1 The Ghost in the Basement Read online

  She locked herself in the study with the diary, leaving Donovan standing in the kitchen feeling like a damn fool. She was upset and angry, and he was beginning to think she had no intention of leaving before the year was up.

  “Leave her be,” said Pop. “You’ve done enough damage. If you can still use that hand, I could use some help finishing up in Billy’s room.”

  Donovan had nearly forgotten his swollen hand. Hitting Cordelli’s ugly face had left it bruised and sore. At least the crew working in the basement had gone out for lunch. Otherwise, they would have gotten an earful, and he never would have lived it down at work.

  The phone rang and Pop answered it in the kitchen. A minute later, he called, “Donovan, Howard Bush needs to talk to you. He needs your Social Security number for his records.”

  “Why?”

  “Hannah listed you as the beneficiary on her investment account.”

  Donovan took the phone from Pop and put his hand over the receiver. “Why me?”

  “Who else?” said Pop, and if Donovan didn’t feel like a jerk before, he did now. He had some major apologizing to do.

  If she’d let him get that close again.

  Chapter Six

  Billy’s bruises had disappeared, and it was time to enroll him in school, the same elementary school he’d attended before Pop sold his house. The kid was so excited he could hardly sit still long enough to eat breakfast.

  Donovan drove Billy to school. “You’ve been off for a few days, so you’ll have to work hard to catch up with the other kids.”

  “I can do it.”

  “I know you can, son. You’re a smart kid.”

  “I wonder if I’ll be in Jason’s class.”

  “I guess we’ll find out.” This school was in a better neighborhood than the last one, and the test scores here were among the highest in the city. Billy had always been a good student, but Donovan wasn’t sure he’d learned much in the past few months. The teachers in the last school had their hands full trying to maintain discipline in their classrooms. It couldn’t be an easy environment for teaching.

  Billy hopped out of the car and ran ahead to greet some of his old friends. Donovan followed, and when the bell rang, the other kids all scrambled to get to their classrooms. “C’mon, Billy. We need to go to the office.”

  Donovan sent a silent thanks to Sonny for making this possible and then enrolled his son in school.

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  Over the next few days, Hannah kept her distance from Donovan. She spent most of her time working on the house and reading the diary. Copying the fancy scroll of the letters she’d already figured out, she made an alphabet to help her when she got stuck. Even then, it was slow work, almost like reading a foreign language she’d never mastered. This book was harder to read than the one from 1912.

  Howard Bush called. “Hannah, you have a little over two hundred thousand dollars worth of Hershey’s and Coca Cola stock.”

  Stunned, all she could say was, “Wow! That’s impressive.”

  “I’m still working on the others.”

  Hannah asked him to sell some of the stock so she’d have the money to work on the house, and then ended her call. She turned to see Pop standing behind her. “Good news?”

  “We have enough money to build those new bathrooms.”

  “What did I tell you?”

  “I’ll never doubt you again, Pop.”

  The money from the stock would give her the freedom to delay her search for a job. She had time to fix up the house and replace worn drapes and rugs. The wallpaper would take longer. It took time and energy to scrape the old paper off the walls. It was several layers thick in some rooms, and she didn’t want to add another layer.

  Hannah and Pop opened a checking account together, so he’d have money for supplies to work on the house. Pop bought wood to reframe the outside doors and insulation to put in the basement ceiling, and they had the roof replaced and new gutters installed. Next summer she’d have the windows replaced with insulated double or triple panes. It was too cold outside to do it now.

  Donovan and Pop installed the bead board in Billy’s bedroom. Hannah painted the room and helped Billy hang his baseball posters. When they finished, Hannah stood back with Billy and looked at the room. “No more pink ballerinas on the walls.” The fussy pink and white bedroom had turned into a boy’s room.

  “Thanks, Hannah. It’s the best room I ever had.”

  “Nothing is too good for my favorite kid.” If she had kids of her own, she couldn’t do any better than this one. Living with Donovan and his family made her realize how much she’d missed in not having a family of her own.

