Moody & The Ghost - Books 1-4 (Moody Mysteries)

by Kim Hornsby

  “I’m sure her no-good daughter poisoned her, or worse,” Rachel said. “Mrs. G told me that they were fighting, and it got pretty bad. I have a feeling, but I’d like you to come by, see if Mrs. G wants to say something from the other side.”

  My mother had no idea I was broken. I hadn’t told anyone that my abilities had left me like a cheating husband’s wife. No one except Eve and Carlos. “Maybe tomorrow.” Appeasing my mother today wasn’t on my to-do list. If the police suspected homicide, they’d investigate. Also, I had good reason to ignore my mother’s plea for paranormal assistance at Mrs. G’s house.

  My whole life Rachel had used me like sending a canary into a coal mine to test the air quality. The ability she didn’t have and wanted was mine, something I often thought of as a curse when she’d take my barely adolescent self to haunted houses and leave me in the dead of night to find out what the ghost wanted. This is basically how she financed our life. We never had much but we usually had a roof over our heads, even if the roof sometimes belonged to one of the Primrose Clan. Then she discovered rich older men and our quality of life improved greatly.

  Becoming a hired paranormal investigator in the last eight years was so much more credible than what my mother had me doing in place of attending high school. During one of our many knock-down, drag-out verbal battles in my adolescence, she’d once said, “At least I’m not making you turn tricks.” I remembered storming from the room that day, knowing my mother would never be normal and because of that, I had a slim chance of turning out well.

  She’d always been beautiful, like a movie star from the fifties, with her dark hair and bright blue eyes. But, in direct opposition to her lovely visage, Rachel swore like a sailor and married men for their money then divorced them faster than you could say, “Too bad there was no pre-nup.”

  I set to work on my laptop, feeling determined to do something that counted, besides inheriting a house that someone else worked hard to build, or buy, and maybe maintain. Just because I’d been raised a moocher, I wasn’t without a sense of contributing. I was probably more aware of pulling my own weight because of all the favors I’d been granted in my twenty-eight years.

  With screen reader software, a lovely female voice told me I’d reached my site online. After typing in my search, I listened to the woman inform me that the deed to the house on Smuggler’s Cove was recorded at the Clatsop County Office. And according to the voice, the house was now owned by Bryndle Clementine Moody. Me.

  How the hell did Belinda McMahon get my middle name? I never told anyone that abomination. I owned the house before I’d even signed the deed. Was that legal?

  An email notification pinged on my laptop. It was from the lawyer. My first thought was that he’d written to say there’d been a mistake and the house was supposed to go to someone else named Bryndle Clementine Moody. But, no. The soft voice I thought of as Moneypenny read me the email.

  I was instructed to send you this email one hour after you left our offices. It’s from my client, Mrs. Belinda McMahon.

  Dear Mrs. Moody:

  I am trusting to you my most valuable legacy, knowing that your life has been based in paranormal experiences that many pass off as fabricated stories. I believe in your talent.

  Cove House is blissfully haunted, and I want to leave this grand old lady to someone who will appreciate its many qualities.

  It is with great joy I pass along my home to you. There’s only one other request beyond keeping it for five years, and that is that you do an investigation. What you will find in Cove House might surprise you.

  I’m counting on your expertise and generosity to help the ghost.

  Sincerely,

  Belinda McMahon

  There was a catch! I knew it. But an extremely good one, it seemed. I’d inherited my own ghost. Today felt like Christmas, with me getting the best toy ever imagined. My heart pounded in my chest and I felt like punching the air in enthusiasm. What did blissfully haunted mean? I wasn’t sure what to make of the letter, but the prospect of a ghost investigation where no one was hanging over my shoulder waiting for a report was appealing to me. In my business there’s always a client, and demands, and a time frame, and sometimes disappointment.

