The Night Before by Lisa Jackson

second. They’d started around midnight, sighing through the branches of the live oaks, causing the Spanish moss to sway. The wraiths grumbled by the old waterwheel that creaked as it turned in the stream flowing past the orchard, and they hid in the rafters of the third story of this grand old decaying manor where Lucille had tried and failed to sleep. She’d thought they would disappear into the shadows with the morning light. But she’d been wrong. They were still annoying her as she swept the wide porch of Oak Hill, the Montgomery plantation, poking her broom at a cottonlike nest of spiders in the corner.
    “You all, jest git. Go away, leave me be,” she muttered, her lips flattening over her teeth as she spied the gardener’s boy clipping dying blooms off the roses. He didn’t look up from beneath the bill of his cap, but she knew he’d heard her. She’d have to be careful.
    Though some people thought she was a little touched in the head, that some of the Montgomery lunacy had somehow invaded her, Lucille was as sane as anyone she knew. Saner. She was just cursed with the ability to hear those who should have passed on, and she was certain the old three-storied home with its beveled windows, crystal chandeliers and pillared brick porch was haunted. She knew some of the ghosts’ names, had read them time and time again on the crumbling gravestones. Some of the angry, bodyless beings had been slaves over a century before, some had been children, poor little souls who’d never had a chance to grow up, but what they had in common was that every last one of the angry souls had been born with at least one drop of Montgomery blood running through their veins.
    She just wished they’d be silent. Slide back into their tombs where they belonged. But that was not to be because something vile and dark had happened last night; she just didn’t know what. Yet.
    Pausing to wipe her forehead with the hem of her apron, she glanced down the long drive, as if expecting the bearer of bad news, even Satan himself, to appear. But the late morning was deceptively quiet. Too still. Only the lapping of the creek and the buzz of a hornet searching for its nest were audible over the whispers of the ghosts.
    Pushing her broom around terra-cotta planters bursting with petunias and marigolds, she kept a wary eye out for palmetto bugs and listened to the raspy voices. Lucille heard them and, she suspected, others did as well; they were too frightened to admit to the existence of the undead.
    Caitlyn . . . now that poor child was cursed. Just like her grandma Evelyn . . . another tortured soul. Lucille made a quick sign of the cross over her bosom without breaking stride as she swept. She’d bet a month’s wages that Caitlyn heard the voices, that the dead whispered through her head. As they had with Evelyn.
    She paused again. To listen. The lawn mower growled as the gardener cut the grass near the stables. A squirrel scolded from one of the live oak trees, and further away traffic rumbled on a distant highway. Yet, above it all, Lucille heard the sounds of the spirits—quiet, angry voices. She felt the ghosts moving, churning, causing a hot wind to brush against her cheeks. Evil seemed nearer somehow, though Lucille could not pinpoint it; didn’t know its source.
    It had started last night.
    She’d gone to bed at eleven, as was her usual time, after giving Miss Berneda her final dose of medication and some warm milk with honey. Once Berneda had dozed off and begun to snore, Lucille had pulled the curtains around her bed and eased out of the room. She’d climbed the back staircase to the third floor, the arthritis in her knees complaining as she made her way up each narrowing riser, her breathing exaggerated with the effort. She was getting too old and fat for the hard work she did, and though she was compensated well and she loved the Montgomery family as if it were her own, she would have to retire soon, to Florida maybe to be with