Better Homes and Hauntings (11 page)

The hippie rolled her eyes, jostling Nina’s arm and topping off her tea. Nina ducked her head, but he could make out the curve of her lips through the binoculars.

The man sniffed, his handsome face twisted into a mocking sneer as he watched the girls raise their glasses together. Well, wasn’t that just precious? He was sitting out here in the heat, sweating his sack off, and Miss Priss was joining her Girl Scout troop for tea and cookies in the nice, cool house. She was rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, and he was hiding in the bushes like some nobody.

It wasn’t fair. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to turn out. Nina thought she could just walk away? She thought she could steal jobs from him and show him up? Not in this lifetime.

Make her pay
, a voice whispered in his ear.

He started, looking around for whoever had whispered in his ear. He waved his hand, as if an errant mosquito were buzzing nearby in the fading light of afternoon. He
focused his binoculars on the window, watching Nina sip her tea and delicately dab at her lips with a napkin.

Always so polite. He sneered. Always so prim and proper. She wouldn’t say “shit” if she stepped in it. She was too good for that. It was what made her so easy to push around, her refusal to make a fuss even when she got trampled. Then again, the Virgin Mary act was also what had made her such a convincing little victim when she finally went to the cops to file her bullshit complaints against him. Conniving bitch.

Make her pay.

It wasn’t a bad idea, he mused.

Nina should pay. She’d used her big doe eyes and her poor-orphan-victim routine to fool Deacon Whitney into hiring her, when she knew
he
was bidding for this job. The lack of loyalty shocked him, pissed him off. The minute she saw his name on the list of bidders, she should have stepped aside. He thought he’d made that clear with all the trouble he’d caused her, but she obviously hadn’t understood the message, because here she was, on Whitney Island, where she had no business being.

Make her pay.

Yes, he would do that. He could show her, once and for all, who was in charge. He’d let her have her little moment now. He’d let her relax and think that maybe her stupid little business might make a go of it. But then he would crush her, just like he had at all the other job sites. He would fix it so that Nina was too much trouble to keep around. He would make Deacon Whitney feel unsafe having her on his staff. And who would be ready to step in and take over the mediocre work she’d done? He would.

Make her pay.
The dark, seductive voice seemed to slither through his mind, worming its way into the cells and making them its own.
Show her who’s in charge.

He nodded slowly. It had been easy enough to sneak onto the island, even with the motion detectors and security cameras Whitney’s people had arranged around the perimeter of the property. He’d simply followed the charter boat rented by the hippie girl and then veered south before they reached the shore. As he crept along the shoreline, he’d managed to spot every hidden piece of surveillance equipment. It was if he were being led along a safe path, allowing him to spy on the Whitney Island team undisturbed. The island, the house, wanted him here, he could feel it. A sly, rasping voice from the recesses of his brain told him so.

You’re doing the right thing. You’re putting her in her place. It wouldn’t be so easy if you weren’t doing the right thing. Whitney will probably thank you later.

He smiled, raising the binoculars to his eyes. Nina would be sorry that she ever crossed him. She would pay.

CINDY HADN’T BEEN
entirely honest when she told Nina that she hadn’t felt anything out of the ordinary at the Crane’s Nest. Since her initial walk-through, she’d felt eyes sliding over her skin like eels. She was used to people looking at her. You didn’t spend your middle-school years in a D-cup without developing a sort of sixth sense for skeeviness. But in the Crane’s Nest, she felt as if she was being studied, examined like prey from every alcove and cubby in the house. She sensed shadowy blurs at the corners of her eyes, but when she turned her head, they were gone. She tried blaming the unnatural chill of the rooms for the goose bumps and the feeling that someone was standing behind her, but her stubborn fight-or-flight response wasn’t buying it.

Despite her fairy-tale face, Cindy Ellis wasn’t one for
flights of fancy. Growing up, she hadn’t had the time to waste. And now she didn’t have the patience for anything that stood in the way of her goals. She’d purposefully ignored the Crow’s Nest’s unsavory reputation while composing her bid, because it didn’t fit her overall agenda to shy away from such a potential career boost. Like every skeptical Newport local, she’d scoffed at the ghost stories connected to the house. Rich people and their nonsense, her father had called it, a waste of a perfectly good house, sitting out in the middle of nowhere, rotting away because of greed and ego. John Ellis had never had time for either. His girl was too smart to let something like “bad vibes” get in the way of doing a job right. An Ellis didn’t back down from a challenge, even when the challenge was accompanied by goose bumps and foreboding. She could get over both with a stiff drink and a mushy Sandra Bullock movie.

But now that she was actually on the island, Cindy couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something very wrong with this house.

And she wasn’t alone. Cindy had lost two day-crew employees within the first three days on the job. She wasn’t about to tell Mr. Whitney. She simply replaced them with other members of her team and continued the preliminary cleanup. She couldn’t blame her employees for their sudden departure. They’d reported inexplicable cold spots, the sensation of being watched, footsteps in rooms where they were the only occupants. On the third morning, Greta and Maria, two of Cindy’s most reliable cleaners, had abandoned the entry hall and run for the dock, purses in hand, to wait for the next ferry—which wasn’t due for six hours.

Greta would only say that she wouldn’t continue working in the house, and if that meant she was fired, she would accept that. Maria was considerably more descriptive, chattering nervously as Cindy tried to coax them back into the house.

“This is a bad place, Miss Ellis,” Maria had told her, clutching the little gold crucifix around her throat. “Watching, everything is watching, waiting, for the right time to reach out. You don’t want to be reached.”

