Better Homes and Hauntings (10 page)

“Fourth of July party?” Dotty guessed, giggling as Jake nodded. Realizing that Deacon was glaring at her, she stifled it, pulling a more penitent face. She may or may not have pouted her lips the slightest bit. When Deacon failed to respond, she made the pout more pronounced. Deacon grimaced. She ratcheted up the pout even more. Deacon groaned. For the others, it was like watching a ping-pong match consisting solely of facial expressions.

“The first time you mess up the construction schedule, you’re out of here,” Deacon warned her.

“You won’t even know I’m here.” Dotty giggled, hopping into Deacon’s lap and giving him a world-class noogie. Deacon’s eyes rolled toward the creepy cherubs, who remained unhelpful and silent on the subject of his cousin.

NINA WASN’T SURE
what to make of Dotty Whitney. This was a woman who clearly had old blue blood flowing through her veins. She carried herself with that innate grace and assurance that old-money girls seemed to learn in their first days at prep school. Even the bohemian mishmash of tights, clashing scarves, and a loose man’s shirt looked magazine-shoot-ready for some feature titled “Yard Sale Chic.” But instead of turning her nose up at the accommodations in the staff quarters, she’d immediately starting adjusting the feng shui of her dorm bedroom.

“I could do yours, too,” she offered, shoving her iron bedframe diagonally from the door in what she called the “commanding position” for energy restoration and calm.

“I’m good,” Cindy said. “Nina?”

Nina was staring through the window at the main house. While a part of her still dreaded the idea of going inside, some peculiar, compulsive part of her brain was urging her back toward the house, to find out whether the smoky figure she’d seen was real or the imaginings of a brain pushed a little too far. There were so many things she hadn’t seen in the house, so many rooms to explore. She could just walk across the lawn anytime she wanted and walk in. Why had she waited so long? She could go right now, if she wanted to, so why didn’t she—

“Nina?” Cindy touched her arm. “You OK?”

“Oh, no.” Nina put her hands up in a warding-off gesture. “Uh, I was just feng shuied last week.”

Cindy noticed a well-crafted leather journal open on Dotty’s bed. On the page there was a photo of the Eiffel Tower, shot at some distance, and another of a slim pair of feet clad in ballet flats on a cobblestone street. She crept a little closer and flipped to the next page, and the next. The book contained an extensive collection of black-and-white and color shots. A field of wheat with cypress trees spiking up from the golden waves. Black-and-white stills of the streets of Paris, a child eating an apple with an open-air market in the background.

“That is my portfolio,” Dotty said. “I have some basic skill with a camera. So I’ve taken an obnoxious number of pictures while I have traveled. But I’m no Galen Rowell.”

“You said something about a book?” Cindy asked.

“I want to document the whole renovation process,
and everybody involved, so release forms are coming your way, thank you very much. And I’ll be going through the trunks and documents in the attic, looking for information about my great-great-grandparents and their marriage. I want to write about how the events of the past have affected our family over the years, how they’re still affecting us, and how Deacon is trying to go about changing that. He’ll hate every minute of being interviewed, but he’ll get over it.”

“Do you really want to dig up all that family dirt—” Nina cleared her throat. “I mean, history?”

Dotty threw a scarf decorated with multicolored skulls over the lamp on her nightstand. “Sometimes the dirt needs to be dug up.”

Cindy’s plump pink lips quirked. “Well, I can help you with the relics. I’ve already saved a few documents from an old desk of Gerald’s that you might be interested in.”

Dotty opened her shoulder bag and rummaged, muttering. “I have a whole list of items I’m looking for—diaries, housekeeping ledgers, visitor books, anything from the architect Jack Donovan’s office on the property. If he kept a journal about the building process, that would be even better.”

Cindy nodded. She’d seen plenty of old books around the house, some of them with handwritten pages. And as long as it was OK with Mr. Whitney, she didn’t mind handing them over to another “on-site” Whitney for inspection before they were catalogued.

“I know that the house has been picked over pretty thoroughly over the years, so you can’t promise much. Would you believe our parents had to actually chase
some historical-society ladies off the island once because Deacon’s dad caught them trying to ‘claim’ documents for their collections of artifacts? Of course, Deacon’s dad wasn’t supposed to be out here looking for valuables, either, but that’s neither here nor there. Dang it!”

