Coming Out (young adults)

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COMING OF AGE.  COMING TO TERMS.

History and modern culture cosmically clash in this lighthearted tale of deception and breaking-away where the fates of two remarkable young women fall into the hands of one remarkably meddlesome ghost.

 

A novel for young adults embracing their sexuality and facing the challenges of coming out to their family, friends, and community. From the author of the critically acclaimed LGBT series THE SECRET TRILOGY: Three Novels. Two Women. On Epic Love Story., a life-affirming adventure for the young, the young at heart, and anyone in between.

 

 

PERSUASION

 

“I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” — Zhuangzi (369 BC)



 

 

 

 

Chapter One

~ THE LETTER ~ 
 

Jessica Wheeler arrived in the world over nineteen years ago. Nineteen years, forty-seven weeks, three days, one hour, nine minutes, and a few passing seconds.

“Jessica? Where are you?”

Born in the middle of October, she was a Libra, just like her mother was, and like her mother’s mother as well.

“Jessica?”

At five-foot-five-inches tall and approximately 120 pounds, she was, also like her mother and maternal grandmother, at last fully grown now. And, despite her current dyed-black hair, which was slowly growing out, her roots revealed that she had been born a brunette too, just like her mother and her grandmother had been before their hair had turned to silver.

“Jessica…?”

As a matter of fact, everything about Jessica Wheeler, above her skin and beneath it, except for that rose tattoo on her ankle, was identical to those two women. Indeed, it could be said that all three of them were far more the same than they ever could be the opposite, even if they tried—allowing, of course, for the obvious disparity between their ages and eras, and, now and then, a stark difference of opinion.

“Jessica!”

The same height. The same weight. The same brown hair. The same heart-shaped face and dimples. The same pug nose. The same hazel eyes with yellow specks and skepticism in them. The same full, red lips permanently pouting.

“Jessica Louise Wheeler, answer me this instant!”

The same sneer.

“Jessica, I know you can hear me!”

From where Jessica Louise Wheeler lay this bright sunny morning, face down on the dewy lawn, she could, she thought, if everyone would kindly just shut up, hear everything.

And that was because, today, she was actually listening.

She could hear the birds singing above her and the grass sighing beneath, the leaves chatting on their trees about turning color, the seasons discussing a change again, the days–growing ever so slowly shorter–grumbling, the muffled sound of a booming bass from the neighbor’s house down around the bend of the cul-de-sac, her brave heart belligerently beating.

She could hear the kitchen window slide up with a sudden jerk and her mother whispering loudly through the screen, her voice drowning out the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings.

“Jess-i-ca,” Mom scolded, in that firm but beseeching tone of hers.

A few yards from Jessica, amid the stench of gasoline and mashed grass, the overheated engine of a hopelessly stalled lawnmower tsked, tsked, tsked at her, its maxed-out metals echoing a similar-sounding disapproval.

“Yes, Moth-er.”

“Jessica, please…you’re embarrassing your father.”

Poor Jessica’s father was embarrassed by his daughter.

Again.

“Good,” Jessica replied without lifting her head, without even lifting a finger. “I’m glad.”

“What’d she say about me?” she heard him ask from the breakfast table.

But her mother didn’t answer him. “Come on, Jessica,” she pleaded. “The neighbors are watch—”

“Screw the neighbors,” Jessica muttered into her shirtsleeve. “I ran out of gas anyway.”

Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk…

“What was that, Laura? What’d she just say?”

“Uh…she says she’s run out of gas, honey. The mower’s got no—”

A chair scuffed rudely across the tile of the kitchen floor and then, “That’s a bunch of baloney,” Jessica’s father snarled through the window. “You’ve been promising me all week you’d do the mowing. Now you get up off the ground and finish what you’ve started,” he ordered. “I’ve had just about enough of this—this—”

This was the whistling mailman heading up the driveway.

“This bullcrap,” her father managed to squeeze out before slamming down the window.

“Well, a good morning to you, Jessica Wheeler,” the postman said, cheerily oblivious to the discourse he was temporarily interrupting. “I see you’re keeping the lawnmower company today.”

Jessica turned over and sat up. “Good morning, Ron,” she answered, pulling modestly at her sweatshirt which had ridden up to partially expose a small pad of baby fat she still had on her belly.

She was, in public, very self-conscious about that baby fat. Self-conscious about a host of other things, too, which she had gradually begun to realize was quite silly. “What’s going on?”

“Got yourself another certified letter. Need your John Hancock right here.”

Another piece of certified mail this week. Shit.

The sun was shining directly into Jessica’s eyes now and she winced. She shielded them with one hand and looked up at the mailman apprehensively. “From the school again?”

“Nope. This one looks to be a love letter. Yep, that’s what I’m willing to wager it is, a certified I-love-you addressed to one ‘Jessica Wheeler at 284 Maple Lane’. Going to sign for it?”

A certified love letter for Jessica Wheeler at 284 Maple Lane? Oh-my-god. She knew, without asking, who that had to be from.

Jessica shot a glance toward the kitchen window, relieved to see that no one was there now.

“Can I get your signature?” Ron the postman repeated, his bald head glistening in the sunlight.

“Yeah,” she said. “Got a pen?”

He produced a pen and Jessica hurriedly signed for her special delivery.

“Hey there, Ron,” Mr. Wheeler said, erupting from the house like a cannonball. “Another school bill is that?”

“Oh, I couldn’t say for sure, Mr. Wheeler. I just deliver the mail, I don’t really look at it, you know?”

Jessica folded the mysterious missive in two and quickly shoved it into her back pocket.

“Anything for me then?” scowling Mr. Wheeler asked, eyeing both the postman and his daughter doubtfully. “A big fat check perhaps, to offset all of my sudden but not-so-unexpected losses?”

“Sorry, there’s mostly junk here, I’m afraid,” the postman replied, handing him a stack of mail bound together with a wide, red rubberband.

“Mostly junk—yeah, he doesn’t look—you might as well toss it over here, Jess, if that’s another notice from the school.”

“It’s not another notice from the school, Dad, so just forget about it.”

“Well, you all have yourselves a nice day then, folks,” Ron said, retreating back down the driveway.

“Just forget about it, she says! Then I know who it’s from. You don’t even have to tell me.”

“Oh, you know who it’s from. But you know everything, don’t you? I wish I could be as smart as you are, Dad. As smart as ‘Mr. Wheeler Dealer’ is. Say it then. Who’s it from?”

But, of course, this letter—or rather the letter writer to be more specific—is what they had just argued about last night, and then again this morning over breakfast, and last week during dinner, and so on and…so Mr. Wheeler just sidestepped the issue for the moment and wagged his finger at his daughter, “Yes I am smart, young lady, so you just watch your—”

“Did I forget to put gas in it, honey?” Mrs. Wheeler asked, appearing out of nowhere it seemed and offering both father and daughter yet another of her awkward rescue attempts, hoping against hope that sooner or later they might be persuaded to accept one, that they too might be awfully tired from all this endless bickering.

It was so pointless and depleting.

“I must have forgotten to refill it the last time I used it,” she lied. “Before I put the thing away.”

“Nah, that’s not the problem,” her husband snapped. “I know there’s plenty of gas in the tank. As a matter of fact, I can smell gas all over the place because she’s gone and flooded it.”

“It stalled on me, Mom, and wouldn’t start again. I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

Mr. Wheeler blew air through his nose. “What’s wrong with it—you didn’t empty the bag, that’s what’s wrong with it! You choked it to death. Probably burned out the engine in the process. Do you have any idea what this mower cost me? This is a very, very expensive lawnmower, I’ll have you know. Cost more than that—that two-bit boyfriend of yours two-bit wreck he dares to call an automobile, that’s for sure.”

“Now, honey,” his wife interjected.

But her husband was on a roll: “That pencil-necked, sissy, pipsqueak. Seven-thousand buckeroos, Jess, that’s what a lawnmower like this costs a man. And then you just go and destroy—”

“Seven-thousand bucks, whoop-tee-doo!” Jessica mocked. “Seven-thousand bucks, everybody! Did everyone hear that?”

“Now, darling,” her mother interjected.

But her daughter was on a roll: “C’mon, Mom, really, what kind of an idiot would pay seven-thousand dollars for a freakin’ lawnmower, I’d like to ask?”

Mom wouldn’t speculate.

“What kind of an idiot?” Mr. Wheeler volunteered, his face and neck beet red. “I’ll tell you what kind of an idiot. The same kind of idiot who throws away twenty-five grand on your freakin’ college education, that’s what kind of an idiot. And now you don’t want to go to school. Now you don’t want to be a teacher. Now you don’t want to be anything but on that damned computer or the cell-phone day and night. Twenty-five grand down the toilet!”

