by E M Kaplan
A man’s voice, less inebriated, said, “Hush now. I don’t want anything.”
Waitaminute.
Josie lunged for the tape player and knocked her root beer bottle over, splashing the boombox. The voices were on the recording, way at the end of the tape. She’d left the tape playing while she’d been sorting through the file.
Frantic, she grabbed a t-shirt off the top of her laundry pile and sopped up the spilled soda, trying to keep the sticky puddle from ruining the tape player.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know who I am,” Mary Clare said.
“No, don’t hit me. Settle down now.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be.”
“You’re you, honey. You don’t need to be anything.”
“But I do. I can’t be nothing.”
“You’re the woman I married, sweetheart.”
“I’m not her. She’s nothing.” There was a pause. “What are you doing?”
“I’m just recording this a little, so you can hear yourself tomorrow.”
“Why would I want to do that? I already know what I sound like.”
“No, honey, so you know how bad you get. So maybe you’ll get some help.”
“I don’t need any help. I’m fine. You’re all I need. Just kiss me.”
Josie waited through some ambient noises. Some shifting and light shuffling, but not much else. Maybe they had stopped talking to make love. Maybe, as drunk as she was, she had passed out. She hoped Billy would come back to the tape recorder and explain what he’d wanted to capture, what he witnessed, what he wanted to prove to his wife.
But the tape ended there.
Part 3: Flame
Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material like wood, paper, charcoal briquettes, a marshmallow, or the family home in the chemical process or reaction of combustion. The flame is what we see during the ignition point of the reaction.
Little bit dry, right? Forgive the pun.
Let’s think of it the way the Ancient Greeks did.
Thank you, Prometheus, for stealing the flames from Mount Olympus to give us the means of searing our ribeye steaks, powering our combustion engines, putting that lovely golden crackle on our creme brûlées, and covering our tracks when the evidence must be destroyed.
—Josie Tucker, Will Blog for Food
Chapter 21
As Josie sat stock-still and shocked with her sticky t-shirt clutched in her hand, root beer dripped off the night table and onto the hotel carpet. Drops hit a soggy, apricot-sized stain on the carpet with a pit pit pit sound like carbonated, sucrose-filled Chinese water torture.
“Oh crap.”
She dove for the brown bottle, which had wobbled and gone over again while she’d been trying to clean off the tape player. Another small pool had collected under the tape player again. She sent up a frantic prayer to the god of small electronics that she hadn’t destroyed it, like a WALL-E robot deity in the sky. Samsung-ishna. Then she cringed, hoping her religious bastardization wouldn’t get her struck by a bolt of lightning through her hotel window. Not that she was superstitious. Much.
“Please don’t be broken. Please don’t be ruined.”
With frantic dabs, she cleaned up the table, floor, and Manny’s sacred boombox. Her stomach plunged in trepidation. Could she have broken it? She didn’t want to think about it. Not poor Gary. Not now. Not yet.
When she’d soaked all the soda up, she retrieved a damp cloth from the bathroom and cleaned up the rest of the syrup. When she lifted the tape player, however, more root beer dripped out from the bottom.
“No, no, no.”
Heart pounding, she pressed the Play button, but nothing happened. Then she remembered the tape had played to the end, so she pressed Rewind. Nothing. Maybe rewinding didn’t work on this player, although Gary hadn’t mentioned that. Surely Manny had kept it in perfect working order since he loved it so much.
Pressing Eject successfully popped the tape out, but that didn’t require anything electrical—the button just pushed open the tape door. She slid out the cassette. Maybe if she played the other side.
That’s how these stupid things work, right? A side and B side.
It had been so long since she’d used a boombox—high school, maybe?—she started to question herself, thanks to her panic. But she pulled herself together, inserted the tape, flipped over, shut the door, and pressed Play again.
Nothing.
Her stomach twisted in a knot. She and Gary were dead meat.
“Okay, let’s think this through.”
