Esme had the biggest, smuggest smile I had ever seen on her face…ever. With anyone else that smile would have been followed with 'I told you so,' but Esme had her own way of saying such without actually saying it, I was never going to hear the end of this.
"Hi Mum" I replied crossing my arms on my chest and returning her look. "How was your day?"
Esme didn't answer my question, she continued to look at me expectantly for a few seconds before deliberately ignoring my question and giving her own take on the situation. She knew I had been trying to keep away from what she had just witnessed and would not let me get away with that.
"And to think I've let you get away with this loner charade for all these years," she scolded gently, still smiling.
"It wasn't a charade exactly,"
"Then what was it? Because I know you Christian, putting a mask has been a character trait of yours for a long time, but I thought that was in the past."
I shrugged, unsure what else to do, she was right of course, my mother usually is when it comes to our personalities, but admitting she was right takes a little bit more gut.
We pulled out of the parking lot and headed towards Hoquiam where Esme is working on a 120 year old Tudor home that she and Carlisle bought two years ago.
We all have been helping them restore the mini mansion for the historical society. The Tudor is small in comparison to most similar styles of the time period and it's even rarer to find such a house in Hoquiam not exactly known for high end houses like that. Hoquiam, like Forks focused on the mining and logging industry so most folks living in those towns worked there. But the guy who owned our Tudor home had owned three of the mines just outside of Hoquiam and had owned most of the properties that the logging industry in this part of Washington utilized.
"So what are we doing at the house?" I asked, desperate to change the subject away from me and Marie.
"I just need to double check some of the rooms on the ground floor."
I raised an eyebrow
"Why?"
"The historical commission is dropping by tomorrow afternoon to see the progress and do some measurements."
"Measurements?" I asked, thinking for a moment "oh for the furniture?" When we finished it, Carlisle and Esme planned to donate it to the historical society.
As one of the oldest homes in the town it would make a perfect home base for the society they also planned to open it up to tours to promote the history of Hoquiam and the man who helped put the town on the map.
"Yes, they managed to procure some of the original furniture that wasn't lost at the estate sale."
"Wow…I mean the place was pretty bare when you guys first bought it." Esme smiled and nodded. The house was bare and decrepit; a deathtrap to be honest, exactly my mother's favorite kind of project. "How'd they manage that?"
"I'm not entirely sure, I believe most was purchased by the same family who offered to donate it to the historical society, when they learned what the society planned to do."
"Cool."
As we pulled up to the drive, I hopped out to open the gate, that's our next project with the house, wire the gate and the house so the circuits worked as one.
With the gate open, Esme drove through and I shut the gate behind the car and ran as fast as I could, easily beating her to the half moon drive that circled in front of the house.
A canopy with pillars on either side completed the front of the house, it's really spectacular and Esme has really outdone herself on this one, considering how bad it was when we first found it.
She unlocked the front door and I followed her inside, the front hall of the house is a wide open space with a grand staircase leading up to the second floor and beyond. Off to the left of front hall is a set of French doors that lead to a sitting room and on the right is the bare library.
Pictures of the old house, which Esme picked up from the town showed us exactly what the house looked like in its heyday.
The last owner of the Tudor had been the grandson or maybe great-great nephew of the original owner, the man who had owned the mines and logging property. The last owner, died in the 80s unexpectedly, but had no one to leave the property to and hadn't even constructed a full will.
After his death, the property was virtually abandoned; save for a groundskeeper who also made sure that the house didn't fall apart in the nasty Washington weather.
When the groundskeeper died in 2003, the town took control of the house and it's land, to raise money for the town, everything was auctioned off…including the house itself, which is how Esme and Carlisle got a hold of it.
The groundskeeper had done his best, but he was nearly 90 when he finally died so he could only do so much to take care of the house itself and thus, by the time the town got a hold of it, it was in really bad shape and the end result of the work was nearly $20,000 out of our own pockets to repair the virtually destroyed house.
A fire had been started in one of the rooms on the third floor, done in by candles left by teenagers looking for a place to hold a séance or something like that, I don't think it was anything other than a strong interest in the occult and an attempt to summon the spirit of the original owners wife who died of pneumonia back in the 1890s.
I guess there's been ghost stories' circulating for a long time 'bout the place being haunted by her and other spirits. As if to add to the legend, the house is suppose to be built on a Indian burial ground where the dying, the insane, and the all around evil members of the tribe were kept to await their deaths.
Sounds familiar right? If you like ghost stories or scary stuff in general, it should, the legend only came out AFTER the late 70s, after a certain house in Long Island New York supposedly chased its residence out after they had lived there for 28 days I think.
