Scary Stuff Page 9

  She forgot that she had cautioned her mother not to barge into a strange house—indeed, she forgot she was in a strange house. Jane, overcome with curiosity and longing to authenticate this treasure trove, made a beeline for a paper black cat with a honeycomb body. She reached for the fragile cat just as the door from the kitchen swung open.

  A woman stood still in the doorway, her head cocked as if she were listening as well as looking into the front of the house. The inside of the house was as sheltered by the oaks as the outside, and although there was a kitchen light on behind the figure, Jane stood in the dimness of the dining room, made darker by the heavy wood trim and velvet-curtained windows. At first Jane wasn’t sure the woman saw her. She wore old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses with the lenses tinted a smoky gray and seemed to be looking beyond Jane into the parlor. She was wearing a long dark skirt and a long black shawl-collared cardigan, belted around the waist. She was thin and, Jane could see, even in this low light, old. In fact, Jane wasn’t sure she had ever seen an older-looking human being. Her hair hung to her waist, gray and knotted, and her hands were as gnarled as the roots of those oaks. Those hands, though, appeared strong. One held open the door and the other held a knife. It was a large, gleaming silver knife, with an evil serrated blade, pointed directly at Jane.

  Jane swallowed hard and hoped that her voice would not fail. In scary dreams, she always opened and closed her mouth like a fish when confronted with evil and nothing came out. This was real, and she prayed for sound.

  “The door was open, we’re sorry if we scared you,” Jane said, sounding hoarse, but audible, thinking even as she said it how weird it was to be apologizing in this manner, for possibly scaring the scariest-looking woman she had ever seen . . . who just happened to be holding a knife.

  The woman continued to look past her, squinting behind the wire-framed glasses with tinted lenses. Loudly, too loudly for the room, she shouted, “Cousin Nellie? Is that you, Cousin Nellie?”

  Jane turned to look at her mother standing a few feet behind her.

  Nellie nodded and shouted back, “Yes, it’s me.” Nellie then looked at Jane.

  “Secret’s out,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

  8

  “We were born on Halloween,” said Cousin Ada.

  “That’s no reason to fill up your house with this—” said Nellie, stopping when Jane kicked her under the table.

  Ada, the old woman, whose knife-wielding appearance startled, to say the least, was marginally less frightening sitting across from Jane, an enormous pumpkin, with its seeds scooped out, in front of her. Jane and Nellie had interrupted her in the act of what Ada referred to as “the yearly carving.”

  “When we were kids, Ma and Pa carved lots of pumpkins and we put them all over the yard, lit up, and people drove from all over to see. Got to be a tradition that people in town helped and brought over their own jack-o’-lanterns and we’d have maybe hundred, two hundred maybe, all over. We got to be the haunted house. Ma made caramel apples and popcorn balls and spooky punch that had smoke coming out of the bowl and we’d have us a birthday party like no other kid in the world,” said Ada, stabbing the blade into the pumpkin’s middle. “You remember, don’t you, Nellie?”

  “Nope,” said Nellie.

  Jane wasn’t sure if her mother was being difficult or truly didn’t remember her cousin’s birthday parties. Since Jane had never heard of Cousin Ada before, Jane wasn’t sure how to characterize Nellie’s behavior. Garden-variety rude? Daily dysfunctional? Sociopathic?

  “And then you and your sister came one summer and we played in the cornfield and I got lost for so long? And Ma shook me and told me it was dangerous to go playing in the tall corn like that?”

  “Nope,” said Nellie.

  Nellie’s reluctance to hop aboard the reminiscing train didn’t stop Ada. She kept naming events in which she was sure Nellie had participated.

  “Stop kicking me under the table,” said Nellie to Jane. “She can’t hear me. She’s deaf as a post. I don’t think she can see very good, either.”

  That was not a comforting thought since she was hacking away at the pumpkin as she talked. Jane pulled her chair a little farther away.

  “She recognized you, Cousin Nellie,” said Jane in a whisper. “I thought you told me you didn’t have any family. You always told Michael and me that we didn’t have cousins.”

  “You don’t. Except for her, maybe,” said Nellie. “I think.”

