The Ghost and Miss Demure Read online

  Eventually the world stilled, more of her senses returned and she was able to roll over and stagger to her feet. She put her phone in her pants pocket. The nerve endings in her fingertips tingled violently as she clasped them to her still sightless eyes. Her cheeks were caked with grit and her eyelids burned with sudden, scalding tears as they tried to dislodge the dust paste in and around them.

  “Oh, God! Am I dead?”

  She clutched blindly at her chest. Her heart was still beating, wasn’t it? Yes, there it was, pumping like an insufflator on an old engine. But her eyes! Why couldn’t she see? Hadn’t she read somewhere that a lightning strike was five times hotter than the surface of the sun?

  Before she could begin to truly panic, her baby blues had worked up a good cry, and they began to wash the dirt and calcium away. Karo hung her dizzy head and let her tear ducts have their way, and her vision slowly cleared enough to see that her shoes had more chalk on them than Minnesota Fats’s favorite pool cue. One of them even had a hole punched through the toe like a summer sandal! Another pair of Italy’s second finest had bitten the dust, literally. She looked like she’d been wading in wet cement.

  She cried harder. So much for that old chestnut about the benefits of dressing for success! What was the point in investing in expensive footwear if Mother Nature was going to spit on it? Wasn’t she in enough trouble already? Now she had to face her boss looking like a dirty snowman.

  A good cry for her loafers’ destruction drove back her panic to bearable levels and she began to feel more competent. Karo wiped her face on a clean bit of sleeve and began to consider other important things.

  “Well, hell,” she muttered, looking beyond the end of her white feet.

  It soon became evident what had happened. Lighting had struck at the old dogwood that leaned on the gatepost and snapped it like kindling. The charred remains lay shattered and smoking only a few feet away. The tree trunk was toast. The road around her looked like the aftermath of an explosion from a howitzer round. Seashells were blown yards clear from the fresh red scar plowed in the topsoil.

  Karo stood utterly still, her damaged shoes forgotten. She was numbly grateful that the lightning hadn’t actually struck her, as she had assumed in those first blinding moments, but holy moley and all the apostles! It had been close. Of course, getting crispy-crittered would only have been what she deserved for being such a moron as to be caught standing by an iron gate in a lightning storm.

  She took a shaky breath. When she felt a little better, she would kick herself for being volatile and frivolous—and treasure hungry—during a hurricane. At the moment she was too cold and tired to punish herself further.

  Taking a minute to inventory her tender body, she was relieved to see only minor scrapes and bruises. She hadn’t even torn her clothes, although they were now very wet and dirty. No osteoporosis for her jeans, she thought wryly; they’d just absorbed enough calcium to stave off brittle bones forever.

  Except for the ringing in her ears and the odd painful tingling in her hands and feet, she was back on her feet and ready to roll—this time at a reasonable speed. If she could get past the poor blasted tree that was blocking the drive.

  Karo stared at the burned offering with growing consternation. It was still smoking, and it looked awfully big and flammable to try moving on her own. She could try nudging it with the car, but what if it wedged under the engine and the fuel lines caught fire? She didn’t need her dad to tell her that she might not survive a second explosion.

  She wiped her hands carefully on the sides of her pants, frowned at the new white smears on the palms and tried to decide what to do. Fact number one: The road was completely blocked by the smoldering remains, and she couldn’t move them without some extra muscles and asbestos gloves. Fact number two: She was shaking like the proverbial leaf, and cognizant enough to realize that she was shivering because she was suffering from shock and cold. Which was an important fact. What had they said in her CPR class about treating shock? Get the victim warm and elevate the feet. That was it. The day’s temperatures were in the high eighties, but she needed to get warmer. It seemed scarcely feasible, but she had to try.

  Karo walked slowly back to the Honda and climbed in through the open door. The seat was wet on the left side and the old sheepskin smelled like a barnyard. Had she left the door unlatched and maybe the wind had blown it open? Surely she hadn’t been so careless as to walk off into the rain and leave it standing wide…

  What was she doing? Oh, yeah. Getting warm.