“Al, let’s not flog a dead hors—”

“I should have known better than to let you talk me into sending you to that private college. All the things you wanted to be that you never finished. Gymnastics, soccer, cheerleading, piano lessons, guitar…college, teaching. All that good money down the drain, and then that—that boyfriend! And now the bum has the nerve to sneak you a letter. I’ve had it up to here, Jess. I really mean it! What do you want to be when you grow up? Penniless? Homeless? That’s a plan!”

Across the street, the Joneses were pulling out of their driveway. They cruised slowly by the Wheeler residence, their windows rolled all the way down, listening to the Wheelers going head to head with each other.

Yet again.

Jessica brought her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, and rested her chin with an emphatic sigh. “Just fix the mower for me, Dad, so I can finish the lawn today.”

“Fix the mower, Dad. Fix this, Dad. Fix everything for me, Dad. Why don’t we just ask your hotshot handyman to come and fix it for us?” he asked. “Handy, my foot, that’s why. Didn’t know a spark plug from the goddamned hole in his—”

“Honey!”

Jessica only smirked at the insult.

Her father was not wrong about that part of his litany, she would have liked to inform him. Although, for real, he didn’t even know the half of it. No, not by far he didn’t. Or he’d drop right in his tracks!

All those pretty little lies she’d bought, hook, line and sinker, followed by all those sweet little confessions she’d eagerly devoured one by one like chocolate kisses. Each small revelation slowly and steadily inching its way toward the absolute truth of it all. A big truth. A HUGE truth. Riotous and rollicking. A stand-on-your-hands, kick-up-your-feet, and laugh-out-loud kind of truth. A you’ll-never-believe-what-happened-to-me truth. A full-fledged, bona fide, bubble-busting, life-will-never-be-the-same-again truth. Shocking, yes, it was pretty shocking, and still so sublime.

The letter, that unhandy “handyman’s” love letter, signed, sealed and certified, was burning a hole in Jessica’s pocket. She looked up guiltily at her mother and tried to wipe the smile off her face.

Mrs. Wheeler shook her head in dismay at the two of them. Squabbling. They were always squabbling. Since the kid was at least eight or nine. She had thought perhaps they would grow out of it, that their relationship would somehow progress, but she was wrong. In fact, if anything, they were fighting more than ever. Especially since that boy had come around. Come around and then, one day, abruptly departed, leaving her daughter frazzled and aloof, morning, noon and night.

Such an unusual fellow that one had been. So very different from Jessica’s other boyfriends, from the jocks she used to date, those soon-to-be-respectable young men, those men’s men as her husband called them, rich and powerful and assertive. That was the only type of male her husband ever approved of, that he both hated and admired, that he both envied and emulated, that he wanted his only child, a headstrong daughter, to marry someday.

No, this oddball, pretty-boy that Jessica had fallen in with last year, that she had fallen in love with last year, he couldn’t stand the kid. Always picked on the poor guy and hounded him mercilessly for petty little things: his ponytail, his pencil mustache, his old car, his questionable finances. Finally drove him away with all that nonsense.

Or so had been the plan. So it had seemed to everybody.

It was an unfortunate affair, Laura felt, and it made her sad all of these dealings, but things had somewhat settled down these past few months since that boy was out of the picture. A fragile truce of sorts had developed between her husband and her daughter. Yet now there were strange doings afoot again, dropping out of school without notice or explanation, the pouting and moping, and, of course, there was this curious letter too, with her husband all but hyperventilating over it.

“You’ve got to watch your blood pressure, Al,” she cautioned him. “You know what the doctor said.”

At that reminder, the somewhat delicate subject of his health, Albert Wheeler took note of his daughter’s changed expression and then shrugged, momentarily satisfied that he might have finally won a round with her, or at least regained some lost ground in their long drawn out battle. “My blood pressure’s fine,” he fibbed, steadying himself against the lawnmower.

He knew his wife was right, naturally, because he could feel his pulse pounding hard against his temples, his blood red-hot in his veins, his heart racing.

“Al…?”

“Doctors and teachers,” Albert murmured, wiping the sweat from his brow with a shirtsleeve. “Aw, the hell with it,” he said, in resignation. “Where’s the key to this?”

The key was in Jessica’s pocket.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

~ THE KEY ~

 

The key to happy child-rearing is to simply resign to the fact that some children are naturally going to be easier to raise than others, and that some kids are just born to be a hassle.

Take Zoe Boice Summerfield, for instance.

Zoe was a perfect baby who rarely cried or fussed and never caused her father any trouble whatsoever in her formative years, which was lucky for a man who knew more about the needs of exotic animals, reptiles, and acrobats than those of an infant child. Especially an infant girl child.

Lucky Horatio Summerfield.

Lucky in most things anyway.

The name Horatio, however, regardless of how well it may have suited the man, was not Horatio Summerfield’s real first name. He had changed it to this from something a lot more commonplace, something with a far less theatrical ring to it.

There were some cynics in the world who, when they discovered this little-known fact about Horatio, accused him of being pretentious because of it, but pretense was hardly the motivation for his distinguishing alias, because, thinking in terms of mass appeal, which Horatio always did, it was more than obvious that HORATIO SUMMERFIELD’S THREE RING CIRCUS & BIG TOP sounded a great deal more compelling than, say, DAVE’S or DAVEY’S might have.

On the other hand, as names go, Zoe was always Zoe Boice Summerfield’s real first name. Although she too, in time, but for a much different set of reasons, would eventually answer to other things.

Still, in the grand scheme of it all, that’s not so strange either. Not for girls, it isn’t.

Girls do change their names sometimes.

“Girls are difficult,” widower Summerfield’s closest friends and advisors had warned after the unexpected (and singularly unlucky) death of his young wife left him with a toddler to bring up all on his own. “A boy might be able to manage okay without a mother,” they all agreed, “A girl, however…well…a girl will just go wild on you.”

But, while Horatio was constantly on guard for that awful possibility, it never happened with his Zoe. Zoe Boice Summerfield was anything but wild. As a matter of fact, Zoe Boice Summerfield was a mild child and, as a result, her father’s pride and joy.

In his frequent boasting about her, there were many things that Horatio attributed to the highly agreeable demeanor of his golden and only child, not the least of which was “good breeding” and a “first-rate sire.”

Nannies helped too, though. As well as topnotch tutors, private schools, and scads and scads of money, money, money.

But the most important thing of all was keeping that kid away from the circus. A circus was no place for a young lady of substance. There were clowns under the big top, shysters, phonies, loose women, and con men.

Horatio went to extreme measures to keep his Zoe a great distance from the place, and so it was that, in all of her youth, she had not been there even once.

Of course, a prudent ringmaster can refuse to take his child out to the circus, but this won’t necessarily guarantee that he can take the circus out of his child.

 

Chapter Three

~ THE WINDOW ~ 

 

“Well, what do you want to be when you grow up, dear? Just how are you going to spend the rest of your life? I can’t honestly say that that’s such an unreasonable question, especially in light of your current caper.”

That was two whole weeks ago and Jessica was working on it, but she still didn’t have an answer for her grandmother.

“But, Nana,” she’d protested at the time, “maybe I don’t want to be anything when I grow up. Maybe I am grown up now and this is who I am, or all I am to become. What I mean is, maybe I’m just me, you know? Nothing major, just some ordinary person. Just somebody who’s…well, what would be so wrong with that? What’s wrong with just…just being?”

Nana, Jessica’s grandmother on her mother’s side, smiled knowingly at this declaration because it sounded to her so distantly familiar. And not solely school-related either. “You’ve shared this theory with your mother?”

Jessica shook her head. No, she hadn’t. Not yet anyway.

Actually, Jessica had been on the lam that first week, hiding out at her grandmother’s house till she could get her thoughts together and her story straight. Neither her parents nor the school, nor, for that matter, any other interested party, knew of her whereabouts then. She would continue to hang out at Nana’s in secret like that for five full days, mulling things over in her mind as she hid, and filing away snippets of Grandma’s free advice for future reference, should she ever need it.

Jessica had picked her grandmother’s place for a refuge because it was peaceful there and she could trust Nana.

Mostly.

After a week, however, her grandmother had handed her an ultimatum: Go back to school and finish out the semester, or go home to Mom and Dad and face the heat there.

Jessica was through with the collegiate experiment. It was all a load of crap, the same as if she’d never left home to begin with. Money this, money that. Making Money 101, Advanced Money, History of Money, Current Affairs and Money, Art and Money…

“Jessica?”

Why were people so wrapped up in making money?

