The Diva Haunts the House Read online

  “Nonsense. That was nothing but a fluke, dumb luck at best. Must run, darling, so much to do!”

  I rubbed Daisy’s ears. “It was very generous of you to chase the person who attacked Natasha. Especially given the way she treats you. I know it wasn’t accidental.”

  Her tail wagged so hard that her hind end wriggled, and she panted a doggy smile at me.

  After lunch, we decorated like fiends for hours. By seven o’clock, we had accomplished more than I expected, and it was time to feed the troops again. I had anticipated being dog tired and had prepared pizzas in advance—the cheese, pepperoni, and slices of peppers arranged in jack-o’-lantern-style grimacing faces. All I had to do was pop them into the oven.

  Humphrey and Bernie headed to work. I felt guilty that they’d spent their free time laboring, but Bernie assured me that he enjoyed working at the restaurant during the evening hours, and Humphrey reminded me that morticians have to be available around the clock.

  The kids went home with me. Blake had already called his father and asked him to pick him and Jesse up at my place. I dreaded another encounter with Patrick. We walked the few blocks to my house, the boys constantly trying to spook the girls.

  We approached my block, and Jen held out her arm to stop us from walking. “Do you have company?”

  I didn’t. Yet candles flickered in my kitchen windows, the little orange lights around my front door glowed, and the three pumpkins that scowled at the base of the door had come alive in the dark.

  The kids clustered behind me, whispering.

  “We’ll protect you, Sophie,” said Jesse.

  “Maybe Nina wanted to surprise us?” But honestly, I doubted Nina Reid Norwood, my neighbor across the street and my best friend, would have gone to the trouble of turning on the holiday lights. My pulse raced as we crossed the street and walked toward my front door.

  FOUR

  Dear Natasha,

  My out-of-town cousin is coming for a pre-Halloween dinner with her five small children. I don’t have children, toys, or games. How do I keep her brood occupied while I’m cooking dinner?

  —Nervous Wreck in Sleepy Hollow, NY

  Dear Nervous,

  Keep those little hands busy! Set up a children’s table with a plain white cotton tablecloth. Tell the little ones you need them to decorate it for Halloween, and pass out nontoxic crayons. Swap it for a plastic tablecloth when they eat. After they’ve left, place a piece of waxed paper over and under each image, and apply heat with your iron. Present their original work to Mom and Dad as a gift. It will make a delightful keepsake.

  —Natasha

  As I grasped the door handle and pushed, my throat got tight. The front door opened with a creak, and the skeleton that hung from my foyer chandelier rattled, every bit as creepy as I’d imagined it would be. I let Daisy lead the way, but she didn’t appear to be perturbed.

  “Hello?” I called.

  I tiptoed inside, aware of the rich scent of wood burning in the fireplace. With Jen on my heels, I peeked into my kitchen. An elderly woman wearing cat ears and a costume of ocelot-spotted fur snoozed in one of the comfy chairs by a crackling fire, her feet up on an ottoman with Mochie, my Ocicat, nestled on her lap.

  “June?” I said it gently, hoping I wouldn’t scare my former mother-in-law.

  “Faye? Is that you?” she murmured.

  Oy. Faye was June’s deceased sister, and the previous owner of my house. Maybe June had been dreaming about her. “June! It’s Sophie.”

  She woke fully, flopped her feet off the ottoman, and set Mochie on it before rising to give me a big hug. “I hope you don’t mind, dear. You said I could drop by anytime.”

  I had said exactly that and had given her a key, too. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “That’s why I turned on the lights around the front door. A burglar wouldn’t do that.” She twirled around to show off her costume. “Do you know who I am?”

  She’d used makeup to skillfully draw an M on her forehead, along with cat whiskers and exotic eyes. “Mochie?”

  “For Halloween I have his jumping ability. I can leap to the tops of cabinets and sneak into rooms on silent cat feet. I’m agile and limber again.” She peered past me. “This couldn’t be Jen?”

