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31_days2013-11-18 12:17 pm
insaneladybug.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2013-11-18 12:17 pm
[November 18th] [The Rockford Files-related] Chronicles of a Friendship, 18
Title: Chronicles of a Friendship, scene 18
Day/Theme: November 18th - The Poor, Unlucky Girl
Series: The Rockford Files (using characters from The Queen of Peru episode)
Character/Pairing: Ginger Townsend, Lou Trevino
Rating: K/G
A stand-alone, but does take place the day following the latest mini-arc trilogy.
By Lucky_Ladybug
Ginger and Lou were not the original owners of their house. That had been obvious when they had discovered a medallion in the fireplace that had housed an evil spirit. They had meant to go through the house from top to bottom and make sure there weren’t any other unsettling surprises, but they never seemed to have a chance. Today, since Lou had been advised by the doctor to take it easy after that knock on the head, he and Ginger had decided to do a little exploring.
“That time Mike stayed in the basement because the upstairs guestroom was occupied, he seemed kind of freaked out,” Lou remarked.
“I remember,” Ginger mused. “At the time, I thought it was because he and I were still on fairly ill terms, but perhaps it wasn’t.” He frowned. “Are you suggesting there might be a spirit in the basement?”
“I hope there isn’t,” Lou sighed. “But I guess it’s something we need to think about, especially considering that medallion.”
“I haven’t ever felt anything evil in the basement,” Ginger said as they headed down the stairs from the second floor. “I do, however, recall feeling a strange unease by the fireplace before you unearthed that blasted box. It’s felt peaceful ever since we removed it.”
Lou nodded. “Maybe it feeling kind of funny there was why I ended up poking around in the first place.”
Ginger stepped into the living room and turned to the left. Opening the basement door, he clicked on the light and started down the stairs.
Lou trailed after him. “Some of the people who were here before sure left a lot of their furniture and stuff,” he mused.
“And we’ve had no real reason to move it or get rid of it,” Ginger grunted. The house was very large on every level. He and Lou usually lived on the two main floors and didn’t use either the attic or the basement very much. Quite a lot of the basement was still as it had been when they had first moved in.
The bottom of the stairs opened into a large family room with light blue carpeting. It was one of the rooms left partially furnished by the prior occupants; a couch and coffee table sat near the middle of the floor.
Ginger walked the length of the room and moved to the head of the corridor. “It feels nice enough in here,” he determined. “I suppose it might get unsettling to be down here alone, but Michael lives alone anyway. It shouldn’t have bothered him that much.”
Lou pulled his suit coat more firmly against his shoulders. “It kind of feels colder down here than it should,” he frowned.
“Most likely because it’s nearing winter,” Ginger returned. “Even Los Angeles is cold in autumn and winter.”
He opened the doors and peered into the rooms until he found the one in which several old boxes had been stacked. He and Lou had peeked into one of them long ago, but upon determining it was very old material, they had left all of the boxes there to be examined at a later date.
“It does feel unusually cold in here,” Ginger acknowledged as he stepped into the room filled with only boxes. He drew his coat closer around himself.
“At least it doesn’t feel evil,” Lou sighed. “But it still feels kind of eerie.”
Ginger took down the nearest box and set it on the floor. Then, sitting on the next box down, he opened the first box.
Lou knelt on the floor, not daring to sit on the cardboard boxes (and not sure he would want to, even if he wasn’t concerned about breaking them in). He watched as Ginger lifted an old frame out from the top of the box. “What’s that?”
“A little girl.” Ginger turned the photograph so Lou could see it. Not only was it black-and-white, it was bent and wrinkled with age behind the glass. But it was still clear enough to depict a smiling girl of about ten, standing in front of a rosebush and wearing a light-colored dress and a straw hat with a ribbon for a band.
“Well, that’s innocuous enough,” Lou mused. “I wonder who she is.”
Ginger let Lou take the picture and dug deeper into the box, producing a yellowing folder. “Jennifer Bradshaw, perhaps,” he said, glancing over a birth certificate inside the folder. “This is for a person born in 1900. 1910 sounds about right for those clothes in that photograph.”
“Is there anything else in there?” Lou peered at the folder.
