Rita turned to me, covered my hand with her free one. “He never was much of a sleeper. Likes to dump his troubles off on me right before bedtime. Lately though…it’s been worse than usual. More like true insomnia.” She studied me thoughtfully. “Why, baby? You were restless from the moment you hit the pillow tonight. And what was all that with the lights earlier?”
I reached for a biscuit for distraction. “I told you, a small power failure. And a bad dream…”
When I looked up between the two women, Katie had her cryptic face on. “Maybe it was symbolic. A warning. Your abilities are about to be tested again, Elliot.”
I glanced over to see if Rita was gloating yet. She wasn’t. She was watching Katie intently, arms still crossed over her breasts. “How long this time, Katie?”
Katie sat back slowly, sighed deeply, turned and opened her shoulder bag. “I’m not sure. There’s really never any way to be sure. A couple contacted me from San Diego.”
Rita’s brows went up. “San Diego, wow! Can I come too?”
Katie grinned faintly, fished out her tablet, tapped buttons.
A brown Victorian bloomed, ringed by a short-cut manicured lawn, and fat-bole palms. Birds of paradise flanked the flagstone walk to the gingerbread entrance. “Mid-Victorian,” Katie said, “Coronado, California. That’s across the bay from San Diego.”
I scooted over and Rita came around oooing and cooing.
Two more shots: side yard and back, a small but blue wedge of pool, tall olive trees, a scarlet lake of bright bougainvillea surrounding it.
“I’ll take it,” from Rita.
Katie tapped. A cute young woman, tanned and sun-bleached, smiled against the chest of a nice-looking, lean-jawed young man with perfect hair and blinding teeth, line of blue ocean and framing palms behind them.
“Mr. and Mrs. Byron and Donna Sanderson,” Katie said. “Not sure of the ages, but looks like late 20’s—early 30’s to me.”
“I’ll take him,” from Rita.
“Have to take him with this,” Katie tapped. A silky blond, peach-skinned 3-year old filled the screen.
“Ohhhhhh! You’re mean, Katie! I’ll definitely take her!”
I frowned at Rita. “You always told me you didn’t want kids.”
Rita glared at me as if I’d made a dreadful faux pas.
“It’s a boy, actually. Nathaniel. Pretty enough to be a girl, huh? Byron Sanderson, by the way,” Katie winked at Rita, “is an architect. Of the prize-winning variety, so I’ve heard.”
Rita bent closer. “Cute and rich? Oh, Lord. You distract the hunk, Katie, I’ll strangle the beach bunny wife.”
“Why not just get a sperm sample?” I said, “The guy obviously makes great babies.”
“May as well have the cone along with the cream.”
“Thanks for taking this seriously, guys,” from Katie. “Check this out.”
Another shot of the adorable 1-year old, this time guarding a pile of Legos. “He is scrumptious.” Rita sighed.
“She,” Katie corrected, “this is Natalie, Nathaniel’s gorgeous baby sister. An embarrassment of riches, huh?”
Rita slumped back. “This couple is beginning to make me nauseous. They have to be Republicans. Whatever happened to ‘too much of a good thing’?”
“Could be.” Katie tapped the screen. “In the case of the Sandersons it might just be this...”
The screen lit with a blank wall.
“What’s this?” from me.
“This is the nursery. The…” Katie checked her notes at the top of the screen, “…south wall, facing the back of the house.”
I stared at the blank wall. “Uh-huh. And this is significant because--?”
“Look closer.” She turned the tablet to me. “See anything?”
“A wall.”
“Anything else?”
I squinted. Rita edged over and squinted too. I shook my head. “No.”
“Rita?”
She studied the screen, finally shrugged. “A shadow?”
“Nice work, Ms. Blaine, maybe you should be in the paranormal investigation game.”
I took the tablet from Katie, squinted closer. “I still don’t see it.”
Katie pointed. “Here.”
