Page 1 of Hoodoo House
Prologue
Mrs Cameron stood at the kitchen sink, considering the dishes created by her morning baking. She stared at the boarded-up kitchen window, the result of a strong dust devil that had hit the north side of the house and torn off a section of the roof a week ago. A sheet of plywood shielded the glass from the repair work above on the decaying one-hundred-and five-year-old wood-framed house.
With the light from the outside cut off, the windowpane became a dim mirror reflecting the activity and inhabitants of the kitchen. Mrs Cameron looked at her reflection and saw a woman with a jowly countenance and hair that had gone completely white. She hadn’t turned full-on apple doll yet, but it was inevitable—unless, of course, death took her first.
When did you become so old?
Her thoughts were interrupted.
“What’s this symbol called?” Henry asked, holding up a piece of paper and pointing to an indiscernible character. He was surrounded by the remains of his math homework spread all over the table.
“Well, you’re gonna have to bring it here. My eyes aren’t telescopes.”
Henry scooted the chair back, brought her the paper and held it up to her milky blue eyes. She pulled her reading glasses out of the pocket of her apron and held them in front of her, like a jeweller would hold their loupe while examining a rare gem.
“It’s a pi,” she said.
“I like pie,” he said with a smile.
She raised an eyebrow. “Now how long have you been waiting to tell that joke?”
“It’s not so much a joke as witty wordplay,” he said, heading back to his chair.
This from a thirteen-year-old, she thought, shaking her head. Henry often seemed wiser than a boy of his age. Although he was only her ward, she thought of him as the child she’d never had and due to their age difference, he had taken to calling her Gramma Carol.
She patted him on the shoulder. “Now, clear up your mess and set the table. Then you can go and tell Mr Tull breakfast is ready.”
Henry quickly did as he was told.
Mrs Cameron smiled as she looked around. The kitchen was her domain and nobody in Hoodoo House would dare to question anything she did here or, frankly, anywhere else on the property. She was the housekeeper, cook, scullery maid and holder of just about every other staff position one could imagine. She was as permanent a fixture in the building as the ancient stove or the kitchen’s large wooden prep table and she loved every scrap of wood and broken-down fixture in it…almost as much as she loved young Henry.
Writer Malcolm Tull, however…
An acrid smell hit her nostrils.
“Damn.”
She ran towards the oven. A cloud of smoke filled the air as she pulled out the tray of burnt baking.
“You damned fool,” she muttered to herself as she removed the biscuits and placed them on a cooling rack. She could scrape the char off the best ones and they’d be fine. The others she’d save for crumbling up for the chickens, or perhaps the centres could be used for stuffing. Either way, they would end up inside a chicken.
She checked the coffee perking in the pot and dabbed the fat off the freshly cooked bacon. She turned back towards the kitchen table and was startled to see Henry standing at the door, his eyes wide, his mouth open. It took him a moment to speak.
“There’s something wrong with Mr Tull.”
“Well, what’s wrong?” she asked.
“He’s asleep on his desk and he’s lying in his own sick.”
Mrs Cameron hurried to the writing room. Henry followed. She went to the desk and examined the prone man. She’d been around long enough to know when something wasn’t alive, but to be certain, she checked for a pulse—nothing.
“Henry, leave the room and don’t touch anything. And don’t come back in here.”
She scurried past the boy and headed back to the kitchen where she called the doctor…and the police.
* * * *
Sergeant Kaci Bowen from the Drumheller, Alberta RCMP detachment was in her late fifties and moved like she’d walked too many miles in cheap shoes. She trudged into the writing room. It was a large space with bookshelves on three walls and a sizeable casement window in the fourth which faced the roadway and the distant fields of prairie grass beyond. As had been reported, the body of writer Malcolm Tull, forty-five years old, was seated in a leather chair behind an expansive oak desk. His torso, head and arms lay across the desk. His face lay in a pool of vomit, which had formed a ring around a blue ceramic coffee mug just beyond reach of Tull’s right hand. On the left side of the desk was a prescription bottle one-third full of round white tablets.
