“Have you heard of Vivianna Wainwright?” Abby asked suddenly and Cash halted and watched her a moment
Then he murmured, “I see. Fenella has been –”
Abby cut him off. “No, Cash. Fenella has been nothing.”
“Darling –” he started again and Abby interrupted again.
“I didn’t slip in the bathroom,” she announced and watched as his body went still. “Your hand doesn’t slam through a mirror when you slip. It slams through a mirror when you’re shoved.”
Cash stared at her a moment then said softly, “Darling, you’ve been going through a lot lately.”
“Yes,” Abby agreed on a toss of her hair, “I have, including becoming the target of a ghost.”
“Abby –”
“Cash, listen to me!” she yelled. “I’m not crazy. I know what I saw. I know what I felt. I was standing at the sink, looking in the mirror and there she was behind me. She came at me, shoved me between the shoulders and I slammed forward, my hand going up to shield my fall, it went through the mirror. Only then did I slip and hit my head on the basin. And tonight, it was worse.”
His gaze was locked on hers, his jaw clamped and she saw a muscle working in his cheek.
Then his eyes moved over her face then down to her sweater where they stopped and narrowed.
“What happened to your jumper?” he asked and Abby looked down to see there was a burn mark on her sweater, just like the one on Vivianna’s dress, where Cassandra’s amulet had sparked.
She hadn’t noticed it until now.
“Cassandra’s protection amulet,” Abby explained, “it kind of… exploded when Vivianna and I clashed.”
Cash’s eyes jerked to hers and he repeated, “Cassandra’s protection amulet.”
“Yes.”
She watched as something dawned on him and his mouth tightened as his eyes went to the ceiling.
Finally he muttered, “I don’t f**king believe this shit.”
“Believe it,” Abby returned.
He looked at her again. “Abby, no matter what these people are telling you, I promise you, there are no such things as ghosts.”
“There are,” Abby retorted.
“No, there aren’t.”
“You felt it yourself,” she told him.
“I felt what?” he asked.
“The minute we walked into the castle, the entry swayed. You were there, you said you felt it!”
“That wasn’t a ghost,” he said.
“Then what was it?” Abby queried.
His face now held a hint of soft concern. “I don’t know, darling, but it wasn’t a f**king ghost.”
Abby stared at him then she had an idea and asked, “Did you pick up the diaries?”
At her swift change of subject, Cash’s head cocked to the side. “Diaries?”
“Your grandmother’s diaries,” Abby prompted.
He watched her a moment then said, “Emma went to get them today.”
Immediately Abby enquired, “Do you have them here at the house?”
“They’re in the study,” he answered and Abby was on the move.
Walking around him, she went to his study, flipped on the light and saw his briefcase opened on his desk. A stack of several, slim, elegant, leather-bound books sat beside it.
Abby walked up to the desk, grabbed the first one off the stack and started sifting through it, randomly picking pages and skimming. She found nothing so she threw that diary down and picked up the next, doing the same.
“Abby, what the f**k?” Cash muttered but then Abby saw it.
She immediately started reading, “My favourite brooch is missing. The one Richard gave me. I can’t find it anywhere and Richard is asking where it is. I know she took it, she knows how much I love it. It’s just the kind of thing she’d do. Especially since Richard is getting annoyed that I haven’t been wearing it. I was searching for it on my hands and knees beside the bed when I heard Vivianna laugh.”
Abby looked at Cash and saw his eyes were on the diary and his jaw was again clenched but he didn’t say anything so Abby persevered.
Using her thumb against the edges, Abby flipped pages ahead skimming quickly then she found another passage and started reading, “I’m frightened. She’s watching all the time. Everywhere I turn, if I’m alone, she’s there. Hovering. And anytime Richard is out of the house, she screams. And screams and screams and screams. We’ve lost three servants this week alone. They can’t bear it. I don’t know how long I can bear it either. I keep telling Richard about Vivianna but he just won’t listen. He thinks I’m being silly, he finds me amusing. He tells me it’s a legend, a myth, that I shouldn’t believe the servants’ gossip and let them make me anxious. I can’t get him to understand that she’s real. It’s getting worse, it feels different now. I think she means to harm me.”
Abby’s eyes went to Cash’s face again and Cash remarked, “My grandmother Lorna died of a stroke when I was seven years old. She wasn’t murdered by a ghost.”
“She stopped being a target,” Abby told him.
“And why is that?” Cash asked.
Abby stared at him, not wanting to get into the “love of their lives” business, not again and definitely not with Cash.
Therefore, she said, “She just did.”
Cash looked into her eyes and stated quietly, “Darling, do you have any idea how preposterous this sounds? Vivianna Wainwright is a ghost story handed down generation to generation. She isn’t real.”
Abby stared at him all of a sudden wondering why she’d told him. Of course he wouldn’t believe her. If she was him, she wouldn’t believe her either. It did sound preposterous, even though it was true.
Abby closed the diary and set it on his desk. She looked to the side to avoid his eyes then lifted her hand to pull her hair off her face. Bunching it at the back of her head for a moment, she decided to give up and maybe lie and say she got a little crazy when she was on her period. Men bought that kind of excuse all the time.
She sighed, looked back at him, dropped her hand and he watched it fall as she said, “You’re right, I –”
But Cash interrupted her. “What’s happened to your hand?”
Abby’s chin dipped, she lifted her hands, palms up and studied them. They were dirty, smudged with black and there were angry red scrapes along the heels of her palms. She hadn’t noticed it before, considering her Layering of Freak Outs, but she knew how it happened. She’d fallen hard on the stairs, landed on her hands then she’d used them to crawl back up.