Summer Shadows (21 page)

“What was
that
?” he asked.

Ron looked back to the house. He thought it odd that he was more curious than frightened. He tried the door handle, but it was firmly locked, and the sign on the door warned against entering these “dangerous premises”.

“What are you doing?” Dylan squeaked.

Ron looked over his shoulder. “Don’t you want to see where it came from?”

Dylan swallowed hard. “Well, sure,” he said shakily. “Why not? I mean, that’s why we’re here, right?”

“Right.”

“You know, it’s too bad the camera wasn’t on. I could have used it in the video.”

He seemed to be recovering his courage, and he stepped gingerly over the fallen brambles and up the shaky stairs. Ron tried some of the windows, but they were stuck shut. He brushed some of the dirt away from the living room window and peered in.

At first he saw nothing but darkness, then, as Dylan leaned in next to him, his eyes began picking out spots of light reflecting off of what appeared to be small mirrors. He could just barely make out a bureau of some kind and maybe a chair, but nothing more.

Dylan grunted.

“Dark in there,” he said. He lifted his flashlight and turned it on, but the light bounced off the dirt on the panes and they saw even less than before.

Neither said anything for minute. They didn’t have to tell each other what they were listening for, but all they could hear were the kids on the sidewalk and an awful crowing sound from the trees.

“What do you think it was?” Ron asked.

“What do
you
think it was?”

“It could just be pipes or something.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it could be.”

They tried the rest of the windows, but their enthusiasm was waning. The project was no longer just a fun, scary way to fill their summer afternoon; now, they were waiting for something to step out of the shadows – every nook, every darkened doorway was now a hiding spot for a lurking figure.

They were glad when Katy called for Dylan to come home. They’d had their fill of the old house for the afternoon. In fact, in his eagerness to get away from the place, Dylan jumped the front fence, wounded leg and all. Ron supposed that their being caught was no longer a prime concern.

The other kids clustered around them eagerly.

“Did you see anything?” Amelia asked.

“Nothing definite, but it is a spooky place,” Dylan said, regaining his normal swagger.

“Is there a ghost?” Dana whispered.

“We didn’t see it.”

“But is there one? Did you feel it?”

Dylan hesitated, and Ron gave him a warning look. Regardless of what either one of them might think about the reality of ghosts, he did not want his younger siblings being frightened out of a good night’s sleep.

Fortunately, Dylan didn’t seem inclined to commit himself. With a lingering look at the old house, he said, “Oh, there’s a mystery there, all right.”

The three younger children exchanged confused looks. Amelia ran over to where Ron perched precariously on top of the fence.

“Ron, you’ll tell the truth,” she said, looking up at him. “Did you see a ghost in there?”

She was wearing the same adoring expression that made Ron uncomfortable. He wished he could tell her to knock it off, but that would be rude.

Fortunately, he could truthfully answer her question without giving Dana and Jack nightmares.

“No,” he said. “We didn’t see anything.”

“Good, excellent,” Katy said impatiently. “Let’s go, Dylan.”

“Oh!” Dana was disappointed. “Then the project is done? There’s nothing else to investigate?”

Dylan stopped, twisted in his bicycle seat, and gave her an arrogant look.

“Nothing to investigate?” he said. “I wouldn’t say that, Dana. I wouldn’t say that at all. Later, kiddos!”

He and Katy peddled off without a backwards glance, leaving the two girls confused.

“But if there’s no ghost,” Amelia said, “what is there to investigate?”

“Maybe the murder,” Dana suggested.

“But didn’t they catch the bad guy?”

“Yep.”

“Then what does Dylan want to investigate, Ron?”

Ron shrugged and brushed at his clothes. He felt much safer on this side of the fence.

He rubbed the rust from his hands and checked his watch. At 7:30, it was later than he thought. His stomach was starting to rumble, and he hoped that Aunt Julia had given some thought to supper.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

They went back to the house, where they found Julia and Wilde on the front porch, dirty, tired, and waiting for the pizza delivery man to arrive.

27

J
ulia went to bed early that night. After the kids were settled in, she took a shower, put on her nightgown, and wearily brushed her teeth. She was exhausted, and her arms were weak from hours of scrubbing walls and scraping glue. She flexed a muscle in the mirror and grinned ruefully at her image.

“Oh yeah. You’re a tough girl,” she said softly.

It took them all afternoon just to do those two rooms, much longer than any of them anticipated. Even Wilde was surprised.

“What did they use on this wallpaper?” he had muttered, chipping away.

“Superglue?” Julia suggested. He laughed, and she loved the sound.

Now, watching her reflection in the mirror, she wondered - if it took this long for two rooms, how much of a nightmare would the office, bedroom, storage room, and hallway be? The idea made her heart sink.

“If it isn’t done before school starts,” she told the mirror, “you hire someone to do the last bits and you sell it anyway. That’s all.”

She nodded at her reflection, then crossed herself and whispered, “Thank you, God, for Robert.”