  “You think what? That she’s a cousin or that there aren’t any more?”

  “And you brought me your girl?” said Ada, turning toward Jane. “She’s pretty, Nellie. Like you as a girl.”

  “Everyone says I look like my father,” said Jane. “Do you live here alone, Ada?”

  “Her hair’s the color you had, Nellie, when you were a girl.”

  “May I look around at your beautiful house?” Jane asked, almost shouting and positioning herself directly in front of Ada.

  “Look around, sure,” said Ada, waving the knife around her head and pointing toward the dining room. “The kids always want to see the haunted house, don’t they, Nellie?”

  Jane involuntarily ducked as the old woman swung the blade, then slipped out the kitchen door. Nellie could take care of herself, catching up with “Cousin Ada.” Jane could hear Nellie describing Jane as a junk dealer who was working out at Swanette Flanders’s farm, clearing out the house for a sale. Nellie was transparent, not so subtly advising Ada that she could use a little “clean-out sale” in this house.

  While Nellie lamented the clutter at Swanette’s, Jane was free to check the house for “Jim,” the man Jane suspected of being the Internet “Honest Joe.” The man at Edna’s Cafe had not hesitated when looking at Michael’s face—he said it was Jim Speller and Jim lived in this house. Was he Ada’s son? Did Ada have a husband, a family tucked away behind the cobwebs?

  Jane walked back to the entry hall through the dining room and front parlor. As in many old homes, that small front parlor was just a miniature of the main event on the other side of the house. A “visitor’s parlor,” Jane had heard it called. On the other side of the house was a large double room with fireplace and mantel, crowded with stuffed upholstered chairs, small chests and tables, every surface displaying some homage to Halloween.

  This house was almost as crowded as Swanette’s farm house, but the quality of the clutter was different. What was it? This house was dark, but not because the windows were streaked with grime, blocked out with stacks of unread papers. This house was dark by design. Heavy velvet drapes hung at almost every window, and although there were lamps, when Jane switched one on, only a small pool of light spilled out. Jane switched it off and peeked at the bulb under the shade. Twenty watts. Not enough light for even one corner of the room. The furniture was old—but Jane couldn’t pinpoint the period from which it came. It wasn’t ornate Victorian, nor was it simple Arts and Crafts. Handmade? Jane would have to check for tool marks, but there wasn’t enough light in here now. Square and bulky, the chairs and two sofas were upholstered in still sturdy fabric. Heavy wool afghans clung to the back of each piece like matching sweaters. Jane imagined Ada and friends, wrapped and lashed into their chairs like hand-knit mummies.

  There was a small room in back of the parlor. Jane stepped into it, admiring the tall oak bookcases, the broad desk and chair. It was a lovely office, undecorated. No black cats, no springy skeletons hanging from the ceiling. A desk lamp was switched on, its green glass shade glowing, illuminating a small neat pile of papers on the desk. Letters removed and unfolded, but still paper-clipped to the envelopes in which they’d arrived. Jane leaned over to read the second paragraph, the only one visible since the salutation and the first paragraph were covered by the envelope flap.

  . . . although you specified no returns in your post and I realize I have to live with the poor deal I made, I just want you to know that I have reported you to the auction site and given your information to an
auction watchdog blogging site and will do everything I can to make sure that no one is ever cheated like I was. How do you sleep nights, Honest Joe? Passing off cheap glass trinkets, plastic junk . . . machine-made quilts as hand-stitched? You have cured me of online shopping. Like my father used to say, when a deal is too good to be true, it is! My husband is ready to—

  “Trick or treat?”

  Jane hadn’t heard Ada come in behind her.

  “I was looking for—”

  “Candy?”

  “Paper and a pen, actually, I need to jot down a note . . .” said Jane, relieved that she hadn’t actually picked up the letter. Detective Oh always cautioned her to use her eyes and ears in place of her hands whenever possible. No one gets caught looking at the bag, Mrs. Wheel, one gets caught holding the bag. If Ada’s eyes were as bad as they seemed, Jane would appear to have been leaning over the desk, scanning it for a simple piece of paper. And after all, Ada had encouraged her to look around, hadn’t she?

