Seven Turns: A Ghost Story/A Love Story

Cally got back to Vale House well before noon and stopped at her car to say hello to her belongings, promising them she hadn’t forgotten them. She was concerned about her CD collection, currently in a plastic milk crate on the floor of the passenger side of the car; she feared the CDs would be ruined if she continued to keep them in a car in the hot sun. Her daughter had helped load most of her favorite songs (as well as quite a few of Kelleigh’s own choosing) onto her MP3 player, but she still cherished the physical CDs. She had built her collection with the sudden flush of money from the publication of her book – it had been one of the first things she had ever done just for herself. She picked the crate up off the floor and tucked it under her arm before heading into the house.

She found Bethany and Katarina sitting on the porch steps, shelling peas into a colander. The fat gray cat sat next to them, basking in the sun and dozing with what was the closest thing a cat could have to a smile on its face. “Ms. McCarthy!” Bethany said cheerily, “I’ve left some cold cuts on the sideboard in case you want to make yourself a sandwich.”

Cally didn’t want a sandwich. She thought she’d use the time before her meeting with the Captain to unpack her suitcases and put a few things away. When she unlocked the Rose Room door, though, she found the suitcases were not where she’d left them. Setting the crate of CDs down on the desk, she let out a long, exasperated sigh and strode to the closet, flinging open the door. There her suitcases stood, side by side under her neatly hung clothes – all of them. Her shoes were lined up on the closet floor, and her slippers, she saw as she turned around, just peeked out from under the rose-patterned bed ruffle.

Yanking open the dresser drawers, she found her underthings folded and neatly arranged on the rose-scented drawer liners. Someone had even attempted to arrange all of her mismatched socks into matching pairs. “Now that is going just too far!” she said out loud. She switched the lingerie to the other side of the drawer, disarranging the neat stacks, and picked up all her socks in two hands, being sure to mix them well as she let them fall back in to the drawer in a pile. Then she slammed the drawer shut and stormed out of the room without locking it (“Why bother?” she thought.)

By the time she had got down the stairs and to the front door, she had calmed down a little. She took a deep breath and pushed the screen door open. “Bethany, may I speak to you for a minute?”

“Of course!” Bethany’s warm smile did not change Cally’s determination to be firm.

Bethany left Katarina to the peas and came back inside the Hall. “I appreciate how nice everyone is being to me here,” Cally said as gently as she could. “But please can you ask that nobody touch my personal things when they go in to tend my room? In fact, I can make my own bed, if that would help. It’s just that...”

“Oh, Ms. McCarthy!” Bethany looked truly upset. “I assure you, we have a strict policy here of never touching our guests’ belongings! I made up your room myself today and I left everything as it was, well, except for your nightgown on the bed, which I tucked under your pillow when I straightened out the coverlet. I hope I didn’t offend you?”

“Oh, no, no, of course not,” Cally assured her. “Of course, that’s fine. But... someone unpacked my suitcases and put everything away and – well that was thoughtful of them but – you understand. I could have had valuables in those suitcases... not that anyone here would, of course...” She faltered, seeing Bethany’s face grow increasingly alarmed at what she was saying.

“I will certainly find out who did that!” Bethany said firmly, crossing her arms. She looked even more outraged than Cally felt. “That was completely unacceptable! I will see that it does not happen again.” She glanced darkly at Joan’s closed office door.

Cally followed her gaze, but somehow she couldn’t picture Joan performing that kind of “customer service” with her own hands, though she may have ordered someone else on the staff to do it. “Really, I didn’t mean to get anyone into trouble,” she said. “Everyone here is lovely, and I can’t picture Katarina or George doing anything dishonest. Maybe I’m just too sensitive because my mother used to do that sort of thing when I was a kid, and it really drove me nuts.”

Bethany’s face softened and she laughed. Then she frowned. “George? I think... Oh, I see. Ms. McCarthy... I think you should know, Georgie isn’t really there...”

She was interrupted by a rapping at the screen door. The Captain stood outside it, grinning and tapping the doorframe with the handle of his cane. “Hellooo,” he called cheerily. “I believe there is a lovely young lady here who wants to chat with me?”

Both women smiled and turned to help him come inside, but he said, “Let’s sit out here,” and turned away, back toward the wicker chairs beside the door. Cally put a reassuring hand on Bethany’s arm and said, “Thank you for understanding.”

She went out to join the Captain. As they sat down, Katarina appeared as if by magic with a tray of cookies and two glasses of tea, which she placed on the small table between the chairs. “I hope you put a little whiskey in that,” the Captain said, settling himself stiffly into one of the chairs. Cally hoped she hadn’t.

She felt awkward, because she hadn’t brought her notebook down with her in her haste, and she didn’t want to make the Captain wait for her to go back and get it. Then she remembered her phone was still in her pocket, and decided to use it to record the old man’s story. She set it on the arm of her chair and thanked the Captain for agreeing to be interviewed. He assured her that any day he could talk to a beautiful young lady was a good day, in his books.

