Authors: Don Sloan
He took one last look, but there were no lights on upstairs or anywhere else that he could see―just the firelight that still flickered on the thick bevels of the front door glass.
He turned his back on the house and started walking toward his own, listening to the seagulls’ shrill calls and the constant, ceaseless booming of the surf along the shore.
Sarah was halfway through her second glass of wine, and frying a couple of pork chops in a frying pan when it dawned on her that she had never asked Nathan his name.
“Idiot,” she whispered to herself. “Would you like some wine, what’s your-name?” She started crying, and banged the frying pan hard against the electric burner of the stove. Boy, you sure know how to run them off in a hurry, she thought, and finally just broke down completely, sobbing into a dish towel and stabbing now and then at the chops with a fork to keep them from burning.
Some frozen vegetables were melting into a watery heap in a saucepan on the back burner, and the French bread she had bought earlier at the market in town was browning in the oven. OK, Sarah, she thought―you knew this wouldn’t be easy. Pull yourself back together and at least make a meal for yourself without screwing that up, too.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something move.
She turned quickly but by the time she had wiped the tears from her eyes and could see clearly, there was nothing there. Just the rest of the kitchen, as it had been when she arrived, only warmer now with the furnace on and going full blast.
“Hello?” she said nervously. “Are you back to do my taxes?” she asked the darkness in the hallway. “Well, that’s fine with me; I can also get your name,” she said and, starting with the hall, she turned on every light downstairs―the hallway, the living room, the dining room with its still-sheet-covered table and chairs, the parlor, where the blaze in the fireplace had died to embers―all the lights downstairs now blazed and lit the house brightly, chasing shadows up the stairs to the second floor.
She thought for a minute of going up and turning on all those lights, too, and then decided that if she took the time to do that, her dinner would burn for sure. So, returning to the kitchen, she topped off her glass of wine and settled in for a good meal.
“This will fix me up,” she decided and began putting out dishes on the large farmhands table.
well, my dear, what do you think happened next?
I’m sure I don’t know
anything can happen in a heartbeat and does so often
in a lifeboat out at sea, where the bodies are lashed in and drifting up one wave and down another, rubbing together and creating
tea leaves―she read tea leaves for their fortune and it didn’t look as though
the Hascombs had ever heard of such a thing as a gold rush
well, rush or not it was all too clear what would happen next
door to door it moved and silently took the babies
no!
yes, because they are the simplest to get at and make the smallest amount of fuss over every
thing it touched turned a crimson color. And it was delighted.
After dinner, Sarah climbed the staircase and, stepping onto the first landing, looked back over her shoulder. The feeling that she was not alone in the house had taken hold and she could not easily shake it.
The interior décor was a mixture of modern and period design. She looked back down the wide staircase: broad oak planking from edge to edge, wearing a thin and threadbare burgundy carpet. The walls were covered in a florid paper of indeterminate pattern meant to resemble climbing roses; but now they were rendered simply as broad red splotches over a hunter green background. It seemed to Sarah that the pattern itself moved and scuttled whenever she looked away from it, so that thick clutches of flowers might appear within arm’s length of where she stood while none covered the vines ten feet away. The lights on the landing shone out brightly from wall sconces meant to resemble large clamshells.
“I wonder who furnished this place,” Sarah said out loud. “It’s a cross between Martha Stewart and Martha Washington. Remind me to bring a decorator from this century with me next time I come.”
She shivered, wishing now she had brought anyone with her. She was also regretting her rash vow to make this visit some kind of character test.
She rolled her large, black suitcase into the first bedroom on her right, bumping the wheels off the carpet and onto the bare planking that, in sunlight, was charming and warm. Now the room seemed stark and uninviting, unwilling to give up the cold that seeped from its surface. The room itself was cheery enough, however, and had always been a favorite of Sarah’s in past visits.
She clicked the overhead light switch and rolled the suitcase onto an oval rug next to the iron four-poster bed. With a quick motion, she yanked off the white sheet that covered the rich down comforter and feather pillows. This room was done up in yellows, her favorite color, with pale white accent paint on the wainscoting and windowsills. A fat, old-fashioned chair with ottoman sat in a corner next to an elaborately carved wardrobe and, across the room, an antique washstand, complete with pitcher and basin, was centered on the wall.
