Moonrise. Cassandra King

mountain roads, especially after what happened to Rosalyn. Helen told me she’d never spent any time in the mountains, nor been around anything higher than a sand dune.

      Suddenly the rhododendrons clear out, and there’s Moonrise. Big old ugly thing that it is, it never fails to take my breath away. The way it looms out of the clearing is a surprise, with its rooflines of different heights, and the round turret like a fairy castle. The walls are made of local river rocks, but they’re about covered with ivy. Takes all me and my crew can do to keep it cut back so it don’t cover the windows—why it’s so dark inside. Everything here looks good, though, long as you stay in front. The back’s another story. I kept telling Emmet how bad Rosalyn’s gardens had got, but he won’t let my crew, or nobody else, work back there. He don’t want them moon gardens here, not ever again. Let them go to rack and ruin, he said, and they up and obliged him.

      I brought more of Tansy’s dahlias here, too, not wanting to wade through the overgrown gardens looking for blooms. I leave the front door open to catch the breeze blowing up from the lake, which is sharp and pine scented. No matter how often I air it out, the inside of the house is always musty and damp. And cold as a well digger’s ass.

      Even though it’s broad daylight, I go around turning on lamps. My work boots sound like a mule clopping on the slate floor of the entrance hall, but I don’t mind. It’s way too quiet here. Always is. Turning on the lamps don’t help much because they either have painted globes or dark, fringed shades. Not a plain, ordinary lamp on the premises, but then, it’s not an ordinary house. After Momma got too sick to work here anymore, I took over. That’s when Rosalyn showed me how to take care of everything, way more information than I gave a fig about. When the house was on garden tours and things like that, Rosalyn was the guide. She insisted I tag along until I learned the history of the house.

      When I asked Rosalyn how come the furnishings were so fancy, she told me they were Victorian, as though that explained it. All I know is, the Victorians couldn’t leave anything alone. Every dang thing in the house is gussied up with fringe, ribbons, scrolls, scallops, embroidery, flowers, feathers, or beads. Worse of all is the furniture. The tables, chests, and sideboards are as big and heavy as coffins, with deep carving you can’t half dust. The fabric they used isn’t easy to clean like the kind we have nowadays, either. Oh, no—nothing would do them but velvet and satin and linen and lace. If I was Helen, I’d yank down all these brocade curtains and let in some light! Then I’d get someone to haul off every last piece of the furniture, even if it did belong to Rosalyn’s family.

      I head down the hallway to the kitchen, carrying my basket. The stove’s cold as a stone, with no smell of gas, but Helen was right to double-check. As old as that thing is, it could spring a leak, I reckon.

      I notice that Helen’s using the glassed-in porch as their sitting room now. The TV, something most summer folks don’t even have, is in the back parlor. Rosalyn had to put one in for Emmet, who never misses the news. Unlike most kids, Annie wasn’t bad about watching TV, but she wasn’t here much. Always off at some horse-riding camp. Now she’s grown into a young woman I barely know. She’s nice enough, but kind of a hippie chick. I wonder if she’ll visit here, get to know Helen. Even before her mama died, Annie and her daddy didn’t get along so hot. He was always fussing about her dropping out of college, and not doing anything with her life. Last I heard, she’s living in Boone and working on a horse farm.

      I put my basket of homegrown tomatoes on the counter, and some fresh eggs in the fridge. I felt bad for Helen when she first saw the kitchen, and her a cook on a TV show. She tried to play like everything here was “quaint” and “charming,” but didn’t fool me none. I knew good and well that Emmet hadn’t told her how old-timey it was, or how Rosalyn wouldn’t change anything. Helen told me how she’d be trying out recipes for her new cooking show this fall, and how she’s writing a cookbook to go along with it. She sure won’t get much cooking done unless she fixes up this god-awful kitchen. Rosalyn didn’t cook because they either went out to eat, or had stuff catered from town. It’s obvious that Helen’s gonna be a lot different, but especially in the kitchen.