She padded out of the bathroom, almost tripping over her sleeping bag in the hallway. She set up her sleeping quarters there after the Wildes left that evening; now, she realized that she was in the way of Dana’s nightly journey to the bathroom and she would probably spend half the night being tripped over.

Still, she was too tired to move it. She poured herself a cup of tea and added a spoonful of sugar, and leaned against the kitchen counter to sip it.

Julia was exhausted, but too alert for sleep. She kept going over the list of things that needed to be done to the house. She decided that she needed something to take her mind off of the projects all together.

She wandered into the office, where they had set up the temporary living room with the TV set, but it wasn’t hooked up to cable and the only movies on hand were children’s entertainment. All of her DVDs were buried somewhere among their things, and she simply wasn’t up to digging through it all.

She was about to leave the office again when her eyes fell on a stack of books. She hadn’t had time to read since their arrival. A good novel might do the trick.

The first book that she came across was
Picturesque in Death
. Standing in the silent, darkened room with peeling wallpaper and the musty smell of old rugs tickling her nose, the B-movie cover seemed ominous and creepy.

Almost against her will, she opened it. A. Glen Bernard’s enormous strokes nearly covered the title page. She flipped past the prologue to about fifty pages into the novel. It was a habit of hers to check the writing style midway, to determine whether or not she wanted to read it.

Daphne Maxwell-Harcourt lay coiled in the middle of the enormous bed, her robe a blood-red stain against the luxurious creamy down coverlet. Her hair was pulled back into a simple pony tail. Some tendrils had escaped the elastic and hung in tantalizing ringlets by her long, smooth neck. Her eyes were huge, her features delicate. Her hair was like spun gold, the red highlighted by her apparel. She was looking at the camera with a laughing smile. Somehow, she managed to look both provocative and innocent at the same time.

There were other photos: Daphne at work, Daphne on the beach, Daphne on her bike, Daphne in Boston, Daphne under an oak tree in the fall, Daphne coyly covering her face with her rain coat. They were all well shot, well arranged, and made full use of the woman’s exquisite beauty. Her delicate features and slender figure made her a fascinating subject.

Hollister grunted. “You’ve a good eye,” he said.

Harcourt looked up and blinked, not understanding. He looked haggard, Hollister thought. As though he hadn’t slept in weeks.

“You’ve got a gift with the camera.” The captain tapped the picture.

The bereaved husband blinked and shook his head. “They aren’t mine,” he said. He lowered his eyes to the scotch glass he rolled between his palms. “One of her art school friends, I think. I don’t know.”

Hollister nodded and turned his back to the wall.

It wasn’t particularly riveting stuff. Julia skipped ahead another fifty pages and tried again.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” he said, as he eased his way through traffic. “Everyone loved her – no one has a reason to kill her, except maybe the husband and he’s too honestly broken up about it. Perhaps Fenton is right. Maybe it was a suicide.”

“Sure,” Barbara scoffed. “Young, rich, beautiful young model, a promising acting career, her first marriage still in the honeymoon stages, if all the witnesses are to be believed, and she commits suicide by hanging. Why? No reason. She wasn’t doing drugs. She didn’t drink. No one had died or left her. Her husband was faithful, her career just starting, and Mom and Pop were taking her to some South-Sea island for her birthday. More importantly, she left no note. No artistic temperament could resist leaving something for the fans, a poetic end that would make her legendary. She’d have left a note.”

The mist gave way to downpour, and Hollister turned up the wipers. They drove in silence, with only the rumble of the engine, the popcorn sound of the rain against the roof, and the rhythmic squeak of rubber against the windshield for music.

Barbara spoke again. “What I don’t get…” She trailed off, then shook her head and continued. “What I don’t get, being the nasty, small-minded kind of woman that I am, is the fact that she
was
so universally loved. No one has had a thing to say against her and that – that doesn’t make sense.”

Barbara’s point touched on something that had been bothering Julia about Stephanie Lang: everyone seemed to like her, including Doris Mone, who - even on such short acquaintance - struck Julia as the possessive type. It didn’t make sense. Had Bernard come up with an explanation?

She shut the book and studied the cover. Worth the read? Probably not. Bernard was entirely too much in love with “Daphne Maxwell-Harcourt” to deliver a good procedural. But as a study of the case, it might offer a perspective that could put some of her questions to rest.

At any rate, she was certain that it would put her to sleep.

Tonight, the floor seemed harder and her sleeping bag thinner than usual. She piled up her two pillows with the blanket underneath them and settled in with her mug and book. She managed 25 pages or so before waking up to find the book had fallen from her hand. She put out the light, curled up again, and fell into a deep sleep.

The next morning, Robert and Amelia arrived just as Jack and Dana were finishing breakfast. Ron was already in the living room, studying wall-repair instructions. Wilde brought his own coffee in a Harley-Davidson travel mug and chatted with Julia while they set up. They had a full day ahead of them.

Occasionally, Julia would stop and watch. Everyone was hard at work, talking, joking, and laughing together. Ron looked happy, even if he didn’t exactly smile. They were comfortable together in that room, these two families who had known each other only a week.

