The White Lady

Tuesday

Dawn broke grey and misty. Megan woke to the sound of Hailey's alarm clock buzzing willfully on the dresser. Megan was one to silence the buzzer with the snooze button as soon as it began its annoying racket, but Hailey just lay there letting the obnoxious noise flutter through the room unabated. Finally, Megan climbed over her sister and hit the snooze button with a vengeance.

"God, Meg! What are you doing?" Hailey growled.

"What you should have done five minutes ago! Ugh! How can you stand that noise?"

"If you don't like my morning routine then maybe you shouldn't be in here in the morning!" snapped Hailey.

There was a long pause as both girls lay quietly, sleep still clinging to them heavily.

"Speaking of that..." Hailey began, "what are you doing in here anyway?"

"I don't wanna talk about it," Megan hedged.

"Meg," her tone was flat, "you haven't snuck into my room like this since you were nine. It was during that storm in the summer of '04. Remember that? It took out four trees at our old house."

"I remember. It split the maple in the front yard in half," Megan mused, "the lightning was so crazy. I thought it was going to kill us."

"You were always so afraid of storms," Hailey added, "I never knew why."

"I dunno," Megan whispered.

"You're not afraid of much else," she turned, then, to look at her sister's profile. She waited patiently for Megan to begin speaking. Megan fought the urge to indulge her sister's curiosity, but eventually she found herself compelled to speak.

"Have you..." she began slowly, trying to think of how to start, "you know I'm not superstitious, right?"

"Ya," Hailey almost laughed at the absurdity of the question, "you're the LAST person I would describe as superstitious."

"Well, I went out to that house," she paused, "ya know? The Murder House?" Hailey merely nodded her response, "I took some pictures. Later on, when Cody looked at them, he said he saw something in one of them."

"Did he?" Hailey turned to look at Megan suddenly.

"I don't know," she shrugged, "Cody said he did. We argued, of course, and he told me I should go back out there and take some more pictures of the place, ya know, to see if anything else showed up in any of them. I finally agreed, but then he told me he wasn't going to drive me again. I ended up getting a ride with that Goth girl, Eva Auditore, and right away she started talking about not getting too close to the house and all of that nonsense--"

"Danielle's sister was just telling us about that!" Hailey added excitedly, "She said the ghost gets angry if you get too close to the house. She doesn't want people looking in the windows. Supposedly, it's because she's ashamed of what she did there and she doesn't want people to see."

"Why?" Megan scoffed, "It's not like there's anything to see anymore."

"I don't know," Hailey shrugged, "maybe she can still see it."

"Maybe," Megan sighed in acknowledgement before continuing, "anyway, I just took the whole business with a grain of salt and started snapping some pictures. The next thing I knew, I was practically on the porch. I was taking a close-up of the railing when I felt something really cold behind me. I didn't give it much thought at the time, but when I talked to Eva later, she said I shouldn't have gotten that close, that I'd upset Old Jag-Jagged Ax.