The Haunting of Ashburn House Read online

  Adrienne retraced her path up the main street and stepped into the café on the corner. She couldn’t afford to waste money on a meal, but a cheap coffee would buy her space at a table for an hour or two.

  She chose one of the larger tables, sat straight and alert, and made eye contact with everyone who entered the store. Her hope was that at least a few people would be curious enough about Ashburn to take notice of her. Staring at complete strangers was awkward and embarrassing, but it worked. Within a few minutes a portly, middle-aged gentleman stopped by her table with a cheerful, “Well, you’re the new girl from Ashburn House, aintcha?”

  Adrienne responded enthusiastically and invited him to sit for a chat, and soon a small crowd had gathered around her table. With so many other people there, Adrienne was able to sit quietly and listen to them swap stories.

  A few talked about Ashburn fondly, and a couple sheepishly admitted that they’d sneaked up to the porch as children. One woman with large, horn-rimmed glasses insisted that she’d felt a ghostly hand land on her shoulder once when she was walking past the driveway.

  “Spookiest thing I’ve ever felt,” she said. “Like ice running down my spine. I turned around, but there was no one there.”

  One of the older men gave a snort of disgust. “Ashburn is a lot of things, but it’s not haunted.”

  “How would you know, John? After that poor family got murdered there, I would be surprised if it didn’t house a whole coven of ghosts.”

  A tall, spindly man piped up. “Ghosts don’t have covens. Only witches. The correct group noun is a ‘fraid’ of ghosts.”

  “No one cares, Jerry.”

  Adrienne could feel the discussion being derailed and tried to save it. “How did the family die, anyway? I never heard the full story.”

  A chorus of answers came to her. “Cholera.”

  “A serial killer attacked them while they slept in their beds. He was never caught.”

  “Poison in the sugar bowl.”

  “They all went insane and killed each other.”

  “I heard it was Edith’s father who went through the house and shot them before they could escape.”

  Adrienne managed a thin smile. “Oh… I, uh, I guess there’s not really a consensus, is there?”

  The portly man who’d first stopped at her table huffed as though he’d just heard a bad joke. “They’re just a bunch of sanitised tales these lot were told as children. They seem to forget that my grandfather was a policeman during that time. I’d say I’m one of the only people in town who knows the real story, but nobody ever bothers to ask me about it.”

  Adrienne leaned forward, her heart thundering. “Your grandfather was there? What did he tell you about it?”

  “Oh, plenty. He went into dementia in his last years, which wiped his memory, but he was staying with me during the early stages and loved to talk about it. Mostly about how much of a botched job it was. It was the first proper murder Ipson had ever seen, and neither he nor his partner knew what to do. They were touching things with their bare hands and moving bodies around and ruining evidence. A few people from the public even traipsed through before backup from one of the larger towns arrived and took over. He said he didn’t know any better at the time but wished he could have gone back and smacked himself. He had this idea that, if he hadn’t contaminated the evidence, the killer might have been caught.

  “It was definitely murder, then?” Adrienne didn’t even try to keep the excitement out of her voice.

  “You sure you want to hear about this stuff?” The man leaned back in his chair and scrunched his mouth up as he appraised her. “Don’t want to give you nightmares.”

  The chatty woman gave his shoulder a slap. “Come off it, Greg, and just tell us.”

  Greg raised his eyebrows and looked around. Close to a dozen people had crowded into the little café’s corner, some sitting and some standing, to listen in. He surveyed the large audience, and the corners of his mouth twitched up. He laced his hands together. “All right, since you’re all so darn curious, I’ll tell you what my grandfather passed on to me. I don’t think he even shared this stuff with my dad. People didn’t really like to talk about the deaths back then; I think they found it too close for comfort. That’s why, when kids asked about it, they were given all of these ridiculous half-truths. Cholera, my foot.”

  The woman who had suggested cholera scowled.