While she was freaking out, she retreated into the bathroom to rinse out her soda-soaked t-shirt while she tried to figure out how to salvage this screw up. She had about fifteen minutes until Lizzie was coming to pick her up. Fifteen minutes to repair this situation and to save a life.
The water came on cold, which was good for stains, wasn’t it? Her spoiled t-shirt was a Def Leppard one, so she didn’t feel so bad. Their song about pouring some sugar on someone popped into her head and a half-hysterical giggle escaped from her throat. But how could she laugh at a time like this when Gary’s life was on the line?
Never mind that she was stunned by what she’d heard on the tape.
Was Mary Clare an addict? An alcoholic? Maybe. Emotionally troubled? Definitely, which might have been coupled with some kind of substance use. The slurred voice was in sharp contrast to the calm, smoky tone of the greeting at the beginning of the tape. Was there a deeply troubled woman behind the façade of the socialite and former beauty queen?
Josie had to listen to the tape again, just to confirm she wasn’t making things up in her mind. Had she really heard all that?
She hung up her shirt to dry on the towel bar in the shower and returned to the other room to retrieve the tape off the bedside table. Maybe the boombox just needed to dry out, like how she’d dropped her phone in the sink one day and needed to let it sit overnight in a bowl of uncooked rice…Unfortunately, she didn’t have that kind of time. She had ten minutes—nine to be exact now.
With a growl of frustration, she yanked open the drawer of the desk and caught the hotel pen that rolled toward her over the monogrammed notepad. Just what she needed, a manual rewind button. Old-school style. She gently wedged the end of the pen into one of the cassette tape holes and unwound the tape—after she figured out which way to turn it—going slowly so she didn’t create any gaps or folds in the fragile strip. She’d be even worse off if she damaged Skip’s tape.
Carefully, she again lifted the tape player and went over it with the damp towel, catching any drops that came from its plastic seams and screw holes. When she opened the battery compartment, she was relieved to find it dry and free of root beer. She slid the tape back into the slot, pressed the door shut, crossed her fingers, and pressed Play.
She almost cried with relief when the gears inside the player started whirling, winding the tape ahead. Whew. Not broken. She’d freaked herself out over a flaky old appliance—the boombox had been fine. However, her jumpy nerves were messing with her. She’d rewound the tape to a blank spot before the voices came back on, but rather than risk screwing things up again with more button pressing, she let it play through the silence until the voices came back.
Mary Clare, slurred and pleading. Billy placating and…tender.
The recording showed a true devotion between the pair, and possibly an unhealthy co-dependency as well. Josie was no counselor, but the heightened emotion in Billy’s and Mary Clare’s voices made even her cold, shriveled heart hurt just a bit.
Her phone rang just as she finished listening all the way through the second time. She let the tape run as she fumbled for her phone.
Lizzie, sounding a bit breathless, said, “I’m running about forty-five minutes late. I’m so sorry, but I’m still coming. I was babysitting my nieces and my sister didn’t get home until just now. I’m going to swing by the storage unit and pick up some equipment, but I’ll meet yo
u downstairs at 10:45. I’m super stoked about this. So don’t worry. I’m on my way.”
Glancing at the clock on the night table, Josie discovered it was past ten now. Time had flown while she’d been panicking. Where the heck was Drew? She bit her lip. At this rate, she was going to have to leave him a message explaining where she was. Not good.
Face to face would have been so much better, but what were her options now? Could she scribble some cryptic message on the hotel insignia notepad and hope he didn’t get ticked off at her? Ugh.
“No worries,” she told Lizzie, making sure her voice was strong and upbeat because, for Pete’s sake, she was an adult and could figure this out. “Don’t even park. I’ll be waiting for you at the curb.”
