Five

FIVE

I'm in charge of tonight's drinks. Each of us has a day when we'll serve our signature cocktail. Yes, we're here for a very serious purpose, but that won't stop us from treating it like a holiday. Dr. Cirillo says that's exactly what we should do. We aren't going to spend all of our waking hours trying to contact Anton. We need to relax, and in relaxing we're making the environment welcoming and reminding the dead of the best parts of life, spending time with family and friends.

My signature cocktail is, yep, shooters. Jin and Libby can tease me about it—and Anton thought it was adorable—but drinking is as much about ritual as the actual consumption of alcohol. University is the first taste of independent life for most kids, but when you have a chronic illness, that independence can be even slower coming. There's someone watching and monitoring and fretting long after the age when other kids slip from under parental eyes.

It wasn't just my parents. It was me, too. After we left behind the trauma of my junior year, I was the perfect little CF patient. Part of it was an apology for uprooting my family and part of it was knowing that those events would make my parents even warier of letting me attend any postsecondary-education institution that couldn't be reached on the Toronto transit system. My goal was software engineering at Waterloo, which was only an hour's drive, but I really wanted to live on campus like a normal student.

Drinking age in Ontario is nineteen, and I was that weird kid who didn't actually drink until she was of age… which was also my first year in university. Then it was all shooters, all the time. Okay, not all the time. But when I went to parties, I didn't want beer or vodka or, god forbid, wine. I wanted sweet liqueurs, layered in pretty colors, knocked back fast for that delicious buzz.

So my drink for our cocktail hour is shooters. A shooter buffet, to be exact. I've brought test tubes, so we can sample without getting wasted. Because my choices are mostly liqueurs, my food offerings are also sweet—homemade caramel corn and spiced nuts.

Jin, Shania, and I enjoy our cocktail hour, chatting away as the buzz settles in. When we're finishing up, Shania walks to the fireplace and peers at the portrait overtop. It's a very old painting of a Victorian couple's wedding day.

"Relatives of Anton's?" Jin says, waving his shooter at the portrait.

I laugh. "Uh, no. Something the owners found in an estate sale, I bet."

"Is it just me," Shania says, "or does she look like she wants to escape?"

Jin shakes his head. "They both look like they were led to the altar by a shotgun."

"It's the time period," I say. "Smiling for portraits wasn't really a thing—"

Jin cuts me off with a jabbed finger. "None of that. We're here for a séance. Get in the spirit."

"Fine. They're clearly a miserable couple, forced to wed at gunpoint. They spent their first night together, and when he woke, she was gone."

"Never to be seen again," Shania chimes in.

"Until years later," Jin says. "When her spirit began haunting the honeymoon suite. Then, one day, while playing hide-and-seek, someone opened an old chest in the attic… and out fell her body, still in her wedding gown."

"Nice." Shania glances at me. "Are there any weird stories about this house? It's so old and so big that there must be some."

I munch some caramel corn. "Nope."

"No, it doesn't have any or no, you don't know any?"

"According to Anton, it doesn't have any. I'm sure some relative died here in the distant past but if so, their spirit moved on. There's never even been a hint of a ghost."

"Well, we are about to change that," Jin says. Then he makes a face. "Sorry. One too many shots. That was inconsiderate."

I lean over and lay my head on his shoulder. "It wasn't. I do hope to make contact with Anton, but a haunting is a very different thing, and this house has no history of them. Dr. Cirillo actually asked about that, and he was happy to hear there aren't any stories. We're hosting an intimate gathering, not a wild party. Our invitation is extended to a very select audience of one."

I rise from the sofa. "Okay, let's not get maudlin. I should take you two on the tour of this weird and wacky—if boringly ghost-free—estate."

"Oh!" Shania says, zipping ahead of us. "There's a locked door. I wanted to show you that."

She leads us down the hall. At the end is a door. The antique knob has been removed and replaced with a modern lock.

"So what's behind the door?" she says, waggling her brows. "Any guesses?"

"One vacuum cleaner," I say, "two mops, and three Costco megapacks—toilet paper, paper towels, and tissues."

She mock-glares at me. "You are terrible at this game, Nic."

"No, I've just rented enough places to know there's always a locked room. That's where they keep the cleaning supplies, and sometimes stuff the owner doesn't want us touching."

"Such as the bodies of the last renters," Jin says. "Stacked like cordwood."

"We'd smell them," I say.

He shakes his head. "You really are bad at this."

He looks up and down the hall. "I bet this place has plenty of secret rooms and passages."

"Nope," I say. "Anton poked in every nook and cranny. There's nothing."

