I decided to wrap up the rest of my experiences with Barbara over the past few days.
Fortunately, the gelatinous mixture coating the walls and tub hadn’t hardened during my nap in the car. Barbara was considerate enough to pulverize JM’s bones, so for the most part, he slid right down the drain. A roll of paper towels and some bleach took care of the rest. I decided to throw the boots and other scraps in a remote dumpster somewhere as soon as possible. My street was pretty sleepy. Probably no surveillance cams outside people’s door cameras, but JM and I were on on the store’s security footage together. If anyone cared about him enough to file a missing person’s report, and the authorities somehow ended up here, I didn’t want them to find any trace. Explaining that “Yes, he broke in, then died, and I disposed of the body instead of calling the police, but I didn’t kill him. It was the lady who died here long before I was born,” definitely wouldn’t go over well.
Barbara probably saved my life, but I wouldn’t have crossed paths with JM in the first place if she didn’t drive me out of the house. Though she might not have meant to do it - there was that attempt to comfort me, I guess, with the ghostly back rub. Which was more unsettling than soothing, but she tried. And if JM didn’t come after me, he could’ve have broken into someone else’s house and done God knows what to them. Ultimately, it was a good thing Barbara took care of him. Feeling self-conscious, I made a little speech to the air, expressing appreciation and apologizing for the salt circle thing.
As the day moved forward, my thoughts drifted back to my refusal to let the landlady share Barbara’s story with me. She’d been there for the most terrifying moment of my life. Shouldn’t I return the favor? It was too late to save her, but I could listen. I told Barbara as much, but nothing happened. The extent of Barbara’s abilities were a mystery. Maybe she couldn’t communicate even if she wanted to. I could go to Gwen, the landlady, but shouldn’t someone be given the opportunity to tell their own story?
A Ouija board was not an option. You needed at least two people for that, and I couldn’t take the risk of Barbara harming anyone else. She’d hurt me, and I think she kind of liked me. JM had it coming, but who knows what transpired between Barbara and the previous tenant who fled. At least I hope they fled.
I went to the living room and decided to try and watch something on TV, but no sooner than I sat on the couch, some of the events of the previous night began to play out again. Namely – I froze up. It was if the walls in front of me fell away, enabling me to watch a scene from the past. It was like a waking nightmare. A woman I assumed was Barbara had come home and caught someone ransacking the bedroom that was now mine. Her empty jewelry box was on the floor, and now he was tossing things out of her dresser drawer. He looked just a few years younger than she was. “Hughie? What are you doing?” She’d sounded more confused and angry than scared.
He tried to play it off like a joke. “Uh, April Fool’s!” It didn’t work, and she ordered him to get out. He gave everything back, and apparently, he thought she was just going to forget this ever happened. It was like something snapped in him when she said she was going to call the police. She must’ve seen it too, because she turned and ran down the hall, but he caught up to her in the bathroom doorway.
Barbara spared me most of the details. Next thing I saw, she was was lying in the tub, and Hughie was pulling a ring off her finger. He lost his grip on it, and it slipped down the exposed drain. He flew out of there.
Just like last time, whatever made me freeze dissipated. I grabbed my laptop and signed up for a free trial at a genealogy site. It didn’t take long to find the article in the newspaper archive about the 25 year old who hit her head in the tub and died at this address in 1975. A tragic accident, according to the article. Did the police somehow miss the signs of the struggle or was there a cover up? Those answers weren’t available online, but digitized copies of the local high school’s yearbook were. It didn’t take long to find a picture of the 1973 senior class vice president, Hugh ____ III.
Further research brought me to a social media account on a certain popular website. Hugh and his wife shared a page, and apparently no one taught them anything about online safety, because all their posts were public. He was nearly 50 years older now, of course, but on his 40th wedding anniversary, his wife, Carol, posted posted an old photo of the two of them to mark their wedding anniversary. She must’ve taken a photo of the picture with her cell, because it was kind of blurry, and there was a lens flare on it, but it was still unmistakably a slightly older version of the man from the vision.
One trip to the hardware store later, I had a drain snake and some acid, for any remnants of JM that were hiding in the pipes. After prying off the drain cover and working for ages, time and effort rewarded me with a grimy ring that hadn’t seen the light of day in 48 years. It felt like a miracle.
It only seemed right to make a little speech explaining myself. “It makes me relieved to know that the person who could have hurt me isn’t around anymore. Maybe you would feel the same way? I don’t know if this will work, but I’m going to try to give you the opportunity you didn’t get before.” The thought of getting arrested for breaking and entering didn’t appeal to me, so hoped Barbara wouldn’t mind improvising and that she’d be fair.
Thanks to Carol’s posts, I knew where they lived, that they were taking a trip out of state to visit their daughter, ahead of Easter weekend, and that they’d hired someone to drop by and take care of Sadie, the cat. Today, they posted a picture of the airport. And so I drove out to the house, told a curious neighbor that I was one of the pet sitters, then I put the ring in Hugh’s pool drain.