Ever After (24 page)

A large puff of dust propelled into the air as we stepped on the door. The room was so stagnant I covered my nose with my shirt.

“Whew.” Shelby did the same. She walked in using her hot pink T-shirt to cover everything but her eyes. She dropped it as soon as the room’s contents came into focus.

Kaitlyn moved straight in, and when the dust settled, we all froze.

The door hadn’t been opened in over a hundred years, or if it had, no one had moved any of the previous inhabitant’s belongings.

“Holy crap,” Kaitlyn muttered.

“You wanted answers. Here they are,” Shelby said.

Both sisters looked at each other and then to me as I inched forward.

I left footprints in the carpet of dust bunnies.

No modern lighting.

Kaitlyn and Shelby pulled out little pocket flashlights.

To the right, against the wall, an old wooden bed with a canopy of moth-eaten ruffles was still intact. For a second, a flash of the old picture of the room played in my mind like a strange memory, and then it was gone. The once white bedding was elaborately laced but now yellowed. The antique feather pillows looked as though someone had let the air out of them.

“This is amazing,” Shelby said, standing outside the closet, fanning the flashlight over bodices of nineteenth century dresses that hung in the closet. She stepped over to the antique vanity against the wall.

As if it had just been used yesterday, an old perfume bottle with a little bulb sprayer sat off to the side. Hair accessories lay beside an old hairbrush with yellowed bristles, a comb, and a hand mirror. Decades of dust fogged the mirror on the vanity. The flashlight’s glow blurred in the reflection. An old yellowed towel hung from the rack of a washstand. Oil lamps sat all around the room, a big one beside the bed. Black soot and cobwebs covered a grate in the bottom of the fireplace. Pictures so covered in dust the faces were blurred hung over the fireplace. Black cat book ends held moth eaten books together on the mantle.

“Why wouldn’t Ava have remodeled this room? She had electricity ran to the rest of the house?” I turned to the girls.

“This was her room.” A vacant stare came over Kaitlyn’s expression.

“What do you see?” Shelby said.

This was the same room from the pictures. I stepped closer to the bed.

Kaitlyn touched a dusty gray ruffle on the bedspread.

“She was so full of joy. Overflowing.” Tears rimmed her eyes, but she lifted an eerie gaze past me toward the door. “It was so horrible. Her dreams were all coming true, and then something devastated her. She died, but her spirit moved on into another body.”

With her gaze locked over my shoulder, I half-expected someone to be behind me. No one was there.

“I also feel a male’s leftover agony. Losing the girl destroyed him.” Kaitlyn looked to the closet and then to the mantle.

“She’s telling you the truth. Finally,” Shelby said with a sad sigh.

“How dare you?” Cole said almost jarring me from my skin. He stood against the backdrop of light from the hall, his profile infiltrating the shadows of the room. He clenched and unclenched his fists, staring at us under a furious brow, a wild green glowing in his eyes.

Shelby’s flashlight beam landed on his hollow face. Dark circles surrounded his eye sockets.

I backed up a step.

Cole pointed an angry finger at me. With every word, he moved closer to us. “How dare you bring her to this room? It has nothing to do with what you’re looking for.”

I cowered.

“Out.” His muscular arm stretched toward the door. “Take her with you.”

Neither girl moved.

“Not till she sees,” Kaitlyn said.

Cole turned his wrath on her, his death glare more dangerous than it had been the night before.

Shelby moved between Cole and her sister, stepping nose to nose with him. As if she was upset over some deception, she said, “You’re supposed to be asleep.”

Cole started around Shelby toward me.

My heart hammered.

He took my arm and started to remove me from the room, but not before something white in the bottom of the closet caught my attention.

I pulled against his grip.

Cole turned toward me.

“Please. There’s something in there.” I nodded toward the closet.

For a second, he melted under my gaze. He looked down, his shoulders sagging.

The girls nodded to me.

Cautiously, I pulled free of Cole and stalked closer to the white thing poking from the shadows on the floor of the closet. I shoved back the dusty old dresses and gasped.

Cole came to the closet and encircled my waist with his arms. He gently put his hands over my face. “Please, don’t.”

Kaitlyn and Shelby rushed him from behind and detained him.