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  In the backyard, Donovan stacked the bricks they’d removed from the basement. He intended to build a patio and planter, but he didn’t want to start the job until next spring. The bricks had the same markings as the ones on the basement walls, and they looked like they came from the same batch. He’d done some checking and learned the company that made those bricks had long since gone out of business.

  The bricks alone weren’t enough to pinpoint exactly when the victim was killed, but it was a clue that couldn’t be ignored. The builder wouldn’t have ordered that many more bricks than he needed for the job, which meant the house wasn’t finished when he died. That would logically put the time of the victim’s death around late 1918 or early 1919.

  While the men worked on the victim’s remains, he sorted through the junk in the basement. He didn’t find much worth keeping. It would take several trips to the dump to get rid of this trash, and he’d have to borrow a pickup to get it there.

  The remains were finally lifted out of the shallow grave and sent to the lab, along with the remains of a beam that had been buried under the body, the apparent murder weapon. Would the spirit of the victim go with the remains or stay here in the house?

  He wanted to ask Hannah if she’d felt the spirits, but she’d been keeping her distance. There were no more shared cups of coffee, no more smiles or kisses, no nothing. During the day, she worked on the house, cleaning and removing old wallpaper, and in the evenings, she worked on the diary or read in her room. The distance between them left a heaviness inside him.

  Without being asked, Billy swept off the front porch and steps, kept his room cleaner than he ever had, helped Hannah carry in groceries, and set the table every night. Donovan knew he was trying to recapture the warmth of Hannah’s smile.

  One night when Billy was helping Hannah in the kitchen, Donovan heard him ask, “Hannah, are you mad at me?”

  “Of course not. How could I be mad at my favorite kid?”

  He shrugged. “My mom used to get mad at me.”

  “She was sick, Billy.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  She sat at the kitchen table and reached out to him. “You know you can talk to me about anything, don’t you? When my father died, nobody would talk to me about him, and I really needed to talk to someone.”

  “I don’t even remember what she looked like.”

  “Maybe if you asked your dad, he could find you a picture of her. I’ll bet she was a beautiful lady who loved you a whole lot.”

  Billy hung his head and Donovan knew he was crying. Hannah put her arms around him and pulled him into a hug, holding him and rocking him.

  Billy sobbed. “She didn’t want me.”

  “I love you, Billy. If I had a son, I’d want him to be just like you.”

  Donovan wiped his face with his sleeve. He’d give anything if Billy hadn’t heard Maggie say that. He squatted down beside Hannah, rubbing his son’s shoulder. “Your mom was crazy out of her mind from the sickness, Billy. She didn’t know what she was saying.”

  He stood and lifted his son into his arms, holding him while he cried, remembering the past. Maggie had been furious when she discovered she was pregnant, and it was all he could do to talk her out of having an abortion. She didn’t want to mess up her perfect figure, and she sure as hell didn’t want
to take care of a baby. When Billy was born, she didn’t even want to look at him. Changing diapers was out of the question, and forget nursing. Maggie’s mother, Eleanor the witch, told her it would make her breasts sag.

  Before Maggie died, she’d lost both breasts and her hair. His beautiful wife was nothing but skin and bones, and she blamed him. If he hadn’t gotten her pregnant, she wouldn’t have gotten breast cancer. If he’d loved her enough, this wouldn’t have happened. It was all his fault. Everything that went wrong in Maggie’s life had always been his fault.

  Donovan had kept Billy away from her, so she didn’t dump her venom on a kid who couldn’t handle it. In the last few months of her life, Maggie saw Billy twice. Both times she was so nasty, Billy left in tears. She didn’t ask to see him again, and Donovan didn’t offer to bring him. When Maggie was sick, she turned into a shrew nobody wanted to be around, except her mother.

  In the short time they’d lived in this house, Hannah had been more of a mother than Maggie ever had. The only time Maggie had ever held Billy was when she knew someone was looking. By withholding her love, she’d left a bleeding wound in this kid’s soul. Hannah was sewing it together, one tiny stitch at a time.

