Journey, The (2 page)

Cass lifted a long-necked bottle to her mouth and took a pull.

"Then there was Old Lady Mitchell on the council. She got crazier than a hen this summer. She insisted that the city at least board the place up. The poor woman blew a fuse, literally. She died of an aneurism last month."

"That's sad," Michelle said. "So what happens now?"

"The courts are still sorting it out. I'll be dead and gone by the time they do something. In the meantime there it sits."

"Did you ever go inside the house?" Nancy asked.

"Are you kidding? It was Party Central for most of us," Cass said, "and something else for some of us."

"No way," Michelle said as a grin spread across her face. "Please tell me you didn't have sex in that dirty, stinky house."

"At least once a week," Cass said, "except in the winter, of course."

Heidi and Nancy spit out their drinks and laughed.

"Jimmy bought a new mattress just for that purpose. We'd hide it in a closet when we were done. And, besides, it wasn't a dirty, stinky house all the time. The bank was still trying to sell it back then and sent someone over every month or two to sweep it out."

Michelle smiled, shook her head, and stared at the storyteller. The storyteller cocked her head, smiled, and returned the stare.

"Don't get all high and mighty with me, Shelly Preston," Cass said. "You and Scott practically lived at the drive-in, if I recall."

"And to think I missed all of it!" Nancy said with a grin of her own. "I don't think I went to the drive-in once, much less inside that dirty, stinky house. I feel cheated."

"Then why don't I give you a tour?" Cass said. "It's pretty clean inside. You can even see where Jimmy and I carved our initials on one of the beams."

"You want to go there
now
?" Heidi asked.

Michelle sat up and shifted her eyes from one tablemate to another, as if searching for a source of sanity. She came up empty.

"Why not? I could use a walk to work off these fries," Cass said. She wiped a spot of ketchup from the corner of her mouth and downed her beer. "And from the looks of your mugs, you fancy-pants girls could use some excitement."

CHAPTER 3: MICHELLE

The walk to the house took twenty minutes. Michelle followed Cass, Nancy, and Heidi across a steel truss bridge and a quarter-mile up Riverside Drive to a structure that looked like a refugee from New Orleans' Garden District. Built in 1880 by a lumber baron and philanthropist, the A.F. Pennington mansion, as it was officially known, was an eclectic amalgamation of gables, columns, and shutters that sat atop a rocky rise overlooking the river.

When the women reached the driveway, Michelle stopped and gazed at the River District, where condos competed with fast food franchises, remodeled office buildings, and urban parks. Unionville had undergone a facelift in the new millennium, but it was still mostly the same ranching community of 15,000 she had once called home. To the east, a waxing moon rose above recently harvested winter wheat fields and the distant but still imposing Blue Mountains.

"I have to admit I like your sense of adventure, Cass," Michelle said. "And I thought I wouldn't have fun tonight."

"The evening's just starting, Shelly. I plan to take you three to the Cattle Club – if you are up for it, of course. The Hells Canyon Boys are playing tonight and whiskey shots are two-for-one."

"I'm game," Michelle said.

Nancy walked up to a large multi-pane window and peeked inside.

"How do we get in?" she asked.

"I've got that covered," Cass said, pulling out a key. "I'm one of the radical preservationists who fought to save this place and one of three people who still keep it up. The bank saw the upside of free maintenance and gave us unrestricted access."

Cass opened the imposing front door and held it for her friends as they stepped tentatively into a residence that hadn't been permanently occupied in thirty-one years. Though no electric lighting was available, none was needed. Daylight spilled through unadorned windows, providing ample illumination for the would-be thrill seekers.

"There it is," Cass said as she walked toward a beam above the bottom of the stairway. "JG plus CS equals a whole lot of lovin'."

Nancy laughed.

Heidi ran her fingers along the top of a dusty stone fireplace and then turned to survey a fifteen-by-twenty-foot space that almost certainly served as the living room.

"Did anyone ever figure out what happened to the Franklins?" she asked.

