“Given the grammar in the writing we’ve seen, we can assume the diarist had some level of education beyond the typical governess in the schoolroom situation. We can also infer they are of the social class which would have had a governess in the schoolroom due to the grammar, penmanship, and the diary itself.” I started to reach for it but drew back, the sight of the water-bloated pages and fuzzing of mildew around the edges making me want to wash my hands all over again. “A servant might have kept a diary, but not one bound in what appears to be very fine leather and with pages that, from what I can tell, were heavy paper and not foolscap or cheap scraps.” I reached for the diary only to have Jacob lay his fingers atop it, not grabbing it but definitely staking claim. “If you’re expecting us to investigate with any level of seriousness, we need the…the clues,” I finished lamely. Ezra softly whistled the Scooby Doo theme. “Well, what else would you call it?”
Jacob’s smile was decidedly slick. “The historic society gets first dibs,” he said, but didn’t meet my eye, damn near twisting his neck like an owl to avoid looking at me. “I managed to get hold of Betty Brent, the co-president of the society, and she’s promised to come up as soon as there was a break in the storm.”
“To what end?” I demanded. “I have experience with artifacts, Jacob. And, all things considered, this isn’t exactly ancient material here. I know how to handle an old book.”
“Still, it’s property of Hendricks House. One of the conditions of our filming here was allowing the historical society and the owners of the house have first look at anything we find. Speaking of, Charlie’s uploaded the raw footage of the investigation.” He turned his laptop so we could all see it, the footage already queued up. “I haven’t seen this yet myself,” he added as I stared at myself, pinch-faced and all angles, peering into a dark pool of shadows just outside the shot. Fellowes and Baxter were naturals on camera, moving as if they didn’t even notice Charlie behind us. The digital recorder had yet to be played back, but even I had to admit that the green-washed minutes of Oscar seeming to interact with someone none of us could see were a bit creepy. Just what Jacob wanted for the show. “How long is he usually out with these headaches of his?”
“As long as he needs to be,” Baxter replied shortly. “He’ll be ready when he’s ready.” Not for the first time, I wondered if his snarling reaction to me was less due to my position as the ‘official skeptic’ there to poke holes in their ghost story and more to do with his relationship with Fellowes. He all but bared his teeth in a snarl at Jacob when it seemed as if Jacob were about to argue with him on Fellowes’ need for rest.
“Shit,” Jacob sighed. “Okay, well, we can do this part without him for now. I’ve set up a video conference call with Xavier Jennings.”
Ezra’s eyes went so wide I thought they might bug out like a cartoon’s and poke Jacob square in the forehead. “Oh my God, seriously?”
“Who’s Xavier Jennings?” I asked. “Another medium?” Was Jacob calling in a ringer? Did he think he needed to replace Fellowes or something? Granted, I had no idea how fast these things were supposed to take but maybe this investigation was going to slow for the filming. The idea of someone else coming in unsettled me and, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t deny it was due to my attraction to Fellowes.
Crap.
“Oh my God,” Ezra said again, though with considerably less joy. “He’s nominated for his role in Crying at the Moon.”
“Yay?”
Jacob shook his head. “Pop culture is anathema for Jules. Unless there’s space battles or,” he waved a hand airily, “I don’t know. Wizards and dragons and faeries.”
“Find me a movie that combines all of those and I’ll marry you.”
Baxter shook his head sadly. “You didn’t read the prep materials, did you? Xavier Jennings. Nominated for just about every film award in existence, rising Hollywood star, the guy who did the interview with Paula Coleman Presents and talked about this place being haunted?”
“Oh! Dimples!” I grinned at the disgusted look on Baxter’s face. “Okay, so I didn’t know his name. I don’t know the name of one actor out of a crop of a thousand look-alikes. It’s not a big deal.”
“No,” Jacob said. “But you’re still going to play nice when you interview him in about an hour, if the power doesn’t go out again. He’s agreed to this video call and we worked out a deal with his reps to allow us to show it as part of the episode.” No doubt about it—Jacob was pleased as a pig in shit about that. His own grin was painfully wide, all teeth and pink cheeks. It fell a bit after a second, though, when he turned to Baxter. “Will Oscar be good to go?”
