Guest Author
March, 2001
author of The 8th House
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This month's featured book giveaway:Although Wendy Jensen has been writing for years, The 8th House is her first published novel. After receiving a round of rejections, she epublished it with CrossroadsPub.com and self-published it in paper. Wendy Jensen currently lives in an imaginary world filled with fascinating characters and frightening events. Occasionally that world intersects with the real one in a 125-year-old house located in Red Wing, Minnesota. Her husband, four dogs and two cats keep her company there. Her teenaged son wanders through on occasion, and sometimes her grown children visit with some of her ten grandchildren.
Excerpt from The 8th House:The 8th House, which Scribesworld.com described as "...a gripping, page-turning tale of suspense that will have you spellbound from the first page to the last." During the month of March, 2001, Wendy is running a special Sisters in Crime sale. A personally autographed copy of The 8th House can be purchased directly from the author at 25% off the cover price. Visit http://www.wendyjensen.com/SinCSale.htm for details.
Be the 20th person to e-mail Wendy
before March 31 and you're a winner.
You'll receive a free paperback copy
of The 8th House.
PROLOGUE
Zoe Zignego thought she wanted to be psychic. Now she sees ghosts and dreams of murders. She doesn't have to look any farther than the walls of her own home for psychic phenomena, but when a serial killer terrorizes the Twin Cities, Zoe helps police with the investigation... and finds her psychic proximity to 'The Astrologer' too close for comfort.
CHAPTER ONE
The house stared at me from the faded photograph. It looked alone. Lonely. Like a kindred spirit.
" How about this one?" I asked.
The real estate agent’s chatter about taxes, escrow and good land prices ceased. Her silence stretched into double-digit seconds before I glanced up and found her staring at the three-ring binder in front of me.
The last page looked like it had done its time in the front window of the real estate office, trying to tempt passersby into buying. A two-story house with the wooded Ozarks for a backdrop was still visible, with no other houses around it.
The address was a rural route, with directions down several county roads. A remote location. I liked remote.
Shelley MacPhearson swallowed the gum she was chewing, coughed, and finally sputtered, "Y’all want to see that one?"
I looked behind me. The only other person in the office was a secretary with the nametag of ‘Lilah,’ whose chocolate-colored fingers were pouncing across a keyboard at a dizzying 130 words per minute. I didn’t think Shelley was asking her.
Maybe I had a multiple personality showing. I’d been accused of being crazy many times, but this was the first time someone had referred to me in plural.
"Yes, I do." I stressed the singular ‘I,’ but the impact was lost on Shelley. She looked like she’d seen a ghost.
I glanced around the office again. No ghosts. Nothing to explain Shelley’s complexion suddenly matching her cream colored blouse. Perhaps the specter of a low commission frightened her. The house was priced to sell.
"When can I see it?"
"When can you see it?" Shelley stared at her desk calendar as if she hoped its blank spaces would magically fill up with appointments stretching into next week or next year.
"Today?" I prodded.
"Today?"
"Yes, today. Unless you have other customers?"
Shelley’s blue gaze flickered around the office, then to the nearly empty street outside. Her attempts to conjure up a land rush failed. She turned her attention back to me. "Well, I’m the only one here today. If the phone rings...."
"Hmmph." Lilah rolled her eyes, but her fingers never paused on the keyboard. "You go ahead and show Ms. Zignego that house. I can answer the phones."
To prove her point, the phone rang. Lilah had it to her ear before Shelley’s hands left her lap. Shelley waited, watching, no doubt hoping that the ringing signaled urgent business for her.
"No, ma’am. We don’t. We’re very happy with AT&T. Thank y’all anyway." Lilah dropped the phone back in its cradle and her fingers returned to Microsoft aerobics
Shelley swallowed and glanced back at me. "I... I’m not sure where the keys are to that one...."
Lilah’s lips repressed a smirk. "Cupboard, third row down, far right. Yellow tag."
Office politics, I thought. Wonder what dear Shelley did to Lilah that she’s paying for now. Snobbery, maybe. Shelley looked the type: frizzy blonde hair whose roots hinted at darker things; tailored suit over a deliberately underfed figure.
Whatever the battle concerned, Lilah won this round. Shelley stalked to the cupboard and retrieved the keys. It must be a very old house. They were skeleton keys, and Shelley handled them like they were made of real skeletons. Lilah’s belly quivered with a suppressed laugh, but her eyes stayed on the computer screen.
Shelley snatched three other key rings out of the cupboard and sent a smile as bright and artificial as a halogen beam in my direction. "We’ll just stop at these first. They’re right on the way."
*** ‘Right on the way’ must have a different meaning in Missouri than it did in Minnesota. Shelley drove to a compact 1930’s bungalow on a street sporting trees and residents of approximately the same era. In the yard next door, a wrinkled woman in a pressed housecoat stared suspiciously at me across the intervening twenty feet of clipped grass and precise petunia beds. The crone’s thoughts flooded towards me.