  “Like I said, my grandfather was a policeman at the time—one of only two in this town. Ipson was a little larger back then but not by much, so people talked when the Ashburns stopped coming into town. They were the richest family about, which doesn’t sound important until you remember that this was just after the turn of the century. We hadn’t long moved past the strict social classes of lords and dukes and whatnot; when Ashburn House was established, the Ashburns would have been the most-important family in the neighbourhood.”

  And perhaps they hadn’t adjusted to the twentieth century as well as other families. Adrienne thought of Edith’s wardrobe, filled with black silk dresses that would have been outdated even when she was a child.

  Greg paused to sip his coffee as he looked about the group to ensure he had their attention. “So when the Ashburns stopped coming into town, people noticed, and it didn’t take long for one of their friends to check in on them. My granddad said she came running into the station screaming, ‘They’re dead, they’re dead, my God, they’re all dead.’ He said she was so hysterical that he had to shake the family name out of her.

  “He and his partner left for Ashburn immediately. He reckoned he could feel something bad in the air as soon as they crossed the property bounds. Like a foul smell but one you felt rather than tasted.”

  “Come off it, Greg,” the chatty lady said. “Stop embellishing.”

  “I’m not! That’s how he described it.”

  They glared at each other for a moment, then Greg sighed and waved a hand as though it weren’t important. “Well, regardless, my grandfather said he could smell the blood before he even opened the door. And what he found inside is the reason why the story has been so thoroughly distorted through the last few generations: the truth was too grisly for the teller to want to recount and too horrible for the listener to believe.”

  He paused for effect, and Adrienne had to squeeze her hands together under the table to stop herself from shaking him. “Yes?”

  “The Ashburns had been torn apart. Blood was sprayed over nearly every room in the building, and limbs were scattered everywhere. My grandfather threw up on a dismembered arm. He said that one of the Ashburns seemed to have been trying to escape but was caught just before they reached the door. A red trail of blood ran down the hallway where the body had been dragged back into the house. Mrs Ashburn—Edith’s mother—had her whole lower jaw torn off. One of them had been burnt alive. Charles Ashburn’s heart was found three rooms away from the rest of his body. He said—and no”—he glared at the chatty woman—“I’m not embellishing this part—he said it was like the house had been baptised in blood.”

  He still held the crowd’s attention, but the expressions of fascination had morphed into revulsion and doubt. The tall, spindly man who’d corrected the use of coven looked faintly green.

  Greg paused to sip his coffee again. He seemed to be enjoying the story’s effect. “To make everything worse, the family had been dead for a couple of days by the time they were found, and were decaying. He said the smell was worse than anything I could imagine, and he was sick all over the crime scene.”

  “This is ridiculous,” the chatty woman interjected. She threw her hands up as though trying to break some spell they’d been pulled under. Her tone was brisk and exasperated, but Adrienne could see beads of sweat developing on her face. “You’re an appalling liar, Greg.”

  Greg just shrugged. “And this is why none of you ever got to hear the real story. You were told lies. Your parents were told lies. Your grandparents were told lies. Because the truth was just
too awful to spread.”

  “I don’t understand.” Adrienne had her hands clasped around her cup. The coffee inside had cooled to lukewarm, but she couldn’t bring herself to drink it. “If the murders were really as awful as that, and if the crime was unsolved, the story would spread. There’d be books written about it. Or it would be in those ‘Top Ten Unsolved Murders’ lists that float around online. People love mysteries like this.”

  Greg made a small noise of annoyance in the back of his throat. He held up his hand and began ticking points off on his fingers. “Well, to start with, the Internet wasn’t even a pipe dream when the Ashburns were murdered. News spread slowly back then. Ipson was a small town, and its occupants didn’t put much effort into recording their history. And those top-ten lists you’re talking about? Don’t think they include every noteworthy unsolved crime. Heck, I doubt they list even a small percentage of them. They just parrot the best-known stories. How many hundreds of thousands of mysteries exist in this world? How many will you hear about, and how many are left to rot in the cold-cases section of some two-man police station?”

