Twelfth Night (A Wendover House Mystery Book 2) Read Free Page A

There is always a price, isn’t there?
    Actually, there were fewer outlets in each of the upstairs rooms
than I would like, but in some rooms we were lucky to have them at all. Mr.
Benson had employed great ingenuity in this matter. The man was an
architectural surgeon.
    Case in point, the blue room. It
was during the wiring of my grandmother’s old bedroom that I began to dream
about the dark-haired woman. We had had to pull up part of the floor, which had
proven rather easy because someone had made a secret compartment there already.
In it I found a letter—unreadable and crumbling except for one little bit at
the bottom of a page … and he ordered
that she be putt to death, the executione to be no
later than five of the clock. There being no road in this extremity of the woods,
it was a deed witnessed only by those who came on foott ….
And there was a brittle yellow handkerchief and a lock of brittle, butterscotch-colored
hair that I believed came from an adult and not a child. The color was also
very familiar. Touching it raised gooseflesh on my arms and I thought of
stories of death contamination and how the sins of the fathers were visited on
the children ’til Kingdom come, Amen.
    Mr. Benson’s voice interrupted my sudden dread and shocked
me into action. As little as I wanted to touch those artifacts, even less did I
want someone else to see them.
    “… glad that the leaf- peepahs have gone. They— sonova’oah —uh,
sorry for the language. But I’ll be murdehd if
I can see any way around this stud. I— are you okay,
Miss? Did you find a rat?” Concern replaced annoyance. Apparently Mr. Benson
expected to find rats and also expected me not to like that.
    “No rat. I’m fine,” I managed to say as I scooped up the
paper, cloth, and hair with reluctant fingers and hid them with my body. The
hand that touched them went numb and cold.
    “Why don’t you sit down, Miss. There’s no need for you to work here.”
    “How about some lunch? Maybe we can
think of another way around the wall when we get some food in us.” My voice
sounded almost normal as I dumped them in the first receptacle I found. It
happened to be my grandmother’s old jewelry box.
    “ Ayuh , that would be cunnin ’. You make
some wicked good chowdah , Miss. No one would guess
you were from away.”
    I forced a smile. This was a compliment of no mean order.
    We ate. Mr. Benson thought of a work-around for the wiring.
I sat with a cold hand that only gradually regained feeling.
    The woman I saw in my dreams that night—and sometimes waking
hours in the days after—was nameless and faceless, a figure of darkness that
eyes couldn’t always detach from the rest of the dark around her. She never
actually entered the house, though I thought she wanted in. Instead she stood
in the garden looking up at my grandmother’s window, night after night, twisted
hand raised in supplication. I think that she was crying as well as sometimes screaming,
but it was difficult to tell because tangled hair covered her face and she was
always standing in the rain. Even when it wasn’t raining.
    At first I dismissed her as a nightmare, like one of Scrooge’s
blots of mustard or underdone potatoes, conjured up by those horrible words on
that yellow paper. But night after night she came back, and I know that after
the first sighting I was not asleep when I saw her. Always in
the same place. Always looking up at the same window. My grandmother’s window. I have always believed in my
senses and I didn’t think my eyes lied.
    It took my mind a while to accept that this room had
belonged to people before my grandmother. This sounds stupid now, but so
completely did the house belong to me that I just couldn’t seem to admit that I
had ancestors who had been living and dying in that house for almost three
hundred years. It was my house— mine —and for a while my
great-grandfather’s. But the ghost persisted and eventually I did accept the
emotional truth