The Haunting (17 page)

I was fairly sure that Mr. Merle wouldn’t have had access to Charlie’s keys. He would have found another way to get into the house. I wondered how many people knew about the broken window sash in the kitchen. As Grandma and Sheriff Fuller nervously tiptoed around the entry hall, looking like a couple of housebreakers themselves, I stopped and listened. The hair on the back of my neck rose as I thought I heard a faint cry.
It sounds like a cat
, I told myself.
It has to be one of Mrs. Phipps’s cats.
I walked through the dining room and into the kitchen.

A tire iron lay on the floor next to the wide-open door to the basement. Wood had been splintered on the door frame around the lock.

“Grandma! Sheriff Fuller!” I shouted. “Come here! Quick!”

They dashed in behind me.

“I’ll be darned. Looks like ol’ Ray did some damage here,” Sheriff Fuller said.

I stepped aside to get out of the way, and as I did I glanced down the stairs into the basement. A dim greenish light shone through the basement windows, casting a sickly glow on the body of a man who lay on his back at the foot of the cement stairs. His wide eyes stared straight up into mine.

I
hung on to Grandma and tried not to scream. A kind of whimpering, strangling sound came out.

“What’s goin’ on?” Sheriff Fuller asked. “What’s the matter?”

The man at the foot of the stairs suddenly raised his head and yelled, “What took y’all so long? Didn’t anybody hear me shouting?”

Grandma kept making gasping noises, and for a few moments my mind refused to work. Sheriff Fuller reacted faster. He trotted down the stairs and bent over the man. “Homer,” he said. “What the hell happened to you?”

“That’s Homer Tavey,” I said to Grandma. “We met him yesterday. He’s an antiques dealer and he’s awfully pushy. He was really pressuring Mom.”

Grandma recovered rapidly. She leaned into
the doorway and shouted down the stairs, “What are you doing breaking into our basement, Mr. Tavey?”

“Whoever you are, lady, don’t you give me any grief,” Mr. Tavey said. “My right leg’s broke, and my back hurts somethin’ awful. I’m in a lot of pain.”

Sheriff Fuller took the steps two at a time. “I’m gonna radio in for an ambulance,” he said to Grandma. “See if you can find a blanket or somethin’ to put over him.”

Grandma headed toward the parlor, but I carefully walked down the stairs. The railings were intact. The cement stairs weren’t slippery. I reached Mr. Tavey and was about to sit next to him on the lower step when I saw a movement in the shadows. Two yellow eyes in a mound of black fur gleamed at me.

“The cat!” I cried, and took a step toward it.

The black cat gave a terrible cry. It shot out of its hiding place and disappeared into the depths of the cellar.

My legs shook as I clung to the railing, lowering myself to the steps. “How long has that cat been here?” I asked Mr. Tavey.

“You shouldn’t have chased it off. Cats keep rats away.”

“I didn’t mean to chase it. I … Oh, never mind. How did you fall?”

“I don’t know,” he said. His lower lip protruded in a pout. “I was at the top of the stairs, and then suddenly I wasn’t. It was like something pushed me.”

“You mean
somebody.
”

“I don’t know what I mean. I was being quiet, so if there’d been footsteps I think I would have heard them.”

“Ripping open a door with a tire iron isn’t being very quiet,” I pointed out.

Mr. Tavey groaned. “I know what it looks like—breaking and entering—except it wasn’t, not really.”

“It looks like you were going to steal something,” I said.

He groaned again. “I just wanted to see the wine cellar. In that copy of a diary that Mrs. Lord is so blamed proud of there’s something about a wine cellar. If there were any bottles left, can you imagine what a collector would pay for them?”

“To you?”

“To your folks,” Mr. Tavey said. “Honest. I’d get a little something for arranging the deal, a nice percentage, but that would be all. Your folks wouldn’t know their value. When they cleaned up the basement they’d probably toss the bottles out.”

“Why didn’t you just ask Mom and Dad if you could see the wine cellar?”

