The Ghost Hunter's Daughter

by Caroline Flarity

  She knew she should stop. But this one small piece of floor was going to be clean, completely clean. Anna blew through the roll of paper towels and opened a second one. When she was done the small circumference of concrete gleamed. Anna sat in the clean spot and let herself cry for a few minutes before getting back to work.

  • • •

  It was almost dawn when Anna dragged the last of seven full extra-large garbage bags to the curb in front of the house. She’d made a dent, not a large one, in fact a relatively minuscule one, but at least a dent, in the basement. Anna hadn’t allowed herself to be sentimental; everything at all porous was ruined and would be trashed. The few things she'd saved, like her mother's butterfly pin, would need a thorough disinfecting. Jack had stayed in his room, icing his head, and for that she was grateful.

  The garbage bags on the curb would be picked up later, but the three plastic storage bins she dragged up the basement stairs had salvageable contents. They contained rare books on paranormal phenomena, old case files and even a few tagged objects. Anna decided to drive the plastic bins to the new office, but first she needed to scrub the outside of each one. She went through another full roll of paper towels, and by the time she finished her knuckles bled from the sharp-edged plastic lids. Using every muscle, Anna lifted two of the bins into the trunk of Jack’s sedan. The last bin went in the backseat.

  It was a short drive and she rolled down her window, hoping the late-September air would energize her. The houses of Eden Street were dark and it was dead quiet outside, perfectly still but for the glowing ribbons of green and red that flickered in the sky. Anna turned onto Washington Street, hearing not a single insect, bird, or barking dog, not even the wind, only the sound of her own breath.

  There was a light, though. Anna saw it as she pulled up to the new office. Saul the realtor’s blue SUV was in the driveway and a light was on in Geneva's bedroom. She drove a few houses down from the ranch house and parked. What was Saul Gleason doing in Geneva’s bedroom, especially when she wasn’t even there? Geneva and her hatchback were both ensconced at a Holiday Inn on Route 33. Maybe Saul was checking on the property. Maybe he kept weird hours. Who knew? She did not want to have to explain what she was doing there in the middle of the night without her father.

  The light in Geneva's bedroom shut off, and moments later the front door opened. Anna was relieved to see Saul get into his blue SUV and drive away. She pulled Jack’s sedan into the driveway and spent the next half an hour maneuvering the plastic bins out of the trunk and into the ranch house, not giving Saul’s odd presence too much thought. Anna had her own job to do, and it was a doozy.

  After hauling the last bin into the main office area, Anna allowed herself a few minutes of rest. She sat on one of the new office chairs, surveying the emerging work space that would hopefully reinvigorate the family business. But the house, originally so light and hopeful, radiated a dim gloom. For the first time it occurred to her that the office could fail and ruin Jack for good. Once a flicker of hope the office now felt like another burden, heavy enough to crush them both. Anna drove home with a heavy heart.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Emi Is Operational

  Anna parked Jack’s two-toned sedan next to Geneva’s dented hatchback and trudged back up the pathway of the new office, wincing as the noon sun hit her eyes through the canopy of pines. She was surprised Freddy wasn’t there already, drooling over Geneva’s invention. Then again, a late Freddy was the new normal.

  She’d managed to sleep for a few hours after scrubbing the basement grime off her skin in a hot shower. Anna wanted nothing more than to be back in her bed curled up in her comforter, but she was meeting Geneva and Freddy to continue setting up the work space. If the office ended up as the final blow to Jack’s sinking financial ship, then so be it. For now it was still their only chance. Getting Jack away from his hoard on a regular basis might help salvage the remaining splinters of his sanity, assuming there were any.

  Entering the ranch house Anna didn’t see Geneva, but the large living room still felt crowded. The light streaming through the curtain-less bay windows no longer made the room feel fresh, but it did reveal encrusted dirt on the plastic bins that she’d missed the night before. Anna swore. She didn’t want remnants of the basement cesspool corrupting the new office, but with the bulky plastic bins scattered about, the room bore a faint resemblance to Jack’s Kingdom of Crap. And where was Geneva? Anna dropped her backpack on the drafting table and peeked down the hallway. Geneva’s bedroom door was closed. Anna called Geneva's name, but there was no response.