Ginger turned the certificate over and was greeted by another type of certificate. “Yes,” he said slowly. “A death certificate for the same person.”
Lou tried and failed to ignore the chill going up his spine. “When?”
“1918. She was a victim of the influenza outbreak.” Ginger set the folder back in the box and took out a thin white box, not unlike some modern department-store boxes. Lifting the lid, he found himself looking at a yellowing pinafore made for a child.
“That doesn’t look a hundred years old,” Lou said.
“No, it doesn’t. And I doubt that medallion was, either. The cult that used it seemed to be relatively recent.” Ginger closed the white box and pawed through the remaining contents of the parent box. Everything was fairly innocent, from children’s clothes to an old photograph album, the kind that required each picture to be glued in place. They perused that for some time, hoping to find some clues to the people’s identities, but no names were written.
“They must’ve figured they knew who everybody was,” Lou remarked.
“Obviously. And that there would never be two strange chaps looking over the memories of their pasts and wondering who the bloody devil all of them were.” Ginger closed the album and set it aside. As he replaced everything in the box, he put the album near the top, where it would be more easily accessible.
The other boxes in the room mostly consisted of other old clothing and a few household items. Lou discovered a pair of tarnishing silver candlesticks in one box. “These might’ve been worth something in the past,” he said, turning one of them over in his hand.
Ginger glanced over from where he was leafing through an old book. “They might still be worth something to an antique collector,” he said. “But perhaps not enough to bother with, in their condition.”
“Is that box mostly books?” Lou wondered.
“Mostly,” Ginger agreed. “And some old paper dolls. I can’t tell if there were several generations of the same family in this house or several completely different families.”
Lou sighed. “Well, we don’t need this room anyway. Maybe we might as well leave all this stuff here.”
Ginger nodded. “Perhaps you would like to read some of the books sometime.”
“Maybe. But Ginger, have you noticed this room is still cold?” Lou shivered. “Rooms generally warm up when people are in them for a while. But this one still feels as cold as it did when we walked in!”
Ginger frowned. “I’ve definitely noticed,” he said flatly. He got cold much easier than Lou, which was one of the main reasons for his ever-present, heavy coats.
“Then I think I’ll just leave well enough alone,” Lou said, spooked. “They might not want us taking anything out of here, including the books.”
“On the other hand, they might like for their belongings to be appreciated by someone again,” Ginger said. “It’s not as though they can read anymore.”
“Maybe they could if they’re poltergeists,” Lou said.
Ginger grunted, not wanting to debate the abilities of various types of ghosts. He replaced the book in the box and got to his feet. “Well, at least we haven’t uncovered anything remotely resembling that cult,” he said. “Let’s move on. What’s the room like that Michael was staying in?”
“Mostly pre-furnished,” Lou said. “That’s why the room’s there, I think. We were thinking of making a guestroom on the ground floor, not the basement.”
“Yes,” Ginger mused. “We still haven’t got around to that.”
He headed for the door, Lou closely following.
Across the hall and farther down was the door leading into the guestroom. Ginger pushed it open and stepped inside, taking in the furnishings in a glance. Then he walked towards the nightstand by the bed, beginning to open the drawers.
“This looks like a nice enough room,” Lou remarked as he wandered inside and kept to the far wall, studying the paintings and the chest of drawers. “I guess it would be kind of creepy being down here alone, though.”
“It shouldn’t be, if you live alone anyway,” Ginger grunted, “as Michael does.”
“Unless there really are spooks down here and he picked up on it,” Lou said nervously.
A search of the room didn’t turn up anything other than an old letter stuck in the back of the nightstand. Ginger pulled it out, studying the addresses and the postmark. “This letter is dated from the 1970s,” he announced. “It’s addressed to someone named Anthony Barstow. There is no return address.”
Lou came over to look. “Are you going to read it?” he wondered.
“I’m going to look at it anyway,” Ginger said. “I want to know what we can about the people who lived here before us. Perhaps there’ll be some clue about the medallion or whether there’s anything else like that in this house.”
He slid the letter out from the envelope and unfolded it, skimming through the pages. “This isn’t terribly interesting,” he said, sounding very bored indeed. “It’s little more than a rejection letter from his girlfriend. She rambles on for several pages about how incompatible they are.” Fed up, he replaced the pages in the envelope and tossed it into the drawer.
