The Haunting of Ashburn House (15 page)

A tight, painful ache rose in Adrienne’s chest as her mind reconstructed the scene. A few people in the crowd began muttering—some in disbelieving shock, some in anger—but Greg continued as though he hadn’t heard them.

“Because she was the only survivor, Edith was naturally a suspect in the murders but got cleared pretty quickly. She was only eight at the time, for starters. And the cupboard had been locked from the outside, meaning at least one other person had been alive to hide her in there. She got shipped off to her grandparents’ the following week, her relatives’ corpses were cobbled together and buried, and the case went cold. Eventually, the event faded enough from people’s memories that they no longer double bolted their doors at night, and they stopped hiding guns under their pillows. And here we are, near to a hundred years later, and people are trying to claim the Ashburns died of cholera. The end.”

“You’re a real ass, Greg.” The chatty woman’s face was contorted in anger. “A lying shock jock of an ass.”

The tall, weedy man cleared his throat. “Actually, the term shock jock only applies to radio presenters.”

The chatty lady was too furious to respond. She turned, threw her half-finished coffee into the bin, and stormed out of the coffee shop. Greg lifted his hands as if to say
What can you do?
then also rose.

“Hope I didn’t ruin the house for you,” he said to Adrienne. “Don’t worry—Edith had the whole thing remodelled when she moved back in. New floors, new walls, the lot. So if you see any weird stains, it’s probably not blood.” He winked. “Probably.”

The crowd was disbanding. Adrienne had the impression some of them would have liked to talk with her, but Greg’s horror story must have left such a bad taste in everyone’s mouths that they wanted nothing more than to leave and purge it from their minds.
Maybe Greg was right,
Adrienne thought as she made herself drink the cold coffee despite her churning stomach.
Maybe some stories are just too horrible to spread.

Adrienne sighed as she exited the café. The sun was far lower than she’d expected. There wasn’t any more time to hunt for answers, but she could still make it back to Ashburn before sundown if she hurried.

Greg’s story hung with her, particularly the image of young Edith trapped inside a windowless box while her family was murdered. Nauseating anger churned up her stomach. She realised she hated the town for how callous it had been towards her great-aunt. The ostracisation, the rumours, and even that mean little bet about how soon Edith would die were like thorns digging into the back of her head. Edith clearly hadn’t been well, and she might have had a prickly, stubborn personality, but the community should have been kinder to her. It couldn’t have been easy for Edith to live in the house where her family had died.

Then why did she?

The question came out of nowhere, but Adrienne couldn’t answer it. Greg said the Ashburns had been wealthy, and Edith clearly hadn’t been friendless if she’d been raised by her grandparents. So why had she chosen to return to Ashburn House?

“Addy!”

She’d even had the money to fully renovate the building. And if the reconstruction had depleted her fortune, she could have sold the property and moved to a smaller house in a different town.

“Addy! Please, wait!”

Adrienne pulled up short. She’d been so engaged in her puzzle that she hadn’t heard the voice or the pounding footsteps. She turned and blinked at Sarah, who clasped a folder to her chest as she ran up the street. “Oh, jeez, I’m so sorry, I didn’t hear you!”

“It’s fine! Fine!” Sarah, caught up, doubled over and wheezed in laboured breaths. “Oh, wow. Okay. I didn’t realise I was so unfit. And Jayne wants us to take up Pilates next month. It might just kill me.”

Adrienne laughed and patted Sarah’s shoulder while she caught her breath. “It’s okay, take your time.”
But please not too long; the sun’s close to setting.

“I was about to give up looking for you.” Sarah straightened and rubbed wisps of hair out of her flushed face. “I thought you must have gone home.”

“You caught me just in time. What happened?”

Sarah was still breathless, but she seemed excited too. “After you’d left, I couldn’t stop thinking about those newspapers and how the articles had been cut out. So I asked Pam if she remembered if anyone asked to see them. She’s worked at the library for, oh, longer than I’ve been alive. She was surprised but said yes, that Edith had come in to see them nearly a decade ago.”

“Ooh.” Adrienne wasn’t as surprised as she would have expected to be. She found it easy to picture Edith sitting at the papers with a scalpel and carving out the stories with brisk, precise cuts. “I wonder what she took them for.”

Sarah shrugged. “I asked Pam why she didn’t stay in the room with Edith. She became flustered and told me she’d been too busy and to mind my own business, but I think she was scared of Edith and didn’t want to be around her for too long and—sorry, I’m rambling!”

