A Haunting at Hensley Hall (A Ravynne Sisters Paranormal Mystery) (3 page)

“Yes,” Mrs. Brown conceded with a forced brightness that made Charlie grit her teeth. “The estate will need some repairs. But it was built mid Nineteenth Century, back when they really knew how to build, so I’m sure the basic structure is quite sound. Of course, I am no expert in such things and, since we are practically giving it away, it is being offered strictly ‘as is’. It was neglected quite shamefully, but I’m sure with a little money and some elbow grease it will be a stunning asset to our little community once again!”

Charlie had been hoping for at least the owner’s name, but knew the direct approach wouldn’t work with Mrs. Brown. “I’m sure the Wilsons did all…”

She could practically see Mrs. Brown’s superior smirk. “The Hensleys,” she corrected her with a snap, then caught herself. “I don’t believe their name is relevant. It is the house we are talking about.”

Meg tugged urgently at Charlie’s arm. “Ask her where they died?” she whispered.

Cupping her hand over the receiver, Charlie mouthed with a touch of annoyance, “What did you say?”

“Ask her where they died?” Meg persisted.

So Charlie asked and was told, “Why would that be pertinent? They died quite peacefully in their own home of natural causes. After all, they had been quite elderly and it was totally expected. No surprises…none at all!” Mrs. Brown said with exaggerated emphasis. A prickling awareness shot up Charlie’s spine, just as Mrs. Brown excused herself and hung up.

Meg sighed. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

Charlie let the ‘what?’ she didn’t want to ask escape her.

“
Ghosts
is what! The place is bound to be haunted, though I suspected as much from the first moment I saw it. No wonder they’re raffling it off in some cockamamie contest. Who in that town would buy the place if it has the reputation I think it has? No wonder they didn’t list the address. Anyone driving into Merritsville would soon find out the place is haunted and be out of there on the next bus!”

“They drove in, they wouldn’t take a bus out, would they?” Charlie asked wryly. “You are really beginning to enjoy all this, aren’t you? We haven’t sent the check in yet. It’s not too late to call the whole thing off, if that is what you really want.”

“Haunted mansion…ghosts…things that bump you in the night, are you kidding? You know how I love that kind of thing!” Meg told her with what came dangerously close to a giggle.

And Charlie did know. How could she forget? At eight, Meg had begun holding seances in the attic. At first she had been the only one there, until she talked her non-believing sister into attending. She remembered Meg, her head wrapped in a silk scarf she’d pilfered from their mother’s dresser, concentrating on conjuring up the spirits, who had seemed totally disinterested in being conjured! Then one night, not long after they had persuaded their babysitter to let them see a Dracula movie on TV, Meg summoned up a vampire. Or thought she had.

Charlie had never seen her so scared. And when she hadn’t been able to put her vampire back in his box, or wherever she hoped to stuff him, she asked their cook for garlic cloves. If Mrs. Porter wondered why Meg had developed a sudden craving for garlic, she never asked and, most importantly, never told their mother.

Meg had tied the garlic in a wool scarf and wore it around her neck… night after night. Though she loved Meg dearly, she didn’t
love
sleeping in a room that reeked of garlic! In fact, she had developed a strong dislike for Italian food that scarred her to this day…so she had decided to take charge of the situation.

It had been a stroke of genius! She had staged the vampire’s death. At midnight, with a full moon lighting the dark deed, she’d wrestled a black yard bag full of grass clippings to the ground and thrust a wooden stake through its ‘heart’. It had all been a lot more work than she’d thought, but with Meg watching from their upstairs window, it had seemed worth it at the time. She’d spiced up the vampire’s death with a few blood-curdling shrieks that brought lights on all over the neighborhood, including their mother’s. She had been forced to lay low for what seemed like hours, before she could safely sneak back inside.

She had expected to find Meg awaiting her conquering heroine, but had found her fast asleep, the raggedy-eared teddy bear she’d been ‘too big for lately’ clutched close to her heart. Freddie. Why hadn’t she remembered that before? Now ‘Freddie’ was a shaggy white dog, who comforted Meg and had been the catalyst in changing her life.