“Jessica…?”

Wasn’t there anything a person could do with their life that didn’t involve being the richest or the best?

“Jessica, why don’t you come on inside till he has the mower fixed? You’ll get yourself a good case of Lyme Disease lying out there like that.”

Jessica turned over in the grass. She couldn’t see her mother through the glare on the windows, but she figured she was standing behind the one in the kitchen again, waiting there for a “civilized” response from her. “There’s no ticks out here, Mom,” she finally answered. “What’s taking him so long anyway? I know I didn’t break the stupid thing.”

Dad was still struggling with his Cadillac of a lawnmower. There were loud clashes and clanging coming from the direction of the garage and an occasional cuss word. Or four. Jessica knew not to offer her father any assistance when he was in a mood like that, when her name was at the very top of his SHIT LIST.

Yes, all in capital letters.

The bedroom window on the second floor slid open and Jessica peered up at it, squinting and surprised.

“Then please put some socks and shoes on, sweetheart,” her mom said. “They can smell you thirty feet away, I read online.”

The deer-ticks, Jessica presumed with a chuckle, not the neighbors!

She wasn’t wearing socks and shoes, she was wearing platform sandals, so her feet and ankles were now plastered with a layer of freshly-cut blades of grass, the tips of her toes stained a light, pukey shade of green.

And her mom, snoopy Mom, was in her bedroom.

Sherlock Holmes Mom.

Nancy Drew Mom.

James Bond Mom.

Miss Marple Mom.

“Hey, I found your sneakers in the clos—”

“Okay, Mom. Don’t worry about it, huh?”

There were no clues in the bedroom for her mother to accidentally stumble upon. There were no clues in the dresser, no clues under the bed, no clues hidden in the closet. Nothing. The mystery was, for the most part, all inside her, in such a jumble at the moment that even Jessica was having difficulty deciphering it.

Solving it.

As she must do.

Somehow.

Sooner or later.

The rather hasty, not well thought out, and incredibly impulsive decision about terminating her “higher education” in pursuit of…well, in pursuit of happiness, wasn’t quite final yet, although it was clear that her parents would much rather see her take a leave-of-absence from school than to outright quit and waste all those credit hours and, not incidentally, all of Dad’s “hard-earned money” while she was at it. This seemed practical, even to Jessica, but she had missed a major chunk of this new semester’s classes already, and, in all of her brief academic career, significantly more time than just these past two weeks, something she’d failed to mention to her parents.

What good a leave-of-absence would do her now, in light of those qualifying circumstances, Jessica wasn’t too certain.

Promising as an alternative to take some courses at the local community college in order to appease her parents had been totally lame of her, she realized, and she truly regretted such an offer to compromise because, in reality, going to college was simply out of the question for her right now. It was the least important of the many important issues at hand, issues with which she was, at least so she had thought until this morning, finally making some headway.

But then there had come this short and sweet letter.

“I found some clean socks up here, too,” her mom called out. “I’m going to throw them down with your shoes, so heads up.”

“Great idea,” Jessica said, sitting upright and pulling her cell phone out, then issuing a rather curt but cordial, “Thank you, Mother,” when her sneakers, complete with gym socks tucked into them, landed with a thud in front of her.

Two voice-messages this morning.

The first one was from her best-friend Annie. Good old, treacherous, EX best-friend Annie: “Oh-my-god, Jessie. I think I just saw you-know-who with Miss Thing again. What’s up with that, I want to know? Call me back right away!”

And the other one, she saw by the number, was from you-know-who: “But I love you so,” a garbled voice said tentatively.

Jessica took a deep breath and held it for a while in her center.

She had, of late, and of necessity, outgrown her childhood friend Annie Parinella. Annie was a troublemaker and, Jessica only recently discovered, quite two-faced as well, wooing her confidence for the sole purpose of betraying it, of publicizing her deepest secrets, making what surely must be an otherwise unimportant life somehow more important with back-stabbing and gossip.

Permanently stuck in a time-warp somewhere between the catty ages of twelve and fourteen, that girl was doomed, Jessica firmly believed now. Well on the path to becoming a mean old woman someday.

This epiphany took place probably around the same time that Jessica had learned the actual identity of the woman you-know-who was sometimes seen with. Miss Thing.

Of course, this new knowledge made an already strange relationship even weirder to Jessica, so, for a combination of the above reasons, it was highly unlikely that she would bother to return Annie’s call, or ever attempt to fully explain the situation to her.

As to you-know-who. Well…

“But I love you so.”

“But I love you so.”

“But I love you so.”

“But I—Jessica turned the phone off, embarrassed.

It was perhaps embarrassing, should just anybody happen to overhear it, her dad for instance, but she had to admit that this ardent I-love-you-so was exactly what she had always wished for. A boy who would talk to her like that, with both fervor and flourish. The sensitive type. A true gentleman. Devoted, doting, romantic, and intelligent. Someone who could recite poetry and quote famous prose to her, and send flowers and chocolates without having to be asked to.

And that’s exactly what she got, wasn’t it?

Oh, god, Jessica thought in retrospect, hiding her face in her hands and feeling duped, torn, and ridiculous. How could I have been such an idiot? There could never be a boy like that!

“All right, the matter’s been resolved,” Albert Wheeler announced, dragging the lawnmower victoriously behind him and then depositing it, efficiently enough, in the exact same spot he had taken it from, beside his barefoot daughter. “But what a friggin’ mess you made of it,” he had to add. “FYI, you’re not supposed to mow damp grass, Jess, and certainly not without emptying the bag every few minutes.”

All right, all right, all right—the climbing sun was beginning to slowly drain her of what little energy and enthusiasm she’d had for the project, and there was something she was thinking she might do later—so let’s get this show on the road, folks.

“Jessica, please put those shoes on!” her mother whined, once more in the kitchen.

“I am, Mom. I am. You can see me doing it.”

“Fine. And both of you, come on in first and have your lunch. It’s lunchtime.”

Jessica shot a pained look toward the house. It was the longest day of her life already. And getting longer by the minute.

 

Chapter Four

~ THE HOUSE ~ 

 

Many a kid has an invisible friend, but Zoe Boice Summerfield has a friend who can be invisible. That’s about the only thing that Millie can do, however, because she’s dead.

. . . . . .

Before he had even laid eyes on Hillgrove House twenty years ago, Horatio Summerfield had become enamored of the old mansion, because, he’d been informed, there was a ghost on the premises.

Not that he himself, a “professional charlatan” by trade and well-versed in the art of strings and mirrors, actually gave such tales any credence, of course…

A haunted house, haunted grounds, haunted everything, Hillgrove was not the place for the faint of heart and it went without saying that, due to its alleged supernatural features, it had become a realtor’s worst nightmare. This, Horatio’s advisors quickly realized, helped to explain the bargain price of the estate and its fairly dilapidated condition. As to whether there really was a ghost hiding somewhere in it, that they couldn’t confirm, but then a ghost wasn’t the issue that actually scared them.

“It’s a dump,” they reported, upon a thorough physical inspection. “A money pit. A disaster. A white elephant.”

Which was no exaggeration.

But a haunted house complete with lore and legend was the only thing missing from his repertoire, Horatio had ultimately decided; and (he was convinced at the time) it would be a welcome distraction from the run-of-the-mill circus melodramas that had begun to bog him down daily. Not to mention the unwanted burden of a recent and terrible personal tragedy.

That is to say, disastrous investment or not, the horror stories and warnings about Hillgrove House only served to make Horatio Summerfield want the old boarded-up estate more than ever. Besides, he successfully argued, with the asking price just under $500,000, even if such yarns were true, even if Hillgrove turned out to be infested to the rafters with phantoms and ghouls, the place was nevertheless a steal, what with all that accompanying land it had as well, sixty-five-plus wooded acres bordering on a prehistoric pine barren.

So, with no other bidder to have to compete against, he arranged to purchase the historic New England property virtually sight unseen, had it renovated, decorated and staffed, and then, without any further ado or debate, set the date-certain for occupancy.

Thus it was almost two years to the day of his wife’s untimely death, the middle of a brisk October, that Horatio, with their three-year-old daughter perched high atop his shoulders, stood at last in the great halls of Hillgrove and announced to its ethereal inhabitant, wherever the illustrious specter might have been lurking at the moment, that they had finally arrived and intended to live there in peace with it.

Permanently.

“So come on down, ghost, and meet your new family,” he had nonchalantly called out. “What’s left of us anyway,” he’d added softly for Zoe’s sake, though he wasn’t too certain if the little girl fully understood yet all the tumultuous events that had transpired up until that point.

