Finding the Way Back (18 page)

I still needed to settle down and took a few
extra minutes in the bathroom to wash my face and brush my hair but
Connie went to bed right away. Returning to the bedroom, I closed
the door and climbed under my covers. “Why do you think our
grandmother is still here?” I asked. But Connie was already on her
way to dreamland and didn’t answer.

Chapter
Nineteen

It was still dark when I awoke to hear the
muffled clattering of dishes in the kitchen. Rolling over, I saw
Connie still lying in bed. Instantly, I was wide awake and sitting
up. Now what? My heart pounding, I quickly grabbed my robe and ran
down the stairs, my bare feet slapping each step. I turned at the
bottom of the steps, looking for intruders then exhaled in relief.
My mother and Aunt Shelly were in the midst of cleaning the
kitchen. “Good morning, sleepy head,” my mother affectionately
called out.

“Mom, do you know what time it is?” I
grumbled then let out another sigh of relief.

“Time for you to get out of bed.”

“God, I hate morning people.” My mother had
been this way since I was a child, waking at dawn, surprised
everyone else didn’t do the same. Making my way to the coffee
machine, I focused on the thought of my first cup. After the
obligatory infusion of cream and sugar, I took my cup to the table
and sat down. Perking up, I noticed someone had brought donuts and
I reached in to grab my favorite chocolate-covered. I smiled and
settled in, the dark chocolate melting in my mouth and filling my
body with more sugar.

“I told you the donuts would tame them,” my
aunt said, smiling.

“Yes, now I forgive you anything,” I answered
back in buoyant spirits. I heard Connie plodding down the stairs.
“Look, donuts,” I called as I held mine out for her to see.

“God, I hate morning people,” she grumbled
under her breath as she made her way to the coffee machine.

“So what are you two doing here this morning
anyway?” I asked.

“That’s not the most welcoming attitude,
Laney,” my aunt answered as she came to sit at the table. “We have
a lot more work to do around here and we decided on the way home
last night that as mothers we should be here when all of this ghost
stuff is happening.”

The sun started shining through the window as
Connie and my mom pulled out chairs and joined us at the table with
their coffee. “You’re not moving in are you?” Connie asked.

“No. But we thought we could be here a lot
during the day,” Aunt Shelly answered.

“Well, you missed a good one last night,”
Connie said, taking a donut covered in sprinkles.

“I knew we shouldn’t leave you here alone.
What happened?” my mother asked, her face drawn in concern.

“We saw her last night, Mom.”

“Who?”

“Grandma. It had to be her. Young woman,
blonde, fifties clothing. She looked just like the few pictures we
have of her.”

“You saw her? In the house?” My mom and
Shelly looked at each other incredulously.

“It’s been so long,” my mom said, blinking
away the tears. “I thought I saw her, just once, right after the
accident. But it was so fleeting, I couldn’t be sure. I tried to
tell Dad but he just got angry and said to stop making up stories.
I never mentioned it again. Sometimes I thought I could feel her
close when I was upset but then I wrote it off as wishful
thinking.”

“I was always envious,” Aunt Shelly said
longingly. “I wanted to see her too, but never did.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, not knowing what else
to say. “She was beautiful.”

“She looked scared,” Connie said.

“Scared?”

“We just saw her for an instant, Mom. We were
so shocked, it was hard to tell exactly what we saw.” I gave Connie
a look, no need to alarm our mothers any more than they already
were. “But it’s okay, we actually felt better after we realized it
was her. She would never hurt us, so we don’t have anything to be
afraid of anymore.”

“Did she talk to you?” Aunt Shelly asked.

“No. It was really quick. She was there at
the front door, then she was gone. We came back in the house after
meeting the neighbor and went to bed and everything was fine.”

“Which neighbor?” my Mom asked.

“Louise, next door.”

“Oh, she used to babysit us. Her mother was
always a real hoot, very spunky. What was her name?”

“Ruth, and it sounds like she still is.
Louise said we’d have to meet her someday.”