Oh, there’s a strange one. What’s she wearing a long skirt for on a day like this? Probably one of them religious cults. And look at her hair! Lordy, Lordy, Delores would turn in her grave if she knew something like that was looking to buy her house....
I shook my head against the pain sliding down my skull as I followed Shelley through the front door and into the living room.
Shag carpet, pea green. Through an archway, a tiny kitchen with metal cabinets, avocado green. A tinier bathroom, freshened up with mint green paint about twenty years ago. And the one bedroom, where Delores had gotten brave with rose wallpaper, after her husband’s death.
Through the bedroom window the local version of Gladys from Bewitched stared at me. She knew about the wallpaper. He would never have stood for it, not Ralph, but once he was gone....
Shelley’s voice interrupted my thought reception. "It’s an estate. Daughter lives in California, wants to sell real bad, might even go for contract for deed. Previous owner a widow, died last fall...."
"Delores."
Shelley stopped chattering and blinked at me. "Why, yes, Delores Hartman. How did you...."
"Let’s go. I don’t like it. Too small." I headed for the car, leaving Shelley fumbling to lock the front door. I slid into the passenger seat and massaged the right side of my head. The scar tissue tingled at my touch.
Shelley started the car, glancing at me from the corner of her eye. I didn’t need to be psychic to guess her thoughts, but I received them anyway.
Dammit, Janice, why’d you call in sick today and leave me stuck with this weird woman in purple silk and gypsy jewelry? Wait ‘til you come in on Monday, I’ll tell you what....
"Could have been worse," I muttered. "I could have worn my black velvet outfit today." The one everyone said made me look like Elvira.
"Huh?" Shelley ran a stop sign while staring at me.
"The heat," I improvised, fanning at the neck of my blouse. "It would have been worse if I’d worn black."
"You Northerners aren’t used to our summers, I guess."
I didn’t bother to tell her that, having been born at Rhine-Main Air Base in Germany, I didn’t qualify as a Northerner. Or anything else, for that matter, except maybe the proverbial Army brat. Make that an Air Force brat.
We entered a newer district, Elliston’s pretense at suburbia. The cedar-sided split-level house was one of a quintuplet of such homes on the block, distinguishable from each other only by variations in siding and paint color. The neutral-colored rooms with their flowing beige carpet stank psychically of angry nights and sullen days.
"Divorce?" I asked. Shelley’s eyes showed a little more white around their sapphire-blue contacts as she nodded.
We moved on, stopping in an area of two-story frame houses with trampled lawns and sprinklers in action. This neighborhood teemed with life the short, two-legged kind. They ran through the sprinklers, shrieking their joy at being alive, out of school, and wet on this lovely June day. I refused to go in the house.
"Too noisy," I told Shelley. "I’m a writer. I need quiet to work." Which was true enough, but not the whole truth. I couldn’t bear to live in a neighborhood with constant reminders of the children I never had, would never have.
We finally turned onto strips of gravel weaving their way around wooded hills. We crossed a single lane bridge over churning waters. The rundown houses on meager subsistence farms grew farther apart. Shelley had given up talking miles ago, and when I glanced over I saw her jaw working, as if chewing the gum that was still in her purse. She made a sharp left, seemingly straight into the woods.
We plunged into what might have been a driveway back when I was in grade school. Judging by the ruts, it now served as a creek bed during heavy rains. The afternoon sun disappeared and branches slapped the car for lengthy seconds before we entered a clearing.
Or what used to be a clearing. The photo at the real estate office was faded for a reason it was old. Ten years old, if the birch and poplar saplings growing where the yard used to be were any indication. Shelley turned off the ignition, and silence descended.
The afternoon sun stabbed the clearing with slanting spears of light. The house sprawled before me. It was constructed of local stone, with ells and additions tacked on like afterthoughts. One wing was tucked like a sleeping baby beneath a blanket of Virginia Creeper. An ancient rose bush raised a few red buds against the porch. The empty windows ignored me, as if the house had seen its share of prospective buyers and knew I would fare no better than the rest.
I approached its fortress. Shelley trailed behind me, thrusting the ring of keys into my hand. As I climbed the steps she lingered in the yard, babbling.
"The power’s shut off, has been for years. No lights, it’ll be dark in there. We could come back tomorrow with a flashlight."
I ignored her. The movement at the end of the porch was harder to ignore.
I turned my head slowly. Things glimpsed from the corner of my eye sometimes vanished when I looked them straight on. But this one didn’t.
I knew, then. Knew why Shelley had turned pale at the prospect of showing this house, why she had not preceded me onto the porch. I knew why she still fidgeted at the bottom of the steps, beyond the domain of one who once lived here.
I knew that I would never be alone in this house.
CHAPTER TWO
I held his gaze for a moment, baleful eyes staring from his haggard face as he moved back and forth. Then I turned and walked down the steps.
