The Old Wife’s Tales of Mystery, Murder and the Macabre
Original Short Stories by Marie Winters Haisan
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by Marie Winters Haisan
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Contents
1. Ashton’s Angel
2. Ghost Writer
3. The Last Dance
4. Loneliness
5. A Question of Innocence
6. The Resurrectionist
7. Silent Film Star
8. The Auction
9. Be Careful What You Wish For
10. Home from the Sea
11. A Matter of Life and Death
12. Poor Prince Hal
13. The Prisoner
14. Suicide Note
15. Twentieth Anniversary
16. The Best of Intentions
17. The Brothers Guilford
18. The Curse of Narcissus
19. The Gargoyles
20. Miss Mudge’s Retirement
21. The House on Montrose Street
22. Nonfiction
23. The Tattoo
24. The Angel in Charlie’s Bar
25. Carrie Harper
26. The Course of History
27. Imaginary Playmates
28. Letters from Salem
29. Silver and Gold
30. The Sins of the Fathers
31. Sticks and Stones
32. Why?
33. Beauty
34. Behind Every Great Man
35. Cult Classic Hero
36. Daddy’s Little Girl
37. Ghost of Alcatraz
38. It’s a Comfortable Life
39. Leather Apron
40. Man’s Best Friend
41. Mirror, Mirror
42. One Second to Midnight
43. The Self-Portrait
44. The Snowfall
45. Scavenger Hunt
Chapter 1. Ashton’s Angel
Ashton Roberts stood on the bridge, looking down at the swiftly moving river beneath him. He wondered how painful it would be when his body hit the surface of the water. Perhaps the force of the impact would stun him, and he would not be fully conscious when he drowned. Suicide by drowning was not the most desirable of methods, but Ashton had no access to a gun, fast acting poison or a supply of sleeping pills. He didn’t even have a garage, so suicide by carbon monoxide was out of the question, too. Other methods had been immediately ruled out because Ashton thought they’d be too painful.
Swallowing his fear, he climbed onto the handrail. After a few seconds of hesitation, he jumped. When he hit the surface he felt a sharp pain in his arm. He went deeper and deeper into the dark water. He wondered if he would hit bottom. Yet despite his decision to commit suicide, Ashton found himself holding his breath. He just didn’t have the courage to open his mouth and breathe the cold river water into his lungs.
In a sudden, desperate desire for self-preservation, he began to swim for the surface. His lungs started to burn from holding his breath as he frantically tried to propel himself upward. Finally, he broke the water’s surface and greedily gulped mouthfuls of fresh air.
Having narrowly avoided drowning, Ashton was faced with the problem of making it safely to shore. The current was strong, and he was being carried down river as he tried to swim.
Then, just as his strength was failing, he spotted a small rowboat nearby. He yelled for help and tried swimming toward it. A cramp raged through his leg, and he went under. When he surfaced again, he saw the boat coming toward him. The young girl in the boat tossed out a life preserver, and Ashton clung to it, fighting for his life. With amazing strength, the girl tugged on the life line and was able to pull him over the side and into the boat. Once Ashton was safely aboard, the girl took a blanket out of a large first aid chest and handed it to him.
“Take those wet clothes off and wrap yourself in this,” she instructed him.
The girl turned her back while he disrobed. Then he sat down, shivering, and pulled the blanket tightly around him.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” Ashton said through chattering teeth. “I owe you my life. If you hadn’t been here, I’d be a goner.
“No need to thank me,” she replied with a somber face.
Ashton sat quietly as the young girl made her way to a nearby dock. She tied the boat up and helped him climb out. Then she handed him his wet clothes and asked if he had any change.
He reached into the wet pocket and pulled out a small handful of quarters and dimes.
“There is a pay phone at the gas station three blocks from here,” she announced.
“I know it’s not necessary, but I’d like to show you my gratitude in some way.”
“There’s no need to,” the girl replied and got back down into the boat.
Ashton walked to the end of the dock, turned around and looked back. Both the young woman and her boat were gone.
“It was the damnedest thing,” he later told his friends. “She appeared from practically out of nowhere, and then she left without a word. I wanted to buy her lunch or something, show her my gratitude, but no dice.”
“Maybe she wasn’t human,” his friend Chuck laughed.
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe she’s an angel or something. ‘Cause this sounds an awful lot like that old Jimmy Stewart movie. You know the one where he jumps into the river and an angel pulls him out and shows him what the world would have been like if he’d never been born.”
“Do you know who I am, Chuck?” Ashton asked with a laugh.
“Course I do! We’ve been friends since third grade.”
“Then I’m not someone who’s never been born, am I?”
Chuck looked confused. “I suppose not,” he admitted.
***
The months went past, and Ashton realized how foolish he had been to jump from the bridge that day.
“To think I wanted to end my life just because I lost a job,” he said, remembering his desperation.
At the time he thought he would never find a job with the same salary and benefits as the one he had lost. He had imagined himself losing his car or not being able to pay his rent, or both. But his worries were all for naught. Despite his lack of a college education, he was able to find a job not only with a good starting salary but also one with an excellent chance for advancement.
Ashton’s whole life, in fact, changed for the better since the day the young girl fished him out of the river. He met a wonderful woman, and after a 15-month long courtship, the two were married. They saved their money for a year and bought a modest three-bedroom ranch in the suburbs. Two years later Ashton’s wife informed him that she was pregnant.
The young couple’s life remained full and happy until the eve of their tenth wedding anniversary. On that fateful day, Ashton was packing for a trip to Hawaii, and his wife had just returned from taking their two children to her mother’s house.