“I told you, I don’t know,” he growled. “Hopefully. These migraines don’t usually last more than a few hours. If he gets some sleep, it’ll help.”
“Shit.” Jacob drummed his fingers on the desk again. He made a motion at Charlie, who shut off the camera and began fiddling with the equipment hanging around his neck, pretending he wasn’t paying attention to us now. “Okay. Rearranging things a bit. Jules, you do the booth right now then head to the library. We’re setting up the video call there so we can have a great backdrop with that massive fireplace. If Oscar’s about tonight after dinner, we’ll do the kitchen and library, and he can do his booth shoot after. Ezra, you go after Jules in the booth. And I want you both ready to discuss the equipment, theories, whatever, after the video call. The angle is educating the skeptic.”
“The angle?” Baxter and I asked together.
Jacob’s smile was back. “Y’all didn’t think reality shows were all free form and organic, did you?”
Jessica was waiting for me in the upstairs room with the booth. “You’re gonna do fine,” she said, tossing her glossy red ponytail back over one shoulder. “I know this is ridiculous but it’s one of those necessary evils for this show.”
I gave her my most put-upon sigh and hang-dog expression. “Do I have to? Don’t wanna.”
She laughed, a great rollicking peal of amusement.“You sure do whine a lot for someone who allegedly read his contract.” She tempered her sharp retort with a wink. “It’s not as bad as all that. Just,” she did a little jazz hands gesture.
“Just…” I jazz hands backed at her. “Perform Fosse choreography?”
“I’m much more of a Tharp aficionado but whatever works for you.” She motioned for me to come closer as Charlie and one of his assistants set up the camera for the booth. “Hey, did you do what I said? Listen to Oscar?”
“Well, in as much as possible, yeah.” She looked worried, her brow pinched as she worried her lower lip with her teeth. “Whatever he did upstairs took him out with a migraine so…”
She sighed heavily. “Damn it. Okay, well just… Just keep an ear open, okay? Wait, better than that. Keep your eye open.” She tapped herself in the middle of her forehead and winked again. Jessica glanced at the ceiling as if she could see into the third floor above us.
“You ready, Doc?”
I hated being called Doc. “Just Julian works.” When I looked back, Jessica was already out the door, hunched over something in her hand as she hurried down the hall towards the stairs. “Okay so what do I need to do?”
Turns out, I needed to not look like I was about to be sick, smile more, no not that much, don’t sigh so much, try not to breathe so loud, don’t hold my breath, look at the camera no not directly at it just at it, and, for the love of God, try not to sound like I was in pain every time I answered a question. “I’m sorry,” I finally snapped. “This is how I talk! I can’t change that!”
Stella, Jacob’s assistant and jack of all trades on the shoot from the looks of things, heaved a pained sigh and raked her fingers through her stick straight, blond hair. “Look, I get it. This isn’t what you dreamed of doing. You hate reality shows. You’re above us. I got it.”
“I never said I’m above this—”
“Whatever. Just try not to sound like that stick is so far up your ass you can taste sap, okay? Reset, Charlie, and
let’s try one more time.” The audience was to be primed with footage of the third floor investigation so I was to just discuss my own take on the happenings. “Let’s start with some of the other questions,” Stella muttered, skipping ahead in her stack of note cards. “How would someone fake the rapping and banging heard during today’s investigation?”
“Er, well, that’s a complicated question. Rather, the response is complicated. In the hey days of spiritualism, you had people like the Fox sisters who could crack their toe joints loud enough to make people think they were hearing knocking on a table. There’s been cases of alleged mediums who employed specially made devices hidden about the space a seance was being held and having an assistant activate them when certain cues were given—”
“And the type of noises y’all heard today?” Stella pressed. “Would you be able to replicate those?”
