A Little House in the Prairie

Book 1

The Shadow of the Haunter

In the darkness of the night

Waiting for the light to come

When the demons in your mind

Remind you of the damage done.

Always talking, so much to say

Like a haunting ghost from the grave

And Heaven seems so far away.

—Daughtry, Changes Are Coming

*

*

Sometimes, things have a funny way to happen before you can even realize what on earth is going on. Hi, I’m exhibit A.

I was twenty-five back in the summer of 2023. I was living in Boston and I’d been waiting tables twelve hours a day for six months already, while trying in vain to find a job that would allow me to make ends meet. I couldn’t afford a rent all by myself, so I shared a tiny apartment in Jamaica Plains with two friends. And by the end of June, ruthless math said that such as I was, my dwindling savings wouldn’t last the summer.

That was when the diner manager put on his sad face and told me they had to let me go.

Great! Now what?

I was wandering around, trying to clear my head and come up with a solution for my desperate situation, when my phone rang. Blocked number? Fine. I would vent out on whoever the spammer trying to sell me shit. Serves them well.

“Miss Francesca Garner?” asked a formal lady. “My name is Ronda Williams, with the law firm Jenkins and Crown.”

What? What had I done now? How come I always get in trouble without even noticing?

“Yes, it’s me,” I said cautiously.

“Mr. Jenkins has a document in your name. When can you come to our offices?”

What the hell was she talking about? Why would some fancy lawyer have something for me? Well, not like I had anything better to do.

Twenty minutes later, I paraded my cheap clothes into one of the most exclusive office buildings in town. The receptionist, straight out of a fashion magazine, requested an ID for confirmation and came from behind the front desk with a welcoming smile.

“This way, please.”

She took me to a sober conference room with large windows to the street and a glass table to sit at least twenty.

“Have a seat, Miss Garner. Mr. Jenkins will be here momentarily. May I offer you a coffee, tea, water?”

“No, thanks,” I muttered, puzzled by her obsequious ways. I was used to serving people like her, not the other way around.

Plain to see she would stand by the open door until I sat down, so I picked a chair a couple of seats from the head of the table. She flashed another smile and left, closing the door behind her.

My eyes slid to the windows and I let out a sigh, ready to wait for a couple of hours until the big shot in suit had a minute to waste on the poor girl in worn jeans and sneakers.

He walked in only a few minutes later, though, a classy elderly gent with a nice smile and a black leather binder in his hands.

“Miss Garner,” he greeted me with a quick smile and a nod. “Coffee, tea?”

“No, thanks,” I replied, forcing a smile back.

“Straight to business, then,” he said. He sat at the head of the table and rested both hands on the binder before him. “Tell me, Miss Garner, did your late mother ever tell you about Miss Grace Blotter?” he asked softly, looking up at me.

I nodded. Mom had told me about this old lady, a big-time English professor, who had mentored her back in college. But I had no idea what it had to do with me now. And how come this lawyer knew about Mom’s death? Guess my questions reflected on my face, because Jenkins smiled yet again and replied like he was telling his grandchild a bedtime story.

“Your mother happened to be Miss Blotter’s favorite student ever over the decades she worked at Harvard, and they kept in touch after your mother dropped out of school. Even if she never met you, she knew a lot about you. That’s why, after your mother passed in 2017, she took care that you had the means to go to college.”

I sat up, frowning. Could this old lady have anything to do with my scholarship? I’d gotten it pretty much out of nowhere, and it’d been the only reason why I’d been able to get my bachelor’s in English literature.

The lawyer went on before I was able to even come up with a question.

“Unfortunately, Miss Blotter passed too, last month. I called you as the executor of her will.”

“Oh,” I managed to mumble.

“Miss Blotter was single and had no children, so she left most of her fortune and estate to the Blotter Foundation, but not all: since your mother passed before her, she included you as one of the beneficiaries.”

The surprise made me sit up in my chair. “Come again?”

“Miss Blotter left you one of her family’s houses, and a generous monthly allowance for as long as you reside there. If you ever decide to move out, the house will return to the Blotter family estate, you will lose any right to it, and the allowance will be terminated. The Foundation will cover all taxes, services and expenses of the property for you, as well as the housekeepers’ salary and any and all repairs not derived from your use of the property.”

I pursed my face like he was speaking in tongues, unable to compute what he was telling me. Jenkins read my utter confusion all over my face and nodded with another grandpa smile.

“Her intention was to offer you a place to live and the means to become an author. She loved this house dearly, and spent her retirement years there. She thought it was the perfect place to write.”

“Oh.”

“Take your time, think about it and call me back. You have two months to decide if you accept this arrangement. If I haven’t heard from you by September, you will be removed as beneficiary.”

