Widow's Tears by Susan Wittig Albert

question seemed to puzzle Claire. “It was—it must have been something in her posture. I think she was worried because something was coming. Something very bad, and there was nothing she could do about it. Anyway, I just kept on watching, for two, maybe three minutes. Then I heard somebody driving down the hill and I glanced in that direction. It was Sam in his old green pickup truck, coming back with the groceries from town. When I looked back at the house, she was gone.”
    Ruby felt no surprise. “Just…gone? No theatrics, no crash-bam-boom?”
    Claire nodded. Her brown eyes were very large in her pale, heart-shaped face. “But here’s the thing, Ruby. There’s no way to get up to the widow’s walk now, or to get down. There used to be a ladder and a trapdoor on the third floor, and when I was a kid, my mother would take me up there sometimes. She always held tight to my hand, which was good, because it’s high—almost forty feet off the ground—and the slate roof is steep. But after Aunt Hazel died and Mr. Hoover took over the management of the house, he had the ladder taken away and the trapdoor nailed shut. He told me he had been thinking of renting the place to summer visitors, and he didn’t want any little kids playing Superman off the roof.”She stopped twisting her ring and flexed her fingers. “I looked, Ruby. That trapdoor is still nailed shut.”
    Ruby took a breath. “So you went to the phone and called me.” She frowned. “No, you couldn’t have done that, because there’s no phone in the house. Right?”
    â€œRight.” She looked uncomfortable. “This is going to sound pretty silly, but the truth is that I was…well, the only way I can say it is that I got a message to call you.”
    â€œA message?” Ruby asked in surprise. “Who?”
    Claire shrugged. “I don’t know who. It just…it just popped into my head when I was coming downstairs from checking the trapdoor.
Call Ruby.
And then, as if there might be some mistake,
Call Ruby Wilcox.
But when I thought about it, I realized that it was exactly the right thing to do, not just because you’re my oldest friend, but because you saw her. You saw her
first
. So I got in the car and drove out to the county road, where I got a signal. I could have texted you, probably, but I thought this was way too complicated for that.” Now, Claire’s words were tumbling out in a breathless rush. “This whole thing is so wild, Ruby—I mean, really
bizarre.
The house itself is bad enough, the crazy, crooked way it was cobbled together in the first place, as if Mrs. Blackwood was making it up as she went along. And there’s the wind and the weird weather that seems to happen here and nowhere else. And on top of that, there’s this ghost or poltergeist or whatever she is, and I’m at a loss to—”
    â€œPoltergeist?” Ruby interrupted. “Have there…have you seen or heard anything else? Besides the woman, I mean?”
    Claire’s glance slid away. “Actually, yes. I’ve heard…” Her voice trailed off. “But maybe you won’t…”
    â€œTry me,” Ruby said. “What’s going on?”
    â€œI wish I
knew
.” Claire’s voice was dry and scratchy. “But since you ask,well, yes, I’ve heard a few things. There’s a harp in the music room, I’ve heard that—no melody, just a faint jangle, like fingers running across the strings. A foghorn, distinct but far away—and of course, the closest foghorn is over on the Gulf coast. The wind whistling in the eaves, even when there’s not a breath of a breeze.” She cast an apprehensive glance at the pans hanging from the rack over the worktable. “Those pans rattling. A bell tinkling, a ball bouncing, a window breaking. A woman crying—weeping as if her heart would break. The