Something about her questioning was making me uneasy. If it had been Jacob or even Baxter or Fellowes asking, I’d have been more at ease but Stella made my hackles rise and I could not put my finger on why. “I have no idea. I just know we heard banging on the roof and walls. I thought it might be the oak tree that’s on that side of the house, losing branches in the wind due to the storm, but…” I trailed off. “Well. I don’t know. I mean, I suppose, given the time, I would be able to experiment and replicate the sounds but that’s not certain, and even if I could it wouldn’t mean anything unless I was able to do it in the same conditions we heard them in upstairs. Just because I can rig up some complicate device to make it sound like the walls are knocking doesn’t mean shit if it would take four people to operate and is too big to hide easily.” I couldn’t see Stella, just the lens of the camera pointing through the neatly cut hole in the booth’s wall. “Hey, if you’re just going to hammer me with questions instead of letting me just talk, can I get out of the glory hole? It’s making me feel weird in a not-fun way.”
Stella went on as if she hadn’t heard me. And for all I know, she didn’t. She was a woman on a mission, her tone determined and not a little disdainful.“Do you believe you encountered a spirit on the third floor? Fellowes claims to have heard wailing and crying. Did you?”
“I… no. No. Hey, I thought this was supposed to be like a confessional or something. Why are you asking me these questions?” I reached out and pressed my hand over the camera lens. Charlie uttered a soft hey, not cool on the other side of the thin fabric wall. “I’ll move my hand when she answers my questions.”
It was several moments before Stella replied. “This is the first visit to the booth, Doctor Weems. Think of these questions as prompts to get you talking.”
It felt more like a deposition. “What sort of things are you going to ask Baxter and Fellowes?”
I couldn’t see her expression but it must have been sour. Her words were clipped short when she replied, “That’s none of your business. I think we’re done up here. You’re due in the library. Tell Mr. Baxter to look lively so we can wrap this up in time for the conference video.”
Disentangling myself from the mic when I stepped out of the booth, I chanced a peek back at Charlie and he gave me a slow head shake of the I don’t even know, man variety. I was still dwelling on Stella’s aggressive questioning when I passed Baxter on the stairs. “Head’s up,” I muttered. “Stella’s out for blood for some reason.”
“She just had to spend fifteen minutes in a room with you. I don’t blame her,” he said as he jogged past.
I waited until he reached the landing above before muttering “Ass” under my breath. I passed a few other crew members on the steps, including Jessica who was hurrying back up with a pinched look on her face. “Everything okay?”
“Oh, it’s fine,” she promised, smiling sunnily over her shoulder at me. “Don’t forget what I said.” She touched her forehead again and continued up the steps, dodging around a slow-moving tech with a box of battery operated lanterns.
The weather was taking a down turn again, thunder munching around the edges of the sky as I reached the library to find it surprisingly empty save for Fellowes, huddled on the settee near the floor-to-ceiling French doors overlooking the darkened afternoon. “Jacob is futzing with the Wi-Fi,” he said, voice thin and strained. “Don’t tell, but I’m hoping it’s down for the count so I can go back to bed.”
“He didn’t wake you, did he?” I asked, already half-turned to leave and go find Jacob for a good chewing-out. Fellowes had looked terrible when we got him down from the third floor, his migraine so intense it was causing nausea and visual disturbances. Pale, clammy, moaning softly under his breath, he was in obvious misery after we’d found the diary. It clear he had not been faking any of it for the camera. Now, curled up in a corner of the settee, he had his color back and wasn’t shielding his eyes even from the very dim glow of the touch lamp on the end table, but he still looked like shit.
“No,” Fellowes sighed. “Someone else did. She was insistent I come down.”
Fucking Stella. There were only so many ‘shes’ it could be, and since Cec was down for the count at least for the rest of the day and I highly doubted any of the female crew members gave two fucks whether or not we did this little interview Jacob was so keen on, my money was on Stella.
“Whoever you’re thinking it was,” he said with a hint of a smile, “you’re wrong.” He shifted, swinging his feet to the floor, and patted the cushion next to him. “Come on, then. Grab a seat. Practice sitting next to me without giving me side eye so we can get through this interview with Sunshine and I can see if they’re hiding any tea in the kitchen.”
