Murphy gave up talking about the laughter, only because it was possibly Claire’s. Murphy couldn’t be sure, because she hadn’t heard Claire laugh—really laugh—in years. Who the heck knew what Claire found funny. Probably old nineties shows about rich people, like Frasier.
Maybe she was watching Frasier on her phone.
Murphy settled on that explanation because she was creeped out already, and she didn’t need to add “mysterious ghost laughter” to her list of “Signs the House Is Haunted.”
Regardless of what Eileen said, this could be a funny story one day. How Murphy and her sisters got winter-squalled into an old house and were almost ax-murdered by their long-lost uncle.
Ha … ha?
No. Diner Cathy had to be wrong. Murphy bet that once Mark Enright had left town, he’d gone off to live in Argentina, or Switzerland, or wherever else morally dubious creeps went. No way he’d care about a house in Nowheresville, Oregon.
If he was around, though, they were armed. Eileen was brandishing a large kitchen knife she’d found downstairs. She’d given Murphy her open switchblade.
“Aren’t these illegal?” Murphy had asked.
“So are intruders,” Eileen had countered. “Anyway, blades are best. If someone tries to take your weapon, they’ll end up cutting themselves. Just keep a good grip.”
“And I’ll yell if I see something suspicious?”
“You won’t, Murph. No one’s here. We’re doing this to make Claire happy, because she’s a freaking princess, and I don’t want to deal with her bitching the rest of the night.”
Eileen had seemed confident, and that made Murphy feel better about their mission. For … a minute. Upstairs, though, things felt scarier.
Maybe there wasn’t an intruder. What about ghosts, though?
“Murph, stop breathing down my neck.”
Murphy shot back to reality, where she was kind of breathing on Eileen. She hadn’t realized how close beside her she’d been walking. It wasn’t because she was scared, though.
It wasn’t.
“Check that one,” Eileen ordered, swatting Murphy toward the bedroom across the hall.
Murphy was about to say, Why me? but stopped herself. She didn’t care if Eileen thought she was a whiner, but a coward? That was different. So Murphy shrugged like it was no big deal and went to the other room.
This place hadn’t been touched since the 1970s, at least. The wallpaper was striped mustard yellow and mud brown. Murphy squinted till the lines went runny, blending together in one putrid glob. She wondered, was this what it was like to be high on weed, or LSD? Is that why everything was barf-colored back then?
First, Murphy checked under the bed. She had to psych herself up, telling herself that no one had gotten their brains bashed in here, and there was definitely not a rotting corpse awaiting her on the other side of the bed skirt, à la “A Rose for Emily” (thanks, Ms. Hutchinson’s seventh-grade English class).
“You’re cool,” she told herself, gripping the switchblade. “You’re totally cool.”
She flung up the crocheted lace. There was nothing there. No storage boxes, not even dust. Was Uncle Patrick a neat freak till his dying day?
Murphy told herself to focus on the positive: no corpse. She felt a lot more confident when she got to her feet and checked the closet. No corpses there, either, or ax murderers. No dust bunnies, no anything.
She let herself wonder, what if this had been her dad’s room? It was a weird thought, and the weirder thing was, these rooms were old, but none of them contained a ton of old stuff. Murphy hadn’t found clothes in the dressers, papers in the desks, or picture frames on the walls. The only photo she’d seen had been the one Eileen had found. As for personal stuff, maybe Uncle Patrick had gotten rid of it. Or maybe it was stored away in those boxes downstairs.
“Clear!” Murphy yelled, but when she turned for the door, her eyes locked with another pair. Blue. Unblinking. Dead.
“HOLY—” Murphy started and didn’t finish.
It was a doll. The creepiest, ugliest porcelain doll she’d ever seen. Its hair was a mountain of ratty blond curls, and its lips were painted blood-red, slightly parted to reveal rabbitlike teeth. It was wearing a pink dress and pinafore, and Murphy wasn’t sure which was more disturbing: that the doll’s nails were painted, or that Murphy knew what the word “pinafore” meant.
Her heart revved to three hundred beats per minute. She clutched at it like an old woman and tried to breathe.