Haunted (7 page)

"She never had any intention of having her daughter in the midst of the business and she sent her off to the school she herself went to as a girl. But she was soon sent home. For nearly two more years, she enrolled Christabel in school after school, and the girl continued to be expelled."

"Geez, Dad, what'd she do?" Amber asked. "Blow up toilets?"

He chuckled, despite himself. He'd told Amber a good deal of the story on their way out west, so she already knew. She was just adding to the drama to torture Theo, who still wore a look on her face like she was smelling a fresh pile of manure. His earlier attraction to her began to fade and he continued his tale with gusto. "Blowing up toilets would have been preferable to Christabel's proclivities. She liked to kill things. No chicken coop was safe, and if a school happened to have dogs or goats in residence, she took care of them also. But chickens were her favorite. She sacrificed them to Erzuli, the goddess her father had taught her to worship.

"So she ended up back here. Her mother interested her in art-
-doll making--and, for a time, she seemed to reform. But it didn't last. Against her mother's wishes, she became involved in the business. The information is sparse about how she accomplished that." David cleared his throat. "Then, eventually, she destroyed it. So," he finished, crossing his arms, "that's why Lizzie Baudey wears the expression she does in the portrait."

"Still, a cathouse," Theo said doubtfully. "It's no wonder she was so troubled."

"Lizzie had inherited the house and grounds but no money to speak of." He stared at the portrait. "Look at her. Does she look like the sort of woman who would take in laundry or sewing?" He shook his head. "Of course not. She used her business sense and opened a house of prostitution that was world famous at the time. Lizzie had a hedonistic nature to go along with her artistic talents, and her business sense allowed her to indulge in both." He saw the sour look on Theo's face and added, "You have to admire a woman of that era who knew how to get what she wanted, even if it wasn't approved of by other people."

Theo
harrumphed then said, "Shall we see the rest of the house?"

They moved to the other end of the hallway to explore a large bedroom with a wall of built-in wardrobes whose glass art was just short of scandalous. As he inspected the room, David began to suspect that this had been Lizzie Baudey's private sitting room. She would have wanted to stay near the front door, where she could keep an eye on the comings and goings of her customers. If, as the story often went, she broke her legs and couldn't walk without pain, she might well have
slept down here, as well.

"God, Daddy," Amber cried, "do you know what these are?" She squinted at the glass on one wardrobe door.

"They're... they're..." she paused, at a loss for the word, then sputtered, "Trouser mice!"

"They're what?" Theo asked. The dark mood that had hung over her like a pall in the other room had lifted.

David peered closely at the glasswork. "Penises," he said, catching a whiff of the sweet perfume.

"Dad!"

"That's what they are, kiddo." He glanced at Theo. "Amber's always felt that the correct terms for reproductive organs are more improper than almost any euphemism."

"They're gross-sounding words," Amber said
hotly.

Theo joined them at the wall of wardrobes and put her
fingers to the arched glass over the rosewood doors. Amber backed away, looking disgusted.

"When Lizzie Baudey inherited this house, she poured her artistic talents into it," David told them. "She replaced a lot of the original wood panels with glass. And since she was running a house of prostitution, I assume she thought that pornographic art
was good for the mood. It probably appealed to her sense of whimsy, too, so that's what she designed and commissioned."

"They're not really pornographic," Theo said, her voice throatier than usual. "They're too beautiful to be obscene."

"Well, I don't want any of those things in my room," Amber stated with disgust. She walked out of the room.

"They are well done," David remarked to Theo, even more aware of the sweet scent. "I especially like the way Lizzie's sense of humor shows in some of the designs." The two-inch pink, rose, and purple penises in the glass arches were entwined with fig leaves and many of the elegant little organs seemed to be hiding, rather coyly, behind the foliage. He opened his mouth to say so then snapped his jaw shut, shocked that he'd been about to say this to a woman he barely knew. Exhausted, he thought, I must be too exhausted to think straight. "It's getting late. Shall we
finish the tour?"

