The Wedding Gift (16 page)

She laughed a little, and
asked if I was hungry, which I decided I was, and then she asked me
whether I would like her to bring my lunch outside by the pool
since it was such a nice day, and I decided that sounded real good
too. So I was feeling pretty happy when I went upstairs to my
bedroom to change into one of my new bikinis.

When I got up to the
landing, I turned right instead of left though because I had to
make sure that George had kept his promise to fix those horrible
children’s rooms. Sure enough, all the furniture was gone; all five
of the rooms were bare, with fresh white paint on the
walls.

Empty and cleaned out like
that, they were just regular sunny rooms that smelled like paint,
and I couldn’t get out of any of them fast enough. My room still
looked like a fancy hotel suite, but I saw that George (or Maria)
had put bowls filled with roses from outside all over the room. I
don’t know why, but I shut the door to our ensuite bathroom while I
was changing into my bathing suit.

When I came back out, I
made a note to tell Maria to turn off the A/C during the day; this
room was too cold for comfort, even though it was about a hundred
degrees outside. I opened one of the French doors out to my little
balcony and walked outside onto it. Our bedroom overlooked the pool
and I waved at Maria down there putting out the plates and the
pitcher of sweet tea for my lunch.

The door clicked shut
behind me, and, when I tried to open it, I couldn’t. I tried about
three more times before I started shouting for Maria, but she had
gone back inside the house and couldn’t hear me. I knew she would
be coming back outside in a minute, so I just waited kind of
absently looking into my bedroom from outside, wondering what I
should change first about the room.

That’s the first time I saw
her. Robina.

While I was just standing
there waiting for Maria to come outside, so I could holler to her
to come upstairs and let me in. I could see the door to my bedroom
open from the hallway. I thought it was Maria come upstairs to
check on what was taking me so long, so I kind of pounded on the
glass yelling “Hey Maria, over here, I locked my stupid self
out.”

But anyone could tell right
away that it wasn’t Maria. For one thing, this girl was tall, a lot
taller than me, and she was bone thin. She had long dark hair that
was worn straight. Her hair hung down on either side so I couldn’t
make out anything but the side of her face. She was barefoot and
wearing this gauzy, peasant type of skirt, and a blue halter top.
Even though she had on summer clothes her skin was dead white, the
kind of skin that looks like it had never been tanned. While I
stood there shocked, I watched her wander over to my
suitcases.

And though I couldn’t see
her face, her body language told me that she was surprised to see
them there. I watched her bend down; she even picked up the tag
that had my name on it. She looked at it for a minute, and then
dropped it. As I stared, I got ice cold even though I was standing
outside in the hundred degree sun. She then went and sat down on
the edge of our bed and put her face in her hands. She bent over
and started rocking back and forth real rapidly. I have never seen
anyone who looked so pitiful and alone.

I know no one will ever
believe me, especially not Jessie, but I didn’t feel afraid of her
then … honestly I didn’t. I knew she was a ghost, but she didn’t
look like a ghost; she just looked like an ordinary girl, like me,
a girl who was too thin and too sad to even stand up. But while I
watched her, she did stand up; she stood up and walked over to the
mirror hanging above the fancy marble fireplace in the
room.

I still couldn’t see her
face; I just watched her back, which was shaking the way backs do
when you cry real hard. You could tell she was taking deep breaths
(with what lungs, though, I could not tell you) like the ones I had
taken in the limo downstairs. That’s what a girl does when she is
trying to collect herself before having to face people and pretend
everything is okay. Then she straightened her shoulders and turned
and walked out the open bedroom door back into the hall. The only
kind of scary thing was she walked through the door. It slammed
shut behind her hard enough to make the glass panes shudder as I
watched her walk through.

I can’t say why, but I
thought maybe that slamming door was for me, that perhaps she had
known all along that I was standing out there watching her and that
maybe what I had mistaken for sadness was not sadness at all, but a
woman so mad she was just trying to hold herself together from
doing something she might regret later. Thinking this made me so
scared that I was backed up as far on the balcony as you could get
without falling over the railings when I saw the bedroom door open
again.

Oh poop, I thought. I was
not up to seeing the house’s previous owner again. I was just
fixing to try to lower myself off the balcony to the one below it,
when I saw it was Maria. She came into the room looking real
puzzled and then I started hollering for her.

“
Hey Maria, out here, on
the balcony, I got locked out
.”

Maria came over and opened
the door, looking at me real funny. “
Miz
Leeann, what you doing out there?
”

I told her how I had gone
outside to look off the balcony, and that the door had shut and
locked behind me, but she showed me that there were no locks on the
door at all. We decided it must be swollen wood and she said her
husband was a real good carpenter and maybe he could fix
it.

I told her sure thing, to
please send him on over, and then I asked her what made her come
looking for me. She said it was the sound of my bedroom door; it
had slammed so loud that she had heard it in the kitchen. Maria
said she thought maybe I had been calling her and she hadn’t heard
me, so I had slammed the door to get her attention.

Even in my extreme fear,
hearing her say that made me laugh. It sounded so much like
something Miz Bethany would do if you weren’t quick enough to suit
her. I told her that obviously it hadn’t been me since I was
trapped on the balcony like Juliet or someone, and she said it must
have been a cross current from the window being opened and then she
looked at me all reproachful and said “
Mees Leeann, it’s real hot in here, and you should not open
the windows in the heat of the day; bugs weel get
in
.”

I looked at her funny
because I had only opened the damn windows as the room had been so
cold, but she was right - the room was about a hundred degrees
now.

