A Haunting at Hensley Hall (A Ravynne Sisters Paranormal Mystery) (2 page)

Meg hiccupped and sighed simultaneously. “Got it. This time I’m not changing my mind. This time he went too far.”

Charlie’s eyes widened in alarm. Tipping her sister’s chin up, she looked her right in the eyes. “Too far? What does that mean? I’m taking you to the hospital and then we’re going to the police no matter what you have to say about it,” she told her fiercely.

“No…no…I’m fine other than what you see. Mitch hurt
him
. He threw him against the wall. I screamed at him to stop, but he just laughed so I went after him. I hit him as hard as I could and kept on hitting him, again and again, so he wouldn’t have time to hurt him any more. But he’s okay and that’s what’s important! I saved him,” Meg told her with a touch of pride.

Baffled, Charlie shook her head. “What…who…are you talking about?” she managed to ask around the angry tears that tightened her throat.

Smiling, Meg pulled aside the afghan. There nesting in the crook of her knees was a small shaggy white dog. He was trembling slightly…his brown eyes wary but hopeful. He looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and a lint ball, Charlie thought, as she reached out to pet him. His tail thumped briefly, as he gave her hand a quick lick, before he burrowed deeper into the couch cushions.

“He’s still kind of scared after what happened. He’s a rescue dog I adopted from the animal shelter. You know how I am about animals. It was Christmas Eve and I didn’t want to spend another Christmas with just Mitch, me, and his bottle. The sign above his cage read: One white dog. He looked so sad and lonely, just like I felt, so I brought him home. Mitch pitched a fit when he saw him. Said he was ‘good for nothing but peeing, pooping and eating’ so that’s what he wanted me to call him. Goodfor. But I named him Freddie.”

“That Mitch! The soul of a poet, ” Charley said with a mixture of venom and sarcasm, thinking it should be legal to put a bullet in him! “How about we get you and your pup out of here…now. I’ll help you pack. If Mitch comes back and I have to kill him, things might get messy and they’re quite messy enough already.”

“You wouldn’t really shoot Mitch, would you?” Meg asked almost hopefully.

Charlie answered with a
very
dark smile.

***

Charlie looked out the window, as she haphazardly misted the ragged Schefflera that had hung in there with her for the past three years. Across the street she could see Meg sitting on her bench with her dog ‘Freddie’ lying next to her. She smiled. Meg often sat there or went for long walks, trying to give her the time and quiet she needed to work. The book had pretty much stalled to a stop. Maybe that was inevitable. There had been a lot of adjustments on all sides, when they returned to her tiny apartment.

But it had been almost a month now and Meg was still walking on eggshells….always apologizing for the silliest things, as though everything in the world that went wrong was her fault. Sometimes she just wanted to scream at her to knock it off, then reminded herself it was a deeply learned behavior from fifteen years with the incomparable Mitch. That and being left to the not so tender mercies of their uptight mother, the self-styled “iron fist in the velvet glove”, after their dad left for California to begin a new life with dark, elfin Sage Farley…the visiting New Ager who had sat in on his mathematics lecture…stayed to argue the merits of Numerology and captured his heart as well as other parts of his anatomy, judging from the arrival of 7lb12oz Rayne less than eight months later. Strangely enough, or maybe not so ‘strangely’ Sage had proved a blessing in many ways.

Charlie sighed. Today she would have her say, before she bit the end of her tongue off. Patience never being her strong suit! She went back to her computer and looked at the last thing she had written…and rewritten…and rewritten again, but it was no use. Her muse was still stubbornly shirking her responsibilities no matter how hard she tried to court her. She rose and crossed to the window for the third time in ten minutes. What was she going to say? How do you tell someone like Meg…gentle, sweet Meg… that she was a royal pain in the butt? She heard footsteps and the scrabble of claws on the steps and sucked in a deep breath.

Meg opened the door and followed Freddie inside. Unsnapping his leash, she straightened and looked around, surprised to see Charlie, standing by the window, looking as if she had just swallowed a whole dill pickle. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked, her pale blue eyes rounding in surprise.

