He was not used to women reacting so negatively to him. He didn’t like to think he relied too much on his good looks and manners to get his way in life, but he also knew that it didn’t hurt, and generally when he turned on the charm, it worked. People liked him. Women especially liked him. They opened up to him. In fact, sometimes they mistook his pleasantries for invitations of intimacy he did not intend, which caused awkward problems later on. But they didn’t roll their eyes at him. They did not encourage him to go away. The truth was he could not stand for people not to like him. What was there to dislike? He was good-looking, intelligent, polite, and easy-going. He didn’t pass judgments. He didn’t preach his views or talk politics. He was likable. And he wanted Casey to see that.
How angrily she’d reacted when he’d assumed she merely worked at the café. You’d think someone that proud would boast of her business, and herself, online, but not Casey. He also knew that whatever title Casey claimed over the café, Rosetta owned it. Whatever Casey’s deal was, he would uncover it. He enjoyed puzzles. He would solve the riddle that was Casey Jones and win her over. She had clearly issued a challenge that morning, and he couldn’t resist a challenge. And if flirting with Casey took his mind off of Ashley, that would be okay, too.
When he shut the lid of his laptop and glanced out the window, he saw that the fog was finally breaking up and something like a thin, pathetic ray of sun was trying to make its way through. Thank God. He’d take a walk and then try to corner Rosetta so they could talk money. That’s what this would all boil down to. If Sweet Water could buy the property cheap enough to offset the difficulties (and accompanying costs) of building here, the deal might have a chance, but that seemed like a big if to Brett.
Chapter 16
St. Nabor Island, South Carolina
The truth about investigations of paranormal activity is that a lot of the time they are boring. You set up all your stuff, lock yourself in, and wait, and as often as not nothing happens. Nothing but you and your team scaring yourself and each other every time someone hears a noise. But those long boring hours are worth it when you stumble onto something inexplicable.
Randy went into every investigation cautiously optimistic; he knew better than to get his hopes up too high. This investigation was different though. This was the home of Angela Ellis, the girl with the ghost brother.
He hated to think about elementary school. Kids were so mean. He’d never fit in, not from day one. Pretty girls with brand-name clothes—girls like Angela—were the worst. They could pin you down with a look, even as nine- and ten-year-olds. Randy had hated them; everyone who wasn’t one of them hated them. And yet, he’d wanted their approval. Everyone did. It was human nature, a grand paradox that governed people’s lives from youth through old age.
He hadn’t heard Angela’s ghost story from her. He’d heard it from a friend he ate lunch with most days, who recounted a story Angela had told on the bus about her ghost brother watching out for her. The conclusion of this retelling was an assertion that Angela was stupid because only babies believed in ghosts. At the time Randy had probably nodded, solidarity of nerds against cool girls, but actually he was intrigued. He believed in ghosts. If Angela also believed in ghosts, they had something in common. Maybe he could talk to her about it. Maybe she’d realize they weren’t so different and she’d open the door to a kinder, gentler middle school by bestowing friendship on him.
Except of course she hadn’t. He’d tried to talk to her and she’d made fun of him the minute he opened his mouth. He never even got to talk to her about her brother’s ghost. Actually, when he thought about it now, maybe it wasn’t Angela who made fun of him. Maybe it was one of her mean friends who shut him down before he’d even begun. But either way, Angela hadn’t wanted to talk to him, clearly.
And now here she was, asking for his help. The pretty little girl who had grown into a beautiful woman. When she had told him about her mother, when she’d cried right there in the bookstore, he had softened toward her. How could he not? Who could be unmoved at the sight of a beautiful woman in tears? If he was being totally honest, he had wanted nothing less than to take her in his arms, pick her up, and take her back to his place where he could hold her all night long. Still being totally honest, he wasn’t sure how much of that was a desire to comfort her and how much was a desire to have proof that he was now, officially, cool enough to get a girl like Angela Ellis. He didn’t like that feeling. He preferred to think himself above all that pettiness.
Now, kneeling in front of her in her living room, he felt it again, the desire to be alone with her, to comfort her, to take away all her grief—and then the guilt returned.
She agreed to let him record the garage and they both stood up and went back to the dining room. He led her to a chair at the far end of the table from the computer equipment while he gave instructions for the final set up.
