Bump in the Night

by Meredith Spies

  “Do we have to?” Ezra urged. “They’re filming Weems. If we get them to stop everything now…”

  “Fuck. Okay. Here, come on.” I moved to the end of the table, out of sight of the library door. The table itself was tucked beside the massive double doors leading into the ballroom, the open doors providing a sort of wall at one end of the set up and casting a long shadow over the table itself. “Turn the light on your phone on,” I ordered quietly, grabbing the sugar bowl and dumping it out onto the table, smoothing the spill into a thick flat circular shape. Ezra thumbed the light on and we both winced from the bright glare. “Keep an eye, would you?” He nodded, already turning his attention towards the library, making sure they were still occupied. I closed my eyes, my fingers dipping into my pocket to feel for my pendulum. If the ghost didn’t want to speak aloud again, I wanted to be ready for other forms of communication. “Stop what?” I asked softly. The air around us shivered, not quite a breeze but a sensation of someone moving. Almonds and something sweet teased my senses but I couldn’t tell if it was the ghost or the food. “We heard you, but we need to know what to stop.” I slowly pulled my pendulum free and let it dangle over the sugar. “If you can’t, or don’t wish to, speak again, you can use this to communicate.”

  The pendulum hung from my fingertips for several long seconds before I felt the familiar tingle-burn that came with someone using it to speak. Stop. Stop. Stop.

  I smoothed the sugar over again.“We know,” I soothed, the vibrations stronger now. Ezra was sweating, his face pale in the bright light from his phone. “Are we in danger?”

  The pendulum jerked then swung loosely as it spelled out the message. Hend.

  “Hend… Hendricks,” Ezra murmured. “Ran out of space.”

  I cleared the message and raised the pendulum again. “The Hendricks family, or the house?”

  Death. Dead. No.

  Smooth over, start again.

  “Are you a family member?”

  God No.

  “Well, then,” I muttered. “Ezra, are you—?”

  Ezra nodded. He’d been filming this. I knew we’d need to show this to Jacob and the others but for now, I was more worried about getting the spirit to tell us everything it could. “Can you tell us your name?”

  Dead orange.

  I started to smooth the sugar again but the pendulum swung hard. It traced a single symbol into the sugar.

  “Shit.” I looked up at Ezra, who was swaying slightly. “Are you alright?”

  “Confusion,” he said softly. “I feel… Shit, I think I might…” His phone clattered to the table as he slumped over. I managed to get my arms around him before he hit the floor, the tray of fruit sliding as we bumped the table and sending peaches, grapes, and a sad looking banana bouncing across the parquetry.

  “Whoa, is he okay?” The PA bounced her way over from the steps at a fast lope, pixie face scrunched in concern. The cold vibrations of the spirit exploded, shaking through me hard enough to make me gasp. The urn of water shook, rocking side to side on the tabletop.

  “Whoa!” The camera man—Jimmy, I recalled, or maybe it was the ghost whispering at this point, I couldn’t tell with the world shaking to bits—darted around the table and helped me move Ezra out into the open, away from anything that could fall on him. I felt like my insides were jelly, my chest aching with the need to gasp in great lungfuls of air even as we checked Ezra’s vitals and people began to gather ‘round us. “Move back,” Jimmy barked. “He’s fainted. What happened?” He addressed the last to me as he chafed Ezra’s wrists in a move straight out of Victorian first aid.

  Weems dropped to his knees beside me. “He’ll be okay. Faints usually don’t last too long. Give him some room to breathe. When he comes to, the last thing he needs is all of us staring at him.”

  Jimmy scooted back as Jacob knelt on my other side. “They were talking by craft services,” he informed Jacob. “Next thing I know, Ezra was falling over and Oscar looked like he’d seen a— Um. Well.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” I hedged.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Jacob muttered under his breath. “Anyone call an ambulance?”

  “He’s just fainted,” Weems said. “Even if the ambulances were running out here right now, it’d be a waste of a trip unless he doesn’t come to in a few minutes.” As if he’d spoken some magic, Ezra began to stir. After a minute or so of groggy disorientation, he was sitting up and shaking off offers of help.

