by J L Bryan
“All right,” I said, a little worried about what acting weird might entail. He was probably just an introvert. I could relate to that.
“Aw, is he a little shy?” Stacey asked, as if the forty-something man were a toddler or puppy.
“No, he has a serious psychological condition. It gets worse the more people are around, especially if those people are unfamiliar. I don't like having to tell you about it, but since you're going to be in our private home here...and all of this does fall under the secrecy contract, too.”
“Okay.” Stacey frowned. Her eyes went to Amberly's bodice and corset, then lit up as Stacey got an idea. “Hey! Maybe if Ellie and I dress up like princesses for this investigation, he'll be more comfortable! We could wear gowns and crowns and jewels, Ellie—”
“No,” I said, flatly. It may have been the flattest no I've ever uttered in my life.
“—and braid our hair—”
“I said 'no,' Stacey. Don't make me repeat it in German. I know how much that language scares you.”
“Okay, okay.” Stacey held her hands in surrender. “But if you change your mind—”
“I won't. Mrs. Pennefort, we understand your concern, and we will be sensitive to it.”
“Even if it means dressing up in costume—” Stacey began.
“Very sensitive,” I interrupted.
Amberly seemed satisfied. We walked back through the apartment, past the flute-and-harp songs and the smell of baking clay. Through the ajar door, I could see Thurmond painting his castle with an ultrafine brush, completely absorbed in it.
Green MOOVIN' ON boxes filled one end of the dining room. The dining table and its eight chairs were draped in white dust sheets. It looked like we'd walked in on ghosts having a silent banquet. More sheets were draped over the china cabinet and sideboard.
“We've pretty much just used it as storage.” Amberly pointed at the wooden-slat shutters along the room's long windowed wall. “This is where she came at me.”
“Have you seen the apparition here more than once?” I asked.
“I try to keep the door to this room shut, but it always seems to find its way open. Sometimes I feel her watching me from in here. Sometimes I can see a dark shape moving toward me, but I close the door before she gets too close. That's happened twice. I'll go for days on end, thinking it's all over...then something will happen again, even if it's just a feeling of being watched. So I started looking for help, and this psychic I know from the Wizarding Festival ended up recommending you. Well, your boss.”
“Calvin's mostly retired now,” I said. “But he's worked every kind of paranormal case, and taught me everything I know.”
“I'm glad to have some kind of experts involved. Do you think you can help us?”
“We can try,” I said. “The first steps are research and observation. Do you know any of the history of the building? Any tragedies? Murders?”
“You'd have to ask my husband. But not when he's working.”
“Is there anyone else in the building we can speak to? Long-term employees? Tenants? People who live or work in a haunted building for a long time often have stories that could give us clues.”
“Not tenants,” she said quickly. “You can talk to the building staff, but you can't tell them why you're here. That's real important. I don't think many of 'em have been here long, to tell you the truth. People tend to quit.”
“We can pretend you hired our firm to consult on updating building security. That will explain why we're poking around.”
“You're good at being sneaky?”
“Oh, yeah!” Stacey winked and pointed a finger gun at me. “Sneaky. Just call us the Sneaky Twins. Or the Sneaky Sisters. The Sneaksters, for short.”
“Will people really believe you're private detectives?” Amberly asked Stacey.
“But we really are...” Stacey began, then frowned.
“Are you sure your husband will be okay with us setting up gear in your apartment?” I asked.
“Oh, I'll handle him.” She waved the question away as if it were a minor one.
“Great. Did you say there are unoccupied apartments on this floor?”
“Two of them.”
“Could we take one over while we're here? We need to set up a nerve center for monitoring our cameras and microphones. It'll fill up a whole room, so you won't want it in your place.”
“Oh, yes. I can get you the key to the next apartment over.” She seemed to think about it, then frowned. “That would be upstairs...I'll have to send Thurm to get it. His Aunt Millie's up there, and his Uncle Vance lived there until he died a few months back. That's not our space, it's their space. And really this floor isn't our space, either. The house was our space. I miss the house so much.”
“You said it's being renovated?” I asked. “If there's a deep family connection between that house and this building, then events in one place affect events in the other.”
“Oh, they do,” Amberly said. She looked upstairs, maybe thinking of Thurmond's unconscious aunt or recently deceased uncle. “Unfortunately.”
“Has anything strange been observed at your house?”
“Not by me. The trouble started when we moved here.”
“Okay. This 'hot' ghost is a big concern for me, because those are rare. Sometimes they died in fires. Sometimes they can start fires. Where was that observed?”
“Hyacinth said it was a big red blur out in the hallway. And it was hot. One time, Dexter said he felt too much heat in his room, and he went to sleep on the couch. But his room felt normal to me. I think there was more he didn't want to say.”
“And he was definitely complaining about heat, not cold like you experienced?”
“Definitely.”
“It could be two different entities. In a building this old, multiple presences can accumulate over the years. Personally, I'd like to stay at least one night.” I was calm and professional on the surface, not wanting to panic the potential client, but the hot ghost worried me a lot. I decided to push gently, trying to close the deal. “We brought plenty of gear with us from Savannah. We can start as soon as you get us the key to the vacant apartment.”
