Chapter Four

Richie woke from a long slumber, feeling more rested than he had in a while. He stretched; surprised his back didn’t hurt more from sleeping on the hard floor, and sat up, smiling at the sun that streamed in through the sparkling windows. He stood and crossed to the back of the room, staring out over the wide expanse of luxurious green lawn and at the apple trees that still bore their fruit. Getting dressed, he went outside to enjoy the crisp autumn air. He strolled around the house, enjoying the sights and smells of the fall flowers.

Rounding the side of the house, he started for the maze. As he traveled its neatly pruned lanes, he let his mind wander. He was really in love with this house, and was so glad that it seemed to love him back. When he got near the center of the maze, a soft, lilting voice made him stop short. He peeked around the corner of the bush he was standing behind and gaped at what he saw. Sitting there on the ground at the base of a beautiful fountain was a small waif of a woman with dark hair so long its edges touched the grass around her. She wore a pale peach old-fashioned gown, and Richie could swear he saw the toes of sturdy walking boots peeping out from under the hem of the dress. The woman was smiling with her face tilted up to the sun, and humming a tune he didn’t recognize. Richie smiled at her and turned his own face up, enjoying a shared stolen moment with this woman.

When he looked back at her, he was startled to see she had gone. He hurried to the fountain and around it, but she wasn’t there. He went out the back of the maze, knowing she couldn’t possibly have passed him without him seeing or at least hearing her. He followed the flagstone path down to the lake, but there was no sign of her there, either. He scanned the shoreline, but didn’t see even a footprint in the soft moss that lined the lake’s edge.

When he turned away and started up the rhododendron path that skirted the edge of the maze, he felt rather than saw someone watching him from the bushes.

“Hello?” he called softly. “Miss, are you in there?”

Hearing no answer, he continued along slowly, peering through the branches to see if he could get a glimpse of the woman or her peach dress. Halfway up the path, a skinny hand reached out and grabbed his arm. It was clearly a woman’s hand by the size of it. There was blood under her nails, her skin was dirty, and it held a smell that Richie could only describe as decay.

With a startled curse, he reared back, but the hand held fast, and when he stepped backwards, more of the woman was revealed. A tattered sleeve with patches of clean peach fabric among the filth came out of the bushes. The curve of a bosom and a long sweeping skirt peeped out. Richie tried desperately to free himself, clawing at the ice-cold hand that was clamped tightly to his forearm, but he couldn’t. He really didn’t want to see what the rest of this creature looked like, but he couldn’t make it let go.

As he took another step back, a scuffed and battered black boot came out of the shrub border. He jerked his arm hard, and the woman-thing’s nails raked his skin, leaving angry red trails along his forearm. He watched in horror as a swing of dirty, matted dark hair emerged from the bushes. With one more step, the woman was revealed. She had been badly beaten. Her left eye was puffy and bruised, and her lower lip was split and caked with dried blood. He could see a welt on her cheek, and leaves and dirt clung to her hair and tattered gown. She held the ruined garment closed at her breasts with a tiny, damaged hand, and Richie could see finger-shaped bruising around her neck. Outraged, Richie immediately forgot his fright.

“Oh my God, what happened to you?” he whispered.

For a moment, the visage before him shifted to that of the woman he had seen sitting at the base of the fountain. When their eyes met, his brown to her gray, Richie saw flashes of images behind his eyes – a wedding, twin baby girls, a Christmas tree, a baby boy, the lake, and an angry man’s face. In a split second, the woman turned back to the horrible thing that he had pulled from the rhododendrons. The woman-thing leaned forward.

“Will you find me,” it said with a slightly accented voice that was barely a whisper. “Help me, please.”

Richie gasped and bolted upright on his bedroll; a sheen of sweat covering his chest. For a moment, he was disoriented, hanging in that realm between conscious and subconscious thought. Before he knew it, he was on his feet and running for the door. He didn’t recognize his surroundings and had started to panic, but he knew it would all be okay if he could just get out of the room. He threw open the door, and was startled to see his truck parked at the bottom of a short staircase. He squeezed his eyes closed, and willed himself to wake completely up. Tentatively, he opened his eyes and focused on the truck. Slowly, his consciousness caught up to his body, and he remembered where he was. He turned to look behind him and saw the empty room, the cold, dark fireplace, his sleeping bag, duffel, and guitar. Once his breathing returned to normal, and his heart rate came down from triple digits, he frowned impatiently. “What the fuck?” he asked the room. Of course, there was no answer.

After that dream, Richie knew he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. He wouldn’t even try. He groaned when he looked at his watch and saw it was only 5:30. With a muttered curse, stalked back to his bedroll and folded it up. He snatched his jeans up off the floor, and pulled a fresh pair of Calvins and a clean black t-shirt out of his duffel. He rummaged around until he found his towel and a bar of soap, and went upstairs to use the one bathroom that worked. Maybe a hot shower would help clear his muddied head.