When she couldn’t find what she wanted, she sighed, dug into her jeans pocket, and fished out what looked like a Starbucks napkin. She smiled triumphantly and handed her “list” over to Cindy. “And while you’re at it, I need you to keep an eye out for these . . .” Dotty plopped onto her bed, kicking off her shoes and digging into her army duffel to pull out a sketchbook that she handed to Nina. Nina was beginning to wonder if it was like Mary Poppins’s bottomless bag, with an endless supply of gypsy travel supplies.

She flipped through the sketchbook until she found several pages on which Dotty had fixed frayed, yellowed sketches of elaborate pieces of jewelry. A chunky bracelet made from diamond daisies. A choker consisting of two ropes of pearls holding in place a large citrine in a sunburst setting. A golden peacock brooch with emeralds and sapphires set in the tail. A multipaneled Bohemian-style garnet necklace.

“This is Catherine Whitney’s fabled jewelry collection. Gerald may have been stingy with his affections, but he was a pioneer of the theory that diamonds make up for everything. Men of a certain class liked their peers to know they could afford to keep their wives and mistresses swimming in jewels. After search parties found her body and the maids were packing up her belongings, they realized the collection was
missing. Catherine’s wedding-ring set was also missing from her hand when they found her, which just reinforced the notion that she’d left her husband. Like she’d ripped them off and thrown them at him in a final ‘eff you.’ ”

Nina peered down at the detailed sketch of a diamond ring set with sapphires. The sketch was marked “Wedding set.” Something about the ring was very familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. Maybe she had seen something like it in a movie? She asked, “The jewelry that she left behind, were they her costume pieces?”

Dotty’s eyebrows rose. “Why do you ask?”

Nina shrugged. “I just figured Gerald probably didn’t keep a lot of cash around the house. I’ve noticed rich people tend not to. And if he did, Catherine probably didn’t have access to it. So if she was about to bolt, she probably took anything she could sell for traveling money. If I’m running from a husband I resent and I have a collection of expensive, easy-to-pawn jewels, that’s what I’m selling to get away with the man I love. Said resented husband knows that not only have I escaped him, but he funded my getaway with his presents. It’s the final ‘up yours.’ ”

Dotty tilted her head as she looked Nina over. “Once you relax a little, you don’t pull any punches, do you?”

“Neither do you,” Nina retorted, her chin set in a stubborn line. It was the sort of posture that would have been natural—instinctual, even—just a few years ago. Now it felt awkward, like stretching an unused muscle. Dotty didn’t seem offended. Her friendly smile
only stretched wider as she dug through her bottomless bag.

“The pieces she took were the real deal,” Dotty assured her. “Back before the family fortune went belly-up, the Whitneys were what you might call conspicuous consumers, investing in some very flashy accessories for Catherine. And a good chunk of Catherine’s jewelry collection was missing. But it wasn’t found on her body. The police believed Gerald found her as she was making her escape, probably by the boat they found stashed on the far side of the island, and he killed her in a jealous rage, then dropped her into the water, thinking that she’d be carried out to sea. Family legend held that Gerald might have stashed the jewelry somewhere on the island after he killed her.”

“Why would he have done that?”

“To conceal his involvement? To make it look like Catherine had been robbed once she reached the mainland? Because a man who strangles his own wife in a rage probably isn’t great at long-term planning and impulse control? When you consider how desperately poor some of the descendants were, it was more of a fairy tale than anything else, some small hope that they could recover a piece of their legacy.”

Cindy frowned. “The family had no problem believing that Gerald killed her?”

Dotty shook her head. “I think that’s the part that bothers me the most. That it was so easy to accept that one of our own was capable of killing someone he’d promised to love, honor, and all that. It shows an incredible lack of trust, which after all the years, you’d think I
would be used to, but still . . . it just hurts. And I think it hurts Gerald, too.”

“ ‘Hurts’ in the present tense?” Nina asked, lifting an eyebrow.

“You’ve heard the stories, of course,” Dotty said. “The strange noises, the lights, the phantom voices. Unfortunately, Deacon and his parents have always refused to allow paranormal investigators onto the property to prove it, but there are several restless spirits wandering the house. Can’t you feel them?”