  She started the engine without any trouble and turned the heater up to high and only then remembered to close the door. Soon the interior was warmer than the outside, and Karo began to dry out. As the cold receded from her quivering limbs, she was able to let go her grip on the steering wheel and to think more clearly about what should be done.

  The only option that she could see was to walk up the carriage drive. Belle Ange couldn’t be that far away now, and even it was, there was certainly nothing on the road behind her for at least eight miles. She should also be safe from lightning once she was away from the gate. How could the storm find one lone Yankee down among all these trees? There were plenty of other things to draw Paula’s fire if she was still hanging around looking for a target. The thing to do was to get away from her car and the gates. All that metal was just asking for trouble.

  Despite her pep talk, Karo sat unmoving for several more minutes, staring at the path beyond the smoking dogwood, feeling oddly reluctant to travel any farther up the gloomy tunnel of foliage. She hadn’t noticed before, because of her excitement with the urns, but it was dark down there, with a premature twilight that belonged in a monster movie, and badly overgrown with clawing bushes that probably hosted spines and spiders. It was, in a word, spooky. Which was to be expected, she supposed, at this time year. Though Virginia had a kinder and slower onrush of winter than the north, Fall was still the season of dying and haunted things.

  A belated sense of concern that had been lacking for the last twenty miles, due mostly to her inability to give attention to anything beyond skiing down the slick road with her bald tires, now prompted her to think carefully about the air of desertion along this path. She was pretty certain that this was the road to the plantation, but…

  If you go into the woods today, better not go alone.

  “Shut up,” she said to the taunting singsong voice in her head. Of all the times to think of that tune! But Karo still looked about cautiously to see if there was any proof that she was truly on the drive for Belle Ange. There were no conveniently placed signs. The urns and gate were suggestive, but she would have preferred a note from her employer, or a nice brass plaque announcing the plantation by name—unless these were hidden under the vines, which were pretending to be ivy but which were actually some parasitic plant whose roots were trying to tear the gates down.

  “Well, hell.”

  A moment’s examination showed that the dark shrubs were actually carefully maintained by human hands. The narrow tunnel of birch and quickthorn disappearing into the distance was deliberately trimmed from a living canopy that blotted out the sun. The path would be colorful in the spring when bursting with new leaves and blossoms, but just now it was rather rank, and she did not care for serpentine undulations moving through the foliage, especially those right near the soggy ground.

  “Wild hares. Birds. The wind,” she told herself. But she didn’t believe it, not all the way down in her bones where she was still shaking. Could the rain have driven out snakes and forced them to search for higher ground?

  Karo’s eyes moved higher in the gloom, searching for any bit of sky. She forced herself to be reasonable in her reaction. The fear pinching her shoulders was not precognition; it was just shock and nerves. Anyone would be upset after such a close call as she had suffered, and there was no need to be hysterical. The sky was still there, even if she couldn’t see it.

  “Everything is going to be fine.” But the ranks of w
hiplike saplings above and to the side, which danced so eerily in the blanched light of afternoon, were certainly an odd choice of roadside landscape for a tourist attraction—unless it was a Halloween haunted mansion.

  There were probably plans to change this path before the plantation was opened to the public. The owner would have to do something, she thought with a flash of comforting common sense, because this was strictly a one-lane road and he couldn’t risk the sorts of accidents that could happen with gawking tourists who always end up driving the wrong way. So everything was okay, right?

  Karo took a deep breath and made herself stop listening to the frightened voice in her head that was urging her to find some other way out of this predicament. No, there wasn’t any other option but walking this dark path. Ominous or not, she would have to trot up the road to the house and find someone with oven mitts or fireplace tongs and large shoulders to help her with the Honda. It would be stupid to risk a long drive back to the highway in the rain and growing twilight just because a pair of funeral urns and a close call with a freak lightning strike had shaken her nerves. The trees weren’t really shuffling closer together, lacing their branches into a tight cocoon to prevent her escape. That was nonsense, freak optics and the result of reading too much of the wrong kind of fiction.