“That’s kind of weird, to keep a Dear John letter around,” Lou said. “Especially since our house was built in the nineties and he would’ve had to have brought the letter from another house.”
“I suppose. I’d probably burn it,” Ginger said. “But some blokes seem to enjoy punishing themselves. Perhaps he read it over and over.”
Lou bent down and peered under the bed. “Well, I don’t see anything else out of place,” he said. He grimaced, sneezing from the collection of dust bunnies. “. . . Almost.”
Ginger nodded. “Perhaps there’s nothing to concern ourselves over. However, let’s look around a bit longer.” He headed for the door.
Lou got up and followed.
They had never really explored all over the basement. They had given it a few cursory looks when trying to decide whether to purchase the house, and again after first moving in, but mostly they had left it to its own devices. They had examined the one-room attic more, but had not actually found much up there. Most of the prior residents’ belongings were gathered in the basement.
The basement was silent and cold as they wandered the long corridors and explored the many rooms. It had been made into rooms as numerous, or moreso, as were on the main levels of the house.
“It’s kind of crazy how much of our house we don’t even use,” Lou remarked. “I barely remember most of these rooms!”
“If we wanted, we could fix them up quite nice,” Ginger mused. “But we would probably always have people wanting to stay over.”
Lou knew Ginger wouldn’t like that. “That’s true,” he mused.
Finally they came around to the staircase again via the other hallway. The large room opposite the family room was empty save for a bit of peeling wallpaper.
“Well,” Ginger said, “that search was entirely inconclusive.” And hopefully that meant there was nothing to find along the lines of which they had been looking.
“I wonder if there was another house on this spot before this one was built,” Lou said. “Our house isn’t a hundred years old.”
“Or perhaps the people who moved here first, in the 1990s or whenever it was, brought their ancestors’ photographs from the previous ninety years.” Ginger briefly walked over to feel the wall for loose springs, but finding none, he went to the stairs and started up.
“Yeah, maybe.” Lou went up with him, anxious to get back into familiar territory. “Ginger . . .”
“What.”
“If there are ghosts down here, do you think they’ll follow us up?”
Ginger grunted. “Unlikely. They’ve had other chances to do so and haven’t.”
“We hope,” Lou said.
“You haven’t felt the presence of spirits upstairs, have you?” Ginger returned. Reaching the top of the stairs, he turned and waited for Lou before switching off the light.
“No,” Lou admitted.
“And by now we’re getting quite good at sensing them,” Ginger said in irritation. “So I will continue to believe there are none.”
“What about down there?” Lou wondered. It seemed almost a relief to shut the door to the basement.
“I’m not sure,” Ginger admitted. “It is unusually cold in some of the rooms, but that doesn’t always mean spirits are present.”
“Maybe we’re only really good at sensing the bad ones,” Lou said. “So if anything’s down there, maybe it’s harmless.”
“That’s possible too,” Ginger acknowledged.
“And we only even know the names of that one girl and the guy with the Dear John letter,” Lou went on as he walked towards the study. “That’s kind of weird. Maybe I’ll try looking up the girl and see what I can find out about her and her family.”
“I suppose it’s worth a try,” Ginger said as he followed.
But as it turned out, information was still scant, on them as well as on Anthony Barstow. After an hour at the computer Lou leaned back, worn-out from the attempt.
“They were a really secretive family,” he frowned. “It’s like they dropped off the face of the planet after the girl died.”
“Not to mention that they barely seemed to exist before she was born,” Ginger added. “And there’s nothing to really indicate how Barstow fits in. But hopefully none of that will affect us now. We’ll leave their belongings in the basement and go about our lives, as we’ve always done.”
Lou nodded. “I’m ready to come back to the present day,” he said as he closed the browser. “I’ve been thinking what I’ll make for dinner tonight.”
“Are you sure you feel up to it?” Ginger asked in concern. “The doctor told you to take it easy today.”
“I won’t do anything complicated,” Lou said. “And if you help out, it should be fine.”
Ginger pushed away from the wall. “Alright then. Let’s go out there and see what we can come up with.”