  Adrienne didn’t have any answers.

  “Exactly,” Greg said, nodding as though he’d won a vital debate. “For a story to spread, people have to hear about it. Ashburn’s massacre never reached the greater world, never got circulated, and its place on those top-ten lists was taken by some murder from a town with an actual journalist.” He sighed and flexed his shoulders. “Now, let me finish my story. We’re almost there, I promise.

  “As you’d know, Edith was the only Ashburn to survive the massacre. She’d been hidden in a locked cupboard—probably by one of her parents—and escaped the encounter with just a couple of scratches. She was nonresponsive when found. The police tried to interview her, but she wouldn’t say a word. Shock, my grandfather said. I guess nowadays it would be classified as PTSD. She’d listened to her family die then been trapped in a lightless box for two days while her loved ones decayed just metres away.”

  A tight, painful ache rose in Adrienne’s chest as her mind reconstructed the scene. A few people in the crowd began muttering—some in disbelieving shock, some in anger—but Greg continued as though he hadn’t heard them.

  “Because she was the only survivor, Edith was naturally a suspect in the murders but got cleared pretty quickly. She was only eight at the time, for starters. And the cupboard had been locked from the outside, meaning at least one other person had been alive to hide her in there. She got shipped off to her grandparents’ the following week, her relatives’ corpses were cobbled together and buried, and the case went cold. Eventually, the event faded enough from people’s memories that they no longer double bolted their doors at night, and they stopped hiding guns under their pillows. And here we are, near to a hundred years later, and people are trying to claim the Ashburns died of cholera. The end.”

  “You’re a real ass, Greg.” The chatty woman’s face was contorted in anger. “A lying shock jock of an ass.”

  The tall, weedy man cleared his throat. “Actually, the term shock jock only applies to radio presenters.”

  The chatty lady was too furious to respond. She turned, threw her half-finished coffee into the bin, and stormed out of the coffee shop. Greg lifted his hands as if to say What can you do? then also rose.

  “Hope I didn’t ruin the house for you,” he said to Adrienne. “Don’t worry—Edith had the whole thing remodelled when she moved back in. New floors, new walls, the lot. So if you see any weird stains, it’s probably not blood.” He winked. “Probably.”

  The crowd was disbanding. Adrienne had the impression some of them would have liked to talk with her, but Greg’s horror story must have left such a bad taste in everyone’s mouths that they wanted nothing more than to leave and purge it from their minds. Maybe Greg was right, Adrienne thought as she made herself drink the cold coffee despite her churning stomach. Maybe some stories are just too horrible to spread.

  29

  Implications

  Adrienne sighed as she exited the café. The sun was far lower than she’d expected. There wasn’t any more time to hunt for answers, but she could still make it back to Ashburn before sundown if she hurried.

  Greg’s story hung with her, particularly the image of young Edith trapped inside a windowless box while her family was murdered. Nauseating anger churned up her stomach. She realised she hated the town for how callous it had been towards her great-aunt. The ostracisation, the rumours, and even that mean little bet about how soon Edith would die were like thorns digging into the back of her head. Edith clearly hadn’t been well, and she might have had a prickly, stubborn personality, but the community should have been kinder to her. It couldn’t have been easy for Edith to live in the house where her family had died.

  Then why did she?

  The question came out of nowhere, but Adrienne couldn’t answer it. Greg said the Ashburns had been wealthy, and Edith clearly hadn’t been friendless if she’d been raised by her grandparents. So why had she chosen to return to Ashburn House?

  “Addy!”

  She’d even had the money to fully renovate the building. And if the reconstruction had depleted her fortune, she could have sold the property and moved to a smaller house in a different town.

  “Addy! Please, wait!”

  Adrienne pulled up short. She’d been so engaged in her puzzle that she hadn’t heard the voice or the pounding footsteps. She turned and blinked at Sarah, who clasped a folder to her chest as she ran up the street. “Oh, jeez, I’m so sorry, I didn’t hear you!”

