A Ghostly Romance

“What do I do? How can I get this cleaned up? There has got to be a reason that he has abandoned this place for 30 years and now he wants it back? I know there is a reason, but what is it?” John stalked into the library, shouting the words out load to venting his anger.

“You know the reason.” He didn’t know where the words came from. He heard them clearly, but there was no one in the room.

“Who’s there?” John was on full alert. He stepped back with his back to the wall by the fireplace and picked up the broom, whipping it around in front of him into a guard position.

“You know the reason.” The words didn’t seem to be coming from any particular place, they were in his head.

“Okay, I hear you, but I don’t see you. Where are you?” He didn’t feel particularly scared, but wasn’t comfortable with voices in his head. ‘My God,’ thought John, ‘Am I suffering from shell shock? After two years?”

“I can show myself, if you wish.”

“Yeah, yeah I wish.”

Slowly a mist gathered in the back of the library, near the back wall. A form began to take shape. John watched, not sure whether he should be scared, run like hell, or just wait. And there was something familiar about that fog. He’d seen it a couple times before. In the kitchen that one night. The figure came forward a bit and he could see that it was female. A rather shapely female at that, but certainly not solid.

“You know the reason John. I heard you say it.” With that he made out the face and his mouth dropped open in surprise. The eyes. The same ones that had stared at him out of the picture in the book behind him, the same ones that had stared at him out of the picture hanging on the wall at the farm. He knew those eyes! She was pretty much as the pictures had shown here, the long hair hanging down over her right shoulder. The rest of her form was there, but not well defined. He couldn’t tell if she was wearing anything or not.

“You know the reason.”

“I don’t!”

“Of course you do! You said it yourself. He doesn’t want anyone to dig here.”

“You! You’re the reason, you’re Laura Elvey.” Suddenly things fell into place!

“I wasn’t dreaming that night on the porch! It was you! Wait, yes, it does make sense! You disappeared on June 23, 1933. That was the day. Oh! Did he . . .?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Christ! Sorry, didn’t mean to swear.” The sound of laughter echoed in his head. She thought it was funny that he would apologize to a ghost! “Well you are a lady after all, and a gentleman should never swear in front of a lady.”

“Thank you, John Wellington! That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in over 30 years.”

“Okay, he killed you. Was that all he did?”

“It wasn’t all he wanted to do, but before he could do what he wanted, it happened. It really was an accident, I’m sure he didn’t mean it. We were both celebrating the end of prohibition along with some of the others and he started to get a bit more, ah, shall we say, adventurous then a good girl likes. I slapped him and he hit me. I tripped over the rug and hit my head on the fireplace. I hit really hard and it bent my neck in a weird way. I remember feeling pain, and then it went away. I found myself standing again, looking down at my body.”

“And he was scared. He didn’t want anyone to know so he hid the body. He buried you someplace! That’s why he wouldn’t allow anyone to dig! He didn’t want anyone to find out!” Suddenly things were clearing up.

“So did anyone know you were here? Did anyone ask him about you?”

“No one knew, at least none of the adult crowd really knew. I had told my parents that I was going to visit Elsie, and father let me take the car. I came up here with Rich and a couple of others. They took off to get some more booze, leaving the two of us here alone. He hid my body under some construction materials in the back yard. Then he drove my car into the garage, back in one of the old horse stalls. He put the top down and dropped straw over it to hide it.”

“When the other came back, he told them that I had left and that I had said I was tired of this hick town and I was going to get away. And Elsie told the Sheriff what she knew. And then when the sheriff stopped by and questioned Rich. He gave the same answer. She left this hick town and didn’t want anyone following her. He told them that he watched her drive down the street and over the bridge.”

“Alright, that sort of explains why people really thought you had run away. Did they ever find the car?”

“It is actually still in the garage out back. When he got the chance Rich took the wheels off of it, and took off the plates. Some of the parts were taken away, over time, but the frame and chassis are still there.”

“And what did he do with you?”

“The materials in the back yard were for the addition onto the back of the house. The cook’s room and bath, and the pantry on the east side of the kitchen were in the process of being added on. He buried me that night inside the foundation they were almost done putting in.”

“So he has been afraid that they would put the sewer in and go right under that part of the house and find your body! And because the town would want to run the shortest run of pipe possible, with the garage sitting where it was, the only place that they could get to that was a straight line was right under that room!”

“Correct!”

“But why didn’t he just put in the septic system? If he had done that he could have avoided all of this!” John realized that he had relaxed to the point that he was leaning on the broom handle and puzzling through the whole system. He looked over at the figure shimmering as if a strong breeze would blow her away.

“Well, I wasn’t exactly making life nice for him, was I?” John grinned totally relaxed for someone having a conversation with a ghost.

“You were a bit peeved with Mr. Spencer?”

“I was upset by what he put my parents through. I would hear news of them once in while, but I’m kind of stuck here. So I gave him a hard time. He was looking for a reasonable excuse to get out of here and grasped on the sewer issues to find an excuse for leaving. I can get a few hundred feet from this area and just can’t seem to go any further. And you are the first person to do more than just walk through this place in ten years. Everyone else I’ve tried to talk to runs away screaming.”

“Yeah, you could have that affect on someone. I suppose most of them were either kids coming in here on a dare or those trying to find something to rip off. They would have been gun shy to begin with. So, why don’t you bother me?”

“You didn’t start with a guilty conscious, for one. You came here with good reason. Because I like you.”

“I like you, too, Laura. You must have been something in those days! Um, can I ask you a personal question?” The eyes still seemed to be staring through him, but there didn’t appear to be malice in them, just without anything really being there the two black dots of her eyes seemed to be drilling holes in whatever they looked at, not unlike the eyes in the pictures.

“You can always ask.”

“What color was your hair?”

