Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: see Chapter 1
LIVING LA VIDA LOCA
Chapter 3
Sam pushed his potato round his plate with his fork, but didn't really transfer much of it to his mouth. Not that he was alone in his lack of appetite. A general pall of gloom pervaded the elegantly appointed dining room of the ancestral Wainwright mansion, caused mainly by the Winchester males' expressions of 'we have no good news'.
Dean and Sam had run their own investigation and as they had never doubted found that their father had been thorough and comprehensive. Peter and Julie Hanson stuck to their claim that there had never been any similar occurrences previously in the family. This claim was backed up by the children, who were usually reliable as barometers of what honestly went on. All of the kids (with the exception of one-year-old Tommy whose conversation was limited to 'beb-beb') corroborated their parents' statements. Apart from the occasional typical sibling strops, eleven-year-old Sylvie, nine-year-olds Benjamin and Barnabas and of course the precocious seven-year-old Emily were a great deal more well-adjusted than Dean and Sam had ever been at that age.
Apart from the Hansons the only other people were Bernice Hoskins, the housekeeper/cook, Harry Warwick, a handyman/gardener and Clarice Wigmore Tommy's nanny/Emily's childminder. All three were agency staff hired for the summer from the city; they came daily and didn't live in and had been unknown to the Hansons previously. Likewise the Hansons hadn't brought any of their own furniture with them as the house was fully furnished; the fixtures and fittings had been in the house dating back to the time of Nathaniel Wainwright I, but above and beyond them being valuable antiques, they had never caused any trouble vis-à-vis levitating etc., for the Wainwrights or anyone else.
In short, all the usual suspects had cast iron alibis.
Dinner more or less petered out and they all drifted into one of the nearby sitting rooms. It was a large room with an ornate marble fireplace, the dark wood panelling and deep, burgundy leather couches offset by graceful, large Palladin windows framed by heavy drapes and thick, bright oriental rugs. Sam sat Tommy against the corner and right arm in one of the old square-backed sofas, keeping his palm lightly atop the boy's head just in case the baby listed over. Sylvie and the twins sat as close to their parents as they could in clear determination not to miss a thing whilst Emily was more interested in the little wooden rocking horse on one shelf.
He kept a weather eye on the kids and let John and Dean take over the doomsayer deal. Dean was always complaining that he was so wrapped up in trying to 'soften' the blow that he spent an hour talking around it, which was rich – being critiqued on his people skills by the Sultan of Sarcasm! The room was dominated by a massive four-by-two oil painting of Nathaniel Wainwright I on the wall above this couch, but it wasn't as ostentatious as some he'd seen. That guy down in Maine had a virtual floor-ceiling oil painting of his florid and flabby great-whoever in the entrance hall scowling down at all comers. The guy had been prepared to pay them any price to get rid of his poltergeist problem but had then insisted they use the tradesman's entrance to his mansion at all times. It had taken fifteen minutes of solid non-stop talking to persuade an apoplectic Dean not to invite more poltergeists in rather than exorcise out the one already there.
Most of the other paintings were much more modest in scope, interspersed with those gilt-framed antique portrait type photographs of various Wainwright progeny from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. None of the men and women in the faded sepia portraits were grinning, but most had a definite upturn of the lips detectable, indicating a general contentment of spirit since back when photography was first invented in the 1850s, smiling at the camera was the ultimate faux pas.
"…and that's it," He tuned in to hear John Winchester wind down. "I'm just so sorry we couldn't be of any more help. This one has got me stumped."
Peter and Julie nodded with almost a commiserating attitude, and Sam noted that even as they looked glum, Peter squeezed his wife's hand. Maybe the whole deal wasn't a total washout after all then? Adversity would always either bring a family together or tear it apart, and it looked like the Hansons might still be leaning towards the former –
Sam blinked as the large gilt-framed photograph on the wall directly opposite him trembled and twitched as everything else remained static.
Once again he saw it spasm; reacting instantly Sam yelled, "Get down!" even as he snatched Tommy from the couch and jumped to one side.
Everyone scrambled down, Dean grabbing Emily, John, Sylvie and their parents hauling a twin each off the couch to the rug as the whole room vibrated violently like a train thundering past a rickety slum tenement. There was a loud crash and the disturbance instantly stopped.
Sam got to his feet with Tommy wailing in his arms, and sucked in his breath – the photograph had flown across the room and hit the couch in the exact spot where Tommy had been, with such force that one corner of the ornate gilded frame was embedded in the back of the couch like an axe buried in a tree-trunk. The glass front of the photograph had broken into pieces from the impact and lay in shards on the seat.
