Cemetery Walk

By Robert Kanehl

Walking in a cemetery can be peaceful and reflective, as long as you don’t hear voices. Hannah Griswold, however, does hear voices. Why are they calling to her? Why can’t she have a normal teenage life? It is her senior year at Litchfield High School, and boys are beginning to notice the 17-year-old. Why can’t the voices leave her alone?

This time, it is the spirit of a lonely young girl desperate to return home that is reaching out to Hannah Griswold. As in the past, Hannah must help bring peace to this soul to end the haunting. However, this spirit is calling to her from an old town cemetery, the same cemetery where Billy Warren has asked her to attend a Halloween Event.

Can Hannah help the ghost? Will Billy use the fact that she hears voices as a means of teasing her? Or can Hannah help the ghost without Billy ever finding out?
These questions haunt her daily, as does the ever ringing question – who is trying to get home? Who is haunting her dreams?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Write Words Inc.
• Release date: Jan 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781613863596

Book preview

Cemetery Walk

A Hannah Griswold Mystery, Vol. 3

By Robert Kanehl

© 2016 Robert Kanehl All Rights Reserved.

First e-Book Edition, December, 2016

Published at Smashwords by Write Words, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-61386-359-6

Bowker Standard Address Number: 254-0304

Dedication

To my father

for his timeless support

(1928-2015)

Chapter 1

It was a question. The pale hazel eyes rimmed in those dark eyebrows were asking a question. They stared at me, in an endless question. Devoid of a body, they floated in my dream world asking their endless question. I had been dreaming of them for a year, not every night, but often enough to remember them. With them came an acidy smelling smoke, like the sulfur experiments we did in chemistry class.

After seeing them, I often woke feeling scared, lonely, and most of all homesick. How I could be homesick, I don’t know, considering I was living in the same town I was born in. Maybe I was just missing my parents, who had moved, leaving me with my grandmother.

What the question was, that those eyes wanted answered, I did not know. I just saw them staring at me, questioning me, as I woke.

Still drowsy and stuck between the world of sleep and consciousness, I laid in the bed, one moment hearing the birds outside my window, the next staring into those questioning hazel eyes. One moment I was snuggled inside a warm blanket, and the next, surrounded by the cloud of foul smelling acid. I shuddered with an emotion somewhere between fear and frustration.

Whose eyes were they? My mind asked for the millionth time since they began haunting my dreams.

The alarm sounded again from the third snooze tap I had managed that morning and I rolled over, hoping to will myself out of bed.

Whose eyes were they? The question fell from my lips as I sat up.

Senior year is supposed to be the most exciting time of a high school student’s life. The time that they see the first big ending in their lives, and the time when we discover that the world is much bigger than we had ever thought. We all know that we can conquer that huge world, if only given a chance, and boy are we willing to take whatever chance comes along.

I looked at the year as one tall mountaintop. From the pinnacle of this mountain, I could clearly see my past, with its ghosts and the heartbreak of all that I had known, as well as the doorway to the future.

I only hoped that the future was as filled with experiences, and love, as the past had been. Waking one morning during the early part of the school year, I had suddenly realized that was where I was in my life.

Hannah, you’re moving slow today. The voice of my grandmother broke through the fog of teenage morning hatred. It had traveled through the crack between the door and frame created by the slightly ajar door; as my grandmother walked down the hall starting her own day. You’ll miss the bus if you don’t get out of bed soon. The voice reassured me that the dreams I had visited the night before had been only dreams. There had been a hint that I was not living in Litchfield, Connecticut, but had actually moved with my parents to North Carolina.

My parents had traveled south from Connecticut in the middle of my junior year in high school, because my father’s company had relocated. They had allowed me to stay with my grandmother in Litchfield, so that I could finish my schooling in the same high school, and the same school my father, his father, and his father and so on, had also attended.

Stepping onto the cold, wooden floor, I stretched and saw again the eyes from my dreams. They were looking down from my mind, longing for me to find them. Hope in their stare that someone, most likely me, would help them find the route to their real world. What had triggered this dream? I did not know, but something had happened the day before, in school that flipped my whole life over on its back.

