One Thursday a month I join my cousin Josie Greenblatt and our friends Stephanie Stanton and Grace Sullivan for our regular girls’ night out. Since Connor was due back from his conference Thursday afternoon, I’d asked my friends if this month we could meet on Wednesday instead, and they’d agreed.
It had been Grace’s turn to decide where to go, and she’d chosen a newly opened Italian restaurant we hadn’t been to before.
“I’ll guess almost-married life is suiting you, Lucy,” Steph said when we were seated with glasses of wine and big plastic menus in front of us. “If you want to be home when your man returns from his travels.”
“With a frilly pink apron on and a casserole in the oven?” Josie asked.
“Believe it or not,” I said, “I’m attempting to learn to cook something more substantial than microwavable pizza.” I’d grown up in the type of family where the housekeeper did the cooking. My mother, daughter of a no-nonsense Outer Banks working family, had learned to cook from her mother. She promptly forgot everything she knew when she married into my dad’s wealthy Boston family, and she certainly never taught me. After I left my parents’ house and finished college, I’d always lived alone—an apartment in Boston when I worked in the libraries at Harvard, and then in the Lighthouse Aerie. Leaning how to cook practical, delicious, nutritious meals for one had not been a priority in my life. Now, I was determined to learn to cook. To that end, I’d bought an Instant Pot and a cookbook to go along with it. I hadn’t yet been brave enough to open the cookbook or take the pot out of its box.
“Can Connor cook?” Josie said. “I’ve never thought to ask him.” Josie’s my first cousin, daughter of my mother’s sister, my aunt Ellen. Not only can Josie cook, she owns and runs Josie’s Cozy Bakery, the hottest spot for coffee, sandwiches, and baked goods in Nags Head, and her husband, Jake, is a top chef with his own restaurant.
“He can cook,” I said. “When he puts his mind to it. Although everything he makes can be called plain and practical. Steaks on the grill with baked potatoes or pork chops in mushroom soup gravy.”
“Nothing wrong with steaks on the grill,” Grace said.
“No,” I agreed. “But I don’t want that every night.” I handed the waiter my menu. “I’ll have the spaghetti bolognaise, please. Now, pasta,” I said, once the waiter had collected the menus and the orders and left us, “I can have every night. Particularly Josie’s mom’s lasagna.”
Steph moaned at the memory.
“Why don’t we plan an afternoon at the beach house?” Josie suggested. “I’ll get Mom to give you a lesson in lasagna making, and then we can eat the results of your labors.”
“Great idea,” I said.
She chuckled. “If I can convince Mom to give up her recipe, that is. I don’t even have it.”
“How’s the house working out?” Grace asked. “I have to say, I thought you two were taking on a lot of work with that place.”
“It is a lot of work. Not that I do much of it.” My left thumb throbbed with the memory. “Doing the work is making Connor—not to mention his dad—as happy as owning the house does.”
“Men are strange creatures,” Steph said, and we all agreed.
“It’s going to be absolutely fabulous when it’s finally finished,” I said.
My friends smiled at me.
“The Harpers were quite the family.” Josie leaned back to allow the waiter to place a fragrant bowl of mussels in white wine sauce in front of her. She gave him a radiant smile in thanks, and he almost dropped the empty bowl intended to collect the shells.
“Were they all as eccentric as Ralph?” I twirled strands of spaghetti around my fork. “What’s the story with his sister Jo? Do you really think she was chased out of the house by a ghost? Or, I suppose more likely, she was chased out of the house by what she thought was a ghost.”
“As someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts,” Steph said, “I’ll say the latter. My mom knew Jo Harper in school. Even before the incident at the house, she had the reputation of being a strange one. Whatever that means.”
“My mother’s a few years older than yours is,” Josie said. “She knew Ralph and Jimmy better than she did Jo, although they weren’t friends. Ralph never wanted anything but to go to sea like his father and paternal grandfathers had, and he quit school the day he turned sixteen. Jimmy didn’t bother to quit school. He just stopped going somewhere along the way, and no one, not his parents or his teachers, cared enough to try to get him to come back.”
“Who’s Jimmy?” I asked.
“James Harper. Ralph’s twin brother.”
“Ralph and Jo have a brother? I didn’t know that. Ralph and Jo jointly owned the house, and their names were on the papers when Connor and I bought it. Was this Jimmy not involved? Has he died?”
“Not as far as I know.” Josie separated a plump mussel from its shell. “But then again, I wouldn’t necessarily know. They’re Mom’s generation, not mine. Although I do know that Jimmy was the so-called black sheep of that family.” She popped the mussel into her mouth.
