Jenny Pox (The Paranormals, Book 1) (36 page)

“
Maybe I should go and pay,” her dad said.

“
Maybe you should,” Jenny agreed.

***

They spent Saturday straightening up the front yard.  Seth and Jenny raked pine straw from the woods, while her dad chopped down the high weeds and grass with a push mower.  They used the straw to turn the bare, oil-stained patches of yard into little islands.  They planted an azalea in each island, the rose bush by the front steps, the willows further out from the house. 

Later, when her dad was ready for his first date in more than twenty years, Jenny cut some flowers from her new rosebush so he could give them to June.  Jenny and Seth stood in the driveway and waved as he drove away in the freshly-washed truck.  He would be taking his new lady friend to The Catfish House in Apple Creek.  If she wanted to come back with him, he had coffee and a little chocolate cake waiting.

“They grow up so fast,” Jenny said, and Seth laughed. “And what are you and me doing for Valentine’s?” she asked.

“
You said you were cooking for me.”

“
Did I say a thing like that?” Jenny teased. “Okay.  But we have to go by Piggly Wiggly.  And you have to give me money.  And wait in the car while I shop.”

When they eventually reached Seth’s house, she banned him from the kitchen while she cooked.  He filled the first story of the house with Patsy Cline, which made her smile as she worked for the next two hours.

She brought him supper in the dining room: shrimp and grits, cornbread that was a little on the sweet side like Jenny liked (and her father hated, preferring his cornbread as rough and dry as Brillo pads), green beans she’d flavored with pieces of bacon and crushed red pepper, and a simple fruit salad with melons, cherries and coconut to sweeten up the Valentine’s meal.

Seth had set her place at the table with a vase of assorted roses, a box of Godiva chocolates, and an envelope printed with red and pink hearts.  Jenny’s own heart fluttered at the sight of all this.  It was really her first Valentine’s Day, she thought.

As they ate, they tried to guess how her dad’s date was going.  Jenny made sure he had Seth’s phone number and told him that if he didn’t call, she would take it as a good sign.

For dessert, they had strawberries dipped in a chocolate sauce Jenny had purchased at the store, but allowed Seth to believe she had made from scratch. 

She gave Seth his present, which had been first manufactured as a brown wool hunting jacket sometime in the 1960s.  She’d sewn some new black material at the collar, pockets and wrists, and remade all the buttons with vintage bottlecaps and old coins she’d picked from a box at the Five and Dime.

He paraded around in front of her, striking poses, flipping up the collar. “Nobody has a coat like this!”

“You like it?”

“
Love it, Jenny.” He kissed her, then put the envelope in her hands. “Now you go.”

Jenny carefully peeled the envelope open without ripping any part of it.  The card had a picture of two baby lambs nuzzling together.  The inside read I WOOLY WOOLY WUV EWE!  When she opened the card, a folded slice of blue-tinged paper tumbled out and landed on the table.

“What is that?”  Jenny asked.

“
It’s your present,” Seth said.  “Open it.”

Jenny eyed him while she unfolded the sheet.  It had a thick blue border veined with white, and a golden seal with a palmetto tree in the upper left corner.  The page’s header read:

State of South Carolina

Certificate of Title

Of A Vehicle

The paper identified Jenny Morton of Fallen Oak, SC as the legal owner of a 1975 Lincoln Continental.

“Seth?  What did you do?”

“
Nothing,” Seth said. “I just went by Merle Sanderson’s house and paid him for the car, so you could keep it.”

“
You’re kidding.”

“
He really didn’t charge that much.  He said he couldn’t decide between giving a Morton discount and charging a Barrett premium.”

Jenny laughed.  Then she held the page and stared at it for a while.  It was really her car now.  She and her dad wouldn’t have to share the truck.  She could go where she wanted, whenever she wanted, without asking anybody.  She felt her eyes sting.

“Seth, this is amazing.” She sat in his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck.  “God, I’m actually crying.  You bastard.  That was way better than my coat.”

“
Nah,” Seth said. “I didn’t make the car or anything.”

She kissed him.  She brushed his lower lip with her finger. “I want one more thing.  Can you guess?”
“I think I can.” Seth smiled.

“
I want to see the third floor.  The haunted part.”

“
That wasn’t my guess,” he said. 

“
Come on, Seth.  What’s up there?”

“
Just my great-grandfather’s room.” His smile shrunk away. “They had to move all of it from the second floor, because of the all the racket his ghost made after he died.”

“
Shut up,” Jenny said.

“
That’s what my uncle told me,” Seth said. “He never visits.  He says he still has nightmares about this house.”

“
Seth, that’s not cool,” Jenny said. “I have to sleep here.”

“
Yeah, so do I,” Seth said. “Which is why I stay away from great-grandpa’s stuff.  They say he’s territorial about it.”

“
Come on,” Jenny said. “You haven’t ever seen a ghost.  Have you?”

“
No.”

“
I knew it.”

“
I’ve heard his footsteps up there.  And his adding machine clacking.”

“
When?”

“
When I was a kid,” Seth said.

“
That could have been anything.” Jenny stood up and held out her hand. “Take me.”

Seth stood up, but he looked reluctant.  They had to go to his father’s office to find the third-floor keys, which were buried in the back of a file cabinet drawer.

They followed the curving front stairs to the second floor.  Seth unlocked a tall door by the head of the stairs.

“
Are you sure?” he asked her.

“
Stop being dramatic,” Jenny said.

The door opened onto a steep, very dusty staircase.  Seth flicked on the single electric bulb hanging from a string.

