Seven Turns: A Ghost Story/A Love Story

A soft, gray rain was falling when Joan came home in the morning. Ignacio carried a rain poncho out to the truck for her, but she waved him away angrily and insisted that only Ian could help her out of the truck. Ian stood patiently holding an umbrella in one hand and a pair of shiny new crutches in the other. When Joan tried to use them, they slipped on the wet grass and Joan clutched at Ian to keep from falling. Ignacio managed to keep Ian from falling, but the umbrella landed in a puddle in the lawn.

“Dios mío!” Katarina cried, watching through the front door. “This house is starting to look like a battlefield hospital!”

“Careful,” said Cally. “You are starting to sound like Joan.”

Katarina bit her knuckle. “And this morning Ignacio found three of the chickens dead in the garden. What an awful day!” She turned to get the wheelchair from beside the stairs, and Cally refrained from reminding her about Bethany’s discarded toast that Ignacio had thrown out to the chickens the day before. She held the door open for Katarina and the wheelchair, and planned to ask Ignacio if he had thought to set aside the chickens’ carcasses for the sheriff to examine.

Out in the lawn, Ian managed to persuade Joan to sit in the wheelchair, while Ignacio covered her cast with the poncho. Cally went back to the desk and watched all this through the screen door. She didn’t want to go far from the phone today, because the guests she had booked for that evening might need to call for directions if they ran into trouble finding Woodley. She wondered what she would tell them if they did.

Joan and the dripping wheelchair rolled through the door into the hall. “Good Lord!” Joan was grumbling. “This whole house is starting to look like a hospital!”

“I’ll get you a towel,” muttered Katarina, running out of the hall.

“Bring me a cup of tea, too!” Joan called after her, and then to Ignacio, “Just get me into my office, José. I don’t have time for this nonsense. I have too much work to do!”

When Joan was safely behind her oak door, Nell poked her head out from the parlor. “Have you seen Foster?” she asked Cally.

“I haven’t.” She noted that Foster’s car was not in the parking lot, either.

Nell came the rest of the way into the hall. Apparently she hadn’t been hoping to find her husband, but had been hoping not to find him. She gazed out the front door into the rain.

“Probably not the best day for a walk,” Cally told her.

“No,” Nell agreed. “How about Georgie? Have you seen him today?” She spoke of him as if he were any other member of the household. And really, it occurred to Cally, he had as much claim to that status as any of its living denizens.

“I haven’t seen him since the investigators were here. Why?”

“I need to ask him about something. I’ll just wait in the parlor. If you see him, please tell me. I have some questions for him.”

“So do I,” Cally said to herself. In the parlor, she could hear Nell busily flipping through the channels on the television. Cally had not seen George, but she had seen the Preacher, earlier that morning. Just as Bethany had once told her sometimes happened, Cally had smelled smoke, and had glanced behind her at the clean-swept fireplace with its basket of silk flowers on the fender. Turning back, she had seen – instead of the blurry shadow of Bethany’s story – the seriously-dressed, sober-faced man she had seen standing in front of the desk when she’d first arrived at Vale House. He was gazing up at the portraits above the fireplace, not speaking, not moving. Cally had got up the courage to ask him if she could help him, but he had not seemed to hear her at all. He had remained there a good twenty minutes and, just as Bethany had learned to do, Cally eventually ignored him and resumed her work. He had faded away, along with the smoky smell, shortly before Joan had returned.

Katarina came through presently with a mug of tea and a large, flowered bath towel for Joan. Cally stopped her. “Do you mind if I take those in to her, while you listen for the phone? I just want to talk to her.”

“I don’t mind at all!” Katarina said emphatically, plopping herself down in the chair behind the desk. “Good luck with that!”

“Thanks, Kat. If Mr. Delaney calls for directions just... I don’t know, tell him whatever you usually tell people.” She paused with her hand on the office door knob. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you about that, myself, sometime soon.”

Katarina gave her a deer-in-the-headlights look. “I’ll do my best,” she promised. “But I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask.”

Cally knocked firmly on Joan’s door and did not wait for an answer before entering. She found Joan seated on one of the sofas with her injured foot propped up on a coffee table. A pillow had been put under her foot, and the television had been turned to face her. Cally set the mug of tea down on the end table next to a now ubiquitous bottle of pain medication. She handed Joan the towel.

Joan rubbed her bedraggled head with the towel. “My new hairdo is ruined,” she moaned. “Everything is ruined! Ian will never get any business at this place now!”

Cally wanted to blurt out, “Well what did you expect, playing at idiotic games like that?” but, in spite of her suspicions about Joan, she couldn’t bring herself to kick her while she was down. She took the high ground and approached the conversation in the role of the concerned supporter.