I needed a whole day to process and actually believe such a plot twist in my life. But once I did, I didn’t waste any time. So I called Jenkins back two days later and we signed all the paperwork before the end of the week. On Saturday morning, I packed up to move to Hardwick, Massachusetts, twenty miles west of Worcester, where the house was.

As long as the internet held, I had no problem living in a rural area. Socializing is not my thing, so I couldn’t care less about being alone in the middle of nowhere. Not to mention my roommates were lovely but too loud for my guts. I mean, I would get paid for living in a nice house and writing! Hell to the yeah!

So I loaded my few boxes of stuff in my car, hugged Trisha and Padme goodbye and hit the road, leaving Boston to the west on a bright summer morning, like a pioneer of old.

According to Wikipedia, Hardwick had been first settled in 1737 and had a population of three thousand. It wasn’t exactly a town, with only a few houses, stores and institutions scattered around a traffic circle. It had all the charm of those old New England rural areas, quiet and beautiful. The dream place for a writer looking for solitude to work and breathtaking scenery for relax and inspiration. I was already loving it as I drove north down Greenwich Road toward the Quabbin Reservoir, woods all around, the artificial lake just a stone-throw away. Oh, my, if this was a dream, I never wanted to wake up.

Then I saw it: the place this woman I’d never gotten to meet had left me. I needed to pull over the shoulder to fight back a fit of laughter and tears. Because it was a three-story Victorian that looked like it’d been just built. It stood past the tall iron gates in the middle of a gorgeous garden, surrounded by woods on three sides, hardly a thousand feet away from the Quabbin.

How on earth had this ever happened? On Tuesday, I was crying down the boardwalk, wondering how was I to pay my share of the rent next month. And on Saturday, I was moving into a frigging Victorian mansion? I mean, c’mon. Had I fallen through some interdimensional crack? Who was Spiderman in this version of the multiverse? I actually pinched my arm to make sure I was awake.

I turned onto the driveway and spotted two lovely smaller houses at each side across the garden, built in wood and stone like out of a fairytale. Later on, I learned the one on the west side was the housekeepers’ home, and the one on the east side was the guesthouse.

The housekeepers waited for me by the stairs to the roofed porch. Susan and Mike Collins, a middle-age couple, polite and suspicious of outlanders from the big city like me.

“Welcome to Blotter Manor, Miss Garner,” was Susan’s greeting.

Blotter Manor! The house even had a name?

As soon as they shook my hand, Susan put her husband to unload my stuff and invited me into the house to show me around.

I was speechless as she showed me the three parlors, the library, the dining room and the huge kitchen, the only part of the whole house that had been fully renovated and looked like any modern open kitchen with a dining area nowadays.

Up the dark oak stairs, the second floor had four large bedrooms, each with their own bathroom and big windows opening to the woods and the Quabbin, and a nursery for two children and a nanny. The late Miss Blotter’s room was all dressed in dark reds, and the moment I saw it, I knew I wouldn’t set foot in there again unless my life depended on it. The one next door, dressed in calming blues, called me like a siren, and I decided it was where I would sleep. Susan seemed to approve of my choice, maybe glad I hadn’t claimed the master bedroom.

The third floor had once been the servants’ quarters, but Miss Blotter had torn all the inner walls down to turn it into a large study, with massive bookshelves, a heavy desk under the biggest window and several loveseats around a coffee table.

“This was Miss Blotter’s favorite room,” said Susan, while I gaped around.

“I can totally see why,” I muttered. “It’s awesome.”

I didn’t say it, but I could already picture myself sitting at that desk with my laptop, writing until my fingers went numb.

“Why don’t you and Mike live here?” I asked as we headed back downstairs. “Plenty of room, if Miss Blotter lived alone.”

Susan hesitated, picking her words carefully.

“We love Blotter Manor, but we wouldn’t feel at home living here.” Her flat tone struck me as odd. “You’ll find out in your own time that this is a very special place. With a mind of its own, you may say. It’s the house that decides who’s welcome under its roof.”

I should’ve paid more attention to what she was hinting at, but I was so excited, I didn’t even pause to wonder what her cryptic answer might mean.

Never mind. Like she’d said, I would find out soon enough.

That very night, to be accurate.

Mike took all my stuff to the blue room, tapped his baseball hat at me and left. Susan had already made lunch for me, and she insisted on warming it up while I changed my clothes. When I joined her back in the kitchen, she pointed at a stick note on the fridge door.

“Our number. Please remember you can call, or knock on our door, at any time, be it day or night. We’re here for you.”

Here for me, be it day or night? A little too much? Yeah, another hint my radar missed.

She brought my lunch to the wooden table in front of a massive flat TV and left.

I was all alone in Blotter Manor.

Well, at least that’s what I thought until the footsteps woke me up at midnight.