The Haunting of Ashburn House (14 page)

Sarah swivelled the paper to face Adrienne and pointed to a tiny article in the lower-right corner.

ASHBURN HOUSE TO BE REOCCUPIED?

Since the tragedy that transpired in our town’s most notorious house in the summer of 1918, the Ashburn property has lain dormant. Recently, however, there have been rumours of reoccupation. Mr Paul Grover reportedly sighted labourers carrying timber to the property. When asked what their purpose there was, they claimed to be hired to renovate the house. Some suggest the sponsor and intended occupant may be Miss Edith Ashburn herself, who would have recently turned eighteen and so inherited the property.

“You’re kidding,” Adrienne muttered and glanced at the paper’s date: June 18, 1929.
But that would make Edith over a hundred years old when she passed.

Sarah was already kneeling beside the boxes and reading their faded labels. “It was a lucky find. Without it, we would have just kept going forward without realising we needed to look earlier.”

Adrienne stacked the papers back into their box so that there would be room for the new crate Sarah carried over. She took the lid off, pulled the stack of papers out, and laid them on the table. This time, they searched through the yellowed sheets together.

They only had to sift through four papers before they found what they were looking for. As Adrienne had suspected, the story filled the front page. The title, in huge bold font, read, “GRUESOME SLAUGHTER AT ASHBURN HOUSE.”

But the text below made no sense; from what she could figure out, it was talking about a sheep-herding competition.

Sarah lifted the page, and Adrienne’s confusion turned to surprise as she saw a rectangular hole in the paper. Someone had carefully, meticulously, sliced out the article’s body. The sheep-herding story Adrienne had been reading belonged to the page behind it.

“Unbelievable,” Sarah hissed. “Someone must have cut it out as a souvenir.”

All that was left of the front page was the title and a smaller article near the base: “Town In Shock.” Adrienne read that story, but it only contained interviews from neighbours expressing grief and alarm. There was no information about the deaths, probably because they’d been exhaustively covered in the main article.

“Look in the next paper,” Adrienne said. “I’ll bet there will be articles following the investigation.”

“Good call.” Sarah shifted the newspaper to one side, and they both made little upset noises when they saw the tabloid below had been vandalised as well. That paper didn’t even contain a heading; nearly half of the front page had been cut out. All that remained were unrelated articles.

Sarah leafed through the paper while Adrienne moved on to the next, and then the one after that, and the one after that. Each
Ipson Chronicle
had been altered. Sometimes large chunks had been carved out, sometimes just a small side column. In every case, the cuts were surgically precise and straight.

With each subsequent paper, the excised sections grew smaller as the story provided less new material, until at last, Adrienne reached a paper that hadn’t been touched. She flipped through every page, but there was no mention of Ashburn House.

She turned back to Sarah and saw her face had grown pale and her lips quivered with quiet, restrained anger.

“This is reprehensible,” Sarah whispered as she stared at the damaged papers. “These are historical documents—possibly the only copies left. To butcher them this way—if I ever find out who did this—”

Adrienne didn’t know what to say. Sarah stared at the papers for a minute then exhaled and gave her a tight smile. “Would you like to keep looking?”

“I don’t think there’s any point.” Adrienne peeked through a few more papers and saw another space where an article had been removed. She dropped them back into place. “Whoever did this was incredibly thorough.”

Sarah rose. “I’m really sorry, Addy. I’ll ask around town to see if anyone else might have some copies, but—well, it was so long ago—”

“Just shy of a hundred years,” Adrienne said as she helped stack the papers back into their box. “That’s a long time to keep old newspapers.”

They slid the crate back into its space in the shelf, and Sarah turned towards the door. “I’d better go back out. Pam’s usually good about letting me take breaks, but I’ve been gone a while, and her patience has its limits.”

“No problem. Thanks for helping me out.” Adrienne rubbed at the back of her neck. She also needed to know who was terrorizing her at night, but it was a difficult question to phrase. “Ah, as an aside—do you know of anyone in town who’s shown, uh, an abnormal interest in Ashburn?”

Sarah’s eyebrows rose. “Well, Beth loves researching it, just like she loves all of Ipson’s mysteries. Few that they are.”

Adrienne couldn’t imagine bright, cheerful Beth attempting to drive her off the property. “Anyone else?”

“Not that I know of. People sometimes talked about Edith if they saw her in the street, but I think mostly they forgot about the house.” She tilted her head. “I hope this isn’t too rude, but is there a reason you asked?”

