Page 67 of The Christmas Spirits on Tradd Street
Jack.
“What?” I pressed the phone against my ear again. “Did you say ‘Jack’?”
Another moment passed, and then I heard it again.Jack.
“What about Jack?” My question was met by silence, even the crackling sound fading. “What about Jack?” I repeated. But the phone had gone completely dead; there were only the sounds of the old house and General Lee’s snoring for company.
I hung up the phone and turned around to see if Jack was awake. A sliver of moonlight cut across his pillow, accentuating the white of his empty pillowcase. “Jack?” I said out loud, looking at the bathroom door for any light from beneath it. But the door yawned wide, an empty black shadow indicating no lights were on inside.
I slid out of bed, making General Lee snuffle and adjust himself on my pillow, then go back to sleep. I glanced at the video monitor, but the nursery was empty except for the two sleeping babies in their cribs. Sliding on my slippers, I grabbed my robe and thrust my arms into it before hurrying out the door, the rubber bands around my stomach squeezing tighter. My grandmother never called just to chat.
I hurried down the corridor and paused at the top of the stairs. A light was on downstairs, and a few of the rubber bands slid off my insides. When Jack was writing, he often woke up in the middle of the night with a story idea that couldn’t wait until morning. I placed my foot on the top step, then stopped, aware of an odd sound coming from Nola’s bedroom behind the closed door. She was still sleeping in the guest room as Greco continued with his redo of her room, the paint and sawdust from the new built-in bookshelves and window cornices making it nearly unlivable. The restless spirits, too, if one wanted to count them as disrupters of sleep.
After a quick glance toward the light downstairs, I moved slowly down the hall to Nola’s bedroom, brushing past the two miniature Christmas trees filled with tiny children’s-toy ornaments—one for a girl and one for a boy—that Sophie had insisted we needed. One shook and nearly toppled when my robe snagged on it, and I had to grab it by the stuffed teddy bear tree topper to keep it upright. I promised myself for the millionth time that next year we were going on a cruise and skipping the holidays completely.
I paused a moment to flip on the upstairs hallway lights, and was not completely surprised when nothing happened. One of the screaming phone calls Jack had received from Harvey that past evening had been about these exact same lights. Apparently, there was something wrong with the Southern wiring (his words, not mine, and he used a few more descriptive adjectives before the wordSouthern) that was causing the lightbulbs to blow out as soon as the switches were flipped.
I thought for a moment about getting Jack but stopped myself. If he was writing, that would be a good thing, and nothing I wanted to interfere with. I was an adult. And a mother of toddler twins and a teenage girl. There shouldn’t be anything left that could scare me. Surely I could handle whatever was behind that door. And if not, I could close it and then go get Jack.
I gingerly touched the door handle, for some reason thinking it would be hot. The brass felt cool to the touch, so I wrapped my fingers around it, then pressed my ear to the door. I couldn’t identify the sound at first, probably because it seemed so out of context in my house in the dead of winter. A buzzing, like a man’s electric razor several decibels louder than it should have been, vibrated through the door, traveling from my head to my fingers and making them tingle.
With a deep breath, I turned the handle, then pushed the door open enough for me to peer inside. Moonlight filled the unadorned windows, lighting the room with a blue-white glow. I reached around the doorframe for the light switch and flicked it on. Nothing happened.
The buzzing was louder now, unbalanced, the source concentrated on one side of the room. The dusty scent of gunpowder drifted toward me and I glanced furtively into the dark corners for the musket-carrying British soldier I’d seen twice before. Except for the moonlight, the corners were empty, the room bare.
Pushing the door as far as it would open, I stepped a little farther into the room, listening as the buzzing took on a new rhythm, athud-thump, thud-thump. Like a beating heart. I swallowed, unwilling to let go of the doorknob just in case I needed to make a hasty retreat and needed to find the door. My eyes gradually adjusted to the moonlight, my gazemoving from one side of the room to the other, stopping when it reached the bed.
Greco had stripped it of all its bedding and had been draping fabric samples over it for Nola and her grandmothers to pick and choose from. But the noise wasn’t coming from the mattress. It was coming from higher up. I looked at the foot of the bed, where the two carved bedposts jutted toward the ceiling like fat fingers. I blinked, my eyesight even worse in the dark, but good enough to tell that one of the posts was different from the other. It was thicker at the top, it seemed. Rounder. I blinked again.Moving.