She hoisted the bag onto the mattress and began unpacking. The pork chops had done a good job of filling her with counteracting ballast for the half-bottle of wine she had consumed, and she now only had a pleasant buzzing sensation that was making her very sleepy.
Without much thought to organization, she shoved clothes, underwear, socks and other belongings into various drawers built into the wardrobe and then hung up a few bulky sweaters.
The house was now warm enough for her to walk around without the jacket and she had left it downstairs in the kitchen. The blue cable knit sweater she wore over her jeans and Timberland boots would, with slight variation, be her favored attire for this visit. She never had been much of a clothes horse (whatever that means, she thought) and always chose comfort over style when possible.
With her unpacking complete, she picked up the few toiletries she had brought, along with a thick cotton nightshirt and lilac velour robe, and stepped into the cold hallway to visit the single bathroom on this floor.
Wind was whistling through the seams of the window at the end of the hallway and Sarah shivered again, drawing a thin arm across her well-formed breasts. The hallway light was on and stark shadows were drawn on the floor and walls by the heavy furniture that lined the hallway. She dashed quickly into the bathroom and threw the door shut behind her, fumbling for the light switch. She clicked it on and yellow light flooded the small room. Her heart was racing, though she could not say why.
“I really am going to have to cut back on that wine,” she said, and started getting ready for bed.
The Monday morning sun rose bright and salmon-pink over the Atlantic Ocean, as big as a vintage dinner plate made from Depression glass.
Nathan saw it rising from his bedroom window on the second floor of the big house and decided to walk into town for breakfast. He got out of bed and glanced at the large windup clock that sat on the nightstand. The ancient timepiece, which had ticked like a metronome all night, showed 7:05 a.m., a little past the time he usually got up for work.
Well, he thought, I am on vacation. Still, he worried that the days might slip away a second at a time if he didn’t plan them out, and this he vowed to do over breakfast.
After a quick shower and shave, Nathan dressed and stepped out the front door. He found that the wind had disappeared during the night, leaving a clear and cold morning that made his heart ache at its rare beauty. He looked up and down the porch and decided that after breakfast he would bring around a couple of Adirondack chairs from the storage shed in back. That way he could read on the front porch and spend at least part of his vacation outdoors.
This idea pleased him very much and he zipped up his jacket against the morning chill before stepping onto the short front walk that led to the gate in the picket fence.
Nathan was the new owner of this grand dame of a house; he had inherited it from his father’s sister, whom he knew only as Aunt Millie. She had never married, and had herself inherited the house from Nathan’s uncle many years earlier. That side of Nathan’s family had money―old money, it was sometimes called (usually by people who didn’t have any themselves). But the house had been in the family for more than a century, passing from one generation to the next, along with its family traditions and upkeep, which was not insignificant considering its advanced age.
The house was built, along with many of its neighbors, after the Civil War, back in the days when servants had their own quarters up on the top floor of the house and life was considered to be more civilized.
Over the intervening years modernizations had taken place, but always with an eye toward preservation of the house’s exterior and, to a remarkable degree, of the interior. Even some of the furniture inside dated back to the 1880s, including a remarkable baby grand piano in the parlor. Nathan had learned to play on this piano, taught patiently by his Aunt Millie, and he could still sit for hours playing endless riffs and chord changes that started out in the key of C but usually wound up two or three changes up or down.
He played as the mood took him―usually pensive melodies that mirrored his steady but reflective personality. Never one to draw attention to himself, Nathan had been the antithesis of his fast-moving father and mother, who had lived life to its fullest, growing up in the 60s and spending much of their youth shocking the much more staid members of the family who gathered at this wonderful mansion on holidays and during the summers.
These were special times for Nathan, who remembered his parents fondly. They had only the two children, and lavished love and affection on Nathan (as the “baby”), not holding back in the least and letting him share in their great zest for living. Perhaps it was this very penchant for experientialism that caused their deaths, while Nathan was at college one year. His parents had died while on a cruise in the Bahamas―victims of an unfortunate mishap when the small boat being used to ferry passengers back and forth to a private island had capsized in rough seas.
