“Dang …” he said with a touch of awe. “How did it survive up there?”
“It was wrapped up in a bunch of plastic. It’s got some mildew on the corners, but mostly it’s okay.”
“That’s a miracle.”
“A cool miracle.” She opened the cover and showed him the first few pages. “There’s an agent in New York who’s asked to see it. Her dad used to represent Joe, a long time ago.”
They flipped through the pages together for a few minutes, when Denise’s phone buzzed on the table beside her. “It’s … look, it’s my mom. Apparently I have to go back to the house. Or … I get to go back to the house? Sounds like there’s no asbestos. Just filthy garbage … hooray.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“If you’re not afraid of no ghosts, or no probably-not-asbestos … you’re welcome to join me. All they did was run a test they bought at Pete’s. Who knows how reliable it is. It’s not like they hired a professional or anything.”
Norman wasn’t too worried about it. “Everybody has asbestos, around here. If it’s not in the ceiling, it’s in the walls, and if it’s not in the walls, it’s under the floor. You’re lucky if it’s under the floor. Usually those are just tiles. You can break those up, and pull them out yourself.”
She didn’t ask him why people didn’t get the rest of it removed. She already knew why.
Asbestos, old wiring, rusty lead plumbing … if it wasn’t going to kill you right that second, you went ahead and lived with it—just like she and Sally had quietly lived with it, in one of their crappier apartments back in the day. Asbestos and mold had lurked all over the place, but the mom-and-daughter duo knew they wouldn’t be there long. They could ignore it for six months at a time.
You add up enough six-month stretches, and eventually you’ve got years and years of pretending it isn’t there, and figuring that if it was gonna hurt you, it would’ve done it by now. After a while, you forget it was ever there. You forget you were ever worried about it.
But Denise and Sally and Mike couldn’t forget about this one, this time. This time, everything had to be up to code.
Denise and Norman tossed their garbage and started walking, but they didn’t get very far before Dominique joined them. There wasn’t much room on the sidewalk, so Denise and Norman stopped.
Terry came running up behind them. “Hey Denise, Norman. Hi Dominique,” he said, covering all his bases.
Dominique smiled at him. “Hey there, Tee. You doing good?”
“Yeah, just walking home. Or to the nail house, to see if Denise was there.” He flipped a thumb at her. “But I saw y’all walking, so …”
“So come on, and walk with us.” To Denise she said, “Terry told me all about your ghost.”
“I gave her the rundown,” he said modestly. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“Nah. It’s no secret, I guess. Everybody knows that somebody famous died there.”
The rest of the way to Argonne Street, Denise gave Dom a few more details on Joe and his afterlife—with Terry chiming in when he felt the need to elaborate. Dominique didn’t look like she understood the need for laser thermometers, voice recorders, or EMF readers any better than Denise did … but she was game to listen, and she made appropriately impressed noises at all the right times to keep him happy.
Norman, on the other hand, got nerdy about it. “You got a recorder? With real EVPs? I love that stuff on TV.”
“I’ll play them for you, later! Oh wait, Denise!” he interrupted himself. “You were having electrical work done on the house, right?”
“I’m not sure if they’re finished yet or not. Every time I think somebody’s done with something, it turns out I’m wrong.”
“If you ever get a chance, ask an electrician for an EMF reader. Maybe they’ll let you keep one overnight.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with one.”
“I would!”
“Got it: You want me to borrow an expensive piece of equipment so that you can come to my house and play with it.”
He beamed at Dominique. “See? I told you she was kind of smart. She’s going to be a lawyer.”
Norman said, “Sweet! You and me will have to stay in touch. You never know when you’ll need a good lawyer.”
“Why? You planning to go committing any crimes?”
“Like you’ve got to break any laws, in order to need a lawyer.”
Denise nodded approvingly. “I knew I liked you. You get it.”
Dominique laughed a little. “Yeah, my cousin here—he’s all right.”
“Yeah, he is.” Then she said, “You um … you want to come see the house? It’s kind of gross and full of grumpy spirits, but if you wanted to see inside … ?”
“You had me at gross, and lost me at spirits. I don’t do ghosts, man. I leave that stuff to Terry. It freaks me out. But thanks for the invitation, and I’ll take you up on it one of these days … in broad daylight, with all the lights on. Hey, this is where I turn to my street, so I’ll catch you later.”
“Your cousin?” she asked Norman.
“Second or third, if you want to get technical,” he said. “I was going to head over to your place after breakfast, Dom, but do me a favor, would you? Tell Grandma I went to work in the nail house early. Tell her about the ceiling, and that they’re cleaning up. Tell her they need a hand.”
“You real sure? She was hoping you’d swap out her old AC unit today.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” He gave Denise a pained look.
“Don’t worry about it,” Denise told him. “My parents would probably die of embarrassment, if you saw the place right now. It’s pretty bad.”
“I’ve seen worse, but whatever makes you happy.” He gave her a smile followed by a little salute, and walked off with Dom.
Terry waved good-bye, and Denise threw them a head-nod that was supposed to look cool, but probably looked like a spasm.
