The Attic – A Ghost Story Part 4

I knew sleep was going to be difficult that night. The strange occurrences emanating from the attic had everyone on edge, and there was a sexual tension in the air that our evening trysts had failed to quench. We all kept our lights on, and barely slept, frequently texting each other or waving out our windows at each other across the courtyard to make sure everybody was okay. By morning, the texting had become borderline sexting. Having not slept a wink, we were all trooping down to the coffee pot by six AM.

Nobody said much at first, I just handed out mugs as we all sat around the kitchen table staring blearily and vacantly into our java. The tension from the previous night was still thick in the air. It was Lila who broke the silence.

"Unless someone comes up with a really good reason, tonight I am going up there and laying on that bed in the attic," she said. "I let you guys talk me out of it last night, but that's my starting position today."

There was another pause, then Mina giggled.

"Your starting position…" she said, and giggled again. "Your starting position was on your knees from what I saw last night. Your finishing position, too."

"Like you have a lot of room to talk," my wife shot back with a smirk.

That broke the tension and we all laughed.

"Seriously," Lila said, when the giggling slowed down.

"I think before you do that, we need to figure out who those two ghost women are upstairs," I said. "And what the deal was with that bedroom."

"How do we do that?" Callie asked.

"There are probably three avenues of approach," I said. "One avenue is to look for news articles about this place, either online or at the library. The second avenue is to talk to the neighbors. And the third avenue is to check back with the Realtor to see if they have any background on the house or the family that used to live here."

"Callie and I can do the research angle," Mina said. "We're doing so much of it already for class that it makes sense for us to do it."

Lila nudged me. "You should talk to the Realtor," she said. "Miss Angelina definitely has the hots for you. Lay on some charm, show her a little of those pecs, and I bet her mouth and her legs open right up." I rolled my eyes.

"You would trust me to talk her after what happened up in the attic last night?"

Lila kissed me on the cheek.

"Outside of our ghostly roomies, I trust you to keep it all in the family," she said and winked at the twins. I looked down at the the table and brushed away a crumb awkwardly while the twins giggled. I cleared my throat.

"You can chat up the neighbors," I said back to her. "You're very good at that."

"Seriously though, to Mom's earlier point," Mina added, a hint of angst creeping into her voice. "We probably want to make a solid investigation of the attic and all the stuff again, together, not alone. I'll bring that trash in from the curb before the collectors come. We should go through it again in case there's something relevant to our situation."

"That makes sense," Lila said. "So we all get of the house by 8:30 and we convene back here by 12:30 for lunch and a nap, then we attack the attic again. Agreed?"

We all nodded.

"One final thing," I said, a thought coming to me. "Before my adventure last night, had anyone been up there after dark for any extended period of time?"

Shakes of heads around the table confirmed what I had thought.

"Then let's make a new rule that nobody goes up there alone." Everyone agreed.

The realty office opened at 8:00. I figured face-to-face was a better approach. I called and Angelina said she would be around, so I drove over.

Angelina was roughly the same age as Lila and I, maybe a couple years older, and her family had lived in the town for several generations. She knew her way around and some of the history of the place, so I was hopeful. When she had shown us the house, she had mentioned that the previous family, the Helmsworths, had lived there for three generations and had taken pretty good care of the place. The last grandkids had moved and sold the place when they took a job out-of-state. They had been on a tight timeline and part of the reduced price of the house had been that we had to inherit the junk in the attic – or at least that was what we were told. We had had the place inspected three times before we closed the deal – including specific plumbing and electrical inspections - and it seemed like a steal. Now I was beginning to wonder.

Angelina had taken a liking to me, and I got the feeling that the fact I was married would not be a hindrance to her if I responded in kind to her advances. I had no intention of doing so, but she didn't seem to care. She was going to continue to try to get my attention.

I didn't exactly discourage her. I wore a button-up short sleeve shirt with enough of the top buttons unbuttoned to make sure she could get a look at those pecs Lila crowed about, and my sleeves were short enough to display my guns.

Angelina was in her office and gave me a smile when I came in. I held out my hand to shake hers but instead, she came around her desk and embraced me in a big hug that was a bit closer and was held just a smidge longer than decorum would seem to require. She pressed her body against mine for as long as she could get away with. I was glad when she finally disengaged.

"It's nice to see you today, Tim," she started, when we were seated with a desk safely between her and myself. She spoke a little fast and disjointed, like we were on a date or something. "Everything going well in your new house, I trust? How are the twins doing? What were they studying again? You were very vague on the phone, what can I do for you?" I noticed as she talked that the blouse she wore was open a bit deeper into her cleavage than I would have expected. I could see the edge of one of her bra cups and the tiny little lace flower at the center of the bra.