  Jen had met June years ago when I was married to June’s son, Mars, which led to the inevitable my-how-you’ve-grown comments. If the light in the room had been stronger, I felt sure I would have seen Jen act embarrassed. Vegas clearly knew June, since she was living with Mars. I introduced the boys, but within minutes, the kids were engaged in their own conversation, excluding June and me.

  Although I was tempted to turn on more lights, the crackling fire and the candles offered a spooky ambiance that I enjoyed. I preheated the ovens and pulled spiderweb guacamole out of the refrigerator for munching on as an hors d’oeuvre.

  I shook tortilla chips into a basket lined with a black Halloween napkin and noticed that June was listening to the kids.

  “I have a scary story for you,” she offered. “A true story.”

  Even in the dim light, I could see their lack of enthusiasm. As though the spirits knew what she had in mind, the wind howled outside. June settled into her chair by the fire, which caused shadows to dance across her feline face. She didn’t wait for the kids to indicate an interest.

  “My sister, Faye, threw loads of fabulous parties here.” She pointed to the portrait hanging on the stone wall of the fireplace. “That’s Faye.” Candlelight flickered below the picture, casting an unearthly glow.

  Mars and I had inherited the house from Faye. When we divorced, I bought him out, so I was now sole owner. But it seemed right to honor Faye’s memory by keeping her portrait above the fireplace. Slightly risqué and incredibly romantic, the painting depicted her holding a pine-colored drape around herself with one shoulder bared.

  In years past, June had insisted she could hear Faye’s ghost in my kitchen. I wasn’t so sure about that, but my house qualified as a historic landmark and was over one hundred years old. If ghosts lived anywhere, it would be in the historic houses of Old Town.

  June continued. “It was the sixties and everyone was open to new things. Much more than today. We liked to say, ‘Anything goes.’ ” She flashed a glance my way. “I was never as adventurous as my sister, but I loved to come to her parties.”

  Jen and Vegas settled cross-legged on the floor, with Mochie and Daisy between them, enjoying the attention. The boys clustered by the food, munching.

  I put a pot of cider on the stove to warm, with a cinnamon stick for a hint of zing.

  “One of Faye’s regular guests was the very dashing Viktor Luca. He absolutely enchanted all the women. He spoke several languages, could discourse on any subject with astounding knowledge, and, oh my, was he handsome! Wavy dark hair brushed his shoulders. His skin was gossamer, as though he had never seen the sun, and his blue eyes bored into your soul.”

  “Like a vampire,” breathed Vegas.

  “You’re so smart, Vegas. He talked with an accent and spoke intimately of Paris, but we were fairly certain he wasn’t French. Viktor was on the guest lists of all the chic hostesses in Old Town. He was the life of every party. The only one who wasn’t completely taken with him was my husband, the judge. Viktor seemed to have an abundant source of money but he never worked, and he lived over at the Widow Nagle’s boardinghouse.”

  I chuckled. “Abundant money but he took a room at a boardinghouse?”

  “She called it a pension, like they do in Europe, to class it up. But my husband said the same thing. He never trusted Viktor—unlike the ladies in this town who enabled Viktor to live the high life. Plenty of widows asked him to travel with them as a companion. He went on cruises and tours around the world.”

  Viktor sounded like a gigolo to me. I poured hot cider into black mugs dotted with images of candy corn so bright they seemed to glow.

  “One night, Faye’s party broke up quite late, and Viktor offered to walk on
e of the guests, Peggy Zane, home. My husband and I stayed here with Faye, and we were all awakened in the morning when Peggy’s husband called to ask where she was. He’d been at a business meeting and had skipped the party. She never came home that night!”

  I handed mugs to everyone while June told her tale quietly but with dramatic emphasis. She’d definitely gotten the kids’ attention. The boys were so mesmerized that they’d stopped eating.

  “We went straight to the boardinghouse, and when the Widow Nagle unlocked Viktor’s room—he was gone. It was as though he had never been there. His clothes and all his possessions had simply disappeared. The bed was stripped, the mattress bare, the dresser and closets empty. There was no sign that the room had ever been rented. Even the trash can was clean.”

