Page 14 of Giving Up The Ghost
He chuckled, folding his hands at his waist. He had, in one hand, a long lead but was lacking a dog. He followed the direction of my gaze and shrugged. “Missy does like a good run. Haven’t got the stamina I used to, and she does get tired of waiting.” He nodded in the direction of the farmer’s field across the way, still brown from the winter cold but bearing signs of replanting already. “I was just mustering my wherewithal to go get her before Tom North starts blowing up my phone with complaints about her getting his terriers all in a state.” He sniffed, turning back to me expectantly. “Are you staying with the lady of the house then?” he asked.
“Er, the lady of the house? You mean Violet?” I hazarded.
“Violet? Oh, she’s passed, hasn’t she?” He clicked his tongue in that politely sorrowful way older people had. “No, not Violet. We weren’t close at all, were we? And I don’t fancy that you’d be the guest of a ghost,” he chortled. Tapping his temple, he winked. “I’m old but not at the fanciful stage yet. No, I mean the Frenchmadame. A cousin of the Fellowes or some such, isn’t she?”
“Something like that, yes.”
He nodded, humming thoughtfully. A distant chorus of barks tugged the lingering grin from his face, and he sighed. “So, you’re a friend of the family?”
“Of a sort. I’m a guest of the late Mrs. Fellowes’ grandson. Oscar.” Lord, this was starting to sound like an Austen novel.
“Grandson, eh? Hm. Well. World’s full of all sorts, eh?”
The baying grew more frantic. Denby Henderson heaved a mighty sigh and threw up his hands. “That’s my cue then. Tom North’s got no idea how dogs get, does he?”
He set off at a surprisingly spry jog across the lane and hopped the fence into the field, loping gracefully across the uneven ground. “I suppose not,” I muttered, sinking back against the half-fence behind me. The door to the house shutting just short of a slam had me glancing back, half-afraid it was Charlotte come to snarl at me, but it was Ezra, his scowl deep and brows drawn down as he strode across the grass towards me, Oscar trotting after with a distracted, distant frown on his own face. I waited a few moments until they were closer so I could call out and be heard more easily. “Y’all mind if we drive?” I called out. “My hip…”
Ezra diverted towards the drive with a nod, pulling the keys out of his pocket with a nod while Oscar double-timed it over towards me. “Are you sure you don’t want to rest here? We can set up in the study upstairs. It’s not as comfortable as the sitting room but?—”
“I’m not an old man.”
Oscar looked hurt for just a fleeting moment before he looped his arm through mine, both of us pretending I wasn’t resting some of my weight against him as we walked toward the rental car. “No, but you’re a stubborn one, you arse.”
“Stubborn but lovable,” I corrected, glancing back to see Denby Henderson trotting back across the field with a very happy Airedale leading the way.
“Well. Only sometimes,” Oscar muttered, and I snorted, forgetting for a moment to mention meeting his grandmother’s neighbor.
CHAPTER 4
OSCAR
The morning had been full of thin cheer, just an oil slick of interested murmurs and smiling remembrances that never quite rang joyful. Ezra and I took Julian ‘round to the old shops on the high street, some of them dating back to the eighteenth century in structure if not businesses. There was a tiny museum that had been a dusty relic since before I’d been a boy, full of spiderwebbed corners and the smell of old, untreated wood, and we took him there too. Julian had perked up a bit at that, fascinated by the things Ezra and I had written off as dull when we were barely teenagers.
My smile was tight and thin. “Ez, remember when we came here around fourth form? It was miserable out and we were hoping it’d be cooler in here.”
He snorted, dropping his yawn and shaking his head. “That friend of Violet’s, the one with the weird eye that looked leaky, he ran the place, yeah?”
“Wallace Tormund and his weirdly bloodshot eyes and overwhelming smell of cheap pipe tobacco,” I reminisced.
“He’s probably one of the exhibits here now,” Ezra muttered, pointing to a neat little cream-colored card near the Suggested Donations box. “In memory of Wallace J. Tormund, April ninth, 1922, to…” he trailed off. “Huh. He died last month. Kind of impressive considering he looked like he was falling apart a decade or more ago.”
“Seriously?” I crowded closer, Julian pressing in behind us, to read the little biography beneath the card. Ezra pulled out his phone and started Googling furiously and, after a moment, turned the screen to show me the article from the local paper’s online version. “Wallace Tormund, local historian and museum curator, dies in drowning.”
“Slipped and fell into his pond,” Julian read.
Ezra and I exchanged glances. “He was friends with Violet,” I muttered. “In her circle.”
Ezra nodded. “I remember.”
“He was another medium?”
I glanced back at Julian and nodded once. “Of a sort. His abilities weren’t terribly strong, from what I remember, but he was a gifted psychometrist. It’s why he loved this museum, all sorts of things he could handle and get a reading on with his abilities.”
A door shut somewhere deep in the building and the tap of heels alerted us to someone approaching. A moment later, a thin-faced older woman in a blazer with a shiny nameplate pinned to it appeared from behind a door markedEmployees Only. “Oh, I thought we had guests,” she smiled. “My name is Jill Hastin. Have you been here before? Here, let’s get you started with some self-guided tour maps.”
“Thank you.” I took one of the maps made to look like an old-fashioned print on vellum rather than something printed off the office machine and run through the laminator. “You must be the new curator!”
Her expression crumpled for just a moment before she plastered a smile back into place. “It’s both my honor and sorrow to take Mr. Tormund’s place. He passed recently, as you may know.” She nodded at the memorial plaque. “Such a shock, really. He was so vital! So full of excitement!”
