Journey, The Read Free

would-be thrill seekers.
    "There it is," Cass said as she walked toward a beam above the bottom of the stairway. "JG plus CS equals a whole lot of lovin'."
    Nancy laughed.
    Heidi ran her fingers along the top of a dusty stone fireplace and then turned to survey a fifteen-by-twenty-foot space that almost certainly served as the living room.
    "Did anyone ever figure out what happened to the Franklins?" she asked.
    "No. Every now and then someone calls the police and swears that they've seen one of the kids in Florida, or someplace like that. Then there are the ghost sightings," Cass said, rolling her eyes. "We get a lot of those. But there has never been anything that has amounted to something."
    Michelle didn't jump in with questions of her own. She didn't have to. Like most people who had lived in Unionville, Oregon, in the late seventies, she knew all about Roger and Sarah Franklin and their young children, Alice and Tim. They had moved to Unionville in January 1979 and had lived in the house barely three months when they literally disappeared.
    For weeks police had suspected that Roger had killed and disposed of his family to pursue a relationship with a pretty 22-year-old secretary he had hired and secretly dated shortly after becoming a junior partner in a law firm started by his brother. But no physical evidence supporting that theory – or any theory – had ever been found. Roger had vanished along with the others.
    The only clue to the family's disappearance had been a phone call between Sarah and her mother in Denver. Halfway through the conversation, Sarah had mentioned a commotion upstairs. She had placed the receiver on the kitchen counter, walked away, and never returned.
    The bank reclaimed the property two months later but could not unload it. No realtor and no buyer wanted to touch a home so directly connected to the mysterious and likely tragic disappearance of an all-American family.
    As Nancy and Heidi explored the main floor and debated the mansion's possibilities as a bed and breakfast, Michelle moved toward the hardwood stairway. She stopped on the bottom step, turned to face Cass, and smiled.
    "I've been in this house at least six or seven times, but I've never been upstairs. You think there are any ghosts?"
    "If there are, they're all drunker than skunks and passed out on the floor," Cass said. "I've been up there a thousand times and never heard as much as a 'boo,' much less Jacob Marley or Count Dracula. I think it's safe, hon. But let me get you a light."
    Cass walked to a small metal box attached to a nearby wall and retrieved an LED flashlight, the kind that smarmy salesmen peddled on late-night infomercials. The kind you had to shake ten minutes to get thirty seconds of light.
    Michelle took the flashlight from her friend, placed her purse on a small table at the foot of the stairs, and started up the steps. She silently praised herself for coming to the reunion. She missed real people and down-home experiences and was getting her fill of both on this long weekend trip to Oregon.
    When she reached the top of the stairs, Michelle peered down a long hallway and saw the open doorway of a well-lighted room at the other end. Wires hung from a spot on the ceiling that once supported a light fixture. But the rest of the corridor looked immaculate, from the paper-covered walls to the polished hardwood floor to the ornate doors that guarded the way to three rooms. She shook her head. Ghosts or not, this place was amazing.
    Michelle entered the open room, walked to the far wall, and peered through a large window. The view from the corner office, or bedroom, or whatever it was, was breathtaking. The woodwork alone was worth thousands. She vowed right then to do whatever it took to save the house, whether that meant donating generously to the preservation fight or buying the place outright.
    Looking out another window, which faced the river, she thought again of her life and her choices and the missed