According to the case studies Randy had read over the years, ghost activity was most likely around the hours of noon and midnight, and around the moments of seasonal shift—summer and winter solstice, spring and fall equinoxes. It was only a few days past the equinox, and tonight was a new moon, a pitch black sky. People always thought the full moon was spooky, and there was some truth to the idea that people’s inhibitions are lower during the full moon, but spirits were not called forth by the moon. Spirits, it seemed, preferred the darkest nights.
The team had decided that Angela should go up to her room around 11:45. She was to go in and shut the door and turn off the lights, as if she was going to sleep, since all the activity so far had been after she had gone to bed. A camera had been set up in the room and Bill would monitor it from command center, and she had a walkie-talkie to communicate with him.
Jen and Randy would investigate the rest of the second floor, spending time in each room and performing various tests to search for unexplained magnetic fields, air currents, or other energies. Krissy and Rick would investigate the first floor in basically the same way.
He and Jen crept upstairs at 12:30 as planned. First they went to the guest room, where as expected, they found nothing at all unusual. Next, the bathroom, also not a room where anything was anticipated.
At 1:30, they moved on to Angela’s mother’s suite. They went to the far side of the room from the door and began. First Jen took out her audio-reducer, a handheld box that to the uninitiated might seem like a white noise machine, but which was actually a hypersensitive filter of sound waves that could detect things beyond the capabilities of the human ear and compress them into audible noise. Sometimes, with situations like the one Angela had described, the audio-reducer could pick up and translate the sound from the spirit-world, and with careful listening, one could make out what it wished to communicate.
While Angela reported hearing her mother’s voice loud and clear, she had also told Randy that her other friends hadn’t heard a thing, but he was hoping the audio-reducer would help him to verify her experience. And if he couldn’t verify it? The wounded little boy inside him said that would be okay, too—he was the one with the upper hand here. He could put her in her place. And feelings like that were exactly why he often thought about moving far away from Palmetto Landing. He could move and never run into anyone from his youth and never have to feel those nasty, resentful, vengeful thoughts again. He was above all that, he really was, but sometimes, when face to face with someone like Angela, the old feelings crept in again.
Randy and Jen sat in silence with their backs to the wall, waiting. The audio-reducer gave off its usual, all-normal, static sound. It was just before two when Angela came over the walkie talkie. She had heard footsteps in the hall coming toward her mother’s bedroom. Randy and Jen exchanged glances. This was it. Randy put on his infrared goggles and trained his eyes on the bedroom door, which was partially ajar.
“Angela,” Randy whispered into the walkie-talkie, “can you go out into the hall?” She had said she only heard the actual voice when she left her room.
“Alone?” Angela asked.
“We’re right here. We’ll come out the minute you call for us.” He hoped she could handle sitting with it for long enough. He wanted to get the voice talking and capture evidence of it, but Angela had said that when her roommate came into the hallway, the voice had stopped.
“Turn that off,” Randy said to Jen, nodding toward the audio-reducer.
“But—”
“If the voice starts up, you can get closer to the door and turn it on, but I think the quieter we are the better.”
She shut it off.
They heard Angela’s bedroom door open.
“We should have left the door open,” Randy said. If they had, he’d have a clear view into the hallway where Angela now was, and with his infrared goggles he’d be able to detect anything else out there with her.
“She said she always keeps this door shut,” Jen said, defensively. This was true, and they had felt it was important to try to replicate Angela’s past experiences as closely as possible.
They heard Angela sob out loud. There was nothing fake about Angela’s distress. He could hear that. Whatever she was experiencing, it was real. Randy felt bad for ever doubting her, for ever imagining joy in telling her they hadn’t detected anything. She cried out again and Randy leapt to his feet, but Jen caught hold of his hand.
“Wait. She didn’t call for us.”
Randy looked down at her, and then inclined his ear toward the hallway. He could hear her, out there, whimpering. Jen was right. She hadn’t called for them. If they wanted evidence, they needed to see how this would play out.
He tiptoed to the edge of the bed, hoping his view into the hallway would be better, but he still couldn’t see Angela. Behind him, Jen got up and, keeping to the wall, crept to the doorway. She set the audio-reducer down on the floor inside the bedroom threshold and switched it on. The static sound competed too loudly with Angela’s cries, and Randy gritted his teeth. He didn’t like this.
He had never had the slightest hesitation about having someone act as ghost-bait in any other investigations, but it had never been personal before. Usually the suspected ghost and the investigating team were strangers to one another, and the ghosts, however malevolent they might seem to the property owners, were only objects of research to the team, but this was something else.
