The Haunting of Thornview Hall Page 3

  “I know,” Sully said. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  Dez released him, satisfied his point had been heard. “So what did she show you?”

  Sully dropped his head. “Her death. Her father killed her. Beat her to death. And she showed me her mother. She wants to find her.”

  “Do you think her mother’s even alive anymore?”

  “Not likely. It’s probably irrelevant anyway. It’s possible she needs her mom with her to help her cross over.”

  “Okay, so we’ll find the mom.” Dez peered closer at Sully. There was something else, no question—and he was pretty sure he knew what. “It brought it back for you, didn’t it?”

  Sully nodded. “Usually, when a ghost shows me how they died, I come back and I can separate myself. What happened to Miriam ….”

  He trailed off, forcing Dez to finish the thought. “It happened to you. It hit you hard because you were in her position once.”

  “More than once.”

  Dez sighed and draped an arm around Sully, hugging his opposite arm. “Hey, I know this doesn’t erase anything, buddy, but you’re not back there anymore. You’d crush those bastards now. Hell, I’d crush ’em.” Dez leaned forward, trying to catch his eye. “Can I crush ’em?”

  Sully’s snicker turned into a full-on laugh. When he met Dez’s eye, Dez could see he had re-emerged from the black pit he’d fallen into. “You’re a dork.”

  Dez released Sully and clapped him firmly on the back before standing. “So are you. Tell you what, let’s have coffee, and then we can call Lachlan and see if he minds us working a job while we’re supposed to be on days off. Maybe we can even get your new pal Leo to pay us something for our trouble.”

  Dez’s past as a cop gave him a pretty clear idea of how to handle most investigations into missing people. The first thing was to speak to those close to them.

  In the case of Jacob’s mom, Lilian Garver, that was easier said than done. A quick call by Sully to Jacob provided the answer Dez had suspected it would: he hadn’t seen or heard from his mother since she left them when he was seven.

  Sully had put the phone onto speaker mode to allow Dez to hear.

  “I don’t even know anything about her family or what her maiden name was,” Jacob said. “I mean, I could find out. Like I told you earlier, I just never cared enough to bother. Far as I was concerned, she wasn’t much worth the effort it would have taken.”

  “I can appreciate where you’re coming from,” Sully said. “But we need to find her for Miriam’s sake. And anyway, there might be stuff you don’t know about her. I grew up believing my birth mother had dropped me off on a doorstep as a baby. Turned out she gave me up to save my life.”

  “While I’m sympathetic—”

  “I’m not looking for sympathy,” Sully said. “I’m saying sometimes it’s easy to get so blinded by the pain you suffered as a kid that you don’t see the full truth, even as an adult.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Jacob said. His tone suggested he meant the words. “Are you asking me to find out more about her?”

  “Even a maiden name would help,” Dez said. “We aren’t asking you to contact anyone. Even access to your parents’ marriage certificate would help.”

  “I might be able to find it, though I think my father left some of those things behind at our old house before he sold it. He moved into a condo, and given the size of the house, there were a lot of things he either sold, destroyed or left behind. I’d imagine you’d find a few things in the attic or basement there if you were to check it out.”

  “Might be tricky for us to get in,” Dez said. “A couple of strangers turning up on a doorstep, asking to dig through someone’s attic? Might be you’d have better luck as a former resident.”

  “I don’t think it will be a problem,” Jacob said. “No one’s at the house anymore. Well, no one but the housekeeper. Speaking of, she might be a good place to start. She worked for our family, and my understanding is she stayed on with the new owners. You’d know her too, I’m sure.”

  Dez exchanged a glance with Sully. “Why would we?” Dez asked Jacob.

  “Didn’t you know? The house my family used to live in, it’s called Thornview Hall. You’ll know it well. My father sold it to Lowell Braddock.”

  4

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Coming to noon on a cold January day, fast food bags open on the centre console, and Dez was staring at the gate guarding the country property owned by Lowell.