Lou smiled as they left the study and headed for the kitchen. It had been a weird day, no question of that, but it had been enjoyable since they had shared it—and since it had been relatively quiet and peaceful.
He wouldn’t mind sharing another day like this.
Day/Theme: November 18th - The Poor, Unlucky Girl
Series: The Rockford Files (using characters from The Queen of Peru episode)
Character/Pairing: Ginger Townsend, Lou Trevino
Rating: K/G
A stand-alone, but does take place the day following the latest mini-arc trilogy.
Ginger and Lou were not the original owners of their house. That had been obvious when they had discovered a medallion in the fireplace that had housed an evil spirit. They had meant to go through the house from top to bottom and make sure there weren’t any other unsettling surprises, but they never seemed to have a chance. Today, since Lou had been advised by the doctor to take it easy after that knock on the head, he and Ginger had decided to do a little exploring.
“That time Mike stayed in the basement because the upstairs guestroom was occupied, he seemed kind of freaked out,” Lou remarked.
“I remember,” Ginger mused. “At the time, I thought it was because he and I were still on fairly ill terms, but perhaps it wasn’t.” He frowned. “Are you suggesting there might be a spirit in the basement?”
“I hope there isn’t,” Lou sighed. “But I guess it’s something we need to think about, especially considering that medallion.”
“I haven’t ever felt anything evil in the basement,” Ginger said as they headed down the stairs from the second floor. “I do, however, recall feeling a strange unease by the fireplace before you unearthed that blasted box. It’s felt peaceful ever since we removed it.”
Lou nodded. “Maybe it feeling kind of funny there was why I ended up poking around in the first place.”
Ginger stepped into the living room and turned to the left. Opening the basement door, he clicked on the light and started down the stairs.
Lou trailed after him. “Some of the people who were here before sure left a lot of their furniture and stuff,” he mused.
“And we’ve had no real reason to move it or get rid of it,” Ginger grunted. The house was very large on every level. He and Lou usually lived on the two main floors and didn’t use either the attic or the basement very much. Quite a lot of the basement was still as it had been when they had first moved in.
The bottom of the stairs opened into a large family room with light blue carpeting. It was one of the rooms left partially furnished by the prior occupants; a couch and coffee table sat near the middle of the floor.
Ginger walked the length of the room and moved to the head of the corridor. “It feels nice enough in here,” he determined. “I suppose it might get unsettling to be down here alone, but Michael lives alone anyway. It shouldn’t have bothered him that much.”
Lou pulled his suit coat more firmly against his shoulders. “It kind of feels colder down here than it should,” he frowned.
“Most likely because it’s nearing winter,” Ginger returned. “Even Los Angeles is cold in autumn and winter.”
He opened the doors and peered into the rooms until he found the one in which several old boxes had been stacked. He and Lou had peeked into one of them long ago, but upon determining it was very old material, they had left all of the boxes there to be examined at a later date.
“It does feel unusually cold in here,” Ginger acknowledged as he stepped into the room filled with only boxes. He drew his coat closer around himself.
“At least it doesn’t feel evil,” Lou sighed. “But it still feels kind of eerie.”
Ginger took down the nearest box and set it on the floor. Then, sitting on the next box down, he opened the first box.
Lou knelt on the floor, not daring to sit on the cardboard boxes (and not sure he would want to, even if he wasn’t concerned about breaking them in). He watched as Ginger lifted an old frame out from the top of the box. “What’s that?”
“A little girl.” Ginger turned the photograph so Lou could see it. Not only was it black-and-white, it was bent and wrinkled with age behind the glass. But it was still clear enough to depict a smiling girl of about ten, standing in front of a rosebush and wearing a light-colored dress and a straw hat with a ribbon for a band.
“Well, that’s innocuous enough,” Lou mused. “I wonder who she is.”
Ginger let Lou take the picture and dug deeper into the box, producing a yellowing folder. “Jennifer Bradshaw, perhaps,” he said, glancing over a birth certificate inside the folder. “This is for a person born in 1900. 1910 sounds about right for those clothes in that photograph.”
“Is there anything else in there?” Lou peered at the folder.
Ginger turned the certificate over and was greeted by another type of certificate. “Yes,” he said slowly. “A death certificate for the same person.”
Lou tried and failed to ignore the chill going up his spine. “When?”
