Donn's Legacy, page 5
For an instant, I considered going downstairs and telling Darlene my theory. I could encourage her to start clearing out some of her accumulated junk. But though Yuri pushed a “supernatural second” approach with the Soul Searchers, trying to rule out mundane answers before turning to paranormal ones, he still set up our ghost-hunting gear. He always made sure.
With my back against the frame of an open bedroom door, I settled myself into a relaxed, cross-legged seat on the floor. I placed the sage and the campy lighter on the floor in front of me, within easy reach in case they were needed. Then, eyes closed, I took a deep breath in through my nose. The dusty air burned my nasal passages, but I did my best to ignore the sensation, holding my breath for a moment before slowly releasing it out of my mouth. I repeated the process, focusing on a different part of my body with each breath until I could slump, relaxed, against the doorframe.
The breathing technique was relatively new to me. Elizabeth had shown me how to do it during a recent massage session as a way to help me clear my mind. Once I was no longer thinking about my surroundings or worrying about the future, it was easier to cast my consciousness outward.
I did so more thoroughly than I had in the cemetery. There, I had only been feeling for my mother—and half-heartedly at that. In my experience, cemeteries were some of the least haunted places around. I’d had far more hair-raising experiences in libraries, motels, and private residences than within the serene surroundings of a graveyard.
Here, I felt outward for anyone and anything at all. I sent my mind down the hallway and into each bedroom, allowing my sixth sense to creep along like invisible tendrils, touching and feeling the air as I went. I pictured the whole of Darlene’s house, what I knew of the inside and the outside, and even into her yard and along the fence line.
I sensed nothing.
For a moment, I considered taking off my black tourmaline necklace. Was it preventing me from feeling whatever presence lurked here? Its protective energy shielded me from malevolent forces; I would be able to feel a friendly ghost but was essentially numb to anything that would want to harm Darlene.
The thought sent a chill through my bones.
The worst-case scenario—the most dangerous possibility—was that something truly dark lurked up here in this forgotten part of her house. What if I had been right, and the sounds she heard were caused by things falling over, but those things didn’t fall on their own? What if these things Darlene hoarded up here came with more history than she realized? Kit’s girlfriend, Amari, had opened my eyes to the world of haunted objects. Could Darlene have picked up something like that and squirreled it away up here with everything else she couldn’t let go of?
If that kind of spirit lingered here, Darlene could be in real danger. My fingers crept toward the back of my neck, where a single silver clasp was all that separated my senses from everything that hid from me now.
And from Horace.
My hands froze in midair. If I took my necklace off, I would be vulnerable. Horace would find me. I didn’t know how, but he was able to feel me the same way I was trying to detect any spiritual presence now. I had to assume it was because he was hundreds of times more powerful than I was, and I had to assume he was looking for me all the time, waiting until his sight could penetrate my defenses.
No, I couldn’t take it off. And as I made that decision for the second time that day, I realized I didn’t need to. None of the original Soul Searchers team had any psychic abilities, but Yuri, Kit, and Mark had managed to identify and banish plenty of spirits before I came along.
I forced my hands back down to their original position, palms resting on my knees, and thought about what Yuri would do if he were here right now. He would probably start by going from room to room, assessing the situation while he considered everything he had learned in his pre-filming research… of which I had done exactly zero.
Just as I was about to suggest we hit the library tomorrow and come back another day, I heard them.
Whispers.
My eyes flew open. The sound was muted but unmistakable. Multiple voices, blending together, murmuring in the darkness. They spoke too quickly and too quietly for me to make out the words.
I kept my voice low. “Do you hear that?”
Graham nodded. His attention was fixed on the doorway at the end of the hall.
My hands were around the sage and the lighter in an instant. The butane torch lit the dried herbs more easily than a match, for which I was grateful. I blew out the flame, and the end of the bundle glowed comfortingly as the cleansing scent chased away the stale odors around us.
Graham pulled me to my feet by my free hand. Together, we crept down the hallway toward the nearly closed bedroom door.
The whispers grew louder.
I gripped the sage in both hands and held it in front of me like a shield. Graham reached out and pushed the door open, and the light from the cell phone in his hands illuminated a space as cluttered as the living room had been.
I pawed the wall for a light switch. Thankfully, this one worked. As the overhead light flared to life, I felt my jaw go slack.
“What is it?” Graham whispered. “Do you see something?”
My mouth worked in silence for a few moments, opening and closely uselessly while I tried to process what I was seeing. For an instant, I forgot where I was. I forgot when I was. A wave of memories slammed into me, knocking me backward into Graham’s arms.
He steadied me and gripped my shoulders. “Mac, what’s wrong?”
“This is my mother’s bedroom,” I said.
“What?”
“All of this”—I gestured to the bed, dresser, vanity table, and bookshelf crowded into the small space—“was in my mother’s bedroom.”
It was arranged differently than it had been next door. The bed was on the wrong wall, and the vanity was smashed into the corner by the closet instead of sitting under the window. There were no fresh flowers anywhere, and my mother would never have tolerated this much chaos on every flat surface. But there was no mistaking it: this was my mother’s furniture.
