Page 55 of Crazy Spooky Love
Marina squats down on her haunches and lets Lestat stand on his stumpy back legs to fuzz his flat face against her cheek.
“How was your first night in your new home, my sweet little vampire boy,” she babies him, screwing her nose up when he licksit.
“Oh, he had a whale of a time,” I say, not hiding the sarcasm in my tone. “He stole my crisps, peed and crapped all over the floor, then crashed out like Jabba the bloody Hutt on my bed. I ended up on the sofa because his snores could give a girl tinnitus.”
“Nooo,” she croons, as if I’m lying just to make him look bad. “Were you scared, little one? Is that what it was?”
I conjure up the image of him blissfully passed out and snoringlike a drunk at 4:00a.m.this morning. Nope, he definitely wasn’t scared.
“Is he going to live in here during the day?” Glenda inquires politely, sweeping her ankles to the other side as he makes a beeline for her. When I nod, she pulls up a website and clicks on an offer for a jumbo bottle of odor-removing disinfectant spray. My gran’s insistence that she clean up vomit has clearly had a lasting effect. Glenda is nothing if not efficient; she arrived this morning with not one, but three boxes of latex gloves. One for Blithe Spirits, one for us, and one for spares, because you just never know around here.
Artie flies through the door at 9:10a.m., bending double with his hands on his knees as he pants.
“Artie, what happened?”
He pauses to catch his breath. “Missed the bus.” He stops again. “Snake escaped.”
All three of us look at him, horrified, and even Lestat seems to understand because he drops onto his belly and lays his jowly face on my Converse.
“Did you catch it?” I can hardly bear to ask. Am I the only one of us scanning his body for signs of an errant python? I check his shirtsleeves, his collar, and the bottoms of his trouser legs. All clear.
To my relief, he nods. “In next door’s washing basket. She said she was seconds away from a boil wash with her husband’s work shirts,” Artie tells us, eyes wide.
Personally, I feel more concerned for his neighbor than the snake. I’d never be able to face shaking my smalls out again.
“Holy shit.” Marina shudders. “Remind me to never visit you.” Glenda doesn’t seem so offended by the bad language this time; in fact, I fully expect to see her order up a snake-catching net or something similar in the next few minutes, just in case.
“Glove-up, everyone, it’s time toread Agnes’s diaries.”
Marina, Artie, and I gather around my desk after lunch, diariesand latex gloves at the ready. We’re all stuffed full of the chicken and chorizo paella that my mother appeared with after a successful trial run for a dinner party she’s planning to throw at the weekend. It’s the first I’ve heard of it, but I don’t question her because a) she hasn’t invited me, and b) the paella smells divine. We’ve all demolished large bowls full, Lestat included, so much so that he sat down and stared at Artie disdainfully when he jangled his lead at him afterward. Right now he’s crashed again; I should probably be more grateful that he’s deigned to use the tartan-padded bed I bought especially for him and is snoozing quietly on his belly rather than noisily on his back.
“He’s like the Garfield of the dog world,” Artie says, gazing at Lestat affectionately. From what I recall, Garfield is a lazy, lasagna-eating oaf of a cat. Yup, Lestat is indeed his canine double.
“We have 1908 through to 1920, but there are a couple of years missing, notably 1910.”
“The year Douglas was murdered,” Marina murmurs, and we all nod. It was too big an ask to find the events all neatly recorded.
“The one for 1909 is here though, and 1911, so we should get a good flavor for how things were for the Scarborough family before and then not long after Douglas’s death.”
I hand Artie 1908, Marina 1909, and I take 1911.
“Go through and make notes of any dates and events that might be worth us all reading. Look for any comments you think might be significant, no matter how small.”
Artie straightens his notepad, and it strikes me that I could see him joining the police force in the future or maybe becoming a reporter. I don’t tell him though; I don’t want Fletcher Gunn getting his hands on my protégé. Artie is of course free to follow whatever career path he chooses…as long as it’s not as a reporter alongside Fletcher Gunn. In fact, he should stick to ghost hunting, but absolutely not for Leo Dark. So, err, yes, Artie is free to do whatever he wants, as long as it’s only ever ghost hunting forme.
On the whiteboard behind my desk, I’ve written Agnes Scarborough’s name and “I made a terrible mistake/diaries” beside it. I’vealready relayed the story of my early-hours astral visitor to Artie and Marina, and we all know her words need to stay uppermost in our minds as we examine her journals.
Companionable silence settles over the warm, morning-sun-filled office as we all snap on our gloves and set about our task. Marina makes a note almost instantly, and I peer across to see what she’s written.
“Buy funky lavender-colored pens.”
I shoot her aReally?look, and then, finally, I take a deep breath and dive headlong into 1911.
God, Agnes was so terribly,terribly sad in 1911, it’s breaking my heart. She was in her midforties, and Douglas had died at the beginning of the previous summer. Her diary reads like one long, poignant love letter to her lost child, and I have to keep pausing to wipe my eyes. I even walk Lestat up and down the alley to clear my head, much to his disgust. Agnes’s grief at losing Douglas is unfiltered and harrowing, a tangible thing, so all-encompassing and undiluted that it reaches out and spikes icy shards of fear through my heart. I don’t know how she survived it. Douglas was her beloved boy, forever twenty-one in her head now. She wrote of her precious memories: her joy at his first faltering steps with a toothy grin on his baby face, her elation when his first word wasMamma,and how carefully she’d watched over him through every step of his life to keep him safe. How could that have all been for nothing? It didn’t make sense. How could all of those wiped tears; softly sung, middle-of-the-night lullabies, and sticky, beautiful childhood hugs have not been enough to keep him safe? Her emotions swung between violent anger and grief so palpable that I’m surprised her tears didn’t wash her words away as she wrote them. She said her heart had turned coal black in her chest, as if someone had set fire to it. She said that every second of every day afterward she fought against theurge to claw at the earth that covered his body so she could hold him to her breast once again. She said that her doctor had told her she must drink more water because she’d wept the tears of a village. She didn’t care if she was dehydrated, if she shriveled and dried out, or if she died, because it couldn’t possibly be more painful than being alive in a world when her child was not.
But Agnes didn’t lose only one son in 1910. She lost two. She was so entirely desperate for answers that she allowed her grief to manifest itself as anger toward the person everyone believed to be the killer: Isaac. How could one brother bring himself to kill another? She couldn’t fathom it. He’d left because she told him to go. She’d taken a knife from the kitchen drawer and stood in front of him in the hallway of Scarborough House, and she’d begged him to hack her heart out because it had stopped working. She couldn’t feel, and she couldn’t love, and most of all, she couldn’t love him. She couldn’t even stand to look at him, or to know that he was still breathing when Douglas wasn’t. Isaac had taken the knife from her hands and laid it carefully on the table, and then he’d walked out of his family home for the very last time.
I’m none the wiser as to who actually killed Douglas by the time I reach December 31, 1911, but I’m utterly exhausted. I close the diary gently on the desk and glance up at the clock on the wall. It’s after 5:00p.m., and I’ve never felt more in need of a huge glass of wine and a restorative soak in the bath.
