Take a picture, jerk.
Blank faces stared into the yard from the windows like the place really was haunted. She’d read somewhere the house rented out for overnight ghost tours, and this must have been a doozy. A few people, including a nurse in scrubs, spilled out onto the lawn, the photographer snapping away. Skid turned her head and picked up the pace, not that she had anywhere to go. Work didn’t start until 4 p.m. and it was halfway across town. Security at a Doobie Brothers concert wasn’t tough, just a matter of making sure all the stoned Baby Boomers didn’t start a riot during “Keep This Train A-Rollin’.” Somebody might lose their dentures.
She needed a shower and probably a nap because some asshole had blinked out of existence right in front of her last night, and she hadn’t had any coffee. She reached a thumb up to pull a sweat-soaked bra strap back into place.
“Coffee first.”
2
The reporter from The Kansas City Star stood in the yard next to a sign that read Sanderson Murder House, in blood-dripping letters. Cord’s stomach wrestled itself into a knot. Last night had been perfect for business and he had twenty witnesses. Who cared if the ghost wasn’t really a ghost? If it appeared like a ghost, vanished like a ghost, and made him money like a ghost, it was a ghost. The people at The Star certainly jumped on it. Thank God for slow news days.
He’d excused himself from the tour at about 10 p.m. to put fresh batteries in his stereo remote, which came in handy around 3 a.m. when the tour went back into the downstairs hallway to see if Thomas Sanderson fell on the floor again during the Witching Hour. He didn’t, at least visually, but Cord triggered the hidden stereo and the EMF meters he handed out went crazy at the right time. His customers needed to get their money’s worth.
But 11 p.m. had been Cord’s favorite time of the night. After he bought the Sanderson house, he’d heavily insulated the closet of the master bedroom on the second floor and lined it with refrigeration coils, the motor that circulated the coolant hidden deep in the walls surrounded by sound dampening panels so no one could hear it running. The result was a cold spot in the closet, unexplainable except as a sign of spiritual activity. It didn’t hurt that poor Cecilia Sanderson had attempted to escape her crazed husband by barricading herself in that closet and failed miserably. The psychological impact of the death spot coupled with a mystery chill was as powerful as a punch to the face.
Cord steered the hot girl and Vampire Boy into that closet at 11 p.m., and Vampire Boy couldn’t take it anymore. He’d been jittery most of the night, and he’d finally started to crack. All he’d needed was a little push. As soon as his girlfriend shivered and said, “Don’t you feel that? It’s a cold spot,” he rushed back out into the master bedroom, leaning himself on the bed the Muppet man had paid $50 extra to sleep on. Yep, it was that cold in the closet; not cold enough to store leftovers, but cold enough to make an impression.
“Fuck this,” Vampire Boy said, pushing himself away from the bed and moving his feet like he’d forgotten how to stand. He pointed at Cord. “And fuck you. I’m going home.”
“Come on, Roman,” the hot girl said, her voice pleading.
Roman? I thought Romans only existed in soap operas.
“No,” Roman shouted. Footsteps began to clomp from down the hall. People had paid for a show and this shouting was part of it. Roman moved to face Cord and jabbed a finger toward him. “I want my money back, man. I want it back now.”
Cord shook his head. Normally an angry, buff, stupid guy would be the cause of some alarm, but not tonight. This jerk was in his house.
“Sorry,” he told him in the same voice he used in his former life as a car salesman to inform buyers their trade-in wasn’t worth quite what Kelley Blue Book said even if it was. “No refunds. It’s worded that way in the waiver you signed before the overnight.”
The waiver everyone signed said no such thing, but Roman wouldn’t bother to look and Cord would have that fixed by the time the next tours showed up tomorrow. But tonight? Roman glared at Cord and flexed before he looked to his girlfriend, his face melting from anger to a pout before he left her standing in the unnaturally cold closet.
Oh, yeah. Eleven p.m. had been a magical time.
