Free The Skeleton Key by Tara Moss Page B

with dark petticoats, giving her the shape of a funeral bell as she hung lifelessly, her small lace-up leather boots dangling. I recognised it as a turn-of-the-century mourning dress.
    The woman spun slowly, the chandelier twisted to one side, and a thought flashed into my mind: Has she always been there, twisting that chandelier?
    I needed to cut her down. Now.
    The front door of the house slammed shut behind me and I jumped. When I looked again the woman was gone.
    Impossible. She was right there.
    â€˜Um, hello?’ I said to the empty lobby. The chandelier was askew, draped in cobwebs. ‘Is anyone there?’
    I was not afraid of ghosts, even faceless ones. Yet my heart was pounding quickly in my chest and my skin had come up in tiny bumps. The woman was gone but the strange feeling remained. What was it exactly? An energy? Or the opposite – something cold and deathly, like a new void in the house?
    â€˜Hello? Luke, are you here? Lieutenant Luke?’
    There was no response.

I knocked on the door and entered Celia’s penthouse, shaken.
    My great-aunt regarded me. ‘Darling, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
    I nodded, feeling jittery. ‘I did.’
    She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, I’m going to make us some tea,’ she announced, and before I could protest she was sauntering towards the kitchen in her elegant slippers with Freyja trailing behind her.
    Celia did make very nice tea, but I wasn’t sure that could fix everything just now. Slowly, I placed my heavy satchel on the floor, took off my coat and hung it up, and slipped off my shoes, trying to absorb what I’d seen and, particularly, my reaction to it. The sight of that woman had really shaken me. It wasn’t just that I’d seen a ghost because I’d been seeing ghosts for as long as I could remember. It was something else. Something about her. Or something about the new strangeness in the house that had seemed to arrive just as Luke had disappeared; just as he’d warned me.
    That mouth. Open. With the black veil pulled tight across it.
    Freyja came over to herd me gently into the kitchen, purring against my ankles and nudging me forward.
    â€˜How was work today?’ my great-aunt asked casually over her shoulder as she put the kettle on, calmly absorbed in her ritual.
    I leaned against the doorframe. ‘Work was fine.’ I paused. ‘But there was a woman hanging from the chandelier in the lobby just now.’
    She turned and cocked her head, the veil sitting against her high cheekbones. ‘Well, then. Hanging from the chandelier?’ she said, watching my face. ‘And she is gone now?’
    I nodded. ‘But I did see her. She was there.’
    â€˜I have no doubt,’ my great-aunt said. She prepared a tray with the lovely pot and cups, a little jug of milk and some cubes of sugar, and once the tea was ready she walked to the lounge room and sat down in her reading chair, the tray jingling a little. She placed the tray on the little table next to the chair and I perched myself on the edge of the leather hassock.
    â€˜The widow Elizabeth Barrett,’ Celia said calmly, waiting for the tea to steep.
    My eyes widened. ‘Dr Edmund Barrett’s widow? You think that was her I saw hanging from the chandelier?’
    â€˜Yes, the sad thing. She seems the most likely person. She’d been in deep mourning for a year before she hanged herself on the anniversary of her husband’s death.’
    Oh.
    â€˜Some people don’t handle becoming widows very well,’ she said, and I thought of how well Celia had coped all these years. Being a widow hadn’t exactly held her back; though, of course, I knew she had loved her husband very much. It must be incredibly hard to lose a partner like that. ‘I believe she killed herself in the lobby,’ she said.
    Then it would have been from the chandelier , I thought. There