Piedmont Porchlight Stories — Mrs. Delphine’s Dixie Boarding House

Mrs. Delphine did not walk to the kitchen.
She stormed it.

Her slipper heels slapped the floorboards like a judge’s gavel reprimanding the guilty. Each step said:

“My house. My rules. My biscuits.”

Behind her, the hallway still whispered with the memory of rocking, and a faint echo of that impossible whistle hung in the air like the tail end of a dream.

When she rounded the doorway and braced herself against the jamb, she saw…

nothing.

No ghost.
No intruder.
No coal scuttle.
No smoking stove.

Not even a shifted biscuit crumb.

This, somehow, bothered her far more.

Mrs. Delphine was not a woman who feared chaos; she feared mess.

And the kitchen was pristine.

Angrily pristine.

She sniffed.
The mysterious scent of coal smoke still lingered, but nothing was burning. It was the smell of a place that had recently remembered something.
Something it had no business remembering.

She crossed the linoleum floor and opened the stove.

Cold as a banker’s handshake.

Then she checked the toaster, the oven, the plug outlets, and the cabinets. All spotless.

“If that ghost cleaned this kitchen,” she muttered, “he did it too fast for the laws of the good Lord.”

But as she turned to leave…
something caught her eye.

The First Clue: A Perfect Circle of Soot

Dead center on her spotless countertop lay a small, perfect ring of black soot.
‘Tweren’t no bigger than the bottom of a teacup.
So perfect, so delicate, it looked stamped, not spilled.

She frowned and touched it.

It was warm.

Warm.
In a kitchen that hadn’t been used since supper hours earlier.

Mrs. Delphine narrowed her eyes.
“That,” she declared, “did not come from my stove.”

And then she noticed the second thing.

The Second Clue: A Handprint

Faint, almost invisible unless the lantern swung just right, there on the back door’s frosted windowpane was a handprint.

Not greasy.
Not smudged.

Just… frosted.
Outlined in cold.

It was the handprint of a man wearing a glove.
A railroad glove.

She knew the pattern too well:
three ridges across the fingers, one across the palm.

Her late husband, Colvin, had worn the same kind when he worked the rails before the children were born.

The sight of it stilled her breath.

“A railroad man,” she whispered.
“Not just tidyin’. Not just hauntin’.”

She stepped closer.
Pressed her own warm hand to the cold shape.

It matched perfectly in size.

“And he was inside.”

The hair rose on her neck.

The Third Clue: The Back Door

She tried the doorknob.

Locked, from the inside.

The bolt was still thrown.

Nobody could’ve come in.
Nobody could’ve gone out.

But the frosted glove print remained.

And then she noticed…

At the bottom of the door, where the wood met the threshold, a thin line of dust had been disturbed.
Not scattered,
compressed.

As though something heavy had slid through a space too small for it to logically pass.

A space like…

a door crack.

She inhaled sharply.

The ghost hadn’t walked out.

He’d passed through, leaving behind the faint soot and the glove print of a man who’d handled lanterns and rails.

The Fourth Clue: The Cookie Tin

Finally, she saw it.

Her cookie tin.

The one she hadn’t opened since Wednesday.
The one she’d placed on the highest shelf to keep greedy boarders (and one particularly determined child) from getting into it.

It now sat on the counter.

Lid removed.

Inside…

A single ginger snap.
Perfectly centered.
Perfectly uncrumbled.
And beside it, the faintest trace of coal dust…
the same color as the soot ring.

Mrs. Delphine stared a long moment.

Then she whispered:

“Well, now. You weren’t just makin’ my house pretend to be a train…
you were leavin’ me somethin’.”

The kitchen was silent.

But she felt watched.

Not by menace…
by memory.

A memory that had hands.
And gloves.
And soot.

A memory that had stood where she was standing now.

The Realization

She stepped back, heart thumping like a misfiring engine.

“Lord, have mercy,” she said quietly.

Then, softer:

“Whoever you are…
You ain’t just hauntin’ this place.”

She touched the cookie tin gently.

“You’re tryin’ to tell me somethin’.”

*****

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