Whatever Zoe’s interpretation of things may have been at the time, the concept of a haunted house, insofar as it being something novel and entertaining, she did seem able to grasp.

“Ghost, ghost!” she had screeched with glee that day, ecstatically kicking her feet against her father’s chest and laughing. “Ghost, Daddy, ghost!” she giggled, pointing wildly in all directions.

The much-touted ghost was a no-show, however, just pure fabrication that Horatio could tell; the subsequent thirty or so incident-free days and nights at Hillgrove leading him to draw the quick conclusion that he’d purchased a rather paltry poltergeist, if indeed there was one to be found at all anywhere in the mansion.

But with a ghost or without a ghost, permanence was ultimately what Hillgrove would have to offer the Summerfield gypsies. For even though it had been abandoned more than three decades and its buildings and grounds long before then woefully neglected, the house itself still stood as plumb as when it had first been erected in 1843, and, despite its grand size and fifteen foot ceilings throughout, it was nonetheless “inexplicably comfy and cozy,” as Horatio would in the ensuing years come to fondly describe it. “Far superior accommodations within which to raise a toddler than hotel flats and circus caravans.”

To be sure though, because of the constant demands of owning and operating a circus big top and a grueling annual international touring schedule, the only truly permanent resident of Hillgrove would turn out to be young Zoe herself―Zoe, the tutors, the domestics, the gardener, and one Millicent Ida Parsons, the now-you-see-her-now-you-don’t haunt who actually had full run of the estate in the absence of its perpetually wandering master.

Oh, how it would have pleased that absentee master to no end if it had been he himself who’d first encountered Millicent, but, as fate would have it, it was one of his less enthralled and more hapless employees.

Or to be precise, just one of what would become an endless string of staffers who, lured by the excellent pay there, had tried to overcome their initial squeamishness about working at Hillgrove, only to flee it in fright soon after arriving. Each one citing the exact same reason in their hastily-composed farewell addresses: THAT GHOST.

It was with this remarkable rate of attrition at Hillgrove that the once vague and worn out rumors of it being possessed got a second life, the stale tales of its haunting rapidly giving way instead to new and very specific sightings. And it was these updated anecdotes, more than anything, that helped to revitalize the community’s lapsed interest in the big house on the hill, conjuring up fresh speculation about it and old gossip.

After that, thrown about for mass consumption, there were as many “solid” theories concerning the ghost as there were people theorizing. All of them dead wrong.

But, as to the real reason that the restless soul of Millicent Ida Parsons would be roaming Hillgrove in the first place, this was not very clear historically speaking. Deeds to the property did not reveal anybody by the name of Parsons as having even a miniscule legal stake in the estate, let alone a significant owner’s share, as inferred by the specter’s extremely overbearing manner with the house-help and her exceptionally imperious persona.

Further, as the more stoical and inquisitive members of the staff were astonished to discover, records maintained in the Hillgrove private library were so meticulously kept that they actually listed former employees as far back as the year the ground had been broken for construction, yet these too provided no hint whatsoever as to the spirit’s unusual relationship to the house, and what on earth might have caused it.

The physical substance of the legend apparently long lost, but its surly subject steadfastly remaining, Hillgrove’s determined staffers even went so far as to scour the public library for clues about her and to consult with local senior citizens and historians. But this sleuthing too proved futile because not a single individual they interviewed had ever heard of a Millicent Ida Parsons, and, while the Parsons surname itself wasn’t exactly unique to the area, the experts all verified that no such person had ever resided anywhere in the county.

Nor, for that matter, anywhere in the state.

It was these final revelations that gave rise to the strong suspicion among the Hillgrove staff that the person who had divulged the specter’s identity, Zoe herself, may have been embellishing the tale somewhat, livening it up with a child’s runaway imagination. Or else, if not the case, then being so young at the time of her disclosure, she might have simply misunderstood the ghostly mumblings and relayed the wrong name to everybody.

But mix-up or malarkey or whatever, a ghost by any other name is still a ghost, and everyone could agree that, without fail, this one always answered to “Millie”.

Horatio’s response to these developments, when he finally caught wind of them on location in Europe with his circus, was a combination of both delight and disgust. He was thrilled to learn that the presence in his house was the real thing, with a real name no less, and not merely an overblown myth. On the other hand, the prospect of having to replace skittish employees on a monthly basis he found “immensely inconvenient,” as well as alarming with respect to his daughter’s long term needs which could not be served properly, he insisted, if the people in her life were to be so timid and transient. Something that, by the ninth month of the Summerfield’s residency, was proving to be the case.

“Now listen up,” he’d endeavored to lecture his staff on an emergency overnighter he had hastily scheduled in order to somehow address the deteriorating situation. “To begin with, allow me to make one thing perfectly clear: a ghost is not the same as a zombie or a werewolf or a vampire,” he attempted to assure them. “Now, those kind of chaps you have a darn good right to be afraid of. They’ve got the power to suck your blood, eat your liver, and gnaw your limbs down to the bone, if you’re not vigilant. If you let your guard down with them,” he teased, winking good-naturedly at his Zoe.

Zoe had grinned at her father’s jesting, but the weary and wary staff, especially those who resided there full-time, weren’t amused in the slightest.

These professionals Horatio had retained for the daily operation of the mansion were townies for the most part and, aside from the odd and inherently unpleasant matter of a ghost amongst them, there’d also hung in the air that all-important, yet-to-be-answered question of whether they even liked their eccentric new employer, having met him face-to-face only a handful of times and, at this conjecture, knowing only that he was a filthy-rich entertainer from abroad who had a very sweet little daughter.

As to judging the man’s merits by his charming offspring, everyone who met her was enchanted with their small charge but, for all they knew, that pretty cherub might have been the only redeeming quality a man like Horatio Summerfield, with his slick manners and foreign ways, actually possessed. Certainly they viewed him in a harsh enough light as it were “to have orphaned the poor child twice” with his long and protracted absences, and for leaving her care in the hands of utter strangers.

And in the company of an obnoxious spook.

They fidgeted where they stood assembled. The place should be exorcised is what they believed and had seriously recommended, but they held their tongues so their employer could continue.

“Unlike zombies or werewolves or vampires, there’s nothing substantive to a ghost.” Horatio told them. “It’s just a wisp of a thing. A suggestion of life, at best. A nuance of it. A nuance is just a…well, a nuance is just a nuance, my friends. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that it—the ghost—has no real power.”

Naturally, there were some among his workers who, having witnessed Millie’s talent for intimidation themselves, would’ve begged to differ with him on this point, but still they remained absolutely silent, perhaps out of politeness, or perhaps hoping that an actual night or two in the house now that the spirit had been “stirred up” would correct their employer’s rather cocky and misguided perspective.

“Now you just take a look at this little sprite here. Even my baby girl isn’t afraid of an apparition. Are you, Zoe?”

Zoe heard her name mentioned and shook her head, unsure of the question. “Millie’s afraid of vacuum cleaners,” was all she said.

Horatio paused long and hard at that declaration, and the eyes of the others in the room grew wide.

“She doesn’t like loud music, either,” Zoe added in a reproachful tone. “Anita played loud music when she vacuumed. Millie says she fired Anita because she was a…a menace.”

Horatio gave his daughter a quizzical look.

“What’s a menace, Daddy?”

“Well, Zoe, a menace is a…is…who is this Anita person?” he asked the staff.

“She was the second floor maid, sir,” someone answered. “She quit this week, if you remember.”

“Oh. I see.”

Horatio did not recall the name of the worker who had quit that particular week, but evidently it had been Anita, she was a maid assigned to the second floor, and she’d gotten on the wrong side of Millie.

“Yes, of course. Anita. It was Anita who quit us then,” he said, looking that instant more perplexed than vexed, as if he might be searching for a sentence from what he’d thought had been a well-practiced speech, or that he had just misplaced his cue-cards. “All right then. So that’s that and Anita’s gone and she played loud music when she vacuumed and it’s finally making some sort of mad sense to me, I think. In any event, to press ahead with the matter now before us—and I’m going to have be perfectly frank with you people, so please do pay attention—it seems more than obvious to me, upon my full investigation, that there is a relatively benign presence in the mansion and that you are empowering this ghost of mine with your unfounded fears of it. In short, that you’re unwittingly enabling Millie to scare the dickens out of you whereas she could not do so otherwise because, as I’ve just explained, she is completely powerless in that arena.”

The staff sighed and hmmphed in unison, but Horatio only ignored this.

