Ghosts from the Past Page 2

  I nodded, digging out my keys that had, as always, fallen to the bottom of my purse. I gave them to her.

  “I’m Maggie,” she said. “Jack of all trades around here and keeping things running for the rest of you. If you have problems, you tell me and I’ll try and get someone out to fix it.”

  She rounded a corner. There was a narrow stair there, and, of all things, a small yellow and black walkie-talkie. Maggie picked it up and pressed a button.

  “Jimmy?” she said. “Lara’s here. I’m leaving her keys near the side door. You’ll want to bring in her things before the storm starts.”

  I heard static and a response that sounded like he’d be right down.

  “Good then,” Maggie said to the walkie-talkie.

  Turning to me, Maggie explained. “Bethany wanted to have an intercom system put in but they’d have to pull the walls down to wire it. That will happen in time, of course, but for now, we have those things.” She pointed casually. “We’ve configured them all to be on the same channel. They’re just cheap things from an outdoor store but they work here which is more than I can say about a lot of the stuff we’ve thought about. In theory, we have cell phone coverage, but don’t count on it. We almost never have it from the first floor, but you sometimes get it upstairs.”

  Maggie turned away and started up the stairs before I could respond. My shoulders touched the walls on both sides of the stairs and I noticed that Maggie’s shoulders, which were wider than mine, swept off any dust that might have accumulated. I realized why she was wearing jeans and a worn-looking flannel shirt.

  She reached the next floor and made a quick turn to the left. The ascent had been longer than I was used to in my condo, so the ceilings throughout the Manor must be high. Either that or the steps were lower, or perhaps both.

  “We’re in the new wing,” Maggie said. The nearly black paneling that continued to line the walls belied her comment about “new”.

  I must have looked surprised.

  “You don’t want to see the main manor yet, not at night. No one really goes to the main part of the house at night. The floors creak, and although we’ve had workers in there, no one is certain how sound the floors are. The electricity hasn’t been updated there but we have plenty of electric lanterns scattered around.”

  I nodded. None of this had been in the interview.

  My room was the fourth door on the right of the hallway. “Your room looks over the old orchard area and the old greenhouse,” Maggie said as she opened it. I noticed there was a new lock on the door.

  The door itself was black wood, the same as the paneling. It, and all the others, had barely stood out in the hallway. It opened with a slight creak. The room smelled of artificial lavender, and I wondered if that was Maggie’s touch to make it less musty, as in the stairwell I had smelled, and even felt, as if I were walking through the pages of an old book.

  Inside, there was a new looking bed with a simple headboard, probably a queen size. Still, there was plenty of space around it. Two nightstands and a dresser that looked like they were from IKEA sat around the edges of the room. There was a large boxy thing that I realized must be an old wardrobe.

  “We’ve left the wardrobe, as even this wing didn’t have proper closets,” Maggie said. “And it’s been remodeled to have a simple bath.”

  She pointed to the door. I looked in there and a surprisingly modern room greeted me with white and dark blue subway tiles. There was a gleaming white pedestal sink and toilet. The tub and shower combo competed across from those two as to which could gleam the brightest in the light, which flickered slightly but was still bright enough to work by.

  “We have electricity in this wing,” Maggie said. “And it’s mostly been redone so it should be safe enough to use whatever you have to. The kitchen is on a different breaker and that hasn’t been redone since about 1940, which means only the hired cooks can work in there, although you’re allowed to store any food you have in the refrigerator. Just mind that it’s small and we all have to use it.”

  I nodded.

  “Any questions?” Maggie asked.

  I had plenty of them. I was about to start when a dark shadow passed by behind her. It was not followed by a human walking down the hall. Any thought of what I wanted to ask flew out of my mind.

  Chapter 3

  I gaped at Maggie for a few seconds that felt much longer. It seemed like shadows grew around us before she decided to turn around. She clearly noticed nothing.