  “Don’t be such a coward.” Karo shut off the car engine and thrust open her door. Water attacked her. The sticky dribble burned, perhaps having picked up some toxins from the local noxious plants as it passed through the trees.

  If you go into the woods today…

  She slammed her door resolutely and stepped around the smoking birch tree’s burly bulk, trying to blot out the sickening smell of charred honey that rose surprisingly from the exploded oyster and clam shells. Drizzle fell from the gold trees in a thin drooling veil.

  Karo jogged quickly through the shadowed wood, looking neither right nor left in case there were indeed trolls or wolves hiding in the shrubbery; if they were there, she didn’t want to know about them. It was enough to watch for poison ivy and copperheads; thoughts of bigger beasties she couldn’t handle.

  If you go into the woods today, better not go alone…

  What gruesome tunes her brain was playing! What moron had ever sung that song to her as a child? Still, it had a good galloping rhythm and Karo used it to set her pace. Eventually the tunnel widened and she stepped onto a lawn riddled with tree roots from a giant oak that grew in its middle. Something moved overhead, and she dropped to her knees gasping in fear. For one horrible moment she thought she saw bodies swaying in the ancient limbs, soldiers dressed in Yankee uniforms, but a second terror-stricken look showed her it was only Spanish moss being tossed about by the wind. Feeling foolish, she regained her feet and trotted double-time toward the clearing where the light was somewhat brighter.

  At last the main house came into view. It grew and grew with every step. It was an enormous thing that defied the usual rule of symmetry that was the passion of the early American architects. It was almost Romanesque Revival, mated with Gothic and loco rococo. Arched windows, iron railings and flying buttresses were grafted on at random to the asymmetrical turrets and gables. The river stone walls faded into deep shadows as they disappeared into the restless, golden trees. Up and up the house went, like a Gothic Jack’s beanstalk.

  “Holy spit.” Karo’s footsteps slowed. This hybrid mongrel was looking very familiar. A small Hearst’s Castle. Only, more sinister. This was not a gracious, sprawling mansion where Ashley Wilkes would live. Frankenstein’s monster, maybe, but not a southern gentleman.

  Karo craned her neck further. The round rocks gleamed damply in a stray bit of light that had found its way through the haze and gold leaves, and pointed to the diamond panes of glass with a bright finger. She was pleasantly surprised by a lovely tangle of roses that were rampaging up the south side of the mansion in sprawling abandon. The storm had stripped it of many blooms and hurled them to the ground, but others still clung tenaciously.

  No, there wasn’t a single sign of the expected early eighteenth or even seventeenth century architectural order here. No courteous Georgian windows lined up in neat rows, no symmetrical Greek Revival columns holding up an Athenian temple. It was plain to see that Belle Ange—if this was indeed the Vellacourt family plantation and not some other unknown mansion she had found while driving lost in the rain—was totally unexpected.

  She failed to see any sign of life or light inside the strange house, or any vehicles in the drive. But, perhaps the power was out. That would be a comfortable reason for the place to be dark and silent. She liked that explanation much better than the idea that she was alone in an abandoned wood with a rather creepy house that wasn’t Belle Ange, because that would mean another walk down the wriggling green maw behind her. Not good. Her stores of courage were depleted.

  Karo stood for a long minute absorbing the neo-Gothic splendor that sprawled before her. The disquieting feeling grew that it was, in spite of the scarlet roses and quaintly crazy roofline, a less-than-welcoming abode. Still, in the sunshine it would have a certain storybook appeal that tourists might like and that would make her job easier…

  As if sensing her qualified praise and wishing to deter her from any comforting thoughts, all stray sunbeams were snuffed by roiling clouds, and the damp twilight and lonely silence settled back around her in a cheerless shade. Soon there was only the gentle drizzle of rain on stone, and the sly, sighing wind for company. The whole scene put her in mind of some of the more sinister fairy tales in her mother’s antique books, the ones that hadn’t been cleaned up for children. Sleeping Beauty, perhaps. Or Cinderella. No, she had it now! It was the cover of every gothic horror novel she’d ever read! And wasn’t that a cheery thought with darkness coming on?

