READ WEBNOVEL Just an Accident
When Cally ran into the hall, it appeared at first to be completely empty. Cally thought she saw someone running up the stairs, but then Katarina’s voice behind the desk took her attention. She ran and looked over the desk to see Katarina frantically trying to move the toppled filing cabinet, calling “Bethany! Bethany! Miss Chase!”
Before the screen door could bang shut behind Cally, Ignacio came running through it. He vaulted over the desk and lifted the old wooden cabinet almost effortlessly, setting it upright again. There lay Bethany, bent in a very uncomfortable looking position on her back next to the toppled office chair. Katarina continued to call her name, and shook her when she didn’t respond, until Ignacio warned, “No, don’t move her.”
Cally knelt behind the desk and put a comforting hand on Katarina’s shoulder. Ignacio checked to make sure Bethany had a pulse, and assured Katarina she did. But Bethany was not responding, and there was a good deal of blood on the floor and the fender of the stone fireplace, where Bethany had apparently hit her head when she fell. Cally now regretted having let her cell phone battery run down, but Ignacio was already on his own phone talking to the 911 dispatcher.
Joan burst from her office door, shouting. “Oh, for Pete’s sake! What’s all this noise out here? I’m on a very important call with the paranorm...” She stopped when she saw the scene behind the desk. Then she muttered “Why must everything happen when I’m busy? Someone call 911!” She reached to where the desk phone should have been, but it, too, was tangled amongst the furniture and Bethany on the floor.
Then Ian May came in from the back hall, and his presence seemed to quiet the commotion in the room. Ignacio said something in Spanish to Katarina, who left the room and returned quickly with a clean dish towel to hold against Bethany’s bleeding head. Bethany groaned and opened her eyes, struggling to sit up.
“Don’t try to move until the paramedics get here,” Ian said to Bethany, and took the phone from Ignacio’s hand to speak to the dispatcher. “It’s kind of hard to find by GPS,” he told them. “I’ll send someone to stand by the highway to flag you down.” He handed the phone back to Ignacio, who nodded and left. Soon the red pickup truck roared out of the yard and turned down the main street, heading out of town.
Bethany did not follow Ian’s advice, and sat up on the floor, awkwardly trying to straighten her skirt around her knees. Katarina knelt behind her to give her some support, paying no attention to the blood soaking into her dress from Bethany’s head. “This is so embarrassing...” Bethany groaned, and Ian smiled.
“If you’re worried about that kind of thing,” he said, “then you are going to be alright.”
It seemed like hours to Cally, but was probably really only a few minutes, before Ignacio and the red pickup reappeared in the yard, followed closely by an ambulance with sirens wailing. “Oh, no, I wish they wouldn’t use the sirens,” Bethany groaned.” Now everyone will be talking!” And then, “No, really, please. It’s not necessary, I’ll be fine,” as two young paramedics rushed into the hall and set a stretcher down beside her. But she was clearly not fine – she shrieked and her face contorted in pain when they lifted her carefully and laid her on the stretcher. Ian patted her hand and assured her everything would be alright, and she smiled weakly. Then they wheeled her out the door, carried her down the steps, and were gone. Ignacio helped Ian into the passenger seat of the red truck and they followed the ambulance, promising to call as soon as they had anything to tell.
Joan flung her arms up and said, “I’m never going to get all this paperwork done this way!” She went back into her office and slammed the door sharply behind her.
Silence descended on the sunny Hall, except for the muffled sound of Joan’s voice on the phone behind the door. Cally looked down at the vintage office chair, broken into two pieces between the seat and the wheeled base, and wondered what on earth had just happened.
Katarina kept folding and unfolding the bloody dish towel in her hands. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “All she did was sit down in her chair. Then Boom! Crash!” She made a wide gesture with both arms, indicating all the wrecked furniture. “It’s like the things just attacked her!” She nodded, wide-eyed, at the filing cabinet. “And.” She turned her saucer-eyed gaze to Cally. “Just before, when I came in. I saw the White Lady. There, on the stairs!” She held the dish towel to her breast with one hand, and crossed herself with the other.
Cally glanced at the staircase. She recalled having seen a retreating figure, herself. She had assumed it had been Nell. “Well,” she said, indicating the chaos on the floor, “I don’t think a Lady would have done all that.”
She felt numb and could think of nothing except that the Hall needed to be put back in order. Stepping behind the desk, she pushed at the filing cabinet. It was heavy, but it slid easily on its felt-covered feet back to where it had originally stood, at the end of the desk. Papers lay everywhere and Cally started scooping them up.
“Maybe you shouldn’t touch all that,” the Captain called, maneuvering himself, his cane, and his iced-tea glass through the screen door. “Interfering with a crime scene and all, you know.”
“Crime scene?” Cally looked up at him. “This wasn’t a crime. Just an accident,” she said, but his words made her pause.
Katarina bent to help, righting the fallen base of the chair. Cally looked at it – it was the kind that screwed onto a threaded post rising up from the base, so it could be raised or lowered by turning the seat. “That’s what must have happened,” she said. “The old wooden post here must have broken off.”
“Why would it break? It’s better quality than modern furniture,” Katarina said, clinging to her Attack Furniture hypothesis.
“How about we just call the sheriff’s office and let them come take a look anyway?” the Captain suggested.
“You can’t arrest ghosts,” Katarina pointed out.
Cally wished Ian were there to decide what ought to be done. It was his home, after all, and she certainly wasn’t going to advise consulting Joan on the matter. “Foster and Nell should be back soon,” she remembered. “Why don’t we let them decide whether or not to call the sheriff?” As she said this, she realized it really could not have been Nell she had seen on the stairs, but she refrained from mentioning this to Katarina. “We should at least get all these papers out of sight. They’re all kinds of financial information that shouldn’t be left out in public view.”
The Captain agreed to that. “It always takes the sheriff hours to find his way here from Blackthorn anyway,” he grumbled, and ambled off into the parlor.
Cally gathered the papers nearest her into one pile and opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet. Then she developed a new hypothesis, one that she suspected held more water than Katarina’s. With the top drawer open, the cabinet was off-balance and started to topple forward toward her.
“Here you are, Kat,” she said, shutting the top drawer quickly. “The filing cabinet was off balance because all the weight was in the top drawer. When Bethany opened the drawer, the cabinet fell over and took her down with it.”
Katarina gave her a skeptical look, but said nothing. Cally opened the bottom drawer instead and stacked the papers inside it. “We can get them sorted out later,” she said. But glancing at Joan’s closed office door, she had a sinking feeling “we” would probably end up being Katarina.
She looked up at Katarina. “If Bethany takes care of all this stuff,” she wondered, “then what, exactly, does Joan do in there all day long?”
“Oh, You know.” Katarina rolled her eyes. “All This Paperwork!” she said in a very credible imitation of Joan’s voice. Cally had to laugh, and she felt a little better then, but just a little.