  She was about to knock on Geneva’s door when a sweet, smoky smell hit her. A sickening chill wrapped around Anna’s spine. Not another fire. She flung the door open, bracing herself for an onslaught of smoke, for the sight of Geneva’s body slumped on the floor, unnaturally still. But Geneva was sitting on the floor next to two boxes of books, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with “Go with the Flow” printed across the front. She held something in her hands, a piece of paper. No, a photograph. A wisp of smoke rose from a small stick that Geneva was pressing into the photograph.

  “Geneva!”

  The woman’s head snapped up. Her eyes flashed with a cold anger and then softened in recognition.

  “What the frig are you doing?” Anna asked.

  Geneva stubbed the stick out in a small metal dish on the floor.

  “Of course, the smoke must be upsetting for you. I'm so sorry.”

  A spicy smell wafted toward Anna along with the last puffs of smoke. It was incense. Geneva really took the whole hippie thing seriously. Then again maybe not, since she appeared to be using it as a weapon of sorts.

  Anna stepped into the room. “What’s going on?”

  Geneva swiped her hands through the ash that had fallen on her jeans, leaving dark smears on the denim above her knees.

  “Not much,” Geneva said. “An old photo fell out of one of my books. It brought back some not-so-happy memories, I guess. I thought I’d cheer the room up a bit with sage, but—” She laughed bitterly. “Well, you saw what happened.”

  Anna wasn’t loving the vibe in Geneva’s bedroom either, despite the yellow paint job that had made it homey and bright only yesterday. It must be the smoke in the air. Would Anna ever smell smoke again without feeling that suffocating dread?

  Geneva tossed the photograph at the small metal pail by the bookcase, but it bounced off the rim and lay face up on the floor. It was a picture of Geneva and a man. Even with half of his face obliterated by the incense, he was clearly handsome, lean and square-jawed with amber-colored hair pulled into a low ponytail. His arm was slung over Geneva’s shoulder as she curled into him, looking radiant, tan and in love.

  Anna couldn’t help but think of Craig. She hadn’t heard from him after abruptly leaving their webcam chat. A pain crept up the back of Anna’s neck and joined the ever-present thudding behind her eyes. What if he was with Sydney somewhere? Anna had an urge to go online and conduct a frenzied investigation into both of their social media accounts. With effort she pulled her thoughts away from Craig. Keep it together, Fagan.

  As far as the photograph Geneva torched, Anna figured that moving on and not asking questions was the kindest option. She sat on the floor next to Geneva and leaned against the bed. Subject-changing time.

  Feigning interest, Anna peeked inside one of the cardboard boxes. “Are these textbooks?”

  “In a way,” Geneva said. “They’re your typical hard science standards. I brought them from my office at Stanford.”

  Anna lifted a few books out of the second box and checked out the titles: The Power of Now, Life after Life, The Seat of the Soul.

  “These, too?”

  Geneva gave her a wry smile. “Oh no, definitely not. Subjects like those are largely ridiculed in academia. They’re from home.”

  “I thought college was about exploring different ideas.”

  Geneva snorted. “Not when it comes to matters of the sou
l. Well, if you’re a theology student, yes, but not in the sciences. It’s ten times worse with the supernatural. Depending on the institution, even bringing up the subject is enough to win the ridicule of your peers, lose precious funding and maybe your career.” Geneva sighed, twirling a lock of blonde hair around her finger. “Things are changing though, slowly, at least in some universities.”

  “But the whole universe is a mystery, right? I mean, we don’t really know what’s out there.” Anna thought about Freddy’s lanky frame bent over his telescope and felt a sharp pang.

  Geneva nodded. “Astrophysics is the exception, a field of study that allows itself a lot of leeway. Long-held theories can be disproved and new theories embraced, much easier than in other sciences.”

  “What kind of theories?”

