Digging For Trouble

by K. J. Emrick

  She doesn’t answer, but it’s the way she doesn’t answer that bothers me.

  “Lachlan Halliburton. You know he’s here. You know he’s in my Inn. You tried to show me, and now there’s this knocking here, in this room...what’s going on?”

  Jess began to fade, wiggling her fingers in a little wave. She didn’t so much disappear as she just suddenly wasn’t there.

  Before she left me, she pointed over to the bed.

  When I turned, I found Lachlan Halliburton sitting there.

  I jumped. Well, you would too, wouldn’t you? The whole haunted house thing is kind of new to me.

  He waved and smiled like he’d just played the greatest joke ever. This gentleman thief from more than a hundred years ago. He sat there with one leg crossed over the other, in the clothes I remembered from my dream, brown trousers and a crisp white shirt under leather suspenders.

  Then he raised a finger.

  As I watched, his face morphed, twisted, melting like wax to reshape itself.

  Into Jess’s face.

  This was the same trick he’d used when I saw him down by the lake looking like my ex-husband. At first I was just shocked. I mean, I don’t know what ghosts can and can’t do, but I know this—what I’m seeing right here—just isn’t right. Taking another person’s face like that. It’s just wrong.

  Is there a reason for this? Is he trying to impress me? Scare me? Maybe he just likes to be big man about the bush and show off. In that moment, I didn’t care why he was doing it. Seeing him like that, wearing my friend’s face and body, just made me angry.

  Crossing my arms I glared at him. If he were still alive, then he might just have died from the heat of my anger.

  Well. Didn’t mean I couldn’t still give him a piece of my mind.

  “Nice trick,” I told him. “How ‘bout you try for Mickey Mouse and really impress me?”

  In the twist of an eye, his features morphed from Jess’s to a big, floppy-eared mouse. Just as quickly, they went back to his own blocky jaw and blunt nose and dark eyes... only now his eyes were wide with shock.

  Hard to say which one of us was more surprised. I know I found myself all the way across the room, gripping my unicorn necklace tight enough to feel it poking into my palm, breathing hard and staring at this ghost of a man. Mickey Mouse. A big, cartoony mouse in red shorts. Did I make him do that? I said, do Mickey Mouse, and he...

  His face turned vicious, his lips parting away from teeth ground tightly together, his eyes narrowing. He went to stand up, one hand reaching out for me.

  “Stop right there!”

  And... he stopped.

  I still couldn’t catch my breath, but somehow I knew that if I gave in to fear and ran I’d never be rid of this Lachlan Halliburton. He’d haunt me forever, showing up in the form of people I know and cartoon characters alike. So I took a few steps closer, and I acted a whole lot braver than I felt.

  “You can just stuff your Casper act back in your pocket. I’ve got a neighbor who was attacked and an Inn full of guests that don’t need to hear you banging on their walls. Got me?”

  His features shifted again. This time, to a young woman with short hair and a slim body and—

  With an angry shout that I felt rather than heard, Lachlan rushed at me, stopping mere inches from my face. He was himself again and I realized that he’d changed just now, into that barely seen slip of a girl, because of what I’d said. I’d been talking about Arthur being assaulted, and Lachlan had started to change into a young woman...with short hair...

  Arthur had a daughter. We knew that. We did not know what she looked like, but maybe Lachlan did.

  Of course.

  “That’s what you were changing for, just now?” I waited, but aside from a swirl of color rushing through his eyes, he didn’t speak, and didn’t move. “I was talking about Arthur’s attacker, and you couldn’t help but change into the person who did it!”

  His face twitched. Only that.

  And then he threw himself back, arms spread wide, screaming at a pitch I suspected only dogs could hear. My ears crackled with the pressure.

  Then he was gone.

  Just like that, without even a goodbye. I had to smile. Scary old Lachlan Halliburton wasn’t as tough as he thought he was, after all.

  Heh. Mickey Mouse.