“I have something to say to you and I’m going to say it even if it’s around the size nine foot I’m about to shove in my big mouth. You really don’t have to be nice every minute, Meg. No one’s going to hit you if you’re bitchy once in a while, though I wouldn’t make a habit of it or you could end up like me. No more apologies for every little thing! And, most important of all, stop being
grateful
to me all the time. If I hear you say one more time ‘how good it was of me to do this or that’ I’ll scream this place down around all our ears. I am your sister. Big sister at that! I love you very much and we are beginning a new life…you…me…and Freddie. Got it?”

Meg’s “I’m sorry. I didn’t” earned her the thorough misting the Schefflera could have used.

***

Things changed after that. Meg seemed to shed her old self like a cicada leaves its worn out shell hanging on a tree. She smiled more. Even laughed. Bought some new clothes, hired a lawyer and took back her maiden name. “I’ll punch him where it will really hurt that SOB,” she told Charlie. “His wallet!” The worry that Mitch would come knocking some day, changed to a ‘just let him try’ kind of attitude.

The Ravynne family streak of resilience ran deep in Meg, Charlie thought…the very kind that had brought them all through one disaster after another. Some Charlie knew about and some she didn’t want to know about. One could only take so much.

The miniscule apartment remained a problem though and every day became a dance party as each tried to stay out of the other’s way. Thankfully, Meg had taken over the kitchen chores allowing her to spend even more time staring, impotently, at her laptop in the small eating alcove that served as her office.

Then one day (Meg and Freddie had left after breakfast not wanting to disturb her), Charlie’s muse bestirred herself again and her fingers flew across the keyboard until she had three chapters to show for it. Of course, there would be rewrites, plenty of them, but still. She smiled and made herself a cup of tea, then decided to reward herself with a little Internet surfing and the chocolate bar she’d been hoarding for just this occasion.

She had barely started, when she saw it! “Like this can’t be for real or even legal, ” she murmured, as she quickly scanned the text above and below the picture of a house that was certainly not the all American house next door. It was a dark, brooding, mysterious Victorian monstrosity, quite probably riddled with termites, deathwatch beetles (though she wasn’t sure they had such things in the States!), mold, mildew, mice…and even rats. She laughed. Let’s hope there were no rats! If there was anything bigger than a mouse, and there probably was, she’d never get Meg to agree to what she was thinking about doing. She must be crazy. And she knew she wouldn’t have to look far to find others that thought so too. But the house was gorgeous if you liked that kind of thing. And she did. Loved it, if truth be told. But what would Meg say?

She didn’t have long to find out. She was so engrossed, she hadn’t heard the door open and close. Didn’t know Meg was home till she leaned over her shoulder and squinted at the screen. “What are you looking at so intently?”

“Just the most beautiful house ever. Look at it, Meg. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Meg studied the house that could have devoured twenty of her little cottage in Shrewsbury and never burped. Dripping with broken gingerbread, towers fronting both sides like dark sentinels, it looked like the Addam’s family home on steroids. “It’s quite large, isn’t it?” she managed to say around the little bubble of worry that had lodged in her throat. “It says something about a contest. What are you thinking of doing and tell me you are only joking when you say it.”

“Well, we both agree about one thing lately. This place is too small. I need a place to write. You need a kitchen bigger than a pea pod, which reminds me, you need a place to garden. I’ve seen you across the street grooming the Parks Department’s flowers, wondering when they’d catch you and I’d have to come haul you out of jail, like I haven’t done that all too recently with that sister of ours.”

“They needed dead heading or they wouldn’t keep blooming,” Meg mumbled defensively.

“Yeah, right! Bottom line we need some space and this just might be the answer,” Charlie said with a too bright smile.

“But the upkeep alone. We could never afford it. I mean you’ve got some money from your books and I will have some after the divorce settlement, but get real, Charlie. That place is a money pit as big as the Grand Canyon.”

“Well, no point worrying about details like that right now. We haven’t won it yet.”

“And that means what?” Meg asked worriedly.

“This town is running a contest to unload the house and pay off its back taxes, which have been piling up for sometime,” Charlie told her.