  Hannah wiped away tears and he knew she loved his son. And Billy loved her. They had to have a long talk, but not now, when everyone was hurting.

  The more time they spent together in this house, the more it felt like he’d come home, but it wouldn’t be the same without Hannah. Yet, if she stayed for a full year, she’d want the house to herself, and he’d have to move his family out. If he had to leave here, he’d be right back in the same situation he was in before, struggling to pay a bill he couldn’t afford to pay, living in a dumpy apartment, and resenting the miserable life he’d given his family.

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  Donovan took Hannah shopping for a car. With the money from the stock, she could afford to buy a new one, but instead of buying a new car, she chose a small, used pickup.

  “Maybe next year I’ll buy a new car, but this should do for now. You and Pop need something to haul supplies in, and I don’t want a new car sitting outside rusting this winter.”

  The pickup didn’t look like much, but Donovan took it to his mechanic to have it inspected before she bought it. Visions of her standing in the middle of the street in rush hour traffic still haunted him, and he wanted to be sure she drove a reliable vehicle.

  They still hadn’t talked about Maggie. Hannah didn’t ask, and his wife wasn’t a topic he liked to talk about. Bad enough to have to pay her bills. If she hadn’t run up so many credit card bills, he would have been able to pay most of these medical bills at the time, except the specialist from Chicago and that last procedure. They all knew it wouldn’t work, and he’d let Maggie’s mother talk him into it anyway.

  The high-interest credit card bills Maggie had run up during their marriage were paid off now. They’d used the equity in Pop’s house to pay them off. But Donovan still owed the hospital and three doctors, including the specialist they’d flown in from Chicago. Every time those bills came, they reminded him of his failed marriage. He’d stuck with Maggie for Billy’s sake, because he was afraid she’d take his son away from him if he divorced her. He didn’t want to be married to her, but he desperately wanted to keep his son. Billy was the only good thing to come out of a bad marriage.

  Hannah wrote a check for her pickup and Donovan followed her home. Owning the pickup would make her less dependant on him and Pop. She had the means to leave now – money and transportation – but he knew she wouldn’t leave. No matter how much money they found in the old house, Hannah had settled in for good.

  If someone had to move on at the end of the year, it wouldn’t be Hannah.

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  A week after the body was removed from the basement, Hannah climbed in bed with the diary. Reading it wasn’t enough. She wanted to hold it, to touch the past and connect with Charity in some way. The diary from 1912 clearly showed Charity’s hate for her husband. Did she kill him or hire someone to kill him? Did those bones Hannah stepped on belong to her great-grandfather, Cal Taylor? She hoped it wasn’t his spirit she’d released from the basement. From what she’d read in the diary from 1912 and the things Grandpa said about him, Cal wasn’t someone she’d want to know, dead or alive. She’d love to meet Charity, though.

  “Charity, I wish you could show me who was buried in the basement.”

  Hannah fell asleep holding the diary and dreamed about a man with gentle brown eyes and wavy hair. In her dream, a woman called, “Andrew? Andrew, where are you?”

  The man turned toward the voice and Hannah saw the back of his head. It was smashed in and matted with blood. She woke screaming, her heart racing.

  Donovan burst through the bedroom door and ran to Hannah. She sat up and reached out for him, her hands shaking. He sat on the bed beside her and she clutched him tightly. “I saw him, Donovan. I saw the man in the basement.”

  He held her close and rubbed her back. “It was just a bad dream.”

  “No, it wasn’t a dream, not really. His name was Andrew, and the back of his head was all—”

  Donovan pulled back and looked into her eyes. “What?”

  “A woman called to him. She called him Andrew. When he turned toward her, I saw the back of his head. It was all bashed in and bloody. His clothes… He wore an old fashioned shirt, the kind without a collar. And suspenders. Everything was wrinkled and worn, and his shirt had patches sewn on the elbows.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was big and strong, with brown wavy hair, kind of longish. His face… He had a kind look in his eyes, and then he turned and—”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No, but he turned toward the woman’s voice. He seemed concerned about her.”