Theo smiled and gestured at the door. "After
you."

He stepped toward the threshold, aware of Theo right behind him. A second later, he jumped as a hand caressed his left buttock. Shocked, he whirled to stare at Theo.

"What's wrong, David?" The surprise on her face appeared genuine.

"Uh, nothing. Nothing." He stood back and gestured for her to take the lead. The woman copped a feel, he thought, following her dumbly out the door. He couldn't believe it, but he knew what he had felt
. Or maybe she'd just brushed him with her purse? That could be, he supposed. Maybe...

"I see you've found the billiards room, Amber," Theo said, entering the already-lit room. David followed her in, wondering how
she’d react to a subtle goose.

Amber, standing on the far side of the huge billiard table, just shrugged
. "This lamp's not bad," she said, looking at David.

"It's magnificent." The billiards lamp was five feet long and eighteen inches wide, and its leaded shade was comprised of hundreds of multi-colored circles representing billiard balls. "They cleaned up the wood," Theo said, pointing at the table's massive carved legs. "But we've had a hard time locating someone who knows how to re-cover the table top. She laid her hand on the stained threadbare felt. "My secretary
finally located a man down in Santa Barbara who'll do the work, though. I'm really sorry it's not done already."

"No problem." The ancient material, once green, was almost colorless except for the huge blackish stains in the center of the table. David looked up and noticed that Amber had a slight smile on
her face. Her eyes were on Theo's hands, one of which was actually resting on a big black spatter. Her gaze rose to the woman's face and she cleared her throat, obviously relishing the moment when she'd inform Theo that she was touching a seventy-year-old bloodstain.

"Are you ready to see the second floor, kiddo?" David asked, giving her the eye.

"Sure," she said, giving him a shrug that meant I'll get her later.

"We didn't see quite everything down here," Theo said as they headed back to the sweeping central staircase, "but there will be plenty of time tomorrow, won't there?" She put one hand on the ornate banister and the other over David's elbow, unaware of Amber's glare.

Or ignoring it. Troubled, David watched his daughter walk ahead of him up the staircase. Beside him, Theo was going on about the new roof, but he barely heard her because he was thinking about how possessive Amber had become. He supposed it resulted from all the time they spent as a family of two, though for the time that Melanie had lived with them, Amber never exhibited much jealousy. He wondered what it was about Theo that set it off so strongly and hoped that, whatever it was, he could nip it in the bud because he was thinking that he might like to see more of her.

As Theo snuggled her hand more securely about his elbow, he realized that one of the reasons Amber disliked the woman had to be her habit of touching people. His daughter wasn't used to that kind of familiarity. Neither was he, for that matter. Some sort of West Coast thing, he told himself. Amber even had a snide name for it that he couldn't recall. The sweet flower scent suddenly rose again, stronger, more familiar and exciting than ever.

"You smell that, Dad?" Amber asked as they reached the landing.

"Yeah." Relieved that she had picked up the fragrance too, he gently extricated himself from Theo's grasp. The air here felt cool and thick. "What's it smell like to you, kiddo?"

"Flowers. Jungle flowers."

"Do you smell it, Theo?"

"Yes, David, I do now," she said slowly. "That's what you were smelling when you asked about my perfume downstairs, isn't it?"

He nodded.

"It reminds me of night-blooming jasmine."

"You never noticed it before?" he persisted.

"No… but I haven't been here at night before, either. That's the only time the flowers have fragrance." She smiled at him as if he were a small child. "That's why they call it night-blooming jasmine, David. It's delicious, isn't it?"

Sweet and citrusy at the same time, the scent cloyed in his nostrils, so heavy now that the air seemed weighted by it
. And suddenly he remembered where he'd smelled it before. Two summers ago, during his first book tour, he'd stayed in a ground floor suite at the Rolling Sands Resort in Palm Springs. Melanie had flown in, surprising him with a chilled bottle of Mumms and a scandalous lack of underwear. They'd spent the evening in his Jacuzzi, soaking and drinking champagne.