  “Never figured on being back here,” he grumbled.

  “Me neither,” Sully said. “But here we are.”

  They’d spent time at Thornview Hall as kids. Not a pile of it; more often, Lowell and his wife, Kindra, would invite them into the city for a nice meal or would visit them on the acreage. But Dez and Sully had been out here enough to know the place—and to know it was haunted.

  “We don’t have to go back to that cottage, do we?” Dez asked.

  “We might have to,” Sully said. “One of the former groundskeepers apparently ran off with Lilian.”

  “You said there’s a creepy woman around there, not a groundskeeper.”

  Years had passed, but Dez remembered well Sully’s description of the woman: long, straggly hair falling around her face, flowing white gown, blood and dirt covering both clothing and flesh.

  Dez couldn’t see her, but he was happy to give her a pass all the same.

  “Can’t we try the house first?”

  Sully smirked. “You know there’s a ghost in there too, don’t you?”

  Dez turned wide eyes on Sully. “What?”

  “Not a homicide victim, so I can’t see it. But it’s around.”

  Dez turned back to the closed gates. “Great.”

  He drove forward, nearer the callbox. He was about to put his window down when Sully told him to hold up.

  “We broke this gate two years ago, remember?” Sully said. “Lowell and Kindra have been in custody since then. Could be no one ever fixed it.”

  “As I recall, you broke the gate. Don’t bring me into it.”

  Dez decided to give it a shot. He stepped out of the SUV and, with Sully beside him, approached the gate. Closer now, Dez could see a chain had been wound through the railings with a lock holding it together on the opposite side.

  “So much for that plan,” Sully said.

  But Dez wasn’t giving up that easily. He returned to the SUV and opened the hatch where he kept his tire iron.

  “What are you doing?” Sully asked.

  “Getting us in there.”

  “Breaking in, you mean.”

  Dez stopped midway back to the gate and stared at Sully. “He killed Dad and Aiden and tried to kill both of us besides. I’m not worried about offending the bastard.”

  He returned to the gate, placed the tire iron between the chain and the wrought iron railings, and pulled one end of the bar toward himself. The chain was strong, but he was stronger. A moment later, he was rewarded by the sound of snapping metal. The broken chain fell into the snow.

  Dez turned a triumphant grin on Sully before handing him the tire iron so he could shove open the gates.

  “Happy?” Sully asked as they returned to the vehicle.

  Dez retrieved the tire iron and took it back to the hatch. “Happy’s not the word I’d use.”

  He steered the vehicle past the gate, then stopped to close it again, replacing the chain to make it look like it was still functional.

  “In case police happen by,” Dez explained upon returning to the driver’s seat. “I don’t mind breaking into Lowell’s property, but I’d rather not have to explain myself from the backseat of a police cruiser.”

  Sully supplied a lopsided, dry grin. “Fair point.”

  The drive to the house took one to two minutes in the summer. But a recent snow had fallen, obscuring the roadway and making the drive hazardous enough to merit going slow. If they left the road, injury wasn’t a conc
ern; the area was flat and covered in mainly pine, spruce and an occasional shallow water body. What bothered Dez was the idea of getting stuck out here with the city—and even the nearest neighbours—too far away to hike in the cold. The last thing Dez wanted was to be trapped out here with two ghosts and a house belonging to the couple who had all but destroyed his family.

  “You okay?” Sully asked.

  Dez risked a quick glance at him before returning his eyes to the barely visible road. “Ask me again once we’re out of here. Which, by the way, needs to be sooner rather than later. They’re predicting a blizzard in a few hours.”

  “We won’t be here that long,” Sully assured him.

  A large depression marking an iced-over pond came into view to their left, a spot Flynn used to come to fish with Lowell. Dez himself had memories of fishing there as a kid, sitting on the banks with few cares in the world, his dad beside him, Sully napping on his other side. Those had been good days.