  Even though the house was mine, Belinda McMahon felt marginally like a client, but because she was dead, time wasn’t a factor. Nor would there be disappointment at not finding a ghost. Occasionally, a client expected more ghost action besides me just sensing occupation and telling the ghost to move on. Some clients wanted to see the ghost themselves and I had to explain to them it didn’t work that way unless they were psychic. Only a select few got to see ghosts. Not even Carlos and Eve were lucky enough to get in on the action, most times. Eve was on the verge of tapping into her inherited talent and I was trying to speed that process along. Carlos had the standard five senses. These days, I was down to five myself, possibly four, if my clairvoyance didn’t kick in soon.

  I texted Eve, who was twenty steps away in her bedroom, to tell her our exciting news about inheriting a house that was haunted and was now a hundred times more interesting. A thousand times.

  Even if it was a two hundred square foot trailer, I owned a ghost.

  Eve emerged from the other part of Floatville, the area with two bedrooms and a bathroom. “I knew it!” She sounded as excited as I felt. “Now we have two haunts,” Eve said.

  We’d recently been given the go-ahead on a restaurant investigation east of Seattle. The owner had emailed me about setting up the date to explore his haunted restaurant and I was excited at the prospect of gently working my way back to the land of the unliving. My calling card in the paranormal industry, if you can call a bunch of mediums and psychics an industry, is that I hold the honor of being the only ghost hunter who has ever captured a clear image of a moving ghost on video. A stroke of timely luck. The footage of a white apparition crossing a room in a Seattle warehouse went viral last year. It’s five seconds of ground-breaking video. Non-believers said the tape was fake, that it had been doctored, but believers knew it hadn’t. I was used to skepticism.

  “Which place shall we investigate first?” Eve asked.

  I hadn’t felt anything telepathic since the accident and hoped it was because I’d been blocked by grief. For five months we’d been referring cases to another ghost hunter in Washington State, but now I felt ready to get an investigation on our books and uploaded. “Maybe The Eatery in Roslyn,” I said to Eve. Our new case was a small restaurant less than two hours from Seattle in a town called Roslyn where a famous TV show was filmed in the 90’s because the town resembles Alaska. The restaurant had a resident ghost—a female spirit that had been seen several times. I’d taken the case knowing it was a slam dunk for a skittish rider getting back on the horse and was hopeful we’d be able to help The Eatery’s owner, Jim.

  Although visiting haunted houses wasn’t financially lucrative, our show on YouTube was and we needed to get product online after so much time of nothingness. Having a ton of subscribers on YouTube allowed me to pay two employees a decent wage only because I had sponsors and clicks and everything you need to get money on YouTube.

  When I’d decided to take The Eatery case, I was sure the haunted restaurant would produce something wonderful and had been cautiously hopeful. But, having inherited a haunted house in the opposite direction, I was torn between two haunts now. Although Mrs. McMahon’s letter was ambiguous, I was thinking that exploring my inherited house could be my psychic litmus test with no client watching me. It was an opportunity for me to see if what Carlos called my “loco mojo” was still alive. “First on the list, we’ll check out the Oregon house with no formal investigation, then head off to The Eatery, see what that ghost has to say,” I said.

  It was with a glimmer of hope that I emailed Carlos to tell him my news of the inheritance and invite him to road trip to Oregon’s wild coast tomorrow. I would figuratively look at my inherited property and if I felt the presence of a ghost, I’d be farther a
head than I was today. If I didn’t feel anything, I’d deal with that at the time. Even if my inner sight had gone AWOL, Eve could handle things in Roslyn. Her abilities, although undeveloped, were strong enough in a situation where the ghost had appeared multiple times. She and I would play that one by ear having already discussed working in tandem to make it look like it was business as usual for Moody. Nothing wrong here, folks.

  Carlos would film me lying my face off about feeling a ghost.

  Chapter 3

  On the drive to the Oregon coast, Carlos and Eve talked non-stop for the first hour. This was something I was used to, their compatibility, their shared experiences and friends. My two team members had dated briefly in college before they discovered they drove each other crazy when they were around each other long-term, as a couple. Their breakup had been amicable after only two months and a year ago when I’d asked Eve to find me someone with knowledge of how to use all the gear that was needed to measure paranormal activity, she’d suggested Carlos. He was a techie and what my family called “a believer” so when I’d told him the role he’d play in the grand scheme of Moody Investigations, he was all in.