  “It’s the lights here. They flicker oddly. Everyone thinks they see a strange shadow walking down the hall,” Maggie assured me. She reached in to give me a hug, smelling of freshly baked bread that made my stomach rumble.

  I was letting her go and leaning back when I saw another shadow. This one was accompanied by a slight squeak on the boards and then a young man appeared.

  “Hey Jimmy,” Maggie said turning. “You’ve come just in time to find that Lara got see one of our famous shadows.”

  Jimmy held two of my suitcases, one under his arm, my laptop case over his shoulder, and my grocery bags in the other hand. That meant there were two boxes of books and paperwork that I wanted on hand and one more small suitcase, more of a makeup case, really.

  “I should go down with you and get the last of it,” I said.

  Jimmy waved me off. “I’ve got this. I spent the last couple of months hauling and building with the contractors in here. This is nothing.” He gave me a quick smile that was clearly genuine.

  Maggie nodded at me, pushing me further into the room. She pointed to the one nightstand where I saw a yellow and black walkie-talkie. “That’s yours. Carry it with you wherever you go. The house can be confusing, especially at first.”

  “Sometimes even past the first,” Jimmy added, as he carefully set my things down near the dresser. He waved as he left. His slightly too long blonde hair moved in rhythm with his walk. He acted very mature but looked very young, which made me wonder how old he was.

  “Jimmy would know,” Maggie said. She turned to move my computer out of the pile and set it beside the bed. She pointed to a power strip there. “You’ll want to use the surge protector for this. Lots of odd things with the electricity. Nathan has his computer at the shop in Sydney trying to recover files after he had his plugged directly into the wall. He’s just across the hall, by the way.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of that information. Did Maggie expect we’d be having trysts in the middle of the night?

  “But Jimmy…” Maggie shook her head as her voice trailed off. She opened a curtain. Outside the window, evening was blue gray and darkening. There were splatters of water against the pane. I didn’t feel a draft, so I could only figure that new windows had been added. “Jimmy gets lost at least once a week even though he’s probably been here longer than any of us.”

  “Even you?” I asked. Maggie seemed so completely confident being charge that I would have thought she’d been there for years.

  “Oh, yes. Jimmy used to work for Ms. Schilling. Out in the garden, such as it was. Of course, towards the end, she refused to let him do anything, which is why nearly everything is dead.”

  I nodded. “The upkeep on a place like this must get expensive.”

  “I sometimes think it costs more to keep up this place than the entire Canadian government.” Maggie laughed. “But at least I don’t have to pay for this!”

  I wondered where the money was coming from for all the renovations as I looked outside. There was a broken down greenhouse but I also saw some new glass panes as if they were repairing it. Surely if the place was going to be sold, that would be a place to cut corners. Did you really need a greenhouse that ran the length of a Manor of this size?

  “It’s not that Ms. Schilling didn’t have the money. She had more than she knew what to do with, but she was always certain that someone was trying to rob her,” Maggie said. “Poor Jimmy did what he could and there are a couple of the old trees on the estate that survived t
hanks to him. When she passed, he was the only one willing to stay on and work with Bethany now that she’s decided to renovate the estate.”

  “Will Bethany live here then?” I asked, thinking of the huge place and one person living there.

  “She’s mentioned possibly living here, but I think she’s hoping to turn this into an artist’s retreat,” Maggie said. “I’m not sure what that means. Business was never my thing. I can organize you ten ways to heaven, but I don’t have a head for the creativity and original thinking it takes to make a business go.”

  Even though I hadn’t known her for long, I suspected if Maggie had a brainstorm, she’d be able to get any business off the ground. I would be surprised if everything wasn’t organized and perfect.

  “We eat at six. No dressing up, of course, because who would want to in this place?” Maggie laughed.

  I laughed with her.

  I glanced at the clock, which was an alarm clock, I noticed, perhaps because nothing worked quite right here.