#
In the end, Josie only half faced up to her fear about telling Drew where she was going and texted him. She had wrestled with the idea of calling him, but convinced herself it was okay to message him because he was still at the movie theater. So maybe she was a big chicken and texting him was giving herself a convenient out. And so what if he was with a bunch of medical professionals who were probably all used to getting inconvenient phone calls and random butt-buzzing muted alerts in their pockets? She didn’t want to annoy him if he was relaxing and having a good time.
Josie: Hey I need to go out so I might not be here when u get back
After a couple minutes of silence in which she tapped her foot and drummed her fingers on the desk, he texted back.
Drew: Whats up
Josie: Meeting a new friend to follow up on something I found out
She waited in low-key agony after that, not sure if he was cursing or if he’d stopped looking at his phone to order more beer, or what. She paced the short length of the room and then sat on the edge of the bed again.
Drew: Who died
Josie: Um
In the next pause, she knew for sure he was muttering to himself under his breath.
Drew: Ur serious
Josie: Yeah I am tbh
To be honest. And she was being honest. Mostly. She was trying to be, at least. It just didn’t come naturally to her. In time, it would probably come with practice. The trick was to keep practicing facing the truth. And she would, if it weren’t so darned hard.
Another long, drawn-out pause made her wish she hadn’t eaten anything earlier. She was having heart palpitations, though the brownie probably had less to do with the discomfort in her chest and stomach than her anxiety. But she was right to tell him, she knew. Even though it was hard for her to be open and communicative. She would much rather just go and do, not stop and talk about it.
Drew: Im sighing rn
Josie: I know I’m sorry
Drew: It’s ok just b careful and now I might need another beer
Josie: Just don't drive
Drew: Ur telling me to b careful now
Josie: Now Im sighing
Drew: Don’t worry I’ll get a cab or something
She wanted to say she was sorry again, but she didn’t think it would make the situation better. What was she doing here? Aggravating him with her constant need to meddle in other people’s business and sticking her neck out, getting into potential sticky situations. He’d said he understood this was a part of her…but she wasn’t sure if he really accepted it. She needed to talk with him about it, or at least stop moving away from him when she wanted to tie them tighter together.
She wanted this trip to end with an engagement, but she seemed to be making the wrong choices for that to happen. She just didn’t have time to stop and fix it right now. But she would.
Just soon as she got back from tromping through Billy Blake’s haunted house with Lizzie.
Chapter 22
“Okay, so here’s the deal,” Lizzie said, making room for Josie in the passenger seat next to her. “Billy’s house isn’t on the market yet because it’s not ready. I mean, he pretty much just decided to do this, spur of the moment, and hired my cousin because he didn’t know where to start. It was a total coup for her—the notoriety and the potential six percent fee, even if she has to split it with the buyer’s agent. A lot of other agents were kind of pissed off they didn’t get hired for this, but it’s going to be a lot of work—no joke.
“The house still has a lot of personal effects in it, and it needs fresh paint and new carpet and to be staged. You know, made all pretty for the website photos and the open house days. All the personal effects put away. All the counter surfaces cleaned off. Cozy seating areas set up. Beds all made with too many pillows. And since this house is so pricy, my cousin is getting a professional home stager to come and do it up right.”
Josie’s young ghostbuster friend had thrown a shoulder bag and some other miscellaneous papers into the backseat of her older model Pathfinder. The SUV was maybe a 2006 from when they’d gotten big again, Josie guessed. Her great uncle’s car obsession had left its mark on her during her high school years and now she’d couldn't not pay attention to them. As she used the oh crap bar to hoist herself up, she realized it kind of kept him close in her thoughts even though he was physically far away. She looked into the seat behind them. Lizzie had the thing packed full of junk.
What the heck is all this junk?
Black plastic garbage bags. Bright orange construction buckets filled with tools and…paper towels. A mop. Some Pine-Sol. Were they ghost hunting or house cleaning? Would they be encountering ectoplasm goo? Did she need a smock? She hadn’t been told to wear any type of protective clothing.