“It was a good plan,” she told Joan, swallowing hard to keep her voice calm. “It’s a shame it didn’t work out. How long have you been the White Lady?”

Joan threw the wadded up towel across the room where it hit the door with a soft thump. “You people act like I’m some kind of criminal! All I was doing was trying to help Ian’s business succeed! Ow!” she concluded as the cast slipped off the pillow and rapped sharply on the tabletop.

Cally helped Joan get her foot back onto the pillow, enduring the woman’s cries of pain and distress in the process. She tried a different tack. “Have you taken your pain medicine yet?”

This earned her a cold glare. “I don’t like pills. And you people can just stop treating me like I’m some kind of addict, too! Honestly, even the sheriff was hounding me about it last night. Questioning me like some kind of criminal while I was lying there in the hospital in agony. What is wrong with people?”

“I’m sure he was just doing his job.”

“Doing his job! Harassing decent people. Injured people! Look, I don’t even want these stupid drugs the doctors are pushing on me. I don’t like pills. I never have. Just take them away. Ow!”

“Maybe you really do need them,” Cally said quite honestly. Then, “Maybe they’d be easier for you to take if you dissolve them in your tea.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Joan looked like she was looking around for something else to throw. “Katarina can’t make a decent cup of tea to begin with. Putting drugs in it would just make it even more awful!”

Cally decided to stop being coy, and went straight to the heart of the matter. “But that’s how you served them to Bethany.”

Joan seized a small sofa pillow and squeezed it as if she were strangling it. “I would never serve that woman anything! Not even a cup of poison!”

“But she said the White Lady brought her some tea.” This wasn’t strictly true, Cally acknowledged to herself. Bethany had only said the White Lady had been in her room. Cally simply spliced the two halves of the story together for expedience, hoping to corner Joan into a confession.

Joan snorted. “She was probably hallucinating. I wouldn’t set foot in that room she’s freeloading in. And anyway I only put that dress on for the first time last night. I bought it at the Goodwill in Blackthorn the other day when I went to get my hair done. All money down the drain now!” She closed her eyes and let her head fall back on the sofa.

Cally didn’t believe Joan had only bought the dress so recently. She had seen the so-called Lady in White long before that. Including the time she’d spotted her peering at her from an upstairs window – probably Joan’s own bedroom window, she realized now – the very first day she’d arrived at Vale House. She didn’t argue with Joan about it; she figured it would be easy enough for the sheriff to find out when the dress really had been purchased.

“Well, I’ve got to get back to work,” she told Joan. “Would you like me to put the TV remote where you can reach it?”

“Yes, and take those pills out of here. I’m no addict! I don’t want any drugs.”

“I’ll leave them in case you reconsider.”

—

“Nobody has called,” Katarina said when Cally came back into the hall. Before Cally resumed her seat she asked Katarina if she had a few minutes to talk. “I’m confused and I need some answers.”

Katarina repeated that she wasn’t sure she had any answers, either, but she did have a few minutes. “Even though now I have to do all of Joan’s work as well!”

Both women laughed, and Cally felt a little better. “It’s just this thing about this town being so hard to find,” she said. “And yet people do find it. But they always seem to need help. Nobody seems to be able to just drive to the exit on I-85 and stop in for gas and a pizza. Yet, the mail goes in and out. Sometimes we even get a cell phone signal!” She laughed a little, but not heartily. “Kat, is this place even real? Or are we in the Matrix or something?”

She expected Katarina to laugh at the Matrix reference. Instead, the woman simply looked at her with wide, frank eyes and shrugged. Afterward, Cally would remember that shrug as having been one of the most frightening moments of her life. More frightening than the time she had found the note in her husband’s pocket, and almost as frightening as when George had vanished before her eyes.

“I honestly don’t know,” Katarina admitted. “I just go where Ignacio goes, because I love him.”

“Should I ask him, then?”

Katarina shook her head. “Ian knows. I’m pretty sure. Ian and the other men. They sit on the porch and talk, sometimes. It’s hard to keep a business going in a town that is ... hidden. They’re afraid the town is going to disappear. And I hope it doesn’t. I like it here.”

“I like it, too,” Cally had to admit. “Who are these other men?”

“The friends Ian grew up with. The Captain and Doc, and Merv Arkwright. Sometimes the sheriff, but he’s new to their little group. I call them The White Council.” She giggled at this.

“Is Ignacio a member of this White Council?”

“Oh, no,” said Katarina. “Then it would have to be called the White and Brown Council!” She started to laugh at her own joke but cut herself short when she saw Cally’s face. “No, no, I didn’t mean that! I meant, Ignacio is so much younger than they are. His hair hasn’t turned white yet.”

