The Burning (3 page)

“That’s funny. I was just thinking the same thing. Is this some kind of prank?”

“You’re kidding, right? You set this up and now you’re pretending it was me.”

“Okay, Eric, I trust you,” she said, unfolding her arms. “But if I didn’t do this and you didn’t, then who did?”

He looked at the stove and then back at her. “I have no idea. Could someone have come in while we were talking to the cop?”

“How? The back door is covered up with furniture. They would’ve had to walk right by us at the front door.” The smell became overwhelming. “Can you grab that thing and toss it in the bush, and then we’ll talk about this outside?”

Eric opened the cutlery drawer and pulled out the barbecue tongs. Carefully, he leaned into the stove and applied the tongs to either side of the rat’s burnt carcass. With the blackened rodent’s body held firm in his grip, Eric walked across the kitchen toward the door. Once outside, he continued away from the house and tossed the body into the trees.

“There, it’s gone,” he shouted back at her as she stepped outside.

Tessa shuddered the length of her body. “We’ve been here since yesterday. Do you think that charred smell was the rat all this time, and we just found it?”

Eric shook his head. “No, the oven light was on when I went back into the house after the cop left. This is new.” Eric touched his chin and looked sideways, lost in thought. “Funny how it coincides with the cop showing up.”

“Yeah, funny,” Tessa said, with sarcasm.

Dark clouds formed overhead. Blue sky still surrounded the area and the sun shone in the late afternoon position. “It looks like we might get a sun shower.”

“Tessa, I’m going to run into town to see if I can find our real estate agent. After that, I’m going to see if the library is open. Maybe they have newspapers or records on the Jared Tavallo missing person report. I’d like to know more about that. Will you be okay here?”

“Yeah, but maybe you could walk through the whole house to make sure whoever stuck the rat in our oven isn’t still here?”

“Of course,” Eric said and stepped past her.

He entered the front door and skipped up the steps. Tessa stood alone, staring up at the gorgeous chalet they had just bought for a steal. They paid less than half the going rate without wondering why. Full disclosure didn’t reveal that any murders or suicides had taken place in the home. As far as they could tell, the mysteriously anonymous previous owners just wanted to unload the property as fast as they could.

Tessa wasn’t religious in the organized religion sense, or into believing about the Other Side, but it did scare her a little when they first visited the house and she saw the weird trim on all the windows. The gargoyles lining the roof had a certain beauty to them, but the exterior could be renovated. It was the interior that had won them over. They’d always wanted a quiet year-round home in the mountains where Eric could write his historical thrillers and she could dabble in gardening and cook extravagant meals. The oven would need a serious cleaning before she’d put any food in it.

Eric ran out the front door, cars keys dangling in his hand. “The house is clean. No one’s in there.” He slowed as he reached her. “I’m starting to believe the rat was in the oven since yesterday, and that’s what we’ve been smelling.”

“Yeah, that has to be it,” Tessa agreed.

He kissed her and ran for the car. “Gotta hurry. It’s getting late and the library may close. See you in an hour or so. Call my cell if you need me.”

Tessa waved to him as a light rain began to fall. A soft sheet of rain dropped from the gray cloud above. The sun still warmed her as water collected on her face.

Eric’s car fired up and he was off, driving almost as fast as the cop did fifteen minutes before.

Time to get back to painting the bedroom.

Tessa turned toward the house and started for the porch, but stopped in her tracks.

Steam rose off the roof as the rain water hit it. She stepped closer and examined the porch railing. It was happening there too.

Weird.

It reminded her of what water did when it hit the burner on the stove after overflowing from a pot of potatoes, sizzling and bubbling up, and finally disappearing. She touched the railing to see if it was hot, her fingers coming away cool, but not wet.

As fast as the rain started, it slowed and then stopped with only the occasional drip here and there.

Tessa walked into her house and discounted what she’d just witnessed. It had an explanation, she just didn’t know what. Probably the house had heated up with the direct sun all day and the warm rain only dissipated faster than expected.

Who knows,
she thought.
I’m going to paint and not worry about dead rats and sizzling rain.

Chapter 4

Friday, June, 1, 2012…

Officer Clayton stared up at the facade of the house. The house that the area was now calling
The Burning Chalet
. It looked like any other summer home in the Banff area, but he’d been on the police force long enough to know that strange things happened around it.

“Strange things indeed,” he mumbled under his breath as cars pulled up behind him. He took off his sunglasses and watched the line of seven vehicles crawl up the drive, with Arthur McKay bringing up the rear. Good old Arthur — the longest standing resident still alive in the National Park. Clayton was pretty sure Arthur would hit ninety-five this year but people had stopped asking his age a dozen years ago. He was still spry, still eating bacon and eggs and driving his car, but Clayton suspected this would be the last year Arthur did any more driving.

The vehicles broke left and right and parked where they could find room.

“Gather around,” he shouted as everyone filed out of their vehicles. “I want to talk to you all before we get started.”

The search team assembled in a loose circle around Clayton. He counted ten people including himself.

“Okay, here’s what we know. According to the real estate agent, a young couple bought this house and were supposed to arrive for the long weekend in May, a few weeks back, but as far as anyone knows, they never showed up. Here’s the problem … their family in Calgary said they did leave for Banff and came here on the seventeenth of May. I’ve asked you all here to search the area in grid formation. Once we’ve covered every square meter of the property and found nothing, we will all leave as a group and go home. I will report to the family personally with what we find, which I’m figuring won’t be anything. Got it?”

