“Secret passageways. Rumrunners. A lifetime of discarded objects, now useless junk. Someone creeping around in my house at night. Now a dead body. And all I wanted was a nice house to live in.”
“It’s still a nice house,” Ronald said. “All old houses have histories. You just found out more about yours than you wanted to.”
“You got that right,” I said.
“I’d love to have another look at it,” Louise Jane said. “I might be able to make contact with—”
“No,” I said. “There will be no making contact in my house. And that’s final.”
The morning following the discovery of Jimmy Harper and the secret entrance, my colleagues and I were gathered around the display table in the alcove. Connor and I’d spent the night at Ellen and Amos’s beach house, and in the morning we’d been allowed back into our house. The body of James Harper had been removed, I’d been glad to see, and most of the evidence of the police presence along with it. I’d need to buy a new leash for Charles. Even if the police eventually offered to give it back to me, I didn’t want to touch it ever again.
I’d called Bertie to tell her I’d be late for work and why, and naturally everyone wanted to hear the story when I arrived at the library. We have a full slate of children’s programs on Saturdays, as well as being generally busy, so I was able to give my colleagues only a rough outline of last night’s events before Ronald had to head upstairs to get ready for the next batch of little arrivals.
Louise Jane hovered around my desk, and I could tell she was about to make a suggestion. Probably something along the lines of having a séance to contact the ghost of Ralph’s grandfather. Fortunately, the phone rang before she could get the words out.
“Bodie Island Lighthouse Library,” I said.
“Lucy, good morning. Sam Watson here.”
“Detective Watson, how can I help you? Have you …?”
“No, Lucy. I have nothing new to tell you. I would like your help with something, though.”
“Of course, anything.”
Louise Jane leaned closer. I gave her a frown and swung around in my chair. Never one to be easily dissuaded, she leaned closer still. The bones in her face, like those in the rest of her body, were sharp. As sharp as her eyes.
“I’m on my way to talk to Joanna Harper,” Watson said. “Last night, Ralph Harper insisted his sister wouldn’t know anything about this, but I can’t take his word for it. I’ve been told she’s known to be a recluse, and when I was thinking over how best to approach her, I thought the presence of a civilian woman would be helpful.”
“You mean me? You want me to go with you?”
“I do. You can be a calming influence, Lucy. Plus, you and she have something in common, by which I mean the house.”
“I … I guess I can do that. But I’m at work.”
“Put me through to Bertie. I’ll check with her.”
“It’s Saturday. She’s not in today. She’s always given me any time I needed to help you when it’s been necessary. So sure, I guess it’ll be all right.”
“I have something to wrap up first, but that won’t take long. Can you meet me at the Harper house in half an hour?” He gave me the address, and I agreed before hanging up.
“What was that about?” Louise Jane asked.
“You’ll have to watch the desk for a while. I’m going out.”
“Where?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it matters. I’m the academic librarian’s assistant, Lucy. Not your helper.”
“I believe your terms of employment say ‘other duties as assigned.’ I’m assigning you to watch the desk.” I tried to sound firm and authoritative. I am the assistant director here. Meaning in Bertie’s absence I’m the person in charge. “Please,” I added weakly. “It won’t be for long. A couple of the volunteers are due in at eleven.”
Louise Jane emitted a martyred sigh. “Seeing as to how you are assisting the police with their inquiries, I suppose it’s okay. This time.”
“I don’t think ‘assisting the police with their inquiries’ means what you think it means, Louise Jane.”
One eyebrow rose, and she smirked. “Doesn’t it?”
In English detective fiction, that phrase usually means under arrest and being questioned.
Louise Jane let out a bark of laughter. “Your face, Lucy! Of course I’ll watch the desk for you. Take as long as you need. Before you go, you’ll need the background on Aunt Jo.”
“How’d you know—?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “But I do now. I know Sam Watson well enough, so I guessed that was why he was calling. He’ll approach Jo carefully, respecting her boundaries, until he has reason to do otherwise. He should have asked me to go with him, seeing as to how we’re related and all. He probably tried me first, but as cell phone reception doesn’t work very well in this building and you were the first to answer the landline …”
The library was momentary quiet in the break between toddlers’ nine o’clock story time and when preteens and their parents started streaming into the building for the eleven o’clock nature walk.
“I know about Jo refusing to go into her family home again,” I said. “You told us that the first time Connor and I saw the house.”
