Better Homes and Hauntings (15 page)

Dotty inserted the tools into the lock and manipulated them back and forth, listening for the telltale
click
. She was so concentrated on the task at hand she didn’t even flinch when Deacon and Jake pushed their way through the servants’ entrance. Deacon sat next to Nina on the long dining table, and she gave him a smile that made his run across the island worth it.

“What are we doing?” Jake whispered, standing over Cindy’s shoulder.

“Watching Dotty perpetrate an act of extreme optimism,” Cindy said, waving her bolt cutters at Dotty with an expectant expression. “Sweetie, the lock is probably rusted shut.”

“Why do you have pink bolt cutters?” Deacon asked, just as the lock clicked, opened, and fell to the floor. Nina’s jaw dropped, her eyes oscillating between a triumphant Dotty and the defeated lock.

Dotty winked cheekily and lifted the lid of the box. Jake jumped to his feet. Cindy squealed and clapped her hands, only to let loose a disappointed “
hmph
” when
the contents turned out to be stacks of small booklets with matching brown leather covers. At least twenty of them. Each one was stamped “CGW” at the bottom right corner.

Catherine Grayson Whitney.

“Diaries,” Dotty said, flipping through the inside covers, checking the dates that had been painstakingly inscribed on the first page of each. Even in the thrill of discovery, Dotty couldn’t help but marvel at Catherine’s neatly looped, even script. Her own handwriting was a chaotic mix of cursive, block print, and shorthand. Product of a different generation and school system, she supposed. “Catherine’s diaries, starting years before her death. This could be her complete journal collection for her adult life.”

“Not as cool as jewelry but still exciting,” Cindy conceded, trying not to let her disappointment show.

“Yes, Dotty has given us the gift of reading,” Jake said with a shudder. “Reading really old, cramped, faded cursive.”

“This is exactly what I was hoping for!” Dotty exclaimed, launching herself across the room and throwing her arms around Cindy. The blonde’s knees buckled under the force of Dotty’s enthusiasm, and the women went sprawling to the floor.

“I’m sorry.” Dotty giggled as Jake helped the girls extract themselves from their person pretzel. “I just can’t believe it! I found my great-great-grandmother’s diaries, which no one in my grasping, devious family has managed to locate in almost one hundred years. That’s huge!”

“How did you find it?” Deacon asked, laughing
when Cindy’s and Dotty’s legs tangled together and they fell back to the floor in a heap.

“I’m just that good,” Dotty told him as solemnly as she could from the bottom of the person tangle. And when Deacon gave her the now-familiar deadpan face, Dotty added, “My scarf caught the corner of a false wall panel, popped it loose.”

“Jack Donovan designed a lot of little hiding places around the house, the passages between the floors, but I doubt half of them are actually shown on the blueprints,” Jake said, thumbing through one of the journals. “There’s a wall in Gerald Whitney’s library that revolves so he could access a direct stairway to the master suite. And there’s a hallway from Mrs. Whitney’s room to the children’s wing. I guess it was so she could bypass a couple of staircases to get directly to their rooms at night or when they were sick.”

“Secret passages and revolving walls? Suddenly, my
Scooby-Doo
jokes don’t seem so lame,” Cindy mused.

“It was
en vogue
at the time to add an air of mystery to one’s home,” Dotty said, searching through the diaries for the latest date. “And when one’s home is this large, it makes sense to try to skip a few hallways to save time. Plus, rich people tended to have a lot of secrets.”

Dotty frowned, absently tucking her candy-colored hair behind her ears as she sorted through the diaries.

“What’s with the pout?” Cindy asked. “You were so excited a few minutes ago.”

“Oh, I still am,” Dotty assured her. “But I can’t find the last diary. You’d think it would be near the top of the box. But the latest one I can find is about six months before she died.”

“Well, she probably wrote in it every day, right?” Cindy said. “She wouldn’t go to the trouble of breaking into her secret lockbox every evening. She probably kept it somewhere she could get to it easily, like her nightstand or her vanity.”

“Probably,” Dotty said, frowning again as she searched the bottom of the box for the first volume. “But trust me, those would have been the first places my relatives would look for valuables. And no one has ever mentioned finding a diary. It would have provided some valuable insight into what was going on in her head.” Dotty fished the earliest volume from the box and placed it on top. “In the meantime, I can start at the beginning and get some idea of what Catherine’s marriage to Gerald was like . . . and maybe I’ll skip a little, because I’m one of those people who read the last chapter of a murder mystery first.”

“That’s just wrong,” Cindy said, shaking her head.

“Of all the things she just said, skipping to the end of a book is what bothers you most?” Jake asked.

Cindy crossed her arms and set her chin. “I hate spoilers.”

CINDY ENJOYED CLEANING
windows. She didn’t see why so many people made cracks about not doing them. She found it soothing, wiping layers of grime away to reveal a clear, shining surface. Few people were blessed enough to see tangible evidence of the difference they made with their work every day. She swore by an equal mixture of white vinegar and dish soap, which took longer to clean but left a brilliant shine behind.

It was like a meditation exercise. When she was finished, she felt relaxed and at peace. So even though she didn’t necessarily have to clean the windows in the family wing, she found herself with her trusty newspaper clutched in one hand, moving it in slow, sure circles as she stared out through the glass. Her mind wandered over the day’s to-do list, Jake’s many vaguely inappropriate requests for dates, what it might take for her to
say yes to one of those requests. Slowly, the light outside shifted from the clear, sharp air of late morning to the golden blaze of full afternoon. Cindy was so zoned out she barely noticed the difference.

And then she heard an angry shout from outside. Her eyes scanned the lawn to find a woman in an ornate, high-waisted blue gown arguing with a dark-haired man with a mustache. Cindy looked down and saw a dingy rag in her hand. Her sleeve was black cotton, connected to a plain dress and a starched white apron.