“Ladies first,” Seth said.

“
Still not funny,” Jenny told him. 

“
Scared?”

Jenny scowled at him.  She elbowed him aside and started up the stairs, sneezing as the dust puffed up under her tennis shoes. 

The steps widened and grew less steep, and began to curve along the wall.  Jenny realized it had once been part of one continuous staircase spiraling from the first floor up to the huge windows and skylights of the third floor, all of which were now filled in or boarded up.  It must have been a breathtaking entrance hall in its time.

The stairway flattened into a balcony that curved around to the third-floor gallery.  Looking over the balustrade would once have given a sweeping view of the entrance hall below.  Now the big, empty space in the center was sealed with unpainted boards.  Layers of spiderwebs filled the rafters, hiding the ceiling.

“Why did y’all cut it off like this?” Jenny asked.

“
My grandfather did it,” Seth whispered. “He was scared of his father’s ghost.  He moved my great-grandfather’s room and personal things up here.  Then he had workers demolish all the staircases to the third floor and seal them off.  He left this part as the only way up.  Then he moved his own bedroom down to the first floor, to get away.  The last years of his life, he lived in an old servant cottage out back to escape the main house.”

“
That’s crazy,” Jenny said.

“
He wasn’t crazy.” Seth said it quickly, automatically.  Then he added, “I mean, not if it’s haunted.”

“
And what if it isn’t?” Jenny worked her way down the hall, which was cluttered with old furniture, stacks of framed daguerreotypes, glass cases with their contents hidden by thick dust.  Dust and cobwebs covered everything.  The dry floorboards creaked under her feet.

“
Doesn’t it feel haunted to you?” Seth asked.

“
It feels like it’s full of spiders.”

“
Come on.  I’ll show you his room.”  He led her forward.  The hallway turned to the right for a while, then made a U-turn and sent them back to the left.  Seth pulled the chain on another hanging light bulb.  They faced two doors.

“
Uh, hold on.” Seth flipped through the ring of iron keys he’d taken from the office.  “I think we need…the left door.” He tried a few keys, until he was able to unlock the left door.  He walked in and pulled another hanging light.  Another passage snaked away to the left, this one cluttered with dusty shelves, where Jenny saw rows of arrow heads and broken pottery shards.

The twisting passage eventually ended in a T-intersection.  Seth turned to the right, but he didn’t look very sure about it.

“Do you know where we’re going?” she whispered.

“
I think so.  It’s been a few years.”

“
Why’s it so…”

“
Difficult?” Seth suggested. “My grandfather again.  He had the halls and rooms chopped up into a maze.  It’s to confuse my great-grandfather’s ghost.”

“
Your grandfather was really serious about this.”

“
Very serious,” Seth said.  The hallway ended at a wall of dust.  Seth wiped the dust with his fingers, revealing glass that reflected a murky shadow of his face. “A mirror.  We should have taken the door on the right.  Let’s go back.”

“
That’s the whole hallway?” Jenny asked.  It was only about twelve feet long.

“
There’s lots of dead ends with mirrors,” Seth said. “Grandpa thought mirrors could trap ghosts.”

Eventually, through narrow passageways, and with a few false starts, they found the double doors to his great-grandfather’s room.  Seth unlocked them.

“I haven’t been in here since I was a kid,” he said. “Are you ready?”

“
Seth, you’ve got me expecting a skeleton to jump out or something,” Jenny said. “What’s in there?”

“
Just a bedroom.” Seth pushed the doors open with a loud, rusty screech.

The interior was full of cobwebs, and very dark until Seth ignited a glass lamp on a tabletop.  There were no windows, not even boarded-over windows, so they must be somewhere towards the center of the third floor, away from any of the four exterior walls.  As she looked into the gloomy space, she realized one of the brick chimneys passed through this room, but the fireplace was plugged with cement.

Rugs that Jenny couldn’t see very well were scattered over the raw floorboards.  She saw a roll-top desk with a big mechanical adding machine, which had circular ivory buttons set into an ornate wooden box, with a big brass hand crank on one side.  Gold and silver coins were scattered in no particular order around it, as if to keep the ghost busy.

An antique sideboard held a porcelain washbowl with a pitcher, a straight razor resting on its leather strop, and several brown medicine bottles lined up in a neat row.  There was a wall of grainy photographs, including one that Seth thought was his great-grandfather shaking hands with Woodrow Wilson.  In that picture, Jonathan S. Barrett I was a thirtyish businessman, in a stiff felt homburg hat and overcoat, his jaw tight, his eyes like circles of cold iron.

The bed itself was spartan, a simple iron frame and a thin mattress covered with a quilt, not particularly large.  A servant bell with a rope was mounted in the wall by the head.

“
I don’t see any ghosts,” Jenny said.

“
Maybe he’s resting tonight.”

Jenny looked at Seth, and thought about him growing up underneath all of this, with the strange family stories about ghosts and obligations to the dead, passed on through his grandfather and his father.  The thing about money was that it really gave you a chance to express your insanity.

Jenny pushed Seth back onto the bed, and the rusty springs underneath groaned.

“
What are you doing?” he whispered.

Jenny crawled on top of him, and began kissing Seth’s lips.

“We can’t do this here,” he whispered, after a minute. “Let’s go to the navigator room.”

“
We have to show the ghost this is your house now,” Jenny said. “He can’t rule it anymore.” She lifted away her sweater, then unhasped her bra.

“
This is really scary for me, Jenny,” Seth whispered.

“
That’s why we have to do it.”