Forest of Shadows (18 page)

She hugged herself and smiled, her spirit as weightless as the wind that kissed her from head to toe. Closing her eyes, she took her time savoring this feeling of contentment and thanked God for bringing them here. 

And though they were here because the house was purportedly haunted, so far it had been a safe harbor where she and John could heal their wounds, even the ones they didn’t know existed. 

To make things even better, the phone company had come the day before and finally fixed their line so she was able to call her parents and brag about her Alaskan escape. 

She was doing her best to give John space, or earn her keep as she liked to joke, and was remarkably untouched by any fears of the house. Yes, she was partly skeptical, though the part that wasn’t had been greatly influenced by John and his work. So far, he’d said nothing about the house itself or about the results of the tests he’d conducted. She took that to mean that all was well, or at the very least, still. 

On first impression, she liked Judas and his burnout air of passivity. Judas seemed like a nice enough guy and even shocked her by quoting Walden when he caught her just staring out at the trees.

Then maybe Judas and the house were similar in that neither was exactly as they first appeared. That could be why only Judas had experienced something odd in the still empty upstairs room. She posed her theory to John one night after the kids had gone to sleep and he had popped in a DVD for them to watch. 

“Could be,” he answered with one cocked eyebrow then went about fussing with the television remotes. 

That two-word answer told her he knew more than he was about to let on. She knew she’d find out eventually. 

She was startled when one of the patio doors opened with a bang. She looked to see if Jessica had swung it open from inside. The downstairs was empty. 

Guess I didn’t close it tight
, she thought. As she stood to shut it again, she failed to notice the faint outline of a man etched in the bay window behind her chair as it faded into nothing. 

Chapter Twenty-One

“What have we here?” John whispered as he pulled the first picture out of the developing solution. 

Every day, he went through his routine of taking pictures all around the house. Once in the morning and another time at night, just before they put the kids to bed. The nights were getting darker earlier and he needed to use the flash now, so he managed to get his pictures taken just after dinner instead of waking them up with dazzling flashes of light. 

It was a grievous misconception that you could only investigate hauntings at night. The phony psychics and hosts on TV shows and specials all say, “This is their time. The night belongs to them.” It was crap. Ghosts, spirits, even demons have no sense of time. They don’t punch in at nightfall. If a place was truly haunted, it was haunted during the light of day as well as the night. Whatever was lurking here did not take days off to sleep in late. 

In the early afternoon, he would go down to the basement and develop the latest roll. He was a helpless creature of ritual, even amidst his life changing trip. Sure, digital cameras were all the rage, but he was a purist. Developing and handling his photographs appealed to his tactile senses. 

He clipped the picture to the one of the lines that criss-crossed the basement, grabbed a magnifying glass and studied it. The photo was taken in the hallway outside his and Jessica’s rooms just last night. A small white blur, about the size of his thumbprint, hovered outside Jess’s bedroom door. It could have been anything from a trick of the flash to something slightly off with the developing chemicals. 

Except the same white blur was visible in four more pictures in different areas of the hallway, then in Jessica’s room and finally in his own. It wasn’t quite round like classic cases of photographed balls of ectoplasm (a concept whose validity he still struggled with), nor did it seem to have any kind of physical definition. It almost looked like a luminescent smudge mark floating several feet above the floor. 

The room suddenly felt colder and John reached for his windbreaker that he had thrown over a chair. There was a strong smell of women’s perfume, though Eve hadn’t been in the basement all day. 

“Hello there,” he said as he peered at the quintet of pictures hanging before his eyes. “Could you be the boy come to visit us or that damn ball of heat that almost drove me over the edge?” A floorboard right above his head creaked ever so slightly. Eve and the kids were having a picnic in the yard and the house was empty. 

“Or maybe you’re one and the same. You let me know when you’re good and ready.” 

One more tiny squeak and he was once again bathed in silence and the eerie red lab light. 

Even though it was Sunday and the library was closed, Millie still found herself down in the spooky basement going through old file boxes. Unfortunately, she’d had nothing to show Judas when he stopped by a few days ago, but that didn’t necessarily mean the particular items he was searching for didn’t exist. 

Just why she was down here, alone, again, was beyond her. Did she really like Judas that much? Her friend Katy joked that if they got together, they’d be known as Pocahontas and John Smith throughout the town. She knew an open relationship with a Caucasian, even if it wasn’t Judas, would result in ostracism for them both. Despite the fact that Judas had been here since he was a small boy, he was still considered an outsider, and if he lived here until he was an old man, he would die an outsider. She worried that maybe the high drama that would ensue from any sort of relationship with Judas was the actual attraction, not the fact that he was cute and smart in a covert way. 

Why did life have to be so complicated here, in a place where people came to get away from life’s madness? 

When Judas had asked her to find what she could on the Bolster family disappearance, she thought it would be a piece of cake. After all, an entire family in a small town vanishing overnight should have been big news. She’d been away when it happened, getting her education at Berkeley, so the story was new to her. All she’d been able to find was a small mention of the Bolster family returning to their roots printed in the local section of their daily paper,
The Shida Gazette.
George Bolster was a local boy who made a good deal of money selling yachts to the wealthy in Santa Barbara. He decided to retire at age forty-five and brought his family back up to his hometown where they settled into one of Shida’s premier modern log cabins. 

Judas had guessed that George and his family went missing around last November. Only now did he find it odd that the details were rarely talked about, even by the local gossips and loud mouths. His own ambivalence towards Shida pretty much kept him out of the loop when it came to hometown news. 