Oh yeah, I think someone’s trying to frighten me away from my house. Either that, or there’s a serial killer who likes playing with their victims. No biggie.
It sounded crazy even in Adrienne’s mind. She opted for a sanitised version of the truth. “Someone’s been coming around the last couple of nights. I’d like to know who so I could talk to them, if possible.”

“Huh.” Sarah looked a little surprised but nodded. “I can ask about that, as well, if you like.”

“That would be great. Thank you. I don’t have a phone yet, but, um, I’ll pop into town as often as I can. Or send a carrier pigeon or make a smoke signal or something.”

Sarah laughed. She went to the door, opened it a crack, and peeked out. “Okay, Pam’s tidying the shelves. I’ll go out and distract her. Wait a minute, then sneak out and close the door behind yourself, okay?”

Adrienne gave her a thumbs up, so the young librarian slipped out, wearing a smile that was equal parts nervous and excited. Adrienne counted to thirty before cracking the door open. Pam, the older librarian, was facing away and speaking to Sarah, who was gesturing to a book enthusiastically. Adrienne made eye contact with her friend for a split second while creeping out of the room and to the main door.

After being in the cool library for so long, the sun felt beautiful on her skin. She took a deep breath, savouring the clear air, and tried to formulate a plan.

She’d been able to ask after Marion, at least, but the more pressing threads of enquiry had led to dead ends. Someone had gone to great lengths to remove the articles pertaining to the Ashburn deaths. That seemed significant, though she wasn’t sure in which way. The thoroughness with which the stories had been clipped spoke to a dedication that went beyond wanting a simple memento. Did the vandal have a motive for erasing the event from the town’s memory?

Sarah also hadn’t known of anyone who might be a suspect for the nightly visitations. She would need to keep asking about that.

Without any other clear course of action, Adrienne returned to the main street and followed it to the vet’s clinic. She’d suspected it might be too soon for the laptop to be returned, and she was correct. Peggy, the vet nurse—just as enthusiastic as she’d been the day before—said her brother was still working on it.

“He says it’s something to do with the hard board or mother drive or something.” She was talking to Adrienne at the same time as filling out a form for a bug-eyed terrier called Lieutenant Doug. “He reckons he can save all of your documents but needed to order a replacement… oh gosh, it was, uh, a replacement… a replacement…
thing
. He says it should arrive tomorrow.”

Ordering
replacement things
sounded expensive. Adrienne laced her fingers together and tried to avoid the terrier owner’s curious stare. “Um, did you get a chance to ask him about payment?”

“Oh yeah, that’s the best part!” Peggy swivelled back to the computer and began typing the terrier’s details into the clinic’s database. “He says no charge—but he wanted me to ask for a favour.”

A trade—that’s good. Trades are good.
“Yeah?”

“Well, there’s a shortcut to the next town that goes through the mountains. It saves, like, fifteen minutes off the highway. But the first part of it goes along Edith’s—that is, uh,
your
driveway. And Edith never let anyone use it. She’d block the road and, in my brother’s words, rain a hellfire of a lecture onto you. He wants to know if you’d be cool with him using that path.”

Adrienne couldn’t believe her luck. “Yeah! Yeah, absolutely!”

Peggy’s face opened into a huge grin. “Sweet. Pop back in the day after tomorrow, and your computer should be ready. Here we go, Mrs Carrow,” she said, addressing the terrier’s owner. “Lieutenant Doug’s all set.”

Mrs Carrow thanked Peggy, gave Adrienne a polite nod, and carried her dog out. Adrienne waited for the squeaky hinges to subside before leaning closer.

“Peggy, you probably know a lot of people around town, right?”

“Anyone who owns a pet,” Peggy said, scribbling on the form. “Which is literally almost everyone. Oh, I hear you have a cat! We do free dental check-ups on the first Tuesday of every month. You should bring him in sometime.”

“Great, I’ll do that.” Adrienne wondered how the news had reached Peggy. Was she friends with Jayne or her companions, or had it gone through multiple mouths? “I was wondering—is there anyone in town who’s shown an… er…
unusual
interest in Ashburn?”

Peggy’s face scrunched up. “Well, like, most everyone’s at least a
bit
curious about it. But mostly in a
glad I’m not its neighbour
sort of way, if you know what I mean. People were really interested when you moved in. They wanted to know if you’d be much like Edith, being her granddaughter and all.”

“Grand-niece actually,” Adrienne said. “I’m afraid I never met her. Did you?”

“Nah.” Peggy’s face fell as though it were a great tragedy. “Saw her in town a few times but never talked to her. Apparently, she used to bring injured birds in when she found them, but that was before I started working here.”

