Heavy floral drapes had been pushed aside revealing a pane of window overlooking the backyard. Mel had been given one of the corner back rooms on the second floor. The room itself was decorated in a gaudy dark red and gold with flowery trim. The bed, a queen sized affair on a gleaming brass frame, was overlaid with a flower patterned cover. There was a desk, a chair, a lamp, and armchair, and a tall oak bureau. A small door at the end of the room led to the bathroom. Mel had dumped her bags onto the bed, scattering five sleeping cat-spirits. After Mel took out her camera, they had repositioned themselves back on top of her bags and gone back to sleep.
Mel felt a small shiver as she stared out the window with her camera weighing coldly in one hand. The backyard of Townsend House was a bit of grassy land except for one tree in bright red foliage. A thin, dark figure stood beneath the tree looking up at her. She raised her camera, brought it into focus, and took a shot. When she lowered her camera, the figure was gone.
She went back to the bed and pulled out her tote from underneath a yawning tabby. She took out the plastic bag of gray beads. The beads clacked softly as they shifted position with the swing of the bag. The tabby opened one eye and then another.
“I don’t suppose you know a hiding place?” said Mel, half to herself.
The cat-spirit stretched before jumping off the bed. It waved its tail back and forth like a metronome’s needle as it padded toward the bureau. It stopped and tapped its paw on the wood flooring.
She walked over. “One of these drawers?”
The tabby meowed and tapped the floor again.
She kneeled down and closely examined the floor. One of the planks had a barely discernable notch on one side. She dug her fingernails in and pulled the plank up. “Ah. Clichéd, but I think it’ll work—unless you tell someone else about this.”
The cat-spirit gave a disbelieving snort and headed back to the bed.
Mel glanced at the small cubbyhole in the floor, about the size of a shoebox. It was empty. She stuffed the bag of beads into the hole and let the wood plank fall. A really determined person might find the beads but in the meantime, she was going to make it a little more difficult than a riffle through a suitcase.
* * *
Stuart softly closed the door as to not wake the various cat-spirits that had taken up residence in his room. He spotted Mel down the hall, camera aimed down the stairwell. He tucked his hands inside the pockets of his leather jacket and ambled towards her. She didn’t appear to notice him approaching her.
“I see you’re busy,” he said.
Her camera clicked. “Yes I am. I was hoping to get some pictures of the house while there’s some daylight.” She slung the strap of her camera over her shoulder and proceeded down the stairs without looking at him. “I’m going to take a small stroll down the street and take some shots from there.”
“All right. I’ll loiter around here for a bit and maybe get a hold of one of the owners. We could meet back in the foyer in a couple hours and head out to dinner. I thought I saw a couple restaurants and diners on the main street when we were driving up here.”
Mel nodded. “I’ll probably be back in about three hours.” She left through the front door and Stuart found himself alone in the foyer.
He looked through to doorway on his left which led to the parlor. No one was there except Rebecca and the three spirit-cats reading. Not wanting to disturb them, he sauntered to a doorway on the right which led to the living room.
The living room was decorated in soft muted colors, warm and cozy. A fireplace was located at the end of the room, covered by glass screens and flanked with canisters of fire pokers. Fluffy beige couches decorated with white lace doilies ringed the fireplace in a somewhat lopsided semi-circle. An uninteresting landscape hung above the mantelpiece. There were armchairs scattered throughout the rest of the room as well as an entertainment center with a television, video and DVD player, and a stereo system. Like the reception room parlor, there were curtain-covered windows facing the front yard.
At the moment, a thin, middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair in jeans and lumberjack shirt had pushed away the curtains to one of the windows and was wiping the dust from it. A fluffy white cat-spirit lounged on the back of a nearby armchair, watching with sharp yellow eyes. At the sound of Stuart’s footsteps, the middle-aged man turned his head and nodded.
“Afternoon. Doing all right?”
“Pretty good,” Stuart replied. “Although I was wondering how I could meet the owners of this place.”
“You’re looking at one of them. Jed Townsend.”
“Stuart Roubere. You have a wonderful place. Very homey.”
“Thank you. You’re lucky you booked early. The Harvest Festival brings in a lot of business and almost every year we get booked up. Of course, it’ll probably change in the next couple of years.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“They’re building a new motel down on Route 76,” Jed said darkly. “I heard it was going to be a franchise of one of the bigger chains down south. They figure they’ll get more business as the town is growing. More and more young people are turning away from the traditional jobs to go into those new-fangled areas.” His eyes lowered, catching sight of the logo on Stuart’s shirt. “Like computing.”
“I think there will always be a market for your kind of business,” Stuart said mildly. “The quality of a bed and breakfast is completely different than that of a motel.”
Jed grunted. “True, but we’ll see when it gets built.”
