No Ghouls Allowed

by Victoria Laurie

  I felt Sylvie laugh. “She says thank you,” I told him. Sylvie had heard him quite clearly, but I understood how he assumed I’d need to relay the message.

  Sylvie then pointed to her grandson, and I felt her leave my side and move over to hug him. “She’s very worried about him,” I said, wincing a little because I could see the bruise at his temple where I’d clocked him with Kogan’s gun.

  “Does he still have that evil spirit inside of him?” Beau asked.

  I focused intently on Sylvie. If anyone would be able to sense that, it would be her. Her answer greatly troubled me. “She says not entirely, but there’s a remnant of it that’s keeping him asleep.”

  “It’s okay, Beau,” I heard Heath say, and I looked up at him only to find him staring at Breslow. When I glanced at the deputy, I could see he’d gone pale and was holding our vests close to his already fully protected chest.

  “How do you know he’s not gonna wake up and start actin’ all possessed again?” Beau said.

  I focused again on Levi and Sylvie. “He’s in a dormant state,” I said. It was the best translation I could find. His grandmother was indicating that Levi was still in danger from being taken over by the Sandman, but at the moment he really was totally unconscious. And then Sylvie helped me to understand the demon himself. “Oh, my God,” I said. “That’s why he calls himself the Sandman.”

  “Wait. What’d I miss?” Heath asked.

  I pointed to Levi but looked to Beau. My next question would be aimed at him. “The doctors can’t figure out why he won’t wake up, right?”

  “That’s right. They say they can’t see any brain bleeding or damage from the knock to his head you gave him.”

  I grimaced at the reminder, but went on to explain. “The Sandman from childhood fables goes around at night and puts sand in your eyes while you sleep, right? Supposedly helping you get a better night’s sleep, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Yeah, somethin’ like that,” Beau agreed.

  “Well, this Sandman will keep you asleep until he’s ready to take your body over again,” I said, and I couldn’t suppress the shudder that snaked its way up my spine.

  “Whoa,” Heath and Beau said together. “That’s bad, Em,” Heath added.

  “Yep,” I agreed. Again I felt Sylvie come close to me and she all but implored me to help her grandson. For several seconds I communicated with her silently, letting her know I’d do my best, but I could still sense the worry she had for him as she drifted back to Levi’s side, and it left me feeling unsettled. At last I felt her energy begin to fade, and in a wink, she was gone again.

  A moment later I heard Heath say, “Did she give you any ideas about how to fight the Sandman before she left?”

  I shook my head. “No. She was trying to pump a lot of energy into her grandson to help him resist the next possession, assuming there is one, and she ran out of energy before she could tell me more.”

  Beau’s phone rang and the ringtone made us all jump. “Sorry,” he said, lifting it from his belt to look at the display. “I’ll take this outside,” he added, setting our vests on the floor and ducking out to the hallway.

  Heath and I walked over to our vests and started to shrug into them. Mine felt very heavy, but maybe that was because I was just so weary.

  “You okay?” Heath asked.

  I realized he’d been studying me as I got into my vest. “Yeah. I guess. I’m just tired. It’s been a long three days.”

  He nodded and reached over to pull me into his arms for a supportive hug. I loved how well Heath seemed to read me. Sometimes I needed him to be close and sometimes I needed my personal space, and he always seemed to intuitively know, at any given moment, which way I was leaning. I sighed into his chest and he rocked me from side to side. “We’ll be okay,” he said, giving the top of my head a kiss.

  I so wanted to believe him, but I was facing Levi Cook, lying unconscious in that bed, and I couldn’t help but worry. With another sigh I forced my gaze to move away from the deputy. As Heath continued to rock me, my eyes drifted over to the bedside table. There was a pitcher there with a cup next to it, and I thought it was so stupid to put those next to an unconscious man who was currently strapped to the bed . . . but then something about the pitcher caught my eye.

