Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Oscar barely managed not to jump. Ethan stood in the door to the hall, a light sheen of sweat on his brow.
“My apologies for startling you,” Ethan said. “Ms. Montague asked me to see if you need anything.”
His heart began to settle back toward baseline. “Not at the moment, thanks. But tell her we’d like to set up in the dining room, unless their previous investigation found some reason for us not to.”
“Of course.” Ethan held out a hand. “May I? I’m sure Ms. Montague would like to see it.”
“Sure.” Oscar passed the ledger to him. Ethan tucked it under his elbow and departed.
“Just what we need, Ethan jump-scaring us every time we turn around,” Tina said.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean to.” Oscar picked up one of the paperbacks, then put it back down.
He tried to imagine a family reading together near the fire, or curled up in the bay window.
It looked as if they’d been in the process of renovating The Cottage and had chosen to make the library their place of retreat after a long day’s work.
Who had they been and what had become of them when the haunting brought the end to their dreams?
Opposite the fireplace stood a set of French doors leading out onto a sunlit veranda. Oscar swung them open. “We should prop these open to let the air in.”
Nigel and Chris dragged chairs over and wedged them under the door handles. The view of the ocean from the veranda was stunning, and a sudden wistfulness came over Oscar. It was a shame the old place was just going to fall apart.
So far, he hadn’t sensed anything paranormal.
That didn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any spirits around.
Ghosts were energy and needed some source to strengthen them.
Emotional energy from the living, batteries, anything they could draw from.
With the house standing abandoned for so long, any spirits still here would be weak.
Unless Montague had snuck in a Van de Graaf generator like she had at the asylum, energizing the ghosts and making them harder to deal with. It had been meant as a test, she had apologized, and Oscar didn’t think she’d try the same thing twice. Especially not here, where Robin had died.
“Should we set up a camera in here?” Chris asked. “If I put it near the fireplace, it will get most of the room and the veranda as well.”
“Good idea.” Oscar wiped his sweat-stuck hair back from his forehead.
“There’s still one more room on this floor,” Nigel observed. “At the opposite end of the hall.”
“I’m guessing it’s the parlor, since we haven’t seen one yet.” Even the most humble of old houses tended to have parlors, and someplace like this might have more than one.
He turned out to be right. Unlike the hall and the library, the parlor hadn’t undergone any renovations, and the walls wore an ornate brown covering that looked surprisingly intact.
“Oh!” Now this was exciting. “This is Lincrusta. You don’t see that very often—it’s original to the house. Invented by the same man who came up with linoleum.”
This was one of the great things about exploring old, abandoned buildings. You found some really cool stuff that no one had seen in decades. As he turned from the wall, he saw Nigel grinning at him.
“I know; I’m a nerd,” he said.
Old furniture, warped from decades of heat and humidity, cluttered the room, including a round table, several chairs, and an enormous mirror hanging on the outer wall, directly across from a fireplace.
Bay windows jutted out from the side of the house, and Oscar made for them. “Let’s get some air in here.”
While he shoved the windows open, Tina stood in front of the mirror and held up her phone to take a picture.
“Zeek is going to love this,” she said as she snapped a photo. He and Adrienne often worked with mirrors. “I wish I could text it to him now, but I guess I’ll have to—”
Her words ended in a startled shriek, and she threw her phone on the floor, backing rapidly away from it. “There’s a face! A face in the mirror!”