Page 31 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow
His shoulders tense. Okay, not the right thing to say. He isn’t explaining so I can absolve him. He’s just getting it in before I can make a Smits-style sarcastic comment.
I follow him onto the porch, and a board cracks under my weight.
“Watch your step,” he says without turning.
I narrow my eyes at him, well aware that he can’t see it. Then I get my first look at the cottage.
“It’s boarded up,” I say.
“Yeah. Years ago, people heard they were empty and decided that meant free lodgings. I got permission to board them up.”
“Even ours?”
He paces along the porch, checking the boards, and I think he isn’t going to answer. Then he says, “The windows on yours were boarded.Door had to be left open so I could clean it. I installed a few locks before I found one that kept people out.”
“The… redecorating,” I say carefully. “Putting it all back the way it was…”
“Not me,” he grunts. “The place was empty when I started working here. All I did was keep it clean. Then, the day after your grandfather died, I got a message from the lawyer to let a truck in. They must have put everything back.”
He passes me and heads back to the ground level. Then he circles the cottage, tugging at boards and peering at the nails holding them on.
“The boards are secure,” I say, “and the nails are old. That means no one has pried them off and reattached them.”
“I can open it up later, take a look inside, but I don’t see any sign that someone’s been in here.”
“Agreed.”
Without a word, he heads back up the road. We pass my family’s cottage and continue on to my grandfather’s. As soon as we draw near, I see it’s in the same condition as my uncle’s. The porch is rotted, but the windows and door are securely boarded.
This time, I wait as Ben circles. Then I hear a curse from the back and go around to find him pulling back the branches of a bush that’s grown up against the house. Under that bush, a window has been broken, boards pried off.
“That’s not recent,” I say. “Not if the bush grew over it.”
“I haven’t checked in a while,” Ben says. “It’s been years since anyone even tried breaking in.”
I realize he thinks I was blaming him for not seeing it. “I mean that no one is in there now.”
He still yanks the bushes off. Then he clears the broken glass, grabs the sill and heaves himself up and through. When he disappears inside, I move closer. It’s the spare bedroom, with a long window low enough for me to see inside. Or itwouldlet me see inside if the interior weren’t pitch black.
I really do need to start carrying around my phone. Or ask Gail to grab me one of those keychain penlights like Ben has.
Speaking of Ben, he’s vanished into that darkness. I consider. Then I check that the sill is clear of glass and climb through. When I’m in, enough light filters through for me to see.
The spare room is as I remember it. Except, unlike our cottage, it’s been left to rot exactly as it was. There are two twin beds, with moldering quilts. Dust covers everything, and I stifle a sneeze as I walk in.
It looks like it did that last summer, right down to the paperbacks piled on the nightstand, left there for guests by my grandmother. I bend to read the titles:Eat Pray Love, Shopaholic, Twilight, The Time Traveler’s Wife.
All popular titles from around the time we were last here. My grandparents never came back. They hadn’t been at the cottage when my father… When it happened. They never spent the whole summer—the humidity was too much for my grandmother’s arthritis—and they’d been home in Syracuse. This was how it looked when they left earlier that month… and they’d never returned.
I’m standing there, staring at that stack of books, when I remember something and ease open the nightstand drawer. There’s a flashlight inside. All the cottages have them in the bedrooms, for the frequent power outages. I’m sure the batteries are long since corroded, but I flick the switch and then startle when the light comes on.
I carefully shine the beam around the room, half expecting the light to flicker out with any movement, but it stays on, and I head into the next room.
All three cottages have the same floor plan. There’s no bedroom hall—just the two bedrooms and bathroom coming off the main room, which stretches from the kitchen at one end, through the dining room, to the living room. I enter just past the kitchen and look around for Ben. There’s no sign of him, and I have a wild image of being trapped in here as he slipped out to board up that one open window. That’s a testament to how spooked I am, however much I’m trying to hide it.
A light moving in the bathroom leads me to Ben, and he walks out, not seeming the least bit surprised to see me there.
“Nothing,” he says. “Someone obviously broke in, but it was years ago. I don’t even see tracks in the dust. Don’t see anything obviouslymissing either. Must have just been looking around.” He walks past me. “Got a lot of that a decade ago. All that urban-spelunking shit.”