"We love the place," I said, forcing my most charming smile. "It's a beautiful old house, I can't believe we got it for that price. Callie and Mina are adjusting well. They're both studying graphic design, but Mina is more focused on the artistic side while Callie has always been a shutterbug. That's part of the reason we loved the house, there was room for both my wife and I to have our own offices, the twins to have a studio, and Callie to have a darkroom in the cellar. But the reason I reached out was because I wanted to ask a couple questions about the stuff in the attic, and the Helmsworths."

"Sure," Angelina replied, nodding. "If the stuff in the attic is too much to go through, I can arrange for it to be assessed, the good stuff sent out for auction and the junk hauled away. You might even break even in the deal." And as she talked, she absently fingered the topmost button that was still buttoned, as if she was trying to figure out a way to unobtrusively unbutton that one too.

I wasn't buying what she was selling, however, in the interest of keeping her engaged I casually made it a point to let her see me stare at her cleavage a couple times.

"No, we've already made a first pass through the stuff," I replied to her. "The thing is, we just want to know a little bit more about the folks who lived here before. Some of these old clothes are pretty vintage, and you know how it is, these things sell a little better if they have a story to go with them. Plus, we noticed that a lot of the clothes seem to come in pairs, like they were owned by twins. Were there ever any twins that lived in the house? I have a pair of twin daughters and twins run in my wife's family, so that point is also particularly of interest to us."

"Yes," Angelina said, turning to glance out the window as she remembered. I noticed that she had managed to unobtrusively pop open another button, revealing a healthy slice of skin below the bra. She casually fiddled with the next button in line as she continued. "That would be Dorothy and Lorelei Helmsworth. They were born in 1968 and lived in the house for their entire short life. Sadly, they died in a car crash in their early thirties. It was New Year's eve 2000, the millennial celebration. They were out partying, had a little too much to drink, and became another sad reminder that drinking and driving don't mix. It was quite tragic."

"Oh wow," I said. "They lived in the house – my house? Did they by any chance live in that room in the attic."

For the first time, I noticed something flash across Angelina's face, like I had hit a nerve. She stifled it almost immediately, but it had been there. She turned back towards the window, gazed out, and, sure enough, another button popped open. If I kept this conversation going long enough, she would have been topless by the time we were done. She turned back and I again made it a point to let her see me eyeing her offered decollete.

"I surely wouldn't know. I never set foot in the attic until the house came on the market. They were a very...strange pair, and they did some rather unnatural things. They died when I was in my early twenties, but they were kind of insular. They lived there with their married other sister who was a few years older and had a son. That son is the one you bought the house from."

"Is the sister still around?" I asked.

"No, she sadly passed two years ago. Stroke. Sudden and shocking."

I felt like I was reaching the end of useful questioning. It was helpful, but I wasn't sure I really had unearthed anything groundbreaking.

"Thanks for the help," I said, rising to go. "Out of curiosity, are the twins buried around here anywhere?"

The dark look flashed across her face again.

"Nobody in this town would give them a proper burial, and sadly, hardly anyone grieved their passing. I know they were cremated, but I have no idea where their ashes are. They were an odd pair, and you know how small towns can be."

There was an uncomfortable pause in the conversation, then Angelina shrugged and smiled, still fingering her blouse. "Here I go again, acting like the town's crazy cat lady. The Helmsworths must have disposed of the ashes. I wouldn't worry about it."

I thanked her and rose, but before I could slip from the office she darted around the desk and gave me another full-body hug. She managed to rub her chest up my shirt so one of her breasts was just about free of her bra when she held it against me. Her nipple was hard through my shirt. She embraced me for longer than I was comfortable with then she stepped back and smiled.

"If there is anything else you need, or if you run into any issues at home…" she left a brief pregnant pause right here and looked at me hopefully, one of her breasts practically bare "...you just let me know. I'm always here to help."

I was really glad when I made it back out into the light of the mid-morning sun, free of the overly-helpful and overly-hopeful Angelina.

Before I went home I swung by the town's main cemetery. The Helmsworth plot was easy to find, they had been in the town for generations, and as Angelina had indicated, there was no headstones for Dorothy or Lorelei anywhere. It was as if they had never existed.

I got home around 11:30. The twins were already back and they were in the living room with Lila, papers strewn across the coffee table.

"What've you got?" I asked, sitting down and looking expectantly.

"You first," Lila said. I nodded and filled them in on my discussion with Angelina, including her gratuitous displays of cleavage.

"Wow," Mina said. "That connects partially with some things we found. Here are a couple of key points. First off, Dorothy and Lorelei Helmsworth did die in the early hours of January 1, 2000. Here are copies of some of the paper accounts of the apparent accident." She slid some printouts from microfiche machines across to me. "The official word is that they had been drinking at the time, at least that was the story the folks in the town told. Unfortunately for the locals, next to their sleepy little hamlet is a larger and somewhat more cosmopolitan college town, so at the state level, they didn't quite buy the story. There was an official investigation." More papers slid across the table. "The final report was very interesting." Another paper. "The coroner found no trace of alcohol or drugs in their systems...but they had bullet holes in their heads." Another paper. "And nobody was ever charged, it's considered a cold case."