Terry left her at the next block, because ghosts or none … he had no great desire to wade through the ceiling garbage. Not even for Lucida Might. Denise didn’t blame him.
It was only one more block to the house, so she walked it in summer heat that was absolutely choking. “Sunscreen. I need sunscreen,” she muttered to herself, feeling the back of her neck turning pink. “Better yet, a parasol.”
Her sunglasses had a crack on the right lens, but they were cheap and she hadn’t expected much from them in the first place. She rubbed them on her shirt to clean them off, and mostly got them even sweatier. She gave up and stuffed them into her bag, just in time to step into the shade of the rickety porch with its weird baby blue underside that her mom called “haint blue,” though Denise didn’t know what that meant. Something about good luck, or keeping bad spirits out.
It obviously didn’t work.
She glared at the house and said, “All right, Joe. Just so you know … if it comes down to you or us … you’re the one who’s outta here.”
Nothing in the house responded, so she stomped up the first two stairs … and tiptoed up the next two, remembering what had happened to Mike. In the porch floor the hole was still there, wide and ragged, but covered with plywood and a handwritten warning sign that said HOLE IN FLOOR. In case anybody came to the house and didn’t know already.
The door was only sort of locked, with a dead bolt that was set—but a broken sidelight through which any idiot could just stick her hand and unlock it. The sidelight was supposed to be fixed by now, but so were a lot of other things.
Denise used her key, anyway.
This time, the note on the dining room table said that Sally and Mike were at the bank, signing off on some paperwork that would release more of the mortgage money. Apparently the plumbing was officially good to go.
One of the electricians was still present, packing up his bag. He was a short white guy, round faced and blond. He had a crack at the back of his shorts that Denise tried not to stare at. “Oh, hi ther
e,” he said when he realized she was present. “Don’t mind me, I’m just wrapping up.”
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“Got a late start, after your parents cleaned up most of the ceiling insulation, but we’re getting there. These old houses, man. They’ll eat you alive, won’t they?”
She wasn’t sure if that was a joke or if she was supposed to laugh, so she just gave him a weird look until he cleared his throat and continued.
“I’ve got the new circuit boxes coming tomorrow, and then I’ll be ready to finish the rest—probably within a couple of days. I know it seems like it’s taking forever, but we’ll be done soon. Listen, I’m gonna leave this stuff here, rather than haul it all to the truck, okay? I’ll be back first thing in the morning.”
Denise silently thanked God that Terry wasn’t there to explode like a fistful of nerdy confetti. “Go for it. No one will bother them.” She had gotten an idea. She stood still and listened as he drove away.
Denise didn’t want to steal any of his tools, but maybe she’d borrow one. She realized she didn’t have the faintest idea what an EMF reader looked like, so she pulled out her phone to google them.
“Okay,” Denise said to herself. “I can find that.”
It was red, with a little window on top and a needle that moved back and forth. Now she just needed to know how to use it. For a second she thought about calling Terry. Then she thought no, this was her house. She could do a little ghost-hunting on her own.
How hard could it be?
She ran a quick search on how to use the EMF reader, but that got real complicated, real fast. So she narrowed the search to “using an EMF reader to look for ghosts” and turned up some helpful sites with terrible graphics. One had a cackling skeleton GIF that rocked back and forth. One had some bats that flew out of a window. It was all tacky Halloween stuff, circa 2003.
But the information looked legit.
She flipped a switch on the side, and the little yellow light behind the needle lit up. The needle bobbed back and forth along a scale of “mG,” with a range from zero to fifty. It settled around the left-hand side, barely registering 1 mG, whatever an mG was supposed to stand for.
According to the most promising website she found on the fly, anything between 2 and 7 (without an obvious electrical source) might indicate a paranormal presence. Appliances ought to read much higher, from maybe 10 to 30 mG. You were supposed to take test readings around your TV, microwave, and maybe your electrical outlets.
She turned in a circle, and the thin blue needle bobbed across the red scale, lifting off the “1” position and wobbling. There was no TV to check, and Denise didn’t know how long it would be before her parents got home, so she didn’t bother testing for a baseline.
She just dove in.
“All right, spirits.” She cleared her throat. The meter’s needle didn’t move, so she moved instead, slowly circling the dining room. “I know there are two of you. Joe Vaughn, I think you died here. Are you the one who’s been trying to hurt us?”
She didn’t know why she was talking out loud. It wasn’t like she was holding a voice recorder, but what else was she going to do?
“Come on, Joe,” she added under her breath. “Talk to me. Why do you want to chase us out of the house? Or if you don’t want to talk … um … lady ghost? Are you there? I think you helped my mom yesterday. I think you’re trying to protect us. Was this your house?”
The needle twitched.
She thought maybe it twitched when she was facing the parlor, but she wasn’t sure—so she went that direction and got another twitch in the hallway. A big spike, up to about 8, then it settled down around 7. She turned to the living room, and the needle dropped again. Another turn, and there was another bump—one that stabilized around 11—when she stood in the parlor doorway.
“Got it. It’s like … playing hot and cold.”
It had to be. There weren’t any electronic devices anywhere in the parlor—not even power tools, switched off. All of those were stashed around the living room and the back of the kitchen.
