Investigate Moira’s Past

Constance watched me over the sage bundle, waiting.

I kept my arms folded. “You said she has a long history with this place. Tell me.”

Constance’s smile thinned into something colder. She set the sage down and lowered herself onto the edge of the sofa as if the living room were still hers.

“Moira O’Hara was the maid here in 1983. Worked for me and my husband, Hugo. Young. Pretty. Lonely, or so she claimed.” Her voice stayed even, but the old bitterness ran under every word. “She and Hugo had a… lapse. Once. She later decided it had been a mistake. When he tried again, she refused. He didn’t take the refusal well.”

She looked past me toward the stairs where Moira had disappeared.

“I walked in on them. He had her pinned. I saw what I saw and I ended it. Shot her through the eye. Then I shot him. Buried what was left of her in the backyard. The house kept her. The way it keeps everyone who dies on the grounds.”

The residual heat in my body cooled into something sharper. “She’s a ghost.”

“She’s a ghost who still makes beds and dusts mantels and looks exactly the way men prefer her to look,” Constance said. “Ben sees the young one - the short dress, the helpful smile, the body that promises things. Most men do. Women get the other version eventually: older, sharper, less inclined to flatter. She collects secrets the same way she used to collect silverware. And she has a particular interest in the private comforts wives hide from their husbands.”

Her eyes flicked meaningfully toward the ceiling, toward the bedroom where the three black shapes still waited on my nightstand.

“She found your collection, didn’t she?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.

Constance rose again, smoothing her dress. “Moira doesn’t leave. She can’t. The house owns her bones. She’ll keep cleaning, keep watching, keep offering Ben that pretty young face while she decides what to do with whatever she digs up about you. The only question is whether you let her stay useful… or whether you start treating her like the competition she already is.”

Upstairs a door closed. Ben’s voice murmured again, farther away now.

Constance picked up the sage and held it out once more.

“Burn this tonight. And decide how much of the truth you want your husband to see.”

The house listened to every word, warm and satisfied, while the ghost of the maid moved through the rooms above us as if she had never left.