Weeping Willows

Call for Help

Chapter 38

Thankfully, the guys offered to take the vases Mason picked out for the parish as well as the others for the senior center and deliver them. They were gone for a good three hours leaving the girls to work in peace. By the time they returned all unwanted thoughts had been banished from Elizabeth's mind. The girls were chatting lightly amongst themselves when Addison let out a gasp of surprise.

"Guys you have to come look at this." She called to the two of them making Jan and Elizabeth rush over. They each stood on either side of her as they looked down in astonishment. Addison had found an old family album. She was looking to each of them with excitement before she opened the large leather-bound tomb that had Bennett embossed in bold letters across the front. Both Elizabeth and Jan pulled up stools to sit beside Addison as she cracked open the cover coming to the first page of pictures. The photographs started out showing a family of five standing in front of a fishing boat. The stern looking young woman had a little girl and boy to either side of her while she held a baby on her hip. Standing next to her was a young man clearly her husband smiling proudly at the camera. The picture was black and white and slightly faded from old age. As they flipped through the pages, they watched the couple get older and the children grow. The pictures began to become more sepia in color but also rather grainy as well making it hard to really see much detail.

About halfway through the album there were no more pictures that contained the woman's husband making Elizabeth fear the worst. Maybe having lost her own father colored the way she began seeing the family but perhaps they too had lost theirs. By the time, the two older children were near teenage years and the baby was a youthful child, the house that Elizabeth now owned began appearing in the background. A few more pages past the beginning of the house there was a wedding photo of the oldest girl and her groom. In contrast to the joyous smiles most newly married couples of today wore the young couple were rather morose looking. Not long after the wedding photo there were pictures of the young couple with a baby. Before to many pages after that the oldest boy and the young woman's husband vanished from the family photos as well leaving just the women and a toddler. Before too long the album ran out of pages making the three of them frown unhappily.

Jan went back to work at her table while Addison vowed to search for more photographs. Elizabeth pulled the album over, turning back to the beginning. Something about the photos was bugging her and she wasn't going to be able to go back to sorting the other things until she could figure it out. She flipped through the pages slowly examining each picture completely before moving on to the next one. By the time she had gotten to the later pictures of the three children her mind was dinging that she was missing something important. Elizabeth stopped at a photograph of the three of them just before the wedding photo and stared hard at the image. It was clearly William and his two sisters as they stood on the front steps of the house. He had an arm slung over the shoulders of both girls as they stood at his side. William and the younger sister were grinning into the camera as the eldest sister just stared straight ahead looking like she would rather be anywhere then there. As she stared at William's smiling face, she could swear he resembled the man she had seen at the waterfall that day with Ryan. Since the picture was in brown tones it made it hard to make out his natural coloring. The fuzzy detail to the picture also left her with enough doubt that she couldn't be sure she wasn't just imagining things. As she focused on the two girls in the picture however Elizabeth lost all color in her face. Her breath became shallow as her heart rate sped up. She couldn't be a hundred percent sure, but she was fairly certain she was looking at the two women she had had interactions with inside the house. As she recalled William's letters said the sister's names were Ruth and Annabel which were the names the young women had called each other the times she had seen them. Her palms began to sweat as she kept pondering the eerie episodes she had experienced in the house recently. Elizabeth nearly jumped out of her skin when Addison dropped another box on the table beside her.