  Or at least he’d thought so at the time.

  A slight bend in the road and the trees opened ahead of them to reveal the central wing of Lowell and Kindra’s mansion. Thornview Hall—three stories, along with matching turret rooms and an expansive basement and attic—was built into a U-shape, curving back toward the woods behind. The courtyard between the wings was Lowell’s favourite place to socialize in summer, boasting a massive covered patio complete with a heated jacuzzi and a barbecue Flynn used to drool over. A garden filled in the rest of the space behind, and Dez expected it looked far less perfect the past couple of summers than it had in his own memory.

  The road split as they neared the house, the right meant to be used to approach the house and the left to leave. The curved driveway led them around a balustrade-enclosed ornamental pond. It was frozen over and covered in snow now, but Dez remembered summers when it contained large goldfish and a few lily pads.

  The house itself had never been overly intimidating to Dez as a kid. It was old—old enough he avoided areas like the basement and attic without giving it much thought—but it wasn’t one of those gothic-type Victorian mansions situated here and there around Kimotan Rapids. This one was built, he thought he’d been told, in the twenties or thirties. At first glance, it didn’t bear the hallmarks of a haunted property, and that had been enough for Dez until Sully had broken it to him it was, in fact, very much haunted. Even then, he’d believed the haunting was limited to the groundskeeper’s cottage.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about the ghost in the house?” Dez asked.

  “I thought you must have figured it out since I always slept in your room when we stayed here.”

  Dez parked outside a set of double doors flanked by a pair of columns. “Figured you were nervous about the one by the cottage. Never occurred to me there was something else to worry about.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,” Sully said.

  Dez turned to him. “Listen, much as I hate the idea of ghosts, I’m not nearly as afraid of them as I used to be. Anxious, yeah. Sometimes maybe even scared. But not piss-my-pants terrified.” Dez thought better of it. “Not that I actually ever pissed myself.”

  Sully smirked and climbed out of the vehicle.

  Dez joined him, taking the couple of steps onto the platform where the door stood. He stared at the entrance a moment, then met Sully’s eye.

  “What, are we supposed to knock?”

  “I don’t know,” Sully said. “Try the door.”

  Dez did. “Locked. Maybe we should go to the back.”

  “They’ll all be locked,” Sully said.

  Dez had a thought, one he didn’t like a whole lot better than the ghosts. “Didn’t occur to me until now. You think she’s still here?”

  Sully quirked an eyebrow. “Mrs. Carr, you mean?”

  Dez nodded wordlessly.

  Sully returned his gaze to the closed doors. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “But Lowell and Kindra are in jail. They wouldn’t be paying for a housekeeper to work here anymore, right?”

  “Doesn’t mean she’s not staying. The lock on the gate was turned toward the inside, remember? Like someone locked it from this side.”

  Dez frowned. “Someone could have pushed the chain through that way.”

  Sully smirked at him. “She still intimidates you after all these years?”

  Dez contemplated denial but decided he’d never get away with it. “Hey, she’s creepy as hell, man. She skulks.”

  “Well, we need to get in there. If we smash our way in, and it turns out she is here, she’ll call the police on us.”

  Without any further comment, Sully raised a hand and rang the doorbell. A minute or so passed with no response, so he went for the knocker instead. His fingers had just brushed it when the door was pulled open abruptly.

  Mrs. Carr hadn’t changed much. She’d been old and crabby even when they were kids. Now, she just looked older and crabbier.

  Her spectacle-free eyes—Dez figured her eyesight wouldn’t dare to degenerate without her permission—peered up at them with suspicion. Dez fought for a smile but got caught halfway, uncertain whether they should reintroduce themselves. Then it occurred to him there shouldn’t be a need. Not only did Dez bear a notable resemblance to Lowell, he’d been here two years ago, had basically forced his way in, searching for his daughter.

  “Mrs. Carr,” Sully said. “How are you?”

  Her eyes snapped onto him. “Sullivan Gray.”

