Better Homes and Hauntings (19 page)

“Which it totally does.”

“Shut it, Dotty. I’m a rational person, a numbers guy,” Deacon said. “I believe in the things I can see and hear
and touch. It’s hard for me to admit that I’m scared of a feeling.”

“And you haven’t had any ‘feelings’ since you came back here?” Nina asked gently.

He cleared his throat and shook his head. “No.”

Meanwhile, Cindy had started her timeline, titling it “Perception” and marking the earliest known activity in the group, “Deacon (age ten)” with terms such as “Unexplained cold spots,” “Sensation of being squeezed/shaken,” and “Difficulty breathing.” She drew a line to her spot on the timeline, which was also marked “Sensation of being strangled, difficulty breathing.” She drew a separate timeline for “Visual” and noted Nina’s shadow-woman sightings and the vision she and Jake shared. When she turned around, the group was staring at her, all wide-eyed.

“I like order,” Cindy said, her tone defensive.

Dotty managed to wrestle the dry-erase marker from Cindy’s hands. “Well, Cindy’s compulsive tendencies aside, I think there are two components to the haunting.”

“Do we have to call it a haunting?” Deacon whined.

“Yes!” the others chorused.

Dotty scribbled “Manifestation” and “Curse,” in a crooked, loopy scrawl that made Cindy wince. “Hauntings work on a couple of different levels. All buildings absorb a certain amount of emotional energy expressed by the people within their walls. Some buildings—whether because of their location or because of traumatic events or because someone with strong psychic ability lived or lives there—absorb more energy than others.”

Cindy nodded. “The Stone Tape theory, right? It’s why hospitals and prisons are more likely to be haunted than other buildings.”

The others turned to look at her.

“Yes, the pretty girl can read. Moving on.” Dotty continued her lecture. “Sometimes a haunting can be residual or cyclical, where there’s not really a spirit present. But some event, whether it’s traumatic or happy, gets imprinted on the space and plays out over and over like a record. And other times, it’s an actual spirit, which is a more interactive, intelligent haunting and tends to scare people a little more. And then the most malevolent haunting is demonic. It has nothing to do with the history of the house or the people in it; some negative force just takes up space in the house like an unwanted renter.”

“The paranormal equivalent of a drummer sleeping on your couch.” Cindy nodded sagely.

“So you’re saying we have a demon squatter?” Deacon asked skeptically.

“No, I think we’re dealing with residual and spiritual hauntings. It sounds like Cindy walked into a memory pocket when she saw the vision of Catherine and Jack on the lawn. Those are residual, but everything else? Spiritual.”

“Do you think that if we resolve the issues, Catherine and her ghostly entourage will go away?”

“I don’t think Catherine is the ringleader,” Nina said quietly.

Jake’s brows rose. “Why do you say that?”

“Cindy, when you had that vision of Catherine and Jack, where were you?”

“Gerald’s room.”

“OK, so if you saw Catherine and Jack arguing like a couple of not-terribly-discreet teenagers, then perhaps Gerald saw them, too. It would certainly explain the heavy, angry footsteps on the third floor, near Catherine’s room. Who wouldn’t be angry when he realized his wife was sleeping with someone he was paying large amounts of money? That’s a double whammy. And with him being suspected of strangling his wife, the ‘difficulty breathing’ bit makes a lot of sense.”

“She makes a good point,” Jake said.

“If there are spirits in the house, I think Gerald is the one we have to worry about. Can we make him go away?”

“I don’t know. We could have a priest come out to the house and bless it.”

Deacon leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. “And then a news story runs on the wire under the headline ‘EyeDee CEO hosts exorcism at haunted mansion.’ No, thanks.”

Cindy frowned. “OK, in movies and books, you find out what’s bothering the ghost, and sometimes that ends it. But I don’t know whether that’s for literary license.”

“I suppose that Gerald’s problem is that he only got to strangle his wife once?” Jake asked. He cast a contrite look at Deacon. “Sorry, man.”

“Actually, that brings us to the other issue.” Dotty pointed at the word
curse
.

Cindy tried to commandeer the marker. “Let me just—”

Dotty smacked her hand away.

“Dotty, there’s no such thing as the Whitney curse,” Deacon told her, on autopilot.