“It’s hard to believe that by this time tomorrow night, we’ll be strolling on a moonlit beach in Honolulu,” his wife said dreamily.
“Two weeks of sun, sea and romance,” he replied. “It will be the honeymoon we never had.”
“Don’t be silly, darling,” his wife laughed. “We’ve been on one long honeymoon for ten years now.”
Ashton took her in his arms and silently thanked God for sending such an angel his way.
“I’d better finish packing,” he said, reluctantly removing his arms from around his wife’s slender waist. “I’d hate to arrive in Hawaii and realize I left my swimming trunks or my socks in Massachusetts.”
His wife laughed. “All right, Romeo, I’ll let you finish packing. I’m going to go downstairs and see if I can find my camera bag.”
As Ashton tried to squeeze a dozen pairs of socks into the side pocket of his American Tourister bag, he heard his wife’s footsteps echoing down the hall and then down the steps to the first floor.
He hummed a lively tune as he took tee shirts and jeans out of his drawers. He was happy; he had all that he had ever wanted from life and more. Of course, he knew there would probably be tears as well as laughter in his future, but he felt that he could handle the hard times ahead. He was not the same young man who had jumped off a bridge when he lost his job; he was much stronger now.
Ashton went into his walk-in closet and took out one of his suits. It would come in handy if he decided to take his wife out for a romantic dinner in a nice Hawaiian restaurant. When he came out, suit in hand, he heard a movement in the hallway.
“Find your camera bag?” he called. There was no reply. “Honey?”
He saw a figure emerge from the shadows and appear in the doorway. Ashton dropped the suit.
“What are you doing here?” he asked with shock.
There was a look of sorrow on the young girl’s face. “Do you remember me?” she asked sadly.
“Of course, I do. You saved my life. But that was almost 12 years ago. How did you ever find me? And what do you want?”
“I told you then that I didn’t save your life.”
“Well you can continue to be modest, but I know I’d have drowned after falling into the river if you hadn’t pulled me out.”
“You didn’t fall in; you jumped off the bridge in an attempt to end your life.”
Ashton let out an embarrassed laugh. “Yes. How foolish of me to imagine death would be preferable to facing my problems.”
The young girl held her hands out in front of her with the palms up. Ashton looked down and saw a wide gash on each wrist.
“Oh my God! What have you done?” He went to the bathroom and got a towel to wrap around the girl’s lower arms.
“That isn’t necessary,” she said. “There is no blood.”
It was true. Frightened and confused, Ashton had not noticed that the girl’s wounds, although they appeared recent, were not bleeding.
“My boyfriend left me when I told him I was pregnant,” the girl explained. “I was desperate. I had nowhere to go, no one I could turn to. I felt the easiest solution was to die.”
“We were both wrong,” Ashton said. “Life is worth living. We have to hold on through the hardships because things are bound to get better.”
The young girl cast her eyes down as though ashamed to look him in the eye.
“When I told a friend about you,” Ashton continued, hoping to cheer the young woman up, “he said you were probably my guardian angel. Like in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. You know the one I’m talking about, don’t you? An angel shows George Bailey what the world would have been like had he never been born. Silly isn’t it?”
The girl raised her head and stared directly into Ashton’s eyes.
“In a way that’s what I am—an angel. But instead of showing you things as they might have been had you never been born, I have shown you what your life would have been like had you not died.”
Fear stabbed at Ashton’s heart. He called out to his wife.
“She’s not here.”
Ashton called again, louder this time, but there was still no reply.
“The woman who would have been your wife had you not drowned yourself nearly twelve years ago is married to an insurance salesman and lives in New Jersey.”
“That is insane.”
He picked up the phone and dialed his in-laws’ number. Perhaps his wife was there with the kids.
“You have no children either,” the girl said.
“I do, too!” he argued. “I have a son and a daughter. They’re at my mother-in-law’s house.”
The girl shook her head. “You jumped into the river and drowned. There was no boat or no life preserver to save you. When you met me you were already dead.”
“That’s not true!” he screamed.
“Suicide is a mortal sin. It carries with it two penalties. The first is that you must confront the life you ended so thoughtlessly. You are punished now by losing all that you would have had had you not taken your life.”
“You’re crazy.”
“The second penalty is that, like me, you must now guide future suicides as I have guided you. You will see desperate, unhappy people find hope and happiness, and you will then see them crushed under the weight of the truth.”
Ashton ran from the room, anxious to escape the young girl’s decree. But as his foot crossed the bedroom door threshold, he felt himself falling. Suddenly, the modest three-bedroom house in the suburbs vanished, and Ashton saw above him the outline of a bridge just as he felt his back hitting the surface of the water.
***
Martina Fox got into her BMW, turned the key in the ignition and pressed the button to lower the power windows. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“That lousy bastard!” she swore. “I hope he rots in hell for all eternity.”
She leaned over and turned on the radio. Nothing but news. She reached into the glove box, took out a CD and put it into the car stereo. U2’s “With or Without You” started to play and brought forth a fresh torrent of tears from Martina.
“How could he leave me for that little tramp?” she cried, turning off the music. “He’s old enough to be her father.”
For the past several years, Martina had spent three to four hours each day trying to make herself look young and attractive for her husband. But all the aerobics classes, facelifts, liposuction and Botox treatments had been for nothing. After 20 years of marriage, her husband left her for an 18-year-old cocktail waitress.
“I should be like Betty Broderick and go over there and shoot them both!”
Eventually, the tears stopped falling. Martina’s eyes began to feel heavy and she closed them. The humming of the BMW’s engine lulled her to sleep.