"Bullet holes?" I asked, shocked.

"They were murdered, nobody was brought to justice, and the local papers said nothing about it."

"Neither did Angelina," I added, irked.

"She may not have known," Lila said. "If they covered it up."

"That girl knows everything that goes on in this burg. She knew. Damn her."

Callie gave a wry shake of her head. "Two unpopular young women are alone in a car late on New Years Eve. They're murdered on a lonely road in a small town. Nobody around to see what happened. Props to the state for trying, but it seems like the town probably closed ranks around...someone...and the state reached a dead end."

"By the way," Mina said. "When you had your...um...thing with the Helmsworth sisters last night, did you notice the tattoos on the back of their shoulder blades? They each had their name written there. It's in the autopsy report, and it seems like the only way to tell them apart."

I shook my head. Lila smirked.

"I don't think their shoulders were the body parts your father was focused on…" she said. The twins giggled.

"What did you find?" I asked Lila, trying to bring the conversation back around.

"Most people in the neighborhood seemed to have collective amnesia about the sisters. The old lady at the very end of the block said something vague about a pair of twins who did 'unnatural things' and used to have what she called 'special friends' who came over sometimes. The guy that lives with his son two doors down, Mr. Dover, he was kind of weird. He said he had known the twins, and said he had even dated Lorelei at one point. He also mentioned 'unnatural things' and seemed to still be carrying some kind of a grudge after all these years. While he didn't overtly say it, it felt like he thought they got what they deserved. And he said the same things as Angelina about nobody wanting them to receive a proper burial. I can't say why, but I think he knows a lot more than he is letting on. And he got real twitchy talking about Angelina. Super strange, like there was – or had been – something between them."

"'Unnatural things' sounds like a twin thang," Callie said, nudging Mina. "Oh, and one more thing. Random as fuck, we stumbled upon some old photos of a parade in town in the 90s. One of them had a shot of our house. Notice something different?"

Another paper slid across the table at me. I studied the grainy photocopy.

"Not offhand," I said.

"There's a set of stairs on the side leading up to the attic."

"There's a room up there, that's not surprising if someone was living up there."

"But there are no doors up there to the outside. And look closely. The stairs lead up to the back. The attic is in the front of the house in the center wing. Neither of the side wings have serviceable attics – or so we were told. But those steps lead to the back. What the fuck."

I stared. She was right.

"So, pulling this all together," I started. "There were these twins who apparently lived in the attic who may or may not have been lovers, but were doing 'unnatural things' and who had some 'special' friends who visited them from time to time. They were murdered in their early thirties and the town covered it up. They were seemingly denied a proper burial and their ashes are MIA. There seems to be some additional sections to the attic that we haven't uncovered, we will need to search for them this afternoon. This means we will likely need to bash through some walls. Am I missing anything?"

"Just the part about where we get lunch and take a nap before we go up there," Lila said.

Unfortunately, when you have four people who got no sleep the previous night and who are a little scared of sleeping at night, and you feed them lunch then let them take a nap in the daylight, the nap can be long.

It was 4:30 PM when I woke up. I roused Lila and the twins, then while Lila and Callie made coffee and filled a couple of thermoses to take with us to the attic, Mina and I went down the basement to gather the tools we would need for the likely demolition project that would be waiting for us upstairs.

It was almost 5:00 when we got up to the attic. I made a beeline for Dorothy and Lorelei's room. If there was an entryway into the part of the attic we saw the stairs leading to in that old photo, it would be in the back wall of that room. We pulled all the furniture away from that wall and I studied it closely.

"No electrical outlets or switches on this wall," I said. I ran my hands along the wall, then banged a few places. "It looks like pretty much standard studs and drywall. The drywall here doesn't match the plaster on the rest of the walls. This wall is a lot newer. I'd say this wall was probably put up maybe twenty years ago."

"Not long after Dorothy and Lorelei died," Mina said. I nodded.

"Well, I guess it's time to get to work." I handed dust masks to everyone in the room, opened the windows in the attic, and Mina and I grabbed work gloves and wrecking bars.

I made the first strike, driving the bar into the wall. The bar got about three inches into the wall and hit something hard, like masonry. Mina drove her bar into the wall a couple feet away and got the same result. We pulled back several pieces of drywall, revealing a brick wall painted black. I moved over a couple of feet and punched another hole. Behind that drywall section was a thick wooden door, also painted black, with a heavy doorknob.

"Bingo," I murmured.

[To be continued]