Richie sat on the closed commode lid and waited for the bathroom to fill with steam. He thought about the dream last night. It was so vivid, so real. Shaking his head, he got up and climbed into the shower, groaning as the hot water pounded into his back. He turned and hissed in pain when the water hit his arm. He looked down and was shocked to see four angry red scratches, like fingernail marks, on his forearm where the woman in his dream had grabbed him. Startled, Richie’s knees gave out and he sunk to the floor of the tub, the water pounding his head as he examined his arm, turning it this way and that. On the underside, was the fifth mark, where the thumb had dug in.

“What the fuck?” Richie exclaimed for the second time that morning, truly scared now. He tipped his head back against the edge of the tub and had an argument with himself over what could be going on. Richie was never one to ignore the spiritual – he was raised Catholic after all, but this was pushing the limits of his beliefs. Did he really believe that the woman in his dream, whoever she is, really lived here and died here? That he had a ghost? He laughed to himself. He had bought himself a haunted house? He shook his head. It was almost too crazy to be true, but he looked down at his arm again. The evidence was there, but still, he was reluctant to believe it.

Richie stood; his resolve firm. Antiquing will have to wait – he had some sleuthing to do.

* * *

The little placard on the window of the Historical Society said it opened at 9:00. It was only quarter past seven. Grumpy and grumbling, he angled across the street to the diner he had seen the night before. It was a charming old-time diner with a metal-edged Formica counter-top running down its length, anchored by a twenties-era mechanical cash register. Cracked red leather booths flanked tables covered in red-and-white checked tablecloths.

Richie selected a booth in the back and sat heavily, dropping his Stetson on the bench seat beside him. He opened the menu and chuckled at the selections – Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner. A tired 40-something waitress approached with a pot of coffee and Richie eagerly turned his mug over so she could fill it.

“Are ya having breakfast with us this mornin’, hon, or just coffee?” she asked, with a voice made croaky by too many years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

“Breakfast would be wonderful,” Richie said.

The waitress nodded and left. Richie scanned the other patrons in the diner. Even at this hour, the counter was full. A contingency of old men sat placidly sipping their coffees and reading their morning papers. Richie sighed and sipped from his own cup, pleased at the brew’s strength and rich, delicious flavor. A short time later, the waitress reappeared with a heaping plate. Richie’s eyes went wide at the amount of food she had brought him. The plate was full with scrambled eggs, pancakes, grits, bacon, sausage, and biscuits with gravy.

“That’s a hell of a lot of breakfast, darlin’,” Riche said to the waitress.

She winked at him. “Well, hon, ya look like a hell of a lot of man.” Richie laughed, and the woman smiled and blushed, taking ten years off her face. “Give a holler for SueBeth if you need somethin’ more,” she said before disappearing into the kitchen.

After lingering over breakfast, and eating everything on his plate, he left a generous tip, pulled his hat down low over his eyes, and walked up and down the length of the main street waiting for the Historical Society to open. Finally, a few minutes before nine, a car pulled up in front and parked in the spot next to his.

Angel Rose Summerlin got out of her car and sighed at pickup parked next to her. She didn’t recognize the truck. Sure enough, when she checked the rear license plate, she saw it was from New Jersey – definitely not someone she knew. “There goes my quiet morning to myself,” she lamented, and shook her head. From the corner of her eye, she noticed someone at the far end of Main Street heading her way. Ignoring him, she let herself into the building, and turned on the overhead lights. She dropped her bag into the plush leather chair that sat behind her antique partner’s desk, and tossed her keys into the copper pot she kept on the corner of her desk for odds and ends. The floors creaked under her well-worn cowboy boots, and her heels made dense happy clunk sounds as she crisscrossed the room to open windows. A small credenza at the back of the room held a coffee pot, set up from the night before, and she punched the ‘on’ button before settling behind her desk.

Satisfied that everything was ready for the day, she took a few breaths, and checked the answer machine. There was one message.

“Ms. Summerlin, this here is Marty Halstead. The old Thompson place sold today, and the gentleman who bought it is gonna be itchin’ to learn all about it. I give him only a day or two before he’ll be at your door. Could I ask you to start pulling a basic history together for him? I’d leave out any of the spooky stuff if I was you, but of course, you know best. I surely would appreciate it. You take care now, Ms. Summerlin, and I thank ya kindly.”

Ang loved her job. She’d been running the Historical Society for a few years now, and though not too many of the townspeople stopped in anymore, it never got old. She loved digging through the journals and papers that were stored in the two climate-controlled stories above her in fireproof file cabinets. She loved going into the basement vault and fingering (through white cotton gloves, of course) the dozens of gowns and other items of clothing that had been donated over the last century. The vault also contained precious, some would say priceless, jewelry; either purchased from estate sales or donated by local families.

Her very favorite piece was an oval gold locket on a delicate chain. On the front was engraved a rose, and inside were old sepia-toned pictures of three children. On one side was a young boy, no more than five, and the other, twin girls. The piece had no provenance, so she had no idea to whom the locket had belonged, but she felt a strange little shock whenever she looked at it, almost as if she had a connection to the people in the photographs.

Almost as if her curse was rearing its head again.

She usually would love a project like the one Marty had asked her to complete, but something about it was giving her an uneasy feeling – a feeling she hadn’t had in many years. The ‘spooky stuff’ as he called it scratched at a scab in her psyche she thought was healed.