Everything Adrienne learned about her great-aunt was a contradiction.
She never had guests. She prepared your room. She chased cars off her driveway. She rescued injured birds.
The concepts were having a tug of war in her mind, and the rope felt dangerously close to snapping.

She risked being candid. “I think someone’s been coming onto the property at night. But they won’t let me see who they are. If you had to guess who it could be, who would you say?”

“Oooh!” Peggy was so excited she almost shot out of her chair. “It could be the ghosts!”

Laughing felt painful, but Adrienne managed to chuckle. “Yeah, it sure could be. But, um, other than that…?”

The vet nurse propped her elbow on the desk and leaned her chin in her palm. “Huh. Wow. I honestly don’t know. Mr Truscott asked me if I’d met you when he came in yesterday. He has a lovely Maine Coon. And I heard Suzy Delaney—she’s got a horse; we sometimes make house calls—had a bet with Rachel who owns the rabbits.”

“A bet?”

Peggy looked faintly embarrassed. “About… about when Edith was gonna die. I didn’t approve, you know? I thought it was pretty, uh, mor… mor… what’s the word…?”

“Morbid?”

“Yeah. Morbid. And not very kind. But Miss Ashburn wasn’t all that well liked, and she was getting kind of old and… yeah.” She huffed a sigh. “Sorry. Literally almost everyone in this town has talked about Ashburn at one point or another. But I wouldn’t call any of them preoccupied.”

“That’s okay. I really appreciate you helping, anyway.” Adrienne turned to leave but caught herself. Jayne had already suggested some suspects for the night-time visits, and as hard as it was to imagine children being so obsessive, she needed to follow every lead she had. “One other thing—do you know the Crowther boys?”

“Oh yeah, sure! They have two pit bulls.”

Adrienne couldn’t shake the feeling that Peggy identified people by the animals they owned. “What are they like? Do they pull a lot of pranks?”

“I don’t really know them well, sorry. But I don’t think they could be visiting Ashburn, if that’s what you’re wondering. They’re both staying with their grandmother in the city this week.”

Adrienne wandered without purpose for several minutes. The good news about her laptop had cheered her, but the lack of answers on everything else was becoming frustrating.
All I want is to know whether I’m going to be murdered in my bed tonight. Is that too much to ask?

The sun had passed its zenith and was beginning the slow glide towards the horizon. Adrienne needed to be back at Ashburn before sundown, which only gave her a handful of hours in town. She’d spoken to Sarah and Peggy, two people whose jobs put them in contact with large segments of the town’s population, and had zero leads to show for it. And she had precious few other acquaintances to impose on.

She came to a halt and looked up. Her feet had carried her to the bank, not far from the vet, so she pulled her wallet out of her pocket. Without her laptop, she wouldn’t have any notification when her outstanding accounts were paid, but she could at least check her balance.

It had been $3.49 when she’d left her friend’s house for Ashburn, and Adrienne felt relief bloom through her chest when the ATM told her she now had a little over sixty dollars. That meant the smaller of the two accounts was paid, bailing her out of immediate crisis.

She withdrew the money and tried to plan a budget for it as she resumed her walk. There were a lot of items on her wish list, but she could only afford a few of them. The biggest priority was a mobile phone. At the moment, she had no way to contact the outside world if she got into serious trouble, and that was a terrifying idea.

Her pantry had enough food to last a few days, but she felt that it would be wise to get more while she had the funds. And she needed some way to defend herself. The knife was better than nothing but would be close to useless if the stalker had a gun, an axe, or any other weapon that extended their range.

Everything else on her wish list—including shampoo, new toys for Wolfgang, and socks that didn’t have holes in them—could be pushed back until the next couple of accounts were paid.

Adrienne found her way to Ipson’s only phone provider outlet thanks to directions from two men playing chess outside a café. The store clerk rolled his eyes when she asked for help, so Adrienne leafed through the company’s brochure instead. The cheapest plan would take fifty-five out of her sixty dollars. She cringed.

Getting a phone is really damn important. But so is not starving. Jeez, jeez, jeez.

Adrienne eventually left the store empty handed. She’d forced herself to think through a worst-case scenario—a crazed axeman breaking into her house—and had come to the grim decision that owning a phone likely wouldn’t save her. The police station was in the town’s centre, which meant help would take nearly twenty minutes to reach Ashburn. She’d be chopped into mince by then. Finding an effective weapon was a greater priority.

A gun would have been ideal, but at that point, she couldn’t even afford the license. Adrienne found the next best thing in the back of the general store, though: mace. The canister was small enough to carry in her pocket and had the bonus of being able to blind an attacker as well as hurting them.

