the door stuck a little. Decades of heat and humidity had warped the wood, but it only took a light kick to the bottom of the door to get it open. Inside, sunlight fell through grimy windows, and the air was breathlessly hot.
“We’re going to have to get all the windows open before we die of heatstroke,” Chris said.
The foyer was small, paneled in oak with a tile floor. A hall tree in desperate need of polishing sat beneath a covering of dust, across from a mirror in a gilded frame. Another small chandelier hung above, this one with bulbs in it. On impulse, he tried the electrical switch. Nothing happened.
An open door let out of the entryway into an oversized hallway.
It looked as though someone had been trying to renovate it—the walls had been stripped bare, and ladders, old paint cans, and drop cloths stood here and there.
One wall sported light blue paint along part of its length, and an open paint can showed the long-dried remains of the same shade.
On the other side of the hall, slightly offset from the entryway, a staircase headed up toward the higher floors.
Five doors opened off the hallway: one in front of them, one immediately to the left, one on each end, and a smaller door that probably led to the servant’s area tucked in on the back right.
Oscar crossed the hall. The wooden floor creaked under his feet, though the planks felt sturdy. At least there wouldn’t be a basement for them to fall into; the water table would have been too high even before the seas began to rise.
The dining room lay directly across the main hall from the entrance and sported a huge bay window overlooking a line of dunes and the ocean beyond.
The room had been in the process of renovation like the hall, half the original yellow wallpaper already removed, the rest left in peeling strips.
Another ladder stood here, along with a few tools.
What had once been a grand table still occupied most of the space, with chairs drawn up to it.
There was also a fireplace with built-in cabinets to either side meant to hold china, but now only home to spiders.
Oscar crossed the room to the windows. Like the door, their frames had warped, but with some struggle he was able to force them up. A welcome breeze poured in, stirring the dusty curtains.
“Do you sense anything?” Nigel asked him.
He stood in front of the windows, letting the stiff breeze dry some of the sweat from his skin. He tried to quiet his mind and just let perceptions come to him.
“I don’t feel anything in here,” he said after a minute. “We’ll double-check with Ms. Montague and Dr. Lawson, but this might be a good place to set up our command center.”
Chris opened a discreet door in one wall onto a kitchen with appliances straight from the 1980s.
All the cabinet doors stood wide open, revealing old cans, boxes of Alpha-Bits cereal, and ancient pasta.
They made a disgusted face and closed the door again.
“I don’t even want to think about what the inside of those cans looks like. ”
On the other side of the dining room from the kitchen, the stairs climbed to the upper floors.
A small door beside the stairway opened onto a square room with unfinished stone walls and only a thin, narrow window.
More renovation supplies had been abandoned within: cans of paint in various colors, an extension ladder collapsed and laid on its side, paint brushes, scrapers, and more.
“This must be the bottom room in the tower.” Nigel poked his head in the door. “Probably used as a storage room since the place was built.”
Across the hall was an old billiard room, complete with the rotting remains of the original table. Taxidermied animal heads decorated the walls: tiger, mountain lion, wolf, boar, and a number of stags.
“Do you think Ullman killed all of these himself?” Chris wondered as they panned the camera across the moldering heads. Bits of bone showed through here and there, and the glass eyes were dulled with dust.
“Probably. Big game hunting was popular among rich bastards with nothing better to do than slaughter everything in sight.” Nigel shook his head. “Let’s be honest, it still is.”
They forced open all the windows to let in the sea air before leaving the room.
At the end of the hall between the billiard room and stairs was what looked to have been a library.
At least, going by the built-in bookcases that stretched floor to ceiling, though all of them had been emptied.
The huge bay window had ’80s-style couches tucked into it, along with a lamp and a pot with the remains of a long-dead plant.
Two chairs that also seemed to be from the ’80s stood next to a table near the fireplace.
A few paperbacks lay on the table: Steven King, James Michener, and Judith Krantz.
Beside them was a vintage, leather-bound book.
Curious, Oscar picked it up and saw it looked like an old ledger of some sort, its pages yellowed with time.
A firm hand had written the name “Montague” atop one page, along with a sum: $20,000.
Beneath was what looked like some sort of payments, or maybe repayments, in the form of livestock.
It was hard to tell, because the lines had been written in a shorthand that no doubt made perfect sense to someone:
Sow - R, G - $100
Boar - Bl, B - $50
And so on.
“Look at this,” he said, extending it to Nigel. “It looks like it’s from the early 1900s. This page is labeled ‘Montague.’”
“One of Ms. Montague’s ancestors was friends with Mr. Ullman,” Ethan said from behind them.