A Widow's Curse Read Free Page A

secretary that had belonged to my great-grandfather Conner, and a huge overstuffed armchair in the corner between two windows. Best of all, I had my own small bathroom in the other corner, more a concession to my father’s desire for privacy than a convenience for me, but a delight nevertheless.
    The oak tree outside had made a perfect ladder when I was younger, and I’d left the house by window and tree more often than I had through the front door.
    My father’s room, where Andrews often stayed, was a bit more spacious: a double bed there, too, but less clutter. It was across the hall from mine, and made the opposite upstairs corner of the house. The windows faced east, and morning light poured in after the autumn leaves fell every year. Pictures of family members crowded the walls, but the only other stick of furniture in the room was a trunk the size of a casket: all the tricks from my father’s magic show stuffed into a box. He had earned his living with the things in that trunk, enough to keep a wife and strange child above the poverty level, clothed and fed most of the time.
    When I was young and he was gone, I would often open that trunk and try to figure out what trick he could get out of, say, a red bandanna, a hoop made of copper, and a tiny dagger. Those particular items were in a wooden box marked ESCAPADE . I never learned what trick they were used for. Some things were less fascinating to a boy of eleven: an old pair of shoes, a packet of musty letters from strangers, a locked pair of handcuffs without a key.
    Nearly everything in the trunk was absolutely baffling—just like my father. He might let a person see what was inside the box, but when he did, it proved to be as much of a mystery as the closed box had been. He even explained his tricks sometimes, but in such a way as to make them more astounding, more impossible to comprehend.
    I investigated those mysteries in my father for two decades before I gave up, surrendering to the possibility that there was no explanation—or maybe that there was nothing there at all.
    My mother’s room, on the same side of the hall as my father’s, where Shultz would stay, was the most haunted of the three. A single wrought-iron bed stood in the exact center of the room. The walls were covered with strange tapestries she’d said were from her family in “the old country,” though in my presence, she had never been specific about which country that had been. The tapestries were faded. Some were woodland scenes; some might have been Bible stories. By the time I was interested enough to look at them closely, they had mostly faded beyond deciphering.
    My mother had often kept fresh flowers on the sill of her only window—a box seat. By that window there was a worn leather chair, a floor lamp, and a footstool. As far as I could tell, they had never been touched, the chair unoccupied, the lamp never turned on.
    The wooden floor was nearly covered by a thick Oriental rug, mostly golds and greens. The room was always dark and quiet, and had never been in the kind of disarray found in my bedroom. This was not because my mother had been more fastidious than I. Her bedroom had always been clean because she’d rarely stayed there. She’d usually stayed in someone else’s bedroom, in someone else’s home—first one, then another. Unlike most ghostly rooms, that room was haunted more by her absence than by the presence of any spirit.
    So cleaning up the spare bedrooms was a jolly affair, as usual.
    Summer air made the whole house musty, and there didn’t seem to be relief in sight. Though I had conceded to most modern conveniences over the years, my cabin did not have air conditioning. With fans and open windows, the house might be cooled to a bearable level in the evening. To ensure greater comfort for my guests, I drove all the way to Pine City for new window fans to put in each bedroom. The dust churned up by these