“We’re thinking we’re just going to move
forward, Mom, and see what happens. Maybe Grandma will actually
communicate with us. But in the meantime, we have a lot of work to
do on this house,” I said, trying to change the subject. “So what
should we start working on next? How about the dining room? It
would be nice to have a bigger table available to sit down and eat
at. I don’t think I can stand much more of this clutter all over
the place. Once we clear that area out then we can start moving
stuff down from the master bedroom next.”

Everyone was of the same mind, so Connie and
I ran up to get dressed. Throwing my hair in a ponytail, I grabbed
my jeans, a t-shirt and a flannel shirt in case it was cool. “We
really need to finish laundry today, Connie. I still have stuff in
both machines.”

“I’ll run and handle that, you can call the
cable company and locksmith and then we’ll start in the dining
room.”

I picked up my cell phone off the bedside
table and I noticed it was dead again. This was driving me crazy. I
didn’t think the battery was so old that it would stop holding a
charge. I would have to keep it plugged in as much as possible.

Walking down the stairs I made sure to hold
on to the banister. I wasn’t graceful in the first place and it
didn’t help to have a ghost complicating matters. I no longer
thought my grandmother tried to push me down, but the whole thing
was still strange. It really started me thinking about my
grandmother falling down these same stairs. Then it dawned on me.
Could it have been a different ghost? The first one that was in the
house already when my grandparents moved in? Could that ghost have
been behind her fall? I was acting as if it wasn’t dangerous to be
staying here but in some instances it could be deadly. We’d have to
be careful. The whole thing was still hard to digest.

My mom and aunt were standing in the dining
room looking over the accumulated mess. My mother turned to me. “By
the way, Laney, we got twelve hundred dollars for the books. That
should be a nice little start for the redecorating fund.”

“Wow, I usually don’t get more than twenty
bucks for several bags of books! Of course you really had a lot of
them, but still. Nice start but will not really even cover
paint.”

“No matter. It helped having some rare
autographed copies and we did have a few gems.”

My aunt smiled conspiratorially. “It didn’t
hurt that Curt Babcock at the bookstore has always had a crush on
your mother. She bats her pretty blue eyes at him and he’s
putty.”

“That’s not true,” my mom said, starting to
blush. “Well, maybe a little true.” She turned back to the mess and
picked up an old plunger. “Let’s just throw this,” she said,
changing the subject, not very subtly.

My aunt and I both chuckled.

“What did I miss?” Connie asked as she walked
into the dining room with a clothes basket in her hands.

“We’re teasing my mom. Hey, if you’re going
downstairs remember your flashlight.”

“Got it. Say, did you tell them about Saundra
yet?”

“Saundra? What about Saundra?” my mom
asked.

We related what Louise had told us and both
our mothers were mortified. “That’s why you had to call the
locksmith,” Aunt Shelly said. “I was wondering.”

“Laney, we should get a security system
installed. They cost next to nothing these days,” my mom said,
visibly shaken.

“We really should,” Connie agreed. “I know
someone who works for ADT.”

“I wish we had some of Emmett’s cameras
running all the time. Then we’d have solid proof. Right now it’s
just ‘she said, she said.’ You know she’ll deny being here,” I said
glumly. “I hate the feeling of violation.”

“Once you get the locks changed that should
put a stop to any unexpected visits. Add a security system and
you’ll have it covered,” my mom said.

We all agreed and Connie left the room to
start a load of laundry while the rest of us went into the dining
room to look over the chaos. Each of us grabbed a box to sort
through.

“Let’s agree that we don’t keep anything we
don’t need right now. With this much stuff there’s no point keeping
something we only might need sometime in the future,” I said,
opening the nearest box that I remembered moving from the dining
room table. Reaching inside I found light bulbs, batteries, a dirty
old t-shirt, a few extension cords. Then at the bottom I came upon
four one-dollar bills and some change. Holding up my prize I said,
“Look what I found. We’ll have to go through every box carefully
and not just dump things we think are junk. We really don’t know
what we might find.” I threw the t-shirt into a trash bag we had in
the room then walked into the kitchen to look for something to put
the money in. I opened the nearest cupboard and found it jam packed
with dishes. I removed a glass jar, put the money in it and placed
it in the middle of the kitchen table, then returned to the dining
room. I caught the tail end of a conversation my mother and aunt
were having. “That’s just an old rumor,” my mother said
testily.