“Oh, right.” She looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “I'll take care of that.”
“We'll go wait by the elevator,” I said, and Stacey and I headed out to the music room.
We looked out through the windows as rain poured down on tall gray and black towers all around us, and on the distant streets below. Though we were in the middle of a large city, it felt very isolated up there, hundreds of feet from the ground.
I had a feeling it was going to feel a lot more isolated late at night, with all the lights turned out, especially if the bad weather continued...which the weather app on my phone said it would. Big blobs of green were rolling in on the weather radar from the west, charging in to hammer the city.
“So, do you think it's a ghost?” Stacey asked, still looking out at the rain.
“I keep worrying about the hot ghost. Because...you know.”
“Because Clay's a hot ghost, and he killed your family.”
I winced. “Thanks for spelling it out, Stacey.”
“So...basically, I was right,” Stacey said.
“About what?”
“Haunted skyscraper!” She beamed.
“Yeah, I guess, technically—”
“Not 'technically.' Totally! Totally right. Who knew a small-town Alabama girl like me could end up hunting ghosts in a big fancy skyscraper?”
“Is Montgomery considered a small town? It's easily as big as Savannah.”
“Most cities are small compared to this one.” Stacey pointed out at the towers around us, the tree-lined streets below.
“It's not as big as New York.”
“Have you ever been to New York?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“I have,” Stacey said. “But I went with my parents, so we mostly saw the shopping and Broadway parts. And the Statue of Liber
ty parts. That city is huge. I bet it's full of ghosts.”
“I bet it is.”
“Here you go, Ellie.” Amberly emerged from the hallway and handed me a long brass key with a single irregular tooth right at the end.
“Is this a skeleton key?” I asked, holding it up to the light as if that would help me see it better.
“Yes. I didn't want to interrupt Thurm...or go upstairs myself...but you can borrow this instead. It'll get you in and out of a lot of places in the tower, at least those that haven't been updated. And you'll need this.” She handed me a plastic card with SAFE-T-DOOR printed on it. “That will open some of the more modernized doors. Like the loading dock and the service elevator. You can use those to bring up your cameras and stuff.”
“Sounds great, thanks.”
“Just hold off on my kids' rooms until they get home from school, so I can explain to them. They go along with things better if they think they have a say in it.”
“But we can go ahead and set up everywhere else?”
“Yeah, except Thurm's studio. Probably best to leave that space to him.”
“Got it. Okay, we'll get to work on trying to identify these entities. We have to learn all we can in order to figure out how to evict them.”
“Thank you. I don't think I can cope with these problems much longer. I'm about to lose my mind,” Amberly said.
I nodded to Stacey, and we got to work.
Chapter Five
The loading dock was covered by an overhang, so we could unload our electronic gear without it getting soaked and destroyed by the rain. The basement was huge, cold, and dark, but fortunately the service elevator was right by the roll-up door to the loading dock.
The apartment she'd loaned us was similar to her own, minus the intense dragon and wizard décor. It was unoccupied but not empty—it was furnished in a fairly colorful Art Deco fashion, with funky, curvy retro-futuristic furniture. A thick layer of dust had settled over everything.
While Stacey assembled monitors and speakers, I wiped down the windows, trying to cut the gloom. I ended up dusting the whole place. I normally don't do windows or cleaning—that's not part of our standard paranormal-investigation package—but I didn't want to sneeze all night.
Typically, we use our van as a mobile nerve center, parking it just outside the client's house, but that wasn't going to work so well with the van in a concrete-walled parking garage sixteen floors below. The signals could get fuzzy, if not completely useless. Setting up a monitoring station upstairs meant a lot of extra work.
I also went ahead and changed the bedroom sheets in the apartment—they didn't look used, really, just dusty. That way we could grab a nap if we had time.
“Pretty sweet observation point,” Stacey said, reclining on the deeply padded C-shaped red couch. The monitors and speakers were arranged on a big round coffee table in front of her, which was supported by a bouquet of curved legs. “Nice seating, private bathroom, bedroom...I can't say I miss the back of the van at all.”
“There's even a billiards room,” I said.
“Seriously? Can we play?” Stacey hopped to her feet.
“We should probably set up one or two cameras first.” I pointed to the blank monitors in front of her.
“Oh, right. The cameras. I'm so hungry. Can't we have lunch first?”
“We can have lunch after.” I picked up a couple of heavy black camera cases.
“I hate you so much,” Stacey said.
“Think of it as motivation. Our lunch break is our carrot, and hunger is our stick.”
“I'm hungry enough to eat a stick right now,” Stacey grumbled, but she came along.
In the clients' master bedroom, we did our best to keep the camera and microphone out of sight. Then we stuck a thermal camera in the hallway outside, where the daughter had reported being chased by a hot red ghost. The fullest range of equipment went into the dining room, including night and thermal cameras as well as a motion detector.