"No. Every now and then someone calls the police and swears that they've seen one of the kids in Florida, or someplace like that. Then there are the ghost sightings," Cass said, rolling her eyes. "We get a lot of those. But there has never been anything that has amounted to something."

Michelle didn't jump in with questions of her own. She didn't have to. Like most people who had lived in Unionville, Oregon, in the late seventies, she knew all about Roger and Sarah Franklin and their young children, Alice and Tim. They had moved to Unionville in January 1979 and had lived in the house barely three months when they literally disappeared.

For weeks police had suspected that Roger had killed and disposed of his family to pursue a relationship with a pretty 22-year-old secretary he had hired and secretly dated shortly after becoming a junior partner in a law firm started by his brother. But no physical evidence supporting that theory – or any theory – had ever been found. Roger had vanished along with the others.

The only clue to the family's disappearance had been a phone call between Sarah and her mother in Denver. Halfway through the conversation, Sarah had mentioned a commotion upstairs. She had placed the receiver on the kitchen counter, walked away, and never returned.

The bank reclaimed the property two months later but could not unload it. No realtor and no buyer wanted to touch a home so directly connected to the mysterious and likely tragic disappearance of an all-American family.

As Nancy and Heidi explored the main floor and debated the mansion's possibilities as a bed and breakfast, Michelle moved toward the hardwood stairway. She stopped on the bottom step, turned to face Cass, and smiled.

"I've been in this house at least six or seven times, but I've never been upstairs. You think there are any ghosts?"

"If there are, they're all drunker than skunks and passed out on the floor," Cass said. "I've been up there a thousand times and never heard as much as a 'boo,' much less Jacob Marley or Count Dracula. I think it's safe, hon. But let me get you a light."

Cass walked to a small metal box attached to a nearby wall and retrieved an LED flashlight, the kind that smarmy salesmen peddled on late-night infomercials. The kind you had to shake ten minutes to get thirty seconds of light.

Michelle took the flashlight from her friend, placed her purse on a small table at the foot of the stairs, and started up the steps. She silently praised herself for coming to the reunion. She missed real people and down-home experiences and was getting her fill of both on this long weekend trip to Oregon.

When she reached the top of the stairs, Michelle peered down a long hallway and saw the open doorway of a well-lighted room at the other end. Wires hung from a spot on the ceiling that once supported a light fixture. But the rest of the corridor looked immaculate, from the paper-covered walls to the polished hardwood floor to the ornate doors that guarded the way to three rooms. She shook her head. Ghosts or not, this place was amazing.

Michelle entered the open room, walked to the far wall, and peered through a large window. The view from the corner office, or bedroom, or whatever it was, was breathtaking. The woodwork alone was worth thousands. She vowed right then to do whatever it took to save the house, whether that meant donating generously to the preservation fight or buying the place outright.

Looking out another window, which faced the river, she thought again of her life and her choices and the missed opportunities that dated back to her childhood. She could have written a dozen novels in this house and raised a dozen kids. She could have had a happy and fulfilling life without ever leaving the place she was born.

Laughter wafted up the stairs and down the hallway. Cass no doubt had Nancy and Heidi in stitches again. It was probably time to rejoin them and make those big plans for the Cattle Club. Michelle laughed to herself.

Whiskey shots. Good grief! What have I gotten myself into?

As she moved toward the open door and the hall, she saw a closed door in a corner of the spacious room. Shut and no doubt locked, the door appeared to lead directly to an adjacent room. Plain, smooth, and brown, it seemed out of place in a chamber designed for a mover and shaker of the Gilded Age.

Michelle walked to the door and placed a hand on the modern knob. She tried to turn the knob but couldn't. The door, for all practical purposes, was an extension of the wall. But when she pulled on the knob the door flew open, revealing a narrow stairway that appeared to lead down to the first floor and beyond. Seeing no light source in the dark chamber, she shook the flashlight for a minute and pondered the insanity of descending the stairs. She laughed again. What the hell was she afraid of? Mice? Spiders? Was Michelle Richardson, grown woman, no better than Shelly Preston, high school girl? Was the itty-bitty gymnast afraid of the dark?