Mr. Tavey grimaced, squeezing his eyes shut. “Your mother didn’t want to listen to anything I had to say.”

“So you thought if you just found the wine and took it, nobody would miss it because they wouldn’t have known it was there.”

“Yes. I mean no. I mean …”

“You mean you are a scoundrel and a thief,” Grandma said. She clumped down the stairs, squeezing past me, and covered Mr. Tavey with a heavy, yellowed linen tablecloth. Then she
slipped what looked like a small, folded kitchen towel under his head. I wondered if she had been afraid to go upstairs alone and that was why she took the first things handy.

I wasn’t through questioning Mr. Tavey. This was the only chance I had, before the sheriff returned. “What time did you get here?” I asked.

“Right after Charlie left. It was before five o’clock. I wanted to leave here before your parents returned.”

Mr. Tavey had been in the house all night! He could tell us better than anyone else what went on at Graymoss. But I was puzzled. If he’d experienced the voices and faces and all the other horrible things that had been reported, he should have been scared out of his mind.

“You were in the house at night,” I said. “What did you see and hear? Tell me!”

“Nothing.” He grimaced again and raised both hands, pressing his palms against the side of his head. “I was knocked out colder than a catfish. When I woke up the sun was up and I could hear y’all walking around.”

I stepped back, disappointed, but suddenly one more question occurred to me. “Mr. Tavey,” I asked, “what made you think my parents were coming back to Graymoss last night?”

His voice was filled with surprise. “Why, everybody knew that. Your mama thought she was gonna prove that Graymoss wasn’t haunted.”

How could “everybody” know Mom’s plans when she hadn’t even made them yet?
I wondered.

I left Grandma to sit with Mr. Tavey. I pulled my flashlight out of my waist pack and walked
through the basement, wary that I might suddenly come upon that fearsome cat. The basement wasn’t very large, and there were twists and turns in it. Near the back the walls narrowed. There were shelves on my left. They were filled with some small tools and household clutter, like most basements, although I guessed that most of that clutter would be valuable now because it was so old. Some of the things on the shelf I couldn’t recognize. There was something with jagged teeth—like a very small saw; a tapered, pointed metal bar; a flat, pointed piece of iron with a handle; and a low, rectangular pan half-filled with white stuff under a crust of dirt and dust. I did recognize a few garden tools and a wooden mallet.

One shelf held three very dusty bottles of what once had most likely been wine. I rubbed at one and could read part of its French label. Three bottles? Some wine cellar. Mr. Tavey had caused himself a lot of trouble for nothing.

On my right was a short brick wall that joined two concrete walls. It was plain, except in the middle, where the brick design formed a kind of arch. Farther on, at the very back of the basement, I could spot a window with most of the glass missing. The beam of my flashlight struck a jagged edge that had caught a clump of what looked like black fur, so I knew how that cat had entered and where it had gone. I retraced my route and joined Grandma and Mr. Tavey.

Grandma was lecturing him sternly about honesty and respecting other people’s property. Mr. Tavey had a desperate look in his eyes.

The sheriff and paramedics appeared, and in a
short while Mr. Tavey was on his way to the hospital in Baton Rouge.

“Nothin’ more I can do here,” Sheriff Fuller told Grandma and me as we stepped out on the veranda. He carried Mr. Tavey’s tire iron to hold for evidence. “I’m going on to the hospital to talk to Ray. You ladies will be all right, won’t you?”

“We’ll be fine,” Grandma said.

We watched the sheriff stop to talk to Charlie before he drove off. Then we walked toward Grandma’s car. “Will you lock up the house, please, Charlie?” Grandma asked.

Charlie shifted from one foot to the other. “I understand Homer Tavey done some damage to the basement door frame. You ain’t gonna ask me to clean it up now, are you?”

“Why not?” Grandma asked. “Your job includes making repairs, doesn’t it?”

“My wife, May, will be here to clean come Monday next,” he said. “I’d just as soon wait for her. I make it a policy not to set foot in that house if I can help it, and never when I’m gonna be alone in it.”