When she checked for the microfilm and actual hard copies of the paper from that month, they were missing. That might have raised some eyebrows in a well-run library, but not here. Her predecessor was less than attentive to keeping things in order. The Dewey Decimal System was about as foreign a concept as cold fusion to the old bird. Millie guessed that more was missing from the entire library than was actually in its proper place. 

When she looked up Fir Way, she only found a couple of police blotter incidents that occurred on the road over the years. There was no mention of the big house at the end of the road. She remembered when it was built. She was just a teenager then. The town buzzing that a rich white man from Florida was building a house worth more than any ten houses in Shida put together. He was a bachelor tired of the summer heat in Key West and looking to enjoy the latter half of his life in colder climes. The house took almost a year to build and she recalled that he only lived there for a very short time. The house sat vacant until George Bolster moved in over ten years later. Naturally it had stayed empty. No one in Shida had the money to buy it and the tourist trade was almost nonexistent, so outsiders were unaware of its existence.

Now what was the name of the man who had the house built in the first place? Didn’t people used to say it like it was some sort of vile curse? It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the root of their dislike of the stranger. 

Millie rubbed her fingers on her temples and tried to relax her mind. She sneezed three times in a row as the dust and mold continued their assault of her respiratory system. As she was blowing her nose in a tissue, she thought she saw something move out of the corner of her eye. It was fast, and big. 

She jolted in her seat, petrified of the thought that there was a rat scurrying about. 

Paper rustled behind her. 

She whirled her head around and saw only leaning stacks of old boxes. They must have been shifting. 

There was that shadow again! This time it darted behind the stacked metal chairs. Suddenly, the three forty-watt bulbs didn’t seem like near enough light. 

“Heeeyaaa!” she shouted, hoping to scare the rodent away.

Staring at the spot where the moving shadow had disappeared, she rose from her chair holding her pencil like a dagger. Tiny beads of sweat broke out on her chest and forehead.

Slowly, she walked to the standing pile of chairs. Her shoes crunched on the cement floor. 

Aaaahhhhhhhhh.

She jumped. Rats sure as hell didn’t make noises like that. The entire pile of chairs came crashing to the floor with a calamitous roar. Millie yelped and tried to run away but her feet were encased in molasses. 

Uuuhhhhffff.

The voice was everywhere. Panic overtook her and she finally broke from her paralysis. She darted for the stairs, taking two at a time. Her back tingled agonizingly with the feeling that something was within swiping distance. 

With three more steps to go, the door violently slammed shut. She threw her body into it but the old oak obstacle wouldn’t budge. 

“Oh please please, please,” she stammered as she fumbled with the doorknob. It came off in her hand and she could hear the other end drop to the floor on the opposite side of the door. 

There was a popping sound and the basement grew darker. She turned around, sure that she would be face to face with some grinning maniac. 

Pop!

The second bulb went out. 

Pop!

The last bulb exploded and she was plunged in pitch black. 

She screamed and pounded on the door. 

“Somebody help me! Please help me!”

Aauuhhhhffffrreeee…

The voice was louder. Closer. The steps below her creaked. Something heavy walked slowly towards her. 

A moment before her brain snapped like a dry wishbone, she understood.

“It says here that the weather can be quite rainy at the park this time of year,” Eve called out from the couch. John was in the kitchen making a milkshake with Jessica’s eager assistance. 

“Is that the same book that told us it rains most of the time in the interior? We’ve been here for weeks and we’ve only seen a couple of sun showers.” John redirected his attention just in time to stop Jessica from pouring an entire bowl of sugar into the blender. “I think one spoonful will make it sweet enough, sugar monster.” 

“But the kids on Zany’s Place put in tons of sugar for theirs, Daddy,” she pleaded. 

“Yes, but those kids are just cartoons and don’t have to worry about belly aches or cavities. Trust me, you’ll love it the way I make it.” He ruffled her bangs and started the blender up.

Eve brought the book into the kitchen, holding it in one hand while cradling a sleeping Liam in the other. 

“I knew you’d doubt my book, so I called the weather service yesterday and confirmed that they’ve had their usual rainy season this year.”

“Okay, but that means we’re all going to have to hit the town and look for rain gear and whatever else we need for the trip. Last time I checked, we weren’t all that prepared for a date with Noah. You sure you’re up to it?”

Eve nodded. “Can’t be a hermit the entire time we’re up here. Besides, maybe my irresistible charm will win the strange town folk over.”

“Fine by me. Why don’t we go after Liam wakes up from his nap?”

Eve had planned their first big outing, a trip to the Denali National Park, four days from now. She was anxious to take the tours, see some brown bears, eagles and most of all, the beautiful Mount McKinley. It wasn’t a far drive from Shida and the plan was to spend three days taking in the sights with a one night stop in Fairbanks. Even though John felt he was on to something in the house, he did realize that he wasn’t the only person here. Eve and the kids could cavort outside just so much while he skulked around the house and studied pictures, videos and audio in what had become
his
basement. Besides, whatever was in the house would be there when they got back. 

“That’s enough!” Jessica squealed over the loud hum of the blender. Even though the ice cream was still relatively chunky, she insisted on pouring the milkshake into their chilled glasses. “Ahhh, now that’s good,” she said with a big, fat, milk mustache. 

John winced from the effort of trying to suck the drink through his straw. Red faced, he surrendered and reached for a spoon. Liam awoke from his nap smiling and chattering away in his unique language.