“Seven is supposed to be high …” she said to herself. “Eleven has to be even better, right? Even more … electromagneticky?”
One careful foot at a time, she crept into the parlor and swung the EMF reader slowly one way, then slowly the next. A couple of lights blipped, and the needle jerked—all the way up to 16.
“Is that … good? Is there someone here with me?” She wasn’t shaking, not exactly, but it was hard to hold the meter steady when her hands were so sweaty and she was looking up and down, back and forth between the room at large and the device she was holding. “If there’s anybody here, please be a nice old lady. The kind who wears flowery perfume, and doesn’t try to scare anybody. Please don’t be a mean man. Joe … you weren’t mean, were you? You wrote a cool comic, about a cool girl detective. Maybe I’m talking to somebody else.”
Her voice wasn’t exactly shaking, but it didn’t sound steady, either. Not even to her.
“Hello?”
She thought she smelled flowers. Expensive soap, or a funeral bouquet.
“Hello, is someone there?”
She followed the scent, and she followed the bouncing EMF needle. It shook and leaned, farther and farther to the right, as Denise grew closer and closer to the fireplace. An alert buzzer went off, and Denise leaped like she’d been snakebit. She dropped the reader and let it lie where it fell, its needle straining to burst through the little window.
It wanted her to look in the fireplace.
The fireplace was not quite a ruin. Its mantel was intact, if dusty, and the tiles that surrounded it were a pretty shade of turquoise blue, mottled with gold. Across the opening where a fire ought to go, a cast-iron cap was fixed. Mike had told her it was called a “summer cap,” and they used to put them over the fireplace when it wasn’t being used—to keep birds and mice from coming down the chimney. It was decorated with a fleur-de-lis and some scrollwork, and it looked a little bit thin and rusty.
If she touched it, it might crumble to dust.
She touched it anyway. It didn’t crumble, but it creaked a little. There was a knob in the center, and one on the bottom. They were handles, or so she figured out real quick when she gripped them. She crouched, lifted with her legs, and wiggled the cap loose, then pulled it away. It smacked down hard on the floor—it was a lot heavier than it looked.
She let it lie down flat. It rocked back and forth, and stopped with a groan.
Inside the fireplace there was darkness and soot, swirling in soft, black poofs—disturbed by the cap’s removal. When the soot settled, she saw naked bricks with crumbling mortar. She smelled flowers. She heard a whisper, coming from somewhere up inside.
Denise fumbled for her phone. She pulled it out and found the flashlight app, then turned the phone upside down. She slipped it inside the recess, and shined it around. More brick. A large chunk of fallen stone or something, up above. It dangled down into view, almost.
Keep looking.
Her head shot up so fast, she clocked it on the underside of the mantel. Not hard enough to see stars, but hard enough to make her eyes water. She rubbed at the back of her head with her free hand. She asked aloud, “Is somebody here … ?”
Then she saw it: around the fallen chunk of brick, or stone, or whatever it was. Something hung there, just on the other side of it. There was a little hole, big enough for a hand. A lady’s hand. Denise’s hand. She held her breath and reached inside, trying not to touch anything. Still touching everything. It all felt like gravel and dead bugs and sand and dust. It felt like paper.
Paper? Kind of.
She wrapped her fingers around something brittle and pulled it out. It was waxed paper, and it was wrapped around something, secured with an old rubber band. She tried to unstretch the rubber band but it snapped off and fell to pieces.
She tucked her phone under her armpit, unfolded the waxed paper, and found a small cache of folded,
yellowed letters.
The first one had brown stains all along the seams, where mildew had worked its way past the butcher paper that’d been used to protect it. She straightened it out between her palms.
I really wish you would reconsider. The CCA won’t last forever (I don’t believe it CAN), and you told me you weren’t finished yet—you said you had a dozen more LM stories, bubbling on your back burner. You’re just going to drop it like this? Let it all go up in smoke, because some pencil-pusher made some rules you don’t like? You’re bigger than that. LM is bigger than that! People still love her, and want to read more. You’re cutting off your nose, to spite your face. You can fight the power from the inside.
Maybe we should talk about licensing. LM can live on, maybe in film—maybe a cartoon, wouldn’t that be something? So the TV show didn’t pan out, big deal! TV shows fail all the time, and that doesn’t mean they weren’t great, or that nobody loved them. It just means Hollywood is a crapshoot, even worse than comics.
You could try something different. You could take LM a new direction, maybe get her and DF married off at long last, and that would take the edge off the CCA complaints. You could even make the little putz the hero once in a while. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, and it wouldn’t be the end of Lucida Might.
Please, talk to me. Call me, for God’s sake. Stop avoiding me. Stop avoiding this.
It was signed “Marty.”
“Marty.” Marty Robbins, the agent. There was a second letter, hidden behind the pages of the first. It was falling apart, but Denise put the pieces back into place and smoothed them out flat on the floor, so she could read it. It looked like Joe’s reply.
I wish I could say I believed you, about the CCA — but we both know how the world works, and we know they’re here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. By the time that foul organization follows the dodo into the great beyond, it’ll be too late for me. It’s already too late for Lucida Might.
The Agony House Page 14