  It was a simple plastic pitcher with a small red rose on the side, and it felt so familiar in the way that reminded me of something. . . .

  “Ohmigod!” I gasped.

  Heath stood back but held my shoulders. “What’s the matter? Are you okay?”

  My breath was coming in short bursts and I moved out of his arms and over to the side table to pick up the pitcher and study the red flower. “The tea set in the playroom,” I began, chills running up and down my spine. Quickly, I set down the pitcher and pulled out my cell, flipping through the photos, hunting for a particular sequence of images. I wanted to be wrong, but I knew that I wasn’t. “The second I first saw that tea set,” I explained to Heath while I searched, “something about it seemed so weirdly familiar, but I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen it before. I just realized I haven’t seen it before. I’ve only seen a small piece of it.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” Heath said, coming over to me.

  At last my finger landed on an image of the tea set and I bit my lip, because displayed there was exactly the thing that had been troubling me. Or rather, the absence of the thing that had been troubling me. “The tea set on this table is missing its sugar bowl,” I told him, and turned the image around so that he could see the tea set, with its three cups, saucers, teapot, and creamer. But no sugar bowl, which I knew would’ve completed the set. And just to make sure I wasn’t wrong, I expanded the image a little with my fingers to note the fourth cup and saucer on the bookshelf right behind the table. All the pieces of the tea set were visible in the image except the sugar bowl.

  “Why is a missing sugar bowl important, Em?”

  “Because I know exactly where it is. Was. Or at least, I think I know.”

  “Where?”

  “On the vanity in my mother’s dressing room.”

  Chapter 10

  Heath considered me for a long moment before he spoke. “What would the missing sugar bowl be doing on your mother’s vanity?”

  I bit my lip, feeling I’d just discovered something about my mother that I wished I hadn’t. “She used to keep our ponytail holders in it. Mama had very long hair—well, until the chemo made it all fall out—but she used to keep this little dish on her vanity with our elastics in it and she’d braid my hair, then pull hers back into a ponytail. I loved that little dish, because it was small and delicate, and while she braided my hair, I used to hold it up and admire it. It had two little handles and a pink rose on the side and gold around the rim and along the bottom.”

  “Maybe it came from a similar set,” Heath said, but I could tell he thought it was really odd that my mother had a little sugar bowl on her vanity and the tea set from the playroom was missing only one thing—its sugar bowl.

  I looked up at the ceiling, feeling like I wanted to cry. “I wish I thought it was only a coincidence, Heath,” I whispered.

  “Em,” he said, taking my hands and pulling my attention back to him. “It probably is. I mean, there had to have been lots of those tea sets sold around the time your mom was a little girl, right? Maybe she and someone at the Porters’ had the exact same tea set. Maybe it’s just a crazy fluke that there’s no sugar bowl in this photo, and one on your mom’s vanity.”

  I nodded, but I was worried all the same. I didn’t want my mother to have a connection to any of this mess, and the fact that I’d encountered her as a little girl being haunted by the Sandman was still really bothering me.

  “Hey,” Heath said when my gaze began to travel back up to the ceiling again. “Did your mom even know the Port
ers? I mean, it sounds like they were pretty snobby, right? Maybe they hung with their own crowd and she and they never even met.”

  “It’s possible,” I said, but I still felt a terrible nagging in the pit of my stomach. “We’ve got to find out for sure, though, Heath. We’ve got to make sure Mama was nowhere near any of this.”

  At that moment the door swung open and Beau came into the room. He saw us huddled over in the corner and said, “You guys okay?”

  I pocketed my cell. “Yeah. Fine. Everything okay on your end?”

  Beau blushed slightly. “Yeah. My sister is eight months pregnant and her husband is overseas on his second tour of duty, so my two brothers and I are filling in if Carrie needs anything. This week it’s my turn and she wants me to bring her some onion rings and a cupcake.”

