Page 5 of A Heart So Haunted
“At least I’m well read in all genres,” I said.
“Is that supposed to be an insult? Like I don’t read?”
“No, I’m saying your true crime documentary experience makes you better equipped for the situation.”
Sayer took the casserole dish out of my slowly warming hands and pushed it onto the entryway table. It’d gradually become the catch-all spot. Cards perched in a cluster on one side—all sage-greens and muted blues, wishing love, sympathies, and anything else that might sound remotely comforting.
They weren’t.
“And if it’s not someone trying to break open a door?” he tried. “You would really leave me to deal with an angry ghost?”
“So, you’ll sendmeinstead?”
“It’syourhouse.”
The words shouldn’t have stung, because he was only telling the truth, but they did. “So what, you’re a believer now?” I said, the edges of my words serrated.
“There’s a reason I couldn’t watch cartoons with ghosts in them as a kid, you know.” I felt Sayer’s eyes weigh me, like a percentage chart or a fates calculator. As if he were debating the value of an argument right now.
“Fine.” I wiped my hands on my dress with a sudden flood of urgency. I just needed to get this over with—to prove there was nothing to be scared about. An old house did not mean it was haunted. Aunt Cadence said so.
An old house, with a lot of rooms, with a lot of empty space, just like I’d always wanted. Still, the irony of Aunt Cadence passing in order for me to get my wish, hurt. And now the one woman that could have proved the house was normal was gone.
Before I lost any courage, I pivoted in the middle of the foyer and banked into the living room, off to the right.
“Don’t leave me here!”
I rolled my eyes and muttered to myself. Of course he’d be too scared to wait alone. But, to my surprise, he didn’t follow.
The living area was just as Aunt Cadence left it—hand-me-down furniture, thrifted art on the walls, and two large, ornate rugs that were nothing more than swirls of beiges and burgundies to hide the stains from when Donald The Chihuahua had potty-training incidents as a puppy. I wove around the pleather couches that faced the hallway, which opened to the mudroom. Both the mudroom and the garage were additions to the original house.
I stepped over the threshold—and the temperature dropped immediately.
The lights were off, casting the stick-on linoleum floor in gray shadow. The washer and dryer sat patched with rust, both stale from unuse these past three months. Four laundry baskets, all plastic, one broken, were stacked by a wayward, also plastic, shoe rack.
Nothing looked out of place. Then again, I hadn’t had enough time to go through anything. And the last time I’d graced Harthwait I might have been seventeen? Eighteen?
Years ago.
I collected my breath and opened the door to the garage. The smell of musk and warm dirt swamped my nostrils.
“Good Lord,” I whispered. My face scrunched. “When was the last time you opened this door, Denny?”
As if the walls could hear me. Relay the question back to her.
The garage sat empty, save for the VW Beetle covered in a blanket of dust. Its once bright, cheery yellow now resembled a sun-bleached sticky note.
I waited. Listened, or tried, around the subtle pounding of my heart.
It could have been a mouse. Or a nail had wiggled loose from the tool board on the wall and something had dropped from it? Had a bird found its way through the washer vent somehow and ended up in the garage? Maybe one of the windows in the garage door had broken?
I combed through soil bags, a line of preservatives in unopened boxes, and a cluster of gardening tools. I circled the Beetle.
The door to outside hung ajar. Not a lot—but enough.
I paused. Wasthatthe noise?
Three slumped feed and fertilizer bags were piled a few feet behind the door against the wall, beside a tin trashcan and a rake hanger. If the doorhadbeen opened hard enough, it would have hit the feed bags—not the wall, so that couldn’t have been what we’d heard.