“Yoo hoo! Earth to Charlie. I’m still here, remember me? Anyway, I was asking, while you weren’t listening, what do we do next?”

She tugged a lock of Meg’s honey gold hair. “We’ve got a name now…Hensley…and a little research should give us an address.”

A short time later, they had found out that a Walden Hensley had been one of the founding fathers of Merritsville, making his money in lumber and building his huge house in 1875 as a monument to his success. From his picture, he looked stuffy, arrogant and ruthless. His mouth had a cruel twist and his eyes seemed almost malevolent. He held a cane in his right hand like a scepter. He was someone no one would ever want to cross, both sisters thought. His wife, Ruth, was small, unsmiling and nondescript…a little colorless wren who somehow produced four strapping sons, whose parentage could never have been questioned!

Searching the tax assessor’s online property records under the name ‘Hensley’, Charlie found the address: 3750 West Myrtle Trail. With Meg pressed close beside her, she Goggle mapped the house and brought up its satellite image. The house was enormous and surrounded by a number of outbuildings. The grounds looked wildly overgrown, but when they zoomed in for a closer look, the enlarged pixels made it impossible to see anything at all. “I suppose we should drive over there and check it out now that we know where it is,” Meg told Charlie with a sigh.

“That would be the sensible thing to do,” Charlie agreed with a sigh of her own.

“But if we go there, we will probably end up having more doubts than we have now.”

“Probably.”

“And then we’ll never do it. I vote we go ahead, as planned, and handle whatever happens,” Meg said brightly.

Charlie sighed again. Now that Meg had given up the role of ‘devil’s advocate’, she wasn’t entirely sure she liked the change. She needed Meg to keep her grounded, since, quite probably, she wasn’t thinking too clearly just now. But the contest…the house…it all felt so right, how could it be wrong? Memories from the past ‘niggled’ briefly, but she squelched them before they took root. The past was the past and,
granted
, she had made her share of mistakes, but it was no use second-guessing herself at this point. “So, ‘damn the torpedoes full speed ahead’?” she asked.

“Yep! But…”

Here goes, thought Charlie, Meg was beginning to have second thoughts before she’d even finished her first. “But what?” she managed to ask.

“I’m fed up with men…all men, but you? You aren’t going to get involved or married or something and leave me hanging with all this?” Meg asked anxiously. “You always had a slew of guys asking you out in school, though you did turn most of them down, and you’re still attractive enough, when you don’t frown like that. I’ve always wondered why you never settled down, got married, and had a couple of kids. You’d make a great mother.”

“Yeah, right. We both had such a great role model,” Charlie said dryly. She knew Meg was talking through her insecurities. Too many people had walked out on her in her young life, but she would never be one of them!

“Well that takes care of the ‘kids’ part, but why never marry? You must have had your chances?” Meg persisted.

Charlie’s eyes seemed to find some distant place. “I guess I’ve always been so busy looking after everyone else I didn’t have time. Besides, I wanted someone who would…could look after me. Not that I’d have let him, of course, but he would
want
to. That’s the point. He’d want to. And then there’s the love thing. I only came close once.” Her voice trailed away.

“And? Who was he, Charlie?” Meg whispered, hating the pain she saw in her sister’s face.

“His name was Paul and he’s been dead for more than three years. He was my love…still is,” Charlie said, slipping her arm around her sister’s shoulders. “And that’s a story I’ll never tell anyone.”

Rayne swung her long legs into the taxi, gave the driver the address and leaned back with a sigh. Just lately, the traffic, the people the noise had become, well,
irritating
. But there were compensations…museums, galleries, theaters, restaurants, clubs and the shopping. The fabulous shopping! But now that the initial ‘rush’ had worn off, she began to think there was someplace else she’d rather be, though she hadn’t the foggiest notion where that was.