“Mom told me something about that,” Steph said. She was having the chicken Parmesan, and it looked delicious. But not as delicious as my spaghetti. I really did have to learn how to make this. “I told her you’d bought the Harper house, and that got her to reminiscing,” she continued. “James, who everyone except his mother called Jimmy, was always in trouble in school. Petty crime. Fights over nothing. Getting into trouble with the police. The sort of trouble that only escalates as boys turn into young men. The sort that provides me with a living.” Steph was a defense attorney, in practice with Josie’s dad, my uncle Amos.
“That’s right,” Josie said. “You and Connor stirred up a lot of memories when you bought that house. My mom also got to talking about the Harper family. When Jimmy was in his early twenties, he ran into some sort of trouble with the law, went to jail for a short while, and when he got out, he left town and never came back. Far as anyone knows, anyway. He supposedly spent more time in prison, but Mom said that’s only a rumor. He’s not been seen around here for years. Decades. When people ask Ralph how his brother’s doing, they get a grunt and a shrug. So people stopped asking a long time ago.”
“I’m surprised Louise Jane has never mentioned this mysterious relative,” I said. “Then again, she didn’t even tell me Ralph was her uncle until we went to see the house.”
“More like a great-uncle a couple of times removed,” Steph said with a laugh. “But, as you know, family ties run deep in the Outer Banks.”
“Deep,” Grace said, “and twisting all over each other.”
“If Louise Jane had reason to suspect the ghost of Jimmy Harper was hanging around, she’d have mentioned it,” Steph said. “She would never have stopped mentioning it. But as he’s apparently still alive, or at least not haunting Nags Head, she has no interest. Speaking of Louise Jane, how’s she working out at the library?”
“Surprisingly well,” I said. “It’s turned out to be a good fit; she and Denise make a great team.” And we went on to talk of other things.
Once again, I jerked awake. No moonlight broke through the clouds tonight, and only a thin line of light leaked into the bedroom from the hallway. Telling myself not to be foolish, I’d made a point of switching off all but one light when I went to bed. I reached for Charles, but my hand didn’t encounter his soft warm fur. I flipped onto my back and lay there, staring up into the darkness, my heart pounding.
It must have been a dream. Something in a dream had woken me. I breathed softly. I listened. Except for the gentle murmur of the sea, all was quiet. I was about to close my eyes and roll onto my side when I heard it again. Overhead, a floorboard creaked. I stopped breathing. It sounded again.
I switched on the bedside light, scooped up my phone, and, scarcely breathing, got slowly out of bed. This was an old house. It was undergoing extensive renovations. Perhaps a window had broken open upstairs. I’d never even been on the upper level, but Connor and his dad had inspected it. “It’s in rough shape up there,” Connor had said to me, “but nothing needs immediate attention, so we’ll seal it off until the downstairs is completely finished.”
Gripping my phone, I crept out of the bedroom. I could see no sign of Charles. It was likely, I told myself, he’d found a hole small enough to squeeze himself through and gone upstairs in pursuit of a mouse or just to explore. I didn’t bother to consider that Charles doesn’t weigh enough to have the floorboards creaking.
Switching on lights as I moved, I approached the living room. The board sealing off the stairs leading to the upper level was in place, the bolts firmly secured. I gave the board a good shove and tugged at the bolts. It stood firm. Unless someone had clambered up the outside of the house in the manner of Spider-Man, no one had gone up there.
I told myself that if someone had climbed to the upper level, they would have made considerably more noise than one creak of a floorboard.
I tried to keep the thought at bay, but it pushed itself forward: this house, people said, was haunted. Jo Harper was so convinced it was haunted she’d fled in the night and never returned.
“Hello?” I called. I cleared my throat. “Hello?” I shouted. “I mean you no harm. If you’re there. Which you aren’t, of course.”
Charles came out of the kitchen and wandered into the living room. He dropped a bright-red stuffed mouse onto the floor at my feet. I let out a burst of strained laughter. “The mighty hunter presenting his prey. So it was you all along. Let’s go back to bed.”
Once again, I left all the lights on. I slept badly and fitfully, but I heard no more noises in the night.
I lay in bed as the morning sun streamed through the cracks in the blinds. I had to have been dreaming last night. I’d heard Charles playing with his toys and, in the quiet and the dark, alone in a still-unfamiliar house, my imagination had taken over and turned the innocent sounds into someone—something—creeping around the closed rooms overhead.
Connor had been away all of two days, and I was so looking forward to seeing him. It would be nice to have a special dinner tonight to welcome the traveling man home. I could pick up a couple of steaks from the butcher on my lunch break along with potatoes and salad ingredients. Charles snoozed by my side, his eyes closed, his chest gently rising and falling. Charles wouldn’t be happy to see Connor home and reclaiming his spot in the bed.
“Silly cat.” I rubbed his tummy, and he purred softly.