  Heath and I both smiled. “Cravings, huh?” I asked.

  Beau nodded. “She can’t get enough of that combo. Anyway, speaking of cravings, y’all hungry? I figure we can grab lunch and pick up my sister’s order in one shot. Two birds and one stone, you know?”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, a little shocked by how hungry I suddenly was.

  “Great,” he said. We can talk about strategy over lunch.”

  • • •

  Beau drove us to Patsy’s, a delicious Southern-home-cooking-style restaurant that was an old favorite of mine. Heath and I ordered the battered tilapia with grits and collard greens, and Beau ordered a slab of ribs. Over the meal we talked mostly about the missing-persons file on Everett Sellers. “This is the list of guests at the Porter house on the day he went missing?” I asked. There were at least twenty names on the list, with their corresponding ages. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I didn’t see the name of my mother there.

  “Yep,” Beau said. “If you look at that first witness testimony, you’ll see that Regina Porter was throwing a luncheon for the society ladies that afternoon. Many of them had brought their children over to play, and it turned into a small party.”

  I skimmed several statements only to realize that most of the ladies who’d attended the luncheon had left about an hour before Everett was last seen. I pointed this out to Heath and Beau. “And besides all of that, we now know that the room where Everett was killed was intentionally boarded up, meaning someone in the Porter family had to know that Everett was murdered inside the house and likely by whom.”

  “The Porters had four kids,” Beau said, obviously more familiar with the Porters than I was. “Jack, the oldest, died in a car accident when he was seventeen. He was Regina’s favorite, and from what I hear, she never got over it. She spent most of her later years locked up in that big ol’ house wearing black till the day she died.

  “The next oldest was Molly. She went to work for her daddy, who was one of the meanest sons of bitches you’d ever want to meet. My own mama worked for him as a secretary for a few years, and he wore her down to a nub. She finally got the courage to quit on him, and he made sure nobody in town would hire her. For a lot of years after that, it was lean times at our house.”

  I noted the hint of bitterness in Beau’s voice as he spoke about Winston Porter III, who I’d also heard was as mean and vindictive an old coot as ever there was one. Daddy had once had a run-in with him, and the two spat at each other for months afterward.

  “Things got a little better when old man Porter died,” Beau continued. “I wasn’t on the force back then, but Kogan was. Some sort of accident at the home, from what I remember. Porter liked to drink and he ended up falling down that big ol’ staircase. Made a hell of a mess from what Kogan told me.”

  I scowled, wishing Beau hadn’t been quite so descriptive while we were eating lunch.

  “Molly Porter was close in age to Everett—she was fifteen when he went missing—but she was off at some friend’s house that day, and only heard about it when she got home and saw all the police cars at her house.”

  “Still, she’s someone we may want to interview,” I said.

  Beau shook his head. “Well, you can interview her if you want, but I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Heath asked.

  “Because she’s dead. She killed herself a few years before her daddy died. It was Kogan’s first case, actually. He’ll tell you about it if you ask him, but I got the lowdown from another source.”

  “Who?”

  “Mama. Like I said, Porter was a mean son of a bitch and Mama said he was always hardest on Molly. She was still working for him the day it happened. Mama told me that Molly and old man Porter had a hell of a fight that day and then Molly locked herself in her office. An hour or so later, there was this loud crash outside and everybody ran out of the building to find the poor girl had thrown herself out the window and landed on her daddy’s car.”

  “That’s one way to make a statement,” Heath said with a wince.

  “What was his reaction?” I asked.

  Beau paused and looked down. Wearing a bitter scowl, he said, “He called her a dumb bitch and yelled at her dead body until Kogan showed up and pulled him away from there. Mama said he was more upset about the car than he was about his own daughter commitin’ suicide.”

  The pit of my stomach was filled with fury for poor Molly. “What a horrible man.”

  “He was,” Beau agreed. “Mama quit a week afterward. He just disgusted her.”

