Finding the Way Back (35 page)

“That’s exactly what we want to do,” I said,
opening the closet door and walking into it. I took a dress down
and walked back into the room. “Think about it. Maybe one of the
reasons that thing has interacted with me is because I’ve been
wearing grandmother’s clothes and living in her bedroom. On some
level it may be confusing me with her.”

When no one said anything I felt
self-conscious, after all what did I know about ghosts? “Forget it,
I’m probably way off.”

“Actually, I think you might be on to
something,” Emmett said. “For one thing, who or what is the other
entity? It seems like an intelligent haunt, like it’s interacting
with you, but if the house was always haunted then who is it? It
was haunted long before you got here, and before your grandparents
passed. Maybe it was responsible for your grandmother’s fall on the
stairs and now it just keeps reliving that moment. Or perhaps it
just wants to keep her here with it.”

“Sounds like we need a séance,” Dean
said.

“I think we should try it,” Aunt Shelly added
enthusiastically. “Let’s get it all out on the table.”

Everyone looked at each other and nodded. For
some reason I felt a deep sense of dread but the die was cast. Now
all we could do was see what we would roll. One way or another, we
had to get to the bottom of it.

With our next ghostly mission ahead of us,
Emmett assumed the role of commander, giving orders and making
plans. I found it quite sexy in a military campaign sort of
way.

“If we’re going to do this tonight we need to
make sure we have everything ready and in place,” he began.
Motioning to his companions, he directed them. “Dean, you and Glen
can stop by my place and pick up some extra cameras and microphones
I have. We should think about where we want to hold the séance and
how we want to maximize use of the equipment. We also need to find
out everything we can about this house and the previous owners,
names, occupations, relatives, anything we can get. It might help
us ask pointed questions and provoke a response.”

“The land belonged to a farm before it was
parceled out,” my mom said, getting up off the bed. “Maybe it had a
house on it once upon a time even before this one? Come on Shelly,
we haven’t made it to library yet. Let’s see if we can find land
records or anything. We’ll check old city directories and anything
else we can find.” Turning as she headed out the door she said,
“We’ll be back before dark. Don’t leave Laney alone.”

Dean and Glen left to pick up the extra
equipment and Connie and I went in search of her computer. I was
sure we could find some historical records online. We first checked
the items Connie had put on eBay and we already had some bids. I
would have liked to sit and watch the items receive more bids but
the auctions didn’t end until later in the day so we moved on.

We decided to look at one of the well-known
ancestral sites that Connie was familiar with. You could enter
relatives’ names and find records that were associated with them.
We started our family tree with our mothers and their parents.
Neither one of us knew birth dates so we guessed approximate years.
Our excitement began to build when little leaves popped up on the
screen indicating that there were additional documents found with
their names on them.

Dean and Glen returned with more gadgets and
were working at getting them set up. It looked like playing to me.
I wanted to tell them to go somewhere else but everyone had agreed
to look out for me and not leave me alone, and apparently Connie
didn’t count as a bodyguard.

“Bzzzzz!”

“Perfect!” Dean exclaimed. Let’s try it from
a different angle,” he said to Glen.

“What is that annoying noise?” I finally had
to ask. I didn’t like my own fun interrupted by someone else’s.

“It’s a laser-powered motion detector,” Glen
said, pointing to a small box that was pointed toward the stairway.
“If anyone or anything breaks the laser field the alarm goes
off.”

“I noticed,” I said. I was virtually ready to
take a baseball bat to the device when they decided that they
finally got it set correctly.

Connie and I spent the next several hours
looking up our ancestors, but we didn’t find much relevant to our
present situation, mostly military records, census information,
employment histories. Hearing my mother and aunt come through the
front door, I left Connie at the computer and went to see if they
happened to think of anything for lunch. I was overjoyed to see
their arms were laden with packages from a nearby sandwich shop. I
rushed over to help but Dean intercepted me. I hadn’t realized I
was hungry until I saw the bags, but my breakfast was a distant
memory. We needed to keep our energy up for the evening’s
events.