When she was awakened by the sound of the garage door opening, she panicked. Had someone phoned the police? Would they arrest her or send her to a mental institution because she’d tried to commit suicide?
A strange man opened the driver’s door and waited for Martina to get out. An ambulance was waiting in the driveway. One of the paramedics—a very handsome man who had lost his wife to cancer two years earlier—looked at Martina with compassion and something more.
“What an attractive woman,” he thought.
His interest was not lost on Martina, who suddenly realized that life might still hold some promise for her.
When the paramedic covered his mouth and entered the garage to turn off the car engine, Martina turned to the man who had found her.
“Thank you,” she said gratefully. “You saved my life.”
“No I didn’t,” the man said sadly.
“Yes you did. If it weren’t for you, I’d still be sitting in that car.”
She smiled at him briefly, and then the paramedics took her away.
Ashton Roberts felt his heart break for Martina Fox. She would soon fall in love with the handsome paramedic and realize how foolish she’d been to try to kill herself over her worthless husband. She would wake up one morning and realize that she was truly happy and that she had everything in the world to live for. That would be the fateful day when Ashton would return, destroy her happiness and put her back behind the wheel of the BMW where she had died.
Chapter 2. Ghost Writer
Windsor House had stood high on the cliff overlooking the Atlantic since before the Revolutionary War. Several of its owners—mostly wealthy sea captains—had added to the house over the centuries so that the original structure was hardly recognizable. Dominique took one look at the old house and fell in love with it.
“It has quite an amazing history,” the real estate agent explained as she showed Dominique through the rooms on the main floor of the house. “One of the early owners led a band of smugglers, one was rumored to be a privateer, one made his fortune in the slave trade and another—” The agent lowered her voice, like a schoolgirl telling her classmate a juicy secret. “—was found murdered in one of the upstairs rooms.”
“Murdered?” Dominique was instantly intrigued. “Was that the slave trader or the pirate?”
“Neither—a writer, found slumped over a desk in a small room in the east gable. No one ever did find the manuscript the poor thing was working on. And the body—well, there was nothing near it but a pen and an inkwell and a few pieces of blank paper.”
“How fascinating,” Dominique said.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you these things,” the real estate agent said, suddenly fearful of losing a large commission if she frightened the customer away. “Most people would find it disturbing to live in a place with such a dark history.” Damn! She was only making matters worse.
“Not me,” Dominique said. “I only wish the Lizzie Borden or the Amityville Horror house were up for sale.”
The agent gave her an odd look.
Dominique laughed at the woman’s reaction. “I’m a mystery writer, you see,” she explained. “Or at least I’m trying to be.”
“A writer, huh? I don’t believe we’ve ever had one in Puritan Falls.”
“What about the one who was murdered in this house?” Dominique reminded the agent.
“Yes,” the woman replied uneasily. “There was that one.”
***
Windsor House had a strange, unforeseen effect on Dominique. Only a few days after moving in, she began to have difficulty sleeping. Night after night, she lay awake until the early hours of the morning, listening for creaking floorboards, rattling windows or moaning winds. The odd thing about Windsor House was that there weren’t any such noises. This was highly unusual since the old house stood high atop a cliff on the rocky New England coast, and it was subjected to an almost constant barrage by either mild sea breezes or strong winds. Dominique had only to look out the bay window to see evidence of these winds, to see the trees bending in their path, to see fallen leaves blown along the ground or whisked high into the air. Yet inside the house, peace and quiet reigned supreme. Only the crackling sound of burning logs in the fireplace broke the tomb-like silence.
It wasn’t long before Dominique’s battle with insomnia began to affect her ability to write. She soon experienced what most of her fellow authors dreaded most—a profound case of writer’s block. Not only could Dominique not come up with any new ideas, but she couldn’t even fine-tune drafts of stories she’d written before moving into the old house.
“Perhaps I should get away from here for a while,” she thought. “I should go out and make friends with the people in the town.”
Thus, one warm October afternoon, she got into her Subaru and drove to the village of Puritan Falls. She walked around the Common and stopped in the antique shop, the bookseller’s, the hardware store, the grocer’s and finally the library. At each stop she introduced herself to the locals who treated her with politeness, but reserve. Dominique tried several times over the next few weeks to become part of the community, but none of the people of Puritan Falls welcomed her into their homes, nor did they accept any of her invitations to visit Windsor House.
“And I thought New Englanders were supposed to be friendly,” she thought. Feeling rejected by the townspeople, she retreated to her lonely old house, her unfinished and unedited stories and her sleepless, too silent nights.
***
Cooler weather set in, and Dominique spent most of her days reading novels, watching old movies on videotape and purposefully avoiding her computer and the dust-covered stack of incomplete stories beside it.
“Maybe I just wasn’t cut out to be a writer,” she admitted to herself over a glass of red wine in front of her fireplace.
She had wanted to be an author all her life, ever since she was a small child sitting on her mother’s lap, listening to tales such as The Tinder Box, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and The Little Match Girl. As she grew older and learned to read, she graduated from Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm to adolescent mysteries. In no time at all she read her way through the Nancy Drew series at the local library and then went on to the adult works of Edgar Allen Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.
“I used to have hundreds of good ideas for stories,” she thought with growing desperation. “Now I can’t even complete a single, well-constructed paragraph.”
As October passed and the coldness of November set in, Dominique grew tired of watching her small selection of videos and even became bored with reading. With so much free time on her hands, she decided to explore the huge house. She hoped to find one of the hidden passages the real estate agent had told her about, although Dominique doubted if there would be any pirate booty hidden behind a secret panel. She would probably find nothing but dust, spider webs and the corpses of dead rodents, but she enjoyed the idea of the mystery itself.
