by Jessa Archer
Hearing Tessa’s name seemed to have cut through Kate’s fog. She looked up at Ed, and then back at her mom. “Tessa’s dead,” she said, choking back a sob. “She called it. Tessa called it, and it came and got her.”
✰ Chapter Two ✰
Cassie thrust a damp cloth toward Sherry, who stared at it for a moment, uncomprehending. Then she grabbed it and began wiping her daughter’s face. Kate was crying uncontrollably now.
Ed crouched down next to her, something that I knew wasn’t exactly comfortable given his bad hip. “Kate, sweetie, you need to calm down so that we can understand you, okay? What happened?”
Mindy Tucker, who had been watching the whole thing with wide eyes, backed away. “I’ll come back later,” she said hurriedly. Ed didn’t even give her a second glance, which I thought was ironic, considering what she had come to tell him. He had no idea what was looming on his horizon.
Kate’s eyes flickered, and I thought for a moment she might pass out.
“Kate,” Sherry said. “I need you to take a deep breath and tell us what happened. Come on. Snap out of it.”
The girl looked like she was suffering from shock more than anything else, although I supposed heat exhaustion was also a possibility. It was well after sundown, but the temperature hadn’t dipped much below ninety all week, and the girl had clearly been running. She was drenched with sweat.
Tessa’s dead. It came and got her. I shivered, even though the air conditioner was barely keeping up with the overcrowded room.
Kate started to speak but all that came out was a dry, raspy wheeze. Cassie headed back to the coffee bar, returning a few seconds later with a bottle of water. She handed it to Kate, whose hands were shaking so badly that the first few inches sloshed onto the front of her shirt. The girl didn’t seem to notice. She just tilted the water back, emptying the bottle in long greedy pulls.
When she was finished, Sherry tried again. “What’s going on, Kate? Can you tell us what happened?”
Kate’s eyes were brimming with tears. “I don’t know. Maybe it was a dream? Maybe…I imagined it? It was really hot in there, and…” She didn’t sound at all convinced.
“Imagined what?” Ed asked.
Kate looked at him and then back at her mother. “I want to go home, Mama,” she said in a barely audible voice. “Okay? Please take me home.”
Ed cast a worried look around the crowded room. “Let’s get her outside. This room has to be suffocating.” He turned toward Cassie. “Can you tell the people in line that a family emergency has come up?”
Cassie nodded. “Sure. Do what you need to do.”
“No,” Sherry said. “There’s no reason for you to leave early, Ed. Go back and finish the signing. Ruth can help me get Kate to the car, and then the two of you can come out to the house when you’re done here.”
He started to protest, but Sherry held firm. “Ed. I can handle this.” She tiptoed up and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Your public is waiting. Go sign those books.”
I squeezed his arm. “She’s right. We’ve got this.”
“Someone is going to need to call this in, though…”
“We can handle that, too,” Sherry told him. “As soon as I figure out what she saw, I’ll make the call.”
Ed looked torn, but since it was clear that Kate wasn’t hurt or in any apparent danger, he sighed. “The show must go on, I guess. Shouldn’t be too much longer. Call if you need me, okay?”
“Will do,” Sherry said. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s get you home.”
I helped her lead Kate to the front door. Outside, the night was still hot and sticky. Thistlewood was in the grip of a particularly nasty drought. It was mid-August, but it hadn’t rained in over a month. The air was humid, though, seeming to promise relief that it never delivered.
“Where are you parked?” I asked.
“In the lot behind the building,” Sherry said.
I offered to wait with Kate while Sherry fetched the car, but Kate shook her head.
“It’s okay. I can walk.” I got the distinct impression that she didn’t want to let her mother out of her sight.
When we reached their red Accord in the parking lot, Sherry opened the passenger-side door and helped her daughter into the seat. She was about to close the door when Kate reached out and grabbed my arm.
“Somebody needs to go check. Maybe…maybe I imagined it. Would you go? Please?”