She glanced at her cohort for the evening. Other than the glint of the diamond stud in Lizzie’s nose, she wore all dark colors. If Josie had to give her look a name, it was Neo Goth Burglar Ghost Hunter. Josie didn’t know if the dark colors were for sneaking around in the dark or just Lizzie’s personal fashion sense. So far, she had seen her only in black and purple, but Josie hoped she knew what she was doing, that it was more of a uniform than a style. Misgivings zinged through her stomach.
“Is it good or bad that their things are still in the house?” she asked.
She knew what home staging was—she’d watched some home improvement TV shows like Hovel To Home and Apartment Bling when she’d been hanging out on her couch dealing with her testy stomach. Okay, so she’d been addicted to some of them. However, she didn’t know if a cluttered house was better for ghosts. As far as she was concerned, seeing some of Billy’s natural habitat and his belongings, and possibly some of Mary Clare’s, too, was a good thing. More of a mess meant more potential clues. Somewhere, something had to tell the story of what had happened to the woman.
“Neither empty nor populated for paranormal investigations. I’ve heard stories of empty homes being chock-a-block full of restless spirits, as well as spirits following items to the auction house. In our case with Billy Blake’s house, it just means that the owner’s possessions are still inside and so if we get caught in there, we’re kind of on the wrong side of the law, if you know what I mean.”
Josie muddled this over for about three seconds. “So you’re saying it’s not breaking and entering necessarily? But definitely trespassing, and if anything ends up missing or broken, it’s our necks on the block?”
Crap. She wondered how fast she could track down a lawyer if she needed one. Of all the stupid situations she’d gotten herself into in her life, this was one she’d never been forced to test. Yet. Maybe Greta Williams, whom she hadn’t called yet to see what she knew about Bunny Rogers, also knew a good lawyer.
Who am I kidding? Greta probably owns her own fleet of lawyers. Keeps ‘em in her closet in racks right next to her Kate Spade shoes. Or in her garage in the bay next to her Bentley.
Josie conjured up the image of a cluster of men and women in dark suits with briefcases sitting in a clump in Greta’s multi-car garage out in the suburbs of Massachusetts.
Lizzie broke into her thoughts, saying, “Yeah, and also my cousin will deny any knowledge of us being there if we do. She is a career woman with her whole f
uture in real estate ahead of her, and she will leave our asses out in the cold, if it comes right down to it. Are you okay with that?” She cast her a side-eyed glance through her mascara as she drove westward out of town, the moon shining down on the road in front of them.
Josie watched the light reflect off Lake Austin and the big, swooping semi-circle bridge over it. Penny-something Bridge. Pennybacker? Pennybaker? Lizzie had called it the 360 Bridge, and it had taken Josie a minute or two before she realized that the bridge, despite being a semi-circular swoop rising above the water, was not 360 degrees, but that the road was Highway 360. Seemed like a little bit of a letdown. Though it was pretty, she’d been hoping for a big bubble of a bridge.
“We’ll be careful,” Josie said, though she wasn’t a hundred percent sure if she was capable of exercising caution. Her skepticism extended to almost every other aspect of her life. But how often did she say things she didn’t mean, only to find out that she did mean them after all?
She’d proven her rhino-in-a-china-shop tendencies many times in the past—not so much physical as social. Her blunders were renowned, the tales of which were often retold by her small group of friends. But who was to say this time would be like the others?
Okay, that sounded like a lame argument even in her own mind. She shored up her confidence, screwed her courage to the sticking place, as Lady Macbeth put it, though Josie’s was attached more by chewing gum and Elmer’s glue than strength of will. Yes, this evening, she was going to make a supreme effort not to wind up in jail. Or the hospital.
In less than an hour, they reached the neighborhood the Blake house was in. Thanks to the late hour, they didn’t find much traffic on the roads. By the time they reached the far west suburb where Billy’s house was, all traffic had dwindled to just the occasional Range Rover or Lincoln SUV.