Neither of his parents were particularly good swimmers and they had disappeared quickly beneath the waves, since no one in the launch was wearing a life vest. Nathan had received the news while at Berkeley, during the fall semester of his senior year, and the entire experience had been surreal: the half-hearted search for survivors conducted by Bahamian authorities, the memorial service in Philadelphia, where his parents had lived in a brownstone not far from the one he now owned. And, finally, the deep sense of loss he had carried for all these years, wishing he could share mornings like this with his father and mother, yet knowing it would never be.
The dull ache of loss never quite went away, but Nathan was not the type of person to dwell on such matters. And so he thrust the feelings deep into some inner pocket of his soul, to be taken out, he supposed, and dealt with at some future time.
The eastern sky was still dressed in shades of ruby and amethyst behind a quickly rising sun as Nathan turned the corner off Beach Avenue onto Howard Street. “Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. A change must be on the way,” Nathan said to himself as he headed into the heart of the small town. Cape May had a rich history and it was evident in just about every corner.
Originally explored by Cornelius Mey in 1621 for the Dutch West India Company, the area still bore his name. It grew slowly into a prosperous whaling and farming community and then, as southern gamblers seeking to escape the summer heat came to the area in the early 1800s, it became an internationally known resort. Still later, society up and down the Eastern seaboard made it the “Playground of the Presidents.” A disastrous fire destroyed the center of the resort and many of the hotels in 1878, but it was quickly rebuilt, establishing the treasury of Victorian architecture.
Nathan walked more quickly now as hunger pangs awakened within him, and he reached the Chalfonte Hotel at the corner of Sewell Avenue and Howard Street. Built in 1876 by Col. Henry Sawyer, the fine old hostelry still served one of the most magnificent family-style breakfasts in the area. Sawyer, a prisoner of the Confederacy during the Civil War, achieved greater historical note when, during the war, he was exchanged for Col. R.E. Lee, Jr., son of the Confederate leader.
Nathan ordered hot black coffee, a full ham and egg breakfast with a side order of fluffy biscuits, and pulled out a small notebook to begin planning his day.
Sarah was still sleeping while Nathan was having breakfast. Her night had not been a pleasant one, with bizarre dreams she did not understand. In the dreams, she flew about the house as though transported by spirits, witnessing first one horrific scene and then another.
it wasn’t the alcohol that made him do it, you know
well, then, what was it, my dear?
it was the terrible jealousy that had turned him into
a floating slaughterhouse, full of slaves still pinioned by their legs to their berths but lying now in staggered heaps that buzzed with bluebottle flies and
couldn’t be the same wife he married in 1858, just before the War. This one had no eyes because he had gouged them out before
turning to the youngest daughter, crying in a corner of the room as she blindly stumbled about the beautiful morning-drenched kitchen, innocent as a mother’s love but now dangerous as an early autumn hurricane, riding in on
the blood-covered backs of rats, running for cover as he drew a practiced bead on each one and fired the single-shot musket until it
fell smoking from his own dead hands, the last shot traveling on a straight line from the roof of his mouth and out the back of his head.
“No!” shouted Sarah as she sat straight up in bed, drenched through her cotton nightshirt in cold sweat. “No! No more!” she cried aloud. Her eyes flew open and she was astonished to see bright morning sunlight flooding the room. But the voices, the voices still echoed in her mind. Already they were fading, but they left a pounding―a throbbing sensation that could not be attributed completely to the wine from the night before.
“Oh, man,” she said finally. “Sarah, when you decide to get drunk and have a nightmare, that is one area in which you excel. Man!” she said again. “Your imagination puts Stephen King in the shade.” And suddenly Sarah laughed, for she could not stand the writings of King or any other horror novelist. When she read at all (which was seldom) she preferred magazines, and these she thumbed absently from back to front, noting chiefly the photos and the captions under them.
Standing in the full, cheery sunlight that streamed in the front window, she yawned and scratched, and made a mental note to take a long nap that afternoon. And with that thought firmly in place, she moved off toward the bathroom down the hall.
Sarah had grown up in a South Philadelphia neighborhood on South 12th Street. It was a middle-class collection of brick-faced, three-story houses, each one a carbon copy of the next, with cosmetic differences apparent mostly to the owners. Her father and mother had also lived there, he a pharmaceutical sales manager and she a tireless volunteer worker for several area non-profits. Sarah had gone to elementary, middle and high school within walking distance of each other―a long walk, to be sure, but walk she did, whenever the weather permitted. Other times she took the subway or the bus through the crowded streets, or her father or mother had dropped her off. But she had grown up totally middle class and as ordinary as Wonder bread.