“Suit yourself.” Grandma shrugged. “As long as the repairs get done.”

Charlie tilted his head as he looked at me. “Why didn’t your parents come back here last night, like they was goin’ to?”

“Why did you think they were going to?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “They was gonna stay in the house so your mother could prove it wasn’t haunted. Everybody knew that.”

As we climbed into the car and drove toward
Bogue City I said, “Small-town news is faster than e-mail!”

Grandma nodded. “Somebody starts a piece of information and it goes right through town.”

“But it was wrong information.”

“Lots of rumors get started in small towns, too,” Grandma said, “but let’s not waste time discussing trivia. We have something to talk about. For your own good I threw away your voodoo charm. I don’t appreciate your sneaking it back.”

“I didn’t sneak it. I took it because it’s mine,” I told her. “It’s gris-gris, and it protects against ghosts.”

“It’s foolishness,” she said.

“You didn’t think so when I hung it around your neck.” I took a good look at Grandma, but I didn’t see the string or the little bag. “Where is it, Grandma? What did you do with it?”

Grandma blushed. “I didn’t want to enter that house. I freely admit it. Perhaps I was more nervous than I should have been because I didn’t realize what you were doing when you gave me the gris-gris, as you call it. I first discovered I was wearing it when I was tending to Mr. Tavey.”

I held out a hand. “Will you give it back to me?”

“You don’t need it,” she said. “Besides, I no longer have it.”

I shuddered. I was counting on that gris-gris for what I needed to do. “Where is it?” I asked.

“Somewhere in the basement,” she answered. “When I realized what I was wearing, I pulled it off and threw it as far as I could.”

“Oh, Grandma,” I moaned. “It was
mine.
I need it.”

“No, you don’t,” Grandma said. “My job is to take care of you while you’re visiting me, so I feel totally justified in my actions.”

I probably would have kept arguing, but we were on the main street of Bogue City, and there was something else I had to do. “Stop the car, Grandma. Please!” I said. “See that sign? There’s the historical museum. If it’s open we can take another look at what Charlotte wrote in her diary.”

Grandma probably didn’t want to squelch me a second time, so she parked her car, and we went to the door. An Open sign hung over the glass, and inside I could see a woman with blue-white hair seated at a table.

As soon as we were inside the museum, Grandma signed the register and paid an entry fee. While the woman at the table trilled on and on to Grandma about the glorious future of Graymoss—if only it were to belong to the historical society—I glanced around the one small room.

There were lots of framed photographs of people from long ago. There were even two photos of Graymoss, along with a large painting of the house that wasn’t very good. On the back wall hung some farming tools from the 1800s and somebody had made an illustrated chart of local wildflowers. Two mannequins were dressed in old-fashioned clothing, and on a shelf behind them rested a row of high-buttoned shoes.

There were a number of other things on exhibit
in the museum, but I saw what I had come to examine and hurried toward it. Along one wall was a row of posterboards with sections from Charlotte’s diary copied on them.

I reached into my waist pack and pulled out a small notepad and a pen. As fast as I could I copied everything Charlotte had written about Placide Blevins. I didn’t stop to think about what I wrote. I just needed to get it all down on paper.

I had finished and was shoving the notebook back into my waist pack when a hand rested on my shoulder.

“I’m almost through, Grandma,” I said.

“I’m not your Grandma,” a deep voice said.

Jonathan laughed as I whirled around.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” I told him.

“You said you’d call me if you came back. I thought you might call last night.”

“I didn’t know I’d be here today. The sheriff called Grandma and asked her to come. Do you know about Mr. Merle?”

“Yes,” Jonathan said. “Ray Merle should have known better. That’s what comes of playing Halloween in the dark.”

I took a step back and studied him. “What do you mean, ‘playing Halloween’?”

“Figure it out. Merle really wants to make a deal for that property. He was probably hiding near the house, waiting for your parents to show up. If the ghosts didn’t do their job of scaring them out of their minds, he would have filled in. He just picked the wrong place to hide.”