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

that others had felt this way before me. And, God willing,
others would feel that way after. We didn’t own the house, the house owned us.
    These facts reluctantly accepted, if not liked, it followed
that this apparition was probably a relative who had lived here, and I found
myself driven to discover who she was. Her dress was early eighteenth century.
Back then, only my family had lived on the island.
    I began to have daytime reveries, thoughts—memories almost—of
a dark forest. I/she was always bound, riding in a cart. Though my daydreams
revealed nothing definite of the identity of whose terrified thoughts I was
sharing, I had begun to suspect that she was the woman who had been accused of ensorceling Everett and Bryson Sands’ ancestor, the
lecherous Colonel Sands. The one who had cursed him from the
gallows, and whose bloody handprint appeared on his tombstone and would not wash
away. The legends were unclear about her identity and she was never
named in the accounts I’d read, but the Wendovers have a certain “look” and this
ghost had it. Like my grandmother. I have it too—the dark hair and strong
features with even stronger bodies.
    Information from beyond is a kind of lens that focuses the
brain on things it didn’t see before though they had probably always been
there, trying to gain our attention. Let me add that I did not fear her. I felt
horror and pity at her state, but did not sense that she wished me harm. The
ghost was not after me. She wanted something else. At least, I believed so. The
pain she caused me with her memories was unintentional.
    Consumed by an ever-growing curiosity and a desire to prove
my theory that she was kin, I began going through all the books stored in the
attic. At first glance the old books seemed boring and irrelevant, just like most
of the other books in the library. I read lots of them and the pages were
absolutely buttered with boring facts about boring people. The Reverend Hayworth, seeking the rewards of Heaven by shewing the prodigious benefits to avoidance with putrid
locals and rootts of plants near unto the forest
where word of the Savior who died to redeeme mankind
has not yet been received ….
    You get the idea. But I persisted. The dry and wordy old
tomes full of fading ink had been hidden in the attic for a reason.
    First, I learned from some old letters and journals that my
great-grandfather had been a philanderer before his marriage, and after his
wife’s death he became reclusive. Peculiar. Hostile even. He saw ghosts and had visions—which he did his
best to ignore. But between what he saw in the garden, and what I was able to
gather from other sources, an idea began to form. Bit by bit, the story was
revealed until I had a general outline of what was billed as a case of
witchcraft, but which was actually a judicial murder, the law being used as a
weapon to rid a man of an embarrassment instead of for justice for a real crime.
    I was satisfied, incensed, and frustrated all at once.
    My quest hadn’t reached the level of true obsession, but it
might as well have because there was no way I could let the questions go, not
with the woman crying outside the window, demanding my help. I was in danger of
also becoming reclusive, peculiar, and even hostile, because I did nothing but
read and reread old books and take notes on ancient events. It had become very
important that she have a name—an identity so that she was not left labeled as “the
witch.” She had been murdered, which was bad enough, but they had even stolen
her name and stripped her of personhood, turned her into an evil icon, a
footnote in an obscure legend. Made it seem that she—the living, breathing
person—had never even existed.
    Finally I had a light-bulb moment and I turned to the family
Bible, seeking an actual name in the one place where they would be listed. There,
after much interesting but pointless reading of the most villainous handwriting
on the planet, I hit pay dirt. One