To tell the strict truth, I
really needed to tell someone what I had just seen, but I knew that
people of Hispanic origin tend to be pretty superstitious to begin
with, what with Santeria candles and all that stuff, and I was
afraid that if I told Maria what I had just seen that she would
either run for the hills, not wanting to have to work in a haunted
house, or that she would think I was a loco and run for the hills,
not wanting to work for a crazy woman.

I knew Jess wouldn’t be
home yet, as Jack and I had dropped her off at home, and she had
told me that she would just have time to shower …
“
Let Mark hit this, and then get her ass
to Tully’s for the swing shift
.”

Chapter
22

I followed Maria
downstairs, and went out to the pool to eat my lunch, sunbathe and
think about what I should do. It was as hot as the seventh circle
of hell outside and, after I took about three bites of my shrimp
salad (I already loved Maria), I could not resist getting into the
pool.

It was a beautiful pool -
not a long pool like you see at high schools and recreation
centers, but round, with red brick edging, and a pretty little
waterfall that spilled into it. The waterfall connected to a little
manmade creek that ran around the whole property. It had all been
built so long ago that now it looked natural. As far as you could
see out back here, it was bright green lawns and old trees and
roses. You would never know you were in Dalton.

I slid into the water and
made a little shriek. It was probably eighty degrees but, after
being so heated by the sun, my skin still shrank back a little. I
got used to it quick though and in just a minute I was floating on
my back. Above me was the bright blue sky and all around me was
this private little park, and right then instead of feeling all
terrorized by what had happened upstairs, all I could feel like was
the queen of my own country.

I thought that maybe Robina
was still here because maybe she had been, like me, a girl who
didn’t come from much and then she got everything and more than she
could have dreamed of, and that she just didn’t want to leave such
a pretty place just because of being dead and all.

That thought wasn’t so
scary, but then it was easy not to be scared out here in my pool
with the sun overhead, and Maria just inside in the kitchen where I
could see her through the windows. I wondered if I should tell
George about what I had seen, and then decided that was not a good
idea. George had been awful good to me when I freaked out about the
kid’s rooms and, if I told him about seeing Robina, he would think
I was making it up so we could move.

The funny thing was I
didn’t want to move anymore. I wanted to live in this beautiful
place and enjoy everything in it. It was like the imaginary castle
in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ where every room that Beauty walked into
held another surprise for her. No, right then I didn’t even care
about the bad things that had happened here. After all, it was like
Mama said, there is no place on this earth where something bad
hadn’t already happened to someone who came before you and that
didn’t mean a place was ruined or anything.

I didn’t even mind about my
poor brother Charlie as, to tell the strict truth, I had only been
acting upset about that with George to make a point. I had never
even met Charlie, as far as I remembered, so I couldn’t mourn him,
and boys did fall out of trees. But, darn it, that got me to
thinking about what Daddy had always said about how Charlie didn’t
fall out of a tree; how there were scratches on his face and how he
thought Charlie had been inside the house and that someone in there
had attacked him and pushed him out a window.

Thinking about Daddy’s
theories, that made me think about how Robina had slammed the door
upstairs and the anger that could be behind an act like that. What
if Robina wasn’t just hanging out here on account of it being so
pretty and her not wanting to leave the house where she had been
queen of the castle? What if she was still here because she knew
that after murdering her family, well that after doing a thing like
that, there was really only one other place she could go on to …
and it sure wasn’t heaven. What if she had liked murdering her
family and was just a natural born killer who missed having people
around to murder now?

But Jessie had said that
ghosts couldn’t really hurt anyone, but then Jessie was just a kid
like me who had read some stories about ghosts. Reading a book or
two didn’t really make you an expert on a subject. There was only
one person alive that I knew of who could tell me if Robina could
still hurt anyone and that was Donny Readle.

In all these years, he had
never once talked about what had happened the night my brother died
…not after those first couple days at the hospital when he had just
basically confirmed what Sheriff Riffler thought had happened. By
the time Sherriff Riffler got around to interviewing Donny, he had
already told the Dalton Tri-Weekly that the incident had been a
Halloween prank gone bad. Sherriff Riffler said that the boys had
climbed the tree to see inside the windows upstairs, the downstairs
windows being shuttered and all, and that on the way back down the
branches broke under their weight, sending them into free fall into
the emptied pool below. Sherriff Riffler was a nice man but big and
kind of intimidating; he might have just told Donny what he thought
happened and Donny, being just a kid, in pain from his broken legs
and losing his friend, might have just thought it best to go
along.

But if my theory was true,
then I wondered why he hadn’t told my daddy anything different in
all these years? He and Daddy were real close, so maybe it was just
an accident, like Sherriff Riffler had said it was. Maybe, but I
didn’t buy it.

I thought they had seen
Robina in that room, same as I had, and that seeing her, well it
startled them so much, they just fell back out of that tree. After
all, I had almost jumped off the balcony myself when I saw her. If
that was all it was, then it wasn’t so bad; I mean I purely did not
want to share my house with a ghost, but I figured I could stand it
for a little while until Jessie and I could figure out how to get
rid of her.

Yes, I could maybe take it,
as long as all she was going to do was walk around and look sad;
even slamming doors I could get used to (for a little while). But
if Robina was still a crazed killer even in her dead state, well
that was another matter altogether. If she could push people out of
windows or off staircases and such, then I was in danger, and
drastic immediate measures had to be taken.

George was a Catholic. I
guessed I was one now too. Shoot, I had better be considered a real
Catholic since I had to go to all those boring conversion classes
so we could get married in his church. And the Catholics, as
everyone is aware, know all about ghosts and exorcisms and things.
Hell, Jessie and I had watched that horror movie ‘The Exorcist’
like six times, and that movie was based on a true story, as
everyone knew. And if they could get out a demon that powerful, I
figured one thin, ornery ghost girl wouldn’t be much of a challenge
for any self respecting Catholic priest.