Flashback Friday is a monthly meme that takes place on the
last Friday of the month.
The idea is to give a little more love to a post you’ve published on
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now, or maybe it just didn’t get the attention it deserved when you
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Just join in whenever you like,
repost one of your own blog posts, including any copyright notices on text or media, on the last Friday of the month.
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I wanted a Pismawallops PTA story for Flashback Friday again, since the newest book just came out this week, so I hunted a long way back through the archives and found this story from 2014. It was written while I was working on editing the second book in the series,
Death By Trombone. If you want to know more, both
Death By Ice Cream (the story alluded to at places in this story) and
Death By Trombone are on sale through April for only 99 cents!
This one's a little longer than usual, at about 1150 words.
Haunted House
"Kitty, have you heard the rumors about the LeMoine house?" I asked my best friend the question over our weekly binge at the Have-a-Bite bakery.
"Rumors like what?" Kitty's response was not so much an inquiry as a caution. I wasn't sure just how to answer, now I'd brought the matter up. Should I say anything? The kids hadn't known I was listening to their discussion of the place. Maybe that was all the more reason to share what I'd heard.
"I gathered from something Brian and Kat said that kids are daring one another to spend the night there. That something might get them if they do." Presumably the ghost of Letitia LeMoine, I didn't need to add. "In any case, they expect something scary to happen."
"As a parent," Kitty said with a dryness I would have been proud to own, "it sounds like something scary all right."
We considered teens for a moment while consuming espresso brownies a nibble at a time. I only allow myself one a month, so I wasn't going to miss any of this one.
The LeMoine house had stood empty since Kat's daughter and my son and their best friends had found the owner strangled where the Pismawallops PTA usually stored ice cream bars. To the best of my knowledge, the house was empty because the ownership was under dispute, not because no one would live there. Letitia's daughter had gone to the mainland to live with her mother's aunt and she couldn't even rent it out because no one knew if it was hers.
"You don't suppose there's someone squatting there?" Kitty finally suggested. "That might lead to lights in the windows or whatever started the stories. Once they get started, you know how stories like that grow."
"And a story like that might allow someone to stay a long time, if they make it convincing enough," I agreed.
"You should tell Ron." Kitty winked when she said it. As if I needed reminding that I had... something... going with the Pismawallops Island chief of police. I refused to rise to the bait.
"I'm sure he already knows."
In the end, we shrugged it off. Kids like a scary story, and an empty house belonging to a murdered woman offered good material. Our job was to make sure Brian and Kat were not among those who tested the ghost story. I wasn't too worried.
#
A week later I was less sanguine. Not about the kids, who were behaving well, but about the LeMoine house.
"I drove by there again, and someone is definitely changing the curtains around and stuff," I told my best friend when we met for our weekly coffee.
"Maybe a real estate agent, trying to keep it from looking empty?"
"Nice try, Kitty. But everyone on the Island knows about it, so what's the point?" I took another bite of my low-fat blueberry scone and tried to convince myself it was as good as the brownie had been the week before.
Kitty shrugged. "Then we're back to squatters."
"Do you think we should have a look? If someone's broken in, we should do something. Chantal LeMoine may be a piece of work, but that house is her only inheritance."
"The police, JJ. Talk to Ron."
#
I'm not an idiot, despite some evidence to the contrary, and I was on good terms with Ron that week so I did what Kitty suggested. I did it at the police station, though. Neither of us could be trusted in private just then, and I didn't know what I wanted from the relationship. Ron knew all too well what he wanted. At the station he couldn't very well make a play for it.
"I've heard the rumors, JJ, but when one of us drives by, there's no sign of anything."
His department consisted of himself and a worse-than-useless deputy. Leave it to a pair of guys to miss the changes in the curtains.
"Can I take you to dinner?" He changed the subject, asking his usual question. That was the trouble with Ron. He didn't care if the world knew how he felt about me. He'd have kissed me in front of the whole Island, so long as he wasn't in uniform.
"No." Until I resolved some of my existing issues, I wasn't taking on any more.
#
Really, Ron left me only one option. I'd have to investigate the LeMoine ghost myself. Or rather, with Kitty, because I wasn't going there alone.
"Oh, come on, Kitty," I wheedled. "It'll be a lark."
She reminded me of a couple of other things I'd talked her into that hadn't worked so well, and I winced. "We won't go at night. We can just stop in for a minute, look in the windows, and see if it looks like anyone is living there."
Kitty was still reluctant. "Your ideas always sound good," she began.
"Because they are," I insisted. We exchanged looks, her dubious, mine stubborn.
She gave in first. "Oh, fine. I'll go."
"After dinner tonight."
"That's not broad daylight."
"It's light until late, this time of year. It won't be later than 7:30."
"Fine." Odd. She sounded a lot like Brian at his most teenaged.
#
In fact it was a little later than 7:30, and a little duskier than I'd expected, when we approached the "haunted house." We hadn't told anyone where we were going, for fear of being laughed at. Suddenly, I wished we had. I ignored the unworthy thought.
I parked in front of the house and we stepped up on the porch with pointless caution. I peered in the front window and let slip a word I don't let Brian use.
"What?" Kitty squeaked. She seemed jumpy.
"I can't see anything. Too dark." I moved to the door before she could say, "I told you so," and laid a hand on the knob. The door swung open with a small squeak, just like in the horror movies.
We exchanged looks. Then I went in, before Kitty could get reasonable and drag me away.
The front room was neat, and what I could see of it looked much as I'd last seen it.
Too much so. I realized that once again someone was sitting on the couch in the dusk, just as they had that day. . . . I screamed. I'm not proud of it, but the memory was too strong, and I'd nearly died that day.
The figure on the couch jumped up and turned into a teenaged girl. "Oh, my god, I'm sorry!"
I thought I knew who it was, and reached for the light, but of course the power was off.
"Hang on," said Chantal LeMoine, and a moment later a flashlight came on.
I glared at the dead woman's daughter. "You have some explaining to do."
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©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2014
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