Haunted Teapot On Whistler Street

By Fay Risner

Anna Winters buys the cottage of her dreams. The yard is full of blooming roses which lends color and fragrance to the place. When her elderly mother, Joyce Winters's dementia worsens, Anna takes her in. From the start, Joyce says the house has bad vibes and doesn't like living there. When she finds a china teapot covered with roses at the back of her closet, she is adamant a woman named Emily wants the teapot placed on the fireplace mantle. One night behind Joyce's closed bedroom door, Anna overhears her mother in a conversation about the teapot with the imaginary Emily. She worries about her mother's failing mental health. To prove her mother is imagining Emily, Anna investigates the house's previous owners. She finds thirty years before a woman named Emily Carson owned the house. One old newspaper in the library's archive has the front page headline Emily Carson Murdered In Her Home. Town's First Murder In A Decade. Does the teapot have the power to present its deceased owner, Emily, to Anna's mother? Is there really a Haunted Teapot On Whistler Street?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fay Risner
• Release date: Aug 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370332984

Fay Risner

Fay Risner lives with her husband on a central Iowa acreage along with their chickens, rabbits, goats and cats. A retired Certified Nurse Aide, she now divides her time between writing books, livestock chores, working in her flower beds, the garden and going fishing with her husband. In the winter, she makes quilts. Fay writes books in various genre and languages. Historical mystery series like Stringbean westerns and Amazing Gracie Mysteries, Nurse Hal's Amish series set in southern Iowa and books for Caregivers about Alzheimer's. She uses 12 font print in her books and 14 font print in her novellas to make them reader friendly. Now her books are in Large Print. Her books have a mid western Iowa and small town flavor. She pulls the readers into her stories, making it hard for them to put a book down until the reader sees how the story ends. Readers say the characters are fun to get to know and often humorous enough to cause the readers to laugh out loud. The books leave readers wanting a sequel or a series so they can read about the characters again. Enjoy Fay Risner's books and please leave a review to make others familiar with her work.

Book preview

Haunted Teapot On Whistler Street

By Fay Risner

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 Fay Risner

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to the actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locals are entirely coincidental. Excerpts from this book cannot be used without written permission from the author.

Booksbyfay Publisher

Publisher, Editor and author Fay Risner

Sometimes writing short stories seems as hard to write when trying to keep to a word limit as writing a book. When a theme is needed for a short story that's to be submitted to a contest that makes my mind search even harder to come up with the story.

I entered the short story Teapot On Whistler Street, which I have enlarged for this book, in the Arkansas Writers' Conference in 2004 in the Geneva Crook Memorial category.

Tea Was A Predictor Of Many Things

In days gone by when brewing a pot of tea, all sorts of predictions were made. If the lid of the pot was inadvertently left off, then a stranger was expected to call at the house.

If you forget to put the tea into the pot before pouring in the boiling water, it was a very bad omen indeed. The rest of the day you would wait for something to go wrong.

If you make the tea too weak, you would lose the friendship of someone close to you. You never wanted that to happen.

If you brewed it too strong, you would make a new friend. So bitter though the tea was, you eagerly awaited the appearance of this new friend.

And it was very unlucky to stir the tea in the pot. If you did you would certainly quarrel with someone.

Chapter 1

It was early afternoon when Anna Winters stopped her car by the gray stone cottage on Whistler Street. A red rose plant, full of blooms, vined in a thick blanket on the trellis that arched over the white gate.

Sometimes Anna wanted to pinch herself while she looked at this new home she'd just purchased. With the look of an English cottage, it was her dream come true, owning such a house. A white picket fence surrounded the property, and an abundance of rose bushes grew in rows in the yard, along the sidewalk and the driveway.

Brilliant sunshine covered the area, making her place looked like the cottages in Thomas Kinkade's paintings. They were paintings with plenty of bushes, flowers and a sunshiny glow just like hers.

She gaze at the scene. Taking it all in was enough to make her blue eyes shimmer with joyous moisture. Fact was, Anna was ecstatic when she saw a picture of her dream house listed in the realty ads. After months of watching the ads for the right house, she had just about given up hope of finding it. When she spotted this house in the ads, she called the real estate agent right away to set up the time for a walk through.

Truth be told, her mind was already made up before the agent went with her to the cottage just from looking at the picture of it in the advertisement. Of course, she didn't think appearing so eager was the way to act around a real estate agent. She had to remind herself to be calm and not to look too eager during the transaction.

It was plain to see whoever owned the house at one time must have liked roses. Rows of bushes lined the security fence around the yard. A row had been planted on each side of the driveway to the garage. Rows lined the sidewalk to the front door.

Rowed on either side of the gate along the sidewalk, large bushes produced magnificent roses of every color imaginable. At that moment, the bushes were so heavy with blooms the plants drooped over on the edge of the sidewalk.

That might be a problem. Anna was hopeful if people who passed by on the sidewalk admired the roses as much as she did they wouldn't mind stepping around the flowers. If anyone did complain those bushes needed pruning, she'd let them pick a bouquet to lighten the bushes load and clear the path. In fact, she should hang a pick the roses on the outside the fence for free sign over one of the pickets just so rose lovers would feel they could help themselves.

She was excited to get moved in and pick her own fresh bouquets the rest of the summer. The house would smell so fragrant just like the yard did.

It had taken her a while to save the money for a house on her librarian wages. Once in a while she had a moment of reality set in, and she mulled over spending so much of her hard earned savings. She managed to be sensible as long as every house she looked at didn't suit her. Sometimes, she'd say to herself, she was thirty-four-years-old and had managed just fine in her apartment. Why should she throw away her hard earned money on a house at her age? Her resolve to save her money blew away as if on a stiff spring breeze when she saw this cottage listed for sale.

Anna glanced in her rear-view mirror at her reflection. Not one gray hair yet in her auburn hair, and plenty of working years before she had to retire. Surely, she could recoup the money she spent on the house in that length of time to put back in savings.

The real catalyst for buying a house had been the need to move her mother, Joyce, in with her now that her mother was older and suffering from dementia. Anna couldn't see the two of them living in either one of their cramped apartments now that her mother needed supervision. That by itself was motivation enough to make her buy this house.

The driver of the moving van honked when he pulled over and parked behind Anna's black Ford Escort. The sound startled her, bringing her back to the present. She glanced in her rear-view mirror.

When she saw the burly moving men climb out of their van, she got out of the car and opened the yard gate. Before she hurried up the sidewalk, she hooked it to the fence so it would stay open. She fished the house key out of her jeans pocket and unlocked the front door. After she made sure it stayed wide open, she stopped in the middle of the living room to wait for