I debated whether or not to tell Connor about the disturbances I’d heard the last two nights. Eventually I decided I had to. Last night’s sounds were just that—sounds in the night—but the sliding door had been open the night before, and that had not been my imagination. If the deliverymen had left the door open and unlocked, Connor needed to know. I’d checked the living room door about ten times since, and other than the bent sliders that prohibited it from opening all the way, it seemed to work okay, but Connor should have it fixed as soon as possible.
He’d arrived in town in the early afternoon and headed directly for the mayor’s office, promising to finish up whatever waited for him there by seven and be home in time for dinner.
Home for dinner! What a lovely phrase that is.
I’d decided I couldn’t ask the hungry man to cook his own welcome-home meal, so instead of getting steaks for the grill, I went to Josie’s bakery and picked up a premade beef-and-mushroom pie and to the supermarket for salad ingredients. A salad, at least, I could throw together. I’d have to get Josie to teach me to make a meat pie. Maybe we could have a serious cooking session at her mom’s house one day. Aunt Ellen would be delighted to show me all her tricks and tips. I might even learn Uncle Amos’s recipe for the perfect grilled whole fish.
As we had no dining room furniture other than two plastic chairs I’d bought at a beach supply shop so we could sit by the front windows and watch the ocean, Connor and I had every meal at the island in the kitchen. As we ate tonight, we exchanged our news. Connor had little to say except that his convention had been a waste of time. I told him things were going well at the library. So well, I was afraid disaster lurked behind every corner, waiting for me to drop my guard and then it would pounce.
He chuckled and said, “ ‘Sufficient unto the day.’ ”
I cleared my throat. “Uh … one tiny thing happened the other night.”
His eyes narrowed, his fork stopped halfway to his mouth. “What?”
“Nothing big. You don’t need to look shocked.”
“I don’t like the way your voice took that troubled tone.”
“I have a troubled tone?”
“You have a range of them. They go with your facial expressions. And the expression you have on at the moment tells me something’s bothering you but you don’t want to worry me about it.”
I settled my face into unexpressive lines. “How’s that?”
“I am not comforted.” He put down his fork. “What happened, Lucy?”
“Tuesday night I heard a noise in the house. I mean, a noise as though someone stepped on a floorboard.”
“It’s an old house, Lucy, and the wind blows straight toward it off the ocean. Everything rattles.”
“Yes, but … Charles heard it too. We got up to investigate, and …”
“And …”
“The living room door was open, and … and … the tracks of a man’s boots were in the sand and dust on the floor. Tracks running from the kitchen to the door.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure the door was open. Positive about that. As for the prints … I suppose a breeze could have stirred the dust into those shapes, but …”
“But that doesn’t seem likely. You should have shut yourself in the bedroom and called the police if you thought someone was in the house. I’m assuming you didn’t do that.”
“No. It spooked me at the time, but I’m sure it was nothing. Your dad had been here earlier in the day, with the men delivering the wood for the new deck. I thought maybe they’d come into the house to check on the deck and left the door unlocked.”
“If they had been in, my dad would have ensured they locked up behind them.”
“He had to get home. It was his poker night. Maybe he forgot.”
“My father doesn’t forget something as important as that.” Connor dug in his pocket and pulled out his phone. Dinner forgotten, he made a call. “Hi, Dad. I’m home and checking the wood was all delivered. Good. Did you or the delivery guys come in the house? I can’t find the Phillips screwdriver I last saw in the dining room. No? I must have mislaid it. It’ll turn up. Yup, Saturday morning, first thing. See you then.” He put his phone away and said to me, “Dad hasn’t been in the house since the weekend, and he didn’t let the deliverymen in.”
He pushed himself away from the table and stood up. “Show me this door that was open.”
I also abandoned my dinner, and we went to the living room. Charles roused himself from his bed next to the stove and followed. The three of us stood in the entrance staring into the empty space.
“Where are these prints?” Connor said.
I could see no sign of them. The sun had set and the moon had not yet risen. The empty room was dark and full of shadows from the lights in the other parts of the house. Over the past two days, the sand and dust had been disturbed and the footprints erased.
I showed Connor the pictures on my phone. He examined them for a long time, expanding and contracting the image with his fingers and peering closely. “Looks like a boot,” he said at last. “Hard to tell, though, and I can’t judge the size with nothing to compare it with. Might be one of my work boots or Dad’s.”
Connor made sure the door was secure, and then he unlocked it. He pushed it open the few inches it would go before being stopped by the rusty slider. He shoved at it, but it refused to move any farther. “Hard for a man to get in this way.”
“Hard,” I said, “But not impossible. I did.”
He turned around and stared at me. “You did? You mean you went outside? When you thought a prowler might be creeping around in the dark? Lucy, this isn’t a teenage horror flick.”