“She needs to see.” Shelby held Cole back so I could investigate further.

“In a few days, that’s all I’ll be, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?” Cole’s voice was filled with pain.

All sound fell to dark silence.

I was dangerously dizzy. The glow of my flashlight moved up the white bones of both sets of toes, the metatarsals that made up a former human’s feet, and both the tibias and fibulas—the lower legs—till I got to the person’s clothing. An old-fashioned pair of men’s trouser pants. I moved in closer, holding my breath. A long gun, a shotgun, I guessed, was propped between what had been the human’s legs. The tip of the gun’s long barrel was inserted in a hole in the skeleton’s skull. Behind the head of the skeleton was a wedding dress. The skeleton was sitting on the train of the dress and behind the man’s head was old browned splatters of matter.

I jumped back from the closet.

Colby Kinsley.

He’d locked himself away in his beloved’s room and blown his brains out with her wedding dress as a backdrop. He’d committed suicide out of grief. Had anyone even known he had been in there?

Stumbling back from the dark door, I collided with Cole as I left the confines of the corpse’s final resting place.

His face was darker than I’d ever seen it. Not anger. Not rage. Not even low iron. This was different. All his features were twisted. Pain. Cole eased into a sitting position on the bed, the aged bedcovering ripping somewhere under his weight, dust puffing behind him. With his eyes locked on the closet, he said in an almost inaudible voice, “You’ve seen. Now, go.”

I slowly walked out into the hallway, joining Shelby and Kaitlyn. My voice shook. “We have to report what we’ve found to the authorities.”

“He’s been missing since 1879.” Kaitlyn stared at Cole. “I doubt there’s anyone to inform other than the man sitting on that bed.”

“What will he do with him?” I looked past the girls.

Cole stared blankly at the body.

I shuddered, Colby’s final seconds playing on the backdrop of my mind. “He deserves a proper burial for God’s sake.

“With all the unrest we have going on, it would probably be best if he’d shut the door back and forget we ever found him. I mean, the deceased obviously wanted to be there,” Kaitlyn said.

We gave Cole a few minutes to mourn by leaving the floor.

Kaitlyn was white as a snow. “That was definitely a first."

“You’ve seen a dead body before?”

“Not in such a weird setting,” she said with a hint of sarcasm instead of sorrow.

“If someone had told me I would inherit a house with dead bodies and ghosts attached to it two weeks ago, I would have laughed them off the planet. This is crazy.”

I rounded the bottom of the stairs, the girls in tow. “Something I’ve been meaning to ask. When I was eavesdropping on Cole and the both of you, I saw that you didn’t use a radio to block your conversation out from the ghost? Why?”

The girls stopped.

If they wouldn’t answer me willingly, I’d make them. “How mad would Cole be if he knew that you had told me the whole story.”

“Could you shut up?” Kaitlyn whispered, her eyes wide.

“Why? We’re a floor down from Cole now. There’s no way he could hear us.” I cocked my head and waited.

Kaitlyn looked down her face twisted with guilt. “I can’t answer that.”

He could hear us. Somehow he could hear what we said.

Kaitlyn’s hands went to both sides of her head.

Shelby glared up the stairs in the direction of Cole or God. At this point, he played the role in my life so it wasn’t an unfair analogy.

“He can hear us can’t he? He has amplified hearing or something?” I gripped the railing to hold myself up.

Kaitlyn and Shelby glanced at each other.

“Stop trying to figure it out until we have a chance to talk to him. He’s very upset. I don’t want to anger him further.” Shelby stepped down closer to me.

I stumbled back but held the rails for stability.

“What’s he gonna do? Kill you, too? My God, it was just a corpse.” Just a corpse. Wow. Did I say that?

Now both the twins held both sides of their heads.

“Okay, okay, okay!” Shelby looked up in the direction Cole would have been.

“Please, don’t. Let’s not talk about this anymore,” Kaitlyn pleaded.

“You can talk back and forth with him.”

They both nodded. Shelby put a finger over her lips and her stare bore into me.

That was it. A ghost, a man who ate raw meat, a corpse, mind readers, the man I’d been fantasizing about knowing full well that I’d been fantasizing.

“I need some time.” I turned from them. From them all.

