The Haunting of Alcott Manor, page 29
part #1 of Alcott Manor Series
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” She repeated the word over and over as if she could prove this idea wrong. Make it untrue. “Dear God. Please. No.”
Her first thought was of her father, and how she couldn’t leave him. If she were dead, he’d be devastated. Then she thought of the newspaper article. Good God, was he gone, too?
She thought of her childhood home, the warm, happy place where her father still lived. She wanted to see if he was there. As quickly as she thought of his house, there was a rushing, a whooshing of colors and sounds that flew by her and sucked her forward. There was no inertia, just a tugging forward, and then she was there.
The house was empty of his things, and he was nowhere to be found. Some other family occupied her childhood home. It was a young family with crayons and Play-Doh scattered on the dining room table. People she didn’t know. A dining table she didn’t recognize.
Then she thought of her own home on Stinson Beach, and with a surrounding muddle of colors and noises, she was there. She landed in her kitchen, only to find a too-thin woman with long blonde hair who argued with a man whose Popeyed biceps boasted large, dark blue tattoos, one per arm.
Gemma circled the couple and listened to the man growl that the woman had spent too much money on clothes the week before. The woman popped her right hip out, grunted, and left her mouth open an inch.
She went to her foyer and found that her grandmother’s mirror was gone. In its place was a coatrack, a stone side table, and a half-mirror hanging above it. She drifted through the house searching for the familiar, but nothing was, other than the layout of the house.
The colors the couple had chosen to use for decorating were awful. “No one should use this light maroon color on a wall, especially in a beach house.” She pressed close to the wall to examine the color and scrunched her face as if the paint smelled like garbage. “Actually, this is puce. You don't put puce on any wall. Ever.”
When she passed through the kitchen again, the couple was still arguing. Gemma stood next to the island in the middle of the kitchen. She put her hand on the side of a white plate that held a hot bowl of sauce-covered pasta and shoved it hard enough that it crashed on the floor.
The husband stopped mid-bitch. “Did you see that? It just flew through the air!”
The wife looked at the plate of pasta on the floor in amazement. “Do you think we have a ghost? Do you think it’s the last owner of the house? She could still be here.”
Both the husband and wife searched the upper half of the room in awe.
Gemma shook her head and walked out. “Morons.”
She stood on the back porch and watched the two striped cats that she used to feed run up to the house that was situated beside hers.
She followed them and found Cameron, her neighbor with the angular glasses, whose attention she did her best to ignore. He put two white bowls of fresh meaty cat food on his back stoop for the cats.
When the cats ran up, they stopped and gazed at Gemma. She knelt next to them and they purred and circled her.
“What are you doing there, kids?” Cameron asked. “Don’t you want your dinner?”
“Be good to him,” Gemma said to the two cats. “He’s your meal ticket now.”
The cats meowed and pranced to their bowls.
“Did they finally show up?” A dark-haired woman exited Cameron’s house, sidled up to him, and threaded her arm around his waist. She wore teal-colored scrubs and a large laminated name tag around her neck that read: Cynthia Harris, Nurse.
Gemma laughed. She smiled at Cameron and crossed her arms. He wasn’t a bad guy. He just wasn’t her guy.
Her mind shot to Henry. Beautiful, complicated Henry. He had spent his short life trying to do the right thing by others, only to be blindsided in the end. Then he spent his afterlife angry over the injustice of it all, trying to right the wrongs that had been done to him. In the process, he lost his way forward.
Anger could do that to a person. Anger could turn into a crutch that you used as an excuse to keep from moving forward.
Though sometimes, with the right person at your side, you could come back to yourself and find the most fitting path onward.
With the simple thought of him she was back in his arms.
“Are you all right?” His soft touch caressed her cheek, his sweet earthy scent surrounded her.
She stared at him for a long moment, still stunned, but feeling oddly grateful. She finally nodded, slowly. “I thought dead would be different. Empty somehow. And yet, here I am. Still alive.”
“Come on,” he said and led them outside.
A yellowish glow came over the rose garden, just as it had on her first day at Alcott Manor when she saw the flowers with her father.
“Why didn't you tell me? Right from the beginning, you must have known…what I was.” A sick feeling washed over her stomach for saying it. And though she knew she wasn't actually sweating—ghosts didn't sweat—she could feel a cool, sticky damp cover the back of her neck. “A ghost."
“You didn't know you were dead, you were on a mission, you were insistent on helping the property. I tried to discourage you, but you wouldn't hear it. What could I have said to you about your current state that wouldn't have scared you off or made you think I was a lunatic?”
She thought about what he said. Ultimately, she decided he wasn't wrong. If he had told her early on that she was a ghost, she would have thought him a nut. She would have gone on about her business at the manor, trying to restore it for her father—who wasn’t even here any longer.
Ghost stories didn’t get any more classic than hers. That thought made her feel a little ill. She had always prided herself on how independent she was. Accomplished. Smart.
That she could miss something so obvious humbled her.
Though not as much as Henry's love. “You stayed with me all this time just to help me?”