“1918. She was a victim of the influenza outbreak.” Ginger set the folder back in the box and took out a thin white box, not unlike some modern department-store boxes. Lifting the lid, he found himself looking at a yellowing pinafore made for a child.
“That doesn’t look a hundred years old,” Lou said.
“No, it doesn’t. And I doubt that medallion was, either. The cult that used it seemed to be relatively recent.” Ginger closed the white box and pawed through the remaining contents of the parent box. Everything was fairly innocent, from children’s clothes to an old photograph album, the kind that required each picture to be glued in place. They perused that for some time, hoping to find some clues to the people’s identities, but no names were written.
“They must’ve figured they knew who everybody was,” Lou remarked.
“Obviously. And that there would never be two strange chaps looking over the memories of their pasts and wondering who the bloody devil all of them were.” Ginger closed the album and set it aside. As he replaced everything in the box, he put the album near the top, where it would be more easily accessible.
The other boxes in the room mostly consisted of other old clothing and a few household items. Lou discovered a pair of tarnishing silver candlesticks in one box. “These might’ve been worth something in the past,” he said, turning one of them over in his hand.
Ginger glanced over from where he was leafing through an old book. “They might still be worth something to an antique collector,” he said. “But perhaps not enough to bother with, in their condition.”
“Is that box mostly books?” Lou wondered.
“Mostly,” Ginger agreed. “And some old paper dolls. I can’t tell if there were several generations of the same family in this house or several completely different families.”
Lou sighed. “Well, we don’t need this room anyway. Maybe we might as well leave all this stuff here.”
Ginger nodded. “Perhaps you would like to read some of the books sometime.”
“Maybe. But Ginger, have you noticed this room is still cold?” Lou shivered. “Rooms generally warm up when people are in them for a while. But this one still feels as cold as it did when we walked in!”
Ginger frowned. “I’ve definitely noticed,” he said flatly. He got cold much easier than Lou, which was one of the main reasons for his ever-present, heavy coats.
“Then I think I’ll just leave well enough alone,” Lou said, spooked. “They might not want us taking anything out of here, including the books.”
“On the other hand, they might like for their belongings to be appreciated by someone again,” Ginger said. “It’s not as though they can read anymore.”
“Maybe they could if they’re poltergeists,” Lou said.
Ginger grunted, not wanting to debate the abilities of various types of ghosts. He replaced the book in the box and got to his feet. “Well, at least we haven’t uncovered anything remotely resembling that cult,” he said. “Let’s move on. What’s the room like that Michael was staying in?”
“Mostly pre-furnished,” Lou said. “That’s why the room’s there, I think. We were thinking of making a guestroom on the ground floor, not the basement.”
“Yes,” Ginger mused. “We still haven’t got around to that.”
He headed for the door, Lou closely following.
Across the hall and farther down was the door leading into the guestroom. Ginger pushed it open and stepped inside, taking in the furnishings in a glance. Then he walked towards the nightstand by the bed, beginning to open the drawers.
“This looks like a nice enough room,” Lou remarked as he wandered inside and kept to the far wall, studying the paintings and the chest of drawers. “I guess it would be kind of creepy being down here alone, though.”
“It shouldn’t be, if you live alone anyway,” Ginger grunted, “as Michael does.”
“Unless there really are spooks down here and he picked up on it,” Lou said nervously.
A search of the room didn’t turn up anything other than an old letter stuck in the back of the nightstand. Ginger pulled it out, studying the addresses and the postmark. “This letter is dated from the 1970s,” he announced. “It’s addressed to someone named Anthony Barstow. There is no return address.”
Lou came over to look. “Are you going to read it?” he wondered.
“I’m going to look at it anyway,” Ginger said. “I want to know what we can about the people who lived here before us. Perhaps there’ll be some clue about the medallion or whether there’s anything else like that in this house.”
He slid the letter out from the envelope and unfolded it, skimming through the pages. “This isn’t terribly interesting,” he said, sounding very bored indeed. “It’s little more than a rejection letter from his girlfriend. She rambles on for several pages about how incompatible they are.” Fed up, he replaced the pages in the envelope and tossed it into the drawer.