Cord rushed out the front door to greet the reporter and photographer as they stepped out of their car, barely taking notice of the cute girl in the black T-shirt running on the sidewalk. This was it, his ticket. One good story in the local metro paper and he’d have more tour requests than he could schedule. Cord would tell the reporter about Roman chickening out as they worked their way upstairs. He had to.
3
The sun on his face wasn’t the first thing Dave Collison, Ph.D., noticed. Neither was the sensation of something pulling on his leg, although it stopped for a moment before beginning on the other. It was the smell. Something smelled awful.
“Whazizip,” he mumbled, although he was unsure of what he was trying to say. His brain was busy matching up enough synapses to figure out what pulled on his feet, and why it had stopped.
“Hey,” he managed before summoning enough strength to force open his eyelids. He wished he hadn’t. Dave lay in an alley atop a pile of black, festering garbage bags that smelled like rotting fish sandwiches from All-National Burger, and a homeless man had apparently just stolen his shoes. “Hey.”
The man, about fifty and short on teeth, grinned at him through a dirty, rust-and-white beard and held up a leg showing Dave his left Aston Grey Leu leather oxford on the man’s sockless foot, then did the same to his other leg to show Dave his right.
Dave didn’t know what to do so he said, “Hey,” again.
The man, in a dirty T-shirt, shrugged his thin shoulders, stuck his hands in the pockets of his dusty, oversized jeans, and hummed as he walked from the alley out onto the sidewalk and disappeared around a corner.
“Goddamnit.” Dave lay back on the trash bags. He didn’t know where he was, he didn’t know why he was there, and he didn’t know what happened after he’d met the girl in the bar last night. Skirt? Skip? Skid. Her name was Skid. Thoughts of last night began to crawl from whatever hole they’d burrowed into. Nickname. She crashed a motorcycle.
His eyes grew wide as a few mental wheels clicked into place. “A full matter transfer,” he whispered. “I was in a full matter transfer—twice.” But why? He examined the alley and determined, as far as alleys went, this was pretty shitty. “Where am I?”
Dave started to sit up, but realized his face felt like something had slept on it wrong. Then the night began pouring out. The beer, the knife-throwing trick, the fist coming at him.
“She punched me,” he whispered, and moved a hand to feel his face. His nose was tender but didn’t seem broken. “What happened to me?”
Dave pushed himself to his feet, the bad smell sticking to him. His hands went to his pockets. Wallet, keys, phone, all there, but he’d woken in an unknown alley with a dirty shirt, no shoes, and no idea how he got there. “Now I know how Bruce Banner feels.”
It wasn’t until he pulled his cell phone from his pocket that he saw he was going to be late for work.
4
Skid stopped running at the corner of Tim Binnall Boulevard and stretched. Bud Light Dave. That son of a bitch. How the hell did he disappear? That moment at Slap Happy’s replayed in her head and made her want to punch him again. She exhaled slowly and raised her arms above her head, leaning to touch her left foot. As she tried to clear her mind, her eyes locked on the street sign. She froze. Her plan was to turn right on Tim Binnall Boulevard, stop at a coffee and muffin place down the street, take another right onto Baltimore, walk home, shower, and collapse onto her bed. But the green sign with white letters didn’t read “Tim Binnall Boulevard.” It read “Tim Binnall Avenue.”
An uneasy feeling crept over her. She’d gone by the “Tim Binnall Boulevard” intersection every day since she left Roe Bros. and moved to a city that was so
Midwest, people still smiled at strangers. It was “Boulevard,” of that she was certain. Had the city council changed it on a whim? Was this Binnall not worthy of the status of boulevard? A simple vote would be all it took.
Then why had rust grown around the bolts?
“I’ve seen weirder,” she said and started running again.
5
Cord turned off the custom refrigerator in the master bedroom and had no intention of using the stereo remote control for the news crew. Nope. That would be too much of a good thing, bordering on unbelievable. People come into a supposedly haunted house not expecting to encounter cold spots or books flying across the room, so about half the time nothing is exactly what they got. To the ghost hunters and weekend spooktacular enthusiasts, this didn’t mean the joint wasn’t haunted. It was just another house that behaved like they thought it would. A lot of them came back the next night, or maybe a week later because something would eventually happen.