I cocked my head. “Maybe. Could be just a smudge or stain. What about it?”
“Byron Sanderson took it. He said there was a figure in the lens when he snapped the shutter. Or something he thought was a figure.”
Rita took the tablet, tilted it to both aspect ratios and back. “I agree with Elliott. It’s a stain.”
“Not according to the Sandersons.”
I looked again. “What kind of figure?”
“A figure. He didn’t elaborate. Except that when he accidently showed the picture to his son, Nathaniel, the boy started crying.”
She tapped the screen. A small sitting room, maybe a den. Wall-to-wall shelves. Cameras, every size and description.
“And this?” from Rita.
“Mr. Sanderson’s study. He collects antique cameras. That’s an original Brownie on the far left. This one on the second shelf is the first Polaroid Land Camera.”
“They stopped making make film for Polaroids not long ago.”
“I know,” Katie said. She tapped the screen. Shelves of old radios, immaculately dusted, delicately arranged.
“Mr. Sanderson is eclectic. That streamlined yellow model with the red dial? An old Fada ‘bullet radio’. My grandfather had one. 1930’s. Get a thousand bucks or so for a mint one, now. Is Sanderson a dealer?” I prompted.
“Just a collector,” Katie said, “as far as I know.”
“So how come he’s sending you photos of his antiques?” I asked.
Katie appraised the screen. “This one was supposed to contain a figure, too. Somewhere.” She turned the screen to Rita and me. “I can’t see it. You two?”
We bent close, shook our heads.
Katie nodded, tapped. The screen went black.
I looked up. “That’s it?”
“For the pictures. Mr. Sanderson also talked to me over the phone.”
“What did he say?”
“Funny thing. I recorded the conversation—always do with potential clients. This time it didn’t take. When I played it back it was blank.”
“Like Mr. Sanderson’s wall?” from Rita. “That ever happened to you before?”
Katie shook her head. “No, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, I may have muffed the recording or there’s always the possibility of plain old mechanical failure. It’s an inexpensive little recorder.”
“What’s your best guess?” from Rita.
Katie put the tablet on the table, sat back in her chair. “I don’t guess. I proceed methodically, led by the available facts.” She tapped her temple. “Anyway, the gist of the conversation’s safe up here. The short form is, the Sandersons are a young, good-looking, apparently happy couple with two beautiful children living in a big work-in-progress refurbished Victorian in the one percent of the nation with perfect weather. He’s an architect for a major San Diego firm. She does accounting, works at home. They lived there in island splendor for a little over a year before the trouble began.”
“And what was that?” from Rita.
Katie poured herself another cup. “From what I gleaned from the phone call, it seems to have begun with Donna Sanderson’s depression a few months back. Nothing specific, just a general feeling of malaise that comes and goes. This was followed by little Nathaniel’s crying spells.”
“Teething?” Rita said.
Katie shrugged. “All his baby teeth are in, apparently. His mother took him to their orthodontist. Nathaniel got a clean bill of health.”
I stifled a yawn. “So what’s haunting them? That’s what this is, isn’t it, a haunted house story?”
Katie turned to me. “Everything went okay for a time, pretty much day-to-day. Then one afternoon, Donna put the kids down for the evening in the nursery upstairs; on
e of those big old fashioned numbers with high ceilings and a dormer overlooking the sea. At night, on nice evenings—which is practically every evening--she leaves the children’s window open so the smell of orange blossoms and sound of the surf can lull them to sleep.”
“Rough life,” Rita sighed, “all I had was a broken Barbie and the lull of my father’s snoring.”
“Donna works nights in her study, three stories down on the first floor, where she keeps her big console computer hutch. As I said, she’d just put the kids down upstairs for the evening.”
“Long way to walk to check-in on them,” I noted.
Katie held up a hand. “The Sandersons’ master bedroom, down the hall from the nursery, has an audio baby monitor. Plus there’s a camera watching the children that Donna can monitor with the click of a button on her downstairs console.”