Billy Warren, my biggest enemy in middle school, had asked me on a date. Hannah, he said, as he approached me, the day before while I stood at my school locker unpacking my book bag. His voice was not excited; it was as matter-of-fact as the crew-cut boy could make it. I did notice, though, that his brown eyes darted back and forth watching the other students in Litchfield High walk past. Meanwhile, his right hand kept playing with the zipper on his blue, soccer team, sweatshirt. I thought you would like to go to this special Halloween event.

His lips quivered a little, as I looked him straight in his dark eyes. There was no humor in them. They were not pulling a joke. I noticed Nathan Martin walk past then and I relaxed. Nathan had been Billy’s best friend, and another enemy in grade school, but upon reaching high school, he had started dating my best friend. If Nathan was behind Billy then something was legit, my mind’s voice told me.

What is it? I asked in my memory.

Well the kids at the Gunnary School are acting out people in the cemetery. I thought you might just like to go. He looked again at the ground, as if he was afraid to make eye contact with me.

Was he really nervous? I had to ask myself. He had never been nervous when he had picked on me in school. Could it really be that he wanted to spend some time with me, not tease me?

Okay.

Cool, I’ll pick you up this Friday, at 6:30. He turned to leave, and then looked back. You know they say the whole cemetery is haunted. I nodded, knowing the reality of having met spirits from the other world. It was something I did not share with many people, and never with Billy. I thought you would like that sort of thing.

I nodded again as a twinge inside of me screamed of my last visit into the spirit world. Then it had been the spirit of a lost soldier trying to find his way home. It had been an adventure, which drew me closer to Nathan and my father.

Chills crawled over my arms, and I rubbed the goose bumps.

You’re not scared of ghosts are you? Billy’s mischievous smile from my past suddenly appeared across his face.

No. I looked at him, suddenly not sure of my footing with him. I’m not scared.

Good, he continued. I always thought you were not a scaredy-cat girl. His smile changed and I could tell he was different. I always admired that in you. I couldn’t get under your skin like I could the others. He looked over his shoulder, and I could see that he recognized Nathan in the crowd of students. Well I got to get to class. I’ll talk to you later.

He walked away, and Nathan and Carissa, my best friend appeared in the corner of my eye, as I finished pulling my two first-period books out of my locker.

What did he want? Carissa spoke as she eased her way to my side. She had been with me since elementary school. She had been my best friend and backside coverage, as I ventured through the world of school and boys. She had become a wonderful, respected young lady, morphing from the tom boy I had befriended years before. Standing there, in the hall, her dark hair was pulled back behind her head in a pony tail, a yellowish tight button down blouse hinted at her maturity, as did the navy blue skirt. She did not look anything like the tough protector she had been for me in middle school.

He actually asked me out on a date.

No, she whispered shock and sarcasm in her voice. Way to go! She punched me in the arm like she had, throughout elementary and middle school. Even though I knew it was coming, it still hurt.

Looking at the two of them, I questioned. You didn’t put him up to it? I had never been on a date in my life. Considered an outcast, I was the star center for the high school basketball team. That meant I was taller than most of the boys in the little town’s high school. Billy and Nathan were the exception. They played sports for the school as well.

Looking Carissa and Nathan in the face, I saw their smiles, and surmised that they had a hand in the invitation. Billy said he thought you would enjoy the event, Nathan spoke. He’s never said anything like that before, a bemused tone came to the Nathan’s voice. I didn’t believe him at first, but he said it several times over the past week. I promised to be his moral support, if he had the guts to ask you out, I guess he did.

Maybe’s he’s changed, become more mature? Carissa ventured.

Yeah, I muttered, unsure.

Maybe he’s had a secret love for you all these years. Carissa half laughed.

He’s had a funny way of showing it, I retorted. Carissa and Nathan giggled.

Looking away, I watched Billy walking down the hallway, and my heart could not help but remember the strange feelings that Margaret Brent’s ghost had flooded me with the year before. These feelings had captured my heart, and spun me into the arms of Nathan, sharing a kiss with the boy. Margaret’s spirit had transported me back in time, to a time when a girl’s hand, was expected to be placed in a man’s hand.