"I’ll take it." I handed the keys to Shelley and headed for the car.
She stood there a moment, staring from me to the house and back again. I didn’t think she could see him. Most people couldn’t see the things I saw. But she had probably never before sold a house without even giving a tour of the inside, much less a haunted one.
We made good time on the way back to the real estate office. Maybe Shelley wanted to get the paperwork done fast, before I changed my mind.
An hour later I signed the offer. Shelley scooped it up and glanced at the ‘Zoë Zignego’ scrawled across the bottom. "Interesting name."
I capped my pen and dropped it in my purse. "That’s it, then?"
Shelley nodded. "I’ll call you when they accept the offer."
I noticed she said ‘when,’ not ‘if.’
"Where y’all staying?" Shelley added.
I’d driven into Elliston this morning, and stopped at the real estate office on a whim. "Nowhere, yet. Got any suggestions?"
"Well, we only have one motel."
***
From the outside Elliston Motel looked like any other small town motel: a row of twenty rooms with the office in the middle. The woman who signed me in gave me the once-over three times. I watched her take in my lopsided hair, waist length on my left, shoulder length on my right, then scrutinize my medieval laced vest over purple silk blouse and skirt. She interrupted her perusal of my heavy silver bracelets and rings to stare me straight in the face when I said I wanted to rent a room for a week.
"A whole week?"
I felt like asking her if there was a better deal on two halves of a week, but I decided to be polite. "Unless it’s inconvenient."
She glanced from the lone car with Texas plates parked at the far end of the row to my purple Saturn with Minnesota plates. "No inconvenience. Visiting relatives?"
I could almost see her mind working, running down her list of friends, wondering if any of them had weird relatives from Minnesota.
"No. I’m moving here." I didn’t let the shock from that dissipate before I tossed my next grenade. "I’m buying a house. The old Randall place."
I scooped up my key and was halfway to the door before she recovered enough to say, "Well, y’all have a good night, now."
"You too," I replied, resisting the impulse to say, ‘We won’t.’ If I was going to live here I’d better get used to being referred to in the plural. It was oddly appropriate in a way: me and my personal demons.
As I got in my car, I saw the desk clerk pick up the phone, no doubt spreading the news of the stranger woman to all of Elliston. The grapevine still beat the Internet for speed.
I unlocked the door of number 14, which was right between number 12 and number 15. Elliston people must be superstitious. I wasn’t. Superstition is based on ignorance, and I wasn’t ignorant.
I wish I was. They say ignorance is bliss. They’re right.
The inside of the motel matched the outside for mediocrity: the standard mundane prints on the walls, the bedspread and carpet in mild shades of peach. I surmised the effect was supposed to be restful, but occasional shooting pains down the right side of my head promised rest was not on the agenda for tonight.
I threw my suitcase on the bed and unpacked my laptop. I disconnected the nearly antique rotary motel phone and plugged in my modem. I checked out the bathroom while the laptop booted up: shiny peach tile, no surprises there.
While the modem dialed my server, I thought about the nearly forsworn pack of cigarettes buried in my suitcase. I’d been doing well, rationing myself to three cigarettes per day, but only one of today’s ration remained. Save it for bedtime, I decided, as three days of e-mail flooded my mailbox. No doubt my headache would be in full swing by then.
A message from Richard, my agent. Sales were good, needed an address to forward the next royalty check, was I doing any writing recently, and how about a book signing in Atlanta, since I was just traveling anyway?
No. Richard knew better, but he still kept trying. Bad enough I covered pages with tales of murder and mayhem. Worse that they were based on truth. The fact that I made money off of it went against some morality left over from Dad’s religious teachings. Yeah, everyone needed to make a living, including me, but I couldn’t stand to show my face in a mall, smiling at customers lining up to purchase my private nightmares.
I sent a message back, promising a P.O. box so he could ship a crate of books which I would dutifully autograph and return for distribution. But no public signings. Now or ever.
I weeded out a few more messages, scarcely glancing at them: no, I didn’t want one week free access to a triple X website; no, I wouldn’t participate in an e-mail chain letter guaranteed to net me thousands of dollars if I did and a vague curse if I didn’t. Too late, I thought, as I transferred it to the electronic trashcan. I’m already cursed.
The next message glared at me. No subject, but the return address was llarsen#3765@stppd.com.
Lawrence Larsen, St. Paul PD, homicide division. He might have been writing just to say Hi, how’re you doing, what’s the weather like? Might have been, except Larry wasn’t much for chitchat, verbal or electronic. Might have been, except for the attached file downloading behind it. An attached GIF file.
I stared at the unopened message, then fumbled for the pack of cancer-causers in my suitcase. It was going to be a bad night, indeed.
Copyright © 2000 Wendy Jensen
Additional chapters can be read online at http://www.wendyjensen.com/8thhouse3p.htm
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