  “Okay, so Molly and Jack aren’t around, and neither is old man Porter or his wife. Who does that leave?”

  “Well, Glenn Porter is still alive. He handled the sale of the house to Mrs. Bigelow, but from what I hear, the house was in a trust left to him and his sister Sarah.”

  I lit up when Beau mentioned her. “And how old was she at the time of Everett’s murder?”

  “Should be in the file,” Beau said, wiping his sticky hands on his napkin and about to reach for the thick folder.

  I was afraid he’d get barbecue sauce all over it, so I grabbed it first and began to look through the papers. “She was eight,” I said, and again that tickle of unsettling energy pricked its way up my spine.

  “Would an eight-year-old still be playing with a tea set?” Heath asked. I knew where he was going. He thought the playroom might’ve belonged to Sarah.

  “With a set as gorgeous as the one we found in the playroom?” I said. “Definitely.”

  “Could she have killed Everett?” Heath asked no one in particular.

  We all considered that. “It’s possible,” I said. “And it would explain why the family covered up the playroom and directed the investigation away from the house.”

  “Who was it that saw Everett walking away into the woods?” Heath asked next.

  I flipped through more of the file. “It says here that it was Glenn Porter who was the last person to see Everett alive.”

  “So he’s lying,” Heath said.

  “Could be,” said Beau. “And he’s still around to interview.”

  “We should talk to the sister Sarah too,” I said. I felt an almost urgent need to speak with her about a few things, like why my mother possibly had the sugar bowl from her tea set. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t dismiss the coincidence.

  Beau opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment his phone rang and he took one look at the screen and answered it. “Breslow,” he said briskly. And then I saw the shocked and alarmed expression on his face and a moment later he was on his feet, yanking out bills from his pocket to throw onto the table. “We gotta go,” he said, motioning for us to run with him to the car.

  Heath and I didn’t hesitate, but on the way I said, “What’s happened?”

  “There’s an incident at the state psychiatric hospital,“ he said, reaching his car door and throwing it open. “One dead and several others injured.”

  Heath and I both stopped short before getting into the car, stun
ned by the announcement. “A shooting?” Heath asked.

  Breslow waved at us impatiently. “No! Now would you get in?”

  We obeyed, but before I closed the door, I said, “Beau, what kind of an incident is happening over there?”

  “That’s just it, Mary Jane. No one really knows. Cisco is dead, two nurses are being rushed to the hospital, and three other patients have had serious injuries.”

  “If it’s not a shooter, what is it?” I pressed, closing the door when Breslow threw the car into reverse and shot us backward out of the parking space.

  “Nobody knows,” he said. “Wells is over there right now, and he says it’s pandemonium. He says patients all over the place are going berserk, attacking nurses, workers . . . anybody who moves. He also said that when he got there, all the doors were slamming all over the hospital, just like at Porter Manor yesterday.”

  “The Sandman,” I said breathlessly.

  “Shit,” Heath swore, leaning down to pick up his duffel bag of spikes. I took a few from him when he handed them to me.

  As we were getting prepared, Breslow’s radio crackled with sound. He picked up the mic and spoke rapidly into it. I didn’t understand a word of it as it was mostly in police code.

  Very shortly thereafter we arrived at the hospital and came to an abrupt halt behind several other cruisers. Wells popped up from behind one of the cars and hurried over to us, huddling down next to Breslow’s window. “I don’t know what the hell is going on in there, Beau, but it’s bad!”

  Even from inside the cruiser we could hear the sound of doors slamming on all three floors of the building. They were slamming in rhythm, a four-four beat, and it was so creepy that I wanted to cover my ears and block out the sound.

  “Who’s still in there?” Breslow said, pulling out his sidearm and checking the chamber.

  “I’d say at least a half dozen patients. We got most of the staff out, but Debra said that she’s still getting calls from folks stuck in the building. They’re hiding under desks and in cabinets.”