She also collected an armful of budget food, a cheap keychain torch, and batteries, and she splurged on a tin of wet cat food for Wolfgang.
He deserves it after last night.

June, the chatty store assistant, was more than happy to gossip about the town’s occupants. Disappointingly, she couldn’t offer anything except an increasingly long list of people who had spoken about Ashburn. She didn’t think anyone had shown an exceptional preoccupation with the house, and she hadn’t heard anyone talk about one day owning it. Adrienne thanked her and left the store, fifteen dollars remaining in her pocket. She looked at the sky. The sun was dropping much faster than she was comfortable with.

Adrienne retraced her path up the main street and stepped into the café on the corner. She couldn’t afford to waste money on a meal, but a cheap coffee would buy her space at a table for an hour or two.

She chose one of the larger tables, sat straight and alert, and made eye contact with everyone who entered the store. Her hope was that at least a few people would be curious enough about Ashburn to take notice of her. Staring at complete strangers was awkward and embarrassing, but it worked. Within a few minutes a portly, middle-aged gentleman stopped by her table with a cheerful, “Well, you’re the new girl from Ashburn House, aintcha?”

Adrienne responded enthusiastically and invited him to sit for a chat, and soon a small crowd had gathered around her table. With so many other people there, Adrienne was able to sit quietly and listen to them swap stories.

A few talked about Ashburn fondly, and a couple sheepishly admitted that they’d sneaked up to the porch as children. One woman with large, horn-rimmed glasses insisted that she’d felt a ghostly hand land on her shoulder once when she was walking past the driveway.

“Spookiest thing I’ve ever felt,” she said. “Like ice running down my spine. I turned around, but there was no one there.”

One of the older men gave a snort of disgust. “Ashburn is a lot of things, but it’s not haunted.”

“How would you know, John? After that poor family got murdered there, I would be surprised if it didn’t house a whole coven of ghosts.”

A tall, spindly man piped up. “Ghosts don’t have covens. Only witches. The correct group noun is a ‘fraid’ of ghosts.”

“No one cares, Jerry.”

Adrienne could feel the discussion being derailed and tried to save it. “How did the family die, anyway? I never heard the full story.”

A chorus of answers came to her. “Cholera.”

“A serial killer attacked them while they slept in their beds. He was never caught.”

“Poison in the sugar bowl.”

“They all went insane and killed each other.”

“I heard it was Edith’s father who went through the house and shot them before they could escape.”

Adrienne managed a thin smile. “Oh… I, uh, I guess there’s not really a consensus, is there?”

The portly man who’d first stopped at her table huffed as though he’d just heard a bad joke. “They’re just a bunch of sanitised tales these lot were told as children. They seem to forget that my grandfather was a policeman during that time. I’d say I’m one of the only people in town who knows the real story, but nobody ever bothers to ask me about it.”

Adrienne leaned forward, her heart thundering. “Your grandfather was there? What did he tell you about it?”

“Oh, plenty. He went into dementia in his last years, which wiped his memory, but he was staying with me during the early stages and loved to talk about it. Mostly about how much of a botched job it was. It was the first proper murder Ipson had ever seen, and neither he nor his partner knew what to do. They were touching things with their bare hands and moving bodies around and ruining evidence. A few people from the public even traipsed through before backup from one of the larger towns arrived and took over. He said he didn’t know any better at the time but wished he could have gone back and smacked himself. He had this idea that, if he hadn’t contaminated the evidence, the killer might have been caught.

“It was definitely murder, then?” Adrienne didn’t even try to keep the excitement out of her voice.

“You sure you want to hear about this stuff?” The man leaned back in his chair and scrunched his mouth up as he appraised her. “Don’t want to give you nightmares.”

The chatty woman gave his shoulder a slap. “Come off it, Greg, and just tell us.”

Greg raised his eyebrows and looked around. Close to a dozen people had crowded into the little café’s corner, some sitting and some standing, to listen in. He surveyed the large audience, and the corners of his mouth twitched up. He laced his hands together. “All right, since you’re all so darn curious, I’ll tell you what my grandfather passed on to me. I don’t think he even shared this stuff with my dad. People didn’t really like to talk about the deaths back then; I think they found it too close for comfort. That’s why, when kids asked about it, they were given all of these ridiculous half-truths. Cholera, my foot.”

The woman who had suggested cholera scowled.

“Like I said, my grandfather was a policeman at the time—one of only two in this town. Ipson was a little larger back then but not by much, so people talked when the Ashburns stopped coming into town. They were the richest family about, which doesn’t sound important until you remember that this was just after the turn of the century. We hadn’t long moved past the strict social classes of lords and dukes and whatnot; when Ashburn House was established, the Ashburns would have been the most-important family in the neighbourhood.”