“I’m asking a little bit much from you in terms of acceptance, huh?” Dotty nodded. “And by the way, there is a curse.”

Attempting to steer the conversation back on track, Nina interjected, “So, say for argument’s sake that at some point, during the last hundred years or so, someone uttered some sort of incantation, did some sort of blood-letting ritual, or just looked really hard at a picture of Ralph Fiennes, while thinking, ‘I do not like the Whitneys very much. I don’t wish them good things,’ what do we do to break the curse?”

“Ralph Fiennes?” Deacon frowned.

Nina scowled. “He’s shifty.”

Dotty ignored them. “Usually, it involves bringing some hidden truth to light.”

“Maybe Catherine’s spirit wants us to prove without a doubt that Gerald killed her?” Cindy suggested.

“It doesn’t seem to make much sense that Catherine cursed her own children and descendants,” Jake said.

Dotty said, “They bore the name of the man who strangled her. It wouldn’t be too far off to think she had a little anger bottled up when she died. That kind of energy carries.”

“OK, well, how do we prove a one-hundred-year-old crime without a doubt?” Jake asked.

Deacon cried, “This is ridiculous. We’re not detectives!”

“No, but we’re intelligent people who have access to the only evidence left. This house. The grounds. Who knows what’s hidden up in the attic?” Cindy said.
“We should be on the lookout for ledgers, day planners, household books, anything Catherine or Gerald might have doodled on. Dotty, you’ve been looking at Catherine’s diaries. Have you read anything interesting so far?”

Dotty dashed back to her room, retrieving a few of the journals and the notebook she used for notations. Nina cleared the table, and Deacon attempted to help her, hoping to avoid this ghost discussion by hiding in the kitchen, but Dotty dragged both of them back for her presentation. She had several journals spread out on the long table. She explained that Catherine was from Albany originally. But her family moved to New York when she was a teenager to take advantage of the thriving economy. Gerald and Catherine met at a ball, one of the first of her debutante season, in an age where a very young girl marrying a much older, established businessman was considered a coup, rather than sly tabloid fodder.

“The first journal starts on the day of her wedding in 1894. She doesn’t write like someone who’s terrified of her future husband,” Dotty said. “She sounds happy, hopeful, excited about her future, just how you’d hope your daughter would write on her wedding day.”

Dotty pulled out a tintype portrait of Gerald and Catherine. Catherine had a sweet, open face, with wide, light eyes and elegantly twisted blond hair. Her delicate little hand rested on Gerald’s arm as she smiled at the camera. Gerald looked so stern, Nina thought. Stern, no-nonsense, and cold. Handsome in a dignified, unmussed way but not exactly a guy you could see spooning someone on a couch under a comfy blanket.

Jake suggested, “Maybe because it was early days yet?”

“Could be.” Dotty shrugged.

“How does she feel about Gerald?” Nina asked. She stared at the wedding portrait. Something about the photo was . . . well, not bothering her but bringing back that niggling,
I should remember this
sensation in her brain.

“Fond,” Dotty said. “Not quite in love, but she talks about him being handsome and distinguished, funny and affectionate when they’re in private. Not exactly an ogre. Our gal Catherine was a prolific writer. Some of her journals only cover a few months. It’s why there are so many of them. I’m having a little bit of trouble putting them in order, because a few seem to be missing. But I did find an interesting entry dated about two years before the house was completed.” She read aloud:

Gerald has announced that we will be building on an isolated island off the shore of Rhode Island proper. A new start, he called it. Anyone could build a mansion in Newport, he says, but a home on its own island is an estate, a country unto its own. I asked him if I was going to have to address him as Mr. President. Oddly, he didn’t laugh.

I worry, diary, about living in this strange, isolated spit of land in the middle of nowhere’s oceanic twin. What if I get angry with Gerald and cannot walk away from our argument because I am trapped on all sides by water? What if I just want a cup of tea with a friend? My entire sphere will be cut down to the children and the servants. And Gerald has made it quite clear how he feels about me making friends with
them
. How often
will I be allowed to leave? To have visitors? Although I am sure that Gerald doesn’t intend it this way, this change of household feels a bit like a punishment.