After searching the lower floors for several days, she found three hidden staircases, all of which led up to the attic, but there were no hidden rooms. Eventually, she began searching the attic itself—no easy task given the amount of dusty boxes, old luggage and cloth-covered antique furniture that had been stored up there.
“I guess the previous owners never heard of Good Will or the Salvation Army,” she said as she looked through several decades worth of old family heirlooms, unused furniture and cast off clothing. “Most of this stuff is just junk. I don’t know why anyone would want to keep it.”
Near the bottom of the pile, however, Dominique found a treasure. It was a small antique chest, made of exquisitely hand-carved cherry, probably the property of a fashionable 18th century young woman. “This will look beautiful on my coffee table. I can keep my magazines inside it.”
She took the chest downstairs and cleaned it with Old English furniture polish. “Looks like new,” she said. “And not a scratch on it.”
Dominique placed the chest in the middle of the living room coffee table. With one hand, she reached for her small stack of magazines and with the other she opened the latch on the chest. She was surprised to see that it was not empty. She had been so impressed by the chest itself that she had given no thought as to its possible contents. Inside was a small stack of papers, yellowed with age. Dominique gently took them out and thumbed through them. Her heart raced as she saw the faded handwriting, unmistakably the product of an old pen and inkwell.
“This might be—yes! I think I’ve located the murdered writer’s missing manuscript.”
Dominique wanted to curl up on the couch and read the pages, but her good sense prevailed. She had been working in the attic all day, and she was covered with perspiration, grime and dust. First, she would take a hot shower. Next, she would have something to eat, and then, finally, she would read the manuscript.
***
After her shower, Dominique quickly ate a microwaved frozen dinner, tossed the cardboard tray into the trash and went to the living room to read. She opened the chest and discovered with shock that the manuscript was gone. Someone, it seemed, had stolen the papers while she was in the shower, and that someone might still be in the house.
Her first instinct was to phone the police, but she was so terrified that she could not move. She stood still in the center of the room, listening for any sound of the intruder, for once grateful for the profound silence of Windsor House. After standing immobile as a garden statue for close to half an hour, Dominique finally summoned the courage to search the main floor of the house. She found all the doors and windows were locked. How had someone gotten in?
“They must have already been inside the house before I locked the doors. And if so—then that means they’re still here.”
She wanted to run outside, to get into her Subaru and drive as far away from Windsor House as possible. But the keys were in her purse, and her purse was upstairs in the bedroom. Summoning all her courage, she made her way slowly up the stairs, her ears alert for any sound, her feet ready to run if necessary. Dominique looked at the long hallway in front of her. Why hadn’t she chosen one of the smaller bedrooms near the stairs rather than the master bedroom at the far end of the house? While she was on that line of thought, why had she bought this old mausoleum of a house in the first place?
As she walked down the long hall, she neared a doorway about midway to the master bedroom. It was a small room with a slanted roof, one Dominique barely noticed before. A faint, flickering light emanated from behind its door. Could it be a flashlight? she wondered. She was about to turn and flee from what she was sure was the intruder, when she realized the glow might not be from a light at all. What if it was a fire?
“If I run,” she thought, “and it is a fire, this old place will go up like kindling. But if I act quickly, I might be able to extinguish the flames before they spread.”
Bravely, she tiptoed toward the open door and peaked inside. What she saw struck her with a strange combination of curiosity and fear. Three candles burned in a holder on a desk at which a man sat writing. No, it was not a man. At least not one of this world, for he was more transparent than opaque in substance. So too were the furnishings of the room. The desk, the filled bookcases, the pair of wingchairs and the small reading table were mere shadows rather than substance.
“I thought it would be exciting to live in a haunted house,” she admonished herself. “But wanting to see a ghost and actually being in one’s presence are quite different. Next time I’d better be careful what I wish for.”
The phantom writer picked his head up and turned toward the door. Dominique tensed, fearful of the confrontation. But the man looked right through her. “Is anyone there?” he called in an eerie voice that echoed through the room.
Not hearing a reply, the writer shrugged his shoulders, shook his head and resumed writing.
After several minutes, Dominique continued down the hall toward her room. There was no intruder, she realized—at least not a living one. Should she run from a ghost? Why? It didn’t seem as though he meant her any harm. Calling the police was out of the question. She could just imagine what their reaction would be if she asked them to evict a ghost from her house. Perhaps she should phone a priest. That didn’t seem like a good idea either. After all, she was not a Catholic. Would the church be willing to send an exorcist to help out a Protestant, and not a very devout one at that?
After giving the matter further thought, Dominique decided on the path of least resistance: for now, she would do nothing. She would wait and see what the days ahead would bring.
***
The following morning, as Dominique made her way down the long hall, she looked into the room under the east gable. Her ghostly visitor and all his furnishings had vanished. The room was once again empty, its walls and floor bare.
She went downstairs and, after putting the water on for coffee, went to the living room and opened the lid of the small chest. Inside was the manuscript. She picked up the pages and held them tightly against her chest. “You’re not going to get away from me again,” she said as she brought them to the kitchen to read over a cup of hot coffee.
Dominique read the first chapter. “Odd book for a man to write,” she commented. It was apparently a romance, one set in the years immediately following the American Revolution and written in the first person by a female character. The story began with a young woman journeying from Philadelphia to the home of her new husband, a successful young sea captain from Massachusetts. The idea of marriage to a stranger, arranged by her legal guardian, at first terrified the young woman. Upon meeting the handsome and dashing sea captain, however, the she fell helplessly in love.
