I slammed the screen-door.
As soon as I arrived in the hospitable back-yard of Mrs. Dove, I asked her what was wrong with them, or with me, that they should rebuff me so. Stout and red-faced with exertion, she was laboriously washing on a bench under the trees and kept on splashing the suds. Being the only laundry in town, she could not waste time on explanations. Mrs. Dove contracted to do the summer people’s clothing by the dozen, and, counting almost everything that was given her as not rightfully within that dozen, supplied herself with sufficient funds to hibernate for the winter. During the dull season she prepared for the next year’s trade by making rag-rugs and mats with button-eyed cats, the patterns for which had traditionally been brought back from Newfoundland by the sailors. After she had listened to my story and hung up the stockings, she took the clothes-pins out of her mouth long enough to answer.
“You’ll have a hard time all right, getting any one to go near the place. They’re all against it.”
“But why?”
“Well, it has a bad name around here.”
That was what the judge had said. That was the reason he was willing to sell it cheap.
“Do you mean it is haunted?”
Mrs. Dove held a child’s rompers up to the sunlight, soaped a spot on the seat, and rubbed hard again.
“Well, not ghosts, precisely, but there’s always been strange goings-on there, things a person could not understand and that never has been explained. All the men is down on it, because the New Captain didn’t hire none of them to work on the wing he built.”
“But that was years ago!”