Are You Haunted (part thirty-one)

Are You Haunted

(part thirty-one)

He could not persuade himself he had a choice. He backed off waving, Davis Drybrook’s suits over an arm, trammeling the gesture Alfin had probably not seen.

You could have insisted you do your own shopping, Powell tried. Told Alfin you’d drive.

Read the riot act, ordered him off the premises.

Turned his back, his money safe but Alfin free to take the car. Marched to the house, repeated his speech to Dennis and Isobel…he couldn’t, because he liked her, exclude Isobel.

The Big Chief would say it was a question of Powell’s doing his duty.

The Big Chief, measuring the world by his own yardstick, discounted that he had some weight to throw around. Guy hated Toveys even when they did no harm. Maybe, as the trust’s man, counted it his personal duty…

Thinking these thoughts, Powell found himself at the front of the house. Someone had left a truck.

The cab sat sun-bleached and rusty, the flatbed gouged to metal, dented where it had borne the impact of weighty things, red and black coats chipped out under green paint.

Green housepaint.

He looked down the drive.

Mrs. Drybrook and her son willing to pay for a steam shovel to crack that rock face… Not to walk Lettie’s path. This seemed true as well.

From here he could see the top of the barn, a scant border of grass—

“Kenzie, what the hell you doing? Get in the house!”

Powell hustled up, dishes in his box grinding edges with a telling noise. To the door Dennis let go of instead of holding. He rested the box with care, draped his suits over it, cocked an ear to the staircase. “Isobel’s up there?”

“No, she isn’t. She’s in the kitchen.”

“Do you mind if I go up and take a look?”

“I want you,” Dennis said, “to come to the cellar with me. I got something real you can look at.”

The floorboard had bumped. Dennis knew it, couldn’t not have heard it. One more crony, one more source of mischief. Powell trailed Dennis to the kitchen with almost a fellow-feeling for Guy.

Isobel in her Sunday dress had the box of soap flakes out, and the bucket, and was wringing a hankie she might have snatched from Tovey’s breast pocket. She tilted the brown water, showing Powell. “They haven’t really cleaned. Do you think, Powell, that Lloyd Guy will drop by our party?”

“Go upstairs, Bel. You don’t need to be doing that work. Kenzie thinks the ghost’s walking. You stop in, say howdy.”

Dennis followed this insult with a clamp of Powell’s arm.

31

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part thirty-two)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)