“The usual romantic nonsense,” Dominique said with disappointment. But as she continued reading, she noticed that the tone of the story changed. The young bride soon learned that there was a darker side to her husband. He was moody, secretive and often bad-tempered.
“This is more like it! The fluffy little romance is turning into a Bronte-esque gothic tale. Will the brooding sea captain have a mad wife hidden in the attic like Mr. Rochester did?”
The manuscript, however, was not complete. Dominique was left sitting on the sofa with the yellowed pages in her hand, wondering what skeletons the writer might have revealed in the sea captain’s closet had he not been murdered.
“Perhaps I should hire a medium to contact the writer to find out how the story ends,” she laughed.
Then a bolt of inspiration struck her. She was a writer; she could complete the manuscript. For the first time in months, Dominique broke through the wall of her writer’s block. She ran upstairs to get her laptop, but as she passed the small room under the east gable, she stopped.
“I bought this place so that the atmosphere could inspire me. The greatest source of inspiration is right there in that room.”
An hour later, Dominique sat at a card table in front of the window in the small room, writing with a fountain pen she’d had for—who knows how many years. She continued the story where the dead writer had left off. She worked for several hours, stopping late in the afternoon, exhausted and hungry, yet deliriously happy because she was finally writing again.
***
Later that evening, as darkness set in, the ghostly writer returned to the room under the east gable. The card table and folding chair at which Dominique had sat earlier were clearly visible beneath the semi-transparent desk from a bygone era. The specter of the writer continued working on the manuscript.
“I wonder if he even noticed that I added several pages to his story.” If he had, he gave no indication of it.
During the next several weeks, this pattern remained unchanged. During the daylight hours Dominique worked on the manuscript, and at night her ghostly visitor assumed the task.
“It’s time for the graveyard shift to begin,” she joked one evening when she saw the ghost begin to materialize as the sun went down.
The next day, Dominique reread the entire manuscript over her morning cup of coffee. “This is really quite good,” she admitted. “I’ll bet my ghostly collaborator and I would have a bestseller on our hands if we—”
What was she thinking? How could she publish a book, half of which was written by a ghost?
“The idea is ludicrous!” she said, neatly arranging the growing stack of papers. “But who is to know that the book was not entirely my own creation? Is the phantom writer likely to rise from the dead, contact a lawyer and sue me for plagiarism? It’s highly unlikely. Why shouldn’t I submit the manuscript to a publisher?”
As the story of the young bride and her handsome sea captain progressed, however, Dominique began to experience feelings of unease. She started to imagine strange voices in the night and slight movements in the shadows. These could not be attributed to the ghostly writer, however, for she never saw him outside of the small writing room under the east gable.
Soon Dominique not only found herself hesitant to read the latest nightly installments written by the spirit, but she was also reluctant to pick up her pen and add her daily contribution.
“Oh great!” she thought. “First I couldn’t write, and now that I can, I’m too afraid to.”
Regardless of her fear, Dominique was oddly compelled to go up to the east gable each morning, read the manuscript and add her own thoughts. One day she wrote a particularly disturbing scene in which the young heroine learned her husband was involved with a group of unscrupulous townspeople who deliberately lured unsuspecting ships onto the rocky coast with bright lanterns. The captain and his henchmen would then kill the survivors, plunder the ship and hide all trace of their heinous crime. The young wife, who by now had lost her romantic ideals about the man she’d married, confronted him with this knowledge. His reaction had been both explosive and violent. He swiftly struck out with his heavy hand and administered a little husbandly correction.
Dominique put down her pen and stared at the paper. “Why did I write that?” she wondered. “I don’t even remember thinking about such a scene.”
For the first time she considered the fact that there might be an unknown force working through her. Was it the murdered man who had begun the manuscript so many years ago? Could it be that in his ghostly state he could enter her subconscious during the day and write through her?
Dominique pushed herself away from the card table. It had been weeks since she’d left Windsor House. Suddenly, she had to get away from it for awhile. She drove to town and ignored the curious stares of the townspeople; she was not there to try to make friends today. She wanted only to be among the living again.
Being a book lover by nature, Dominique naturally gravitated toward the public library. She walked through the lobby of the old building, looking at the selection of new releases. Suddenly her attention was drawn to a portrait above a large brick fireplace in a reading room to the right of the entrance. The man in the painting was about 50 years old and very handsome. The graying hair at his temples and the salt-and-pepper beard gave him a distinguished, regal look, but the steely glint in his eye revealed a darker side. Dominique moved closer and read the name plaque. The portrait was that of Captain Gideon Mayfield. An icy chill swept through her. Although the man’s name was never mentioned in the text, Dominique instinctively knew that this was the sea captain in the dead writer’s manuscript.
“You really existed,” she whispered, looking up into his menacing countenance.
“Excuse me? Did you say something?” asked an elderly librarian who had emerged from the rear of the building.
“I was just talking to myself,” Dominique replied, slightly embarrassed. “I’ve heard of this man, Captain Mayfield.”
“I’m not surprised. He was a very wealthy and prominent man here in Puritan Falls. Generous to a fault, too. He founded the library and donated a large collection of books to get it started.”
“He doesn’t look like a man who enjoyed reading.”
“The books belonged to his wife. She was murdered, strangled to death. The captain wanted to keep her memory alive, so he created this library in her honor. She was a writer, you see.”
“They lived in Windsor House,” Dominique said, stating a fact rather than asking a question.
“Yes. That’s where she was murdered. Funny thing, though. They never did find out who killed her.”
“They’ll know soon enough,” Dominique said mysteriously. Then, moving as though in a trance, she left the library, got into her station wagon and drove back to the old house. She walked, zombie-like, up the stairs and into the room in the east gable.