He nodded. “It started out that way. I couldn't let you be damned to the kind of life I’d had to live for the last hundred-plus years. So I thought we might work together to help with the restoration and, hopefully, find the note.” He pulled her a little closer, his smile soft with love, forever love. “Then I fell in love with you.”
She didn't think ghosts cried. But she did. Her mother was right yet again.
Ghosts are people, too.
“Thank you, Henry.” She ran her hand along his chest, which was still solid to her touch. “I think you saved my life.”
His eyes, the most mesmerizing form of hazel she’d ever seen, like a tempest in the sea, seemed to warm and respond to her. "I think you may have saved me right back.” His South Carolinian accent charmed and claimed her, setting her world to right.
The warm ocean winds drifted calm and gentle around her now. Several months ago, they had foretold her future, and they had been accurate. Her life as she knew it had exploded in tumultuous change, and all the while, she moved ahead on the appearance of calm.
“The good news is that we're together and we don't have to be apart from one another.” His kiss caused her to melt into him as if he were a dream come true, as if he were tailor-made for her, as if he were the only one who could be.
When she finally pulled away, she wondered. Who’s to say that he wasn’t? If silver linings existed, and she was inclined to think now that they did, who’s to say that wasn't a part of what the manor wanted for her all along?
“Would we stay here?” She looked at the back of Alcott Manor and wasn't at all excited about the idea. Thanks to Asher, the inside of the house was in far worse shape then when she’d arrived. It was completely untenable.
At least the soul of the home had been restored. Refreshed. Perhaps even completely reborn. She had been able to accomplish that for Henry, for the Alcott family, and for future generations.
“No, I’m ready to move on.” He kissed her left hand and gave her engagement ring a nudge. “With you.”
She had no idea how it was that that ring could sit on her finger in her current condition, but she was pretty happy that it did. “Where shall we go? Would you like to see the world?”
Henry shook his head and clasped her hand to his chest. “This way.” He guided them toward the rose garden.
For the first time in a very long time, Gemma wasn’t thinking about clients, her career, or fixing someone else’s problems. She was thinking about something far more important.
There was a warm yellow glow around the rose garden. More of a golden glow, actually, and a pull to it that tugged at her midsection. They glided forward together, into the light. In the distance, she thought she saw her parents, arm in arm, smiling. Waving.
“This way?” She pointed toward the endless light that appeared to surround her and love her from all directions.
“Gemma. When I said I wanted to spend forever with you, I really meant forever.”
When he kissed her, she heard the melody again, the one she’d always known but had forgotten about until Henry held her one night.
When she was a child and heard it the first time, she knew it was a sign—the promise of the perfect man.
Now that she heard it again, she knew Henry was the fulfillment of that promise—the man who was perfect for her.
Chapter 39
Layla Alcott’s two young girls pressed against the window, hands over their mouths, laughing while they overlooked the rose garden closest to the back of Alcott Manor.
“Girls! What are y’all giggling about?” Layla called to her daughters. She had never stepped foot inside the manor before today because she never felt comfortable with the energy of it. It had always felt too dark to her.
Unexpectedly, Tom with the Historic District Commission called and invited her in. She’d met Tom when his friend Mr. Stewart had landed on her hospital floor after a terrible car accident.
She wasn't going to accept Tom’s invitation. But he said he had news. Big news.
“They’re kissing!” Emma Catherine, Layla’s youngest daughter, could not contain her laughter. Her long dark ponytail swished against her back.
Tom had explained that there was a strange turn of events—a birth certificate, of all things, had been uncovered in the restoration. Anna Alcott had had an affair with Sam Cardill, who was one of her newly deceased husband’s relatives. The affair resulted in a child, a little girl they called Lizzie Mae. That made Asher a verified Alcott descendent. Which, in turn, made Layla the largest stockholder in the Alcott family organization.
Layla’s work clogs ka-thunked against barren floors that were in the process of being cleared of ripped-up pinewood and other dangerous items. She leaned to the girls’ height and peered out the window. “Who’s kissing?”
Tom explained that they would win the appeal in the courts, thanks to the video proof they'd found of Asher destroying the property. And, also, that there would probably be another vote among members of the Alcott family. Since she was the leading stockholder, he encouraged her to take a position as the family representative and to oversee the manor’s—hopefully final—restoration.
She wanted to turn him down. After all, she was a trained nurse. She didn’t know anything about restorations or historic properties. She also tended toward the shy side, and if there were a family battle, she didn't know how she felt about that.
But Tom reminded her that she tipped the scales in their favor, and she could be a positive influence if she wanted the restoration. And she did. That she knew. She believed in second chances.
The property was different now, Tom had told her. He admitted that it did have rather a creepy past, but something had changed for the better. He couldn’t describe why or how the manor changed, he just insisted that it had. “Something has lifted,” he’d said. He wanted her to come to the house to see it for herself. To feel it for herself.
So she did.
It only took a few steps onto the land for her to recognize that change. She and the girls usually stopped on the beach and didn’t go any farther, because that’s when she got that tight feeling around her head and heart. Like she was suffocating.