Cally smiled. “Well maybe someday they’ll make him a Junior Member. And maybe it’s time for them to have a Women’s Auxiliary, too.”

Katarina grinned at this, but shook her head. “I don’t know. They have a lot of secrets, it seems. I mean, they’re all good men. I don’t think their secrets are bad or anything. Ignacio trusts them, so I have never questioned them. But, well, all you can do is ask.”

Cally was already starting to think about how she would phrase her question, and to whom, as Katarina headed back to the dining room. She looked around the hall. “George? Are you here?” If he was, he did not answer.

Pushing down a disturbing thought that the incident with the paranormal crew might have scared him away for good, she opened her laptop and located the story Emerald had sent her, the one that was supposed to explain who Emerald was. It really did read a lot like a novel, perhaps a historical romance, about a young woman born in the countryside of a place Cally thought reminded her very much of Scotland. If it was a novel, though, it was a rather rough first draft, and contained a number of continuity gaps. After a few pages, she put it aside for the moment and composed an email to Emerald, asking her to please join her on the chat channel that evening. Then she checked her own incoming email and deleted a message from a Nigerian prince and several messages offering free credit reports. She filed another message from her agent under “Later.”

She opened her word processor and created a blank document. “Sometimes the main character of a story can be something other than human,” she typed. “Maybe he or she is a ghost. Or an animal. Or even a town.” She saved the document with the filename “Maybe.txt” and closed the computer.

---

The sun came out shortly after noon. The phone rang and Cally answered it on the first ring, even though she was still not sure what she would say if the Delaneys were having trouble finding their way into Woodley. “Vale House; how might I help you?”

It wasn’t the Delaneys. A young woman’s voice said “This is Danya Barry from the Greater Asheboro Area Scientific Paranormal Society.” Cally braced herself for a tirade about how Vale House’s shady practices had ruined these young people’s entire lives, but instead the young woman asked tremulously, “Can I send you something?”

Cally wasn’t quite sure how to reply to that. “I suppose. What do you want to send?”

“It’s a photo I took while I was there. Can you stay on the line while I email it to you, so we can look at it together?”

Cally agreed to this strange request, and gave the woman her own email address. She waited in silence, listening to Danya typing it in to her phone, and then opened her computer and watched for new email to appear in her inbox. “Yes, I have it now. Just let me...”

She opened the message and saw it contained the same photo Danya had showed her while the team had been at Vale House, of a figure in white standing at the Gallery railing above the dining room. Cally hadn’t paid it much attention because other matters had seemed much more urgent at the moment. “Yes, I see it,” she told Danya. “What did you want to discuss about it?”

“Well. It looks real, don’t you think?”

It looked real because it was real, Cally thought. It was a rather clear, if translucent, image of George standing in the Gallery above the dining room, wearing a long, white garment. Doctor Boojums was sitting at his feet practically smirking. The outlines of the doors to the upstairs guest rooms could be made out behind them. George was definitely getting to be very “good at electronics.”

“It does look very real,” Cally replied. “But maybe it’s just pareidolia.”

Danya sighed loudly in Cally’s ear. “Come on. Seriously? I get that all the time. I can’t believe you really think that’s what it is.”

Cally didn’t really think that at all, but she also didn’t feel comfortable discussing George with a complete stranger.

“It looks like a black man,” Danya was going on, “though why he’s wearing a robe, I can’t imagine. I don’t think there would be monks in a house like that. Maybe he’s a civil war soldier; maybe the house was used as an infirmary during the war. Do you know anything about that?”

“I’m afraid I don’t, but I do know whom to ask. I could call you back and let you know.”

“Anyway he’s clearly not that crazy woman who was running around pretending to be the White Lady.”

“No, definitely not,” Cally agreed.

“Well I was just wondering. Because this photo does make me think there’s something real going on after all at your bed and breakfast, despite all the shenanigans last night. So, I was wondering if I and a couple of the others might be able to come back and take a second look. Without all the TV equipment this time,” she added.

“I don’t know,” Cally said. The idea of someone hunting George and actually knowing what to look for made her uneasy. “I would have to ask our marketing manager about that.”

A snort on the other end of the connection reminded Cally that this woman knew exactly who the “marketing manager” was and wanted nothing further to do with her.

“Alright, well, I appreciate you letting me share the photo with you,” Danya said. “Please remember it’s copyrighted material and you can’t use it without my permission.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Cally. “I’ll delete it right now, if it makes you feel better.”

They concluded the call and Cally’s hand hovered over the delete button, but she decided to just keep a private copy of the photo for herself anyway. After all, it was of a friend of hers.

“Dear Georgie,” she said to the empty Hall, “Your little pranks are going to get you into trouble someday!”