  “Both of you start talking,” Jacob ordered. “What the Hell happened?”

  Ezra glanced at me and the urge to lie was writ large in his eyes but he sighed and shook his head. “We, um, had a bit of a communication. Where’s my phone?”

  Jacob had been torn between outrage that we hadn’t summoned a camera crew immediately, and giddy excitement that we’d been quick enough to capture the entire thing on video. “As if we hadn’t done this before,” Ezra griped. He was still feeling queasy after his faint and had been ordered by Jimmy, who was apparently functioning as our little medic while the weather raged on and kept us isolated, to ‘just sit the hell down already’ after trying to head upstairs on his own and nearly falling out again. He’d been arranged in the study, ordered not to leave the sofa unless he really had to go to the bathroom and even then to take a buddy. In the meantime, Jacob was salivating over the video and trying to figure out, with Stella and CeCe, how to patch it into the footage we’d already recorded and what sort of voice overs or pick ups needed to be done for the transitions.

  We’d been sent to the naughty step and left there for nearly an hour before Weems showed up, holding his arms oddly across his chest. “Come to visit us in the pokey?” I asked, stretching out along the settee.

  “No one is making you stay in here,” Weems said, glancing around before choosing the hard-stuffed Queen Anne next to the cold hearth. He kept his arms crossed low across his ribs sitting carefully and very straight. “They’re going to make us do a reaction booth thing,” he sighed, sounding as excited as I felt. “Why the hell are they so hot about these booths? It’s ridiculous.”

  Ezra yawned. “It’s a thing on these sorts of shows. It’s supposed to pit the participants against one another when they find out what sort of shit the others have been talking.”

  “Participants? This isn’t a game show,” Weems protested. He shifted and I heard the distinct rustle of paper beneath his sweater vest. He glowered, that plump lower lip of his caught between his teeth as glared at something only he could see. “Jacob’s all over the place with this and I’m worried it’s going to bite us all in the ass.”

  He wasn’t wrong. I had very limited experience when it came to television production but even so, I could tell this was a disorganized mess. A disorganized mess we were, for the moment, contractually obligated to complete. “So what do we do?” I asked. “It’s not like we can walk out in protest.” A gust of wind battering the windows with rain underscored my words.

  “Well.” Weems shifted his arms again, peering down where they crossed. “I’ve been doing some thinking.”

  “I thought I smelled smoke.”

  Weems smiled sweetly and raised his middle finger in Ezra’s direction, finally uncrossing his arms enough that I could see he clutched a book to his chest.

  No, not just a book. The diary. A funny flutter set up in my belly, and only part of it was to do with him. The cold vibration from the foyer ghost shivered across my skin, touching but not making themselves fully present. “Weems…”

  “I love my sister,” he said softly, worrying his lower lip a bit when he paused. “I love her. And I love Jacob when he’s my brother in law. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Cec. But…” He gently set the diary down on the coffee table between us. “Jacob’s refusal to let us see this set off some alarm bells for me. He…” Weems trailed off. “Well. I don’t like how this is being handled. I feel like this,” he waved one hand, encompassing not just our little trio but the entire shoot with hi
s vague gesture, “is going to make us all look like fools if we keep going this way. I can… well. Respect isn’t quite the right word,” he chuckled quietly. “I can somewhat understand what he’s trying to do here but it’s not going to work the way he’s envisioning. Keeping us from all the information we need? It’s not going to make this titillating or exciting. It’s just going to make us beat our heads against the wall.”

  “So you stole the diary,” I said. “Just right out from under him?”

  He looked between me and Ezra, lips parted on words he couldn’t quite make happen just yet. Finally, he sighed, wilting a little like something inside him snapped and he couldn’t hold himself up anymore. “Jacob lied to us,” he said, glancing at Ezra. “Earlier, in the office, when he said he’d contacted the historical society.”

  “How do you know he didn’t?” Ezra demanded. “Why would he lie about that?”