  “It’s fine! Fine!” Sarah, caught up, doubled over and wheezed in laboured breaths. “Oh, wow. Okay. I didn’t realise I was so unfit. And Jayne wants us to take up Pilates next month. It might just kill me.”

  Adrienne laughed and patted Sarah’s shoulder while she caught her breath. “It’s okay, take your time.” But please not too long; the sun’s close to setting.

  “I was about to give up looking for you.” Sarah straightened and rubbed wisps of hair out of her flushed face. “I thought you must have gone home.”

  “You caught me just in time. What happened?”

  Sarah was still breathless, but she seemed excited too. “After you’d left, I couldn’t stop thinking about those newspapers and how the articles had been cut out. So I asked Pam if she remembered if anyone asked to see them. She’s worked at the library for, oh, longer than I’ve been alive. She was surprised but said yes, that Edith had come in to see them nearly a decade ago.”

  “Ooh.” Adrienne wasn’t as surprised as she would have expected to be. She found it easy to picture Edith sitting at the papers with a scalpel and carving out the stories with brisk, precise cuts. “I wonder what she took them for.”

  Sarah shrugged. “I asked Pam why she didn’t stay in the room with Edith. She became flustered and told me she’d been too busy and to mind my own business, but I think she was scared of Edith and didn’t want to be around her for too long and—sorry, I’m rambling!”

  “No, no, it’s fine!” Adrienne’s mind was still churning through the news, and she gave Sarah’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I’m glad you told me.”

  “That’s not all.” Sarah raised the folder, and a jittery smile lit up her face. “I thought that the paper might have published another story to recap the deaths when Edith moved back to town—it had been ten years, and memories would need refreshing—so I looked through the papers from around that time. Sadly, they’d been vandalised, too. Edith must have really, really wanted to hide the story. I was about to give up when I found this.”

  She opened the folder. Inside was one of the newspapers, and Sarah turned it around to show Adrienne. “Read this. It’s from two weeks after Edith moved into Ashburn House.”

  BODYSNATCHERS STRIKE AT IPSON CEMETERY

  The family whose name has become synonymous with tragedy has experienced another blow. This past Wednesday, sometime between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., a bodysnatc
her exhumed the late Eleanor Ashburn’s body.

  Groundskeeper Stanley Horvath claims the grounds were undisturbed when he closed the cemetery gates at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday evening. But when he reopened the graveyard the following morning, a hole had been dug into Eleanor’s grave and her remains removed.

  “Lord knows why they’d want to do that,” Mr Horvath is quoted as saying. “She’s been dead these ten years. Wouldn’t be much of her to take, you know?”

  The culprit is as yet unknown. While many people have voiced suspicion regarding the body’s removal so soon after Miss Edith Ashburn’s return to town, Constable Bluet says he has both interviewed the heiress and searched her home and is satisfied that she has no part in the body’s theft. Investigation is ongoing.

  Adrienne had to read the story twice before she could meet Sarah’s eyes. Her mind was moving so quickly that she found it difficult to latch onto a single idea. “They didn’t say who Eleanor is—was she Edith’s mother or her aunt?”

  “I don’t know. Sorry. Beth might; I’ll ask her next time I see her.”

  Adrienne closed the folder and handed it back to Sarah. “Thank you. That was a great find.”

  “It was, wasn’t it?” Sarah grinned and clasped the folder against her chest. “I’d better put this back before Pam locks the library. Visit again soon, though, so I can tell you if I find anything else.”

  “I’ll do that.” Adrienne glanced at the sun. It was sinking behind the treetops. “Thank you!”

  Sarah raised a hand in farewell then began jogging back down the street. Adrienne turned in the opposite direction, hiked her shopping bag up, and started to run. The delay had been important, but it had turned what would have been a brisk walk into a mad dash. Even if the phenomenon didn’t return that night—and she was praying it wouldn’t—she didn’t want to be stumbling through the woods in the dark.