  “Very cool stuff,” he’d said examining the equipment with a wide grin. “I love filming.” Supplementing his income from an audio-visual part-time job at a high school, he was available to me nights between midnight and dawn and had jumped at the opportunity to investigate ghosts. “Muy creepy,” he’d said in his half-English, half-Spanish way. Carlos was Mexican and into that Day of the Dead philosophy, so Eve and I knew he wouldn’t mock us or wonder if he needed to call the men in white coats when we started channeling spirits.

  Before leaving Floatville that morning, Eve had found what she believed to be my new house on Google Earth. I overheard Eve telling Carlos that the lot was isolated from the town and beach and every other tourist establishment that makes up the wild and wonderful Oregon Coast. “The property is ocean front,” she’d said excitedly. “And if this is the place, it’s not exactly a double-wide trailer, Bryn.”

  I didn’t ask what she meant. We’d be there soon enough. Eve might have meant it was worse than a double-wide. I didn’t know.

  On the drive through Washington towards Oregon, Carlos and Eve kept a running narrative going of what they saw out the window, something I found touching. And helpful. I encouraged them to do this, all day, every day. Like I’d also encouraged them to wear cologne to keep track of their whereabouts. It all helped me picture what I was missing. If I smelled a light floral scent Eve said was called “Happy,” and heard the footsteps of a ninety-five-pound person, it was Eve. When the footsteps were heavier, and I smelled Eau Sauvage, I was sure Carlos was close. He wore Nike running shoes which were harder to hear than Eve’s army boots, but in my sightless condition I was learning to identify people by using other senses.

  Every so often, Eve and Carlos got into spirited discussions that left them cursing and getting so frothed up, they had to be separated. Like now. Except we were in a van, a van I called The Marshmallow, and headed down a freeway to the next state. They couldn’t go to their rooms for a time out. And Carlos couldn’t slam a door in a Latino temper and not come back until tomorrow.

  “I didn’t say that you are a slob,” Eve said. “Only that you don’t do dishes until the health department comes pounding on your door.”

  “What do you think about buying a monitor that registers heat levels?” I tried to change the subject. Paranormal investigators, especially those with no telepathy themselves, monitor levels of everything from heat to electro-magnetic energy. Carlos even had a teddy bear he’d found on the internet that emitted white noise and made it easier for spirits to talk on that frequency and be heard. That was called Electronic Voice Phenomena, when a ghostly voice came through over the TV, radio or a walkie talkie. The short form, EVP, was easier to say. Sometimes with EVP, you had to guess what was being said behind the static but many times I’d heard ghosts speak their names or issue a warning like “stay away.”

  It was always a nice mix of validation and incredible fun when EVP came through. In the past, any equipment we used in our investigation was only backup, on hand to supplement what I determined with my ghost-magnet personality and telepathy. Recently though, I’d wondered if the tech stuff might take center stage in importance.

  “It couldn’t hurt to measure heat levels more effectively than us just saying, ‘it’s really cold over here.’” While Carlos explained how ghosts sapped heat and electricity from around them, I tried to engage, but my mind was elsewhere. I was lost in thought, having now distracted my road trip companions. Today, I was worried that I might enter a known haunted house and feel nothing. And that Eve would feel everything. I didn’t begrudge my young cousin her gift. I just didn’t want hers to be our only gift.

  “And there, mis amigas, is the Pacific Ocean,” Carlos announced.

  We turned south and were now traveling along the coast and although I couldn’t appreciate the view, the smell of the ocean was strong. I had my window cracked and the scent might as well have been expensive men’s cologne complete with a photo of a handsome movie star on the poster. I loved the ocean with a passion. Always had. Harry and I had taken our scuba certification on our Hawaiian honeymoon. The instructor said I was a natural and I believed she didn’t say that to every customer from Seattle, just because that was her hometown too. I felt comfortable near the ocean and in the ocean and wondered as I breathed deeply if my house would smell this good or if it would smell like the rats that probably lived there. Although I could also smell rain in the air, we hadn’t seen a drop since we’d left Seattle. (I had to stop saying stuff like that. They hadn’t seen a drop. I hadn’t heard there’d been any drops.)