  As she wrestled with her nerves, trying to work up the courage to actually walk up the flight of shallow stairs that led to the imposing front doors and use the knocker, Karo finally noticed that a faint light was burning high up in a north end gable, nearly hidden by the towering trees that leaned against the wall. It was steady, like a weak, guiding star, and was just as comforting to see, for it meant that someone was home after all besides the vampires she was imagining. She was not the only living being in this dangerous forest.

  If you go into the woods today…watch out for ghosties and ghoulies, and long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night.

  “What? Shut up.” The voice wasn’t even getting the lyrics right, and her consciousness chided her cowardice now that a light was plainly seen.

  It’s just one light.

  “Yeah, but one is enough for me.” Her voice was barely audible over the droning buzz, the aural remnant of the lightning strike that continued to assault her ears.

  Feeling foolish for talking to herself, Karo pushed forward. She arrived at the top of the stone steps and took a moment to smooth her blouse and finger comb her hair. It was a wasted effort at respectability, but it had again occurred to her, now that her incipient panic had died, that filthy and hysterical and very late was not the best way to present herself to a new employer. Everyone knew that the British were neat and punctual. They probably appreciated those features in their staff.

  The iron-studded door was an impressive specimen that some desecrater had stolen from a thirteenth-century Spanish fortress and then shaved down to fit this smaller doorway. The family was obviously not bothered by anachronisms or adaptation of historical artifacts.

  She raised her hand to an inappropriate Victorian knocker affixed by a tarnished spike ala Martin Luther. Karo hesitated a moment. It seemed pretentious in the extreme to use this shiny klaxon that would undoubtedly sound like a Civil War cannonade inside the house, and yet there was no doorbell, and she had no desire to further damage her hands or shoes by pounding on the heavy wood with bare fists and poorly protected feet.

  If you go into the woods today, better not go alone…

  “Just shut up with the singing already.”

&nb
sp; She picked up the gargoyle’s lolling tongue between finger and thumb. But, before she could let the heavy brass fall, the east wind, in another of its irregular fits and starts, snatched the knocker from her hand and hurled the entire door open—just like, she supposed, it had done with the Honda. Unlatched doors seemed to be the order of the day, and this one slammed against the interior wall with casual brutality. Karo winced as violent echoes receded into the darkness beyond the wide entry.

  The crash should have brought someone running posthaste to see which army had invaded, but not a soul appeared to demand that she be more careful of the priceless, fine oak paneling that filled the dark and no doubt haunted hall beyond. She looked about uneasily and ventured a tentative hello.

  “Please come in,” a voice replied from the hollow house. “Enter freely and of your own will.”

  Karo gasped at the quiet whisper, which sounded rather a lot like Bella Lugosi in his most famous role, not sure that she had actually heard the voice through the continued ringing in her ears. She waited anxiously for some other sign of a person within, but as she hesitated on the polite side of the wide threshold, there was nothing more than the patter of renewed rain behind her and the strong wind pressing at her back.

  “Come in, girl! Come in and know me better!” breathed the impatient voice, the bad Carpathian accent forgotten.

  Karo looked about quickly, but no one was there. It was a fortunate circumstance that no one in her family—well, besides Mom—was given to nervous breakdowns, because if one was predisposed in that direction this situation would definitely send you there.

  If you go into this house today, better not go alone….

  Karo took what was left of her sniveling courage in hand and stepped over the threshold. The wind died abruptly as she walked down the hall, much as if she had closed the heavy door upon it.