Cord always made sure it did. Anything to keep them coming back.
“So, this is where it appeared?” asked the reporter. Cord stood in the hallway with her, the photographer and most of the overnight guests.
“The full-bodied apparition,” the photographer Carly emphasized. “This is where you saw the full-bodied apparition.”
The reporter, who had introduced herself as Beverly Gibson, nodded. “Yes, uh, the full-bodied apparition,” she said, her attention not quite there. “Could you… Could you tell me what happened?”
Cord’s mouth slid open, then shut almost as fast. The reporter lady seemed like she might be a bit off. Distracted? Sad, maybe? But that didn’t matter; this was as big a show as last night and he had to sell it.
“It surprised us all,” he said. “Maybe you could leave the question open for everybody. We were all here. Tamara?” The hot girl blushed.
Oh, Cord. You slick smooth loveable bastard.
“Well, we were here. Right here,” she said, pointing the palms of her hand toward the spot on the hall floor like she was attempting to hold it down. “And Cord’s meter went all crazy.”
“Meter?” Beverly asked, looking at Cord.
Expert testimony in three, two, one— “An EMF meter. That means electromagnetic frequency.” Cord looked around him at all the rapt faces. He felt like a TV preacher. “Spirits, at least in theory, are composed of energy because—” The Law of Conservation of Energy? Sure. “—if the Law of Conservation of Energy applies to the paranormal, the energy of a spirit, a soul if you will, cannot be destroyed. It can, however, be transformed into what we saw last night.”
The crowd, his people, was quiet, no one daring to interrupt Cord’s show. Except Beverly.
“A ghost?”
Carly pulled the camera away from her face for a second. “Full-bodied apparition.”
Beverly faintly smiled. “Of course. Could somebody describe it?”
The tall old nosy neighbor and total Wanker raised his hand. “It was the ghost of Tommy Sanderson.”
The hall fell quiet. “What did he look like?” Beverly asked.
Cord took over before he lost any more column inches in tomorrow’s newspaper. “A man in his thirties with brown hair, white shirt, gray pants, and a really surprised look on his face.”
Beverly scribbled illegible shorthand into her reporter’s notebook while Carly snapped the tense expressions around the ghost-hunting group that wouldn’t have been any better if Cord had paid them.
Cord almost jumped when Tamara’s warm hand rested on his forearm. “He said something to you.”
Yeah, he did. ‘Help me,’ would have been nice. ‘I can’t find the light,’ would have been better. ‘My dad still stalks this house,’ would be the absolute friggin’ best. But twenty witnesses heard what the man had said.
“Where’s Skid?” Cord said. “The ghost of Tommy Sanderson said, ‘Where’s Skid?’” He bit his lip and held it for one, two, three seconds before he looked into Beverly’s eyes. “We have no idea what he meant.”
Carly clicked a close-up of Cord, who smiled like a stoned Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. Alright, alright, alright.
Beverly pulled the conversation back a step. “But the meters.” She looked at her notes. “The E-M-F meters. What did they do?” She looked at her notes again. “Tamara said they, ‘went all crazy’.”
Cord slipped his hand into his pocket and fingered the remote control. Maybe a little show wouldn’t hurt.
6
The coffee place sat where Skid thought it did, on the corner of Binnall and Baltimore, which was as comforting as was the brick storefront with “Muffin Monday All Week Long!” painted in the windows in bright pink and yellow. A black awning hung over the door reading “Manic Muffins” with cartoon lines around the words to show how manic it was. Two wrought-iron tables with three chairs each sat on either side of the door with fresh flowers in tall coffee mugs in the center of each. Cute. This was cute, and normal. The sun cut through the clear morning sky, the coffee shop looked like a coffee shop, and no one disappeared in front of her. Normal.
Skid slowed as she approached the shop, ignoring the store for a moment and concentrating on the street sign at the intersection. “Tim Binnall Avenue.” This sign was faded and slightly bent. It had been there for a while.
That can’t be right.