“The price of wealth,” from Rita.
“Donna was hours into the middle of her reports when she thought she heard one of the children cry out from the nursery. It was about midnight, a late night for her, I’m told. She hit the camera key on the console. But her screen showed only static.”
Rita sat straight with alarm. “The camera was broken?”
“Donna hit the stairs running. As Elliot says, it’s a long flight up two old-fashioned sets of stairs to the third floor. When she finally reached the nursery, she found daughter Natalie peacefully asleep in her crib.”
“And Nathaniel?”
“Nathaniel’s crib was empty.”
Rita’s hand went to her throat reflexively.
Katie nodded. “A mother’s worst nightmare. She searched the nursery frantically.”
“Did they find him?” Rita asked.
“Donna combed the nursery top to bottom, looked under the cribs, inside closets, everywhere, while Natalie slept on obliviously. The terrified mother began searching the house, upstairs and down. Every room. She searched the yards, front and back. No Nathaniel. She called the police and her husband, who was seeing a friend. They arrived at the Sanderson residence about the same time, Byron met by his then-hysterical wife. Both parents and police searched the outside grounds under a full moon. They started in on the house again, including the stone cellar. Then they heard the distant crying. Donna rushed back upstairs to the nursery ahead of the others and found her son sitting in the middle of his crib, red-faced and bawling. Otherwise unharmed and, apparently, untouched.”
I frowned. “He was back in the crib?”
“Yes.”
“How?” from an insistent Rita. “How could a baby climb back into a crib?”
Katie smiled enigmatically. It looked spooky on her.
I rolled it over a moment. “Can the little boy talk?”
“A little. Over the next few days they tried different ways of asking Nathaniel what had happened, where he had gone. He was never specific or maybe even fully comprehending.”
“Did he ever say anything?” Rita asked.
“Once. When Byron mentioned the incident to the boy a few days later, the child responded with two words: ‘animal,’ and ‘people.’”
“Nothing else?”
“No. Except…”
“Except what?”
“Before he hung up, Byron Sanderson mentioned questioning the child again. This time he said he thought—he thought—the child may have meant it as one word.”
Rita leaned forward. “One word?”
Katie nodded. “Animal people.”
Rita looked at me. “I don’t get it.”
Katie shrugged. “Neither did Mr. Sanderson.”
The kitchen went silent.
I reached for another biscuit, still warm, without biting into it. I stared at the perfectly brown top. “What about Donna’s depression, does she still have it?”
“Sometimes. Most of the time she just walks about feeling uneasy. Scared.”
I looked up at Katie. “Well, which?”
“Both. She wants to move. Byron’s already spent a fortune refurbishing the house.”
I nodded, set the biscuit down. “Has the wife seen these…shadowy figures too?”
“No. Or not that she’s admitting to. Byron didn’t tell her about them, or the pictures. Said she was acting paranoid enough. Says she doesn’t sleep, hears things at night.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Things. He didn’t elaborate. He sounded scared on the phone, Elliot. Certainly for Donna but also, I think, for the children. Maybe even for himself. Anyway, there was something hiding there in his voice.”
Silence in the kitchen.
I started as Rita’s chair shoved back quickly with a croak. She headed for the doorway to the hall.
“Rita? What--?” I called.
Katie swiveled in my direction. “Is she mad?”
“I’m not mad,” Rita turned at the doorway.
“Then where are you off to?” I said.
“To pack your suitcase. For how long, Katie?”
“At least a week to be safe. But you better hurry…” Katie pulled two tickets from the shoulder bag at her feet, held them up. “We leave tonight! Red-eye flight.”
Rita nodded. “Get dressed, Elliot! I’ll drive you both to the airport.”
I was on my feet. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! I can’t do this!”
“Why?” from Katie.”
“Fear of flying,” from a smiling Rita. “One of his many phobias.”
Katie shook her head. “You gotta love him.”