I hesitated. There were several other chairs in the room, either close by or easily moved. I didn’t have to sit next to Fellowes. But I wanted to. I was too old to believe in instant attraction, but damned if this wasn’t close, this thing I was apparently developing for Fellowes. He was too young for me, in an entirely fictitious profession, and, given his loudly professed beliefs, had little idea how reality actually worked, but… But. He was attractive. Funny. Smart. He didn’t seem, in real life, like he did on paper.
“Fuck’s sake,” he groaned. “Are you going to sit or will you be finishing your existential crisis first?”
And goddamn it, he was snarky. Aside from the whole age thing and believing in ghosts thing, he ticked just about every one of my boxes. “Sunshine?”
“Xavier Jennings,” he said, closing his eyes and letting his head tip back against the arm of the settee as I took up the spot next to him. “Ezra says he shines bright like the sun so… Sunshine.”
“Ah.” I remembered Fellowes mentioning something about Baxter being an empath. That I could accept a bit more easily than seeing dead people. Empathy, in its most basic form, could be explained as someone have a keen understanding of visual cues and things like microexpressions. Things most people missed or misinterpreted could give someone who is more attentive, either consciously or not, an indication of someone else’s feelings. “Oh, shit, I just thought of something.”
“I hope you stretched first so as not to get a cramp.”
I couldn’t stop my smirk from twisting across my lips before Fellowes caught me and smiled back. “Ass. Baxter claims to be an empath. I have resting bitch face. No wonder he hates me.”
Fellowes tipped his chin down, all the better to give me the hairy eyeball.
“It’s not a solid explanation yet but I have this working theory about empaths,” I said. Outside, a bright flash of lightening split the sky, illuminating everything with a magnesium-bright flare of light. “Shit!”
Fellowes took me flinging myself at him quite well. He only nudged me off a tiny bit. “Fuck,” he groaned, his hands covering his face. “Goddamn, that just set me back hours.”
My heart was jackrabbiting against my ribs. The battery lamp beside us cast a warm, dim pool of orange light. Outside of that small circle, everything else was shadow. The lightning had brought the rest of the storm down on us, like it’d ripped open the fat gray clouds on i
t’s way through. Throughout the house, voices called out checking on one another, cursing equipment and back up batteries, Jacob’s own strident and fluent cursing telling me that we’d definitely not be doing the interview soon. Fellowes groaned again, dropping his chin all the way down now, practically touching his chest while his forehead pressed against my bicep. “Here,” I murmured, taking one of his hands gently from his face. “Have you tried acupressure for your headaches?”
“You think ghosts are bullshit but you’ll do acupressure?” I could barely make out his expression but I was fairly certain he was smirking at me.
“The placebo effect is real,” I said in my best Professor Weems is Lecturing You voice. Fellowes snorted softly, his gasp of discomfort immediately after pushing me that last little bit towards my next act. “And there’s also some research that suggests certain acupressure techniques cause the release of endorphins which can help inhibit pain.” I took his right hand in my left and gently spread his fingers. “Do you want me to stop? Just say the word.”
“I kind of want to see what happens next,” he said on a soft laugh. “Come on, Man of Science. Show me how acupressure can get rid of this oh…”
His soft gasp when I pressed my thumb and forefinger on either side of his hand, right between his thumb and index finger, was gratifying in ways I hadn’t expected and wanted more of immediately. I pressed firmly and, when he made an approving little noise in his throat, I started rubbing my thumb in a firm, slow circle over the spot, maintaining a good pressure on both sides of his hand. “Good?”
“Oh, don’t be disingenuous,” he smiled. With his head tossed back and eyes closed, I had no problem imagining how he’d look in far more intimate situations.
Fucking. I was thinking about fucking. In case that wasn’t clear.
“Is it helping?” I asked after a long quiet that stretched between us like warm taffy.
“It’s certainly not hurting,” he murmured. His voice was low and thick, foxed around the edges in a way that made me want to forget why we were both there, why we’d even met. I slowed the circles on his hand, starting to pull away, but he turned his wrist in a deft motion that brought our fingers together. He didn’t intertwine them, just curled his around mine for a moment. The dim lamp made his eyes glint in the darkened library, his pale face and dark hair giving him an elfin air when the shadows cut across him, giving him more angles than a person should have. “Weems,” he said softly.
Bump in the Night Page 8