It had been a happy time for Sarah and she had been to this house at the shore many times during her childhood and teen years. When she went away to college, she had not gone far―only to a university on the edge of the great city, and majored in mathematics, a subject in which she had excelled in high school. At one time she had thought of becoming a teacher and emulating one of her favorite teachers, Mrs. Brookstone. But she had found the education and child psychology courses tedious and had switched early in her junior year to a straight business degree track.
In college, she had been unremarkable except for her GPA, which startled even herself. She did not try that hard to make good grades, but the routine of study and note-taking had always been second nature to her, and she excelled without even trying. Thus, when NYU’s school of business had come recruiting with a full ride graduate scholarship, she happily packed up and moved to New York.
Two years later, with two diplomas in hand, the day after her open-air graduation ceremony in Washington Square, she went job-hunting back in Philadelphia and landed at Chase with an entry level job in one of the many cubicle warrens reserved for MBAs fresh from the nation’s degree factories. And there she worked many ten- and twelve-hour days, proving her worth in several banking areas before finally landing a key staff position in the huge mortgage banking division of the company.
Living on South Christopher Columbus Boulevard near the Delaware River, in a small corner flat with two other women from Chase, Sarah had settled into a comfortable routine, working and occasionally dating, all through her early and mid-twenties, never getting particularly serious about anyone until Rob came to work one day. A chance meeting in the break room blossomed into a romance―the first serious involvement for Sarah―and when it ended recently, she felt as though she had been cast adrift.
Her friends did their best to console her, but in the end she decided that the best thing to do would be to get away and lick her wounds alone, and try to re-center her life with new priorities and goals. It was a formula that had worked well for her in the past and would undoubtedly do so again, once the grieving was over and she was able to start fresh again.
That was the primary reason she had come to Cape May on a mission―to rediscover herself in terms that she knew were not going to be dependent on anyone but herself. If nothing else, experience had taught her that when all else fails and everyone is busy leading their own tangled lives, it’s solely up to you to jump-start your recovery and choose life again over all other alternatives.
“Nazis Invade France!” screamed the headline of the Cape May newspaper Nathan picked up in the attic. The Jesus-Returns typeface took up half the front page, and was reserved only for the most momentous of news.
“Well, I guess that pretty well qualifies,” Nathan said, and, putting the brown, brittle edition to one side, he picked up another, this one an issue dated around the same year―1939―but with local headlines at the top: “Dismembered Corpse Puzzles Investigators. Unsolved String of Homicides Continues.”
These were the stories that Nathan had heard about as a child, but never in great detail. One of the rites of passage for young cousins in his family had been the endurance of the re-telling of these stories around bonfires on the beach. It was the unhappy chronicle of insanity and evil deeds supposedly played out in the houses along this stretch of Beach Avenue that each new cousin, brought on family holiday to the shore, was forced to hear as night crept close around their shoulders and the sea waves crashed just beyond the firelight.
Nathan now read with interest the news stories from that time period, when a serial killer had allegedly ranged up and down the sleepy sea town, perpetrating the most terrible crimes possible and, in the end, escaping justice by eluding police. The murders, seemingly random, had never been solved, although suspicion had centered on migrant workers moving through the area on their way to work the apple orchards of the Northeast.
This theory, which was the best that could be put forth by local authorities, never fully materialized and the series of incidents faded slowly from local gossip and speculation into that great netherworld where all unwelcome stories finally go. Daily life, which had moved forward as America was plunged into World War II, forced the incidents into recent memory, then distant memory and, finally, into the legendary stuff of which all great ghost stories are made―incidents with the Lizzie Borden combination of horror and true crime, but comfortably either far-off or in a distant time and therefore unbelievable except by firelight.
Nathan had decided after breakfast that morning to begin poking around in the attic to make sure there were no leaks hiding in the roof of his new property. And up among the broad timbers that formed the great skeleton of the house he had found no leaks—but he had discovered this trunk full of newspapers shoved under a pile of assorted wooden odds and ends.