“How can you not?” Rita turned to the bedroom staircase.
Something hit my lap, eliciting a reflexive yelp from me: Garbanzo.
I pressed back a shudder. Katie giggled.
When I looked up glaring she was trying to hide her grin between her fingers. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to say it!”
“Say what?”
She couldn’t suppress a short snort. “’One pussy knows another!'”
THREE
You’ve heard of white-knuckle flights, right?
Forget it.
I was two scotch-and-sodas down before the plane left the runway and begging for a third, even though this was against regulations and I had to bribe the stewardess.
Flight time between Austin and San Diego is less than 3 hours but the western sky was pinking before we were halfway there and I made Katie switch window seats with me so I wouldn’t be tempted to glance out at the vertiginous field of clouds below and treat the other passengers to the sight of me running up and down the aisle in a full-blown panic attack. Every doctor I had ever seen had suggested the same thing to ward off imagined terror: close your eyes and think of something else. Katie was from the Face Your Fears School of phobia therapy: eyes wide open, staring into the mouth of hell, something she helped amplify by reading constantly about the thrills of aviation from her tablet the entire way.
“…San Diego International is located only 3 miles northwest of the downtown business district, did you know that, Elliot?”
“We’re flying into the sun! The pilot will be blinded!”
“His instruments won’t. It’s also only 15 miles from the Mexico-U.S. border at Tijuana, imagine that!”
“I have to pee! Badly!”
“You just peed. It’s the second busiest single-runway airport in the world, with approximately 550 departures and arrivals daily.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?—airline traffic!”
“Don’t be silly, it’s perfectly safe. Lindbergh Field was ranked the 4 best airport in North America in 2007. And it ranked number 3 in 2008. Although…”
“’Although’? ‘Although’ what!”
Katie frowned at her screen. “It says here ‘the approach to the airstrip is steep’…”
“’Steep’!”
“…necessitated by terrain which drops from 266 ft. to sea level in less than a mile.”
“Great!”
“The only runway is located at the base of a hill lined with several
obstructions, including Interstate-5 and the trees in Balboa Park…”
“Okay, that’s enough, Katie!”
“…aircraft do not land at the end of the runway as at most airports, but at what is called a displaced threshold, located 1,810 feet from the runway, effectively shortening the landing distance to—“
“I said that’s enough!”
“Keep your voice down. Try to focus on what I’m reading, not what I’m saying.”
“What--?”
“…the airport does not have standard runway safety areas…”
“Now you’re just making it up, right?”
“…an engineered materials arrestor—“
“Arrestor!”
“…has been installed at the west end of the runway to halt any aircraft overruns. See? Perfectly safe! I’ll bet the airport’s never had an accident!”
“Don’t look it up, okay?”
“Here it is…’no accidents—“
“Thank Christ!”
“—since 1978.’ Oh, dear…”
“What! Never mind, I don’t want to know!”
“…oh, Lord…”
“Just shut off the damn tablet, huh!”
“Okay.” She tapped the screen and it went dark. “There.”
I stared at her in an ice cold sweat.
“What--?”
“Well, you started reading,” I whined, “now I have to know!”
Katie sighed, rolled her eyes and tapped the screen on again.
“’On the morning of Sept. 25, 1978 a Boeing 727 collided in mid-air with a Cessna 172 while attempting to land at San Diego Airport. The two aircraft collided over San Diego’s North Park, killing all 135 people on Flight 182, plus the two people on the Cessna, along with 7 people on the ground. Apparently the sky was literally raining people—‘”
“Stewardess!” I tore off my seat belt, vaulted up and flagged one down. “Another scotch and soda over here, please!”
She hurried over smiling—then frowned when she recognized me. “Sir, that would be your fourth drink—“
“It will be my fifth drink because I’m ordering a double! And could I have a ball-gag and cuffs for the woman next to me, please!”
NIGHT CHILLS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery Page 2
