Better Homes and Hauntings by Molly Harper Page B

her initial walk-through, she’d felt eyes sliding over her skin like eels. She was used to people looking at her. You didn’t spend your middle-school years in a D-cup without developing a sort of sixth sense for skeeviness. But in the Crane’s Nest, she felt as if she was being studied, examined like prey from every alcove and cubby in the house. She sensed shadowy blurs at the corners of her eyes, but when she turned her head, they were gone. She tried blaming the unnatural chill of the rooms for the goose bumps and the feeling that someone was standing behind her, but her stubborn fight-or-flight response wasn’t buying it.
    Despite her fairy-tale face, Cindy Ellis wasn’t one forflights of fancy. Growing up, she hadn’t had the time to waste. And now she didn’t have the patience for anything that stood in the way of her goals. She’d purposefully ignored the Crow’s Nest’s unsavory reputation while composing her bid, because it didn’t fit her overall agenda to shy away from such a potential career boost. Like every skeptical Newport local, she’d scoffed at the ghost stories connected to the house. Rich people and their nonsense, her father had called it, a waste of a perfectly good house, sitting out in the middle of nowhere, rotting away because of greed and ego. John Ellis had never had time for either. His girl was too smart to let something like “bad vibes” get in the way of doing a job right. An Ellis didn’t back down from a challenge, even when the challenge was accompanied by goose bumps and foreboding. She could get over both with a stiff drink and a mushy Sandra Bullock movie.
    But now that she was actually on the island, Cindy couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something very wrong with this house.
    And she wasn’t alone. Cindy had lost two day-crew employees within the first three days on the job. She wasn’t about to tell Mr. Whitney. She simply replaced them with other members of her team and continued the preliminary cleanup. She couldn’t blame her employees for their sudden departure. They’d reported inexplicable cold spots, the sensation of being watched, footsteps in rooms where they were the only occupants. On the third morning, Greta and Maria, two of Cindy’s most reliable cleaners, had abandoned the entry hall and run for the dock, purses in hand, to wait for the next ferry—which wasn’t due for six hours.
    Greta would only say that she wouldn’t continue working in the house, and if that meant she was fired, she would accept that. Maria was considerably more descriptive, chattering nervously as Cindy tried to coax them back into the house.
    “This is a bad place, Miss Ellis,” Maria had told her, clutching the little gold crucifix around her throat. “Watching, everything is watching, waiting, for the right time to reach out. You don’t want to be reached.”
    And now, as she was sorting through furniture in one of the second-floor guest rooms, she was moving around the bright, airy room, in the process of whipping a dusty storage sheet off a piece of mystery furniture, and she could clearly hear the faint echo of footsteps moving around on the third floor. And no one was supposed to be working on the third floor.
    Cindy stood slowly, staring up at the plastered-medallion ceiling. Maybe it was a worker doing some sort of preliminary inspection? Or maybe it was just the house settling. She’d worked in enough old houses to know what noises they made when they shifted. She’d almost talked herself into ignoring it and continuing on with her work, when the ceiling right above her head groaned under the moving burden of some heavy wooden object. It sounded as if someone was moving furniture up there, something she had specifically instructed Anthony’s crew not to do, as she had to sort through and label everything from its original position, per the requirements of the Whitney family’s lawyer. And they were doing it in Mrs. Whitney’s bedroom, which