“So that is why I have crossed the pond to meet with you tonight,” he said. “That is the purpose for my calling you all together. Because this just won’t do, you comprehend me? Won’t do at all, I say, and I want you all to understand that I don’t give a toss for this sort of nonsense, this mass hysteria you’re flirting with. Accordingly, I want it dispensed with and I do mean immediately. I’m sure you can probably guess without my having to say this that I am a very, very busy fellow, and with so few moments of leisure available to me I simply do not have the time to be flitting to and fro in order to be interviewing potential employees every other weekend, and all because allegedly a ghost is…uh…because a ghost is living in my house and occasionally acting unruly. This has become untenable,” Horatio added, as sternly here as he could affect. “It just won’t do, people, and I won’t entertain it. So I am directing you, collectively that is, to disregard Millie as best as each of you are able to and, in general, to simply think of her and to treat her as you might any living member of my family, or even a guest of mine, if you will. Albeit a rather difficult one, I’ll grant.”

Hmmph.

“Yes, well…that is what I have decided for us then, that is the plan, and henceforth these will be your instructions and the policy and procedure as well for whenever I am to be away from Hillgrove. Now…does everybody present understand my directive?”

There was a low murmur of protest from the group and Zoe took advantage of the interruption to ask one more pertinent question.

“Daddy,” she said, in a tiny voice. “What’s a ghost?”

 

Chapter Five

~ THE TREES ~ 

 

Everyone who lived in Maple Crest or who was familiar with that exclusive neighborhood speculated that the row of trees that flanked both sides of its Maple Lane, and those in the woods that partially surrounded the circular development, had to be at least four or five centuries old, judging from their enormous height and width. In reality, however, they were not quite two-hundred-years-old, having been just a grove of saplings at the time that the original road, which included the part now known as Maple Lane, was first established in 1843 for horse and carriage.

Initially engineered without Maple Crest in mind, before housing developments like Maple Crest ever even existed, this route resembled more a path than a real road, slapped together as such to convey cargo and houseguests from the bustling village of Mapleton several miles below to the newly-built mansion which was (and still is) situated at the very top of the hill.

The work of a pair of highly-industrious siblings, the Boregard Brothers Inc., their hilltop mansion and their well-traveled, makeshift “thoroughfare” reigned supreme well into the twentieth century as two of the most prominent and important landmarks in the region. That is, until both were eventually dwarfed by the vast woods around them and by the advent of the automobile which, unlike horse-drawn rigs, required a gentler course upon which to operate and many more miles to explore than the Boregards’ rocky, winding path and perilous offshoots had to offer.

In the mid 1950’s, as America began allocating hundreds of millions of dollars for the purpose of modernizing and streamlining its national infrastructure, an ambitious highway project dealt the final blow to the Boregards’ supremacy, diverting their rustic road at the junction near present day Maple Crest and relegating the dozen or so homes already concentrated in that vicinity at the time as a mere adjoining cluster to the immediate right. This bypassed the mansion above those houses completely, an act done not only to connect the ever-growing village of Mapleton more conveniently with other neighboring municipalities, but to pave the way for an orderly expansion of residential construction and businesses along the entire distance that stretched in between.

Although well beneath that smooth pavement today there still lie a few remnants of the Boregards’ handiwork, formerly known as Mountainview Pass, the hallmark bends, bluffs and boulders, and the rugged ascent to the mansion majestically towering at the summit, are no more. Replacing all that is a lengthy straightaway unsentimentally identified as Route Seven.

Whether traveling it now for business or for pleasure, there can be no doubt that modern Route Seven is a much smoother and safer excursion to embark upon, but if in 1843, by horse and carriage, you had braved the original road’s crude course from its starting point down into the then-small village of Mapleton, perhaps to stock up on some provisions at the General Store or to conduct other important business on Main Street or even to catch a train or a stagecoach to the capital city a full twenty miles to the south of it, you would have had an unbroken view along the way of meadows, woodlands, streams, and farmsteads.

That same journey that might have taken hours back then to complete by single horsepower only takes a few easy minutes by automobile today, but the views on both sides of the now-four-lane highway—views of shopping malls, parking lots, gas stations, condos, fast-food joints, discount motels, drive-through banks, and all-night convenient stores—are anything but bucolic.

The once quaint village and the rolling hills and fertile flats that led to it, even the creek itself that served as a natural boundary line, are barely recognizable features on the modern day landscape, all having been altered to some degree in order to sustain and maintain one of the longest commercial strips in one of the largest commercial districts in the country.

Asphalt and plastic, concrete and faux brick, and miles and miles of industrial complexes, these are the things that come to mind now whenever anyone mentions Mapleton, these have become its landmarks, treasures, and monuments.

With its posh burbs and commerce creep, sprawling Mapleton stands proudly and totally transfigured in the current century, in its own right the brightest star in the evening sky. Which is, coincidentally, exactly the way its founding fathers had always envisioned it would be, and forever the way the affluent citizenry of Mapleton had wished it to remain.

Yet even so, time and tides continue to advance bringing different sensibilities with each new generation, and each fresh wave that arrives invariably leaves a different mark upon the land, causing it to change.

But never without a bit of controversy at first.

Or resistance.

 

Chapter Six

~ THE TOWN~ 

 

Community gardens and small parks have begun springing up in Mapleton over the past few years. Like the one inconspicuously wedged between the commercial giants Wadmart and Burger Queen, and another situated downtown which not only touts park benches and picnic tables made of recycled plastics and a bike path of sorts, but a scenic view of the cement factory, the atomic research facility, and the old rail station as well.

These enhancements come courtesy of some relatively new and well-organized transplants to the area, working in concert with a growing number of likeminded locals, both groups staunchly allied in seeking to install a little more flora and fauna on their hard, harsh horizon, and a lot less blacktop and neon.

Tufts of native grasses in the village square, potted trees and sunflowers in supermarket parking lots, hanging baskets flowering from the lampposts on Main Street…“Going green is nice” the powers-that-be of Mapleton were, at first, only too happy to publicly agree. In fact, going green is the “popular thing to do” they acknowledged, and going green “when done in a small way” can even be “good for business.”

But this year their sneaking suspicions and worst fears have come to be realized, as there are now more strenuous attempts at setting back the region’s environmental clock. The most threatening of these: sweeping proposals for restrictions on land developers and their client corporations.

The strategy of placating citizen activists was proving to be “nothing but pure folly” politicians and business leaders have started rigorously griping behind closed doors, as all the while they’d been acting so amenable to the environmentalists’ “whacky” ideas, the dreaded Green movement had taken root in their community, spreading through it like a virus.

Now, hordes of townspeople were following the trend, calling for the implementation of an aggressive eco-friendly public policy, demanding a moratorium on new buildings and subdivides, passing around petitions for designating wetlands and forever-wild status on certain choice and misused tracts of public land, and organizing various efforts to protect the endangered species which still clung to these dwindling habitats, even if it meant, in some cases, trespassing on privately owned lands.

And in that same vein the proposed controlled burn of the ancient pine barren, in hopes of revitalizing its more natural and forsaken ecology, was becoming the final straw for public officeholders and city planners, and the most contentious proposition yet.

A scourge of wasteland as far as officials saw it and one they’d been undertaking to “control” for decades through targeted development, the pine barren will never burn, they rebuff at every heated town meeting these days. “The pine barren will just inevitably give way to progress and disappear.” An unwavering stance which, for it being so blatantly in-your-face and inflexible, was only serving to further polarize Mapleton, and which has recently led to a lot of rather ugly hyperbole and name-calling, including charges of cronyism, conflicts of interest, and political corruption.

Citizens against politicians, neighbors against neighbors, family members against family members—from a social aspect, there is probably nothing more unpleasant than to live and work every day in a place divided against itself, nothing more discomforting than suddenly being forced to pick a side and surrender up the cloak of indifference and neutrality.

It has boiled down to just that this year: having to finally decide between the visions and values of today, versus Mapleton’s rigid and somewhat outdated Master Plan.

Predictably, the town’s conservative faction are urging everyone to “stay the course.” After all, they argue, the founding fathers of Mapleton had been singularly driven by commercial ambitions for their fledgling community, and not with preserving and protecting the environment or the various creatures who lived in it. They had, at all times, one single-minded sense of Mapleton’s manifest purpose and destiny: to produce material wealth, and loads of it. A goal that had obviously been achieved and which, they stressed, was essentially irreversible now.

And on this point, the entrenched traditionalists were not exactly wrong either, because wealth and economic stability, in the early 1800’s when Mapleton was first incorporated, equaled railroads, factories, mining, and timber. And the inevitable byproduct of those pursuits was a permanently altered American landscape, together with an offspring hardwired to compulsively and endlessly expand upon it, irrespective of the consequences to wildlife or nature.