And perhaps they hadn’t adjusted to the twentieth century as well as other families.
Adrienne thought of Edith’s wardrobe, filled with black silk dresses that would have been outdated even when she was a child.

Greg paused to sip his coffee as he looked about the group to ensure he had their attention. “So when the Ashburns stopped coming into town, people noticed, and it didn’t take long for one of their friends to check in on them. My granddad said she came running into the station screaming, ‘They’re dead, they’re dead, my God, they’re all dead.’ He said she was so hysterical that he had to shake the family name out of her.

“He and his partner left for Ashburn immediately. He reckoned he could feel something bad in the air as soon as they crossed the property bounds. Like a foul smell but one you felt rather than tasted.”

“Come off it, Greg,” the chatty lady said. “Stop embellishing.”

“I’m not! That’s how he described it.”

They glared at each other for a moment, then Greg sighed and waved a hand as though it weren’t important. “Well, regardless, my grandfather said he could smell the blood before he even opened the door. And what he found inside is the reason why the story has been so thoroughly distorted through the last few generations: the truth was too grisly for the teller to want to recount and too horrible for the listener to believe.”

He paused for effect, and Adrienne had to squeeze her hands together under the table to stop herself from shaking him. “Yes?”

“The Ashburns had been torn apart. Blood was sprayed over nearly every room in the building, and limbs were scattered everywhere. My grandfather threw up on a dismembered arm. He said that one of the Ashburns seemed to have been trying to escape but was caught just before they reached the door. A red trail of blood ran down the hallway where the body had been dragged back into the house. Mrs Ashburn—Edith’s mother—had her whole lower jaw torn off. One of them had been burnt alive. Charles Ashburn’s heart was found three rooms away from the rest of his body. He said—and no”—he glared at the chatty woman—“I’m not embellishing this part—he said it was like the house had been baptised in blood.”

He still held the crowd’s attention, but the expressions of fascination had morphed into revulsion and doubt. The tall, spindly man who’d corrected the use of
coven
looked faintly green.

Greg paused to sip his coffee again. He seemed to be enjoying the story’s effect. “To make everything worse, the family had been dead for a couple of days by the time they were found, and were decaying. He said the smell was worse than anything I could imagine, and he was sick all over the crime scene.”

“This is ridiculous,” the chatty woman interjected. She threw her hands up as though trying to break some spell they’d been pulled under. Her tone was brisk and exasperated, but Adrienne could see beads of sweat developing on her face. “You’re an appalling liar, Greg.”

Greg just shrugged. “And this is why none of you ever got to hear the real story. You were told lies. Your parents were told lies. Your grandparents were told lies. Because the truth was just too awful to spread.”

“I don’t understand.” Adrienne had her hands clasped around her cup. The coffee inside had cooled to lukewarm, but she couldn’t bring herself to drink it. “If the murders were really as awful as that, and if the crime was unsolved, the story would spread. There’d be books written about it. Or it would be in those ‘Top Ten Unsolved Murders’ lists that float around online. People love mysteries like this.”

Greg made a small noise of annoyance in the back of his throat. He held up his hand and began ticking points off on his fingers. “Well, to start with, the Internet wasn’t even a pipe dream when the Ashburns were murdered. News spread slowly back then. Ipson was a small town, and its occupants didn’t put much effort into recording their history. And those top-ten lists you’re talking about? Don’t think they include every noteworthy unsolved crime. Heck, I doubt they list even a small percentage of them. They just parrot the best-known stories. How many hundreds of thousands of mysteries exist in this world? How many will you hear about, and how many are left to rot in the cold-cases section of some two-man police station?”

Adrienne didn’t have any answers.

“Exactly,” Greg said, nodding as though he’d won a vital debate. “For a story to spread, people have to hear about it. Ashburn’s massacre never reached the greater world, never got circulated, and its place on those top-ten lists was taken by some murder from a town with an actual journalist.” He sighed and flexed his shoulders. “Now, let me finish my story. We’re almost there, I promise.

“As you’d know, Edith was the only Ashburn to survive the massacre. She’d been hidden in a locked cupboard—probably by one of her parents—and escaped the encounter with just a couple of scratches. She was nonresponsive when found. The police tried to interview her, but she wouldn’t say a word. Shock, my grandfather said. I guess nowadays it would be classified as PTSD. She’d listened to her family die then been trapped in a lightless box for two days while her loved ones decayed just metres away.”