“Don’t worry about us,” Carol said. “We’ll be fine. You and Peg go on into town like you planned.”
“Well… I’m not sure I like the idea of you two ladies out here all by your lonesome, twenty miles from other folks. No sir, I don’t like it much.”
“Nobody’s going to bother us, Vince. The road’s gated; you can’t even get in without a key card.”
“Anybody can walk in if he’s willin’ to go overland just a little ways.”
Carol required several minutes and a lot of words to reassure him, but at last he decided that he and his wife would keep to their usual Friday schedule.
Shortly after Vince left, the rains came. The soft roar of a hundred million droplets striking a hundred million rustling leaves was soothing to Carol.
But Jane found the noise somewhat unpleasant.
“I don’t know why,” she said, “but the sound makes me think of fire. Hissing… just like a lot of flames eating up everything in sight. Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle…”
The rain forced Paul to slow down to sixty, which was still too fast for highway conditions, but the situation called for the taking of some risks.
The windshield wipers thumped metronomically, and the tires sang softly on the wet macadam.
The day was dark and growing darker. It looked more like twilight than like midday. The wind blew obscuring curtains of rain across the treacherously wet pavement, and the gray-brown road spray flung up by other traffic hung in the air, a thick and dirty mist.
It seemed almost as if the Pontiac were a tiny vessel sailing through the deep currents of a vast, cold sea, the only pocket of warmth and light within a million miles.
Grace said, “You probably won’t believe what I’ve got to tell you, and that would be understandable.”
“After what’s happened to me today,” Paul said, “I’m ready to believe anything.”
And maybe that’s what the poltergeist meant to do, he thought. Maybe it meant to prepare me for whatever story Grace has to tell. In fact, if I hadn’t been delayed by the poltergeist, I would have left the house before Grace arrived.
“I’ll keep it as simple and straightforward as I can,” Grace said. “But it’s not a simple and straightforward matter.” She cradled her torn left hand in her right hand; the bleeding had stopped, and the cuts were all crusty, clotted. “It starts in 1865, in Shippensburg. The family was named Havenswood.”
Paul glanced her, startled by the name.
She looked straight ahead, at the rain-sodden land through which they were rushing. “The mother was Willa Havenswood, and the daughter’s name was Laura. Those two didn’t get along well. Not well at all. The fault was on both sides, and the reasons for their constant bickering aren’t really important here. What’s important is that one day in the spring of 1865, Willa sent Laura into the cellar to do some spring cleaning, even though she knew perfectly well that the girl was deathly afraid of the cellar. It was punishment, you see. And while Laura was down there in the cellar, a fire broke out upstairs. She was trapped and burned to death. She must have died blaming her mother for putting her in that trap in the first place. Maybe she even blamed Willa for starting the fire—which she didn’t. It was accidentally started by Rachael Adams, Laura’s aunt. It’s even possible that Laura wondered if her mother had started the fire on purpose, just to get rid of her. The child had emotional problems; she was capable of melodramatic notions of that sort. The mother had emotional problems, too; she was capable of inspiring paranoia, for sure. Anyway, Laura died a gruesome death, and we can be pretty certain that her last thought was an ardent wish for revenge. There was no way she could have known that her mother perished in that fire, too!”
So that’s why the Havenswood identity didn’t check out when Carol put the police on to it, Paul thought. They’d have had to go all the way back to the 1800s in order to find the Havenswood family.
County records for that period probably don’t even exist any more.