For a boomtown like Mapleton these industrial activities, and the philosophies that fueled them, were crucial to its ultimate success, to creating and perpetuating a prosperous legacy and the highest standard of living attainable.

Accordingly, the people of Mapleton built. And then they tore down. And then they built again. Their town, their economy and their population growing larger and larger in the process, and the wilderness all around them steadily losing ground.

The high-end, residential neighborhood known as Maple Crest, despite the stately appearance that the large old maples lent it, was, as with many similar communities in this area, a fairly new housing development, having only been in existence for approximately fifty years. However, most of the homes in Maple Crest were nowhere near fifty years of age, having sprung up on those well-manicured, one-acre plots only in the past few decades.

Such was the case with the Wheeler’s impressive residence at 284 Maple Lane, which the Wheeler family had purchased and moved into almost twenty years ago to the day, on a brisk October morning...

“I started out with nothing, Jess. If you don’t believe that then just ask your mother here. Not one red cent,” Albert Wheeler emphasized to his daughter all throughout a tense lunch, swallowing large chunks of his un-masticated sandwich and spewing bread crumbs across the table as he talked at her and let her in on the “cruel reality” out there that he had tried so hard to protect her from. This, not incidentally, was the same cruel reality that he’d probably told his daughter about a million times already, the concept of which she just couldn’t or wouldn’t buy into. “Zilcho, Jess, that’s what I had when I started out and look at me now, three dealerships and clearing nearly a million per in sales!”

“Al, you’re going to give yourself heartburn eating like that,” his wife warned.

Jessica had lost her appetite and her soup had gone cold. The last thing she wanted to do was talk about cars with her father, new, used or whatever. She rose quietly to leave the table.

“Where are you going?” Albert demanded. “I’m not done talking here yet.”

“I have to finish the lawn now, and then I think I might just go barf up someplace.”

“Do you hear this stuff?” he asked, gesturing to his wife for sympathy. “Sit down, Jess, till I’ve finished what I’m saying—sit down I said!”

At the sound of his bark Jessica automatically sat down again. “You treat me like a child,” she complained under her breath. “Like I’m only five years old or something.”

“You act like a child.”

“Only when I’m here.”

Albert fell silent, considering the possible truth in his daughter’s statement.

Laura whisked the plates away.

Jessica drummed her fingers in agitation on the tabletop, smacked her sneakers together loudly, and huffed.

When Albert finally spoke again his voice was low and earnest. “Look, Jess, I just want what’s best for you. I don’t want you to suffer, to be without like I did when I was a kid, like your mother had to before we got married. College, fine, the hell with it then—I didn’t go to school—but that boy, you gotta believe me, Jess, I ought to know. A high school dropout? Just forget it. And he doesn’t even try to get his GED so he can get a decent job somewhere down the line? Tell me something, how do you think he’s going to support you without a high school diploma or his Equivalency? Huh? Have you ever bothered to ask yourself that one? Has he even? Of course he hasn’t. He’s a bum, that’s why. A total loser to the nth degree.”

There’s something else I have to tell you, Jessica. I’m a…I lied about flunking my classes.

“So tell me straight, what’s happening with him now, Jess?” Albert grilled. “I thought you said it was over with, that we weren’t supposed to even speak his name again?”

I never even went to public school.

“Huh? What’s going on, Jess? I’m your father and I think as your father I have a right to know the answer to that.”

But there was way too much to say, so she said nothing instead.

. . . . . .

“You know, Al, my family ab-so-lute-ly hated your guts,” Laura said, standing at the sink and watching Jessica make yet another halfhearted attempt at the lawn and trying to determine if her sneakers were tied and what her daughter could be thinking about with that faraway look in those hazel eyes of hers, the real meaning of the sullen girl’s picked-at sandwich and neglected bowl of soup. “Especially, as you might be able to recall, my parents.”

This, his in-laws’ dislike of him, their outright hatred, Albert knew only too well, so he thought that Laura was joking by mentioning it and just scoffed at the remark. “How’s the mower running?” he asked her. “Is she still struggling with it?”

Yes, her daughter was still struggling. Laura sighed and turned around to face a thick-headed husband. “It seems to be working okay now,” she said. “Did you hear me, Al, that they hated you? That they told me they found you too common and…and somewhat crass?”

“Well, I don’t know about common—ha ha—but I am somewhat crass,” Albert laughed, defiantly standing up and grabbing his wife around the waist in one of his bear-hugs. “And this crass sonofabitch turned out to be a friggin’ millionaire, so what do you say to that?”

“Mmm,” was what Laura said to that.

“Mmm—that’s all? Mmm?”

“Mmhmm, Al, you sure did. Congrats on your mega millions, honey.”

“Congrats on my mega millions is damn right. So what does your family have to say about it now, about all my moola, I wonder? Zilcho, that’s what. And boo, hoo, hoo, too, with wads of humble pie dripping off their big, fat, frowning faces! To hell with them.”

“Now, Al…that’s not nice.”

“Now Al nothing. I didn’t do too bad for an illiterate plumber’s son from ‘Joisey’ if I must say so myself. And I guess I must ‘cause your people sure as hell will never admit it. Will they?”

Laura smiled impassively. It was her policy to let him toot his own horn if and when he wanted to. He didn’t need her help or approval for that. And she knew nobody could blow it better than Albert did anyway. He was a hopeless braggart.

“You think that’s true, Mrs. Albert Wheeler, that I’m too crass?”

Mrs. Albert Wheeler shrugged. It did not bother her in the least bit if her husband was indeed crass and common. Nor would it have mattered to her if he’d ended up poor really, as he had been when they’d first met and started secretly dating. Rich or dirt poor or somewhere in between, money wasn’t why she married him. “I’m clueless as to how I’m supposed to answer that one,” she laughed. “Why don’t you ask me something easy instead?”

“Ha, ha. Okay, then tell me how come they still hate my guts so much? Is it my dirty fingernails, perhaps? They still think you married a knuckle-dragger, babe?”

That was only one small part of it. Laura coughed at his bluntness before replying, “There were other issues besides your being an auto mechanic that they objected to, Al. You know perfectly well what they were concerned about, so I’m not going to discuss it with you again.”

“Oh…you mean that poor, little bugger Fred?”

“Honey.”

“Fred, the freeloading, impotent fruitcake of a dink—how dare I breakup such a perfect marriage, huh? Me just a grease-monkey home-wrecker and him, with his lame dick and no balls, the ideal son-in-law. Poor friggin’ Fred. Waaaah.”

Her first marriage to Fred had not been a perfect one, but even so, “He was not an impotent fruitcake, Al. He was just sterile from getting the mumps as a young man. There’s a significant difference between being impotent and being sterile, Mr. Know-it-all. Why don’t you spare me the embarrassment of explaining it to you and go look it up for yourself?”

“Yeah, yeah. Sterile, whatever. He’s a bum.”

“A dentist, Albert, is not a bum.”

“A dentist, Laura, is not a multimillionaire, so he’s a bum in my book. And—laugh my ass off—I stole that bum’s wife right out from underneath him while he was too busy with his nose in his medical books studying, and that makes me feel even richer!”

Despite herself Laura chuckled at this irreverent and somewhat over-simplified account of their affair and her resulting divorce because of it; her subsequent remarriage to a man her family deeply resented, even now.

Perhaps though Albert was right to joke about it like this. Perhaps after all these years it was finally funny. Especially since everything had worked out okay for everyone. Even poor cuckolded Fred the dentist was happy now, having found himself another wife, someone who could be faithful to him, for whom having children wasn’t really all that important.

Having money was nice and that windfall was frankly unexpected, but there is something to be said for happiness, too, Laura firmly believed. Maybe, in fact, that’s the secret to everything, that nothing’s more important in the end than being happy. Maybe, in the end, no matter how foolhardy or radical your choices may seem to everyone else, if you’re content with them, then that makes everything okay.

“It ain’t the same thing,” Albert said, the look in Laura’s eyes making him suddenly feel defensive.

“What isn’t?”

“That sorry excuse there of an ex-boyfriend. Ain’t the same at all, Laura. Not by a long shot it isn’t.”

But Laura wasn’t entirely convinced of anything anymore, so she just kept on smiling at Albert, while her own father, god bless him, once again rolled in his grave.

 

 

Chapter Seven

~ THE MUSIC ~ 

 

In Millicent Ida Parsons’ day there was no such thing as vacuum cleaners. No such thing as loud music either unless it was coming from a forty-piece marching band, and, even then, only on special occasions set primarily outdoors. Say for wars and picnics and the county fair, or when candidates rode into town politicking, or for hangings.