“That’s kind of weird, to keep a Dear John letter around,” Lou said. “Especially since our house was built in the nineties and he would’ve had to have brought the letter from another house.”
“I suppose. I’d probably burn it,” Ginger said. “But some blokes seem to enjoy punishing themselves. Perhaps he read it over and over.”
Lou bent down and peered under the bed. “Well, I don’t see anything else out of place,” he said. He grimaced, sneezing from the collection of dust bunnies. “. . . Almost.”
Ginger nodded. “Perhaps there’s nothing to concern ourselves over. However, let’s look around a bit longer.” He headed for the door.
Lou got up and followed.
They had never really explored all over the basement. They had given it a few cursory looks when trying to decide whether to purchase the house, and again after first moving in, but mostly they had left it to its own devices. They had examined the one-room attic more, but had not actually found much up there. Most of the prior residents’ belongings were gathered in the basement.
The basement was silent and cold as they wandered the long corridors and explored the many rooms. It had been made into rooms as numerous, or moreso, as were on the main levels of the house.
“It’s kind of crazy how much of our house we don’t even use,” Lou remarked. “I barely remember most of these rooms!”
“If we wanted, we could fix them up quite nice,” Ginger mused. “But we would probably always have people wanting to stay over.”
Lou knew Ginger wouldn’t like that. “That’s true,” he mused.
Finally they came around to the staircase again via the other hallway. The large room opposite the family room was empty save for a bit of peeling wallpaper.
“Well,” Ginger said, “that search was entirely inconclusive.” And hopefully that meant there was nothing to find along the lines of which they had been looking.
“I wonder if there was another house on this spot before this one was built,” Lou said. “Our house isn’t a hundred years old.”
“Or perhaps the people who moved here first, in the 1990s or whenever it was, brought their ancestors’ photographs from the previous ninety years.” Ginger briefly walked over to feel the wall for loose springs, but finding none, he went to the stairs and started up.
“Yeah, maybe.” Lou went up with him, anxious to get back into familiar territory. “Ginger . . .”
“What.”
“If there are ghosts down here, do you think they’ll follow us up?”
Ginger grunted. “Unlikely. They’ve had other chances to do so and haven’t.”
“We hope,” Lou said.
“You haven’t felt the presence of spirits upstairs, have you?” Ginger returned. Reaching the top of the stairs, he turned and waited for Lou before switching off the light.
“No,” Lou admitted.
“And by now we’re getting quite good at sensing them,” Ginger said in irritation. “So I will continue to believe there are none.”
“What about down there?” Lou wondered. It seemed almost a relief to shut the door to the basement.
“I’m not sure,” Ginger admitted. “It is unusually cold in some of the rooms, but that doesn’t always mean spirits are present.”
“Maybe we’re only really good at sensing the bad ones,” Lou said. “So if anything’s down there, maybe it’s harmless.”
“That’s possible too,” Ginger acknowledged.
“And we only even know the names of that one girl and the guy with the Dear John letter,” Lou went on as he walked towards the study. “That’s kind of weird. Maybe I’ll try looking up the girl and see what I can find out about her and her family.”
“I suppose it’s worth a try,” Ginger said as he followed.
But as it turned out, information was still scant, on them as well as on Anthony Barstow. After an hour at the computer Lou leaned back, worn-out from the attempt.
“They were a really secretive family,” he frowned. “It’s like they dropped off the face of the planet after the girl died.”
“Not to mention that they barely seemed to exist before she was born,” Ginger added. “And there’s nothing to really indicate how Barstow fits in. But hopefully none of that will affect us now. We’ll leave their belongings in the basement and go about our lives, as we’ve always done.”
Lou nodded. “I’m ready to come back to the present day,” he said as he closed the browser. “I’ve been thinking what I’ll make for dinner tonight.”
“Are you sure you feel up to it?” Ginger asked in concern. “The doctor told you to take it easy today.”
“I won’t do anything complicated,” Lou said. “And if you help out, it should be fine.”
Ginger pushed away from the wall. “Alright then. Let’s go out there and see what we can come up with.”
Lou smiled as they left the study and headed for the kitchen. It had been a weird day, no question of that, but it had been enjoyable since they had shared it—and since it had been relatively quiet and peaceful.
He wouldn’t mind sharing another day like this.