Today she could breathe, and she decided Tom’s description was right. Something had lifted. Something was gone. Something had left. It was enough of a change to motivate her to walk right inside and look around.
Emma Catherine made a goofy face and pointed her thumb in the direction of the garden. Anna Kate, her eldest and most blonde, faced the other way, wrapped her arms around herself in a mock-make-out session. Both girls squealed with laughter and ran off.
“Y’all be careful! Take it outside!” Layla’s smile was an honest grin that bloomed from her heart whenever her girls were in sight. She shook her head while she watched the girls chase each other through the kitchen, and she heard the screen door squeak and slam.
Such a nice sound.
With Asher gone, she and her daughters would live a very different life now. A better one, she hoped. A new beginning, she decided. Maybe she’d finally lose the rest of the weight she wanted to.
She pressed toward the window and searched the outside. She didn’t see anyone out there, much less a couple kissing.
But she did notice a beautiful yellow glow around Anna Alcott's rose garden.
Keep reading for an excerpt from A MURDER AT ALCOTT MANOR
by Alyssa Richards
A Note from the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I’ve often heard that a story can choose its author. Such was the case with THE HAUNTING OF ALCOTT MANOR. As I finished LOST IN TIME, my intent was to write more in THE FINE ART OF DECEPTION SERIES. But the story you’ve just read dropped in on me. Like a butterfly it landed gently on the forefront of my mind and refused to leave.
I tried to argue with this creative nudge—I had plans for a different book, a different series. But for nearly a week I felt Henry’s presence while he retold his story, it was as if he was in the room with me. I was so touched by the ending, I finally decided to put down my own plans and write his tale.
If you enjoyed THE HAUNTING OF ALCOTT MANOR, there are two more stories in this series: A MURDER AT ALCOTT MANOR and A STRANGER AT ALCOTT MANOR.
You can learn more about them on my website www.AlyssaRichards.com or on my Amazon page.
Or if you’ve already read them, you might enjoy THE FINE ART OF DECEPTION Series. These books focus on Addie and her touch that reveals secrets. And Blake whose secrets might be more than she can handle. If you like paranormal suspense, past life love and a touch of time travel, then you’ll love this series!
I love to hear from my readers. You’re welcome to get in touch with me at alyssa@paranormalromancebooks.com or via my website. While you’re there, sign up for my mailing list so I can let you know when I have a new title.
I hope you enjoy your visit to Alcott Manor!
Alyssa Richards
A Murder at Alcott Manor
Don’t miss the next story in Alyssa Richards’ ALCOTT MANOR Series—A MURDER AT ALCOTT MANOR!
Her dreams are haunted, but he’s a non-believer. Can they solve a ghostly mystery before it’s too late?
Layla is down to her last cent. Her late, abusive husband left her homeless, in debt, and with two young girls to care for. When she’s offered the position of caretaker at her old manor home, she chooses to overlook the hauntings… and the spot where her husband was murdered.
Mason left the stressful stockbroker business for a simpler life in construction. He’s hoping the seasonal renovation job will lead to something greater and give him the chance to reconnect with his childhood friend Layla. But a series of strange happenings may force Mason and Layla to reveal dangerous secrets they’ve never shared with a soul…
When Layla realizes she’ll need to tap into her otherworldly abilities to protect the manor, Mason is more than skeptical. But she’ll need both her supernatural strengths and his support to solve the deadly force that threatens her family…
A Murder at Alcott Manor is the standalone second book in a series of gripping paranormal romance novels. If you like contemporary gothic settings, mystical dreams, and danger-defying romance, then you’ll love Alyssa Richards’ haunting tale.
Read on for a sneak peek!
Chapter 1 - A Murder at Alcott Manor
“I know this must be hard for you,” Layla’s attorney said.
Billy Langmire sat composed, his tanned skin as smooth and flawless as his expensive navy blue suit. He would never understand just how hard this was for her.
She knew this from the polished and perfect gold band on his well-manicured ring finger. And she knew this from the silver framed photos of his beautiful blond wife and little boy, on the dunes at the white sand beach. And she knew this from the trophy fish that was hung on the wall behind his desk. She often wondered if someone like him ever had real problems, or did he only have difficult choices.
She pinched the soft skin of her thigh beneath the teal green of her scrubs. Numbness was covering her inch by inch like a thick blanket and she hoped the sharp nip from her nails would snap her out of it. Guilt was swallowing her whole, as if a giant whale engulfed her into its dark, watery belly, and she descended into nothingness.
She hadn’t felt this lost since the end of high school, when she had been accused of killing Brooke Williams—an event that caused Layla’s life to jump its rails. It simultaneously destroyed her future with Mason, the man she thought she would marry. And it landed her in a marriage with Asher Cardill—her newly deceased husband who continued to ruin her life, even from the grave.
Back then, an entire summer of official charges and public humiliation had taken place before the police had ultimately proven her innocent. “There just isn’t enough evidence to support the claims,” the detectives had finally said.