Before I could fully process what I was seeing, the whispers sounded again. This time, we were closer to the sound, and with a seventy-watt light bulb shining overhead, it was easier to focus on the noise and make out the details.
It wasn’t a whisper.
It wasn’t even a voice at all.
Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch.
“Do you hear that?”
“Yeah.” Graham frowned. “What is it?”
I listened again, cocking my head toward the sound. “It’s coming from the corner, by the closet.”
The scratching began again, and an unwanted image popped into my mind. The noise was far too much like the sound I imagined fingernails scratching at the inside of a coffin would make. If I heard a bell ringing, I was sure I would need a new pair of jeans.
As I inched my way across the crowded bedroom, I tried and failed to stop myself from wondering how someone could have been buried alive inside—or beneath—Darlene’s house. What would it feel like to be stuck in the wall between rooms, unable to move, no space even to breathe? What if someone had fallen into the pit when they dug out the foundation and been crushed by falling dirt and rocks?
My chest constricted. My feet stopped moving. I gasped for air, clawing at my throat.
“Mac?” Alarm sent Graham’s voice up a full octave. “Do you have asthma? What’s happening?”
I couldn’t suck in enough air to answer. All I could do was shake my head before the panic filled me, taking up all the room in my mind and my lungs. Shadows fuzzed at the edges of my vision.
If Darlene’s house isn’t haunted now, it will be soon, I realized, clutching Graham’s hoodie for support.
“Brrrllll.”
Striker’s muffled trilling replaced the scratching sound from the corner of the room. Then she made a noise I’d never heard before, howling in a strange way that sharply increased in volume before abruptly cutting off. She did it again, and the second “MmOOOWWWww” snapped me out of my panic.
“Striker!” I gasped in air and broke away from Graham, stumbling toward the source of my cat’s little voice.
She had to be under my mother’s vanity. It was a small, shallow piece of furniture with a narrow stack of drawers on the left and a dainty space for a pair of legs on the right. There was no mirror attached; I remembered my mother using a freestanding one she could tuck away in the top drawer when she wasn’t putting her makeup on. Now, instead of her small collection of cosmetics, the top of the vanity was stacked high with a miniature red cooler, a metal toolbox, and several cardboard boxes marked Camping.
When I got to the vanity and knelt down to check beneath it, Striker wasn’t there.
“Striker?” I called. “Where are you?”
“Brrrllll.”
Her answering trill was close. I stared at the stack of drawers holding up the left side of the vanity; Striker was a wily cat, but I’d never seen her open a drawer before. There was no way she was inside one.
I was immediately proven wrong. When I opened the bottom drawer, Striker stared at me from the rectangular space with wide eyes.
“How did you get in there?”
Graham peeked behind the vanity. “There’s no back on this thing, and the drawers aren’t as tall as they look on the front. She must have slipped in the spaces between them. And— Ew! There are mouse droppings back here.”
“Gross. I guess that’s why Darlene heard scratching.” I picked up the cat and lifted her to my chest. “Is that what you’re doing? Hunting little mice?”
“Careful,” Graham warned. “She’s probably filthy. Don’t touch your face until you’ve had a chance to wash your hands, and we should probably give her a bath.”
Striker heard the B-word and twisted around in my arms, squirming and struggling to get down. She slipped out of my grasp, landed on the floor, and immediately settled back down into the drawer. Paper crinkled beneath her furry bottom, and she pawed beneath herself with the intense focus of a grad student excavating an archaeological site.
Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch.
“What did you find?” I murmured, lifting her back out again.
A messy pile of envelopes half filled the drawer. I assumed they were Darlene’s old electrical bills or something else that should have been thrown away two decades ago, but I shined my flashlight inside to be sure.
My mother’s name—Evelyn Clair—was written on the front of the top envelope in a flowing, formal script I recognized. And even if I hadn’t known my former mentor’s handwriting, I certainly knew her name.
The return address confirmed it: Gabrielle Suntador, Donn’s Hill.
CHAPTER SIX
“I hope you don’t mind I kept your mother’s furniture.” Darlene chewed off a bit of her lipstick and glanced at her kitchen towels, which I now recognized weren’t just similar to the ones my mother had owned. They were the actual ones from our house. “It was just sitting out on the curb, waiting for the garbageman, and I thought I could use a bedroom if I had visitors or you came to stay, and—”
I cut her off before she rambled herself into exhaustion. “It’s okay. Really. If you let it all go to the landfill, I wouldn’t have found these.”
The clean envelopes—the ones that had been buried deeply enough to avoid being soiled by Darlene’s industrious little housemates—were stacked into tight bundles on Darlene’s kitchen table. Many of them had already been bound together by rubber bands; I pulled back their edges and scanned through their return addresses like a flip-book but saw only utility companies and mortgage lenders.