“Go where?”
“The old factory.” Kate’s words came tumbling out in a mad rush. “We were out there with some other kids. Tessa’s dead. At least I think she’s dead, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they just…played a trick on me? People do that sometimes, right?”
“I don’t know, hon. But…sure, I’ll drive out and check.”
Sherry closed the door, and I followed her around to the other side of the car. “Are you okay on your own?” I asked.
“Oh, we’ll be fine. I’ll get her home and see if I can find out anything once she’s calmed down a bit. Honestly, I’ve never seen her like this.” She took a deep breath and shook her head. “Thank you, Ruth.”
“I’ll let you know what I find. Hopefully, it’s just a stupid prank. It wouldn’t be the first time teenagers had a cruel sense of humor.”
I definitely hoped that was the case. Because if it wasn’t, I would need to inform the sheriff’s office, and there would no doubt be a lot of questions. The last thing Kate needed in her current state was to deal with Steve Blevins. He had all the finesse of a sledgehammer.
The sidewalk was mostly empty when I walked back around to Main Street. Most of the stores had closed at nine, with just the theater, the diner, and The Buzz still open, although I was fairly certain that Beatty’s Bar over on James Street was still doing decent business, given that it was Friday night. Downtown looked pretty much the same as any other night. There were more cars than usual at the curb, thanks to the crowd at The Buzz, and a new movie on the marquee down at the theater, which would be closing for the season in another week or so. Different signs in a few of the windows. A flyer for the high school raffle. A poster plastered to a few of the lampposts announcing a revival this weekend. You weren’t supposed to put things on the lampposts, but it was a church, so I doubted anyone would press the issue.
Woodward Mills, the old factory that Kate had mentioned, was nearly a mile outside of town. Had the girl run all that way in this heat? No wonder she was exhausted. I’d never been inside the factory, but I’d driven past many times. I’d also recently uncovered evidence that a young man had been killed in that building back in 1955. It definitely wasn’t really the kind of place I was keen to go exploring. Alone. In the dark. The last time I ventured out to an abandoned building in the middle of the night, only a few months back, I’d been questioning the man who was responsible for another killing. This was feeling a bit like the beginning of a bad habit.
But I’d promised Kate and Sherry. And I supposed there was some chance that it hadn’t been a joke. The girl, Tessa, could be merely injured, not dead. Which meant I couldn’t really put it off until daylight.
I went back into The Buzz to grab my purse and my keys, which I’d forgotten in the confusion. Cassie was behind the bar wiping it down. The coffee rush seemed to be over, and the only people left in the shop were either waiting to speak with Ed or upstairs gaming.
“Looking for this?” Cassie asked, holding up my purse. “I thought you were going with Sherry and Kate, so I was just going to take it home when I closed up.”
“I was going with them, but Kate asked me to run over to the old factory and check something out. Can you let Ed know?”
Dean, who had been clearing off one of the tables, joined us. “Is Kate okay?”
“She seems to be. But she believes Tessa Martin might be dead.”
He looked stunned. “That’s…the dentist’s daughter, right? She’s still in high school!”
“I know. Kate said it might also just be a nasty trick her f
riends were playing on her. I don’t want to call Blevins without checking first. Given our history, he’d likely arrest me for making a false claim if this is just some teenage prank.”
Cassie sighed. “I need to go with her,” she told Dean. “Can you handle this until I get back?”
He held both hands up. “No problem. I’ve got it covered.”
Cassie’s decision to join me was odd, to say the least. She knew about the rather grim history of Woodward Mills. And while I didn’t entirely believe in ghosts, Cassie claimed to see them on occasion. That was the reason she generally steered clear of funeral homes, graveyards, and pretty much anything that had to do with death.
