The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House Page 4

  He shuddered.

  The Messerman girls were now weird creatures, able to turn themselves at will into birds of the air. They had always been coldhearted, picky, flighty. Now they were demons sure. Nobody ever stands still. But this—this—

  “Yer a disgrace,” he grumbled in his beard, “to all decent pigeons.”

  THE STRANGE LADY ON THE FRONT PORCH

  When she saw the lights on in the Swansons’ kitchen, Maureen felt relieved. This meant dinner was not over yet. How big was the trouble about her at home? She had her own way of finding out.

  Softly she opened the screen door of the back porch, tiptoed to the kitchen door, opened it only just so far, and pushed one arm through. She always did this. If there was a loud angry outcry from inside at the sight of her arm, she turned and ran and hid in the neighborhood, waiting and watching from behind something while her father and mother, big brother and sister went searching, calling her.

  “Maureen! Maureen!”

  When it was safe, she would run into the house, take off her clothes, climb into bed, and pretend to be asleep.

  When they came back and found her, Mrs. Swanson would say, “Look at her. She’s sound asleep. She’s worn out. I’ll talk to her in the morning.”

  If the trouble was small, her mother would see the sweatered arm thrust through the kitchen door and sigh wearily. “I see you, Maureen. Come on in and get washed for dinner.”

  She said this tonight, and so Maureen was walking across the kitchen floor when her dad, reading the sports page in the breakfast nook, said, “Where have you been?”

  “Oh—nowhere,” she answered.

  He would not drop the subject. “Why did you turn the hose on Mrs. Moody?”

  “She called me a brat,” Maureen shouted.

  “Mrs. Moody called you a brat?” Mrs. Swanson’s voice was shocked and indignant. “She didn’t tell me that.”

  Henry, fourteen, and Diane, sixteen, now came into the kitchen. The television was blaring in the living room.

  Henry pointed an accusing finger at his younger sister. “Maureen turned the hose on her first,” he told his parents. “We saw her, didn’t we, Diane?”

  Diane nodded. “You must do something about her, Mother.”

  “You shut up.” And Maureen raised her hand and ran toward her. Mr. Swanson caught her by the arm.

  “You are a brat,” said Henry.

  “Don’t quarrel, children.” Mrs. Swanson was carrying the plates into the dining room. “Someday you will be thousands of miles from each other.”

  “Goody, goody,” Maureen shouted, and ran from the room.

  —

  That night, at dinner, Mrs. Swanson remarked, “You’re not eating, Maureen.”

  How she laughed and laughed. “Not eating Maureen! How can I eat—myself?”

  Nobody else laughed. It was best to ignore her.

  Then she asked suddenly, “Did anybody ever live in the Old Messerman Place?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Swanson exchanged glances.

  “That’s no place for you to play,” Mr. Swanson said. He held up the fingers of one hand and knocked down each finger with the forefinger of his other hand as he listed the reasons why not.

  “First, you could fall in that pond and get drowned or you could fall off one of the stone balconies and maybe break a leg or you could get splinters in your hand from one of those rotten old boards and maybe come down with an infection, or you could break one of those windows and get us hauled into court by the heirs.”

  “By the hairs?” Maureen was indignant. “Nobody better haul me no place by my hair.”

  “Quiet,” warned Mrs. Swanson. “Daddy has the floor.”

  Maureen thought this was a silly thing to say. Daddy had an ear of corn and he was eating it.

  “Besides all that,” Diane said, “everybody says it’s haunted.”

  Mrs. Swanson was studying Maureen. “You didn’t go in there when you ran away, did you?”

  “Me?” she laughed. “I did not.”

  “That’s good.” Mr. Swanson reached for the salt. “Because you’d be punished if you had. I’ve told you never to go in there.”

  —

  Mrs. Swanson was serving the dessert when the doorbell rang. Mr. Swanson opened the door and said, “Good evening.”

  They saw a tall woman standing in the shadows of the front porch. She was wearing a suit with a long coat over a long skirt and an enormous black velvet hat with a drooping yellow plume. They could hear her saying, “Do forgive the intrusion.”