Watching Billy walk away, I dreaded that I could not control my heart, or even my own feelings, because of that visit I had made into the spirit world.

* * *

Sluggishly I walked from my bedroom to the shower. The pathway was engraved in my mind, so engraved I could have walked it with my eyes closed, and had done so in the dark, not wanting to turn on a light waking my grandmother.

The bathroom was between the bedrooms on the second floor, in the house my grandparents lived in. It was located across the street from the house where I grew up. It had been in the family for over a century, and was the home of the first ghost I ever knew. Anna’s spirit had come to me when I was in eighth grade. She had been a distant relative who had died right there in the house. Anna had been buried among the forgotten graves of a small family plot near the edge of the woodlot my grandparents owned.

I had placed her spirit to rest, I thought as I stopped in the hallway, just shy of the bathroom. A shiver slowly crawled over my arms. I gave you want you wanted, I spoke to Anna in a whisper. But I knew that the spirit world was not really controlled by a high school girl. There was a time when the two worlds were connected in this house; morning was one of those times. I often felt the spirits at that moment between sleep and waking, like this morning or the night before.

I looked around the hallway, filled with pictures and paintings of my relatives. Were they looking down from their frames with eyes that actually could see me this morning? Was Anna or Margaret calling me to solve another mystery? An acidy smell filled my nose, stinging it, reminding me of the smell you get at Fourth of July fireworks.

My mind spun, allowing the sleep of the night to take command just for another moment. Whose eyes were those that haunted my dream? Whose eyes were those that drew me into a spin of doubt and intrigue?

Hannah! If you don’t get in that shower now, you’ll be walking to school, the voice of my grandmother broke into the hold of the dream world, and I shook away the spirits from my mind.

* * *

The heat of the hot shower dispersed any other grip on my mind I had triggered on that edge between sleep and consciousness. My mind turned toward my real world, my life in high school. Once more Billy Warren’s face came to me.

Could this date be real? I asked again, or was I dreaming? Standing in the shower, I unconsciously looked toward the stairs of the attic. I knew I could not see them, from the bathroom, but in my mind’s eye I could picture them. Anna’s ghost had lived up there for over a hundred years, waiting for her brother to return. Margaret Brent’s spirit had waited just as long for her son to return, had I been waiting all this time for Billy?

* * *

The shower provided the nudge I needed to drive me into the conscious world. School and friends filled my mind, displacing the eyes of the dream, and thoughts of the other world. Sitting on the edge of my bed, putting on my sneakers, I drifted back to the day before, and the weary eyes of Billy Warren.

I had not really thought about his proposal, until then. Washington? I whispered to myself, recalling the place. The students at the Gunnary School will be walking though the Washington Cemetery. I pictured the small cemetery located next to the school. I had been there before, first with my history loving father, and later with school friends. It was haunted, I knew from my previous visits.

A tingle went down my spine as I recalled looking at the gravestones from the road entrance, near the school. The cemetery had drawn my attention when I was little, before I had known I could channel the feelings of the dead. My father had taken me that first time to see the grave of some commander of the air corp. The stone was unique because it had a Wright Flyer airplane engraved on it, as well as a listing of the general’s accomplishments.

Once inside the fieldstone wall of the cemetery, I was drawn toward a number of graves other than the stone my father wanted to visit. Voices, that I thought were just my imagination, had bounced around my head, telling me names and dates that made no sense to a 7-year-old.

These voices spoke softly in my head, as I read the stones in front of me. James Miller, a male voice spoke to me.

Good to meet you Mr. Miller, my own mind responded silently.

Eighteen-forty-five to 1878, the male spoke again, within my mind.

Oh I see, you were in the war, so good that you made it back home, I responded. Even at the age of seven, I knew the importance of returning home. I’m glad you had a wife and children. I looked at the stones near Mr. Miller and reflected on the similar names.

That was how I visited cemeteries with my father. When there were voices, I talked