Maybe this was part of her ongoing effort to face her fear. Or maybe she just didn’t want me going alone. We’d had a little discussion a few months back about the fact that my job as a reporter meant that I might have to take risks on occasion. I couldn’t always wait on backup, and sometimes there were things that I simply needed to handle alone. I’d had a very similar conversation with Ed that same evening. I wasn’t willing to take my daughter or anyone else along on an investigation that might be dangerous, but this time I wasn’t confronting a man who might or might not have been a murderer. I was simply checking out a creepy old factory where an accident had possibly occurred.
That building would definitely be slightly less creepy if someone else was along for the ride. So, I didn’t protest. I just asked Dean to tell Ed that I’d meet him at his sister’s house, and we headed for the door.
✰ Chapter Three ✰
Up until the 1970s, Woodward Mills was one of the county’s largest employers, and like many textile factories, most of those jobs were held by women. The mill had produced a variety of different products over the years, but it specialized in towels and sheets. Given the dearth of steady, year-round jobs in Woodward County, both then and now, Samuel Winters, the notoriously tightfisted factory owner, had been able to get away with paying next to nothing.
Lousy pay, combined with Sam’s tendency to sexually harass his workers, did mean the mill churned through workers at a fairly rapid pace, however. Even back in the mid-1980s when I worked at the Thistlewood Star, it was a rare week that we didn’t run a Woodward Mills help wanted ad. Some left for better opportunities, some left in search of a boss who could keep his hands to himself, and others left once they had children and needed more flexible hours. During the decades I lived in Nashville, wave after wave of layoffs hit the factory, and by the time Winters, who was old as dirt even back then, finally decided to close down, it was more of a whimper than a bang.
The building had lain vacant for more than a decade. Winters and his grandson had reportedly been trying to sell it for years. Either there was simply no interest in the property, or even more likely, Sam Winters had an inflated view of exactly how much the place was worth. Either way, it was private property, and there were No Trespassing signs clearly visible from the road. The odds of Kate and her friends actually being here as part of a school-sponsored function seemed almost nonexistent. Even if it was a trash clean-up, that’s not the sort of thing that they’d have been doing after hours on a Friday night.
“So,” I said to Cassie, “as someone who has far more recent experience with being a high schooler than I do, what do you think they were doing out here?”
“Probably drinking. Goofing off. Not that I would have ever, ever done anything like that at their age.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” I said, matching her sarcasm note for note. “You were an absolute angel in high school.”
To be fair, she hadn’t been a bad kid. Now that we’re safely past her teen years, I can even acknowledge that the little bit of teen rebellion she had engaged in was normal and probably even healthy.
“Do you really think Tessa’s dead?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Kate seemed certain of it when she first came running in. But she was doing a very good job of talking herself into the idea that it had all been a nasty practical joke by the time Sherry got her to the car.”
I turned onto the factory driveway in front of a battered sign that read Woodward Mills in large blue letters, with Where Value Meets Quality stenciled in smaller red letters just below. The Jeep’s tires bumped along the rutted path, kicking up the loose gravel. When we reached the front door, I turned my high beams on. The lot was empty, and the front door was padlocked.
“Drive around to the side,” Cassie said. “There’s another entrance.”
I shot her a look. “And you know this how?”
She twisted her mouth to one side. “We spent vacations in Thistlewood, in case you’ve forgotten. I didn’t hang out with you at the house all the time. In fact, you said I should go out. Make friends. And let’s just say that some of the times that my new friends and I said we were going to the movies or into Pigeon Forge…”
I held up my hands. “Okay, okay. Enough details.”
Cassie gave me a grim smile. “If it makes you feel any better, I came here exactly once, because the place gave me a bad vibe.”
“Given that we’re about to walk into that place, I’d have to say no. That doesn’t make me feel better at all. What kind of bad vibe?”
“Nothing specific, but after what you learned earlier this year about that guy dying here, I have a pretty good idea why the place felt…I don’t know…off to me.” She shrugged. “Anyway, there’s a door on the side. Can’t imagine why anyone would come out here tonight, though. It’s too hot. The place has to be like an oven.”