After a while, a sweet fragrance began to rise from the yellow flowers coating the bushes that edged the private patio. Back inside, they left the sliding door open, despite the desert heat, and made love, slept, made love again. It was a night of hedonism and excess and the exotic flowers' perfume had been part of it
. The scent of the jasmine had faded with the dawn, and he'd forgotten it until now. No wonder Melanie was on his mind.

"David?"

"Hmm? What did you say?"

Theo stared at him quizzically. "Are you all right?"

"Maybe somebody left the windows open to air out the paint smell," Amber suggested.

"Are any windows open, Theo?" he asked.

"I don't think so. You can only smell night jasmine on very warm summer nights. It's summer, but it's certainly not warm." She glanced around apprehensively. "Perhaps Mrs. Willard used some air freshener…"

"Maybe it's just ghosts," Amber said.

The fragrance dissipated as quickly as it had materialized, and David turned to his daughter. "You might be right." In fact, he was virtually certain now that it was a manifestation of some sort and, if that were true, Baudey House was breaking with haunted house tradition.

"I thought you said nothing ever happens the
first night, Dad," Amber said, reading his mind.

"So sue me."

"Do you really think it's a spirit, David?" Theo asked softly.

He studied the woman, thinking that she might be the reason behind the phenomena: certain people seemed to set things like this in motion and Theo appeared to fit the bill.
It wasn't something he could detect as much as sense: he thought of some people as "grounded," and others as the opposite. An ungrounded person seemed to feed their own energy into a manifestation and make it stronger. With Theo's sensuality and her thinly veiled volatility, chances were excellent she was feeding it an eight-course meal.

"It's
not a spirit, Theo," he said finally. "It's a memory."

"I don't understand."

"When I was a little kid, I loved to go to my grandmother's house," David explained. "There was a scent--I realized later that it was my grandmother's sachet--that I always associated with the house. With her. When I was ten, she died and my parents brought some of her things to our house. Years later, when I was home from college, I went up into our attic hunting for a pair of skis--and I saw my grandmother's old steamer trunk. I knelt down in front of it and opened it," he said softly. "And was overcome by emotion because I felt like my grandmother was with me, like she was everywhere around me. I cried like a baby, remembering her--when I was ten I pretended her death didn't bother me-but the trunk held linens and little satin sachet bags which still held that sweet smell after all those years." Tears sprang to his eyes and, abruptly, he cleared his throat. "That's more the sort of ghost that we're experiencing here."

"What a lovely story," Theo said, her eyes glistening. "But how do you know it wasn't your grandmother's spirit?"

Give me a break. "That notion would make a nice story, but I'm afraid it simply doesn't work that way in real life."

"Unless your grandma happens to be a genie in a bottle," Amber threw in.

"Amber," he cautioned. The spiritualist viewpoint Theo held frustrated David, not only because be found it simplistic and superstitious, but because it caused many scientists to shun paranormal research. He decided that Theo, obviously an intelligent woman, was merely parroting what she had heard: she was another victim of pop parapsychology. "Perhaps I can explain a little better over dinner some time," he heard himself say.

"Why, that would be lovely, David."

Carefully, he avoided looking at his daughter. She'd probably rolled her eyes so far back in her head that only the whites showed. "Shall we?" Realizing he was exhausted, not to mention starving, he wanted to wrap up the tour as quickly as possible.

"This way," Theo said, leading them past the stairs to the other side of the house. At the cross corridor, she gestured to the right. "Several of the rooms have the original bedframes and we've replaced their
box springs and mattresses, as you requested." Theo stopped at a door on the left side. "I asked Mrs. Willard to make up the beds in the two biggest rooms--this one and that one, two doors down." Smiling, Theo put her hand on the door latch then pulled her hand back, embarrassed. "These latches are still a shock."