Page 23 of A Heart So Haunted
I rested my chin in my palm. Would I erase all my memories from this house by the time the reno was done? Or only a few of them?
But I wasn’t. I wasn’terasing. I was updating, while keeping character. The little bits of Aunt Cadence and the little fragments of history—like the family crest molded to the ceiling in the office, or the blocked-off servant staircase in the corner of the kitchen—would still be here.
I took a deep inhale. Blinked away my blurry vision.
“You’re doing your job,” I told myself, because no one else would. I arranged the heavy notebook in my lap. The quilt felt alive, like it skittered over my bare legs.
I pressed my index finger and thumb to the bridge of my nose. Then I counted the knobs on the front drawers. Two for each drawer. Eight total.
That’swhat I’d forgotten—I needed to order the knobs for the kitchen drawers. If I went with the sage color I had in mind for the walls, gold accents would match better than the existing brass fixtures. Some things I could spray paint, but I’d seen a vintage-inspired set online that would look much better. Instead of the dull, smooth, minimalist ones I usually found in stores, these were twirls of leaves as handles.
“For only two payments of twenty-nine ninety-nine, you can get …” the TV hummed.
I’d heard of people needing a fan to sleep—white noise, something to calm the mind. I needed voices, mindless chatter that resembled incoherent, meaningless thoughts. Most nights, I left the local infomercials on since they ran through the night. If not, lulls of nothingness jerked me out of sleep.
The digital clock flickered to a quarter after midnight.
My room, nicknamed the Blue Room, faced the back of the property. Emma was down the hall, in the opposite wing, in the Austen Room, because she said the aesthetic reminded her ofPride and Prejudice. Which was good for her, because the frills and lace of dresser runners and nightstand doilies made my skin crawl.
I started a new column, wroteprice?before jotting out a few ballpark numbers beside each prospective item. I’d start my renovations with the kitchen, which would be easy. A new light fixture. Remove the rest of the roosters to show that the appliances were, in fact, new, and I could move on to the—
“No, Momma,no, please don’t let him.”
My pen froze, hovering over the paper. Gooseflesh pimpled up my arms.
For a heartbeat, I thought I’d imagined it. Glanced at the TV, which danced to my left on the dresser by a window, angled toward the bed. A new commercial, maybe? But the channel hadn’t changed and neither had the murmuring ad for a new vacuum.
All right, maybe it hadn’t been my TV. Maybe Emma was still awake and watching something down the hall. Or this was my signal to go to bed.
I shook it off and bent back over my list. The living room would be next—
“Please don’t, Momma. I don’t like it when he—”
My head jerked up.
“Free shipping if you order in the next fifteen minutes!” the husky voiced, mountain of a man on TV told me. I stared at the TV, watched the ad all the way through. There was no way it had been that guy—his voice was too deep. Too adult.
It sounded like a child. Distant. Maybe outside.
My thoughts buckled. Had we left the doors unlocked? Had a kid gotten lost and somehow ended up on the property? Or was it a dare—kids always made up stories about old homes and tricked the meek into stepping on the haunted grounds. Ding dong ditch, then run for the hills.Iwould have knocked on a haunted house door for approval.
“I dare you to step on the porch, Fanny-Lanny,” Sarah would have snarled with her buck teeth and slicked-back pigtails. “Or you’re ababy.”
“Momma,” the voice cried—faint. Either breathless or far away or both. “Momma, please.”
I detangled myself from the quilt and stepped onto the cold floor. I didn’t bother to grab a sweatshirt—I braved the hallway in shorts, a T-shirt, and no bra. That’s how much confidence I had that I was just tired and hearing things.
I poked my head out into the hall. Listened. Emma’s door was shut, the lights off beneath the door crack. The longer I stood in the doorway, the more the shadows seemed to settle. Like they wouldn’t move until I turned away. Still, no voice came.
I counted the ticks of the grandfather clock. Three minutes. The refrigerator whirred downstairs, twice, before I stepped back in the room. My hand grazed the doorknob and I slowly pulled it closed.
An inch from clicking shut, I heard it.
“Please,” the voice whimpered.
I opened the door again. The hallway was still empty.
A cold sweat dewed along my neck. Hundreds of possibilities trampled through me. A kid, like I suspected. But to plead like that? Why?