“Charles was outside,” I said meekly. “He wouldn’t come when I called, so I had to get him.”
Connor turned his steely-eyed glare onto the cat. Charles sat down and licked a paw, unintimidated by any steely-eyed glare.
“What did you do after finding the door open and rescuing Charles?”
“I shut and locked the door and walked through the entire main level of the house, checking every door and ensuring every door and window was locked. The board you’ve put over the stairs to the upper level was intact, so I didn’t go up there.” I thought over my movements after that. “I checked the kitchen and the pantry last, cleaned up the water from Charles’s dish, which he’d knocked over, and then we went back to bed. And that was that.” I said nothing about last night.
“Charles knocked his water dish over?”
“Yes.”
“How often does that happen?”
“Never. You don’t think—”
“Did you check the trapdoor?”
“What trapdoor?”
“The trapdoor in the pantry.”
“There’s a trapdoor in the pantry? Leading down to what?” Like most Outer Banks beach houses, this one is set on stilts. Nothing’s underneath the floor but sand and open space.
“Not down, up. Didn’t I show you?”
“I think I’d remember if you had.”
He ran into the kitchen without another word, threw open the door to the pantry, and switched on the light. The cans and baskets of produce and jugs of cleaning supplies sat neatly on their shelves. Connor pointed to the ceiling. “That’s what the rope’s for. To get the steps down.”
I looked up. Far above my head, a rope hung from a square cut into the ceiling. I’d never seen it before. Why should I have? I don’t stand in small, dark rooms examining the ceiling, and the end of the rope was above my line of sight.
Connor reached up, grabbed the rope, and gave it a good tug. A section of the ceiling opened and a full set of stairs gracefully unfolded.
“Goodness,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Connor said. “I should have told you this was here. I guess I thought I had. Dad and I went all over the place, but you might not have been here the day we examined this.”
“What’s up there?”
“Bunch of junk. I’d guess it was a place to store excess pots and pans and table settings they’d only use when the family had company, and over the years, as the owners got older and entertained less, it turned into your typical junk room. Ralph said he’d taken anything he wanted, so I left it all up there until I have time to take it to the dump. I’m going to have a look. You wait here.”
Once he’d disappeared into the ceiling, I grabbed the sides of the ladder and gave it a good shake. It held firm, and so I began climbing. My head popped into a large, dark space. Connor had switched on his phone to provide some light, but shadows filled the corners. “I thought I asked you to wait down below.” He shook his head. “Never mind. We’re in what at one time had been a good-sized bedroom. That door”—he pointed into the darkness—“opens onto the second-floor hallway.”
I pulled out my own phone and shined the light around. Masses of spiders’ webs hung from the ceiling, and the corners were thick with mouse droppings. Everything was covered in a layer of dust, sand, and more mouse droppings. A steamer trunk and a couple of wooden tea chests were pushed up against the wall. A child’s play table occupied a far corner with three small chairs pulled up to it, one of them tilting dangerously on a half-broken leg.
“Ralph and Jo took what little they wanted when their mother died, and then he boarded up the place,” Connor said. “Until Dad and I inspected it and put in the ladder, no one’s been up here for fifteen years.”
A high shelf ran around one wall. A collection of cracked teacups, the pattern almost invisible under generations of dust, and three dolls sat on the shelf, legs and long dresses spilling over the edge. The dolls’ clothes were mouse chewed, the paint on their faces cracked and faded. I felt a moment of sadness, seeing them abandoned, discarded. They’d been up here far longer than fifteen years. I pushed two dolls aside and picked the third off the shelf and studied it. The ribbon in the hair crumbled to dust under my touch. I put the doll on the child’s table and wiped my hands on the seat of my jeans.
When I looked again, I could see that the long full skirts of the dolls had concealed a photograph, glass covered, sepia with age, hanging on the wall from a bent and rusty nail. A formal portrait of a man sitting behind a desk, his elbow resting on a stack of books, one hand propped against his chin. He was in his thirties, perhaps, with thick dark wavy hair and a thin moustache. He wore a dark suit, a white shirt with a high collar and a dark tie, white cuffs, and square cuff links. He stared into my eyes. I stared back. He was a handsome man, but something I didn’t care for lurked behind his narrowed eyes and intense stare.
My imagination again.
“I wonder why they didn’t take this photograph,” I said. “Someone went to the trouble of framing it, so it must be an ancestor of theirs.”
The house had come to us containing some furniture. But that furniture had been moth- and spider-infested, gnawed by mice, and heavily stained with goodness knows what. It was old, but it had been mass-produced and was of little to no value as antiques. We’d junked the lot of it.
“Someone’s been here, Lucy,” Connor said.
“What do you mean, someone?”
“Since Dad and I saw it.” He shined his light across the floor.
Footprints in the dust.