The fact was, both Cindy and Nina could feel the heavy energy on the island, but neither was willing to admit it openly. Desperate to steer the conversation back to more neutral territory, Nina asked, “What were you saying about the jewelry?”

Dotty held up her hands. “I hope that if I find the jewelry, it will prove that there was some other motive to Catherine’s death, some other sequence of events, or maybe even a new suspect.”

“Not to mention the small fortune they’re worth, right?” Cindy noted.

“Finding buried treasure would be nice. I mean, my relatives have been searching for those jewels ever since the ‘Whitney curse’ theory was born. My own granddad was convinced that if he found the jewelry, the curse would be broken and the family fortunes would reverse. Mostly, he just drove himself crazy and got a lot of splinters, digging up floorboards. But I think finding out that my great-great-grandfather wasn’t a murderer would be pretty valuable, too. I think it would go a long way in clearing out some of the angry, frustrated spirit energy in this place and make it a lot safer for Deacon to live here.”

“And what if you don’t?” Cindy asked. “What if all you find is evidence that the stories about Gerald Whitney are true?”

Dotty shrugged and popped a soy crisp into her mouth from a container in her bag. “At least I’ll know, and I can stop feeling indignant about the books and the ghost stories and the fact that a theme park offered to buy this place ten years ago to stage murder-mystery dinner reenactments during the summer.”

“That would sting,” Nina said,
tsk
ing sympathetically. “I can’t imagine how I would feel if people trotted out my family’s dysfunctional holiday dramas as entertainment. No one’s been killed or anything, but we did have a wishbone-related stabbing once.” Cindy and Dotty stared at her. “I mean, someone was stabbed
over
a wishbone, not
with
a wishbone. That would be weird.”

Dotty—ignoring social convention and personal-space bubbles—wrapped her long, elegant fingers around Nina’s wrist, pulling her hand away from her lips. “Sweetie, I bet you’ve got a great laugh. Stop covering it up.”

“Even if you
are
a snorter,” Cindy told her. “It’s still a good laugh. Besides, in the next couple of months, I bet we’re going to find out all sorts of embarrassing things about one another. Snort-laughs will be the least of our worries.”

Since her ordeal with Rick, Nina had shrunk in on herself, trying not to laugh too loudly, smile too brightly, or do anything that would draw too much attention to herself. One of the things Rick had criticized most about her was her “Pollyanna” tendencies. She was too
chirpy, too cheerful, too much to deal with first thing in the morning. She had become more subdued, more “mature,” so she would be more presentable.

Nina let herself giggle a bit. Cindy rolled her eyes and dug her fingers into Nina’s ribs, making her howl. She didn’t hold back the half-joyful, half-anguished noise. She ducked away, holding her hands up in a defensive posture. “OK, OK. I’m ticklish. Cut it out.”

Cindy shook her head and continued her assault on Nina’s sides. “Not until—”

Nina sidestepped and pranced out of range but not before she let loose a loud, distinct snort. Dotty doubled over laughing, propping herself against her knees while Cindy dissolved into guffaws.

“You two . . . suck,” Nina groused, although a genuine smile stretched her mouth so wide it nearly hurt.

“Watch the language there, Red, there are
ladies
present.” Cindy gasped, her hand clapped to her mouth.

“Well, when I spot them, I’ll be sure to censor myself,” Nina retorted.

Dotty wiped at her eyes, while Cindy chuckled. The room fell silent in that special, awkward way that follows shared humor between near-strangers. Dotty had already decided she was going to like these women, come hell, high water, or snort-laughing. She had a feeling they would be key players in helping her nudge the ghosts from the Crane’s Nest.

THE MAN CROUCHING
just a hundred yards from the Crane’s Nest was tall, dark, and handsome. But he was also hunched in the dry, tangled undergrowth between the untamed woods and the lawn proper, watching the
staff quarters through binoculars, which didn’t say much for his character.

Through the windows, he could see the women sitting around the ladies’ kitchen area, drinking iced tea and eating cookies. The hippie girl with the wild hair was sitting cross-legged on the long kitchen table, telling some story that involved puffing out her cheeks and waving her hands like an idiot. The blonde burst out laughing, writhing and jiggling as she damn near fell over. Nina, as always, was slow to respond. She sat there like a bump on a log, practically asking for permission before working up the nerve to smile at the hippie girl’s antics.