Page 107 of A Heart So Haunted
“Ain’t nothing a bit of love and patience can’t fix. And super glue.”
If only that were true.
She patted my shoulder. “Well, now that you’re here—I think I found something you might have been looking for.”
I perked up a bit. “What?”
Meredith wove back toward a shelf with an opened box labeled CHICKENS.
In my handwriting.
She peeled the flaps back, pulled out a rooster, and twisted his head. When she dumped him upside down, a key jingled into her palm, attached by a leather strap and a rolled-up envelope, no bigger than a greeting card.
My heart flipped. Spots emerged at the edge of my vision. Was that—
Her eyes softened. Turned watery.
“I’ve done sold everything else you brought me, but this was the last box of stuff I had left. Was going through it late last night. And I heard something rattling in that rooster and found this. Figured you might need it.” She held out the key, then the envelope. On the keychain: BOX 148, and on the little teal envelope, one word looped across the front:
LANDRY
Chapter Twenty-One
My throat burned the entire walk to my car. When I sat in the front seat, I locked the doors. Perched the little envelope on my dashboard and dropped the key into the cupholder.
This might not be anything important. It might not be what I hoped for it to be.
It mightjustbe a letter. And that was okay.
My eyes welled until everything swam. Short, choppy breaths came from my chest. The car was hot, like a toaster oven, and I knew I’d start sweating soon. But I needed the silence.
With jerky movements, I picked up the letter. Ran a finger over her penmanship. She’d always curled hery’s at the end in a little twirl so it looked like a flower sprouted from the bottom. I tore the flap with care and pulled out a single folded sheet of paper.
My lovely Lanny,
I know you may think me crazy, but I promise this has a purpose. I’m leaving the house to you. Then again, if you’ve got this, you probably already know that.
Don’t worry: right now, I’m not sick. I’m not dying, at least on my watch, anytime soon. I just want to be prepared. I think Charlene next door having an aneurysm got me thinking. Who knows, I might tell you I’ve stored this somewhere so you can find it if the time comes. Maybe I won’t want to deal with this place and I’ll give it to you and just be done with it. Get me an apartment, something I don’t own, and just die there when I’m wrinkled and ornery in twenty years.
But yes, the house. It’s yours. I’ll set it up in a trust, write a will, all the fun stuff. At least it’ll give me something to do.
One, then two tears plopped onto my lap. I wiped my eyes. Propped my elbow on the car door and covered my mouth. Willed myself to keep reading.
The point of this is to tell you something I know nothing about. My Granny used to say never to play with things you don’t know. But then Charlene died and I got to thinking about what would happen if I wasn’t here no more. How I’d feel about leaving you this place and knowing what I know about it. I can’t do that to you, Lanny. I know you loved this place, loved visiting, as a little girl.
But this place isn’t right. I know you think it was cute, that little rhyme I used to tell you and Sayer as kids, but I did it because I wanted you to be wary. I wanted to scare you away a bit, and I’m sorry. I’ve ignored it for a long while, thinking it would just go away. It never did. So it’s time to try and figure out what’s going on instead of ignoring it more. I’ll start at the beginning for you:
You were about four or five when I realized you noticed things. You said you’d seen someone in a window late one afternoon. To be honest, you scared me. I ignored it—you talked about it for months, so I didn’t forget it—but I was hoping it’d go away. And it wasn’t just that, but you’d bring up the oddest things: hearing knocks and creaks when your momma or daddy didn’t. They thought you were playing, but I knew better. Because I’d heard things sometimes too.
It got worse the older you got, so the more I ignored it, the more I worried. By the time you were away at college, I tried toreplace the beadboard in the hallway and busted a hole in the wall on accident. That was when I found the door. These were around it.
In the margins of the paper, she’d drawn a few of the same symbols I’d found.
For the longest time, I didn’t find much. I always heard that sometimes energies were tied to items, so I figured it might very well be an untimely death that left someone lingering. I tried to find remains in both the front and back yards, in the crawl spaces under the house, in the attic. But I never did.
Until I replaced the floorboards in the office.
My heart rocketed up my throat. I squeezed my eyes shut. The floorboards in the office?
