Page 41 of Crazy Spooky Love
I hear weary decades of bitterness in his words.
“I want to help you, Isaac,” I say quietly. I cross the room to sit on a dusty wooden dining chair opposite him. He watches me as I lay the notepad down on the rickety side table next to his chair and then place a new pen on top ofit.
“If I’m going to search for a murder weapon, I need to know where to start. Make a list for me? Anywhere you can think of, you must know most of this house’s secrets after all of these years.”
He laughs, but his eyes are fixed on the middle distance and I get the impression that his mind is miles away. “They were like chalk and cheese growing up, those boys, both in looks and in attitude.”
I nod, hoping he’ll go on and wishing it wouldn’t seem rude to make notes as he speaks. As it is, I sit on my hands and concentrate hard in order to commit his words to memory.
“Douglas and Lloyd?” I don’t really need to say this because who else can he mean, but I throw it in to keep Isaac talking.
“One lived for sport, so the other automatically had to hate it. One had his nose forever buried in a book and the other read only under duress. One adored the stage, the other couldn’t hold a note. Introvert, extrovert.” He shakes his head at the memory. “That’s just the way they were.”
I don’t need Isaac to elaborate for me on which was which. Any man who gets caught for eternity in a smoking jacket is clearly given to theatrics.
“They were a couple of years younger than you, weren’t they?”
I know this is true because I’ve studied their family tree. Isaac nods and twists his slim hands in his lap. I wish he didn’t look so generally unloved and unkempt, it makes me want to buy him a comb and a good dinner, even though he would have no use for either.
“Two years,” he confirms. “I was always the outsider, always separate. Isaac and the twins. Isaac and the boys.” He huffs softly at the memories. “I was a little boy too.”
How I’d love to be able to pat Isaac on the knee right now, anything really, to show that I’m listening and I understand.
“It’s unusual for twins, isn’t it?” I say. “Generally you hear only about their similarities, not their differences.”
“Hard to put my finger on even one similarity,” he says.
“Did you get along with them?”
I force my voice to be ultracasual, even though I am really keen to hear Isaac’s opinion of his brothers.
“Again, I was different from them,” he says, shuffling his feet on the dusty floorboards beneath his threadbare armchair. “More serious, our mother always said.”
“And were you?”
Isaac shakes his head. “It was difficult to compete with them. Lloyd was always so theatrical and demanding, and Douglas was the blue-eyed boy who could do no wrong in our mother’s eyes.” He looks up at me for a few moments, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he can actually hear the cogs moving in my head, casting him as the jealous, overlooked sibling who finally snapped. “Don’t play the amateur sleuth again, Melody, jumping to obvious conclusions. I may not have liked either of them all that much but I didn’t kill Douglas.”
“I didn’t think that,” I say. I totally did. “Anything you can think of, note it down. I’ll be back later today hopefully, tomorrow at thelatest. Your nephew…” I pause and then correct myself. “Donovanis pushing for this to be sorted out soon, even though he doesn’t really have a clue what he wants sorting.”
“He’s Lloyd’s great-grandson. I’m afraid that makes him genetically predisposed to being a theatrical buffoon.” Isaac laughs without humor and I notice the slight shake to his hands as he reaches for the notepad and pen I’ve put on the side table. “I’ll have a think about that list,” he says, and with a heavy sigh he leans his head back and closes his eyes. “I’m glad you’re here, Melody. Resolution has been a long time coming.”
I watch him rest, and I hope like hell I can unravel this tangled web. This isn’t about making the house salable. It’s about three brothers trapped in time by a crime that’s gone unsolved for over a century, about unlocking the real reason they’re imprisoned here in limbo when they should be long gone. In the past I’ve encountered plenty of ghosts who were more than happy to hang around; look at my grandpa. He’s as happy as a pig in muck to be eternally bound to his bedroom and to my gran, but that isn’t what’s going on here. The Scarborough brothers are unhappily tethered to the house on Brimsdale Road because of their unfinished business, and none of them will know a day’s peace until it’s sorted. When I first set foot inside this house there was a distinct staleness to the air, a lazy malevolence borne from years of not being able to communicate with the living aside from terrifying them. My arrival, and undoubtedly Leo’s too, must have been like a shot of pure adrenaline for the brothers. We could see them, and we could talk to them, and because of us there is renewed energy in the house today, a sizzle of potential in the air.
“I’ll try to come back later for that list,” I murmur, and even though ghosts can’t sleep, I pick my way across the cluttered floor as quietly as I can.
As I step out of the room and pull the door closed behind me, I hear a creak on the attic stairs and Fletch joins me on the little upper landing.
“Talking to the fairies again?” he asks, his hands shoved into his jeans pockets.
“I wasn’t talking,” I say, as much to annoy him as anything else.
“I heard you.”
“What do you want me to tell you, Fletch? That I was chatting to a ghost? Will you believe me if I do?”
“You could start by telling me why you said my name downstairs.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I say, pressing my default sarcasm button because I can smell the scent of his skin from here and it’s unexpectedly sexy. Kind of like a weird mix of being in a woodland in springtime and an expensive bar late at night, leather and spice and fresh April rain.