      Upstairs, I lay the wood in the marble fireplace of the master suite, then turn back the covers on the bed. The mahogany half canopy is draped in heavy old lace, and looks like it was made for the bride of Dracula. So does every other dark, ugly thing in here, including the wallpaper. Poor Helen was going to use another room until she saw this was the only one with a shower. She had a hard enough time talking Emmet into coming here, she told me with a sigh, to make him go down the hall to bathe. So she was stuck with it. After placing a vase of yellow dahlias on her night table—trying to brighten things up—I skedaddle out of there.

      Coming down the shadowy hallway, just before I get to the landing, it happens again. I’ve never told nobody, but there’s a reason this house spooks me. Even before Rosalyn died, I had some strange experiences here. I’d be by myself, maybe downstairs in the kitchen, and I’d hear something upstairs plain as day, clomping around. For the longest time I didn’t think nothing about it, so I’d go barreling up the staircase like a fool, thinking a squirrel or coon had gotten in. I never found a thing, not even in the attic. What was more peculiar, the noises didn’t happen for a while, and enough time went by that I forgot about them. I’d come and go without looking over my shoulder for shadows, or jumping at the least little sound from dark, empty rooms. That changed last year, after Rosalyn died. Her funeral was held at a big fancy church in Atlanta, but the next day, the family and her friends came to Moonrise for a smaller service. They wanted to bury her ashes in the garden she’d loved. I’d only been to burials in the cemetery, not a person’s backyard. But I was raised to pay my respects to the dead, so I went.

      The service turned out to be real nice instead of weird like I expected. They didn’t have a preacher, but Linc read a passage from the Bible and a pretty poem. Each of them said something nice about Rosalyn, then threw a handful of her ashes into the hole Noel had dug for that purpose. It’s way in the back of the gardens, beneath a magnolia that Rosalyn planted. When everybody finished, Noel refilled the hole, then put some rocks on the mound so it wouldn’t look so raw. Afterward, Emmet had a catered supper for everybody. I didn’t stay for that but came back the next day to straighten up. I was wiping the kitchen counters when I heard it again, upstairs in one of the empty rooms. Thump, thump, thump. That did it. I just threw down my dishrag and hightailed it out of there. And didn’t go back for several days, either.

      Since then, there was only one other time I thought I heard the haints, and that was the day I first met Helen. It was over a week ago now, the official beginning of the summer season. I’d been on the phone with Helen on and off all day, tracking her trip from south Florida to Highlands. She and Emmet were driving separately so they’d both have their cars up here, and Helen had a couple hours’ head start. She didn’t know Emmet’d asked me to be at Moonrise when she got here. A house that old had too many quirks for anybody to figure out on her own, he said, especially after such a long trip. So when Helen called to say she’d cleared Atlanta, I headed over here. No cleaning since I’d done so already, but I brought her a welcome basket and some zinnias from my yard.

      As I did earlier today, I’d laid a fire in the master bedroom and started down the hall when I heard a noise. Since I hadn’t heard anything strange here since the day after Rosalyn’s service, my knees went weak and my breath caught in my throat. I stood just short of the stair landing while a shiver ran up and down my spine. Oh, great, I thought. The new wife will be here soon, and who shows up to welcome her but those dad-blamed ghosts?

      That’s when I realized the noise was coming from outside the house, not inside. From where I stood on the landing, I could bend down and see beneath the stained-glass inset over the front door. And when I did, I felt like a pure-tee fool. A car was parked out front, behind my truck, and what I’d heard was the slamming of car doors. It was a little gray Honda, and a woman stood beside it, peering all around. She must’ve made that racket getting something out of the trunk. Even though it was a tad earlier than I expected her, the new mistress of the house had arrived.

      I remember how I watched her curiously, glad to have a chance before opening the front door and meeting her eyeball-to-eyeball on the steps. It turned out to be a stroke of luck,