Suckers - J.A. Konrath

Jarvis was still there, watching them. Always watching."
The girls had fallen silent. "About six months after Jarvis died, the oldest daughter couldn't
take it anymore, so she ran away and was never seen again. At least...not alive. They did find her
body. She'd drowned in a small pond, which at its very center wasn't even deep enough to come
up to her waist. And she'd left her shoes by the edge. There was no note inside, but one can only
wonder if Jarvis was somehow responsible for his daughter's death."
Dead silence. The temptation to shout "BOO!" was overwhelming, but I didn't want to ruin
Roger's show.
"One night, exactly one year after Jarvis killed himself, his wife heard the soft footsteps.
They were coming up the stairs. Like she always did, she pulled the blankets up over her head
and waited for them to go away. They were getting closer...closer...until she heard them in her
very room."
Roger's flashlight began to flicker, so he tapped it against his palm until the beam was steady
again. "They stopped. She could feel something watching her. And then she heard the whisper,
'Dorothy...Dorothy...I still love you...'"
"Like in The Wizard of Oz?" asked Becky, one of Theresa's more annoying friends.
"No, not like in The Wizard of Oz," said Roger without missing a beat, "It was Dorothy
Taywood, who lay on her bed, blankets above her head, listening to the ghostly voice whisper
her name. The voice that sounded just like her dead husband. The whispering stopped, and
finally she worked up the courage to peek over the blankets, just...a...bit..."
Roger looked at each girl in the circle in turn. "And there, standing at the foot of her bed,
was her husband."
"Were his guts hanging out?" Becky inquired.
"They might have been. I wasn't there. But she squeezed her eyes shut because she was so
terrified, and when she opened them again, he was gone. She immediately woke up her kids, at
least those who were still alive, and they spent the rest of the night in a hotel. They never came
back to the Taywood house.
"It took them a while to sell it, but finally another family moved in. They heard the same
footsteps in the middle of the night. Once they even thought they heard screaming. And there
were other things, too. Books would vanish and mysteriously reappear. They called the
newspaper, and a couple of reporters from the Chamber Chronicle spent a week in the house, but
54