I pulled around to the side as she directed and got out of the Jeep, leaving it running. The high beams lit up the building brilliantly but did little to illuminate anything outside their radius.
“It’s so weird,” Cassie said, pulling out her phone, probably to launch the flashlight app. “We’re what? A mile, maybe, from downtown? But this place feels like the absolute middle of nowhere. And the cell coverage confirms that. Not a single bar.”
Spotty cell coverage had been one of the hardest things for me to adjust to when I moved back to Thistlewood. When I lived in Nashville, my phone had been practically grafted to my hand, and the same was even more true for Cassie. Up here in the mountains, you get pockets with decent connectivity. Walk twenty feet away, however, and it’s a complete dead zone.
“So, they just leave it open?” I asked as we approached the door.
“Nope. There’s a padlock. Except…” She gave me a nervous smile, then tugged downward on the lock, which opened cleanly, without the slightest resistance. “It’s fake. You can buy them for like ten bucks online, but I think this is just an old lock that someone stripped.”
“You have this entire felonious past of which I know nothing,” I told her, shaking my head in wonder.
“Don’t act all surprised like it’s something I inherited from Dad. I seem to recall you and your best friend breaking into Edith Morton’s house not that long ago.”
I sniffed. “I’ll have you know we had a key. And we were returning goods that you pilfered.”
“Fair point,” she admitted.
Cassie’s attempts over the past few minutes to make light of this whole thing evaporated as soon as we stepped inside. She tensed up next to me, and I reached over to squeeze her hand.
“You can wait outside if you want.”
“Ha. Right. I’ve seen enough scary movies to know that separation is a very bad idea. Let’s stick together and get this over with.”
The Jeep’s headlights cast harsh, jagged shadows off the bulky equipment lining the walls near the entrance of the factory. Beyond that, the massive space appeared utterly dark. As my eyes adjusted, however, I began to make out a flickering yellow-orange circle of candlelight, with another misshapen circle just beyond it.
My first thought was that it was highly irresponsible to leave so many candles burning unattended in a mostly wooden building. But that thought was quickly pushed aside by the realization that the odd-looking circle on the other side w
as the body of a girl. Her back was arched so tightly that her feet very nearly touched her head.
I hurried over and stepped across the flickering candles, being careful not to disturb them. The last thing I needed was to start a fire. And blowing them out wasn’t really an option since I needed the light.
Cassie covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh, God. I can’t believe it’s her.”
Although I’d never actually met the girl, I’d seen her with Kate on several occasions at the park or the diner. I knelt down and felt for a pulse. Nothing. Her arm was rigid, but it wasn’t cold yet. That wasn’t too surprising, though. It had to be at least ninety degrees in this building, so the body probably wouldn’t have cooled much even if she’d been here several hours.
“Do you know for certain this is Tessa Martin?” I asked Cassie, so I could give a positive ID when I called 911.
Cassie nodded. “She comes into the bookstore sometimes.”
Forcing myself to look back at the body, I noticed a wooden board peeking out from under the girl’s right shoulder. An image of a smiling full moon and the word YES were printed on the corner that was visible.
A Ouija board.
“Mom?” Cassie said. “Did you hear that? Mom! We need to go. We need to go now.”
There was an edge of panic to her voice, so I didn’t argue, even though I wasn’t sure what she was reacting to. She grabbed my arm as soon as I stepped outside the circle, and we hurried through the darkness toward the glaring light pouring through the open door.
✰ Chapter Four ✰
Once we were outside in the slightly cooler air, I grabbed my phone and tried to dial 911.
“There’s no service,” Cassie said. “Remember? I already tried. Let’s try out front.”
She was right. I was planning to walk, but Cassie had already yanked the passenger door of the Jeep open. So I got behind the wheel and pulled back around to the front of the factory. When I checked the display on my phone, however, we still had zero bars.