  “Care to step inside?” Mr. Swanson held the door open.

  “Thank you, no,” she answered. “My family is waiting for me.”

  He looked past her but could see no one. A flock of pigeons fluttered above the Smiths’ porch across the street.

  A harsh voice rang out in the house. “Hands up. I got a gun on you.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the woman cried out, stepping back.

  Mr. Swanson laughed. “That’s the television. Maureen is watching a Western upstairs.”

  “A bracelet, priceless, was taken from our garden this afternoon by a child whom I followed up the street and saw turning in here.”

  Mr. Swanson called up the stairs. “Maureen, you come down here right this minute.”

  When Maureen saw the woman standing on her front porch, she felt a hot feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was Ingrid and she was staring so hard at her.

  “That’s the child.” She nodded. Then she added, “Ugh.”

  “Beg pardon.” Mr. Swanson was puzzled. “What did you say?”

  “She,” the woman went on, “took it from the garden at the Old Messerman Place.”

  Now if Ingrid had not said “Old Messerman Place,” Maureen would have run upstairs, reached into the pocket of her sweater, hurried back down, and said, “Here. Here’s your bracelet,” and laid it in her hand.

  But when she said “Old Messerman Place,” Mr. Swanson’s face got stern and Mrs. Swanson’s forehead creased with deep frowns.

  “You did go there?” she asked Maureen.

  “You’ve disobeyed me,” said Mr. Swanson.

  Maureen shouted, “I did not. I was not.”

  The woman on the porch was speaking in a low, well-modulated voice. “If my bracelet is returned, there will be no questions asked. If it is not”—and here she pulled down the brim of the big hat daintily—“there could be—unfortunate consequences.”

  Then she was gone. She was gone so suddenly it was as though when she stepped into the shadows cast by the trees near the walk, they had swallowed her up. Mr. Swanson looked up the street, expecting to see her walk into the light of the streetlamp at the corner. Mrs. Swanson looked in the other direction, thinking she might have walked to that corner to the bus. The sidewalks were empty. The woman in the old-fashioned clothes had vanished.

  Mrs. Swanson was clearing the dinner table later that evening when she stopped suddenly and exclaimed, “Dad, look at that!”

  He was reading the evening paper in the living room.

  “There she is again, across the street, by the Smiths’ porch.”

  He got up and looked out of the window. “That’s not a woman. That’s a tree by the Smiths’ porch.”

  “Not the tree—next to the tree,” she insisted, “between the tree and the house.”

  “Sure is,” he nodded, “and what’s she doing there, standing like a tree?”

  Henry came in through the front door, his eyes wide.

  “It’s real weird,” he told them, “that woman across the street. She keeps saying over and over, looking over here, ‘Gimme my bracelet. Gimme my bracelet.’ Listen to her.”

  They listened. In a monotone, low-pitched, over and over she repeated, “Give me my bracelet.”

  “You’d better have a talk with Maureen,” Mrs. Swanson decided as she shut the door. “There’s something about this I don’t like.”

  —

  Maureen, lying on her
stomach on her bed and reading a copy of “Catman,” had not noticed the three pigeons fluttering on the sill of her bedroom window. Even when Mr. Swanson came into the room, sat down on a little chair, and began to talk, she did not look up from the comic.

  “I’ll never forget,” he began good-humoredly, “when I was a kid and a man came to our house and said I’d broken his window. I said ‘no.’ I lied.”

  Now Maureen raised her head. “So, what did they do to you?” she inquired with mild interest.

  “Nothing,” he answered. “They believed me, and the man went away. But in here”—and he held his hand by the pocket on the left side of his shirt—“there was a lot going on. In my heart I knew I’d lied and I lost my self-respect.”

  Maureen said nothing. Then he asked quietly, “Maureen, have you got something you’d like to tell me?”

  She nodded, put down the comic, and stood up. The pigeons on the windowsill didn’t make a sound.

  “Okay.” Mr. Swanson leaned back in the chair. “Let’s have it.”

  “I need a new light for my bike,” she told him. “Delbert Moody gunched my bike light. He stinks.”