When we'd finished with every active spot except for the kids' rooms, we invited Amberly to look over the set-up in each room, then the monitoring station in the next apartment. Thurmond even took a break to follow us over there. Paint of every color was splattered on the Legend of Zelda shirt that barely covered his pot belly. He trailed behind us, quiet most of the time.
“So you're just going to sit over here, watching us all night?” Thurmond asked, staring at the array of little monitors Stacey had removed from their usual mounts down in the van. “That makes me feel...weird.”
“Y'all could spend the night elsewhere, if you want,” I said, but tried not to sound too encouraging about it. “Some investigators prefer that the occupants of the home be absent during the investigation, to avoid false positives. Personally, though, I like to have the family home, at least at first. If entities are present and bothering residents of the household, they may be accustomed to certain patterns of activity. They might be focusing on certain family members, following them around, even feeding on their energy.”
“Whoa, like vampires?” Thurmond's tone was sarcastic.
“Basically,” I said. “It could be that legends of vampires are rooted in encounters with these predatory ghosts. Has anyone in your household been chronically sick, drained, or low-energy lately?”
“I'd say all of us, since we moved here,” Amberly said. “Hyacinth is always grouchy, and she keeps gaining weight even though I put her on a diet. Dexter's always shut up in his room alone...though I think that's normal for a teenage boy...”
“None of us have really adjusted to the move, that's true,” Thurmond said, suppressing a yawn. “My Mists of Murdoom collection is weeks behind schedule. I'll never have those pieces ready for Chattacon in January.” I assumed that was some sort of fantasy and science fiction convention. Perhaps in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a couple hours away.
“I find myself making more coffee, and putting more sugar in it,” Amberly said. “And I'm trying to cut out sugar. But sometimes I make a candy and chocolate run to the newsstand down in the lobby. Caffeine and sugar, that's what keeps me going.”
“Ghosts can affect your physical as well as mental condition,” I said. “Haunted houses tend to feel dark, cold, and draining. The good news is the reverse is also true. Removing the entity can improve all those affected areas of your life.”
“And you can promise all this for just the low, low price of nineteen ninety-five plus shipping and handling, am I right?” Thurmond asked.
“I'm afraid it'll be a little more than twenty bucks,” I said. “And if we can rule out a haunting, I promise we will, but when you have multiple witnesses having close encounters with entities, it's probably not a matter of creaky floorboards and groaning pipes. A night or two of gathering data should shed a little light on what's happening.” I wanted to press on and ask Thurmond about the history of the building, but he seemed skittish enough about our presence already. He probably wasn't eager to discuss any dark secrets of his family with someone he'd just met. I decided to save those questions for later and hope he got more comfortable with us. Besides, I could probably learn a lot about such a prominent family just from local newspaper archives.
“You really want to do this?” Thurmond asked his wife.
“I think it's what we need,” Amberly said. Her voice was low, but firm.
He nodded and headed out of the apartment.
“Stacey and I will have to rest this afternoon,” I said. “We were driving all morning, and now we'll be up all night. Do you mind if we use the beds in this apartment?”
“Sure, if you don't mind must and dust,” Amberly said.
“Awesome, because I'm beat,” Stacey said. “I'd go to sleep right now, but my growling stomach would keep me awake.”
“Can you recommend anywhere nearby to grab a late lunch?” I asked Amberly. “Not too pricey?”
“I don't know what you like, but there's a bunch of little places around the corner, along Broad Street as
you approach Pennefort Park,” she said. “It's like Epcot Center out there, stuff from every corner of the world.”
“Thanks,” I said. “We'll have a look. And we'll be back later. Other than wiring your kids' rooms, we don't have much else to do until tonight.”
“I hope you can take care of this quick,” Amberly said. “This apartment is like living in a funhouse at the fair, the bad kind where things jump out at you all the time. If you can't fix it...I don't know what we're gonna do.”
Chapter Six
The rain had slowed to a drizzle for the afternoon. Stacey and I walked down a street crammed with small restaurants, including a New York style deli and a Vietnamese noodle place. We ended up at Blossom Tree, a Korean taco place looking out at Pennefort Park across the street. A few granite steps led up to a granite archway into the grassy park. A low stone wall surrounded the park, separating it from the sidewalks all around. A couple of statues were tucked into clusters of trees. Overall, the park made me think of a graveyard, one with very few bodies buried in it so far.
Stacey and I looked through the glass front wall at the park while we ate kimchi tacos and sweet potatoes. We also got barley tea, and overall the meal was the best part of the day so far.
“Okay, ready for some deep background?” Stacey asked, looking at her phone.
“Stacey Tolbert, are you taking the lead on historical research here?” I asked, with awe in my voice.
“I just think it's interesting.”
“Who are you, and what have you done with my tech manager?”
“Big ha, Ellie. Do you want to hear this or not?”
“You bet.” I ate a spicy taco with crispy pork and kimchi while she filled me in.
“It looks like the original guy, Ernest Pennefort, was a real character. It says he was from St. Charles, Missouri, born in 1859. After the Civil War, he traveled around the Southeast selling patent medicines, first with a horse and wagon, then heading up a medicine show that traveled by train. Then he opened up a mail-order patent-medicine business based in Atlanta.”