“As you can imagine, there’s been a lot of talk over the years about what really happened that night.” Louise Jane’s voice settled into storyteller mode: deep and calming, with a rolling cadence that drew me along with it. “Her folks had gone to Raleigh, something about her mother needing to see a doctor, and they’d be away overnight. Ralph and Jimmy are older than Jo, and they’d left school long before and moved out of their parents’ house, so Jo was alone the night in question. Although not entirely alone, if you get my meaning.” She winked at me.
“I don’t,” I said.
“They say she snuck her boyfriend into the house. Her parents were awful strict, my mother says. Now that was back in the 1970s, when most parents were stricter about that sort of thing than they are today, but my mother says the Harpers didn’t let that girl do anything, even the more innocent things her friends did.” Louise Jane’s mouth twisted in disapproval. “All that means is that when they took their eye off her, she went behind their backs and she hadn’t learned self-control. Anyway, she came tearing out of that house in the middle of the night, half-undressed, bare feet, screaming something awful. Her screams woke the neighbors, and they came running. They took her in for the night, and in the morning she refused to go back to her own house, even to get her clothes. The neighbors took her to her father’s sister Ethel in Kitty Hawk. That would be my grandmother’s youngest sister.” I didn’t bother trying to work out that relationship, and Louise Jane continued. “Jo remained with Ethel and her family for a couple of years, never stepped foot in her parents’ house again. She was seventeen at the time and a senior in high school. They say she was super smart and an A student, but she never returned to school. People thought her parents should have done more to help her, but they, her mother in particular, said Jo could decide for herself what she wanted to do. Some people thought they simply didn’t know what to do, and so they did nothing. Ethel was happy enough to have Jo with her. To have the free labor in the house, I’ll bet. A few years later Jo moved in with Ralph when he bought himself a house in town, and she’s been there ever since.”
“She saw a ghost? Or she thinks she did?”
“That’s what she told people. Her granddaddy appeared to her and ordered her to leave his house and never come back.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because she’d brought her boyfriend in. Jo never said that part. But it’s what people believe.”
I thought of the footsteps I’d heard in the night. Footsteps that turned out to have had an all-too-human source. I studied Louise Jane’s face. She has a good reputation throughout the Outer Banks as a keeper of legends and a storyteller of local history. Under the influence of her grandmother and great-grandmother, she searched for paranormal forces, particularly in old places and old stories.
She’s tried many times to frighten me with her tales of the haunting of the library. I’ve never been entirely sure whether she believes them herself, wants to believe, or thinks the telling makes her sound important.
“What do you think happened, Louise Jane?” I asked at last.
Surprise lit up her eyes, and then a smile touched the corners of her thin mouth. “I appreciate you asking me, Lucy. My great-grandmother would tell you that old man Froomer—his name was Ezekiel, if you can believe it—was a mean son of a gun in life, and naturally he’d still be a mean son of a gun after death. The only person he ever really loved was his daughter, and it was a great disappointment to him when she married a common fisherman. But by then his money and influence had long run out, so he shouldn’t have expected her to make what he considered a good match. By which he would have meant snagging herself a rich man. He died a few years before the incident we’re talking about. I can find out for sure, if you want to know.”
“Not necessary,” I said. “I’m just interested in what happened to Jo. Seeing as to how I’m living in the house where all this took place.”
“As for what did happen”—Louise Jane let out a long breath—“most folks said it was Jimmy playing a trick on her. He would have been twenty-one, twenty-two by then. He’d quit school, didn’t have a job anyone knew about, disappeared for weeks at a time, was always getting into trouble, had spent some time in jail, if I remember right. He ran with a bad crowd. Or, as my great-grandmother said, he was leading a bad crowd. It would be like him and his friends to get liquored up, realize his sister was alone in the house, and decide it would be great fun to scare her. Worked out better than he’d expected, I figure. Not long after that he left town for good. Yeah, much as I’d like to believe it was Ezekiel Froomer running off his granddaughter’s beau, it was Jimmy, more likely than not.”
Yes, I could see poor seventeen-year-old Joanna being frightened out of her wits at the sight of something rising up out of the floorboards and yelling boo.
“A practical joke,” Louise Jane murmured, “that ruined a woman’s life. The story’s probably grown in the telling, but I’ve heard Jo was the most beautiful girl in high school in her time, although she kept largely to herself, didn’t have many friends. She was super smart, so they say, but she was always considered to be odd. Whatever that means.”