Michelle reminded herself that her friends, including the big, brave local caretaker of this magnificent mansion, were just a few feet away. They weren't going to the reunion, or anywhere else, without her. Of that she was sure. Michelle shook the flashlight a few more times, smiled, and descended the stairs. When she reached the bottom about twenty steps down, she directed the light to a far wall and saw black shelves and other metalwork, including what appeared to be a partially loaded wine rack. She laughed as she thought about sharing a nineteenth-century Madeira with the crowd at the Little Red Caboose.

Then she had another thought.

What if the Franklins are down here?

Michelle retrieved her stomach from the floor and turned to race up the stairs. She reached the top step when the door shut and her flashlight blinked out.

CHAPTER 4: MICHELLE

The shock and terror, the
initial
shock and terror, lasted thirty seconds.

Michelle pounded on the door and screamed for help in fifty different languages before the seemingly impregnable barrier gave way and the five-foot-four, 105-pound widow fell forward and landed face first on the parquet floor.

She sat up, caught her breath, and placed her head between her knees. She wanted to collect herself and allow her heart rate to return to double digits before rejoining her friends and continuing what she hoped would be a pleasant evening.

But the moment she stood up and glanced out the river-view window, the fear returned. The sky was brighter and the town, or what she could see of it, looked different. The train station looked more like a depot than a brewpub and the bike path had disappeared.

Michelle closed her eyes, said a quick prayer, and started for the exit. The hallway was much as she remembered it. The wallpaper was as vibrant as ever and the light fixture was still AWOL. But even before she descended the steps she knew something was wrong. There were no sounds from below. No familiar voices. No familiar anything.

"Cass, are you down there? Nancy? Heidi?"

Michelle rushed into the living room and turned in every direction but did not see her friends. Nor did she see a flashlight box on the wall or her purse on the table. What she did see were two opened cans of Billy Beer and a half-dozen cigarette butts scattered on the floor.

She peered through windows front and back but saw no one on the lawn or the driveway. She ran upstairs and checked each of the rooms but found all of them empty. The kitchen, laundry area, and guest room on the main floor were similarly unoccupied. When she opened a coat closet near the front door, she saw a flimsy twin mattress, dropped her flashlight, and screamed.

With nowhere else to go, Michelle Richardson bolted out the front door. She again called out to her friends but again got no answer. No Cass, Nancy, or Heidi could be seen walking down the street or standing on the banks of the river. If the three had decided to play hide-and-go-seek, Michelle did not want to join them.

She considered the possibility that this was all a practical joke. It was Friday the 13th, after all, and Cass Stevens was a practiced practical joker. But something about the scene didn't look right. It didn't
feel
right. For the second time in ten minutes, Michelle felt her stomach sink and a sickening feeling return. Something was seriously wrong.

She put a hand in her skirt pocket and pulled out nine one-dollar bills, her change from dinner and a drink at the Little Red Caboose. Nothing else appeared to be missing. She purposely excluded her friends and her sanity.

Michelle proceeded down Riverside Drive as if it were her remaining link to a sound mind. The road had not visibly changed. But as she approached the intersection with Main Street, she again saw things she hadn't seen in many years: a Chevy Vega, an AMC Pacer, a Ford Pinto, and a service station that sold
leaded
gasoline to motorists for eighty-six cents a gallon. A restaurant that had closed in 1981 was again open for business. Michelle knew instinctively that her
Twilight Zone
experience would probably get worse before it got better.

As she crossed the Main Street Bridge, turned east onto Broadway, and began a four-block stretch to the train depot, she finally saw something familiar. A boutique across the street advertised fall attire with a banner much like the one she had seen driving to the reunion. Nearby businesses appeared unchanged, as did other office buildings and residences that presumably led to a brewpub, a parking lot, and her 2009 BMW 750Li. Her spirits soared.

They soared again as she approached the end of the third block and heard a distinctive rock riff, one that had assaulted her ears at least four times in two hours. If nothing else, Michelle would have a serious discussion with her "love muffin."