  Her accent, even after all these years, still retained her accent from her home country, England. Dez had never been over there, so had no idea where in particular the accent originated, but he pictured her haunting the moors.

  It seemed fitting, the idea of this woman stepping from a scene in a gothic horror novel.

  “You turned evidence against Mr. Braddock,” she said. The tone left little doubt what she thought about that.

  “He didn’t give me much choice.”

  “Don’t suppose he did. He wasn’t prepared to simply roll over.”

  Dez bristled. The woman’s tone strongly suggested a belief the blame for her boss’s incarceration lay at Sully’s feet rather than Lowell’s. “Listen, lady—”

  Sully cut in before Dez could get any further. “I understand why you’re upset with me, but I’m only one part of a larger picture. If I was the only one with evidence of Lowell’s crimes, the trial would have started and ended with me. The jury heard six weeks worth of evidence and only one and a half days were my testimony. I don’t know if you’ve been following newspaper accounts of the trial, but there’s not much question as to what Lowell and Kindra were involved in.”

  Sully had provided the statement with tact and patience—the kind Dez had run out of with people like Mrs. Carr. But it seemed to have done the trick. Though she wasn’t any more pleased to see them, she at least wasn’t slamming the door in their faces.

  “What is it you want?”

  “You may be aware we’re private investigators,” Dez said. “We have a client who’s trying to find out what happened to his mother. He grew up here.”

  “Who?” Mrs. Carr asked.

  “The name he goes by now is Leonard Jacob. He was born as ….”

  Mrs. Carr lost a shade of colour. Dez trailed off and considered asking if she wanted to sit down somewhere.

  But this was Mrs. Carr. Despite being slightly built and frail-looking, the woman didn’t know weakness.

  “Leo Garver,” she said, supplying the end of Dez’s dropped statement.

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve been housekeeper here for sixty years. Of course I knew him. I practically raised him.”

  Mrs. Carr stepped back. For a moment, Dez thought she was allowing them in. He’d taken half a step when she started to close the door.

  “Hang on,” Dez said.

  The housekeeper raised a hand to stop his protest. “I’m going to call Mr. Garver and ask. Wait here.”

  Dez crossed his arms and
glared but stayed where he was. Door sealed shut once again, he met Sully’s eye. “I can’t stand her. She’s not just creepy, she’s nasty as hell.”

  “Well, she does think we’re responsible for putting her bosses away. They’re her bread and butter. We’re both very aware of Lowell and Kindra’s dark side, but one thing about them: they were always good at treating people nicely when it was of benefit to them. I always got the impression they were respectful of their staff. Whoever buys this place next, that might not be the case.”

  Dez glared back at the closed door. “Fine. Still doesn’t mean I’ve got to like her.”

  They waited in silence a few more minutes until, at last, the door reopened. Mrs. Carr wore a scowl, one Dez recognized as unexpected defeat. He imagined she’d anticipated an altogether different outcome when she called Jacob.

  “All right,” she said. “Come inside. Find what you need and leave.” She peered up at the clouds through narrowed eyes, as if regarding an enemy. “A winter storm’s blowing in, and I want to be out of here before it arrives.”

  Dez stepped inside and revelled in the warmth before what she’d said twigged in his brain. “I thought you lived on the grounds.”

  “Not for a few years,” she said. “And I won’t stay in this house after dark. Not alone. Not for anything.”

  The question shot out of Dez before he’d even thought about it. “Why not?”

  Mrs. Carr’s lips pressed firmly together. She turned and left them behind in the entryway as she retreated deeper into the house.

  “You know your way,” she said.

  Then she was gone.

  5

  Sully felt it the moment they entered the house.

  It crept over him, sending a chill down his neck and making his skin crawl. As a kid, he’d noticed it the couple of times he’d been on the mainly-disused third floor—so much so that he dreaded the idea of visiting the attic for fear the presence would be even stronger up there.