Being musically-inclined from birth, a lover of music, of brass instruments and orchestras, Millie had desperately dreamed of joining a marching band when she was a young girl, but, as was typical for that patriarchal period in time, her father denied the “unseemly” request.

A successful American entrepreneur, Averill Parsons was certainly powerful enough in his community to have granted just one harmless exception to “the rules” that prohibited Millie’s musical participation, but alas, a stalwart defender of tradition, he was not inclined to be so liberal.

“Only the men-folk make music,” he had insisted, an assertion that was for the most part true if one took a good look around them then. At least that was the norm for “proper” music which was performed before “proper” audiences at “proper” venues.

Proper women did not perform in public in Millie’s time. In fact, proper women really didn’t do much of anything in Millie’s time. No public performances, no higher education, no working except for in the house or the garden, no artistic training, no traveling without an escort, no voting in elections, no ownership of property, and no choice when it came to obtaining a husband.

As to those who might have thought of donning a disguise to garner the exclusive privileges of being a male, even the wearing of pants by women was deemed taboo at that time, not to mention short-cropped hair.

Proper women, young Millie was to learn by her own mother’s example, were to stay at home and be blessings to their families or else they were to get married and have lots of children. The catch there being that they could only wed if their fathers approved of their suitors, naturally.

Such a hard time for the female spirit Millie’s day had been, bound in so many customs and restrictions and propriety. So much personal sacrifice required. So many fruits forbidden.

Yes, that means Millie’s father did not approve of her potential match, of the sweetheart who had chosen her and the one she had loved in return.

“There’s no future in farming,” her father had sternly proclaimed when he learned of the young man’s intentions. And, because his daughter was already twenty-two at the time and by that age considered an “old maid”, he quickly arranged to marry her off to her distant cousin instead, and, as Millie so frequently hinted, a fate far worse than death. Although, about this terrible consequence, the ghost had yet to elaborate.

So the precise circumstances were mostly a mystery to young Zoe, but whatever had happened thereafter to doom her ethereal friend for all eternity it was clear to her that, while still living, the passage of time for Millie had commenced to be marked by one solemn date on the calendar of her entire existence: her wedding ceremony. Thus, that day became not just the anniversary of her loveless marriage to her cousin, but, more importantly, the date since the last time she had seen the man she actually loved.

In this manner Millie had poignantly counted off one, two, ten years since they’d last stood together holding hands for a final time and exchanging heavyhearted farewells in place of their sacred vows.

Then it became decades.

Then a lifetime.

Then forever.

But “that was then and now is now” was Millie’s standard reply whenever Zoe pressed the specter for more information about this. “That was then and now is now,” she’d state, matter-of-factly, “and all of it shrouded in the dreary past. The place where it rightfully belongs, I reckon.”

So, with that vague and sorrowful declaration punctuating this topic each and every time it came to mention, Zoe would drop the subject and try to talk about something more pleasant  instead, play some Sousa for the rest of the day to cheer her sad, lost companion. A Sousa march would usually do the trick, Zoe learned. Or even some Stephen Foster on occasions. There was no composer who could lift a soul quite like Stephen Foster, Millie claimed.

The music of the maids, however, if one could venture to call such a din music, was certainly not Stephen Foster or a marching band. As far as Millie was concerned it was pure cacophony, insufferable to an ear which was still quite refined, still very sensitive to sound, perhaps even more so in her after-death.

It had been bad enough having to tolerate the eighteen months of topsy-turvy renovations and foulmouthed construction crews, but those abuses she’d been able to forbear in silence. After all, the workers went home at the end of each day, leaving the house calm once they left. Not so with the dancing, bleating maids and their shrieking suction devices, their pounding disco drivel and rap songs.

It took Millie nearly five years to enforce peace and quiet at Hillgrove again once the Summerfields and their noisy, boisterous house staff had become its full-time living residents.

Life and the living, be damned, she had cursed throughout this trying period. To think it would take so much dedication! So many years of resorting to every means necessary to impress upon these tin-eared, tone-deaf philistines that had dared to encroach upon her private retreat and reverie that Millie could not tolerate pop tunes and loud appliances.

Deserting the mansion—her home, her nexus—was not an option, so she’d endured the bombast, battling it incessantly, until one day it finally happened: the living relented and the peace was restored again; the golden silence after that interrupted only once in a blue moon by a mindless and uninitiated new employee…

“There is a new maid downstairs, Boizee, and she doesn’t seem to be aware of the rules yet,” Millie complained today.

Zoe grunted an acknowledgment and continued pecking at her keyboard. “Please don’t call me that anymore—I’ll speak to her about it.”

Millie hung like a cloud beside Zoe this afternoon, pale and flickering. Patently neglected. “When?” she demanded to know.

Zoe was absorbed with her computer thing AGAIN and couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.

“When?” Millie repeated, growing brighter at this the most recent of a slew of slights from her much-too-preoccupied young friend. “When, Zoe?”

Zoe threw her head back, exhaled in exasperation, and cast a hostile sideways glance. “When what, Millie? Can’t you see I’m trying to finish this paper? You may remember that I’ve missed a couple of important classes already this semester…?”

Millie scowled at that reply and hovered quietly.

Zoe went back to her typing.

Presently Millie spoke up again. “There is a new maid downstairs and she doesn’t seem to be aware of the rules yet. I suspect the staff has been intentionally negligent in passing on these instructions to her, Boizee, withholding them in order to test my mettle.”

Zoe ceased typing and looked over once more, perturbed to hear this nickname spoken aloud again when she had expressly forbidden it. “Then why don’t you just go and scare her?”

Millie considered the suggestion for a few seconds and then, in an apparent temporary surrender of the issue, began drifting slowly toward the ceiling.

Zoe could just make out the bottom of a pair of ghostly shoes as Millie was exiting. Shoes with high tops and long, brown laces.

Millie had put on her walking shoes this afternoon, Zoe realized, as the apparition disappeared above her. That meant she’d wanted to go someplace. Go for a walk down the wooded lane perhaps, like they used to on days like this, days when the air of the house had gotten too still and too stale. It’d been so long since they’d done that. Gone walking together. Weeks, in fact.

Or was it months already? “Oh, Millie, I’m sorry,” Zoe called after her. “But if I don’t have this paper done by Friday I’ll—”

“Oooooh,” Millie moaned dramatically from the room right overhead. “Oooooooooooooh,” was all she had to say to the belated and much-too-late apology.

Moved, Zoe stood up, closed her programs, and turned off the computer.

Upstairs, Millie took the opportunity to inform Zoe once and for all, and in no uncertain terms, that she was “no fun anymore” and had grown to become a “wretched and neglectful” human being. “Oh,” she complained, how she missed that “endearing and demure little child” of yesteryear. Those walks in the woods they use to take together to spy on the neighbors. Their marvelous pranks and charades. Their afternoon adventures.

“Oh, Boizee,” Millie wailed, low this time so that no one else would hear them. “Since you broke off your courtship with no-names-mentioned, you do nothing but study all the time, and, hence, I am now so melancholy. So…so dispossessed.”

Zoe smiled a bittersweet smile at this lament without meaning to. “Depressed, Millie. The word you’re thinking of is depressed.”

“Yes, yes, I am depressed, Zoe. That is what I have become. Utterly inconsolable am I now. I am depressed with respect to the entire situation.”

Zoe nodded in agreement. She was, too.

 

 

Chapter Eight

~ THE MESSAGE ~

 

They say all the world’s a stage, but Horatio Summerfield knew better than that. All the world’s a circus.

And with every passing decade, as more and more people in the world were willingly exploiting themselves and others for fleeting notoriety and monetary gain, parading their misdeeds and defects before an insatiable and rubber-necking public, revealing and reveling in their indiscretions, their sordid secrets and unsavory schemes, and their high crimes and lowly misdemeanors, it became more and more the case.

All the world was just one big happy circus now, a freak show really, creating a boon for those in the entertainment industry.

It was with just such an astute understanding, in fact, that Horatio had turned his parent’s financially failing Shakespearean troupe and meager animal menagerie into one of the biggest and most profitable attractions on the planet. Not a small achievement considering that, when he and his younger brother Peter had inherited it, it was going belly-up, limping through the final, grisly stages of liquidation and bankruptcy proceedings.

A banker by trade, well-positioned with a large London-based firm and newly married, his brother Peter had taken one look at the company’s books and the long list of distinguished creditors who were demanding to be paid, gasped aloud, and sold his share to Horatio for one pound sterling. This was a perfectly logical decision at the time since the ailing company seemed so hopelessly in the red, but it was to become, in Peter’s own words,  “the biggest mistake” of his life, and one he would, within just two years of making it, have to bear forever with every ounce of humility he could muster.