I held my chest and walked the rest of the way down the flight of stairs that closed in on me the farther I went.

* * * *

Avoiding anyone who had extra-sensory gifts, I spent a few days resting. I’d never had anything more alarming happen to me in my whole life, and something worse was coming. So, I stared at the walls of my room for hours on end, leaving only to run errands in town with Dalton, but not out of spite. Because he was funny. He took my mind off all things bad.

I did turn Preston away, though. I’d had Thomas put him off. Any other visitors, I’d had banned from my room, including the twins, until further notice.

They were hurt, but I was too.

Everyone had lied to me.

Dalton was the only person I trusted at this point, other than the elders of the household, so when he knocked and poked his head in, he didn’t get it bitten off or something hurled at him. Dalton winced. “Hey, Cole wants to see you. I know what you said, but he looks bad. Real bad.”

I considered this for a few seconds. My heart pounded out of my chest at the sound of his name. I hated myself for caving. “I’m probably going to regret this but let him in.”

The blue sky sprinkled with little cotton balls of clouds calmed me as I sat on the end of the bed, waiting.

The door squeaked open.

Cole sighed. “So, do you ever plan on coming out of here?”

“You can hear what I think so there’s no need for me to verbalize. And no. I plan to stay in here till you all let me leave.”

“I get that you’re angry. I’m sorry. You see now, why I don’t bother with people, friends, or romance. There’s no use.” Cole’s voice got closer.

I kept my gaze from his. “If you hadn’t lied to me, I probably would have been fascinated. But you eavesdropped on all those stupid little fantasies I had about you. I’m sure you got a lot of good laughs.”

“It wasn’t like that at all.” His presence neared me.

I hated that I could sense it.
“Right now, I’m pretty sure I hate everything to do with you.”

“Look.” Cole formulated his words carefully. “I know I’m strange. I know I’ve held things back from you, but I had the best intentions. There was no reason to burden you with this.”

“You know what they say about good intentions.” I balled my fists.

“That’s not fair.” The end of the bed sank with his weight.

I turned to look at Cole finally.

“Have you slept?” I sat straighter.

His eyes were red rimmed, his face washed out, and his cheeks gaunt. He was a dead man walking. His hands were shaky. He raked one of them through his dark, flat hair. Even it had lost its shine. Cole’s face darkened as he regarded the floor, his shoulders sagging. “I’m not here to talk about me. I know I have no right to. I came to ask something of you.”

“Tell me the truth, and I’ll do whatever you ask. I want to know the real reason you look like that. Every single detail. What in the world could take someone’s health so quickly?”

“Okay. I’ll give you what you want.” Cole’s determined gaze settled on me.

I sat in rapt attention.

“I promised myself I’d never do this to you, but there have been so many times it’s saved your life I couldn’t keep that promise. You’ve asked for the truth, and this is the only way you’ll get it. First of all, your new BFF’s are on a timeline. They know all my secrets and were instructed by Ava to tell you parts of those secrets as each day passed. Each part is going to lead you to an ultimate truth that I’m sure you won’t be able to handle. It’s going to get you killed. Between now and the night of the last sliver of moon, I need you to stay as far away from me as possible and bind your lips from admitting your feelings for me.” Cole took my hand. “Don’t think of me. Don’t talk about me, and, no matter what that ghost says or does, don’t listen to her, do you hear me? You only have to save yourself when the time comes. I may have lied to you before, but I promise I wouldn’t lie to you about this: She’s going to tell you that I will die if you don’t admit you love me. She’s lying. Our souls are destined to be together. They are over a hundred years old, and they travel from body to body, searching for one another. My soul keeps the memories of us, but as time passes, you forget. Your sister is our ghost, who out of a jealous rage made us this way over a hundred years ago. If you admit you love me, that admission will open your body for her soul to possess it for the rest of your life this time around. If you don’t say the words, yes, the body I live in will die, but the part of me that makes me, me—my soul—doesn’t die. My soul will be born into a new body around the same time as yours, and we will find each other again. It always happens, but I avoid you to keep you safe. Up until now, we’ve only ever touched once, which is a story for another day. Ava tricked us this time. When we touched, it triggered the curse, set it in motion. Now one of us has to go, and it’s going to be me.”