Page 23 of We Live Here Now

22

Emily

I wake up to a text from Freddie apologizing for burning the board and being so shitty and wishing he could be here to look after me, and I fire one back hoping he has a good few days in London and to enjoy it while he can before the Exeter transfer is finalized.

Still in bed, I stare out at the cold day and wonder how I’m going to fill mine once I’ve done my physio exercises. I have a pang of missing work again but quash it. At least I’m alive , I remind myself. And at least they paid me for the year, and given how long I was in the hospital my bank balance is pretty healthy. We’ve got the profits from the sale of the London flat too, so all in all, we could be in a lot worse of a situation. Who knows, maybe when we’ve got the grounds sorted and modernized a little inside, we may even make a profit on this place when I’ve persuaded Freddie to sell it.

I’m thinking about dozing for another hour when a racket from downstairs startles me upright, goosebumps immediate on my skin. It’s the study, I know it is, and with my heart thumping and nerves on fire, I force myself downstairs.

When I reach the room, the door is wide open and I gasp slightly, stepping backward. The books are on the floor. All the books, scattered as if thrown in rage around the room. There are only four volumes left on the shelves. I know exactly which ones they’ll be, but still I pick my way gingerly over the mess until I reach them to confirm it.

It’s as I expect. The four that came off the shelves before— Die or Diet by Dr. Ella Jones, Will You Love Me by Mhairi Atkinson, Here Come the Clowns by Armond Ellory, and You by Caroline Kepnes.

I take photos on my phone of the mess, proof to myself that it’s real, and then look back at the four books. What have they got to do with anything? Is Find it to do with these? I flick through them, wondering if there might be messages scrawled in them, but they’re just ordinary books. I put them down on a coffee table and start picking up the rest to reshelve. I can’t see any gaps in the wall or wood that might cause some crazy wind, nor any slope that might have made them fall, nor anything else that would prove a logical—if tenuous—reason for my books to have been thrown around the room. There is no reason. It wasn’t me, I’m sure of it.

I consider calling Dr. Canning to talk it through, but I don’t have any of the main symptoms listed for post-sepsis, and thinking the house is haunted doesn’t make me crazy. This isn’t something he can help with. Plenty of fully functioning healthy people believe in ghosts and hear weird things in buildings. I know absolutely that this mess wasn’t me, and until I can find something concrete to explain it, I’m going with what my gut believes.

Were you murdered in this house? The planchette was moving to Yes , I could feel it. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t Iso. Something is haunting this house.

Find it. Find what? And where to start?

I close the door on the study and go back upstairs to get dressed. When I get to the landing, the window is open again. I didn’t open it. I’m pretty sure Freddie didn’t unless he’s trying to drive me insane, and why would he do that?

I close it carefully and then stare into the quiet hallway, my mouth dry with nerves, but I stay calm. I feel tasked with a mission. A way to fill the day. I’m going to research the history of the house. Find out who died here.

At the kitchen table, with the warmth of the Aga behind me and the front door close enough that if something happens in the house that really frightens me I can get out as fast as my damaged body will let me, I’m disappointed at first that all I can find from a search on Larkin Lodge is an old Zillow listing and something to do with a place in America. But then, after a second coffee, I go into the library website hub for the area and find that a trove of local newspapers have been uploaded and archived.

Before long I’ve zoned out everything around me as I dip into history, scanning from one report to another as I search for Larkin Lodge. I can’t get even so much as a hint about any murders, but I do find some information about the house.

There’s an obituary from 1864 of Christopher Hopper, the man who bought the house after the previous building was gutted in a fire. He was quite a famous surgeon in Exeter who opened missionary hospitals in Indian slums, so when he died in 1887 there were several print obituaries. They stated that he’d rebuilt the house, but within a year he and his wife had left to start their missionary project. He died fifteen years later, and his wife, Hannah, died of a broken heart only two months after him.

There’s nothing more until an article from 1958. “Actress Fortuna Carmichael buys country retreat.” This one does have a picture. A glamorous woman, all curves and lipstick, lies across the bonnet of a fabulous car parked in Larkin Lodge’s drive, with a tall, handsome man standing casually beside her, smoking a cigarette. The caption underneath says, “Fortuna Carmichael and husband Gerald, the fiery couple as famous for their spats as for their romance, settle into country life at Larkin Lodge.”

I scan the piece. She was a theater actress who’d done a couple of B movie thrillers, and he was a producer. In the picture they both look completely fabulous and certainly not haunted. The Lodge in the backdrop is almost exactly the same as it is now, except there are flowers bursting from beds around the drive and some creeping plants clinging to the stony facade. I look at the grainy top-floor window, a dark blot looking down on this picture of joy.

I move on, the years skipping by in seconds, but there’s not much else other than an entrant to a village garden flower show in the eighties, and then it just mentions the house name, not who was living here. I search for murders in the village and only one comes up—a drunken domestic gone too far on a local farm in the seventies—but other than that the locals of Wiveliscoombe seem remarkably murder-free. Could there have been a killing that was brushed under the carpet? Someone who went missing perhaps?

A search of missing persons brings up far more results but none that really give me any information I can use. Over the years several young girls and a couple of men and two elderly residents suffering with dementia have vanished, but as far as I know—aside from the old pair—they could have just jumped on trains to escape the rural life or marriage or family or any of the awful reasons young people run away from home. Nothing.

I’m stumped, and then I remember. Sally and Joe from the pub said they’d lived here but not for long. Maybe they’d felt the haunting too.