Are You Haunted (part twenty-four)

Are You Haunted

(part twenty-four)

Tovey was slick and aromatic as the day before. He wore the same suit. He augmented his remark with a pinkie, spat tobacco into his teacup, spread himself across the middle of the settee—and having used his grandmother’s china for a spittoon, placed the cup and contents on her cushion.

He made no room for Powell, who was tempted to say, “Scoot over, Dennis.”

Just to see Tovey lose a beat. But he guessed himself not smart enough to pick that fight.

“You were telling me a story, Powell,” Isobel said.

“Me?”

She laughed at the bleat crept into his voice, rose to tug his sleeve and draw him close. “About the little vase? It was something …”

Along with the welcome smell of pot roast came Mrs. Lessing’s talk as she settled Mrs. Drybrook. “Be any time now them gents show up. I better get things taken off the stove.”

He was sure Isobel didn’t mean them, these attentions offered under her husband’s eyes. “I just, because…”

“Because it’s Mother’s Day, and why not? Her son was killed in the accident at the mill, I don’t guess anyone had a reason to tell you.”

The accident, the explosion… He wanted to ask her. He wanted her confidences to go on regardless. He answered tragic news with a nervous laugh.

Tovey said: “They got a pitcher of ice tea in the fridge. Go help yourself.”

“Don’t listen to him, stirring trouble. Mrs. Lessing doesn’t want any of us here. All her routines are just so.”

They heard voices, and Powell saw Summers with another man pass by the glass, the two stand for a second sliced by the window blind. The bell rang.

Tovey yelled out: “Mrs. Lessing, them gents!”

“We’ll have lunch now, thank God for that,” Isobel said.

The young people were given folding chairs. Powell felt a little smug looking at Isobel and Tovey, their chins a few inches above their plates. Mrs. Lessing had him at the corner, next to the stranger.

“What was your name?” Summers asked.

“Powell Kenzie, sir.”

“That’s right. This is Mr. Connolly, one of the Drybrook trustees.”

Connolly forked a beef cube to a potato chunk, and in a guarded way, said, “Summers, I drove all the way down Mill Road, down to that culvert where the water backs up.” He added a pearl onion. “The flood’s gone off. Nothing else to see.”

To Powell, Connolly did not speak, not even of the weather, and having gone days without eating his fill, he could not mind this. He applied himself to seconds and thirds.

24

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part twenty-five)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)