Another second and…his eyes met Dean's across the room and his older brother nodded his approbation.
Crying herself, Julie Hanson plucked Tommy from his arms and began to cuddle the sobbing baby as everyone slowly tried to recover their equilibrium. Emily was doing a limpet thing in her dad's arms; Ben and Barney clung to each other while a white-faced Sylvie hovered over them like mama bear.
"Enough!" Peter made a sharp slicing gesture with his free hand as his other held Emily tightly. "This is it. First thing tomorrow morning, we pack up and go back home. This has gone quite far enough. John –"
"We'll stay the night and help you pack in the morning," John said calmly. "It's the least we can do."
"And I suggest we double up on the sleeping arrangements just in case this thing figures out its patsies are going to scarper." Dean put in. "If Peter and Julie have Sylvie, Emily and Tommy, dad can sleep on the floor of the twin's room, me and Sam will take the next bedroom."
Everyone concurred and Sam shot Dean a grateful look, ignoring the way Dean smirked and winked, the older man as always deflecting and downplaying emotion. The nightmares that had been triggered by Jessica's murder were still present and correct, and more and more of them were segueing into often gruesomely Technicolor visions of peril. Mere nightmares or prescient visions, each occurrence possessed common denominators that included Sam thrashing, yelling and suffering severe headaches, with the doubling-over in pain and sweating like a pig as he swore through agony-clenched teeth as a garnish. A restful bedmate, roommate or just 'guy to try and get a good night's sleep around', he was not.
Despite the relatively early night, they all started to turn in. With that amazing ability to organise 72 things simultaneously inherent in the being known as mother, Julie got the kids to ferret out backpacks and holdalls and start packing what they could. Apart from the larger baby equipment (Arthur Wainwright III being a fifty-year-old bachelor) they'd not had to bring any 'big items' with them. What they couldn't fit in their SUV tomorrow they could always arrange to have forwarded on to them.
Showers were taken, hair was washed and teeth were cleaned - in the twins' case by sending them back to the bathroom after their mother's inspection revealed that no fluoride had come near them that day. Dean, the rat, had nullified the incipient temper tantrum duet by revealing that it had been hell to make Sam clean his teeth because he was scared of dropping the electric toothbrush into the sink and being electrocuted.
"That's silly!" declared Ben – or Barney – scornfully.
"Yeah, so I switched to an ordinary hand toothbrush," Dean regaled them, unaware of the telling slip of 'I' rather than 'dad', "but then I made the mistake of pretending the bristles were real hedgehog spines, and he wouldn't clean his teeth then so the hedgehogs wouldn't have their spines clipped off."
"That's even more silly!" declared Barney – or Ben – with greater scorn.
"Oh yeah, and what about the night you just squeezed the tube without looking and it wasn't toothpaste, it was –" Sam got no further as Dean firmly placed his hand over his mouth while Julie chided the twins to bed.
Finally Sam allowed the day's stress to seep from his joints as he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Nobody was going to tolerate full darkness; the hallway outside had the wall-lamps on and every room featured a nightlight. Julie and Peter's bed in the Master suite was easily large enough to accommodate the parents, the baby and their two daughters. The bedroom just down the hall from that was the twin's room and was one of the two that had twin beds. Instead of the floor, Julie had had the boys share one bed and John Winchester took the other, while Sam and Dean were across the hall in the other twin-bedded room as all the other bedrooms contained a single king-size bed. Nathaniel Wainwright I had had seven children, Nathaniel Wainwright II nine, and each bedroom was large, spacious and as comfortably appointed as the Wainwright finances allowed for – which was a lot of comfort.
Dean fidgeted in the other bed, "I haven't been in bed this early since I was in footie pyjamas," he complained, then smirked, "or else was doing something other than sleep!"
"Well I don't feeling like trying to watch the game or making small talk with the Hansons, do you?" Sam said.
"Nah…"
"Dean, aside from this…when we were investigating, did you get any sense of…"
"Dad's stalker dude?"
"Yeah."
"Yep. Nothing I could put my finger on but sometimes I got a definite sensation I was being watched by something that didn't like us much. Unfortunately that gives us a list of possible suspects you could wrap twice around the world."
"You."
"What?"
"You said didn't like us much; maybe it was just you."
"Thanks a lot."
"Somebody has to keep a leash on your ego."
"Go to sleep, Sammy."
"Night-night, Dean."
"Shut up…"
Sam closed his eyes and waited; just as he felt himself drift off he heard the soft, "…night Sam," and smiled.
Continued in chapter 4…
© 2006, Catherine D. Stewart