“Might be something as simple as not wanting to do what other girls her age did,” I said.
“Not wanting or not able, considering the way her parents kept an eye on her. Anyway, after that night, Jo never went back to school. She never got a job. She never married or had children. She lived with her cranky older brother for the rest of her life and rarely comes out of the house even today.”
“What about the boyfriend? What happened to him? Did he try to tell his side of the story?”
“No one even knows who it was. The neighbors say when they came running in answer to Jo’s screams, they saw a man disappearing down the road fast as his legs could take him. He, whoever it was, might not have had anything to do with it. That a boy or a man was in the house that night with Jo is only speculation. Makes a better story.”
“Good morning, Lucy, Louise Jane. Nice day for an outing.”
I started at the sound of Aunt Ellen’s voice. I’d been so wrapped up in Louise Jane’s tale, I’d forgotten I was supposed to be keeping an eye on activity in the library. Patrons had started drifting in, bringing children for the nature walk in the marsh. Ronald would have his hands full keeping an eye on the children in the open spaces, so he’d recruited an army of volunteers to give him a hand. Aunt Ellen was dressed in sturdy hiking shoes and socks pulled over the hems of her khaki pants. “Everything all right this morning, dear?” she asked me.
I gave her a nod and a smile. “The police are finished at our house, and we can have it back.”
“Jimmy Harper, back in town after all these years. What a way for him to end up. Although from what they say he’s been up to while he was away, perhaps not that surprising.”
More volunteers, parents, and excited children started coming in, and we had no more time to talk. I went into the break room for my jacket and purse, and when I came out, Louise Jane was sitting behind the circulation desk, Aunt Ellen was admiring a child’s pith helmet, and Ronald was chatting to the ranger from the Cape Hatteras National Seashore who would lead the expedition.
I interrupted Ronald to tell him where I was going and then called to Louise Jane. “I have my phone on me, if you need anything.”
“I won’t,” she replied, with typical Louise Jane confidence.
A stream of kids swarmed in. They carried the notebooks Ronald had told them to bring to record their nature sightings in for later discussion and were mostly dressed in some arrangement of outdoor wear—hiking or rain boots, long pants, jackets, and hats. The parents and volunteers were similarly attired, with one exception.
Diane Uppiton wore a pale-peach skirt suit, stockings, and pumps with three-inch heels. Her hair was arranged in a stiff black helmet, and her makeup was thickly applied. She stretched her red lips in what she probably meant to be a smile when she saw me. “Lucy, so nice to see you, dear. I would have thought that after all the excitement you had last night, you’d not be at work. The whole town’s talking about it. Imagine, Jimmy Harper, back in Nags Head. And up to no good, it sounds like. They’re saying someone murdered him. Can’t say I’m surprised. He always was a bad one, and his brother and sister are … you know what I mean, dear.” She made circles next to her ear with a red-tipped index finger.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean. I like Ralph a great deal.”
“Of course you do, dear. Such an admirable trait, to think the best of everyone. Are you safe in that house, do you think?” She tried to look concerned for my well-being. She failed.
“Actually, Diane,” Louise Jane called. “They might be saying he was murdered, if by they you mean rumormongers and common gossips, but the authorities are not.”
“I only meant—”
“Could’ve been a heart attack. Maybe the result of a fall or a stroke. He must have been almost seventy,” Louise Jane exclaimed. “Isn’t that the same age as you, Diane?”
“I am not seventy,” Diane snapped.
“Coulda fooled me.” Louise Jane graced Diane with her sharklike smile. “Can I help you with something?”
“I’m here to assist with the nature walk. I see Ronald over there. I’ll go and check in with him, why don’t I?”
“You do that,” Louise Jane said. “Have fun! After all that rain and snow we had over the winter, the marsh waters’ll be high. Insects and reptiles love that!”
Diane blanched. I tried not to laugh. Louise Jane had been deliberately mean, but I couldn’t help thinking Diane deserved it.
Diane picked her way across the floor, scowling at every child who got in her way. She greeted a startled Aunt Ellen with a flurry of hand gestures and a brush on the cheek. Diane didn’t like children, she didn’t like nature, and I doubted that volunteering played an important role in her life. She could be here for one reason only: she intended to weasel her way back onto the library board.
I would do everything in my power (not that I had much of it) to ensure that didn’t happen.