  Geneva tapped on the floor until it came to her. “Here’s a good one. You’ve heard of the Big Bang, right—the birth of the universe?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, until fairly recently it was widely accepted that the universe was still expanding from the explosive power of the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, an expansion that would eventually slow down due to the force of gravity. But, as it turns out, the universe isn’t slowing down at all. It’s speeding up.”

  Geneva stretched out a leg and used her bare heel to drag the photograph toward her. She crumpled and squeezed it into a smaller and smaller wad, tossing it at the garbage pail again. This time it sailed right in.

  Anna was about to go in for a high five, but a pained expression returned to Geneva’s face.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Anna asked. “About him?”

  Geneva shook her head. “Your dad wouldn’t appreciate me sharing my adult problems with you. It’s inappropriate.”

  “Oh, please. It’s not like I’ve exactly been shielded from the horrors of the world.” She didn’t tell Geneva that Jack had been sneaking around the neighborhood pilfering people’s garbage and was in no position to judge.

  “All I will say is that he cheated on me with a grad student he was mentoring.” Geneva swallowed. “In our home.”

  “Gross. Did you catch them together?” Anna’s cheeks burned. She shouldn’t have asked that. It was none of her business. But Geneva drew into herself again, and she either didn’t hear or ignored Anna’s question.

  “It’s strange because I thought I’d moved past all of it,” Geneva whispered, more to herself than Anna. “I had moved past it.” She pushed the base of her palms into her eyes, either in frustration or to thwart brimming tears.

  Anna wanted to open the window and gulp a lungful of fresh air. But Geneva’s room wasn’t a toxic dumpsite like Jack’s basement. Her eyes darted around the room. Was some thing in there with them? She wanted to flee but couldn’t abandon Geneva in her current state. It was subject-changing time again.

  “Let’s leave that jerk in the trash where he belongs. Tell me more about this universe-speeding-up thing. I’m not sure I get it.”

  “No one does,” Geneva said. “All those great minds?” She kicked at the box of textbooks. “They were wrong. Turns out some invisible force that we don’t understand, previously known as empty space, is pushing the universe out at an increasing rate of speed. They call it Dark Energy. And it’s tearing everything apart.”

  Geneva’s hand went to her right temple, massaging the skin. Her lower lip trembled.

  Panic stirred inside Anna. Was Geneva losing it too?

  “Have you experienced anything strange lately?” Anna asked.

  “Strange how?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe just feeling really off, or like something is harassing you?”

  “What,” Geneva said, “like one of those harmless Tricksters?”

  “Yeah, but not so harmless.”

  Geneva shook her head, looking down.

  “No,” she said softly. “Nothing like that. I think I just need to sit in meditation for a while.”

  The doorbell rang and Anna got to her feet.

  “That must be Freddy. Come say hi when you’re ready.”

  Anna let Freddy in through the front door. He crinkled his nose.

  “Is something burning?”

  • • •

  An hour later, Freddy clicked something into place on Emi. The sound made Anna look up from the files she was sorting just as he pressed Emi’s trigger. The black device shuddered, and a wide beam of blue light shot out of the chamber and onto the drafting table where Anna sat.

  The beam turned the table a pale shade of aqua and revealed a series of flickering, white, hair-like loops that curled around the wiring connected to the printer, laptop and lamp. Surrounding these bow-tie loops of energy was an army of tiny electrical teardrops. These glowing teardrops moved around the magnetic loops as the loops pulsated and shook.

  “EMFs,” Freddy whispered, awestruck.

  Anna stood from the drafting table, hypnotized by the beauty of the charged particles bound to their magnetic tracks. Freddy, too, gaped at the display, his finger tight on the trigger of Geneva’s invention. He pointed Emi up to the light fixtures on the ceiling, exposing the twitching magnetic loops around each bulb, as well as the electric orbs undulating around them. But on the last bulb he scanned, the electromagnetic energy wasn’t looping in a closed figure-eight pattern. As if the bow tie came undone, several loose and wiry magnetic hairs jutted down from the bulbs, thrashing about and throwing electric particles into the air like sparklers on the Fourth of July.