Indeed, as the circus enterprise thereafter continued to grow larger and larger year by year, and with it David “Horatio” Summerfield’s fortune and fame, good-natured chagrin was to become brother Peter’s trademark characteristic which, to his credit, he wore well, agreeing to serve his parent’s legacy for the rest of his life in a far more humble capacity than he’d been destined to: as his brother’s chief financial advisor.

“Now how many elephants are we talking about again, Davey? I don’t have those figures in front of me.”

“Five—scrap the other numbers I gave you last month—it’s five more now. Five beauties, Pete. I’ve got to have them, mate.”

“Five more…but how many elephants do you really need? I say, you’ve already got thirteen, don’t you? What’s wrong with the ones you have already?”

“Pete…I sent you a fax about this just yesterday. These are the smartest elephants you’ve ever seen. Didn’t you get my fax?”

“A fax? Why didn’t you just send me an e-mail?”

“Because faxing is much easier for me. Go get the fax I sent you yesterday. I’ve made some estimates in it.”

“Well, Davey, I just can’t do that. I’m sorry.”

“Can’t? Why the bloody hell not? It’s quicker this way. You can’t expect me to just rattle these numbers off the top of my head. Why can’t you get the fax?”

“Because, as I’ve told you before, I don’t have a fax machine!”

Horatio paused to snicker at himself and at the idea of a lost fax floating aimlessly in the ether just waiting to land somewhere. A fax containing the vital statistics of four gorgeous elephant cows and one exceptionally healthy young bull. “Oh, that’s right. I do recall you mentioning you’ve no fax machine. Once, in any event.”

“At least—where the devil are you right now, Davey?”

“I’m in the colonies this month, but the carnival’s still churning full throttle in Italy, and boy-oh-boy is it ever hot over there. You wouldn’t believe the water tax I’m paying! Good god almighty.”

“Good god almighty, and yet you want me to get you more animals. I’ve got to look into the legal logistics of this transport anyway. You’re crossing an awful lot of borders just to buy some fancy-footed livestock, which, I dare say, you can do without if you truly tried.”

“Legal logist—look here, I hate to waste so much precious time. Isn’t that something maybe Zoe could work on for us?”

“First year law student? I rather doubt it.”

“Starting her second year now—smartest elephants in the world, Pete, and they could be mine, mine, mine, but for the lack of a fax and a time-machine!”

The other end of the line fell silent and Horatio knew his brother was suppressing a laugh.

All of Horatio’s animals were so smart he was always declaring. They were the smartest, the fastest, and the best in all the world. All his bears, all his tigers, all his elephants, right down to the tiniest mouse and the fleas that lived on it, absolutely brilliant.

“Pete…?”

“When will you return to civilization again, Davey? Must be almost time now?”

“Not for a couple more weeks, it isn’t. I’m still on holiday. Winding up that play, too, don’t forget. But I’ll have my secretary send you an e-mail this afternoon with those stats I mentioned. I want to clinch this deal before we start setting up tents in Portugal, Pete. That’ll be in about two weeks. I want those elephants for that gig in Portugal!”

“Cheers, Davey. I’ll be on the lookout for your e-mail then. Oh, and, ‘Horatio’…?”

“Yes?”

“Break a leg, eh?”

“I thank you, Pete, and we’ll chat again. The fates willing.”

Horatio hung up and crossed off Elephants, Italy, Portugal and Peter from today’s to-do list, and added ‘e-mail eleph stats’ at the very bottom of it. “Eileen!” he called out now. “Eileen, are you still in there, I hope?”

Eileen, his all-purpose live-in secretary, was still in there, working away in the small office just across the hall from Horatio’s den, next to the library.

“Sir?” she asked, coming to stand in his doorway.

“E-mail my brother the contents of that fax we sent him yesterday. He’s, uh, having some technical issues with his fax-machine.”

Eileen diligently scratched this into her notepad without looking up. “I’ll see to it immediately, Mr. Summerfield. Anything else today?”

“Yes. I’ve got full dress rehearsal to prepare for now and then two consecutive performances this evening. Where’s my angel at? I haven’t seen Zoe all day.”

“Well, sir, they both went…she went for a walk. Said they’d—she said she’d be back before you leave. There’s a matter she wishes to discuss with you, sir. Before you head out to the theater.”

“Ah. She’s with your nemesis somewhere. That’s fine. And what does it concern, this urgent discussion we’re to have? Classes? Dancing? Fashion?”

Eileen was bristling at the reference to the alleged enmity that she and Millie shared. She did not like to share anything whatsoever with Millie, or to even acknowledge the spirit’s existence. “I believe it concerns the cottage, Mr. Summerfield,” she answered, humorlessly.

His eyebrows raised. “The cottage? You don’t say? She’s finally made a decision? What did she decide then?”

“I have no idea, sir. She didn’t confide in me.”

“I see. I see. Well, we can do that, can’t we?” he said, a glint in his eye at his secretary’s obvious discomfort regarding Millie. “We can have another talk about that cottage again and maybe, once and for all, see an end to all this vacillating.”

“Yes. It would finally seem so, sir.”

“Now, Eileen, do you know if she plans on taking the car anywhere later on? Because, if not, then I’ll have need of it myself soon. Otherwise, just hunt me up my driver. I’ll be ready to go in a little while.”

“She had mentioned the ‘remote possibility’ she’d be going out earlier, but nothing has firmed up yet,” Eileen said, glancing at her wristwatch and turning to leave. “I’ll locate Jeffrey, just in case.”

“Splendid. But one more thing, Eileen, before you go.”

Eileen froze, certain of his next request and searching her mind for an excuse to get out of it. “Yes?”

“Our cheeky Miss Millie has left me yet another of her notes last night, this one on the mirror in the library. Did you happen to stumble across that yet?”

“I did, sir. Do you want me to just erase it for you?”

Horatio shook his head. “No, I do not. I want you to deliver my reply to her.”

This is what Eileen had been dreading all day from the very moment she had come upon Millie’s newest message, her end-the-weeping ultimatum:

“Tis most distressing. The weeping must end.”

Eileen Sikes did not mind working for a colorful and eccentric employer, or living in a house with an interesting past. Even the idea of a ghost didn’t really shake her too much. Big old houses do have spirits in them sometimes and she had, in her long career as a personal secretary for the rich and famous, worked in one or two homes which were similarly haunted. Hardened by experience, she was not especially opposed anymore to cohabiting with a ghost, so long as she herself was not required to have any direct contact with it.

This was, to her way of thinking, the best way to manage that which was by its very nature (or lack thereof) intrinsically unmanageable, the only way to keep those things in order which ordinarily do not keep.

In other words, active denial was how Eileen personally dealt with the haunting of Hillgrove.

Mr. Summerfield had asked her on a number of other occasions to leave Millie responses to certain messages she would scrawl on the mirrors or windows or dusty desktops, and Eileen had done as requested but reluctantly. It was not wise to converse with the dead, she always advised him, because the dead or their phantoms, if encouraged in this way, can easily become capricious and annoying. It was prudent, therefore, to simply ignore Millie’s letters, she’d tried to persuade her boss. Ignore as well those endlessly irritating add-ons that Millie would sometimes make to the Hillgrove shopping lists, work orders, and memorandums.

But Horatio wouldn’t hear of it. “Just jot down some notes there in your tablet, please.”

“Very well, sir. Go ahead.”

“Firstly, begin by reminding Millicent that I am the master of Hillgrove House now and have been its master for nearly two infernal decades. That, as such, I pay all the bills for Hillgrove and provide fully for its maintenance even when I am abroad, doing so, I might add, with the fruits of my endless toil, to which she has clearly derived some benefit. That being the case, if, as the rightful master here, I should desire to roam the house during the night, to wander up and down its halls, my halls, chanting or howling or practicing my lines as I walk, I will do so whenever I please to, regardless of whether she finds this practice somehow disturbing or inconvenient.”

Eileen had not been writing any of this down.

Horatio glanced up at her. “Did you get all those points I just made?”

“Yes, Mr. Summerfield. I’ve got them all up here,” she replied, pointing to her head with her pencil and attempting to look sincere.

“Very good then. Let us not omit one single item that you’ve got stored in there, eh?”

“Mr. Summerfield,” Eileen began her predictable objection. “I don’t mean to harp on this, but do you truly think it appropriate to continue to indulge such a—”

“Just see to it that she gets all that, Eileen. I don’t care if you write it on the mirror in eyeliner for her or slip it under her door while she’s out and about, but I want that uppity apparition to have my reply today, and before I leave for the theater.”

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir. I’ll—I’ll go ring up Jeffrey now.”

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