I stepped back quickly, my heels bumping into the edge of the open door. Taking a deep breath, I looked at the top of the bedpost again, trying to decipher what I was seeing, hoping against all hope that it wasn’t those flying palmetto bugs that were terrifying when they were solo. I had no word to use for when they traveled in packs.
But they were buzzing. Like bees. Forcing myself to let go of the doorknob, I stepped closer to the bed to get a better look. One flew in front of my face as if on reconnaissance, and to my relief it was much smaller than a palmetto bug and most likely a bee. It buzzed and jerked, then flew back to join the cluster of buzzing insects swarming along the entire length of the bedpost.
I walked across the room to examine the windows, wondering if one had been left open. Then I remembered. It was December. From what my father had explained to me about bee behavior, during the winter months bees stayed in their hives, keeping the queen warm until spring. There was another reason there would be a swarm of bees inside my house in December. An unnatural reason. My grandmother had once told me that bees were messengers from the spirit world. How appropriate, then, that I would have just received a phone call from her. As I stared through the hazy darkness at the buzzing, swarming mass on Nola’s bedpost, I wished she’d simply told me on the phone what she wanted me to know instead of sending bees. Apparently,simplewasn’t a word anyone in my family was familiar with.
A shape drifted across the cistern below, a fall of light followed quickly by darkness. I stepped back, not wanting to be seen, and waited for whoever it was to show up on the other side. I squinted, wondering if it was an intruder of the flesh-and-blood type or of a ghostlier sort, unsure which one I’d prefer. I waited for whatever it was to emerge, but the night remained still and dark. But I knew there was someone—something—out there. I felt malevolent eyes on me, like sticky tar that clung to my skin.
I backed away quickly, unwilling to wait for whatever it was to show itself. I continued to walk in reverse until I reached the doorway, not brave enough to turn my back on the window. I saw her then. Eliza. She stood by the bedpost, staring at it as if she were as surprised by the bees as I was.
I remembered Jack telling me to ask Eliza about her brooch. I knew it didn’t usually work that way, but I was tired of waiting for the message to come to me. I wanted to be left alone, to focus on Jack and our family and my career again. To resume normal lives that didn’t involve swarming bees, specters haunting the backyard, and reporters asking questions I didn’t want to answer.
Eliza was more shadow than light, but the green of her dress gleamed like an emerald in the moonlight, the sparkle of the jeweled brooch on her bodice winking at me. “Eliza.” I kept my voice light, mingling it with the buzzing of the bees, not wanting to scare her into vanishing.
She looked directly at me. At least I sensed that she was looking at me. I wasn’t sure—her face and body were swathed in shadow—but I felt her gaze on me. Despite the darkness that enshrouded her, the jewels on her brooch seemed lit from within, small beacons of light. I felt compelled to look at it, to notice something. I squinted out of habit but was close enough to see the shape of the bird, the fanned tail. The four stones seemed to mock me as I struggled to understand what Eliza was trying to tell me.
“What is it?” I whispered. “What do you want me to see?”
Lies.For a moment it was if the buzzing of the bees had mimickedthe sound, the cold breath of a corpse washing over me as the word swirled around the room telling me that it hadn’t been.
“Eliza?” I whispered, but she was gone, along with the bees and the buzzing and the smell of gunpowder. I waited for a moment, attempting to catch my breath, and then, with trembling hands, I reached for the door and left the room, gently latching the door closed behind me. I spotted the light in the foyer and ran down the stairs, knowing Jack was on the other side of that light and could make it all better.
Jack’s study door was open, the green-shaded banker’s lamp on his desk giving pale light to the room. I stopped on the threshold, breathing heavily, not seeing Jack at first. Yet I definitely smelled... pipe smoke? “Jack?” I called, hoping another ghost wasn’t waiting for me. One per night was more than enough.
“Over here.”
My gaze followed the voice, stopping at the corner behind the piano where Amelia had placed a lovely leather Chesterfield chair and ottoman, for times when he wanted to read quietly or just think in his office. I rarely saw him use them, as he did most of his thinking either walking around the room or sitting at his desk. But he was sitting in the chair now, in the near dark, his feet on the ottoman. And smoking a pipe.
I had so many questions that it was hard to pick one to start with. “Why are you smoking a pipe?” I managed.
