Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(5)
They have no idea who I am, apart from their personal kitchen staff—and they wouldn’t care if they did. They are forever tidy, civil, and gracious, and I am charmed by their tendency to climb into my lap and purr . . . working in tandem with the tea to keep me warm on the chillier mornings.
This morning, it was chilly but not so bad that I did not sit with them for a while in companionable quiet—the paperboy notwithstanding.
I’m not being fair.
I’m sure it’s just the boy’s job, that he’s been told a thousand times to aim for the front door. I’ve made that impossible for him, haven’t I? When I rebuilt the front porch a few years ago, I made sure to give myself privacy, and the cats some shelter for the nastier days of winter. He couldn’t hit the front door unless he came inside and stood before it. I suppose he does the best that he can.
But I’ve heard him whisper, when I’ve gone to town. I’ve seen him, and his nasty little friends. I know what they call me. I know what they say, when they think I’m out of earshot. It’s nothing new, and by now you’d think I’d be accustomed to it, but sometimes it gets under my skin all the same.
I ought to be too old to give a damn.
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But I do like the cats.
Emma, when you were alive, I hated to shoo them away—through no fault of their own, they made you sneeze, and you had problems enough breathing without their accidental interference. Now that you’re gone, I can lure them as close as I like, and even let them inside if they’re amenable to it. Most of them are content to remain outdoors, but one or two prefer the fireplace around January. Who can blame them?
Now that you’re gone, and Seabury’s gone, too, I take my friends where I can get them.
Sometimes even now, especially late at night, I think I can hear you, Emma—up in your room, which I’ve made into an office. I awaken in the wee hours to the sound of a bell, like the one you used to ring when you needed me. In my dreams your voice is no longer feeble; it doesn’t struggle for volume, or crack when you raise it. It’s the voice of a stronger, younger woman than I knew you last: the woman you should’ve been, and might have been, if things had been . . . different.
So if anyone haunts this place, I know good and well it’s you. And yet, despite my esoteric interests, I’m afraid to make any effort to find out for certain.
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I wonder if Doctor Owens haunts his old home anymore.
I thought I saw him there once, after his funeral. I attended in black and a veil—not that it concealed my identity in the slightest—because I wished to show my respect for a man who was such a fine friend and ally in difficult times, never mind that his mind was so badly troubled in the end. I needn’t have bothered with my civilized disguise. Only three people attended the service, he was so far gone to the community by the time he left it for good.
He lingered until 1899, barricading himself into that grand old house he once shared with his wife; and then he left to join her in the cemetery by the old Presbyterian church on Eighth Street. I’m not sure who found him, but he hadn’t been gone very long—I know, because I’d seen him only a few days before.
(He’d been much the same . . . distracted and disheveled, scarcely recognizing me but seeming to appreciate my presence. We sat in the parlor and had tea, while he told me stories about the lights in the water, or fish-pale things with starfish hands that he’d seen in his dreams. Disturbing, as always. But I owed him, so I listened to him and I let him talk so long as he was willing.)
At any rate, someone found him and extricated him from that house—stuffed to the brim with all manner of things he’d collected. In the end, the place was only navigable by a series of paths he’d either created or worn with his own foot traffic.
I thought perhaps someone would burn it to the ground and build something new in its place. I couldn’t imagine anyone cleaning it out and restoring it, for the doctor had no family left who might inherit it and feel some sense of obligation to it.
But I’ve been wrong before, and I was wrong again.
Someone bought it for a song, cleaned it out, and listed it for sale. I forget who bought it the first time, and I forget who bought it the second, third, and fourth times, too. No one ever keeps it for long.
Which is why I wonder if he haunts the place.
I think he might. As I said, I remember walking past his house before anyone had emptied it and made it habitable again . . . I remember I was still wearing the black of his funeral, so it must’ve been that very day. (Forgive me, it’s been so long. I forget the finer details, and only remember them by way of other minor particulars, which for some reason remain more firmly fixed.)
I stood outside his house and looked at it, very consciously not looking across the street at that other house—our old house, you know the one. (There are some memories I can’t unfix, not for all the trying in the world.) And inside I saw, just for a flash, a tall shape with a shock of white hair. I would swear to you, this flicker was faster than a gasp—but there was a streak of maroon to it, like the color of the old smoking jacket he used to wear. He practically lived in that thing, in those last years. It smelled terrible. I wonder if they buried him in it. I bet someone buried it, at any rate.
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I am not entirely certain that I believe in ghosts, but there’s no good reason not to, considering.