  Weems shifted uncomfortably. “Jessica. The PA. She stopped me outside my room earlier and asked if I was having phone trouble. Apparently, Jacob and several of the crew can’t get a signal today due to a few of the towers being down.”

  He looked positively ill. I gave in to my urge to get closer to him and moved from my spot beside Ezra to crowd in next to Weems. “He’s not the first person to lie to us,” I gestured between Ezra and myself, “in order to spice up an investigation. I know that doesn’t make it any better but—”

  “But,” Weems cut in, “he lied to us.” He turned his attention back to the diary and, after the briefest of hesitations, flipped open to the third page. “The first few entries are fairly…distraught,” he said, shifting into Professor Weems mode. “I took a glance at the next few and they’re fairly boring but this one,” he tapped a page filled with spidery, cramped writing, “got interesting fast.”

  “Christ but this writing’s small.”

  “Need your readers old man?” Ezra teased, shifting from the sofa to kneel next to the coffee table, beside me and Weems. “Let’s see… My old man was a doctor. I can read shitty handwriting. Right. ‘I knew I was right. He came to me before my trunk was even unpacked. We loved on the freshly made bed, and again on my second best dress, laid out for the maid to press. I must do it myself now, for there is no way she will be able to see the state of that thing and remain ignorant of what has happened in here. I am so happy though that I almost want her to see it and gossip with the other servants. Let them know, let that old cow find out and eat rage’.”

  “Fucking yikes.”

  Weems smiled faintly. “Did you just say ‘yikes’?”

  I nodded. “To be more specific, fucking yikes.”

  Ezra rolled his shoulders, tilting his head side to side just a little like he was uncomfortable. “Are you, ah, getting any signal?” he asked.

  “You can ask if there’s a ghost,” Weems sighed, his smile growing just a little. “I’m not going to go bananas if you talk about it.”

  “No,” I said. “There’s nothing. Well. Nothing more than the usual ambient noise.” Weems raised a brow so I shrugged and added, “In most places, there’s some sort of spirit energy. Either actual ghosts or just the residue from years of human habitation or use. When I was first coming into my abilities, it was like being in the back bedroom while a party went on in the front of the house. It was just a constant din.”

  “Drove him bonkers,” Ezra chimed in. “The other kids at school used to call him Twitch.”

  “Twitch?”

  “Thanks, Ez,” I muttered. “I’d get a bit twitchy, trying to ignore the low-grade hum all the time.”

  “But you learned to ignore it?” Weems pressed. “The whole hearing voices thing? Did you see someone about it or…?” He frowned deeply, his fingers stretching slightly towards mine where mine rested on my knee before he curled his back under into a fist and tucked it down beside his thigh.

  Ah. I didn’t need to see Ezra’s eye roll to pick up on the implications of Weems’ question. “I’ve been evaluated for every mental health issue you can imagine. If you’d like, I can give you copies of my results and correspondence with doctors and therapists.”

  Weems’ expression was shuttered. “I wasn’t implying anything. And even if you have a diagnosis, that doesn’t mean I’m going to blame it for your…abilities. I have bipolar disorder and I don’t see ghosts.” He held himself stiffly, not making eye contact with either of us. “Mental illness doesn’t mean—”

  “I know,” I said quietly. “I wasn’t implying…” Unease, awkward-slick and unwanted slithered between us.

  Ezra cleared his throat. “Alright, lads? Can we get to this again before Jacob decides to check on his treasure?”

  Beside me, Weems relaxed fractionally, uncurling his fist. We weren’t quite touching but it was a near thing. “Do they say anything that might give us a name?”

  “More importantly,” I put in, “do they say anything about murder?”

  “It was written decades too early for them to be Paul Hendricks’ murderer,” Weems said. “Are you thinking the Hendricks family was poisoned over a course of years?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  He wrinkled his nose, his brow scrunching over his glasses as he reluctantly nodded. “The food poisoning theory wouldn’t hold up in court, frankly. I understand it would be the go-to explanation for at least one or two of the deaths but, really, unless each family member was served a different meal at dinner, more than one person would’ve gone down with the illness.”