  Jen and Vegas sat up straight. “What happened to Peggy?” asked Jen.

  “They found her down by the Potomac River, completely hungover with no recollection of what had happened the night before. But she had two puncture wounds on the side of her neck . . . and she died three days later.”

  The girls squealed in fright and exchanged wide-eyed looks.

  I’d always enjoyed June’s company but had no idea she was so talented at spinning tales.

  “But that’s not the end of the story. You see, my husband prided himself on his ability to assess a man’s character. He was always suspicious of Viktor, and his sudden disappearance bothered my husband, so he did a little investigation of his own. The peculiar thing was that except for a few pictures of him, and an address in Paris that he’d given the Widow Nagle, we couldn’t find anything to prove Viktor had ever been here. No bank accounts, no post office box or mail, nothing that a regular person would have. Well, when my husband suggested we take a vacation to Paris, I wasn’t about to say no. He packed all sorts of papers to prove he was a judge and off we went. He thought Viktor was probably a scam artist, so we started at the police station. The young man there dismissed us as silly Americans and denied having any knowledge of Viktor. So we went in search of the address.”

  I leaned toward June. “Let me guess—it didn’t exist.”

  “Oh, but it did. It was the address of a cemetery.”

  Vegas and Jen screamed and clutched each other. Mochie leaped to the safety of the window seat.

  “We couldn’t believe it. It was such a spooky day, with a bitter wind and dark clouds roiling in the sky. We strolled in, and I was certain we’d come to the end of the road. Viktor probably never lived in Paris. And then we saw it—a mausoleum with Viktor’s name on it.” June sat back, apparently pleased by our stunned silence. “He had died one hundred years before.”

  The girls issued screams worthy of a horror movie. Although I’d been skeptical, a chill shuddered through me.

  “And he was here? Physically in this house?” asked Vegas.

  “Many times.”

  “Aw, come on. That didn’t really happen,” said Jesse.

  “Oh, my dear, but it did. Exactly as I told you.”

  Every one of us looked around as if we expected to see Viktor emerge from the shadows.

  We all jumped when the knocker on the front door sounded.

  “That’ll be my dad. C’mon, Jesse.” Blake rose from the table. “See you in the morning at the haunted house. Thanks, Mrs. Winston.”

  Jesse followed him to the foyer, still eating tortilla chips. I assumed his hand gesture meant “ditto for me.” I opened the door, hoping Patrick would be in a better mood. The man who stood on my stoop said, “I’m here to pick up Blake and Jesse?”

  The boys walked by him and out into the night.

  “Smells great! Thanks for taking care of them. I’m sure they would thank you, too, if they had any of the manners we try to drill into them.” He shouted the last part over his shoulder, as though he hoped they would hear. Smiling, he wiped his forehead in an embarrassed gesture, nudging waves of short toffee-colored hair into an unruly peak. He wore a Redskins jacket over a button-down shirt and jeans.

  “Blake was very courteous.” Who was this guy? I didn’t see any vampire partials in his hands, so I extended mine and said, “Sophie Winston.”

  “Dash Bennett, Blake’s dad.”

  I wondered if I should ask for identification. Blake was old enough to know his own dad, though. Surely he wouldn’t have waltzed out if this man were a stranger.

  Using two fingers, he gave me an informal salute. “I’ll drop him off at the haunted house in the morning.” He turned and hustled down the walk, leaving me to wonder—If that was Blake’s dad, then who were Patrick and Maggie?

  When I returned to the kitchen, I asked, “Does Blake have a stepdad?”

  “Nope,” said Vegas.

  A well of horror rose inside me. “Then who are Patrick and Maggie Starski?”

  Vegas tossed her long hair back. “Maggie is his mom but I think her last name is still Bennett, and Patrick is Blake’s albatross. He’s Maggie’s boyfriend. Blake hates him.”