Looking down at the coffee table I had flown
by I noticed the clock still sitting there waiting to be fixed and
remembered my grandmother’s last words.
Find the clock
. I
wondered if this was the clock she was referring to? What was it I
was supposed to find out?

I decided to try to decipher that cryptic
message after lunch. I called everyone to the kitchen while my mom
and Aunt Shelly laid out a spread of sandwiches, chips and drinks.
I selected a roast beef sandwich, then grabbed a small bag of sour
cream potato chips and took pleasure in the luscious sin of grease
and salt.

As we sat finishing our lunches I brought up
the most recent episode with our grandmother. “Connie, did you hear
our grandmother’s last words before she disappeared?”

“No, it mostly sounded like a hiss,” Connie
said, popping a chip in her mouth. “It all happened so fast and I
had only seen her that one other time so I was pretty
discombobulated.”

“Right before she disappeared she whispered
what I thought was ‘find the clock.’”

“Yeah, it could have been ‘clock’ but I’m not
sure.”

“Well, I am sure,” I said, crumpling up my
chip bag and throwing the bag in the middle of the table.

I went to the living room and lifted the
clock. The pendulum inside swung a little and I remembered that you
weren’t supposed to swing old clocks around that much. I clutched
it to my body and tried to walk slowly and steadily into the
kitchen for all of us to study it. “I don’t know if she meant this
one but I thought I would look. The attack happened right after it
came back in the house.” I turned it so the back was facing me. The
little door in the back of the clock had a catch and I pushed it
back, pulling the flap towards me and exposing the clock’s
innards.

“See anything?” my mother asked, coming to
stand behind me.

“I don’t know anything about the workings of
a clock but I don’t see anything that looks unusual to me. The
sides, top and bottom are bare wood,” I answered, pushing at the
sides to see if there were any secret doors and finding everything
secure and solid. The front glass panel opened as well so you could
change the hands on the face, but nothing obvious was there either.
“There are probably other clocks in the house,” I said, gently
turning it back to face me.

“Maybe she just wanted to see it working
again,” Aunt Shelly said. “You may think her words and all of this
is connected, but what if it isn’t? What if it’s just
coincidence?”

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Connie and
I said together.

“Jinx!” We both tried to scream first.

Dean raised one eyebrow. “You two are how
old?”

Connie and I smiled at one another,
remembering our childhood game. It was astonishing how people could
fall back into old habits after so many years.

Glen turned to my mother. “So did you two
lovely ladies find out anything at the library?”

“No, but to be honest we really didn’t look
that hard. It was just too difficult to sit and look through old
microfiche and newspapers when we knew you all were still back here
in the house getting ready for the big night. We were just too
nervous,” Aunt Shelly said.

“I’m not sure it would solve anything anyway.
If there were a different house here originally what difference
would it make? Even if we figure out who the other entity is, how
do we get rid of it?” my mother asked.

No one answered but everyone at the table
turned to Emmett.

“Beats me,” he said. “You know, I only do
this as a hobby. I have never run into a case as involved,
dangerous and active as this one. We tried smudging, and I’ve seen
that work in most of the cases where people really want to get rid
of something. A lot of people don’t mind the hauntings as long as
they’re harmless. Sometimes they even relish them so they don’t try
to do anything. I really think that in this case there is something
that needs to be solved. I even doubt tearing down the house would
be effective.”

Glen reached out his hand. “Slide the clock
here, I want to look at it.” I stood up and carefully put the clock
on a towel and slid it across the table. Glen and Dean leaned in to
poke and prod at the workings.

“Don’t shake it,” I said. “Even though it
doesn’t work, shaking the pendulum could damage it
irreparably.”

Glen continued looking at it for a short
while then closed it up again. “You’ll have to have a professional
look at it. It doesn’t look damaged so it may only need a small
adjustment.”