There was a definite smile on the ghostly face. “Honey Brown is what my father called it. You prefer red.”

“Yeah, I guess I do like red hair!”

“I’ve noticed. Her’s is every bit as beautiful as mine was.”

“Whose?” He was a bit startled by that comment.

“Joan’s. You brought her up here. I could see the way you looked at her.”

“Okay, enough of the personal stuff.” John was a bit embarrassed at that. And then he realized something else.

“Hey! You see everything that goes on here?” She actually seemed to leer at him,

“You bet, buddy!” John blushed. Oh man!

“Look, is this a one time deal? Am I going to see you again? Or are you going to fade away and I’ll forget this ever happened?”

“I’ll be around here. I’m not always sure when I can be seen, but I can apparently talk to you whenever I want. Did you know you talk in your sleep?”

“I’m not surprised. The nurses in the hospital told me that I did.”

“I don’t get much news up here, so there is another war going on?”

“They call it a conflict rather than an all out war. But it is war. At its ugliest.”

“I can tell it wasn’t pretty, you talk about some awful things. I just want to comfort you when I hear you remembering those things. I try, but I really don’t have much physical presence.”

“It’s nice to know that someone cares.”

“That how you got the bad leg?”

“Yeah, sniper’s bullet.”

“They did a pretty good job of fixing it up. Those screws and that plate are pretty solid.”

“And you know this how?”

“I’m a ghost! I can go through things, like walls and legs and clothes.” It was a bit unnerving to realize just how much she knew about his personal being. Time to turn the conversation to another topic.

“So what happens if we dig up your body and give it a proper burial? Do you rest in peace?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been given a manual for this sort of thing.”

“Is that what you want? A proper burial?”

She hesitated. “I think so. I really want my mother and father to know what happened to me.”

“Ah. Laura, your father passed away just a few years after you disappeared. Your mother sold parts of the farm and finally moved to Florida to be with her sister. She’s down there in a nursing home. I can certainly tell her, but I’m not sure she’ll believe me.”

“You’ll have to dig me up. He buried me with my purse, it should be easy enough to identify me.”

“And to think, they could have just run the sewer pipes in from the front of the house, it would have been just as easy, probably a shorter run even.”

“That would be assuming that I was the only secret in the ground.”

“There’s more?”

“Yes, there is more. Not as damning as a body, but I doubt it would have gone over well at that point in time.”

“Do tell, Miss Elvy!”

“If you go under the front porch, and move along the front, right under the tower, you’ll find a small door. It goes into the foundation of the tower and to a set of steps. Down at the bottom of the steps is a room that goes out under the front porch. It covers about half the front of the house below ground level. It has some interesting things in it that Rich wouldn’t want found. And even Rich didn’t know that there is another room behind it. Push the board on the far left on the wall furthest from the door straight in. That provides a slot for a panel that will slide to the left. You don’t need to share that with anyone, Rich was never in there. I think it may have been a place to hide slaves.”

“Underground railroad? Interesting to have something like that in a southern home. So what’s in the front part?”

“Liquor, booze, moonshine. Rich had a business that he started in college. He had a couple of contacts that would either buy moonshine from some of the locals, bring it in from up north, or bring it in from the Caribbean. He’d hide it there and then ship it off to other places, either in exchange for other products or the cash. Some of the bootleggers would give him stuff in exchange for representing them in court. He actually was pretty good at it. And given the challenges of making ends meet in those days, most of the people around here didn’t have any desire to convict, after all, they might be next.”

“Is there much there? Anything that I can leverage?”

“There are some record books in there where he kept track of things.”

“I suspect the statute of limitations would prevent any actual criminal charges being filed, it’s been over 30 years. But that doesn’t apply to murder! Okay, so I can make arrangements to get you taken care of, but what do we do about the Senator?” “You mean Rich is a Senator?”

“Full fledged Senator in the US Congress. He’s actually going to be coming up for a conformation hearing to become head of the armed forces committee. I’m not too happy about that, he says he’ll cut all of the military spending and reduce the size of the military. Not a good, . . . oh, sorry, didn’t mean to get off track, but I’m more than a little upset with him right now.”

“So, he abandoned this place about 30 years ago, you’re doing, I suppose?”

“He didn’t like sleeping with me sitting on his bed. Gave him the ‘heebie jeebies’ I did like to watch him jump! I think he was glad to have an excuse to leave this place and try and blame the reason on someone else. He couldn’t sell it, the new owner would just do what he didn’t want done and then they’d come after him.”

“So, if I have your body dug up, he no longer has a reason to prevent me from digging, because it’s already out in the open. And of course his goose is cooked in front of any group of decent citizens who will be outraged at his gall trying to cover this whole thing up. He probably has no other use for the property which means I will get to keep it.”

“Sounds like you have it right.”

“Okay, I’ll ask the sheriff to bring out the investigators. But first, you better show me exactly where I should have them dig.” He followed the floating form out of the house, well, he went out the door, she was already in the darkness of the new moon when he got out there. She floated over to the foundation and pointed. John took a piece of scrap lumber for a stake and marked the spot.

“How deep?” She sank into the ground and came out and indicated a spot on the wall, he scratched the place.

“Okay, that’s about four feet. Is it just to the other side of this wall?”

“Yes, right on the other side. There was a sort of ditch they builders had used to set the foundation in. Rich dropped me into it and filled in the ditch all around. The workman just thought one of them had done it the day before and finished building.”

“I wonder how hard it will be to move the foundation stones out of the way.”

“Have them dig down about six feet, and then under cut the stones. They will fall out of the way and they will see the bones.”

“How would you know that?”

“I’ve been trying to move things and have learned how to make some small things move. I guessed that if I moved enough of the dirt to make the stones fall, someone would discover my resting place.”