Yeah, that house was supposedly built on the same kind of land. People were hopping on that band wagon pretty quickly, so much so that it really got out of hand, everyone whose house was old enough to match the Amityville house.
Luckily by the mid to late 80s the whole craze started to die down…no pun intended, only to get resurrected in the late 90s, which is presumably when the kids went in.
Anyways, the séance nearly took the whole house, luckily the kids that started it had enough sense, or even moral to call for a fire truck, 'course they didn't stick around, but at least their calling saved the house.
I wandered over to the large stone fireplace and looked up the flue. Last month when we finally cleaned the fireplace, Emmett made me climb up there to remove a bird's nest so he could test the fireplace out, not only was I covered in soot, but turns out, the bird's nest had been vacant for a long time, yeah, karma came back and bit him in the butt for that one.
"Christian," Esme called from the parlor, I stood up and poked my head around the doorway, she was standing there with some blue-prints making sure everything was in order.
"Yeah mum?"
She looked up and smile, which I warily returned, I know that smile, it's the same one I've been seeing on her face since she found out I was going on a…ok…a date.
"So, what are you going to be wearing tonight?" she asked casually, I raised an eyebrow
"Wearing?" I asked, gesturing to what I was already wearing, jeans, baggy sweatshirt, this was my typical attire.
Esme gave me a look
"Isn't that what you wore today at school?"
"Yes?" I replied, grinning a bit. Esme didn't answer me, instead she gave me another look and I could only wince. "Why? What's wrong with what I'm wearing?" I looked down at my clothes "clean, comfortable, no holes. What is wrong?" Again she didn't answer that particular question, instead she handed me a pile of blue prints.
"Take these to the study and leave them on the desk, spread them out and then we'll head home,"
"Head home" I repeated, "so soon?" I looked at my watch and realized if Esme drove at a normal human speed, we would get home just as my siblings were getting out to the car, oh bloody hell, she had told Rosalie and Alice, my sisters knew I was going out with Marie tonight. Now I was in for it.
As slow as I could possibly go, I walked down the hall towards the main study; along the hall are those paintings that watch you. Jasper and I had found them in the attic, wrapped in canvas and protected for the most part.
We had found an art restoration expert who fixed some of the damage and once it was done we hung the paintings back up in their rightful spot but it doesn't change the fact that they are freaky, especially the one of the original owner, he's kind of a mix between David Letterman, Donald Trump, and Mel Gibson trying to play William Wallace in Braveheart, funny for the most part, but he's definitely someone I wouldn't have wanted to mess with, as a human or a vampire.
His office is conveniently right across from his painting. I unlocked the door and put the blueprints on the huge mahogany desk.
"Chris come on, I have to swing by the historical society and give them the spare key. Stop stalling" Esme's voice echoed down the hall, when I looked up, I caught the painted eyes of Mr. Shaw, or as I've come to call him Mr. David Donald Mel Letterman Trumps Gibson. (my brothers find that funny, Esme not so much.)
The painting and I stared at each other, our eyes boring into each other as if Mr. Shaw was accusing me of something.
I don't believe in ghosts, when I was a kid it was fun to pretend that they existed and that such an afterlife existed, but since becoming a vampire I've stopped believing in things like that. Sounds odd right? You'd think becoming something that most people don't believe exists would alter my perception of other paranormal beings, you know make me really believe instead of pretending it could be real, well it doesn't.
You know the show Ghost Hunters? It's a new show, just aired on Sci-Fi. It's a reality show where these guys from some town in Rhode Island go to supposedly haunted locations and try to disprove the existence of spirits. They go in scientifically and won't call a place haunted without some kind of proof to back the claim up. It's this plumbers by day, paranormal investigators by night kinda thing.
It's a good show, the places they go sometimes look like they should be haunted, but are not always able to prove it to the team that it is. I guess that's my way of looking at the paranormal, I have to see it; if you can show me physical proof then maybe I'll consider it.
Take this place for instance; there have been tons of stories written about how it's brimming with ghosts; from Mr. Shaw and his family, to servants of the family, to workers who died in the mines and forests owned by the Shaw family, to the Indians who supposedly occupied the land before the Shaw family built their home on it.
I've spent more 24 hours straight in this house with my family working on getting it ready for the Historical society's grand opening than I can remember and in all that time this undead kid has yet to see the really dead or any remnants of such.
Though, I really got Emmett good a few months ago, because he loves the idea that this place might be haunted. I have yet to see proof that this place is haunted, a painting as creepy as it may be is just a painting and a house is just a house.
So with one final look at the painting, I turned my back on it to lock the study, before running down the hall to meet my mother.