  “Unless,” Ezra said slowly. “Unless maybe the first one, Mr. Hendricks, unless he had something specific he liked with his meal. And he was the only one who ate it.”

  “Granmere’s biscuits.”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly. Your grandmother wouldn’t eat supper without one of those damned biscuits beside her plate. No matter what.”

  Weems drummed his fingers again, faster and harder, his thinking tic. “Damn it. Some old homes have records of menus or cook’s notes and recipes. I wonder if any were saved for Hendricks House from that era. They might indicate a favorite dish or something that would’ve turned up on the table.” He sighed, folding in on himself again, pulling that burst of curiosity back. “Eh, even if they did, there’s no guarantee that would be our smoking gun. And it’d have to be something served again and again, and then later when Paul Lacroix-Hendricks was here.”

  “If he even ate here…” Voices from the foyer silenced us, the loud rumble of Jacob snarling at someone and the placating tones of CeCe trailing behind him. “Shit.”

  “Here.” Weems grabbed the diary and shoved it under his sweater vest.

  “You look guilty,” I muttered, sliding back beside Ezra as Jacob and CeCe arrived in the study.

  “Good news,” Jacob boomed. “I’ve got the interview with Xavier Jennings!”

  “Now?” Weems jerked his thumb to indicate Ezra and me, sitting on the sofa looking, I’m sure, stiffly startled. “We’re not even close to being ready to head out.”

  “Not y’all, just me. And it’s in about three hours,” Jacob said, checking his fancy watch with a slight frown. “Which means I need to get going soon.”

  CeCe rolled her eyes. “It’s less an interview and more of a recorded statement with prompts,” she said. “With the weather still being futzy with our communications, we—Jacob—decided to have Jennings record his experiences and thoughts and we’d include them as a sort of celebrity guest spot thing in the first episode.” She looked strained around the edges, her smile too tight and eyes too narrowed. “The hotel in town,” she didn’t have to specify—Bettina only had one hotel that wasn’t a bed and breakfast, the Hendricks Arms Hotel and Conference Center, “has power and isn’t getting as much of the weather. So Jacob and Charlie are going to head into town and use the hotel’s conference room for a long distance face to face with Jennings.”

  “I’m going to be fine,” Jacob sighed. It was something he’d been saying for a while, from the sound of things. He gav
e us one of those sidelong ‘back me up here’ smiles. “Ernest is getting the SUV out of the garage and we’re between some of the final bands of storms.”

  CeCe’s pinched expression grew even more-so. “I just think it can wait. The first episode isn’t even airing for another week and a half. Minerva should be past us by tomorrow night.”

  “Xavier Jennings has a busy schedule,” Jacob protested on a tired sigh. “Guys? A little help?”

  “I think it’s a great idea,” Weems said, shooting me and Ezra an unreadable expression. “I mean, get it over with, right? With Fellowes’ headache and Ezra’s weird fainting spell, we’re kind of down for the count here, right?”

  Oh, great. He was babbling. I should have guessed he’d be a babbler. The quiet ones usually turn out to be babblers. And my mind took a racier turn than I’d expected, wondering if he’d be a talker in bed, too, or if it was just when he was nervous.

  Oh, there was a thought. Would he be the type to be nervous in bed? I doubted he was the virginal sort but… Four sets of eyes were focused on me. Shit. Head back in the game, Fellowes. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that? My head…” I smiled weakly. Ezra snorted under his breath, always seeing through my bullshit.

  CeCe made an exasperated noise through her nose, throwing her hands up in frustration. “Oh, never mind! Fine, Jacob, fine! Go. If you die, I swear to whatever god is in charge that I’ll have him,” she jabbed a glossy red tipped finger at me, “drag your ghost from the other side so I can kill you again.”

  “That’s not how it works,” Weems muttered, surprising a laugh out of me.

  “Are we making a believer of you?” I teased.