Both turn on me with looks of clear disapproval.

"Oh!" I say. "There is a dumbwaiter shaft."

Jin grins. "Now we just need to wait to hear it creaking up to the top floor, as if pulled by an unseen hand."

"The actual dumbwaiter is long gone. It's just the shaft. And before you say anything, it's not big enough to fall down. Or to stuff bodies in. Again, you'd smell them. However, if you are determined to find something creepy, follow me."

They do. On the way through the living room, Shania sneaks the last shooter from the table, sliding me a grin like she's snatching something she shouldn't.

I smile at her and take another handful of caramel corn for myself. Then we continue to the sitting room, which is not where we'd actually been sitting, and they are about to see why.

"Damn…" Jin says.

"Is this… a joke?" Shania says as she steps into the tiny room. "Ironic creepy decorating?"

"I'd like to think so, but I suspect not."

The room is barely ten feet by ten feet, with no windows, which makes it a terrible sitting room. I can only guess that whoever designated it as such thought the small size and claustrophobic feel made it cozy. Anton said that when he was young, this was his grandfather's den—a place where he could retire with his newspaper or book when the house full of grandkids got a little too rowdy.

Back then, the room held only a sofa, which would have made it nicely spacious. Now it's crammed full with a couch, a love seat, and two recliners. If you used it as a sitting room, you'd be sitting on top of everyone else. But the truly creepy part is the dolls.

The room is ringed with bookcases and every shelf holds a motley collection of books plus three or four antique porcelain dolls, all attired in colorful starched dresses, all scrubbed and clean, all retouched and repainted. And all staring at us with vacant eyes.

"I don't get it," Shania says, staying in the doorway as Jin and I walk in. "How does anyone not find porcelain dolls creepy? I can see getting some in an ironic way, where you're being creepy on purpose. But who looks at this room and thinks it'd be a great place to curl up with a book?"

"Under the watchful eyes of the damned," Jin says.

"This is actually an improvement over the dolls' last residence," I say. "Before Anton and I rented this place, we read the reviews. Apparently, when it opened as a bed-and-breakfast, the smallest bedroom was called the Doll Room, and these were displayed in there."

"Where people slept?" Shania says. "Probably children?"

"Yep. The dolls were quickly moved down here and that became the Disney-themed room. Whenever we stayed here…"

I trail off because I find myself smiling. I'm thinking back to when Anton and I stayed here, and when I smile, it feels like laughing at his funeral. I struggle with that. I know I should smile at memories of our life together. Being able to smile at them is part of the process. But when I do, I feel as if I'm moving too fast. I might not be an old-time widow, draped in a black dress and jet jewelry, but internally, I feel as if I should be in continual mourning, and when I'm not, I'm stricken with guilt.

I smack that guilt away. This is a good memory, and I'm sharing it.

I walk farther into the tiny room. "Whenever Anton and I stayed here, he kept moving the damn dolls."

"Freaking you out?" Shania says. "If I woke to find one of those things on my bedside table, I'd grab the keys and run. Let him find his own way home."

"Nothing like that," I say. "Just moving them around. I'd flop down on the sofa in the living room, and ten minutes later, I'd notice a doll on the shelf. Or on top of the fridge."

I walk to one, with a gingham dress and bonnet, red braids, and painted eyes with a little too much white around the iris, giving her a demented stare. "This was our favorite. We named her Laura. Pioneer zombie girl. We were thinking of finding one for Lucy, to add to her collection of American Girl dolls."

"Lucy's outgrown her doll stage," Jin says. "She's moved into the preteen phase where she'd actually love that creepy thing." Jin looks at Laura and shudders.

We continue our exploration of the house. I show them the dumbwaiter shaft. I'm honestly surprised the owners haven't sealed it up. I guess it's safe enough, and it's something people find cool.

As I poke my head into the shaft, I remember a story Anton told, about his brother scaring the shit out of him as a kid, insisting that you could hear the dumbwaiter at night. I'm about to withdraw and tell the others when a sound stops me. A low moan from below.

I back out fast. "Did you—?"

"Another locked door," Jin says, his voice distant.

I turn to see him over at the basement door with Shania. I glance back at the dumbwaiter. What was the story Anton told me? That his brother claimed to hear the dumbwaiter moving? No, that's what Jin had just joked about. Viktor scared Anton… by making noises from below.

I shake my head. Apparently, I might be good at ruining Jin and Shania's haunted-house fun, but it seems my imagination is having a little of that with me.

Jin jiggles the door handle as I walk over. "Now don't tell me the entire basement is filled with mops and tissue boxes, Nic."