Heads bobbed up and down.

“Okay, we’ll start in that corner in a single line and walk the property. We’ve all done this before. Let’s go, let’s go.”

Arthur stood at the back, leaning on his cane. As the searchers started for the corner of the property line, Clayton walked over to Arthur.

“You sure you’re up to this?” Clayton asked.

Lately, Arthur’s old eyes watered constantly. In a high-pitched grandfatherly voice, Arthur said, “You’re damned right I am. No house will spook me.” He turned and started after the group, leaning into his cane more today than on other days.

The ensemble of volunteers started by ten in the morning and finished the left side of the property by the lunch hour. Everyone went back to their cars for food, where they sat on hoods and trunks to eat.

Mike Lewis gestured toward Clayton, the remnants of a tuna sandwich in his mouth. “You really think that couple came here?”

Clayton shrugged. “I have no idea. Everything points to the negative.”

“I heard everything that comes around here goes missing eventually,” Barbara added from a few feet over.

“We don’t want to encourage fairy tales,” Clayton said.

“What happened to that hunter last year?” Mike asked.

“Who knows?” Clayton bit into a gala apple. “People go missing all the time in the mountains.”

“Yeah, but I heard his rifle was found on the porch of this house.”

“Ghost stories,” Clayton said. “That’s all it is.”

“I don’t think so,” Arthur chimed in. “There’s something wrong with this house. I can feel it in my bones. Can smell it in the air.”

Clayton swallowed the chunk of apple and took a deep breath. “That’s just somebody nearby with a campfire. Probably roasting marshmallows or hotdogs.”

“I smell something burning,” Arthur said. “And it ain’t marshmallows.”

“Okay, folks. Let’s finish this up and get the rest of the search done. I want to be home in time for dinner.”

They gathered their garbage, tossed it into a bag Clayton had brought and assembled at the opposite corner of the property.

After two more search lines were covered, they came upon the old well near the back of the property line. In order to walk around the raised stones that marked the well, Clayton would have to move away from one of the volunteer’s on either side of him.

“Everyone, slow up. I want to scan the base of the well so we don’t have to revisit this spot.”

The line stopped. Clayton got down and circled the well, seeing nothing but overgrown grass and stone. He rose to his full height and looked down into the open hole of the well. Darkness covered the bottom. As far as he remembered, the old wells in these parts had dried up years ago.

He grabbed the flashlight off his belt, flicked it on and shined the beam down the hole. Something reflected off it near the bottom.

“What was that?” he asked out loud.

A moment later Mike stood beside him, leaned down and scanned the bottom of the well.

“I can’t make it out, but from here it looks like a woman’s purse.”

“What would a purse be doing at the bottom of a well?” Clayton asked no one in particular.

“No idea,” Mike answered.

“Okay everyone, continue the search without me. I’m going to get my fishing rod out of my trunk to see if I can hook that purse and bring it up.”

The group of volunteers formed their line again and moved away as Clayton walked out to his car.

Minutes later he stood at the lip of the old well, a large lure with a double hook at its base affixed to the ten-pound line.

He let the line go until the lure touched bottom and then began the monotonous work of trying to hook the purse in the little to no light at the bottom of the well.

The volunteers finished scanning the property and came up empty. There was no indication anyone had spent time at the house in the last few years.

Just as it was beginning to seem a fruitless effort, the hook caught in the front flap of the purse.

Gently, he pulled the fishing line up and began to reel it in. Mike grabbed the tip of the rod to stabilize it and reduce sway.

“You’re getting it. Slowly, slowly.”

Clayton paid attention to the line, making sure he didn’t jerk it.

“Five feet left. Someone reach down and grab it when it gets close.”

Clayton didn’t look up to see who volunteered. He just kept his attention on the rod. To get this close and accidentally drop the purse back into the well would really piss him off.

“Got it!” Barbara shouted.

Clayton let out a pent-up breath. He set the rod down and reached for the purse. It didn’t look old, but the strap was broken and the outside leather worn. However long the purse was in the well, it had been weathered beyond repair.

“Everyone, thanks for coming out. Time to go. I’ll have this and its contents analyzed and let you all know what I find, if anything. Thanks again. See you all in town.”

Clayton walked away, but not before Arthur grabbed his arm.

“I don’t think you’ll find anything in that purse. The house doesn’t want you to know.”

Clayton stopped walking. “What makes you say that?”

“Up there,” Arthur pointed at the second story windows with his cane. “When you got that purse into your hands, something was in the window, watching you.”

“What are you talking about? You think someone is in the house?”

“No, not someone. Something.”

“Now Arthur, I hope you’re not seeing things,” Clayton said as he turned to go.

Arthur grabbed his elbow with surprising strength and spun him back to face him. “Whatever it was I saw, I can tell you it was real and it was angry. I didn’t see eyes, but I felt it watching us. Then it glowed a fire-red and orange color. When you touched the purse, for a brief moment the whole second story of the house looked like it was on fire. Flames licked up the window panes — then turned a deep shade of red and by the time I was ready to point and tell you to look, it all went away.”

“Arthur,” Clayton lowered his voice and leaned in. “You didn’t see anything of the sort. Go home and get some sleep. Thanks for your help today.”

Officer Clayton walked away with the purse in his hand, wondering what he’d find in it.

He also wondered if Arthur had started brewing his moonshine again or if he was finally losing his mind to age.

When he reached his car, he stopped to look back at the house and saw Arthur in the open door.