The card table and folding chair were gone. The room was fully furnished with a solid cherry writing desk, bookshelves filled with books, two wing chairs and a small reading table. Dominique took no notice of the room, its furnishing or of the long, flowing dress that had mysteriously replaced her jeans and sweatshirt. She walked to the desk, reached into the drawer and removed the pages she’d been working on. She had to be quick and make her escape before he came home, before he could prevent her from leaving.
As she was gathering a few personal items together, a shadow was cast into the room. Dominique turned. Gideon’s massive frame filled the doorway, cutting off the light from the hallway as well as her only means of escape.
“Where do you think you’re going, woman?” he bellowed.
“Nowhere,” she stammered as she shrunk from his threatening presence. “I just came upstairs to write.”
The captain stared at the sheaf of papers his wife was clutching in her hand.
“And just what is it you’ve been writing now?” he demanded to know.
“Nothing much. Just some foolish poems. You know how silly we women are.”
Gideon reached out and grabbed the papers. “I’ll see for myself, if you don’t mind.”
Dominique backed away, cornered like a frightened animal.
The captain’s face turned purple with rage as he read his wife’s detailed account of his nefarious dealings. “I see you haven’t learned your lesson,” he growled, advancing toward the frightened woman.
“No,” she whimpered. “Please don’t. I’ll destroy the manuscript. You can burn it in the fireplace if you’d like.”
“And what’s to stop you from writing these things down again? No. Women have got to learn to hold their tongues and stay out of a man’s business.”
The next few minutes seemed to pass in slow motion. Dominique tried to run, but her husband had only to reach out his long, muscular arm and catch her in his grasp. She fought bravely, but she was no match for the bear of a man who towered over her.
Captain Mayfield was further enraged by Dominique’s struggling. His hands reached around her neck, hoping to give her a good scare, but he underestimated his own strength, and within a matter of minutes, he choked his young wife to death.
Dominique’s body slumped to the ground. The captain picked her up and placed her in the chair at her writing desk. He then grabbed the papers, locked them in a small chest he’d taken down from the bookshelf and hid them both in the attic. Then he notified the local lawmen—most of whom had taken part in one or more of the captain’s shipwrecking parties—that his wife had been murdered by an intruder.
After a cursory investigation, the poor young woman’s body was sent back to Philadelphia for burial. Her murder was never solved, for no one in Puritan Falls would dare accuse Captain Gideon Mayfield of involvement in his wife’s death.
***
“This is by far your finest work,” the publisher said, looking across his desk at the grinning writer. “But it is in no way like the other stories you’ve submitted. Mind if I ask you where you came up with the idea for this one?”
The writer laughed. “It’s strange, but last year I moved into an old house in New England. I was actually suffering from writer’s block at the time, when I found a diary in an old chest in the attic. I was touched by the young woman’s story, so I decided to rewrite the diary in the form of a novel.”
“A diary, huh? Do you think this woman and her husband really existed?”
“I know they did. I saw the captain’s portrait in the Puritan Falls Library. Furthermore, I located his wife’s grave in an old cemetery in Philadelphia.”
“And you couldn’t find out who murdered her, could you?”
A smiled played across the writer’s face. “I think it was the captain himself.”
“You’re probably right,” the publisher agreed. “He was an unsavory sort of fellow according to your story.”
“As a matter of fact,” the writer continued. “I intend to do a little investigating into the poor girl’s death. I’d like to write a nonfiction article exposing this captain for the monster he was.”
“Well, when you finish it, bring it by. I’d love to read it.”
The writer stood and shook his publisher’s hand. Then he left the office, with his large advance check tucked safely in his jacket pocket.
After he left his publisher’s office, the writer made the long drive back to Windsor House. He walked up the main staircase and part-way down the long hallway to the small room in the east gable. The card table and folding chair were still placed in front of the window. The writer sighed. He hadn’t been completely honest with his publisher; he hadn’t told him of the strange visions he’d had while sitting in this room or of the conclusion he’d come to: that Windsor House was haunted by the ghost of the murdered writer, Dominique Mayfield.
Chapter 3. The Last Dance
Violet Chilton was a beautiful, vivacious young girl who lived with her wealthy parents on a large estate in southern Maryland. There she frequently entertained the gallant boys in blue who stopped in Washington, D.C., on their way south to fight the Rebels. These soldiers, who faced an unknown and perilous future, sought escape from the horrors of war by dancing with the pretty girls that flocked to Violet’s parties. None of these maidens, however, could hold a candle to Violet herself, and more than one brave Yankee fell victim to her charms.
The son of a humble farmer, Jeremiah Lynn had grown up in the small Massachusetts town of Puritan Falls. Until that wondrous day in 1863 when a young Union lieutenant took him to Violet’s house, Jeremiah had never been to a party, had never danced and had never seen a girl so lovely as his young hostess. Before the end of the evening, the innocent farm boy had fallen in love.
Every evening of his two-week stay in Washington, Jeremiah traveled to Maryland to visit the object of his affections. Although Violet was as much a coquette as the famed belles to the south, she sincerely cared for the handsome officer from New England. On the evening before going off to battle, Jeremiah went to visit Violet one last time. When she greeted him at the front door, she was weeping.
“What’s wrong?” he asked with concern.
“You’re leaving tomorrow,” she replied, wiping away her tears with a finely tatted handkerchief.
“Will you miss me?” His heart filled with hope.
“You know I will. I’ve grown quite fond of you these past few weeks.”
“They say the fighting won’t last much longer.”