  Mr. Swanson laid a dollar bill on the dresser and left the room.

  She went now to her clothes closet, out of which she took a red sweater, found the feathered bracelet, and tried to slip it onto her wrist. It wouldn’t go.

  The pigeons cooed, flapped, and fluttered noisily on the windowsill. Maureen opened the window.

  “Coo-coo yourself.” She flapped her arms like wings. “Shoo-shoo.” They flew away.

  —

  “Look there.” Mrs. Swanson was pointing at the garage as she stood in the backyard. “Come out here, Dad, and look at these pigeons. See them? They’re sitting there like painted or stuffed pigeons.”

  Mr. Swanson agreed. “Never saw pigeons act like that before.” He lifted his arms and waved them back and forth. “Shoo-shoo.”

  The pigeons did not move. Their beady eyes looked into his steadily.

  “Look there,” Mrs. Swanson said as she pulled at his shirt, “look what’s going on at the side of the house.”

  There stood Ingrid, looking up at Maureen’s bedroom, her purse clutched in her hand. She was speaking through her teeth, in a monotone, saying over and over, “Give me my bracelet. Give me my bracelet. Give me my bracelet….”

  “Who’s got what bracelet?” Mrs. Moody, next door, asked as she walked out on her porch, followed by Mr. Moody and Delbert.

  “Nobody.” Mr. Swanson crossed the lawn to speak to them. “The woman must be some kind of a nut.”

  Ingrid, hearing this, turned on her heel and walked rapidly across the yard and through the gate and down the alley.

  Mrs. Moody couldn’t believe her eyes. “Don’t you know who that is?” She looked after her. “That’s one of the Seven Slinky Sisters.”

  “The Seven Slinky Sisters?” Mrs. Swanson was astonished. “Who are they?”

  “She and six other women dressed in funny old clothes like that shoplift pretty things in the stores in town. The police followed them once and saw them tossing things over the wall of the Old Messerman Place. Then they just disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Mr. Swanson’s voice was puzzled. “How?”

  Mrs. Moody didn’t know.

  “All I know,” she went on, “is when they try to find them, they can’t, and they can’t find any of the things in there when they search. They watch and watch outside and nobody ever goes in there or comes out—except pigeons.”

  “That place is haunted, people say,” Mrs. Swanson reminded her.

  “It’s weird, whatever it is,” Mr. Swanson agreed. “And Maureen better never go anywhere near there.”

  Maureen didn’t intend to go there. The next morning she carefully fitted the pigeon-feather bracelet into the sole of her shoe, between the bottom and the lining, planning to toss it over the wall of the Old Messerman Place on her way to school.

  But she forgot.

  THE HORSE-DRAWN CARRIAGE

  That afternoon on the way home from school it began to rain. By the time Maureen was halfway home the rain turned into snow. She shivered, bowed her head against it, and ran.

  An odd sound made her raise her head and look up. It was a clop-clop sound. She stepped back just in time as a shiny black carriage drawn by two gray horses moved in front of her.

  A man with a whip in his hand, wearing a high silk hat and a long black coat, sat up high on a seat, and another man with a high hat and long black coat stood on a little step behind. Between them swung the black shiny body of the carriage. There were faces inside, but she couldn’t see them clearly. What was that? She had never seen anything like it before except in picture books and movies. She ran after it.

  Then she heard a clanging sound and saw two wide iron gates closing behind her. She pushed against them. They didn’t move. They were locked tightly and they were so high. She remembered the gates at the Old Messerman Place, but she had never seen those without the boards behind. Those were rusty, but these were shiny black. Where was she?

  She turned as she heard voices, and although there was now a thick curtain of snow, she dimly saw that people were getting out of the carriage and going into a big lighted house. Then the horses pulled the carriage away from the house and it rolled around the driveway toward her.

  The man sitting up high with the whip had a thick mustache-like fringe. There were snowflakes on it. His face was red and his nose large. He was laughing now at something the man next to him was saying. This man had stood before on the step in the back of the carriage. They both saw her.

  “Whoa,” called the driver to the gray horses. “Whoa there.”