  “How do you know? Did he speak?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t explain, I just know.”

  Donovan stared at her. She could have had a nightmare, but if she was having nightmares about the body she’d stepped on, she would have had them the night after they opened that hidden staircase and found the bones. That was days ago. The body was gone, but the victim’s spirit, the ghost, was still here in the house.

  Some of the people he worked with discounted psychic visions, but Donovan never ignored them unless they were proven wrong. He used every means at his disposal to solve a case, especially when it came to finding missing children.

  Cordelli thought psychic visions were nonsense, and many others in the department did, too, but Donovan had always tried to keep an open mind. Years ago, he listened to a woman who said she’d had a vision about a man who had a little girl locked in his basement, a man who was planning to kill the child. Cordelli laughed at her, but Donovan paid attention to her clues and found the missing two-year-old locked in the basement of a neighbor’s house. The neighbor had molested the kid, but she was still alive. If not for the psychic, she might not have been found in time.

  Donovan held Hannah while she calmed down and her breathing returned to normal. The dream or vision had really upset her.

  He picked up a little book off the bed. “What’s this?”

  “Charity’s diary.”

  “You can’t read in the dark.” But she’d read it in another way. They hadn’t told her how the victim died or what he was wearing, but she knew. She’d seen him in her vision.

  Donovan heard a sound at the door and turned to see Billy standing there, eyes wide. “Hannah had a bad dream, but she’s okay now.”

  “I didn’t mean to wake you up, Billy. I’m sorry.” Hannah held out her arms for a hug and Billy scrambled up beside her.

  “You sleep with a light on?”

  “Yes, I’m a big sissy. My mother’s boyfriend locked me in a small, dark place when I was a little girl. Scared me half to death. Monique tore into him when she finally found me, but I’ve never forgotten it.”

  “Why do you call your mother by her first name?”

/>   “That’s what she wanted. She didn’t want anyone to know she was old enough to have a kid my age, so she told everyone I was her little sister.”

  “How come you don’t have any kids?”

  “Because I didn’t want them to turn out like my ex-husband.”

  Donovan stood beside the bed wondering how come his nine-year-old son got to snuggle and he didn’t. And why did she tell Billy things she’d never shared with him?

  Hannah kissed Billy’s forehead. “Okay now?”

  “Yeah.” Billy went back to his room and back to bed. Donovan tucked him in and returned to Hannah’s room.

  “I know you miss your wife, Donovan, but how could any woman not love that kid?”

  Without asking for an invitation, Donovan slid under the covers beside her and told her the truth about Maggie. “I don’t miss her. If she hadn’t died, we would have been divorced by now. She was a lousy wife and a worse mother.”

  She scooted into his arms and stroked his chest. “Then why did you stay with her?”

  “Lousy mother or not, she was the only one Billy had, and I was afraid she might take Billy just to spite me. She left me several times, but she always came back. The last time I told her not to bother. Then she got sick and things changed.” Maggie needed him then, or maybe she just needed someone to blame for her suffering.

  “Why doesn’t Billy remember what she looked like?”

  “Because the last two years of her life, Maggie lived with her mother, and Billy spent most of his time with my parents. Mom took care of him while I worked, because Maggie didn’t want him around.”

  Donovan tucked Hannah’s head against his shoulder and leaned his cheek on her silky hair. He knew he was in way over his head. It wasn’t lust or simple appreciation for a woman’s beauty this time. He cared more deeply for Hannah than he’d ever cared for another woman. They’d done little more than kiss and share a mug of coffee, but he couldn’t turn off his feelings. Was it love? Maybe, but he wasn’t free to love any woman unless he won the lottery. Not with the burden of Maggie’s bills. And not with the ownership of the house hanging between them like an invisible wall.