“I hope that’s true. This war has lasted far too long already. Once it’s over, you can return to Massachusetts.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be going back there. I’ve been giving some thought to finding a job in Washington. There ought to be plenty of opportunities there for a man, once peace is restored.”
Violet smiled, and her blue eyes glistened through her tears.
“Then perhaps you can find the time to pay me an occasional visit.”
Jeremiah’s heart nearly burst with love for the young girl. He could no longer sit next to her and keep his passion a secret. Suddenly, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
“Marry me, Violet. Tonight, before I leave for Virginia.”
“I do love you, darling,” she cried. “But I couldn’t possibly marry you now. My father would never condone such a short engagement.”
Jeremiah looked heartbroken.
“My love,” Violet said, kissing him on the cheek. “Before you leave, go to my father and ask for my hand in marriage. He couldn’t possibly refuse a man in uniform, one willing to risk his life for our country. Then, once the war is over, we can be married.”
“And you will wait for me? Regardless of how long this dreadful war lasts?”
“Oh yes! I’ll wait even if it takes forever.”
***
Although her betrothed was somewhere south of Maryland fighting Bobby Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, Violet Chilton saw no reason to shut herself away as if she were a grieving widow. The music at her parents’ estate was as lively as ever, and Violet continued to dance with and charm the dashing Yankees who came to her parties to escape the grim realities of civil war.
In all fairness to Violet, however, she made it clear to all would-be suitors that she was engaged to Jeremiah Lynn and that their paying court to her would be a useless gesture.
“I will be married once the war is over,” she warned them. “So save your heart for another girl, one who is unattached.”
One young officer from Pennsylvania, Theobold Hutchins, who was permanently stationed in Washington, was not so easily put off. He realized that the longer the war lasted, the greater the probability that the young officer from Massachusetts would not come back alive. So, he bided his time and masked his strong feelings under the guise of simple friendship.
Much to Violet’s dismay, the war continued. There were terrible battles at Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor. Despite Grant’s superior numbers, Lee showed no sign of defeat.
“I don’t think this horrible war will ever end,” Violet cried.
Finally, in June 1864, Violet received word that Jeremiah Lynn was missing in action after the Battle of Lynchburg. The young girl was devastated and leaned on her friend Theobold more than ever.
***
In early April 1865 the City of Richmond fell. People in the north at last believed the end of the war was in sight. Violet Chilton, who was no longer the vivacious young girl who blithely danced in the arms of handsome Yankees, felt a sense of tired relief.
On the day that President Abraham Lincoln walked into the former capital of the confederacy and sat at President Jefferson Davis’ desk, Theobold Hutchins decided it was time to confess his true feelings for Violet.
“I love you and want to marry you,” he said, going down on bended knee.
“But I am already betrothed.”
“Darling Violet, it has been almost a year since Lynchburg. If your young man were still alive, you’d have heard from him by now.”
“He could be in a hospital or even a Confederate prison camp.”
“Had he gone to a hospital, someone would have written to you. Look, Violet, you know as well as I do that he’s probably dead. The number of unidentified soldiers on both sides is staggering. And even if he were captured, his chances of surviving are slim. I’ve heard stories about places like Libby Prison, Andersonville and Salisbury. Face facts: people in the South are starving. There’s not enough food to feed the army, much less to give any to their captured enemies.”
“I just don’t know,” Violet said, wringing her hands. “I have grown to care for you very much, Theo. I do want to marry you, but what if Jeremiah does come back? I promised I’d wait for him.”
“War breaks many a promise. Just look at the thousands of widows and orphans it has created. Jeremiah is probably dead, but there is no need for you to throw your life away because of a promise.”
Theobold gently took Violet in his arms. She rested her head on his chest. The last ten months had taken a toll on her. She was exhausted and relieved to let someone else make the decision for her.
***
On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the home of Wilmer McLean in Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Although this did not yet mean the end of the war—since Generals Johnston, Taylor and Smith were still putting up a fight—the greatest threat to the Union had come to an end. Politicians, carpetbaggers and scalawags were already preparing for the reconstruction of the South.
On that historic day, Theobold Hutchins and Violet Chilton were married in her parents’ house in Maryland. A feast was prepared in honor of the occasion, and for the first time since June 1864, the doors to the grand ballroom were thrown open. Once again, music filled the house. Only now, Violet did not feel like dancing. Although she had aged less than a year chronologically, emotionally, she was much older. The gay, flirting coquette was gone, another innocent victim of the War Between the States.
The happy groom sat at a table drinking brandy with his new father-in-law. The bride stood amidst a group of girlfriends who were flirting with the few single men in the room, most of who were, like Theobold, soldiers stationed in Washington.
“Cheer up, Violet,” one of her close friends said. “You’ve just married a very handsome man. Count your blessings you’re no longer single like us. The war has managed to whittle down the number of eligible bachelors considerably.” Too late, the young woman realized the foolishness of her remark. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Violet. I forgot about Jeremiah. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s all right,” Violet reassured her with a pained smile. “I’m married to Theo now. Jeremiah must be consigned to my memories. In fact, it’s high time I put the past behind me and get on with my life. Excuse me, ladies,” she added, looking toward her husband. “I believe I’d like to dance.”
Violet walked over to the musicians and asked them to play Aura Lee. Then she smiled at Theobold—an open invitation. He accepted with an answering smile and started toward the dance floor.
A sudden gust of wind blew the front door open. An icy chill crept into the ballroom, a bitter coldness quite unnatural for April.
“I’d better go shut the door,” Violet announced. She took only a few steps and then abruptly stopped.