Stuart watched the man continue rubbing the window. Past the glass, he saw Mel’s figure across the street, hand over her eyes as she gauged one of her shots. “I actually have a couple questions about the history of this place.”
“What, you’re a reporter?”
“I work for Hot Tread.”
The owner of Townsend House snorted. “Never heard of it. But I suppose any kind of publicity would be good publicity for the business.”
“Do you mind if I use a recorder?” he asked, taking a hand-held one out of an inside pocket of his jacket.
Jed waved a free hand. “Go ahead. It’s not like I’m spilling state secrets.”
Stuart smiled as he pressed the record button. “So this was named after your family.”
“Yep. For the past two hundred years, actually. But this house wasn’t always owned by the Townsends. It was built three hundred years ago by one of the founders of Gavot, Cyrus Pendington. He chose this spot because of some occult mumbo-jumbo about energy lines and such. He said this was a place where a person could commune with the spirits.”
“I see.”
Warming to the subject, Jed continued, “Besides as being one of the town council members, Pendington was also known as an alchemist and crackpot. His whole family was a little strange, if you know what I mean. And then it passed on to the Townsend family.”
“Your family bought this?”
Jed shook his head. “No, we inherited it. The last surviving Pendington, Victoria Pendington, who happened to be Cyrus’s great-granddaughter, had taken a liking to a little boy who often came by to deliver some home-cooked food from his mother who worried over the aging lady. In her will, Victoria Pendington left the house to my ancestor, Walter Townsend, because as she stated mysteriously that, ‘his talents so closely mirror mine that he was like my own son.’ I think she believed that Walter was also into this crazed ‘communing with the spirits’ thing, but from all accounts, my ancestor seemed fairly normal.”
“Huh,” remarked Stuart. “That’s interesting. Ever get ghost hunting guests or the such?”
“Sometimes. This isn’t a secret story, you know, so the tale gets around the paranormal community. Two months ago one of their paranormal researchers stayed a couple days. He set up his instruments all over the place.”
“Did he find anything?”
“Nothing. I told him the builder of the house was probably just some crazy old man who made stuff up, but the paranormal researchers never listened to me.”
“So what made you decide to change the house to a bed and breakfast?”
Jed chuckled. “Oh, it wasn’t my idea. Actually it was my grandfather, Donald Townsend, who set the whole thing up. You know, around that time, farming techniques had started improving and not so many people had to work the fields to get the same amount of crops. So he decided to sell off the farmland and start a new business. It was risky at the time, but it made a living.”
Stuart nodded. “So this is a family business, huh? So when you retire, you plan to turn this over to your children?”
The man sighed with a tinge of resignation. “Ida and I don’t have any children. But I do plan on turning this place over to my niece Rebecca—so far she’s been the only one of our nephews and nieces who’ve shown any interest in Townsend House.”
* * *
After Mel took a picture of the quaint little street Townsend House was located on—a little street, she thought, that could typify any little town if she chose to take it at a certain angle—she noticed the curtains to one of the front windows in the bed and breakfast pulled back. It looked like Stuart was in deep conversation with an older man who appeared to be washing the windows. She turned her back on that and walked around the pink house, towards the back. But before she could turn the corner into the back yard, she walked into something.
Make that someone, she thought as she rubbed her nose and looked up. The man was tall, although not that tall, she privately amended. He couldn’t possibly be that much taller than Stuart. His long dark brown hair was tied back in a pony-tail. He had a rather attractive rounded face, clean-shaven, and he wore a black turtleneck and a pair of black jeans. He must have been the figure she spotted earlier from her bedroom window.
“Sorry,” said the man. “I didn’t see you there.”
“That’s all right. These kind of mishaps happen all the time.”
He held out a hand which she cautiously shook. “Laurent. I’m staying over at the Townsend House.”
“I’m Mel. I’m also staying here.”
“You’re a photographer?” he asked, gaze sliding down to the camera in her hand.
“Another reporter and I are doing a story on the Harvest Festival. You are here on vacation?”
He glanced back up to her face, blue eyes piercing. “Unfortunately I’m on business. I’m visiting some potential customers to negotiate prices for some of my paintings.”
“Ah.” Was she imagining it, or did he lean in closer? She caught a whiff of strong cologne and fought the urge to take a step backward.
“I’m sure you’ve never heard of me before. I’m just starting to get known by some contemporary collectors.”
“That’s great. Good luck on that then.”
“Yes. Nice meeting you.”
When he finally departed, she let out a silent breath and ventured to the backyard and found a small deck protruding from the backside of the house. A couple chairs and a picnic table were placed to a corner. She sat down at one of the chairs and took a deep breath of cool air. A sudden thought struck her. Just when did collectors of paintings come to live in a small community like Gavot?