  I could understand why. I enlisted the girls’ help in setting the table with shiny black plates. Before I left in the morning, I had thrown an orange tablecloth over the kitchen table. Anticipating the need for access to the pizzas, I skipped a centerpiece. Vegas added black napkins, and I pulled the hot pizzas from the ovens. As I ran a pizza cutter through them, I couldn’t help noticing that June had acquired admiring new friends. I didn’t often see preteens mesmerized by adults, much less anyone June’s age, but they peppered her with questions and hung on her every word. A considerable feat given that they usually weren’t interested in anything that wasn’t connected to a screen of some type.

  At my urging, and undoubtedly, the fabulous scents of oregano and baked pizza dough, everyone except June moved to the table and took seats.

  “June, will you help us with the haunted house?” Jen asked the question, but Vegas folded her hands in a pleading gesture.

  “I would love nothing more. I’d also like to stay for dinner, but I’m told I must make an appearance at the grand party across the way,” said June. “Better get it over with.”

  I saw her to the door. “Sophie, dear,” she said, “do you still have those boxes up on the third floor? The ones that belonged to Faye?”

  I was a little bit ashamed to admit that I’d neither gone through them nor cleaned them out.

  June was ecstatic to hear that. “Marvelous. It will be like a treasure hunt through the past.”

  She walked out into the night. I could hear voices and car doors around Natasha’s house and hoped June would enjoy herself.

  When I returned to the table, Viktor continued to dominate the conversation.

  Without warning, Jen screeched, “It’s perfect! Our resident vampire at the haunted house has a name—Viktor. That makes it so much more real, doesn’t it? It’s a boardinghouse, run by the witch. What would a witch call a bed-and-breakfast?”

  “A Dead and Breakfast,” suggested Vegas with a giggle.

  “A Coffin and Cauldron?” Jen laughed.

  After dinner, the girls watched a DVD of old Vincent Price movies while assembling little packets of candy corn for the haunted house visitors. I washed the dishes and cleaned up, planning to join them.

  Mochie, his tummy full of sliced ham from the deli, sat by the window, no doubt interested in the sounds emanating from the party. He perked his ears and peered out the window on alert.

  If Daisy hadn’t run to the front door and scratched at it, I never would have heard the knock. Someone rapped on the door down low, and not very hard, but with a rat-a-tat urgency.

  I didn’t see anyone through the peephole, but Daisy’s enthusiasm gave me the courage to open the door. I hoped it wasn’t some sort of ugly Halloween trick. Holding onto Daisy’s collar so she wouldn’t barge out, I swung the door open just enough to see a little boy dressed as a devil.

  “Gabriel Hart! What are you doing out by yourself?” I reached for his hand, peering outside for his father, Frank, or his mother, Anna. Surely
the little three-year-old hadn’t walked over from his house by himself at this hour of the night.

  He willingly took my hand but refused to enter the house. He tugged at me, saying, “There’s a bad man outside.”

  FIVE

  Dear Natasha,

  I’m throwing an adult Halloween party. I’ve looked at invitations, but they’re all cheesy or babyish. I think the invitations should set the tone for the party. What can I do to make them chilling?

  —Frankenstein’s Wife in Scary, West Virginia

  Dear Frankenstein’s Wife,

  Bathe your card stock in a tea bath. Let dry—it’s okay if it wrinkles a little. Run through your printer with a chilling scene involving a noose or a dagger, and your spooky invitation details. Then carefully char the edges with a match.

  —Natasha

  “Honey, it’s Halloween. Lots of people have scary decorations. Let’s go inside, and I’ll call your mommy.”

  “No! It’s the bad man.” He held his ground but appeared to be on the verge of tears.

  I hoped nothing had happened to Frank. After all, there had to be some reason Gabriel had turned up by himself. “Okay. Come in for one second while I get a leash for Daisy.”

  That must have sounded reasonable to him, because he ventured inside and bravely waited for me to pull on a vest and snap a leash on Daisy’s collar. Vegas peered around the corner and gushed about the cute little devil. Jen promptly joined her, and the two girls made a huge fuss over Gabriel. A good thing, because the commotion probably caused him to forget about the bad man he’d seen.