  Jane turned toward the voice, her newly minted, confident I-am-Jane-Wheel-PPI smile in place, but instead of Ada, she faced a much younger woman who appeared to see perfectly well what Jane had been doing.

  “I’m afraid you won’t find anything too practical here. No scratch pads and such. It’s more of a display area,” she said, gesturing toward the books in the floor-to-ceiling cases. “No one’s read those books in years, yet they treasure each and every one, keep track of them, dust them every week. Look at the inkwells and those silver things. Those were for stamping in wax to seal envelopes. You ever see such things outside a museum? They like to keep things the way they were, everything in the house the way it was when they—”

  The doorbell chimed, a ponderous two-note bell.

  “They’re starting early, those kids. It’s a week before Halloween. Ada’s lucky she doesn’t hear them most of the time. Kids come from all over to ring that bell and run away. I mostly just ignore it.”

  “But what if someone—”

  “No one visits Ada.”

  “My mother and I are here. Ada is my mother’s cousin and I’m Jane—” Jane stuck out her hand, but the other woman stepped back and cut her off.

  “No. Ada’s got no family.”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Are you her neighbor, or a friend?”

  “I check on her. I’m a . . . I work for a few people in the area. I been stopping in to check on Ada since . . . for about a year, I guess. She never mentioned family. I haven’t got one contact phone number for her.”

  “Well, here we are,” said Jane, surprised at how suddenly proprietary she felt about Cousin Ada, whose existence had come as a total shock twenty minutes earlier.

  “I got to go now. You’ll find what you’re looking for in the kitchen.”

  “What?” asked Jane. What had she said she was looking for?

  “Scratch paper. Junk drawer’s in the kitchen.”

  Jane heard the front door open and close.

  “Jane,” Nellie called. “Is that you at the door?”

  “I’m coming,” she called back. She violated the no-hands rule and turned over the envelope on the desk. It was addressed to “Honest Joe” at the same post office box number she had gotten from Mowbry. Ada seemed a little spooky all right, but certainly didn’t seem like anyone who was running any kind of bait-and-switch scam on the Internet. In fact, Jane saw no computer or likely spot where one might be. Like most old homes that hadn’t been renovated, Jane could count the electrical outlets she had seen on one hand. Where would someone plug in a computer? Or a printer or scanner . . . something that would enable a person to post photographs—phonied up or blurry or genuine—for an Internet auction? Jane couldn’t see even one grounded outlet in this den.

  Jane looked up at the oversized bookcase. A lovely dark oak library three-step ladder with a smooth turned handrail was at the other end of the case. The books were arranged, Jane thought, by the color of their leather bindings. At least that’s how it appeared in this light, almost as if the books on their shelves were a trompe l’oeil painting, with swipes of dark green, navy, and maroon with glints of gold writing on the spines against the dark wood background. Jane climbed the ladder, reached up and selected one of the books, compelled to touch it, feel its weight in her hand.

  “Sir Walter Scott,” she said out loud, breaking the spell that the library had momentarily cast. This collection of books, with the fine leather bindings and gold leaf, was probably quite valuable, thought Jane, replacing the book and reaching for the one next to it. She would ask Tim to do some research.

  Jane almost lost her balance on the ladder when she grasped the next book and its spine collapsed between her two fingers. For a moment, Jane was afraid the binding had been turned to dust by mites and she would find that these beautiful books were crumbling into powder one by one. What she removed from the shelf, however, was not a book. It was a piece of heavy brown kraft paper, with a swipe of maroon paint on it. The sheet was cut to the size of the books, then loosely folded and stuck between two intact books, to fill in the space where a volume was missing on the shelf. A quick brush with her hand turned up three phantom jackets in the area she could reach from her perch on the ladder. Inside the makeshift book “jackets” were written in pencil BYRON, KEATS, and SHELLEY.

  Back on the ground, Jane looked up and thought she spotted five or six more missing books whose places were being saved with the ghost jackets. It might be Ada’s way of keeping the shelf looking perfect while she took volumes out to read, but that was unlikely. Ada’s bad eyes argued against the supposition that she might have a stack of books on her bedside table.

  “Jane!” Nellie called. “Where the hell did she get to?”