The more interesting finds had been at the top, and after Graham carefully removed the letters from their filthy envelopes, I organized them into piles according to the sender. Striker sat atop the letters from Gabrielle possessively, her yellow eyes narrowed in smug satisfaction. I let her keep her prize for the moment and gleefully surveyed the collection as a whole.
It felt like I’d found a gigantic missing piece to the puzzle of who my mom had been. I knew her as my mother, but it wasn’t until the prior spring that I’d discovered who she was outside of that role. She was a psychic, a traveler, a seeker of unseen truths. I had unlocked more about her personality and her life from a box of letters her favorite pen pal, Gabrielle, had kept in her attic. But now I had the other side of that conversation, plus letters from several other people my mother decided were important enough to keep.
Like from my father.
There was only one, but the sight of his precise, small-caps writing made me snatch it up the second Graham set it onto the table. It had been addressed to Springville, Utah, and was shorter than I would have liked.
Evie,
Thanks again for a great night. Sorry about your shirt. Next time, let’s go somewhere without any marinara.
The invitation to stay with me in Colorado is always open.
Until then,
Henry
To my surprise, reading my father’s decades-old words didn’t fill me with sorrow. I didn’t dissolve into the kind of body-spasming sobs that had accompanied any thought of him after he first passed away. Part of me felt guilty about that, like I should never stop mourning him as intensely as I did the day I lost him. But as I smiled down at his handwriting, I realized that somehow—without me noticing—I had been healing.
Now I had the freedom to remember my father as often as I wanted, without slamming any protective walls around my crushing grief to prevent it from spilling over in mixed company. Like my mother, I could give him free rein in my mind and allow him to come and go as his memory pleased.
“I didn’t even know those were in there,” Darlene said, her nose wrinkled in distaste at the brown splotches on the envelopes. “Nobody ever came to stay, so I didn’t take the time to clean out the drawers.”
That was clear from my rummaging through the rest of the furniture she had hoarded away in that tiny guest bedroom. The dresser was still full of my mother’s clothes, now stiff and musty. Even the tightly wrapped bundles of lavender at the back of each drawer hadn’t been enough to stave off two decades of disuse. The nightstand held expired Tums, over-the-counter painkillers, a small metal ankh, and several bundles of wild blue sage, lavender, and rosemary tied together with purple string.
The herbs and ankh had immediately gone into my purse. I thought about telling Darlene I had taken them, but they felt like they were mine to take. Besides, she would never even know they were gone.
“Well, the mice sure found them,” Graham called from the sink. He had been washing his hands for several minutes now and shuddered occasionally as he rinsed his skin clean of the pooped-on, chewed-up, and shredded envelopes left behind by Darlene’s tiny “ghosts.”
“You’re sure that’s all it was?” Darlene asked. “Mice?”
“Yep,” I said. “I think you just heard their claws scratching around up there. It sounds creepy as hell, but it’s more gross than scary.”
“It’s still pretty scary.” Graham dried off his hands and took a seat at the table. “You’ve got to get rid of those mice, Darlene. They can be dangerous to your health.”
“I will. Thank you both for going up there. I feel like it’s safe enough for me to start using those rooms again.”
She and Graham kept talking about mice and exterminators, but I stopped listening. There was nothing they could possibly say that would be more interesting than the letters in front of me. I combed through the other half of my mother’s correspondence with Gabrielle, filled with everything from advice about the best herbs to use in smoke cleansing to reassurances that a six-year-old Mackenzie wasn’t in any danger from the ghosts who visited her in the middle of the night.
I couldn’t imagine how terrifying that must have been for my mother. She put on a brave face when she fibbed and told me the people who sat on the edge of my bed at night or visited me in my dreams were just an unusually large number of “imaginary friends.” She called them the Travelers because they often told me they missed their homes and families; she never let on that I was having nightly conversations with wandering spirits.
It’s likely a phase, Gabrielle wrote. All children see more deeply into the untouchable world around us than adults. Rest assured, the Travelers will do her no harm.
I wanted to laugh. She had partially been right; nothing I ever saw as a child hurt me. But as an adult…. Well, not every ghost was as peaceful as the Travelers.
Graham leaned over and peeked at the letter. “Find something good?”
“Just a letter from Gabrielle, filled with optimism.”
“Who’s Gabrielle?” Darlene asked. “Your mother never mentioned her.”
“Really? That’s weird. They were very close. I don’t remember her from when I was a kid, but she’s who my mom was always visiting in Donn’s Hill when we went there every spring.”
“Hmm.” Darlene was thoughtful for a minute before shrugging. “I don’t remember the name. But then, Evelyn was always a very private person. She was a great listener, always happy to hear about my life and my family and my problems. But she didn’t talk much about herself unless it was work stuff.”
“Did she tell you about me?” I asked. “About the Travelers I saw?”
Darlene laughed. “Oh, sweetie, you told me about those. Every time I babysat, you had a pile of stories about the imaginary friends who came to visit. You had such a vivid imagination. You came up with whole family trees, careers, all kinds of stuff.”