  “The clock has a battery backup. All of them in the house do,” Maggie said, catching my eye.

  I had a little over an hour until I needed to go down.

  “Kitchen is just to the left when you get to the bottom of the stairs. Go through it and the dining room is on the other side,” Maggie said as she left the room.

  Behind her I thought I saw another shadow, but it was just Jimmy bringing up a box and the last of my bags.

  “Is it okay if I leave that last box for the night? The rain is really starting to come down.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “And do you know where the library is, where I’ll be working?” I asked.

  “You won’t want to go there this late. We have the electric lanterns and stuff, but everyone tends to avoid the main part of the house when it’s this dark,” Jimmy said. His face reddened a little.

  I didn’t quite know what to say to that.

  “Nathan will probably take you there tomorrow and then he can also explain what they hope you can do. I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lot of explaining that needs to be done,” Jimmy said. He smiled when he said it, to show that it wasn’t actually a criticism.

  “Thank you for bringing things up for me. I’m sure this will be fine for tonight,” I said.

  He nodded and shut the door as he left. I saw there was a key in that nice new lock on the door.

  Chapter 4

  I wanted to shower but didn’t think I quite had enough time and wasn’t sure I wanted to get too comfortable that close to dinner. Instead I washed my face and unpacked some of my clothing and toiletries. Thunder rumbled outside, and I heard the tapping of rain on the glass of the windows next to the bed.

  My room had a radiator and it hissed when I turned up the temperature a bit. I hoped that that would be okay. I smelled the faintest acrid smell when I turned it up, as if this wasn’t something that had been done often. I turned it back down, getting another blast of hissing and spitting and a slight squeak at the wheel. It was the only noise that didn’t bother me.

  I wondered whether I’d be in charge of cleaning my room or if Maggie had someone who would do that. I had heard there was a staff of some sort that lived on site, too. Thunder crashed loudly overhead and made me jump. The tapping at the window became a pounding fist rather than a polite clink.

  The lights flickered. I opened the wardrobe intending to put away a couple of shirts and was glad to see an electric lantern sitting on the top shelf. I pulled it down and set it next to the bed. If the storm was coming up, I wanted to be able to see to find my way around.

  I went over to the window to see out and watch the storm, but it was too dark to really do so. There was a faint glow coming from below me, but other than that there were no lights that I could see at all. It would be an amazing place to check out the stars on a clear night.

  I thought I saw a shadow move down near the wing I was in, close to the light, but then it moved into the darkness where I could see nothing. Perhaps it was Jimmy, outside again, running an errand, or another one of the staff. Still, I thought there had been something furtive about the movements.

  I drew back from the window, smiling to myself, thinking that I was doing my best to scare myself. Next thing you knew, I’d have Hercule Poirot down in the drawing room solving a murder. It was that kind of place.

  It was nearly six, so I left the room, taking my key and putting the walkie-talkie in the pocket of the sweater I had on, and followed the hallway to the stairs. I went down those stairs and then made a left turn. The kitchen was there, through a large archway. The hall continued down into the dark, and I wondered what was beyond the kitchen. Perhaps another day I could explore.

  The kitchen itself was huge. It was larger than my condo, which was not a small place by any means. I could easily picture this place having a couple of large fireplaces to cook over rather than the mid-twentieth century appliances they had now. The floor had a vinyl covering that had likely once had a color but was now sort of gray but for the worn parts which were black.

  The cupboards were a dingy white. Many of the doors hung at awkward angles. If not for that, one could say the wood was fashionably distressed. The refrigerator was white with a small freezer on the top, and the stove was an odd sort of pink that I hadn’t seen before. I breathed in deeply, enjoying the smell of fresh bread and the scent of something savory and warming.

  A woman and a man were there. He was chopping something. She had her back to me at the sink. He looked up and gave me a slight smile and nodded at the door closest to me which would nearly take me back the way I had come. There were several other doors around the room as well, leading to places I couldn’t see into.