  I thought back to Denice Aldrich. I pictured her in my mind. Short. Slender. Her hair had those highlights, too, but Lachlan’s picture hadn’t been finished. She was tall and slim, too, just like the image my new ghostly friend had started to show me.

  What was with all of his face changing, anyway? That thought came back to me again as I stood there in the middle of room seven. Could all ghosts do that? Would I go into my bathroom one morning and catch a glimpse of Jess standing there in the Queen Mother’s face like a Halloween getup? No. No, that didn’t make sense. I’ve a good friend from the States who knows about ghosts and such. She’s told me about her experiences. There was never anything about this.

  So why was Lachlan making himself look like my ex-husband, like Jess, like... whatever he bloody wanted to?

  “Um.” I heard someone clear his throat from the hallway.

  I whipped around, thinking at first that it would be Lachlan again but instead, I saw the couple who had rented this room. The Stanths, Mrs. and Mister. Back from their camping trip.

  “Oh. Hi.” It took me a minute to gather myself and release my grip on my necklace. “I mean, welcome back. How was your weekend?”

  “Really good,” Mister Stanth said, his eyes still full of questions. He and his wife came in and set down their packs and sleeping bags, then waited for me to say more.

  “Oh, sorry. Just checking on the room to see if you needed anything before you got back.” The lie rolled off my tongue easily enough. Only thing I could think of, but it had the ring of truth to it. “I was hoping to be done before you got back. Well. Towels, I think. Anything else?”

  After a brief exchange, I went downstairs with a list of things they wanted for the room. I don’t keep much of a staff on Sundays, and I knew that I’d be heading back up myself in a bit with towels and fresh sheets to put on the bed. Well. The life of an Inn keeper.

  Especially when the Inn’s haunted. First Jess, now Lachlan Halliburton.

  How many other ghosts were in my place?

  ***

  Sometimes days get better when someone special shares them with you.

  Other times, it just gets more complicated.

  It was nearly noon when James came in. He was in his Sunday best, which for him meant khakis and a short-sleeved dress shirt. Blue, to bring out the color of his eyes. With that smile he gave me, I just about melted. How I lucked out to have such a good-looking guy in my life, I’ll never know. Feels like once in a lifetime should be all someone gets from the Good Lord. Guess some people just get lucky.

  “Hey there,” I said, my face all smiles. Whatever. I like the guy. I’m not afraid to show it. “Didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

  “Hiya, Dell.” He stepped across the lobby to where I’m standing at the registration desk, and reached across to take my hand. “Please tell me you haven’t had lunch yet.”

  “Not yet.” I’m trying to act all smooth, like I could go to lunch with him or not, but my stomach betrays me by growling right on cue. Can’t be too mad about it. I really do want him to take me to lunch. “Um. Heh. What’d you have in mind?”

  “I thought about a picnic. Maybe out on the hiking trails?”

  Oh, he is so transparent. “You mean, maybe out where I saw Arthur Loren digging in the ground?”

  “Well, if you wanted to show me that spot, that’d be fine by me.”

  “James Callahan, you are not fooling me for a moment.”

  His smile slipped sideways. “No, guess I can’t. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna quote ya. Got my piece already submitted for today’s paper. Myles being held without arrest by our local boys in blue was enough of a story to
fill my column. Even called Senior Sergeant Cutter for a quote.”

  “Really? What’d that yobbo have to say?”

  “Eh, not much. Well, that’s not exactly true. Apparently nobody’d told him what was going on yet. He had a bunch to say. Just nothing I could print in the article. Don’t suppose ya read it?”

  The Inn always has a stack of Sunday papers set out for the guests to take if they want. The Lakeshore Times has a small circulation, mostly just us and Geeveston and Southport. With the killings and arrests last year the paper got a boost that put it on stands as far north as Hobart, but I doubt we’re big news up there anymore. I looked over to the little table just inside the door where the Sunday edition is stacked five copies high. All five are still there.

  “Sorry, James, I’ve been a bit busy this morning.”

  Taking my hand back from his I closed my ledger book. I’d been comparing my handwritten math to what the spreadsheet program on my computer said. I was right, something wasn’t adding up, and I’m betting it had something to do with Denice. Just haven’t been able to find what I’m looking for yet.