I frown and walk back to it. I try the knob myself, but it's clearly locked and there's a keyhole in that knob.

"That's where the washer and dryer were," I say. "Anton and I stuck our heads down there, but since we only stayed for weekends, we didn't need to wash clothing."

"So they blocked access to the washer and dryer?" Jin says. "That's not suspicious at all."

"They put compact stackables in the bathroom right there." I point.

"Because they needed to block off the basement to hide the bodies."

"There are definitely bodies down there," Shania says. "And secret tunnels."

I shake my head. "It was your typical damp old basement, with framed-up walls and a concrete floor. I'm not surprised they've blocked it off."

Jin looks at Shania. "She really is bad at this."

"The worst," Shania says.

"Fine," I say. "The basement isn't very creepy, but that's just the part we saw. When we went exploring, Anton wanted to show me the furnace, if it was still there—it was a monster of a thing. But the door was locked. Two doors, in fact. Both locked."

Shania is about to comment when a floorboard creaks, and she goes still. "Did you hear that?"

"Sounds like someone on the front porch," I say. Then I lift fingers and count down. "Three… two…"

The doorbell dings. They both sigh as I head to answer it.

Dinner has arrived, along with our cook. Mrs. Kilmer is the type of woman I always feel a little sorry for, and then chastise myself for jumping to conclusions based on appearances. She's slight and faintly stooped, despite being only a decade older than me. Her face already shows stress lines around her mouth and worry lines on her forehead, and there's a hesitancy about her, as if she always expects she's doing something wrong and is ready to apologize for it.

"Mrs. Kilmer," I say, smiling. "It's good to see you again." Before I can put her on the spot, I say, "I was here last year, and I was hoping you'd still be cooking for the house."

I don't say "my husband and I" were here. That's another thing I feel guilty for, as if I've already excised him from my life. But I know that if I say my husband and I stayed here, she might presume he's with me, and I'll need to explain, and she'll feel bad for mentioning it.…

Yep, best to just stick with the singular. I was here.

Mrs. Kilmer does the customary "Oh, yes, of course I remember you," which probably means she doesn't, and that's for the best.

"Would you like me to put this inside?" she says, indicating the rolling cooler she's brought. "It's today's dinner and tomorrow's lunch, along with some fresh muffins for breakfast."

"Thank you, and I know this is going to sound incredibly rude, but I'll need to empty that inside and give it back. This week… Well, it's not actually a vacation, unfortunately." I lean against the doorjamb. "I'm here with some other scientists, working, and the person in charge has asked that no one else come into the house."

That does sound rude, and also weird. But I can't exactly say that we're doing a séance and the medium has insisted the house be kept clear of "other auras."

Technically, it's not a lie either. Dr. Cirillo is a scientist conducting an experiment. I'm an engineer, Shania is a nurse, and Jin is a radiologist, so we all work in STEM fields, right?

"Oh, isn't that interesting," she says, without any hint that she's insulted. "Certainly. I understand."

She rolls the cooler to me. I take it inside, unload it as fast as I can, and bring it back out, where she gives me instructions for cooking the meals. I thank her, and she trundles off down the lane, pulling the empty cooler behind her.

We're enjoying lemon-meringue pie and coffee on the back porch when a voice says, "Hello?"

A man's head pops past the corner of the deck, and I scramble up, wiping my mouth with my napkin.

"Hello," I say.

The man is in his early forties, with graying dark hair and a close-trimmed beard. His bright blue eyes crease in a smile. He's dressed in a golf shirt and chinos, with a jacket over his arm, sunglasses on his head, looking like…

Looking like a guy on vacation.

Shit. I've heard of this happening, where you rent a place and it turns out to be double-booked.

"Ms. Laughton?" he says as I hurry over.

I slow. "Yes?"

He extends a hand. "Davos Cirillo."

"Dr. Cirillo," I say, shaking his hand.

I'd been so engrossed in the conversation that I'd forgotten we were expecting him after dinner. I also should have looked up a photo of the guy. Stereotypes again. I'm accustomed to mediums like Leilani, with her jangling bracelets and flowing dresses. This guy looks like a doctor or lawyer or… college professor? Yep, because that's what he is.

"Glad you could make it, Dr. Cirillo," Jin says as he comes forward.

"Davos, please."

Jin smiles. "I'm Jin, Nic's brother-in-law. And this is Shania, our ‘outsider' for the week."

"Thanks," Shania says.

"Hey, that's your role, right? The designated outsider." Jin grins at her and then turns to Cirillo. "Come join us. We're having pie and waiting for the sunset."