“No, no, it’s fine!” Adrienne’s mind was still churning through the news, and she gave Sarah’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I’m glad you told me.”

“That’s not all.” Sarah raised the folder, and a jittery smile lit up her face. “I thought that the paper might have published another story to recap the deaths when Edith moved back to town—it had been ten years, and memories would need refreshing—so I looked through the papers from around that time. Sadly, they’d been vandalised, too. Edith must have really, really wanted to hide the story. I was about to give up when I found this.”

She opened the folder. Inside was one of the newspapers, and Sarah turned it around to show Adrienne. “Read this. It’s from two weeks after Edith moved into Ashburn House.”

BODYSNATCHERS STRIKE AT IPSON CEMETERY

The family whose name has become synonymous with tragedy has experienced another blow. This past Wednesday, sometime between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., a bodysnatcher exhumed the late Eleanor Ashburn’s body.

Groundskeeper Stanley Horvath claims the grounds were undisturbed when he closed the cemetery gates at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday evening. But when he reopened the graveyard the following morning, a hole had been dug into Eleanor’s grave and her remains removed.

“Lord knows why they’d want to do that,” Mr Horvath is quoted as saying. “She’s been dead these ten years. Wouldn’t be much of her to take, you know?”

The culprit is as yet unknown. While many people have voiced suspicion regarding the body’s removal so soon after Miss Edith Ashburn’s return to town, Constable Bluet says he has both interviewed the heiress and searched her home and is satisfied that she has no part in the body’s theft. Investigation is ongoing.

Adrienne had to read the story twice before she could meet Sarah’s eyes. Her mind was moving so quickly that she found it difficult to latch onto a single idea. “They didn’t say who Eleanor is—was she Edith’s mother or her aunt?”

“I don’t know. Sorry. Beth might; I’ll ask her next time I see her.”

Adrienne closed the folder and handed it back to Sarah. “Thank you. That was a great find.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” Sarah grinned and clasped the folder against her chest. “I’d better put this back before Pam locks the library. Visit again soon, though, so I can tell you if I find anything else.”

“I’ll do that.” Adrienne glanced at the sun. It was sinking behind the treetops. “Thank you!”

Sarah raised a hand in farewell then began jogging back down the street. Adrienne turned in the opposite direction, hiked her shopping bag up, and started to run. The delay had been important, but it had turned what would have been a brisk walk into a mad dash. Even if the phenomenon didn’t return that night—and she was praying it wouldn’t—she didn’t want to be stumbling through the woods in the dark.

So Edith is responsible for the missing articles. Why? I could understand it if the stories had become a curiosity in the town and people were reading and gossiping about them, but it sounds like no one had touched the newspapers since they were donated to the library. That means Edith wasn’t stopping a problem but… preventing one? Was there something in those articles that could incriminate her in her family’s deaths?

Adrienne, winded, slowed to a brisk walk as she started along the forest trail. She couldn’t believe her mind had jumped so quickly to considering Edith’s guilt.
It goes to show how powerful circumstantial evidence can be. Edith was the only surviving family member, and she removed the evidence from the newspapers, and that’s enough to implicate her. But Greg already said the police discounted Edith as a suspect. Besides, it stretches believability to think that an eight-year-old could kill and butcher four able-bodied adults.

Daylight had morphed into twilight, but she was making good progress along the path and soon reached the zigzagging steps. She jumped up them, paused to catch her breath at the top, then set off at a jog.

The missing body is another matter. It seems too coincidental that it was removed within weeks of Edith’s return to town. Unless… unless there was someone in Ipson who wanted to torment her. Digging up a loved one’s body would be a horrible but creative way to do that.

It was growing hard to see. Adrienne followed the zigzagging path as well as she could, but shapes blended together in the twilight. She was still five minutes from the house when she realised she’d gone off the trail.

She turned, bent, and hunted for the path.
It’s already so dark. How long until sunset? One minute? Two?
Anxiety made her breath come in quick, low pants. She tried to retrace her steps but suspected she was going in the wrong direction and couldn’t guess which way to turn to correct herself.

The house is on top of the hill. As long as I keep going up, I can’t miss it. Unless I end up on the mountain instead…

A bird burst out of a tree ahead of her. It spiralled into the sky in a flurry of wings and squawks. Adrienne froze, shoulders hunched and shopping clutched against her chest, as she waited for the phenomenon to shake the rest of the birds from their boughs.

It didn’t.