  Proof that Denice isn’t who she says she is.

  James lifted up an eyebrow as he watched me put the ledger away. Of course he’d notice, and put it together with whatever picture he’s been piecing together in his mind. He’s too smart not to.

  “So...” he hesitated. “Maybe I can pick your brain about what happened to poor Arthur? Only fair, I figure, since I let ya pick mine yesterday.”

  “Why James, is this going to be a working lunch?”

  He shrugged, his expression a little too innocent. “It’s always a working lunch with me. Always listening. Have to be, in this town.”

  “Lakeshore’s not that exciting,” I told him, but I can’t put as much conviction into that as I used to.

  “Chance would be a fine thing, Dell. I’d love to go back to the days of reporting on missing cats and writing about whether the mayor’s ever gonna get the town fountain running proper again.”

  Looking him straight in the eye, I had to call him on that one. “You would not. James, you’re in this for the excitement. Can’t imagine why you stayed in Lakeshore as long as you have.”

  Something changed in his expression. It made my cheeks blush and my heart beat a little quicker.

  “I had my reasons,” is what he said. Just like a guy. All the chances in the world to say those three little words and he has to go and be all smoky and cryptic and... and...

  Wonderful.

  “So,” I said, “lunch?”

  “Absolutely,” he drawled. “Just have to pop round my place and change this shirt. Not exactly meant for hiking.”

  “Went to church this morning, did you?”

  “Did. Pastor Albright had quite the sermon today. All about time rushing past us when we’re not looking. Seize the day, is what I took away from it.”

  “Seize the day? Those were his words?”

  “Well. I might be shortening it a bit.” He shrugged, his fingers caressing the back of my hand in a very nice way. “I’m a newspaper reporter, you know. Have to condense everything down to a few sentences or ya lose the audience.”

  Condensed. Shortened. I looked at James, wondering. With everything else going on—Arthur’s mysterious daughter, gentleman thieves popping round—I’d forgotten about one of the other clues Kevin had uncovered. Could it hurt to tell James? I mean, it was information in an ongoing investigation and I wasn’t supposed to have it myself, technically, no matter what I’d told my son about how I had a right to be in Arthur’s house.

  His closet, either, with its spider webs and broken jars.

  “Dell?” James asked when I was silent for a few seconds too long. “Everything okay?”

  I probably shouldn’t show this to James. No, I shouldn’t. Then again, there was no way for him to connect this clue with what we had found. Besides. I trusted this man.

  “Um. Let me ask you something. Does this mean anything to you?”

  Taking my hand back, I took one of the pens off the desk and found a blank sheet of paper, then wrote out a string of numbers for James.

  They were two of the labels from the jars in Arthur’s closet, as close as I could remember them.

  “Can you make anything of that?” I asked him, turning the paper around.

  “Well, sure.” He pointed to the first set of numbers, nine digits long. “That’s easting. This longer one is northing.”

  Easting? Northing? “I’m sorry, was that the Queen’s English just then?”

  He chuckled and took my pen away from me, drawing a sphere on the paper next to the numbers, complete with equator and a curving line around the other way that he labelled Prime Meridian. “These numbers of yours are map coordinates. Puts ya here in Tasmania, right close to where we’re standing, if I remember correct.”

  “No, we tried that. They don’t work for coordinates. They’re too long to be latitude and longitude. Kevin said he tried putting them into his GPS. Landed him in the Pacific, I think.”

  I caught the little twitch on his face when I mentioned Kevin. If James hadn’t suspected this was part of Arthur Loren’s case before, I’d just told him as much now.

  “Well, put them in a GPS like this and they wouldn’t mean a thing,” he said. “That’s because you’re expecting it to be in hours, minutes, and seconds. This here isn’t ENU, it’s ECEF notation.”

  I can’t imagine my face looking any blanker than it must have looked right then. “Um...”