A maid’s uniform.

Cindy peered through the glass. The man seemed to be pleading with the woman, gesturing toward the house and then between the two of them. The woman was shaking her head, trying to pull her hands from his grasp. He pressed her hands to his chest and gently kissed her fingertips, but she jerked away from him and turned toward the house.

Cindy finally got a look at the woman’s face, a face she recognized from photographs and paintings all over the house. The tear-stained face of Catherine Whitney.

The sound of glass shattering on the floor brought Cindy out of the vision.

Jake stood behind her, a pitcher of iced tea in one hand and a drinking glass in the other. His other glass lay shattered at his feet. Jake’s usually tanned face turned pale, and his pupils were the size of olives. “You saw it, too, didn’t you?” he whispered.

“Saw what?” she asked carefully. There was no reason to admit her vision until he tipped his hand in this game of Who’s a Thundering Loony?

“Out on the lawn,” he said, stepping closer to her. “I was bringing you something to drink, and I saw a woman who looked like the old pictures of Deacon’s great-great-grandmother.”

“Arguing with a dark-haired man in a vest and tie?” Cindy asked.

Jake nodded, and his hands started to shake.

Cindy took the pitcher and the glass from him and set them aside. “Were you wearing a maid’s uniform?”

Jake frowned. “No. I just looked through the window, over your shoulder. I didn’t see what I was wearing.” He shivered. “Why would we both see something like that? Why? I mean, if it was dark outside, I could just say that we were scared and misjudged what we saw or that someone was playing a trick on us. But it was in broad daylight, Cindy. How did we see that?”

Cindy shook her head. “It felt like a memory, like we were seeing someone else’s memories.”

“It probably was. Anything’s possible here. I hate this house,” Jake confessed. “I have since I was a kid. I’m only here because Whit’s my best friend, and he asked me for help. I’ve always felt like someone was watching, waiting for me to drop my guard. I would see things, shadows shifting, things moving from where we’d left them. I’d hear angry footsteps on the landing by the third floor, though no one was there to make any noises. But I could never tell Deacon, because it would stress him out, or he would just write it off as me being paranoid. I know he’s seen things here, too, but he just can’t bring himself to admit it. Because his rational, math-fueled brain will not accept it. Also, it’s not very manly to admit that you’re afraid of ghosts.”

Cindy smiled at him, remembering the sweet boy she’d accepted a date from, the boy who wasn’t afraid to admit that he couldn’t dance and brought her a box of Junior Mints because he remembered that she liked them. “Do you know who the dark-haired man was?”

“He looked like the old tintypes of Jack Donovan, the original architect for the house.”

“It didn’t look like they were talking about construction scheduling,” Cindy muttered. Why had Catherine been so upset by a conversation with her architect? It seemed that the rumors about Catherine getting “close” with a man other than her husband were true. The poor soul had looked devastated, and Catherine had seemed . . . irritated. She hadn’t looked heartbroken by love that could never be. She looked annoyed. Was it because she was afraid her husband would see them from the house?

“It did look pretty personal,” he admitted. “If you think about that, it makes sense. If she was going to have an extracurricular activity, it probably would have been with him. Donovan would have been in frequent contact with Mrs. Whitney as he built the house. He probably stayed here on the island with the family in the last few months of completion work, right before Catherine died.”

“We have to tell somebody about this,” Cindy insisted. “We made a mistake before, not telling them about my little episode on the stairs, which I can now admit was
not
dust allergies. We have to let the others know what’s going on so they can be prepared.”

“With what? Holy water and crosses?”

“That only works on vampires,” she retorted. “And no. But I do think that it would be safer for everybody if they knew they could feel or experience something freaky. They may not overreact and hurt themselves if they know what’s coming.”

“I’m not going to Deacon to tell him that I witnessed an argument that happened more than a hundred years ago. He’ll think we’re nuts.”

“We just had a full-on shared hallucination. Do you have any idea how rare and weird that is?”

“Yes, which is why I’m not eager to go around claiming that it happened!” he exclaimed.

“If you help me talk to the others about this, I will go out on that date with you.”

His blue eyes narrowed with suspicion. “OK, first of all, that’s massively unfair. And second, it’s sort of insulting that you think the promise of a date is enough to make me sacrifice my own dignity. And third . . . well, I can’t think of a third, because I’m probably going to fold and accept anyway.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it,” he grumbled. “But I’m not going into great detail about Catherine’s possibly straying with the architect. There’s only so much news Deacon can take.”

“Deal. And we have to stay on the island for our date.”

“What?” Jake cried.

“I don’t want you to try to razzle-dazzle me with fancy restaurants and maître d’s who know you by name. If you’re going to woo me, you’re doing it here. No resources. No false fanciness. It’s like
Survivorman,
only with dating.”

“Cindy!”

“Those are my terms.”

Jake slapped some dust off his khakis. “Deacon should hire you for his legal department.”

Cindy preened a bit and tried to tamp down the frisson of excitement in her belly. And then a thought occurred to her. “Oh, come on, I was possessed by a spirit, had a ghostly flashback, and I’m still a
maid
?”

ELSEWHERE ON THE
island, the day was shaping up to be a bright one for Nina. The indoor garden room was almost cleared and ready for the renovations she’d discussed with Anthony. The water features were refilled and ready for the water lilies. And the crews were clearing the tiered gardens leading to the east side of the house, which would entail planting a variety of spring- and summer-blooming plants, which would blossom on a rotating basis. Nina always enjoyed the challenge of choosing and placing such plants so the transition was seamless. And today she would remove the plants from their peat pots and begin organizing them into the appropriate groupings.