Even though the world seemed almost sane and cheery, she didn’t like the feeling in her gut. The kind of feeling she sometimes had when something bad was about to happen, or when she ate at that dodgy Indian restaurant on Washington Street. Moe, Larry and Curry was the worst.
7
Brick squatted behind the counter and stared at the tray of muffins he’d slid into the display case earlier; big, beautiful chocolate chip muffins in sparkly cups topped with pink frosting and Homer Simpson sprinkles. The frown he wore deepened. Brick got to the shop around 4:30 a.m., baked his first batch of muffins by 5:15, had them iced by 5:45 and in the display case by 6. By then, more muffins were ready, some to be iced, others not. But this batch of muffins was different than any he’d ever iced before because he’d used chocolate frosting as brown as mud—and now they were bright pink.
“I’ll take a pink one,” Katie said, pointing at the rack of muffins that should be brown. Katie was a semi-regular. She was at least 60, maybe older, but came in every morning from a jog. “And a cup of coffee, black.”
Brick forced a smile. He’d never had to force a smile with the older woman before. She’d come in on his grand opening and stopped by a few times a month. “You bet,” he said, and put a pink muffin in a recycled paper sack, “Manic Muffins” stamped on the front.
“You know,” she said as he poured her coffee into a to-go cup. “I had an idea.”
“What’s that, Katie?” he said, snapping a lid on the cup.
“Well, since your name’s Brick, I thought it would be cute if you offered a muffin named Brick.”
“Okay. I’m listening.” He set her coffee on the counter and picked up the cash. She knew exactly how much, to the penny, and she always left a five-dollar bill in the tip jar.
“Maybe you could make red velvet cake muffins but bake them in little loaf pans so they’d be rectangular on the bottom. You know, like a brick.”
That was a good idea.
“And fill it with cream, because you know you’re softer on the inside.”
The forced smile melted into a real one. “That’s perfect. I’ll get to work on that.”
Katie took her sack and coffee and started walking toward the door.
“I’ll have to come up with a muffin called the Katie,” he said after her.
She stopped and turned, her face smiling, but her eyes were flat. “I don’t think you’ve got anything that sour, Brick.” Then she left, the bell over the door chiming as she walked outside.
“That was weird,” he said, turning his attention
back to the pink muffins, the conversation pushed into the back of his mind. How is this even possible? he wondered, then thought, just briefly, that he might be losing his mind. Last night’s whatever it was, then this. I must have used pink frosting. But—
The bell over the front door jingled again. Katie, he thought, maybe with another idea, although he had to admit the Brick muffin was a good one.
A cough from the other side of the display case cut off his thoughts. He stood and saw it wasn’t Katie, and his day wasn’t getting any easier.
“Hipster Dan Haggerty,” said the woman from Slap Happy’s, the one with the knife. “You?”
The morning had started normally. His phone had blared the annoying default bell chime he’d never gotten around to changing, and he had eaten breakfast while reviewing possibilities of why his computer date dumped him. But the woman who punched the Oilyman in the face? He hadn’t seen this coming. Don’t say anything stupid. Don’t say anything stupid.
“I think the universe is trying to throw us together,” Brick said, resisting an urge to groan.
The woman exhaled loudly enough Brick knew that, yeah, it was stupid.
Brick shrugged. “Sorry.”
“I don’t want to talk about last night. Whatever happened didn’t happen. I just want a muffin.” She pressed her finger against the glass display case Brick would have to clean later. He hated smudges. Parents with little kids were the worst.
“A guy talked to me in the bathroom last night,” Brick said.
“I thought there were rules against men talking in bathrooms,” the woman said, then nodded to herself. “I’ll have one of those pink ones, please.”
Brick didn’t move. “I turned my head for a second and he wasn’t there anymore. It was like he just disappeared.” Brick pulled himself up to his full height and crossed his massive arms. It didn’t seem to impress her. “Then I see you talking to the same guy at the bar. He was cleaner than the man I saw, and his hair was different, I think. But it was the same guy.”
So You Had to Build a Time Machine Page 3