  As we closed the distance to Cove House, my companions narrated the view and I was able to imagine the little white roadside diner with the red trim, the neon sign flashing “Beachy Stuff,” the vintage Ford truck we passed driving thirty in a fifty-five zone, and the field of grass dotted with white long-legged birds. The salty smell made my heart rate quicken. For good and bad reasons. We were getting closer to the house. The anticipation of psychic judgement day had me in limbo. Either I’d be devastated today or elated, depending on whether my clairvoyance kicked in. The words “five senses” kept popping into my head as we closed the distance to the house. Five senses rolled around in my head like a wish, a chant, a mantra. I wanted at least five.

  After almost an hour on the coast, we slowed and came to several stop lights in the town of Smuggler’s Cove, which sounded charming. The GPS on Eve’s phone directed us out of town to the house. Carlos slowed The Marshmallow and we turned.

  “You have reached your destination,” the phone voice said.

  “This must be the driveway,” Eve said in a whisper.

  “Trees on either side, dense forest, the road looks like crushed seashells, one lane.” Carlos sounded preoccupied.

  The wheels crunched on the driveway.

  “I see a clearing . . . and the house is dead ahead,” Carlos said.

  “Are you serious?” Eve said on her way to a yelp. “Oh, my gods, will you look at . . .” her words trailed off.

  I waited, depending on my companions for so much.

  “The house is enormous. It looks like a hotel built in the last century.” Eve’s voice was loud and high.

  “The century before that,” Carlos corrected, ever the history major.

  “There’s a sign reading, ‘Cove House.’” Eve added.

  As the van slowed, I rolled down the window and took a deep breath of sea air. I could hear the ocean crashing on rocks in the distance. “Is it on a beach or a cliff?”

  Eve answered. “Probably a cliff. The house and trees block the view from here.”

  The van came to a stop and Carlos whistled. Eve opened the sliding door from the back seat. “The place looks like it’s haunted. It’s grey with white trim, three floors with a widow’s walk.”

  “Probably s
ix thousand square feet,” Carlos added. His mother was a real estate agent.

  We’d gotten very little information from the lawyer yesterday but the address, the key, and later, the letter from Belinda McMahon. In all fairness, the lawyer knew nothing because he had not been Mrs. McMahon’s lawyer in her last years of life, only someone she hired to do the transfer of title and notification that I’d inherited a house. Seldom Wrinkled was innocent.

  Eve described the structure in front of us as she slipped from the van. “It’s mega-humungous. Floatville would fit into it five or six times. Ominous looking. In need of TLC.”

  “Belinda McMahon lived here by herself?” Carlos asked.

  “No idea,” I said. We really knew nothing about the woman. Except that she had a bad heart.

  Eve touched the sleeve of my jean jacket. “I’m no HGTV expert on architecture, but this joint looks Gothic. It’s got eight steps leading to the front door near a gazebo thing with a pointy roof.”

  I tried to picture it.

  “It almost looks like two tall houses of three stories with a center tall house leading up from the front door. Like three sections. The roof looks mossy but no holes. Not that I can see.”

  “Nope, not from this angle,” Carlos agreed.

  “There’s a balcony off a room on the right side second story. The house is trimmed with lots of detail, almost like a dark doll house but it looks like it needs repairs. The third floor has another balcony with a pointy railing, again on the right side. There’s a crow sitting on the roof staring at us.” Eve’s voice wandered off.

  I thought of the crow sitting on my shoulder the day before. “Do you feel anything?” Usually, at this point I had a niggling feeling of paranormal activity. Today, I did not.

  “No,” Eve said. “I’m busy trying to describe this place.”

  “You’re doing a great job,” I said. “Let’s go see the house.” The ground under my Frye boots felt soft, grassy. Things like this were becoming second nature to me. Determining what I hadn’t seen by what I could hear, touch and smell. Taste had advantages but not right now, unless you counted a slightly salty taste on my lips.