Emily was waiting at the door when Dixie walked in and they both burst into laughter.
“Were you spying?” Dixie shoved her keys into her purse, which she’d left on the kitchen counter.
“A little. Man he’s hot. Does he have a brother?” Emily fell back into the sofa in the parlor.
“He said he does, but I haven’t met him. He could be a dog.” She sat next to her best friend, grateful for her presence. “Would you move in with me? Some weird stuff went down today. I just don’t want to be alone. I’ve gotten used to you being here with me.”
Emily grinned. “Thought you’d never ask. Why do you think I haven’t left yet? Besides, I haven’t actually put the deposit down on my apartment. I knew you’d never live alone. But it is kind of disturbing that you want me to stay in the haunted brothel with you.”
Dixie was relieved just knowing Emily wasn’t going to abandon her. “It’s weird. Even though all this stuff has happened, I love this place. Besides, I put every penny I had into it. I can’t leave now.”
Emily shifted, apparently so she could address her face to face. “You wouldn’t leave anyway. I think you like the excitement. Maybe we can use it draw customers. ‘Come visited the haunted boutique. Buy earrings and chat with dead people’.”
Dixie giggled. “Somehow I don’t think we should advertise about our little problem.”
“So you had another experience today?” Emily crossed the room and retrieved a journal from the trunk.
Dixie flinched, afraid if they touched anything she’d be forced to live through another visit from Holland. Even speaking his name or Bindi’s made her paranoid. She thought about her trip to the attic and related the events to Emily, pointing to her new war wounds.
“I thought ghosts, entities, stuff like that couldn’t hurt you. Isn’t that what they say on all those paranormal shows?” Emily sat again, holding the notebook secure against her stomach.
“I’m here to tell you, he’s touched me on three separate occasions. And maybe he didn’t toss me down the stairs, but I wouldn’t be banged up if it wasn’t for him. I wonder if humans can be demonic.” Dixie scooted across the sofa and leaned on the arm. She was exhausted, but she wanted to spend time with her friend.
Emily gazed off as if the answer to Dixie’s demonic human question was somewhere locked in her mind. “Ya know, I think if someone was evil on Earth then they are evil in death. Maybe good spirits don’t hurt you because they don’t want to and bad ones handle humans the same way they did when they were alive.”
“Makes sense to me.” Dixie rubbed at the scrape on her knee, remembering how gentle Blake had been when he was doctoring it.
“You said yourself that he’s touched you. And perhaps the reason he doesn’t appear often is that it takes a lot of energy to do it.” Emily’s eyebrows rose, indicating she believed her own theory.
Dixie was too tired to develop an idea of her own. “You should write horror novels.”
Emily snickered. “Come on. It makes perfect sense. We’d have laughed at anyone who told us their house was haunted before this.”
“No kidding.” This was a notion Dixie could agree with. Before moving into the Holland House, she loved to watch ghost hunter shows, but only so she and Emily could make fun of them.
Thinking back on episodes they’d chuckled at, she wondered how the inhabitants of those homes had learned to live with the paranormal. Very few of them left their houses, as if they were staking a claim on their territory no matter the cost. Dixie didn’t know how much she could take before she’d let the place go.
Emily must have been reading her mind. “We aren’t giving this house up. We’re gonna find out everything and send Holland packing, so smile.”
Dixie forced a grin. “Let’s just hope he can take a hint.”
Emily dismissed the thought with a flick of her hand. “You were gone when I got here, so I did a little digging. I don’t know if it’s worth a whole lot, but I found some info on Bindi.”
Dixie closed her eyes and prepared her brain for some more information that would keep her from sleeping. “Shoot.”
“It’s nothing bad. Bindi wrote in her journal about her parents.”
Dixie opened her eyes and sat up again. She was interested in knowing how the girl had come to be stuck with Holland Aucoin. She didn’t say anything, but she leaned her elbows on her knees and held her head up with her hands, giving Emily her full attention.
“She said she’d lived with both her parents for the first twelve years of her life. While her father was alive, things seemed great. Bindi said she was happy. Her father was a blacksmith and made decent money. Bindi was used to having everything she wanted.”
Dixie interrupted. “Was she an only child too?”
Emily shook her head. “Yeah. She had that in common with us. She must have been brilliant.” Emily didn’t crack a smile, but Dixie giggled and let her continue. “Her parents were happily married, but in eighteen hundred and thirty-nine, her father went on a fishing excursion with a group of men.”
Dixie could feel the story taking a grim turn, but she stayed quiet as the hair on the back of her neck stood on end.
“He kissed them goodbye and left one Sunday. Four days later the men showed up on their door step with her father’s lifeless body. They’d built a boat, and when it capsized, everyone made it back to shore except Bindi’s father.”
“Oh, that’s horrible.”
Emily nodded then flipped a couple of pages and scanned them before she started again. “After her dad died, her mother lost it a bit. She left Bindi at home alone a lot and brought different men home. Then one day she left and didn’t come back.”
Dixie thought about it for a minute. “Maybe her mother didn’t abandon her. Maybe something happened to her.”
“That would be my guess. I mean, I think she loved Bindi. She just got herself in some kind of trouble. But Bindi never mentions it as a possibility. I think she wanted to believe her mother was alive.”
“So then she met Holland?” Dixie’s eyes fell upon Bindi’s immaculate handwriting.
“Yeah. I bet he’d been watching her. He may have even set her up.” Emily was reading again.
“What do you mean, set her up?” As Dixie spoke the banging started in the attic again. She looked up at the ceiling and yelled, “Bang all you want, Holland. We're still gonna talk about you.” She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for repercussions. Nothing happened.
Emily shook her head. “Stop arguing with the ghost.” She glanced upward and then went on with the story. “Bindi got a visit from the police and we both know Holland had them on his payroll. Anyway, they told her if she didn’t find a place to stay they were going to send her to a state-operated girls’ home.”
“That slimy snake. He didn’t give her a choice. No wonder…”
Emily kept going. “The next day, he just happened upon her in the market. He offered her a place to stay. What could she say?”
“It certainly puts it all together. She had to live here or be stuck in a place with criminals and other orphans.”
“Right. He knew she’d say yes. What a pervert. He honestly thought he had a chance with her.”
Dixie looked at the ceiling again. “I think I’m going to sleep down here tonight. Care to join me?”
“Yeah, I’ll grab some blankets. You take this couch. I'll take the other one.”