And now, as she was sorting through furniture in one of the second-floor guest rooms, she was moving around the bright, airy room, in the process of whipping a dusty storage sheet off a piece of mystery furniture, and she could clearly hear the faint echo of footsteps moving around on the third floor. And no one was supposed to be working on the third floor.

Cindy stood slowly, staring up at the plastered-medallion ceiling. Maybe it was a worker doing some sort of preliminary inspection? Or maybe it was just the house settling. She’d worked in enough old houses to know what noises they made when they shifted. She’d almost talked herself into ignoring it and continuing on with her work, when the ceiling right above her head groaned under the moving burden of some heavy wooden object. It sounded as if someone was moving furniture up there, something she had specifically instructed Anthony’s crew not to do, as she had to sort through and label everything from its original position, per the requirements of the Whitney family’s lawyer. And they were doing it in Mrs. Whitney’s bedroom, which was one of the most contentious areas of the house. Aside from the dresses,
costume jewelry, and antiques, the room contained personal mementos such as a hope chest filled with Mrs. Whitney’s trousseau. Several Whitney relatives were petitioning for the right to run through that room like a Macy’s white sale. So properly cataloging the Whitney boudoir before it could be ransacked was priority one.

Cindy nervously swiped her hands along the burnished gold tendrils that had escaped from her tight French braid. She really didn’t want to go upstairs, particularly by herself, but the possibility of the furniture being moved without her approval was enough to get her feet moving toward the second-story landing. “Hey!” she called. “This is Cindy. I don’t know who’s up there, but you’re not supposed to be moving anything.”

No response.

A cold trickle of sweat ran down her spine, soaking into her blue Cinderella Cleaning T-shirt. Over the faint reports of nail guns and the muffled conversations of the workers, she could hear a strange cyclical humming of air. It was as if the house was breathing. Cindy waited for a long moment, praying that the noise would stop so she could forget about the whole incident. But there it was again, the scraping of furniture against the floor, farther down the hall now.

“Hello?” Cindy called.

The silence seemed to stretch out forever, mocking her. She stepped onto the stairs for the third floor, the air growing heavier, pressing against her from all sides, as if she were climbing through thick syrup. Instinctively, she stepped back and was ashamed that a staircase and a
few bumps and thumps had her wanting to bolt for the main floor and the safety of other people.

“Hey!” she called again, her voice pitching higher. “Answer me, damn it!”

And through her shame came a bolstering tickle of anger. She was an Ellis. An Ellis didn’t back down. Whoever was up there didn’t know who they were dealing with. Cindy placed a foot on the first stair, gripping the banister, her knuckles white.

She felt the first impact in her stomach, as if she’d been sucker punched by some unseen fist. She wheezed, barely able to brace herself against the banister and avoid tumbling down the stairs. Her head swam, and her throat closed up, sinking her in a swampy mire of pain and confusion. What was this? What was happening to her?

The world seemed to spin. Her head rolled, and her eyesight blurred. She clung to consciousness, all that prevented her from taking a header down the steps.

“Help—” She started to scream, but a sudden, unexpected pressure at her throat stole her breath. It felt as if she were drowning, strangling, unable to draw air. She stumbled back a step, which made the pressure ease a bit. She rubbed at her throat and gasped, but the moment the air passed her lips, she fell to her knees, fighting the invisible blockage in her airway.

Clawing at the ancient carpeting, she felt her insides go cold. Tears slid down her cheeks as she writhed against the stairs.
Somebody help me.
She begged no one in particular.
Please let someone find me. Anybody, please.

Cindy heard the rapid fire of footsteps on the stairs and a familiar, panicked voice. “Cindy! What happened?”

Anybody but Jake.

Jake pulled her toward him and into the cradle of his lap. The grip at her throat eased, and a small but steady stream of oxygen flowed into her lungs. The spasming in her chest finally relaxed, and she breathed deeply for the first time in what felt like an eternity.

Her eyelids fluttered open, and she saw Jake hovering over her, his face awash in concern as he pushed a tangle of hair out of her eyes.

The baby blues hadn’t hurt, of course, but Cindy had agreed to that first date with him because she’d thought he was different from the yacht-club guys. And then, of course, he’d proven her wrong.

Jake was still staring at her. And the house had tried to kill her.
Right. Focus on the murderous house.

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice coming across as an indignant croak. “I just tripped.”

“In a way that left a bright red mark on your throat?”

Her hand flew to cover the sore strip of skin where she’d clawed her own neck. “Yep.”

“OK, we’ll just pretend I buy that for now.” He moved to help her up, but she shrugged him off, using the stair rail as leverage. She rubbed at her neck.

It was her imagination. She had to believe it. She had to write off that crushing, breath-free vacuum as something innocuous; otherwise, she would have to run screaming from this island and the payday she needed to keep her business prospering for years to come. She just had an overactive imagination combined with dust allergies that made her feel as if she was choking. Of course, she’d never had dust allergies before, but that didn’t mean anything.

And in general, dust allergies didn’t make one so dizzy that one missed a step and tumbled face-forward down a flight of stairs.

“Hey!” Jake exclaimed, barely catching her by the elbows and yanking her to his chest, sending both of them crashing backward onto the staircase. Cindy landed in his lap with an “
ungfh
,” her head lolling back against Jake’s shoulder.

Jake’s arms tightened around her. And even in Cindy’s woozy state, she noted that he was packing some pretty impressive biceps under the ridiculous pastel-green tennis shirt. It was galling to still be attracted to him, to see him being all concerned and knight-in-Polo-armor when she knew what he was really like. She was woefully familiar with how quickly he lost interest when he didn’t get what he wanted. It made her want to smack that far-too-close-to-sincere anxious expression right off his handsome face.