Elisabeth scrambled off the bed to pursue the sound, but it ceased when she reached the hallway.
All the same, she hurried downstairs.
The small parlor, where Aunt Verity’s spinet was kept, was empty, and the piano itself was hidden beneath a large canvas dust cover. Feeling a headache begin to pulse beneath her right temple, Elisabeth checked the big, old-fashioned radio in the large parlor and the portable TV set on the kitchen counter.
Neither was on.
She shoved her hands through her already-mussed hair. Maybe her friends were right to be concerned. Maybe the divorce was affecting her more deeply than she’d ever guessed.
The thing to do, she decided after a five-minute struggle to regain her composure, was to get her purse and drive into Pine River for groceries. Since she’d left her shoes behind, she started up the rear stairway.
An instant after Elisabeth reached the second floor, the piano music sounded clearly again, thunderous and discordant. She froze, her fingers closed around Aunt Verity’s pendant.
“I don’t want to practice anymore,” a child’s voice said petulantly. “It’s sunny out, and Vera and I are having a picnic by the creek.”
Elisabeth closed her eyes, battling to retain her equilibrium. The voice, like the music, was coming from the other side of the door Aunt Verity had told so many stories about.
As jarring as the experience was, Elisabeth had no sense of evil. It was her own mental state she feared, not the ghosts that supposedly populated this old house. Perhaps in her case, the result of a broken dream had been a broken mind.
She walked slowly along the highway, gripped the doorknob and rattled it fiercely. The effort to open the door was hopeless, since the passage had been sealed long ago, but Elisabeth didn’t let up. “Who’s there?” she cried.
She wasn’t crazy. Someone, somewhere, was playing a cruel joke on her.
Finally exhausted, she released her desperate hold on the knob, and asked again plaintively, “Please. Who’s there?”
“Just us, dear,” said a sweet feminine voice from the top of the main stairway. The music had died away to an echo that Elisabeth thought probably existed only in her mind.
She turned, a wan smile on her face, to see the Buzbee sisters, Cecily and Roberta, standing nearby.
Roberta, the taller and more outgoing of the two, was holding a covered baking dish and frowning. “Are you quite all right, Elisabeth?” she asked.
Cecily was watching Elisabeth with enormous blue eyes. “That door led to the old part of the house,” she said. “The section that was burned away in 1892.”
Elisabeth felt foolish, having been caught trying to open a door to nowhere. She managed another smile and said, “Miss Cecily, Miss Roberta—it’s so good to see you.”
“We’ve brought Cecily’s beef casserole,” Roberta said, practical as ever. “Sister and I thought you wouldn’t want to cook, this being your first night in the house.”
“Thank you,” Elisabeth said shakily. “Would you like some coffee? I think there might be a jar of instant in one of the cupboards….”
“We wouldn’t think of intruding,” said Miss Cecily.
Elisabeth led the way toward the rear stairway, hoping her gait seemed steady to the elderly women behind her. “You wouldn’t be intruding,” she insisted. “It’s a delight to see you, and it was so thoughtful of you to bring the casserole.”
From the size of the dish, Elisabeth figured she’d be able to live on the offering for a week. The prospective monotony of eating the same thing over and over didn’t trouble her; her appetite was small these days, and what she ate didn’t matter.
In the kitchen, Elisabeth found a jar of coffee, probably left behind by Rue, who liked to hole up in the house every once in a while when she was working on a big story. While water was heating in a copper kettle on the stove, Elisabeth sat at the old oak table in the breakfast nook, talking with the Buzbee sisters.
She neatly skirted the subject of her divorce, and the sisters were too well-mannered to pursue it. The conversation centered on the sisters’ delight at seeing the old house occupied again. Through all of it, the child’s voice and the music drifted in Elisabeth’s mind, like wisps of a half-forgotten dream. Twinkle, twinkle…
Trista Fortner’s small, slender fingers paused on the piano keys. Somewhere upstairs, a door rattled hard on its hinges. “Who’s there?” a feminine voice called over the tremendous racket.
Trista got up from the piano bench, smoothed her freshly ironed poplin pinafore and scrambled up the front stairs and along the hallway.
The door of her bedroom was literally clattering in its frame, the knob twisting wildly, and Trista’s brown eyes went wide. She was too scared to scream and too curious to run away, so she just stood there, staring.
The doorknob ceased its frantic gyrations, and the woman spoke again, “Please. Who’s there?”
“Trista,” the child said softly. She found the courage to touch the knob, to twist her wrist. Soon, she was peering around the edge.
There was nothing at all to see, except for her bed, her doll-house, the doorway that led to her own private staircase leading into the kitchen and the big, wooden wardrobe that held her clothes.
At once disappointed and relieved, the eight-year-old closed the door again and trooped staunchly back downstairs to the piano.
She sighed as she settled down at the keyboard again. If she mentioned what she’d heard and seen to Papa, would he believe her? The answer was definitely no, since he was a man of science. He would set her down in his study and say, “Now, Trista, we’ve discussed this before. I know you’d like to convince yourself that your mother could come back to us, but there are no such things as ghosts. I don’t want to hear any more of this foolishness from you. Is that clear?”
She began to play again, dutifully. Forlornly.
A few minutes later, Trista glanced at the clock on the parlor mantel. Still half an hour left to practice, then she could go outside and play with Vera. She’d tell her best friend there was a ghost in her house, she supposed, but only after making her swear to keep quiet about it.
On the other hand, maybe it would be better if she didn’t say anything at all to anybody. Even Vera would think Trista was hearing things just because she wanted her mama to come back.
“Twinkle, twinkle,” she muttered, as her fingers moved awkwardly over the keys.
“My, yes,” Roberta Buzbee went on, dusting nonexistent crumbs from the bosom of her colorful jersey print dress. “Mama was just a little girl when this house burned.”
“She was nine,” Miss Cecily put in solemnly. She shuddered. “It was a dreadful blaze. The doctor and his poor daughter perished in it, you know. And, of course, that part of the house was never rebuilt.”
Elisabeth swallowed painfully, thinking of the perfectly ordinary music she’d heard—and the voice. “So