There was no whiskey in the tea – anyway, there was none in Cally’s. The Captain did not complain about his.

“Well!” he began. “This place is just full of spirits!” He spread his arms toward meadow and the grounds of Vale House.

“I’ve lived here all my life. Not here, in this house, mind. But in this town. I grew up right over there on Gardens Road, in the Yellow House, in full view of the meadow.” He said “the Yellow House” as if that was its name, just as Vale House had a name. He pointed past the end of the porch and Cally could see, a few doors down Gardens Road on the other side of Main Street, a glimpse of yellow siding and the front porch of the house he meant. “That house had its own share of ghosts. My sisters and I...”

Katarina quietly excused herself, collected the colander of peas from the porch step, and went into the house. Across the parking lot, the horses came running in from a distant part of the meadow and stood near the fence, twitching their ears and jostling each other just like children trying to settle down to listen to a story.

“Back when my family owned the Yellow House, we always had at least three generations living there. I was part of the last generation of kids who slept in the attic. All us cousins shared the attic as our bedroom. Oh, it was hot up there in the summer, and cold in the winter, but it was wonderful! We could get away with anything. It was one big, open space, with the girls at one end and the boys at the other, and a big room down the middle with those great, round windows on either side. You could watch the moon set in the west window and then see the sun rise in the east window. And we often did! We would stay up late on summer nights and the grownups downstairs wouldn’t hear us. We’d bring up puppies and goat kids from the barn...” He paused, eyes twinkling as he laughed silently at old memories. “But, it wasn’t always fun and games,” he said, growing serious. “Part of the reason we didn’t sleep so soundly was because sometimes we were scared. Sometimes we’d see... things. Hanging from the rafters, from the big beam that ran down the middle of the attic from gable to gable.

“Yah I know what you’re going to say. Every old house has at least one legend of someone who hanged themself in the attic. But we saw them – and it was always more than one of us who saw it, so it wasn’t dreams. Long, white shapes swaying in the breeze, only there wasn’t any breeze in that stuffy attic. And there was never just one shape hanging there. There would be three, or four. Or more. When I got older, I tried to find out if that house had maybe once been a courthouse. Because, you know, that’s where they carried out hangings, in those days, right in the courthouses. But it’s not likely. The architecture isn’t right for a government building, and anyway the old courthouse is in the center of town. It’s our post-office, now.

“But anyway that’s not the strangest thing. Some other times, we saw... something else.” He gazed out across the meadow, past the horses, to the horizon.

“We would be looking out the window, and this was always on a summer night, and we would see, far out across the field, we would see a fire. Like a camp fire someone had started out there for some reason. And we’d see other little lights around it, like people standing around the fire holding torches. The little lights would go up to the fire and then fly into it. Like someone was throwing them. I mean, we never saw any people holding torches or throwing them. It was too dark and far off. This is just what we were guessing based on what the lights were doing. So anyway these little burning brands would be added to the fire, and it would get bigger and bigger. And it would get closer. Or so it seemed to us. It was like we were looking through binoculars. It would get bigger and closer until we could see that it was actually a tree. A huge tree, gigantic, and burning like a torch, only not burning, you know what I mean? The branches and leaves had yellow and gold light running all along them, but it wasn’t fire and it didn’t burn up the leaves or branches.

“Once it got so close it was almost like daylight in the attic. My sisters and I and our cousin Merv ran downstairs to tell the grownups. They were all awake, for some reason, but they weren’t out on the porch watching this spectacle, like you would think. They were all in the back parlor, sitting and talking quietly, like they were holding a Bible study or something. And when we ran in and tried to tell them to look outside, and all about what we were seeing, they all just gave us those patient looks you give to silly children and said, ‘You’re just having a bad dream. It’s what comes of staying awake too late. Go back to bed and this time go to sleep.’

“We tried to protest but they just shooed us away. We went back upstairs and looked out the window but the tree and the fire was gone, like we knew it would be. That’s how it always went.

“And next day the younger kids would run out to the meadow to look for scorch marks or a burned stump, but there was never anything. And anyway there has never been a tree in that field, not as far as the eye can see or as far as kids can walk in a day, and that’s pretty far. So there’s that.”

Cally shut her mouth and looked down at her phone, which she was glad she’d been using instead of her notebook. The battery was running down. “That really was quite a story,” she said sincerely. “Different from all the other things I’ve been hearing over and over. Thank you for sharing it with me.”

“It was my pleasure,” he assured her, patting her hand. “For what it’s worth, this house,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the white clapboards of Vale House, “does have its ghosts, too. All those things that go bump in the night, and doors that won’t stay shut, and things that get moved around.”

Cally smiled. “Speaking of things that get moved,” she said, “would you know who...”

She was interrupted by a scream and a loud clatter from inside the house.