The strange house we spent our time in

 Teheheh who told her that she was not allowed there was a big jokester, we all thought so because she was the owner of the place, in parts anyway, nobody realaly understood the complex contract the fools had drawn up but the general understanding was theat we were all part owners of the strange old building thanks to the little money we'd put up front in the investment...scheme, shall we say...that had given out bumper rewards against anybody's expectations. We had all thought the money was as good as gone, and forgotten about it completely until the day they called up everybody and said owh we have so and so much money, but it's not in a liquid form, it's in the form of a house in so and so place, designed by this popular architect and the investment thing is going to be paying the taxes, you're all partial owners, you can do whatever you want to. We'd decided not to sell it, because why would we, it was a lovely albeit a little weird strange amusing place. You never felt right in there, always a cold gust coming in from somewhere, the steps were never quite the right height, you didn't know what was wrong with them but something was so off you could intuit it. When the wind blew against the outer sidings of the house, it made a long whistling noise that I enjoyed but to everybody else it sounded like a creepy screech. I voted we keep the house, because it could be our holiday pad, as friends, we could bring our families and friends together, a writerly retreat, a place to relax, and somehow convinced them all. They of course thought the house was supremely haunted, and attributed that as the reason it hadn't sold for six months. I mean...there's a good market for haunted houses out there, a good entrepreneurial minded person could double or triple their original investment in a matter of years by rightly marketing and organizing spooky guided tours etcetera, hauntedness of a hosue has often very little to do with how quickly it sells.

What was the problem was that the house was older than most young family cared for, overpriced for the market which had been hollowed out because of the economic crisis, and the style was too strange, a bit unsettling that nobody in their right mights would want their family to be living in such conditions. The HOA didn't help either, they were a bunch of pompous fools, out to get you, always a headache, never letting you change the smallest thing in your unit without getting their permissions, despite all the acres of land in the 'estate'. Blah, some estate, if you had to take permission of some lords and committes to walk around naked in your own property!

There was an offer once, it was the hoa who stopped them. From an adult filming company who wanted to turn the various large rooms into hardcore sets for various scenes involving torture and other medieval forms of...hurting people. We weren't hopeful, but against all sense convinced ourselves the wily businessmen would be able to convince the stodgy old goofs that it would be a good idea for the community. Didn't work out, and that was the end of it.

So we gathered in the house every so often, sometimes the whole group, the fourteen of us, sometimes various combinations. Often it was that you would let them know you were going, and somebody else would have made plans and you'd have a grand old time together, because there was always room for more! That is something that amused us, no matter how many people were occupying the place, there seemed to be space for more, always.

So that eventful night when we got drunk and pretended to scare her off the premises, her own premises, she didn't come back for some time. Which got us concerned because she had had a little much to drink as well, and one is not always in the best state of humor. We sent a search party.