More Than a Game (10 page)

In Love With a Haunted House

By Kate Goldman

Free preview next page

Chapter 1

It was really over, Jim was never coming back.

Mallory knew that, and had known it almost from the moment she had come home to find him sitting in the living room with his hands folded across his knees in what she thought of as his “lecture” pose.

Anger replaced her melancholy. The bastard had packed, had his suitcases and other things removed before she had ever gotten home, and told her that the reason he had done so was to avoid, as he put it, any unpleasantness over the situation. He had known she could not fight against that, everything was already gone—what was there for her to fight for? She could not even try to stop him from packing, it was already finished.

He might as well have left a note rather than wait for her to get home to break the news to her in person. That would have been so like Jim! He never wanted to deal with anything that was remotely messy or complicated. He was always horrified by her tears, and distant enough to be living on another planet most of the time. Why had she never seen that before that moment? Why had she simply allowed her own feelings to overwrite her good sense?

Mallory wove her way through the hastily packed boxes that held her possessions. It gave her a slight spiteful satisfaction to know that Jim would have been horrified by that haphazard packing.

Not that she had had much choice—she was rapidly running out of money and if she did not get out of the apartment today she was going to have sign another year’s lease, which she could not afford.

She looked out the window. At first only her own reflection stared back: pale oval face, large green eyes and high cheekbones all surrounded by a mass of curly reddish-gold hair, but then the view below came into focus.

Mallory’s heart twisted. Living on this coveted section of real estate in Chicago had been an outward sign of their success—hers and Jim’s. The lake stretched blue and serene dozens of stories below her high-rise condo apartment. She could see wind-fattened sails on the boats cruising slowly on the placid waters, and the narrow ribbon of road that ran around the lake.

Once she had taken Jim for a ride through the grittier parts of the city simply to show him how much better they had it than so many others, why they had so much to be grateful for, and he had not spoken to her for an entire week except to inform her, quite frostily, that he had no intention of allowing her to get him murdered.

They had never left their own neighborhood again after that.

Her anger faded and tears began. It seemed like her moods swung in every direction lately like a pendulum without any steadying weight. Her cheeks were soaked before she could wipe those tears away and so was the windowsill. That was probably going to ruin the wood.

Mallory turned back around and gave the boxes an almost puzzled look. Was she really doing this? Was she really going home after nearly eight years away?

It seemed that she was. And it was hardly the triumphant homecoming she had always imagined.

Mallory had come to Chicago with ambition to spare. She had taken college courses while still in high school as well as having obtained a degree in accounting right after. She was intelligent, willing to work long hours and she wanted to see a big city far away from her small hometown.

She had gotten a job offer from Logitechnics and had jumped on it. Everything had just seemed to fall into place. She had moved into a tiny little apartment and gone to work. She had met Jim, who was a university professor, and after a year they had moved in together.

The next year they had moved into this apartment and things had just coasted along. Until a year ago when they had begun saving for both their wedding and a house of their own.

Mallory knew she should have seen the writing on the wall but she had been nearing twenty-eight, ready to settle down, ready for children, and she had honestly thought that after all the years she and that asshole had together he was too.

The very same day she had come home already in tears, because she had been handed a notice informing her that the company had been bought out and that she was one of the employees whose job could be done cheaper through outsourcing, she had come home to find him parked on the sofa waiting to break the news to her that the engagement was off and he was moving out.

The days afterward had drifted by. She had spent nearly three days in bed, curled around cartons of rocky road and mint chocolate chip, wiping her tears on her increasingly dingy sheets and watching romance films on Netflix.

Mallory had not even been able to talk to Jim. He had moved and not given her a forwarding address (but he had put one in at the post office nearly two weeks before, just one more example of how cold-hearted he was) and he had changed his phone number.

It was the beginning of summer so he would not be at the university and when she called up the hotel where they usually spent a week every summer she was met with a disapproving silence, a cleared throat and the suggestion that she check the hotel’s policy on giving out personal information on its guests.

Mallory might have stayed right there in bed for a month or more if she had not run out of both ice cream and peanut butter. Not to mention being jarred completely out of her stupor by the rude wake-up call from the building manager.

The manager had informed her that she needed to be reapproved for the apartment and that if she did qualify to stay she would have to fork over a hefty sum of fees and rental money.

Mallory had her severance package and her half of the money that she and Jim had been saving for the nuptials and the house. She could have afforded maybe six months in the apartment, the rent was staggering—almost four thousand a month—and accompanied by fees and other incidental charges.

Mallory wanted to stick it out—to try to find a job and hang on there in Chicago but she knew that was not possible. Everyone that had been downsized was desperate for a job and their numbers only added to the count
of people already unemployed in the city.