  “Faulty wiring on that one,” Freddy said, clucking his tongue. “We have to tell Geneva!”

  Freddy headed for the hallway with Anna right behind him. They burst, rather rudely, into Geneva’s bedroom. Geneva was sitting on her bed with her legs crossed. Her eyes opened and she regarded them with a mixture of surprise and amusement.

  “Emi works!” Freddy yelled. He pulled the trigger again and Emi’s blue beam roamed around Geneva’s lamp and the overhead light, revealing flickering white loops and radiant particles.

  “Good for you,” Geneva said evenly. She knew exactly what her creation could do. “But take it easy, John Wayne. You’re draining the battery.”

  “Who’s John Wayne?” Freddy asked.

  Geneva laughed. “Never mind.” She turned to Anna. “We should show your dad.”

  “He’s sick,” Anna said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Anna peered at Geneva. The woman seemed brighter and it wasn’t just her mood. She was glowing. No, it was the air around Geneva. It was lighter than the rest of the air in the room.

  “Do you see that?” Anna asked Freddy.

  But Freddy moved Emi’s beam away from Geneva and toward the closet next to the bed.

  “Do you see this?” he said.

  Emi’s beam exposed a gray mist of electrical static hanging in the air. The room was cloaked in it, but it was thicker toward the back wall. Freddy centered Emi’s beam above Geneva’s headboard. There was a hole in the wall above the bed, and a cluster of gray-tinged electromagnetic lightning bolts were shooting out of it in a giant hair ball. Anna made a noise deep in her throat. The bolts were thicker than the white bow-tie loops above the drafting table, and decidedly more ominous. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of the tangled, wiry bolts, and mists of gray static-like particles flew off the ends of each one into the air.

  Geneva scrambled off the bed and stood next to Anna and Freddy, all of them transfixed by what was, moments ago, just a patch of yellow wall. It was as if a giant, electric, thousand-legged spider was climbing out of the hole above Geneva’s bed, legs first, while shooting its choking gray web everywhere.

  Geneva snatched Emi out of Freddy’s hand and turned it off. The bedroom and wall looked perfectly ordinary again.

  “What was that?” Anna asked.

  “Some sort of EMF distortion.” Geneva sounded calm, but her hands were shaking.

  “But there isn’t an electrical source,” Freddy said.

  “We don’t know that f
or sure,” Geneva said sharply. “But I’ve never seen anything like that…thing.”

  “Could there be wiring behind the wall?” Anna asked.

  Geneva frowned. “Even if there were, it wouldn’t explain that heavy electric rain. And I can’t imagine what kind of wiring would generate that large of an EMF.”

  Geneva eyeballed Anna and Freddy with new alarm, as if realizing that she had two minors on her hands while something very unusual was going down. She quickly herded them out of her bedroom. Back in the main office area, Geneva activated Emi and swung the device in a wide arc around the room. The same gray static mist hung in the air, but less densely than in her room.

  “It's everywhere,” Freddy said.

  Geneva had no trace of her former smile. “Honey, you should go home.”

  “But maybe I can help,” he said.

  “I’m sure you can once we have a better idea of what’s going on,” she said, “but for now, I need to let Mr. Fagan know about this situation.”

  Freddy slumped in disappointment.

  “You better call me tonight and tell me what's going on,” he said to Anna as she walked him to the front door.

  Anna bristled. “Chill out. I will.”

  “Yeah, well you've been kinda unreliable lately.”

  The animosity that had been simmering inside of her for much of the last week rose to an instant boil.

  “I have enough going on without your drama. See ya,” she said.

  Anna slammed the door, her adrenaline on overdrive. But she’d been too harsh. She opened the door again, ready to apologize, but Freddy was climbing into Major Tom. He started the engine and music blasted through the windows.

  Anna met Geneva back in her bedroom, and the two of them stood at end of the bed, facing the headboard.

  “I’d feel more comfortable if Jack was here,” Geneva said.

  “That makes one of us.” The last thing Anna wanted was to involve her father.