Thunder growled, ever closer. Those empty rooms of the house must surely be too dark for a proper photographing session, which was a relief, because I didn’t relish the idea of being inside them.
The Saunders Place hadn’t been lived in, since, who knew when. With no heirs, and no living person to lay claim to it, Daisy had waited until it had gone through the required legalities before it came up at auction and she bid on it. The house seemed to me to be sad, like an elderly, cast off relative that nobody wanted to take in.
I didn’t know a lot about the Saunders house, except that it harbored a dark past. Mr. Saunders had died there—not a natural death, but a murder. The word among the younger generation was that the house was haunted. It was just a superstition, but try telling that to imaginative kids. When we were children, my pals, Pat and Jackie and I never ventured anywhere near it. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but it paid to be cautious. Pat, however, made no bones about her fears. It didn’t make the day seem any brighter when my over-active imagination conjured up thoughts of violence and a man lying dead within those walls.
A sudden, hard shower caught me as I rounded the corner of the house. Thinking the rain might be over soon, I jumped onto the front porch to wait it out. I had no wish to get soaked by a cold rain between the house and my car.
The rain was turning out to be more than a brief fall shower. It slanted in under my shelter in cold, stinging bursts of wind. My car was too far away for me to get there without getting soaked. The sensible thing to do was to go inside. I’d leave the door open and venture in only far enough to escape the rain.
Fumbling in my purse, I found the key Daisy had given me, and unlocked the door. I shivered from the cold as well as from, let’s face it, apprehension, but I opened the door wide enough to slip into the front room.
A strong odor of stale air and mustiness met me. Maybe the house leaked somewhere and I was smelling mold, or maybe it was just the scent of disuse and neglect. This room was almost as dark as night, but I could make out shapes of windows. One wall was partially taken up by a large fireplace. It wasn’t a cheerful place to be, but at least it was protection from the storm which sounded like it was gathering force. Rain rattled against the roof and wind shook the windows.
In the dim light, the room looked cavernous, much bigger than I had thought. At the far end of the room, a steep stairway led upstairs. I glanced toward it as lightning flickered through the window. My heart flip-flopped. A shadow, deeper than the rest of the murkiness, drifted slowly down the stairs toward me.
What? No, this house was empty. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. The human-shaped shadow was still there, coming silently and slowly down the steep steps.
This is an excerpt from the newest Ned McNeil moonlight mystery, just out on Amazon yesterday. Ned is caught up in a decades-old murder and, suddenly, she is in danger from an unknown villain who aims to keep a fifty-year old secret and does not intend for Ned to overturn his plans.
Murder By Moonlight
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