  I went through the door the man had nodded to and entered the dining room. Hall would have been a good word to describe this room. It was an enormous rectangular room, so vast that the lights over the large table didn’t illuminate the shadows in the corners. Like everything else, it was decorated in dark paneling. Thank heavens they’d had to remove that in the bedroom when they’d redone the plumbing and wiring.

  The floor was wood. While the finish was worn, it wasn’t completely gone. I wondered if the room was that little used or if someone had refinished it this century. The table that sat in the middle, with two men already seated, looked to be wood as well. While most tables are made of wood, or at least finished to look like wood, I was feeling as if it might have been nice to have a different texture in here.

  Maybe the decorators thought the metal candle holders in the center of the table were enough? It was hard to say. Those did sort of match the cheap looking chandeliers that hung over the table.

  “Lara!” Nathan stood up. He was shorter than I expected after our Skype interviews. His hair wasn’t quite as shiny black either, more a deep brown. All the same I recognized him easily.

  “It’s good to meet you in real life,” I said, smiling.

  Nathan nodded. “Maggie and Jimmy said you were here. This is Jonathan.” He pointed to a tall thin man with pale blue eyes and nondescript brown hair. His face was scared, probably from acne, but I couldn’t help but think they looked like claw marks.

  “Jonathan is the art historian we have evaluating the art work,” Nathan said the two of us had greeted each other.

  “Bethany and Rachel aren’t down yet,” Nathan said. “Take a seat anywhere. We normally sit up towards this end. Maggie and Jimmy gravitate towards the far end. Most the people who keep up the place and eat with us will be down towards their end.”

  I nodded, thinking that the dining placement sounded downright like a medieval castle with the highest ranking of us towards the head of the table and the lower rank further down.

  “So what do you think of the place, so far?” Jonathan asked.

  “It’s big,” I said, trying to smile and think of something else good to say.

  “It’s certainly that!” A woman looking barely old enough to be called a woman and not a girl said as she walke
d with a definite spring to her step. Wild brown curls flowed everywhere, and I pictured her in a yellow sundress bouncing across a meadow. Tonight, though, she was in blue jeans and a red t-shirt smudged with dust and some dirt. Beneath that was a picture of two cats across the front, or perhaps bunnies. It was that dirty.

  Maggie was correct to say no one dressed for dinner.

  “Bethany!” Nathan said, standing again and pulling her towards me. “I want you to meet Lara Rochester.”

  “Lovely to meet you,” Bethany said. Her smile seemed a little too big and too bright, but there was something likable about her.

  She took the seat next to Nathan and I sat on his other side. Jonathan remained on the far side of the table. Maggie came in next, nodding at me, and sat down a few places down from us on the same side as Jonathan. I wondered if I should go over there, but Nathan had said this was how people were seated.

  I was introduced to a couple of other people who filed in. They, too, were dusty, wearing heavy canvas overalls.

  “You don’t normally stay,” Bethany said to one of the men, Dave, I think,

  “Have you seen that rain?” Dave asked. “Rather chance your ghosts and ghoulies than that out there tonight.”

  Bethany laughed. “Don’t scare Lara. This is her first night at Schilling.”

  I smiled a little.

  Dave nodded but didn’t retract his statement, which seemed to put Bethany out.

  The man and woman from the kitchen brought out three large bowls of salad and put them in the center of the table. I looked at our place settings, noticing we had plain white solid dishes, a small dish, probably for salad, a larger one for the main course, and a very small one that could be for bread, although I wasn’t certain. There were three glasses, two of them wine glasses and one plain one along with a coffee mug, not a fancy place setting mug, but a large mug that could hold enough coffee to keep you awake most of the night.

  Nathan passed the first bowl to Bethany who took some and then passed it to me. I placed mine on the small plate, just like she did, and passed the bowl back to Nathan who then passed it across to Jonathan.