She blinked at her surroundings and realised night had fallen. For the second day, the sunset panic hadn’t returned.

Thank mercy.

With no deadline looming over her, Adrienne could afford to take a few minutes to find the torch in her shopping bag, tear the packaging off, and load its battery. The torch was designed to clip onto a keychain, and its beam was narrow and weak compared to the store’s more expensive brands. But it would be a small and handy substitute for the lamp in case the power was cut again, and it would work well enough to guide her through the forest.

Even with the light, she was forced to move carefully. The moon was as good as full, but very little of it permeated the canopy, and the forest floor was littered with debris. On several occasions, she stepped on a pile of dead leaves, expecting solid ground below, only to have her foot plunge into a hidden hole.

The daytime birds were near silent, but night creatures were waking up. A colony of bats chattered behind her, and she even caught a faint, high-pitched wail that she thought might be a fox.

She was just starting to worry that she’d trekked past the hill and was climbing the mountain when she started noticing the darker, sickly trees that she associated with Ashburn. She began breathing a little more easily and quickened her pace.

Something shifted to her right, and Adrienne turned her light towards it. The narrow beam danced across a patchwork of foliage and shadows, but she couldn’t see anything sentient. She licked at her dry lips and kept walking.

The startle had planted the idea that she was no longer alone, and it was hard to shake. Adrienne started imagining she could hear leaves crunching barely ten paces behind her, mixed with low, ragged breathing. She turned, panning her light in a slow arc, hunting amongst the gently moving boughs and trailing vines.
There—the dull glint of an eye!
She fixed the light on the area, but it was empty. Her skin turned clammy, and her heart knocked against her ribcage.

Being careful not to remove her light or gaze from the forest, Adrienne reached into the shopping bag and searched for the mace amongst the food.

A branch snapped to her left. Logic fled. Adrienne turned, ran, stumbled, righted herself, and ran again. The light arced wildly as she moved her arms, providing stuttering glimpses of her surroundings. She was making too much noise to hear if she were being followed, and she no longer tried to point herself uphill but aimed for any gap she could see between trees, her only goal being to put as much space between herself and the stranger as possible.

Her foot caught in a vine. She cried out, fell, and rolled down a shallow incline. Branches stabbed at her. The crunching leaves sounded like a storm in her ears. Adrienne felt as though her heart might explode, but then she slumped to a halt, and the world was still and quiet once again.

She didn’t move for a minute but kept her eyes closed and focussed on her surroundings. The heavy taint of organic decay came from the leaves and filled her nose. An owl chattered nervously behind her. Unlike in the earlier, cramped sections of the wood, she couldn’t feel any branches or bushes touching her. She lifted her head, opened her eyes, and saw why.

Her fall had landed her in a clearing. The canopy was thinner and allowed more light through, which rained down in slanted cold-blue columns. Several hit the headstone; they made the aged rock look as though it were almost glowing.

A cemetery for one.

Adrienne rose carefully. She tried to assess herself without taking her eyes off her environment. Her ankle felt sore. It had twisted but not too badly. She could put her weight on it at least. The torch lay behind her, its beam uselessly directed at a tree trunk, and the shopping was scattered from where it had spilt out of her bag. She retrieved the torch first then shook the bag so that she could see inside. It only contained two bowls of instant noodles, so she dropped it and began searching around the area, moving the light slowly to pick out shapes and colours amongst the detritus.

Whenever she found a piece of her shopping, she threw it back towards the bag, but stopped when she uncovered the mace. She tore it out of the packaging and squeezed the canister in her palm. The weight, small as it was, reassured her, and she allowed herself a few minutes to let her pulse slow.

“This is good.” Her voice sounded strange; it was tinny and thin and seemed to be sucked into the woods. “It’s less than a minute to home from here, and we know which direction to go. We’re going to be fine.”

She returned to her bag, shovelled all of the shopping she’d found back inside, and hooked it over her elbow. She thought she was still missing a few packets of food, but they could stay there until morning.

A branch snapped, and Adrienne backed into the clearing as stress choked her. She tried to tell herself it was fine, that branches broke by themselves all the time, that no one could approach her without her hearing them, that the mace would protect her from anything that stalked through the night. But the primitive, instinctual part of her screamed for her to run.

The forest was eerily quiet. She hadn’t heard anything since the owl’s anxious cry several minutes before. There were no bats, no birdcalls, not even any insects. It was horribly, nauseatingly similar to the calm that had come in the minutes before the sundown phenomenon.