“I never in all my life heard of such a thing.”

“We have to write an essay explaining why we want to live in this house and enclose a check with it.”

“Ah, hah! How much are they trying to scam out of everyone?” Meg asked.

“‘Scam’ sounds a little judgmental, Meg. I’m rather surprised at you. After all, the back taxes have to be paid, a town can’t run on air, and the check is for…$100,” she told her, dropping her voice on the last part.

Meg sniffed loudly. “You’re going to do this and I know I’d be wasting my time trying to talk you out of it. Sogo ahead. This won’t be the first time you’ve done something really stupid.”

Charlie looked at her sister for a long moment. Maybe this new attitude she’d encouraged, had some severe drawbacks. “Look. I know how this all sounds. But I think this is an opportunity we can’t turn down. If it’s meant to be, it will happen. Besides, what are the odds that we’ll win? Have either of us ever won anything in our entire lives?”

“Just that one prize in high school for the most unusual Halloween costume, but only because of that freak accident. The one you told me never to mention again, remember?”

“Sorry. I did say that. Anyway, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll check all this out and see if it’s for real. If it is, we’ll do it. It says here that the place has ten bedrooms, not counting the staff quarters. It would be perfect for a B&B, or we could take in boarders! You can have your nice big kitchen, a yard for Freddie to run about in, and I can have that little tower room on the right with a view of the beautiful garden I know will flourish under your green hands.”

“Oh please! At least I know where I can get the fertilizer! Okay, count me in,” Meg said with a sigh. “But about that kitchen thing. I really…really hate cooking!”

The ‘cooking thing’ would be one more wrinkle they would have to iron out, Charlie thought with a grimace, then remembered. Neither one of them liked to iron either!

Charlie began her homework. Checking on the Internet, she learned all she could about the small town called Merritsville from its database. It had a population of 50k plus, as of the last census, mostly of Scotch-Irish descent, but liberally sprinkled with other ethnic groups. A decent percentage had, at least, a high school education and the crime rate was low. So far so good, she thought. Time to start the essay.

At first, she’d felt at a loss. It seemed her capricious muse had logged off once again. Why did she want to do this thing so badly anyway? It wasn’t remotely sensible, quite probably not even sane, as Meg told her often enough, but there it was. It wasn’t a
likable
house. It had way too much presence to be
likeable
. It was a house one either hated at first sight, feared all the way to one’s toes, or loved.

Suddenly, she had an ‘Ah, hah!’ moment. She had fallen in love with the old house from the first moment she saw it! Impossible as that sounded, it was only too true. It seemed
fated
somehow, though she wasn’t all that sure she even believed in fate. Or hadn’t so far. And when she told Meg that she loved the house and it
needed
her, she had expected her to laugh, but instead she had only looked at her for a long moment and nodded.

While she was working through the essay’s third rewrite, Meg suggested they call the tax assessor’s office, directly, and see what they had to say. There had been no phone number or address listed on the Internet. In fact, it had clearly stated that no one was to contact them directly, but when had that ever stopped her? A quick Internet search turned up Merritsville’s Tax Assessor’s phone number. With Meg’s ear pressed close to the receiver, she made the call.

The voice on the other end was both coldly polite and clearly impatient. “We posted all the pertinent information, which, if you had bothered to read, stated you were not to contact us. I was quite…quite sure we had made that abundantly clear. Just follow the steps and send in your entry …or entries. You are certainly welcome to send more than one, as long as you enclose a separate check for each. I don’t believe I caught your name?” a Mrs. Brown intoned nasally.

Charlie blurted out the first name that came to mind…Maggie Snow…one she sometimes used when she went undercover. After some subtle prodding, heavily laced with the ‘deference due’ one in Mrs. Brown’s quite possibly overpaid position, she learned that the previous owners had died and left no known heirs to take on the “responsibility of the estate”. The couple had been in “considerable arrears”, but the assessor’s office “out of the generosity” of their hearts had let it slide, since the family had been of “political importance at one time”. The house had been empty since their death more than three years ago, so the tax bill was now “quite a significant amount”.