Her mother had provided the solution almost by accident. Mallory had not wanted to answer the phone, all she needed was to listen to her mother try to cheer her up. She knew she meant well; it was just that Cara, her mother, always saw the bright side of things—even when they were so dark that they looked downright desolate. Mallory didn’t know how she managed to do that and at that moment she didn’t really care either, but she answered the phone anyway. She knew Cara would just keep calling back until she did, so she might as well get it over with.

“You are never going to believe what happened,” Cara said as soon as her daughter picked up the phone.

“Somebody had twins?”

“No, although Louise Roberts, do you remember Louise? looks like she might have triplets but if you ask me that is all the ice cream she’s been eating. Anyway, Ms. Lewis died.”

“Who?” Mallory’s head ached but that was not an uncommon thing when she spoke to her mother.

“Ms. Lewis, the one that owned Gray Oaks Manor.”

Gray Oaks Manor. The house that sat next door to Mallory’s childhood home. It was a tall and almost imposing Victorian structure with stained-glass windows on the third floor and giant elm and oak trees, most of them covered with Spanish moss, shielding it from casual view.

“I didn’t know she was still alive.”

“I don’t think anyone did really, poor soul. To be honest I had almost forgotten she was over there. The last few years she barely even came outside. It wasn’t until her lawn service noticed she had not paid her bill this month that they got curious and knocked on her door.”

“Oh my God, you’re not about to tell me that she was dead for months before they figured it out, are you?”

“Oh no. It’s even stranger than that. When one of the men from her lawn service knocked on the door she opened it, wearing a wedding dress. Not just any wedding dress either, it had to be sixty or seventy years old and when they tried to talk to her she just kept saying that she did not have time to talk, she was getting ready for her wedding.”

“That poor old thing. Didn’t her fiancé die or something?”

Cara said, “Yes, in World War II, I think, or maybe Korea. I have no idea really, and I don’t think she did anymore either. She’s been senile for years, you know.”

Mallory said, “Everyone knew that she was senile, but she still had enough money that nobody wanted to put her in a home.”

“Yes, if she had lived in a tiny little house on the other side of town somebody would’ve simply snatched her out of her house a long time ago and put her away. But that’s not why I was calling you, well, actually it is why I was calling you.

“You always loved Gray Oaks, and you always wanted to buy it. Well, here’s your chance. It’s going dirt cheap, apparently she left the outside of the house up to her lawn service and the guy who came around to clean out the gutters, but the inside is a real mess.”

Mallory asked, “Mom, have you lost your mind?”

Cara replied, “No, but if I did, don’t tell anybody. I want to stay in my home until I die too. Did I tell you how she died?”

Mallory shook her head, the whole conversation was going right off the rails into some uncharted territory that she was not sure she even wanted to try to navigate at the moment. “No, you didn’t.”

“Well, it seems that the guy who owns the lawn service decided she needed some help. I mean you can’t blame the guy; she was flitting around in a falling-apart wedding dress asking him if he had seen her cake pans, so he called an ambulance.

“The ambulance driver showed up and decided that she was all the way off her rocker and that she needed to be hospitalized but when they tried to take her out of the house she told them that if they took her away she would be late for her own wedding and that she wasn’t going to have that.

“They got her all the way to the door and I do mean all the way to the door. Before her feet crossed the threshold she grabbed ahold of the door frame and shouted out ‘I do, I do’ and fell over dead.”

Mallory’s mouth sagged open to her breastbone. Ms. Lewis had always been odd, to say the least, and it was no secret that everyone in town thought that her house was haunted although Mallory had never seen any evidence of that.

“Mom, you do know you’re trying to talk me into buying a house where a woman just dropped dead in the doorway?”

“Yes, I do know that, but think about it—you could afford it. Isn’t that the most important thing?”

“I don’t even know what to say to that, Mom.”

“Say that you’ll come home. Then ask me for the name of the person selling the place, you better hurry up, though, if you want to buy it. You know half the town has been dying to get their hands on that property.”

“Mom, what would I do in Golden?”

“Well, what are you doing in Chicago?”

Ouch. “That’s a little unfair. You know I’m trying to find a job.”

“I know you’re up there eating your own misery. You can get a job here, John Markham has a just expanded his advertising agency and he could use a hand. Not only that, there are a lot of businesses here in town that could use a good accountant; you could set up your own business.”

“Mom, that is so risky.”

“It seems to me that getting a job with another company that might lay you off is pretty risky.”

Mallory could see no way to argue with that. Now, just a few days later here she was: packed, ready to go, and trying to figure out if she had temporarily lost her mind or just fallen victim to one of her mom’s plots.

It didn’t really matter. She could not afford to stay in Chicago; she couldn’t afford it financially, or emotionally. Jim had done a number on her and maybe it would do him some good to know that he had lost her.

That stopped her in her tracks. Was that what this was all about? Was she hoping that she would get back to Golden and Jim would come running after her? She hoped not, surely she was not that big of a fool.