She laughed and the driver glanced at her, speculatively, in the rearview mirror. Out of all her siblings…half and otherwise…she was most like Charlie. They both had gypsy souls. Neither seemed able to stay in one place very long, though Charlie had been settled for the past 3 years? Now she and Meg had entered some contest to win a Victorian House of Horrors, as Meg described it in her latest letter.

It was always Meg that wrote, keeping in touch with everyone…sort of like the family ‘town crier’. She sounded so much happier now. Apparently, the divorce had gone smoothly, though they were still trying to recover the money Mitch emptied out of their bank account on his way out of town. With no children, it would all be final soon and Meg would be free.

She remembered the first time she’d met her two half-sisters. She was five years old and Allyn only three, when they went to the airport to meet their plane. With a parent gripping each of her hands, Allyn in her mother’s arms, they had waited for the passengers to debark. She looked up at her dad and saw tears in his eyes. Her mother was smiling. She didn’t know what she was
supposed
to do, then she saw them and they were not at all what she had expected. Somehow, she had thought they would be children still, like her, someone to play with not grownups almost as old as her mother!

Of course, they had only been teenagers…Meg shorter and rounder with a riot of dark blonde curls, while Charlie had been taller…much taller…with straight, silver blonde hair that spilled down her back. She looked like she’d stepped straight out of a storybook! Hunkering down, she had met her at eye level, and smiled. She always remembered her words. “Looks like I have another baby sister to look after” and she always had. She was the first one she’d called, when she’s got into trouble last year.

She frowned as she slipped into that memory. She had reported Jared for harassing her and they’d blown her off with, “That’s not the story we heard!” She could just imagine what they’d ‘heard’. Jealous, possessive, unable to believe her ‘no’ meant just that, he had followed her for weeks, but he was a cop, one of their own, and she wouldn’t be allowed to
smear
his name or hurt his family with her ‘unsubstantiated’ accusations. Never mind that she wasn’t his first victim. The others were local women who had withdrawn their complaints for undisclosed reasons.

They had said she ‘stalked and killed’ Jared, because that was what they wanted to believe. The
stalked
part was where they got it wrong. She had
killed
him. Blown a hole in his manly chest as he forced her up against the kitchen counter. She had spent many nights, trying to forget his look of surprise.

It had been Charlie who had made them look at the forensic evidence: the broken pane in her kitchen door, the bits of glass the coroner had dug out of Jared’s lacerated elbow, the size twelve work boot prints found outside all her windows, which had matched Jared’s exactly.

Charlie made them do their jobs with a quiet force that pushed everything out of its way. Then she had made a call to someone, an important someone, that stirred up everyone and set her free…all charges dropped.

Now she was here. The Big Apple. Exactly where she had thought she wanted to be…a new recruit to the trendy crowd of the smart upwardly mobile. She had joined the wolf pack of ‘in control’, independent, savvy women from her office, as they trolled the clubs, looking for? She didn’t think they’d quite figured that out yet. Nor worried about it. They were having fun. It had been her kind of fun once, but now it all seemed rather flat, like warm stale champagne. She smiled wryly. At twenty-five she was beginning to have growing pains? God, how had that happened?

The cab skittered to the curb and she slid out. Hugging her shoulder bag tightly against her body, (something she did religiously since coming to New York), she looked up at the brownstone apartment building butted up against a row of look alikes in a neighborhood that was straddling the line between newly improved and sadly worn out.

She had answered the ad for a roommate almost a year ago. There was no way she could have afforded a place of her own then and, even now, with a good job at the ad agency, it would still be an impossible stretch. Especially the way she liked to spend money. Besides, she had the place to herself most of the time, when Amanda of the colorful ‘body art’ was either working her two jobs, or staying with her boyfriend.

Time to move on, she asked herself? She could go back home for a visit. Her mother would be getting ready for the summer solstice right about now. She was a Wiccan, not a witch, she often told her, though, in her opinion, the distinction was negligible. She smiled. Sage Farley Ravynne, witch or not, was a wonderful mother. The life they had all shared in the little adobe ranch house had always been a happy one.