Barely a foot from the French doors that were wide open for the occasion, Violet was the first to see the uninvited guest. Jeremiah’s features were all but obscured by a strange white fluorescence. This frightening specter floated rather than walked up to Violet and extended his arm. The horrified bride looked into the lifeless eyes and swooned. Jeremiah caught her in his arms and carried her to the dance floor. The rest of the guests were too frightened or too stunned to react, even the bridegroom.
Against their will, the musicians played an unearthly, discordant tune. Jeremiah began to dance, clutching the terrified bride to his chest. The music increased in tempo, and Jeremiah whirled across the floor like a dervish. The ethereal officer from Massachusetts danced so fast that soon the wedding guests had difficulty distinguishing his form from that of the poor bride. They could see only a radiant white haze. Then the music climaxed in a deafening crescendo that left many of the guests covering their ears in pain.
“Violet!” Theobold screamed with mournful agony. But his beautiful bride and her ghostly dancing partner had vanished.
***
June passed, and it was July. That fateful April was now only a memory. The nation was reunited, the slaves were freed and the surviving soldiers had headed home. Americans had buried their dead and were now seeking to put together the pieces of their broken lives.
On a hot July afternoon, Colonel J. Risque Hutter, a former Confederate hero who had been wounded and captured during Pickett’s ill-fated charge up Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg, was walking through a wooded area adjacent to his home, Sandusky House, in Lynchburg, Virginia. There he saw a sight all too familiar to him during the preceding five years. It was the body of a dead soldier—a Yankee, he guessed, by what was left of the blue uniform that clung to the bones in tatters.
“Another one,” he sighed. “Haven’t I seen enough dead men for one lifetime?”
Hutter leaned over and turned the rotted corpse over, hoping to find some clue to the dead man’s identity. Luckily, one of the soldier’s pockets had remained intact. Inside, Hutter found a well-worn photograph of a pretty young woman. On the back, the faded handwriting read,
My darling Jeremiah,
May God keep you safe. Hopefully, the war will end soon and you can return to me. Till then, I’ll save a dance for you.
All my love,
Violet
“Poor guy,” Hutter said, regardless of the fact that the dead man wore a different uniform than he had. “That’s one dance you’re never going to get.”
As the former Confederate colonel dragged the corpse out of woods so that it could be properly interred, a gold wedding band fell from the dead man’s skeletal fingers. It was the gold band that Theobold Hutchins had placed on the third finger of Violet Chilton’s left hand three months earlier.
Chapter 4. Loneliness
Victor walked down the lonely city street. It was black as pitch, for there were no streetlights, and the moon and stars were obscured by a dense layer of cloud. But Victor had no difficulty finding his way; his eyes were accustomed to darkness.
As he approached the entrance of The Chamber, a light rain began to fall. Two young people hurried through the door ahead of him. The Chamber wasn’t much of a place—just a dozen or so tables, a make-shift stage and a bar, but it was one of the few places in that part of the city that was open at 4:00 A.M.
The interior of the gothic club was as dreary as the night outside. The walls had been painted black and purple, and only artificial candlelight cut through the darkness. A young woman, wearing a strange outfit of black leather, lace and safety pins, sat in a chair in the center of a small stage, reciting poetry.
“Loneliness,” she said dramatically, “is a cancer that devours my happiness and a ruthless invader who rapes my peaceful slumber….”
Victor smiled. The beautiful young woman may have been many things, but she was no poet, at least not when one compared her verses to those of Byron, Keats and Shelley.
Victor sat at the bar and ordered a glass of red wine. As he sipped it, he watched the poet recite her ode to the inattentive audience.
“Loneliness,” she concluded in a whisper, “it shall be the death of us all.”
She left the stage, talked to several people sitting at the tables and then made her way to the bar.
“New in town?” she asked, taking the glass from Victor’s hand and swallowing the last of his wine. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
“Do you know everyone who comes in here?”
“Just the good-looking men,” she smiled provocatively.
Victor returned her inviting smile. “Are you paid for performing here?”
“Nah. Anyone who feels like emoting can go up on stage and give voice to their pain. It’s like group therapy in a way.”
“Does it help?”
“Sometimes. There are a lot of pain killers in the world. If this one doesn’t work, I take something stronger.”
“Such as?”
The woman eyed Victor with suspicion. “Are you a cop or something?”
“No. I’m just a stranger in town with nowhere to go.”
The smile returned to the young woman’s face. “I know a nice, quiet place—perfect for strangers.”
Victor put the empty wine glass on the bar and followed her outside. As they left The Chamber behind, the young woman placed her arm around her companion.
“Don’t you know it could be dangerous picking up strange men in bars?”
“You sound like my father,” she laughed. “You might be dangerous, but I doubt it. Besides, strange men are the only cure to what ails me.”
“And what is that?”
“Loneliness. Chronic loneliness.”
“What do you know of loneliness?” Victor asked sadly. “You’re what … 19? 20? You’re just a child.”
“You make yourself sound so old,” she teased. “You don’t look a day over 25.”
“Actually, I’m much older than I look.”
The young woman renewed her attempt at seduction. “I’ll bet a good-looking guy like you has never been lonely a day in his life.”
Victor shook his head sadly. “Loneliness, like death, lies waiting to claim us all.”
“Hey, I like that. Mind if I use it in one of my poems?”
“Be my guest. But tell me: are you really that lonely?”
The young woman was pleased. The handsome stranger was taking her bait. “Yes. I get so lonely sometimes that I wish I were dead.”
Victor took her into his arms, and she laid her head on his shoulders. He gently kissed her cheek and then her neck. He felt her stiffen, momentarily struggle, shudder and then finally go limp in his arms. Victor let the young woman’s body fall to the cold, wet ground. Then he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped her blood from his face.