I followed Fannie into the house. The first thing I noticed was that the place was stifling hot. The next thing I noticed was the dead animals everywhere.
I stopped.
Fannie glanced back at me. “Don’t let my pets scare you off, girl. They won’t bite. Well, not anymore.” She cackled at her own joke. “I couldn’t bear to separate from my precious loves, so I stuffed them.”
“Your precious loves?”
I was staring at a sea of stuffed cats, taxidermy style.Cats.It was horrible. A gray cat lay stretched out on the rug. A red tabby sat in a window. A black cat sat in a corner.
It blinked.
I almost shrieked.
“Some of them are alive? How can you tell the difference?”
She laughed again. “Blissful, I like you. Want a drink?”
“Sure, water is fine.”
Fannie brought me a water. A cat hair floated on top, so I laid it on a table. She poured herself a finger of scotch from a bottle on a TV stand.
Oh, that’s the kind of drink she meant. Heck, if I lived in a colony of stuffed cats, I’d drink too.
“So you knew the neighbors who ran the inn?”
“The Hudsons,” Fannie said. “Nice people.” She leaned forward to tell me a secret. “But they didn’t like cats.”
“I’m surprised you were even friends with them.”
“Me, too.” She knocked back the scotch. “They were nice enough, though. What can I tell you about them?”
“Anything you can. Am I to understand the inn was in full swing in the seventies?”
“That’s right. You said it. People traipsed in and out of that place every day. I never liked it. I told my husband you couldn’t trust all these outsiders. Some of them were Yankees, you know. Coming to see the town and the Southern ghosts we had.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “No one wanted a bunch of Yankees, but who was going to say anything? The ghosts bring revenue, and what mayor is going to complain about a strong economy? None. Want another drink?”
I hadn’t touched my water. “No thanks.”
“I think I’ll have one.” She poured herself another finger and swirled it as if trying to see how long she could wait before chugging it down.
“Was there ever anything strange about the Hudsons or the house through the years?”
“I’ll say.” She snorted. “Screams. When the Hudsons lived there, you’d hear all kinds of screaming. It was terrible. Horrible.”
I blanched. “Did you call the police?”
“Of course I called the police. Either I would or my husband. You can’t raise children in that sort of environment. So the cops would come down, knock on the door and get the whole thing sorted out.”
Fannie stared into her cup.
“Well, what was it? What caused the screams?”
She clicked her tongue. “You know, I never knew. We never found out, but Mrs. Hudson, Deborah, she would swear it wasn’t her. That she wasn’t the cause of the screams.”
“So it wasn’t any sort of domestic violence?”
“Huh?” Fannie stared at me, perplexed.
