Sneak Peek from PAPER GHOSTS

PART TWO

Present Day

The black door of the Wester House opened. The beautiful older woman who stood before them was wearing a tweed skirt and a shirt that looked made of liquid, with a large bow tied at the shoulder. Her soft blond hair was cut just below her ears.

“Hello, Mother.”

“You’ve lost weight, Tug,” she said, staring at him with bird-like eyes.

That made five-year-old Bailey turn to him, as if meeting him for the first time. She’d never heard anyone call her dad that before. Her mother had called him Terrence. His boss called him Terry. He had charm without a whisper of ego, and he even looked like a sweet man, with his blond hair cut short in back and longer in front, where it swooped boyishly over his forehead.  He often seemed rudderless. Bailey thought Tug suited him. It was more indicative of the way he tugged at your heartstrings, especially now in the gauntness of young widowerhood.

The woman finally stepped back and opened the door wider. “Please bring in those bags. People will think I’m moving, and I refuse to give them that delight.”

“The neighbors would like you more if you didn’t spy on them.” Tug picked up the bags and herded Bailey in. 

“I do not spy,” she said as she closed the door behind them.

It was very cold inside. The air conditioning was blowing fast through brass floor vents. All the curtains were closed and lamps were on everywhere, their yellowy light reflecting off dark wooden floors. They were standing in a foyer with a staircase in front of them. A dining room was to the right and a living room was to the left. It was obvious this had been a grand place, once. It was still well-kept and smelled of foamy furniture polish, but everything Bailey could see had a distinct patina of age now, like a fading photograph. As she looked around, she suddenly noticed an umbrella – long, old-fashioned, and vaguely Halloweenish – lying inside the narrow floor vent. She started to point it out, but her father put his hand on top of her head and said, “Mother, this is Bailey.”

She turned to see the woman staring at her.

She didn’t know what else to do, so she curtseyed.

“She isn’t the queen, sweetheart. This is your grandmother, Willamena.” He paused. “What should you like for her to call you?”

It seemed to catch her grandmother off guard that this wasn’t already established, and it was clear she didn’t like being caught off guard. Something flashed across her face, and for a moment she turned into a young woman. A very beautiful, very sad young woman. She tuned her head as if listening to someone, then she smiled a little. “Yes, she may call me Mim.” She turned back to them. “I put sheets on all the beds for you. You can choose which rooms you want.”

“Thank you.”

Mim nodded once, then turned and walked down the hallway beside the staircase. She opened a door to a burst of sunlight, and she stepped into what was obviously the glass sunroom. The door closed and darkness melted back.

Tug picked up their bags and told Bailey to follow him up the staircase. She trailed behind him, holding onto the carved banister that curved like a cat’s tail around the floors. After showing her his bedroom, he led her down the hall to her room, which had a curtain of string beads hanging in the doorway. She parted them, and the wooden beads made a clackity sound as they fell back into place.

There were only three things in the room: a bed, a dresser, and a half-moon shaped wicker hanging swing chair in the corner.

Wait. She had a swing in her room? She ran and hopped into the wicker chair and it twisted back and forth with a squeak from its spring. Her sudden happiness seemed to spark a sleepy curiosity in the house, and she felt something lonely walk in to watch her with her father. She stopped swinging immediately and her eyes searched the corners of the room, trying to find it.

“Do you like it?” Tug asked.

She turned back to him and smiled. “I love it.”

“This was your grandmother’s room when she was a girl. Come on,” Tug said. “I’ll show you the rest of the house.”

For the next half hour, the presence in the house followed them as Tug made sure Bailey knew every nook and cranny, most of it off limits due to what he called the Wester Rules, which were as follows:

No one but family was ever allowed in the house, so Bailey couldn’t have anyone over to play.

She wasn’t to pound on the grand piano in the living room. In fact, there was to be no music in the house at all, unless she had her headphones on.

She couldn’t go down the hallway by the staircase on the first floor. That was Mim’s domain, where the sunroom was on one side, and Mim’s bedroom and the double-locked basement door were on the other.

And she was never to go near the creek.

At least that last one made sense when Tug took her to the back yard, through the French doors in the dining room. They walked across the lawn where a single gingko tree was leaning over a precipice you couldn’t see until you were right on it. Far below was the churning water of a creek that ran through town.

“When I was a boy,” Tug said, “I believed this was the ocean and people on the other side were in Europe and spoke another language.”

“I bet if this tree fell, it would make a bridge and we could walk to it,” Bailey said. She put her hands against the tree trunk and began to push, grunting with effort.

“I used to think that, too. But that tree will probably be here forever.”

She stopped pushing. “What did you do for fun here, Daddy?”

“In there,” he used his head to indicate the house, as if it might be listening, “not much. But you’ll have fun when you start school. Then you’ll graduate and a whole world of fun will be waiting for you. You’ll leave and never look back.” He knelt beside her and put his hands on her shoulders. “I’m going to be a better father, I promise. It was always easier to be who I should be here.” Should. She knew that word was important, but she didn’t know why. “Let’s walk downtown. That’ll be fun, huh? I saw the frozen tea shop is still there.”

“What’s that?”

“They sell ice cream made with tea. You’ll love it.”

Bailey squealed and ran in place like a cartoon character until he took her hand and led her back into to the house. The lonely presence was waiting for them, just inside, and followed them to the front door.

Bailey pointed to the floor vent. “Why is there an umbrella in there?”

“I don’t know.  It’s always been there. That’s another rule: She doesn’t want it moved. And don’t ask her why, she won’t tell you.” He opened the door. “It’s simpler to just go along with your grandmother on some things.”

That detail, too, was important. The Wester Rules weren’t actually his rules. They were Mim’s. And they weren’t made up on the spot, either.

They’d been around for a long, long time.

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