  He chuckled softly, but I could tell he wasn’t making fun. “Earth Centered, Earth Fixed. ECEF. It’s complicated, I know. I did a story for the paper a few years back on how Australia had adopted a new geocentric datum system or else I wouldn’t have recognized it either. This is a system useful for cartographers and navigators and scientists, and pretty much nobody else. It translates your usual GPS coordinates into something a lot more specific...”

  My expression hadn’t changed.

  “Um. Right. Sorry, got a bit off topic there. Basically, these will give you a specific location on a map, if you know how to read them.”

  “You know how to read them?”

  “Well, it’s been a bit. Have to rack the old brain and such. Besides, I can do ya one better.”

  He held his hands out toward my computer, waiting for me to say it was all right before he turned the monitor around so he could see it and then bringing the keyboard over to his side of the desk.

  In a few seconds flat, he had a website up that promised to convert ENU to ECEF coordinates and back again.

  It was still gibberish to me, but James showed me where to put in the numbers I had, and get back recognizable GPS coordinates.

  “You know,” he said to me, “I’m surprised that Myles couldn’t tell you what these are. I woulda thought he’d do anything to prove he’s innocent, if he could.”

  “I, uh, didn’t exactly get around to asking him about this. We had other things to talk about.”

  “I’ll bet. For a simple Inn keeper in the middle of nowhere, ya sure do find your way up the gum tree often enough, don’t ya?”

  “Guess trouble just finds some people more than most.” I shook my head, realizing how true that was becoming for me. Time moves on, sure, but where does it bring us?

  “Dell... I worry ‘bout ya sometimes.”

  “Only sometimes?”

  I was trying to joke, but James’s expression was very serious. “I mean it. Last year, that whole mess with your friend getting killed. Are we startin’ that all over?”

  I wish I had a good answer for him.

  “Just, promise to be careful?”

  “Well, that much I can do,” I tell him. “Cross my heart.”

  “Heh. Reminds me, though. I found out something else ‘bout your gentleman thief.”

  I’m beginning to think we might never make our lunch, me and James. Been over a year building up a relationship with this man. Why couldn’t life
just leave us alone for a little bit longer?

  “Lachlan?” I asked, knowing full well who James was talking about. “I thought you told me everything last night?”

  “Did. But, I had me some time before church services today and I got to thinking about the story of Lachlan and Callum. So, I went through some of the back files that the paper keeps for reference material. Turns out, Lachlan Halliburton wasn’t just your basic thief. He had a moniker.”

  “Ooh. A moniker? You mean, like Jimmy the Fish or Scarface Al Capone?”

  “Exactly. Lachlan was known as The Actor. Seems he had a very specific modus operandi. When he was out to rob someone, he would—”

  “Wear a disguise,” I gasped, suddenly knowing what James was going to tell me. “He’d dress up like someone else.”

  “Right. Just so. He’d even use wigs and stage makeup to change his appearance. How'd ya know?”

  “Just a guess.”

  A guess based on experience.

  In real life, Lachlan Halliburton had changed his appearance over and over to commit his crimes. Lachlan, as a ghost, could change his appearance to match anybody he wanted to. Jess. My Ex. The woman who attacked Arthur.

  He knew who attacked Arthur. Somehow, he knew. That little creep. If I ever got my hands on him I’d wring his spectral neck until he gave up what he knows.

  Almost said ‘until he gives up the ghost,’ but I guess he’s done that already.

  I bookmarked the webpage on GPS coordinates and then came around the counter. “Tell ya what, James. I’d love to go to lunch with you. Do me a favor, first?”

  “Drop you at the police station?” he guessed.

  I leaned up with my hand on his chest to kiss his cheek. “That’s my guy.”

  On our way out, arm in arm, I saw Mister Brewster standing on the stairs, watching.

  Just watching.

  Chapter Eight

  I could hear the screaming from out in the police station parking lot.

  Stepping out of James’s car, I glanced across the street, to where Oliver Harris was standing in the open garage door of his towing and recovery business. He was staring over this way. Guess he could hear the dulcet tones of Officer Bruce Kay from all the way over there.