Julia felt a sense of peace, security, and calm that she had not known since the accident. For the first time, she felt at home. The worries about the future were far away today.

They finished the walls by noon and ate lunch out on the porch. Mrs. Jurta, looking distracted and harried, walked by with several dogs, stopping to say hello. The kids were delighted to play with the puppies for a few minutes, and Mrs. Jurta brought this to Julia’s attention, slyly commenting on how well Horatio and Dana got on.

Julia escaped to the kitchen. Robert came through the living room, carrying an armload of dishes and Jack on his back. He dropped the dishes on the counter and Jack into a chair.

“Everything all right?” Julia asked.

Jack shook his head miserably as Robert explained, “We just got a little unnerved by some dogs trying to lick us, didn’t we, Jack?”

“He was trying to eat me,” Jack said solemnly. “I saw his teeth.”

“Well, he can’t get his tongue out without showing some teeth,” Robert said. He turned to Julia. “Mrs. Jurta wanted to know if the kids would walk the dogs for a little bit while she made a phone call. I told them to go ahead – is that okay with you?”

Julia looked out the window and saw the three of them waiting by the side of the road, each with a leash in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. Naturally, Dana had Horatio, and Tigger was with Amelia while Ron held two others.

Julia turned to find Robert grinning at her.

“I know,” he said. “It is a set-up, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to give the kids a break from work.”

“As long as they stay on this street, it’s fine.”

He went out to tell them while Julia and Jack loaded up the dishwasher. After a few minutes, Robert came back in.

“The putty is still soft in the living room,” he said. “We should let it dry before we paint over it. Where’s the list?”

Julia pointed to the counter and he settled at the table to study it. Jack and Julia finished up tidying the kitchen, and then she took the little boy upstairs with Yellow Teddy. Jack was exhausted and didn’t protest.

“The dog did try to eat me,” he said as Julia stepped towards the door.

Julia smiled. “Then you’d better stay in here where they can’t get you.”

He nodded. Julia left the door open a crack as she left.

She found Robert examining the home improvement magazines that she had left on the counter. They were well worn, and some of the pages were dog eared and marked with notes. She almost wished that he hadn’t found them. Some of her original ideas sounded good back in Springfield while she was sitting in Amanda’s magazine-spread-worthy kitchen. Now they just seemed pretentious.

He looked up as she sat down.

“I was thinking about working on the kitchen next,” he said. “But I wasn’t sure, from your notes, exactly what you wanted to do.”

To her dismay, the magazine lay open to one of the more elaborate and expensive kitchens that she had taken a shine to. The only way that particular plan would work was if they knocked down a few walls and enlarged the kitchen to three times the original size.

She looked around. They had been so busy the past week that she had almost forgotten what a shambles the room was. “It would be great to get this done. I feel like the board of health might come in to close us down any moment.”

“Cosmetically it needs work but, otherwise, it doesn’t look too bad to me. Did you have a design in mind?”

Nothing like that magazine,
she wanted to say.

“I’d like some shelves put up,” she said. “The cabinets need to be cleaned and repainted. Ideally, I’d like the walls repainted, the tiles either fixed or replaced, but that would take a lot more than I can give to just one room.”

Robert folded his arms as he looked around. “So, you don’t want those cabinets replaced?” he asked, nodding towards the blank space on the wall.

“No. I think an open shelving unit would brighten up the wall and make the room look larger. Besides,” she shrugged, “there’s no use in putting too much time and effort into it. One of the first things people redo is the kitchen when they buy a place.”

He looked at her, puzzled, then shook his head. “Oh, right, I’d forgotten.”

“Forgotten?”

“That you were going back in the fall,” he said quickly, looking down at the magazine. “You’ve all fit right into the neighborhood, almost as though you’ve always been here – I just forgot.”

Julia’s heart jumped. “This is a really nice neighborhood,” she murmured. “We’ve felt very welcome here.”

“So did I when I first arrived. They’re good people.”

“You all are. I almost wish circumstances were different.” She broke off quickly, wondering why she had said that.

Curious, he asked, “Circumstances?”

She nodded.

All it took was a another quizzical look from him and the whole story came out – about Amanda and the accident, the kids and their grieving process, the decision to come to Franklin. She told him about the job she’d lost, and the job she hoped to get, the house in Springfield and how others wanted her to sell it. She found herself talking quickly, saying more to him than she had said to anyone in months.

She worried that she was telling him too much. But he seemed immersed in her story, and he didn’t interrupt except to ask questions.

She finally managed to stop and laughed awkwardly.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was way more than you needed to know.”

He cleared his throat and looked down at his hands. “I didn’t know that you’d all been through so much.”

“Yes, well… It’s been really hard for the kids, obviously. Their entire world turned upside down.”

“So did yours. You went from a swinging single to a grieving mother of three in, what, a moment? You gave up a lot for your sister.”

There was a look in his eyes that Julia couldn’t name. It made her feel respected - the focus of a kind of attention that she had not received in a while. The truth came out easily: “I didn’t think of it like that. You do things for family, you know?”