“Maybe not,” my aunt insisted.

“What’s a rumor?” I asked.

“Our father was well known for not liking the
bank manager,” my mother started.

“He didn’t like anyone,” my aunt cut in.

“Yes, well, they had a falling out about
thirty years ago and my father took all his money out of the town
bank, cussing out the bank manager and banks in general. Now if he
had just transferred it to another bank it would be one thing. But
he took it all in cash, and enough people saw him to start the
rumor mill flying that he took it home and hid it somewhere in the
house,” my mom continued. “But we found several accounts out of
town after he died so I let it go. My feeling is, however, that it
just wasn’t enough. My father was an extremely successful
businessman. Either he spent it all on the things in these boxes or
maybe it is somewhere in the house. He was always suspicious of
strangers. He wouldn’t let too many people in and if a handyman or
other workers of any sort came he would watch them the entire time
they were in the house.”

“The neighbor said that handymen would run
out all the time,” I noted.

“Well if they did it was probably because of
something our father did or said, not because of any ghosts. He was
known to be a very aggressive man with a temper. He didn’t suffer
fools quietly, and he thought he knew everything.”

Dragging a chair from the kitchen, Connie
came in with a pen and legal tablet. “I’m going to list everything
anyone thinks has worth,” she said. “Then we’ll look it up and
record the estimated value. I’ll start by putting it on the desk in
the study.”

Concentrating on the task at hand, I kept up
a dialog in my head puzzling out all the information. It was quiet
in the room except for the occasional exclamation from someone
finding a treasure or more money. We piled the items that we
thought had some worth in the study. I sighed putting down the vase
I’d just found on the floor. It wasn’t long before that room
started to look cluttered again.

Later, the locksmith arrived and changed out
the locks. I would feel much better about leaving the house
occasionally now that that was accomplished. It still made me sick
to my stomach to think of Saundra rummaging around the
house—
our
house. Did she know something about hidden money?
Or was she just believing the rumors?

After spending some time sorting in the
dining room I asked a question that had been on my mind for a
while. “What happened the night your mother died? Do you think it’s
possible she was pushed by a ghost?”

“I can’t tell you for sure,” my mom said.
“But this negative energy in the house is new, at least as far as
these ghostly encounters are concerned. The odd things that
happened when we were growing up were more fun. Just things being
moved, almost playfully. I sometimes thought I smelled a hint of
cologne, or felt the sensation of a presence. I was much more
afraid of our father who was very much alive. He would explode at
the slightest thing,” my mother said, starting to reminisce. “On
the night Mother died Shelly and I were home all evening while our
parents went to a company party. My mother had dressed in a
beautiful pale pink. I still remember. It was a full, flowing kind
of dress. Her light blond hair was elegantly pulled back and she
looked like Grace Kelly to me.”

“She was lovely,” Shelly added. “Even after
she died it helped me to picture her as an angel. Sometimes, I
pretended she was here watching over me and would just walk in from
the next room.”

My mom nodded. “We were in bed asleep when
they got home. I woke when she screamed, and by the time we got out
of bed to run downstairs it was already too late. She was gone. Our
father was leaning over her as we came down the steps and he yelled
at us to go back upstairs. He looked very pale and shaken. We ran
upstairs to our room and listened through the closed door together,
crying. We were so scared. We didn’t know what to do. The doctor
came quickly. In those days doctors often came to you. We heard him
tell our father that she was dead. We were shocked. I think
everyone forgot us up in that room. We clung to one another all
night until we both just fell asleep together. Our father never
even came to find us and see if we were okay or even tell us our
mother had died. I’m sure he was lost in his own grief. It was the
worst night of our lives.” Aunt Shelly reached out her hand and my
mom gripped it. “It’s been us against the world ever since
then.”