  Jane wondered if Nellie was at all worried that Jane had left her alone there to catch up with Cousin Ada while Jane returned to Swanette’s farm. Jane enjoyed that thought for a moment—Nellie, confused and worried, a bit frightened to be alone in this haunted house with a cousin who might be harmless enough, if a bit eccentric. The enjoyment was brief. Jane entered the kitchen to find both women brandishing knives. Nellie had one arm cradling a gigantic pumpkin, and with the other hand, she plunged a butcher knife into the vegetable, carving the mouth into a toothy frown.

  Ada was telling Nellie what she planned to give away for treats on Halloween—homemade taffy if Nellie would stay and help her “pull” the candy into shape—and Nellie was shaking her head violently.

  “I can’t stay here, Ada. Don needs me at home. And no kids are going to eat that homemade stuff. Just buy some candy bars or suckers or something. Parents nowadays take away all that homemade stuff.”

  “Mama always said the homemade’s better,” said Ada.

  “Maybe, but when your ma made it those were safer times. Now people are afraid of crazy people with razor blades and rat poison,” said Nellie, concentrating on sharpening one of the fangs on her pumpkin. She didn’t notice that Ada looked like she was about to cry, her wrinkled face crumpling like one of the crepe-paper decorations in the dining room.

  “Maybe you could make homemade candy for the children you know, who are neighbors, and give out store-bought candy on Halloween night,” said Jane.

  Ada looked up and, although she at first seemed hopeful, shook her head.

  “Won’t work,” she said.

  “Shouldn’t we get back to Swanette’s?” asked Nellie. “We got work to do, Ada, we got to go.”

  “You haven’t said hello to Brother,” said Ada.

  Jane was still standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Ada was in front of her, facing her. Nellie was behind Ada and began a vigorous arm-waving, head-shaking pantomime of refusal. NO she mouthed to Jane. NO.

  “I’d love to meet your brother,” said Jane. “What’s his name?”

  “Brother James is upstairs,” said Ada. “I’ll take you.”

  Nellie was practically jumping up and down, waving her butcher knife like a sword over her head.

 
“No, Ada,” said Nellie. “Just tell him we said hello. We got to go.”

  Ada started out the door where Jane let her pass in front of her and lead the way.

  “We can say hello in person, just to be polite,” said Jane. “Sounds like you don’t get out here very much.”

  Nellie waved Jane away from her, shaking her head, preparing reluctantly to follow along in the parade to Brother Jim.

  “Leave the knife, Mom,” said Jane.

  “You might be sorry,” said Nellie, plunging it into the top half of her pumpkin, either as a statement of contempt or the beginning of her jack-o’-lantern’s left eye.

  Jane followed Ada as she slowly climbed the stairway to the second floor. No electric lights were turned on and the spare October light offered no natural illumination. Jane could feel Nellie close on her heels.

  “For someone who didn’t want to come up to see her cousin, you’re tailgating pretty close,” Jane said, turning around to look at Nellie.

  Her mother looked straight ahead, keeping her eyes on Ada. Jane had spent a lifetime studying her mother, struggling to read her. Nellie was an untranslatable book. After so many years, she thought she had memorized all of the movements and expressions, even if she didn’t always know what they meant, but Nellie had a look on her face now that Jane had never seen before. Part fear, part grim determination and something else. To Jane’s surprise, Nellie began to chuckle. It was an evil little laugh, but Nellie did seem to be amused about something.

  “What is it?” Jane asked. “What’s funny?”

  “You. If you think my secret was a big surprise, wait until you see Ada’s,” said Nellie, now openly laughing.

  At the top of the stairs, Ada paused in front of a closed door, and knocked.

  “Brother, I’ve brought Cousin Nellie and her girl.”

  There was no answer.

  “We’re coming in now, Brother.”

  It took Jane’s eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness in the room. Expecting more of the large wooden furniture and heavy drapes, Jane was prepared for a gothic scene, complete with an invalid brother propped up in bed. She steeled herself to not recoil at even the most horrible disfigurement or strangeness, not wanting to give a startled reaction, partly out of concern for Ada’s feelings, but mostly to rob Nellie of any satisfaction.