  They stopped. The driver leaned over. “What are you doing here,” he asked her, “in this storm—half dressed?”

  “You’ll catch your death,” said the second man.

  She didn’t answer. And she didn’t know her mouth was open until she felt the taste of snowflakes on her tongue.

  “Come into the stable and get warm,” the driver said. Then he cracked the whip and the horses moved forward clop-clop-clop. Maureen followed them into a big brick building. There were stalls full of hay on one side and more hay in bins at the other side.

  The men were taking the harnesses and bridles off the horses. The horses were tossing their manes and stamping their hooves. When they saw Maureen walking in, the men said gently, “Steady, girl, steady.”

  “Stand there by the stove,” one told her, and pointed to a big round stove in a corner. It had a chimney and a bright metal skirt at the base. She had seen stoves like this in movies, too, and men with high hats like that and long coats like that in movies or old books. But she thought it was all “in the olden days” and nowhere around anymore.

  “Where do you live, child?” one man asked her as he led the horses out of the shafts.

  “331 Beach Street,” she told him.

  “Beach Street?” he repeated, puzzled. “Never heard of it. Must be in some other neighborhood.”

  “You’re lost,” the second one told her.

  “Go to the kitchen door and ask for Nora. She’ll take you home.”

  “Kitchen door? Where is the kitchen door?”

  “There.” And they pointed to a path outside the carriage house that stopped at steps leading up to a white wooden, screened-in porch.

  She ran up the path against the snowflakes, but when she got to the door she stopped and looked around. She felt strange and timid.

  The men called out to her. “Go on, knock on the door,” they shouted. Then one of them said, “Nobody’s gonna bite you.” And they both laughed.

  As she was raising her fist to knock, the door was opened and there stood a young woman wearing a long white apron over a long gray skirt. She had a puffed white starched hat on her head.

  “Bless my soul,” she said, and smiled. “Come on in and out of the storm—quick.”

  Maureen looked around the kitchen;
big, warm, bright, cheerful—but different. There was no breakfast nook. The walls were painted yellow, the sink was shining like silver. The floor had blue and yellow linoleum. It made her think of something. She tried to remember something. The sink reminded her—of what? The young woman was pushing a high stool toward her.

  “Sit yerself here,” she said, smiling, “and I’ll be bringing yez a glass of warm milk. It’s like a drowned rat ye are.”

  She poured milk into a little pan, took it over to the stove, lifted the round black iron lid with a lever, and poked down inside. Maureen could see red-hot coals.

  The young woman laughed. “Look at ye,” she said. “Didn’t you never see a coal range before?”

  Maureen shook her head. “Only in an old house once.”

  “Have some cake.” The maid handed her a plate with a piece of chocolate cake, a fork, and a neatly folded linen napkin. Maureen didn’t want it and she didn’t know why.

  “No, thanks.” She backed away. “I’ve got to get home.”

  “Where do ye live?”

  “I live at 331 Beach Street.”

  She was like the men in the stable. “Never heard of it. Ye’re sure that’s it?”

  Was she sure? Of course she was sure. She wrote it on every school paper: Maureen Swanson, 331 Beach Street.

  “Wait here and eat that cake,” the maid said as she smoothed out her apron, “and I’ll ask the Missus where that is.”

  She left the room and Maureen followed her, holding the door open to see where she’d gone.

  She gasped as she looked. It was so beautiful. Great, high-ceilinged rooms with lace curtains and velvet draperies tied back with gold ropes, a hall with a wide staircase going up, up, up. On the landing stood a tall grandfather clock with a round silver face and a long pendulum. This landing! It made her think of something, too. There was a landing on the stairs like that at the Old Messerman Place, but that was dirty and dusty. She looked into a big room with satin-covered sofas and chairs with gold legs, a black marble mantel where a fire burned, a handsome chandelier with candles, and a shiny black grand piano by the window. On the piano were two silver candelabra with five candles each. She tiptoed into the room and stood behind the piano. There was sheet music on it. One piece said: “Wait ’Til the Sun Shines, Nellie.” Another said: “Moonlight Sonata.” She could play chopsticks. She touched the keys now.