“What do you think of cleaning out some
things from the basement?” Connie asked. “Most of the stuff down
there is garbage and it would waste time until nightfall. If we
have the séance there we’ll need room to move around. And as a
bonus, we have three strong men here to help carry stuff out. If
all of us are down there I doubt anything will happen.”

“Great idea,” my mom agreed enthusiastically,
looking over at the three strong men who could do her bidding.

“If everyone’s done with lunch, let’s get
cracking,” my aunt added.

Chapter
Thirty-Seven

I let everyone go ahead of me downstairs. I
wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of being in the basement
again but I needed to be able to go there if I was going to
continue living in the house. I fiddled around in the kitchen,
wiping up the countertops and table, dragging my feet and wishing I
didn’t have to go down those steps.

Connie noticed I wasn’t with them and hurried
up the steps to find me. “Laney, remember, never alone.” She gave
me her sternest mother look and motioned for me to go down in front
of her.

I picked up a flashlight from the counter on
the way to the stairs. I didn’t know if anyone else had one but I
wasn’t going to be stuck without light even if the seven of us were
together. I stood at the top of the stairs looking down into the
dank basement. It was almost as if I could feel despair and
loneliness rolling up to meet me. My mother had always told me my
imagination was one of my strongest traits, but today I wished that
weren’t true. I forced all my dark thoughts away and tried to
quickly immerse myself into the room, like jumping into the deep
end of a cold pool.

Dean gave me a thumbs up as I made it to the
bottom of the stairs and looked around. Emmett came over and put an
arm around my shoulders. “Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to you
while we’re here.”

There was so much to do, it was as if no one
knew where to start. Surveying the mountain of work, I picked up an
old lantern that was sitting atop a wooden trunk. “It looks like
some of this stuff might be worth selling. Why don’t we pile it in
the garage? I wanted to move the car out anyway.”

“I like that idea,” Emmett said. “I can move
the car out.”

“I’ll go with him, just in case it doesn’t
start,” Dean said. “Where are the keys?”

“I’ll get them,” my mother replied, following
the men upstairs.

Connie, my aunt and I shared a smile. “They
don’t miss a chance with cars do they?” I asked as we
snickered.

“Hey, still in the room,” Glen said from the
corner. That was the trouble with Glen; he was so quiet we always
forgot he was around.

“Sorry,” I said, but there wasn’t much
sincerity in the word. We laughed again; it seemed to lighten the
pall that threatened to envelop me.

My mother clattered back down the stairs with
Dean in tow. “It started right up. I asked Emmett to go give it a
wash.”

I shivered, remembering the last time I’d
been in the garage. “Is he going to vacuum it also?”

“Not sure,” she replied, leaning over to open
a box. “This looks like some kind of tools.” She motioned Dean over
to take a look. “What do you think?”

“Looks like old planers and sanding
materials,” he said, looking inside.

I found myself still holding the lantern,
watching everyone else work, but my heart just wasn’t in picking
through this mountain of trash. It was hard to think of anything
else until we solved the ghost problem.

“I’ll take this to the garage,” I said,
making my way to the stairs and running up quickly when no one
objected.

I walked out to the garage just as Emmett was
getting into the car. He waved when he saw me. “What do you say we
play a little hooky? Get in.”

“Sounds great to me,” I said, suddenly
smiling. I ran into the garage to place the lantern on a shelf.
Bounding into the car, I took a huge breath and let it out.
Freedom!

Emmett took off in a swirl of dust, and I
felt like a teenager again. He put down the top and we drove around
town as the wind blew the hair out of my messy bun. I laughed and
sat back, enjoying the sunshine and the feeling of escape. West
Acre wasn’t that big so we knew we’d have to return to the house
soon.

It was a short respite but I felt like a new
person. We stopped at the gas station in town to get a car wash and
Emmett put the top up. I’d never liked car washes. They made me
feel claustrophobic and nervous with all the moving brushes and
water spraying everywhere. Our town had a newer no-touch style
which was a little better, not as many moving parts but still
claustrophobic. But it sure was cozy to be locked in the dark
interior with Emmett at my side.