As an added irritant, Gerald is insisting on hiring a local builder for the house, while other first-circle families have hired the best in French and English architectural minds. I believe he wants to endear himself to our more “pastoral” neighbors, as we will be living in this location year-round and will need to maintain good relationships with them—even if we are separated from them by miles of ocean. However, he doesn’t seem to understand that it makes him appear miserly to his peers, using an unknown, unproven name when our contemporaries have selected the masters of the field. He will be judged, whether he believes that is important or not, and he will be treated differently by the people with whom he would like to make connections. Oh, la—what a snob I am turning out to be! To think I used to be one of those more “pastoral” folks myself.
Oh, bother, what’s done is done. I hope that the builder’s ideas will be so unique that his origins will be forgotten.

Nina glanced down at Catherine’s hand, resting against Gerald’s arm. And she realized what was bothering her. The ring. Catherine’s wedding set. It was a large diamond ring set with sapphires. Just the like the ring she saw in her recurring bed-making dream. The woman in the dream was definitely Catherine Whitney.

“How soon after did they hire Jack Donovan?” Jake asked.

“A few weeks, but there was an added wrinkle for Catherine,” Dotty said, flipping through the journal until she found the appropriate entry:

This morning marked our first meeting with the builder Gerald has hired for the Crane’s Nest. Imagine my surprise when Gerald elected to hire Jack Donovan, the very same boy who used to sit on my front porch and steal kisses in between sips of lemonade. I hadn’t realized that Jack had trained as a builder; we lost track of each other when he went off to university and my family moved away. I must confess, he is little altered since our brief “romance” when we were barely more than children. There is no great tale of loss here, diary. This morning, I told him that he was lucky that I hold no resentment for how easily he moved on and established himself after “breaking my heart.” He merely laughed, while Gerald looked on in irritated confusion. He was—and is—a perfectly nice young man. He has the same dark good looks and easy smiles. Still, I cannot help but wonder how my life would be different had I waited for Jack—if my parents hadn’t moved me to New York to put me in a more “suitable arrangement.”

Would I have married Jack? Would I have been happy as his wife? Would I have been able to stand hearing about the fine houses he was building for other folks while we lived in a single room in some unremarkable section of town? Would I have continued loving him in that stubbornly romantic way only girls of seventeen master? Or would I eventually resent the loss of my “destiny” as the young heiress to Newport’s upper circles?

So yes, Jack’s presence has left me unsettled to the extreme.

Cindy blew out a low whistle. “So I guess the theory about Catherine’s inappropriate relationship with the architect wasn’t too far off the mark.”

Nina thought of the way the dream man’s hands fit over her body—
Catherine’s
body—and blushed. She wanted to fan her hot cheeks but resisted the urge. She didn’t want Dotty or Cindy to notice.

“Maybe, but that’s one of the last entries of the diary, and I haven’t found the next volume yet,” Dotty said.

“Is it weird for us to be talking about this?” Cindy asked. “I don’t want to offend you two.”

“It’s not as if I ever met them,” Dotty said with a shrug. “And I’m just as interested in the story as you are. I’ve always been sort of morbidly interested in my ancestors. I mean, most people think of their great-great-grandparents as being these cute, cuddly, old folks, but mine were a tragic horror story. I have to wonder what drove Gerald to kill her. I mean, he looks so cold. Who would have thought he had it in him to strangle the mother of his children? Love, jealousy, anger, those are all very powerful, dangerous emotions. Imagine he had to be pretty desperate to do something like that. It doesn’t justify it, but . . . Gerald never came across as a cruel man. Just cold. It’s strange. I know she’s not doing the right thing, or at least, it seems like she won’t eventually, but I can’t help but feel a little bit sorry for her. She’s a young wife, and her occasionally emotionally unavailable husband’s dragging her out to the middle of nowhere to build a house with her ex-boyfriend?
That’s got to be a bit of an ethical muddle. Deacon?”

Deacon nodded. “I thought I understood, but hearing it in her own words humanizes her. When you’re finished with the diaries, would you mind if I read them?”

Dotty beamed at him. “Of course! In the meantime, we document everything. We journal all of the experiences, weird dreams, visions, eerie feelings, noises.” She reached into her giant shoulder bag and pulled out blank steno pads, tossing one to each in the circle.