Angela’s voice rose above the noise of the machine. “Go away! Go away!” she shouted, and Randy had had enough. He dropped his infrared goggles on the bed, crossed the room, flung the door open, and went to Angela who was crouched on the floor of the hallway with her hands pressed against her ears. She didn’t look up at his approach. In fact, she didn’t appear to even notice that he was there. He knelt down and touched her knees. She jumped like she’d been shocked, and then registering that it was him in front of her, she collapsed into him, letting him wrap his arms around her.
He rocked her gently as her breathing returned to normal. He could hear Jen whispering into the walkie-talkie back in Angela’s mother’s room.
After a minute, Jen brushed by them and stomped down the stairs.
“Y’all didn’t hear anything,” Angela said softly.
Randy shook his head.
“But it was so loud,” Angela said, her voice rising with panic. “It was the loudest it’s ever been, and angry.”
“What did it say?” Randy asked.
“It said I needed to go back to bed, like always,” Angela said. “You believe me, right? You don’t think I’m imagining this?” Her lip trembled.
“Of course I believe you,” he said, taking her hand and squeezing it gently. “Did it say anything else?”
“It said I was a bad, ungrateful girl. Just once, it said that, right before you came out here. Mostly it was the same as always, repeating over and over that I should go to sleep.”
Downstairs, Rick and Krissy hadn’t found anything on the first floor. Jen grumbled that she never had a chance upstairs because Randy had intervened before she could pick up anything with the audio-reducer. Bill hadn’t seen anything on the cameras, although his attention was divided, and he said he wanted to check some of the footage more closely later. That was it. Nothing. They had nothing. Nothing except Angela’s experience that none of them could corroborate.
Randy gave instructions to move some of the monitoring equipment around and then he sat down beside Bill at the computer. He glanced over at Angela and when he was certain she wasn’t watching, he clicked open the live stream from the garage. It was just a garage, with the usual garage stuff in it—trash cans, bikes, Angela’s car. Nothing was moving. No strange sights. He closed the window.
The last few hours until sunrise dragged on with no more activity, and then it was six o’clock and they were quickly packing up cameras and microphones and lugging them back out to cars and then it was only Randy and Angela, sitting in the kitchen with fresh cups of coffee, bleary-eyed and exhausted.
“What does it mean?” Angela asked.
“It means that we all witnessed you encountering what you believe is your mother’s spirit,” Randy said. He wanted to watch the footage from the hallway at the time of the encounter. Until he could see that, he didn’t feel that he could make any judgment on the night. Bill said he hadn’t seen anything strange, but in the heat of the moment, it’s hard to analyze what you’re seeing. He would go home, get a few hours’ sleep, and then look at it again. There would be something there. He didn’t doubt she’d experienced something real and profound. Seeing her in the hallway was all the proof he needed, but he knew she needed more, and he wanted to be able to provide it for her.
“You don’t think I’m crazy?” Angela asked.
“Nobody thinks you’re crazy,” Randy said.
“Jen didn’t believe me.”
“Jen is difficult.” Jen was in many ways a mystery to him. She was one of the most devoted members of the club, but not because she was convinced that a spirit world existed. Rather, she wanted proof. She needed to see to believe. So far, on all the investigations they’d done, even when everyone else felt they had confirmed the presence of paranormal activity, Jen expressed doubts.
“What am I going to do now?”
“You’re going to get some sleep, and then we’ll talk more later,” Randy said. He would review all the material this afternoon and tell her what he found. He would have some good news for her. He was sure of it.
Chapter 17
Devil’s Back Island, Maine
Casey closed the café at four. The fog had cleared and the sky was a brighter sort of gray, so she went outside for a walk down on the beach instead of going straight upstairs. The problem with working and living in one building was that whole days could pass where she never went outside, which was exactly how the past week had been. Now that the weather was letting up, it was time for fresh air.
But when she stepped off the path onto the coarse sand of the beach by the inn, she saw Brett making his way along the water—thankfully walking away from her—and she turned back. She’d had enough of him for one day.
As she trudged back up the slope from the beach, she saw the light of the TV flickering through the window of her apartment and muttered a curse under her breath. She never should have given Jason a key. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She wanted a long hot bath, a crappy romance novel, and a relaxing evening alone.
She climbed the stairs at the back of the cottage—the outside entrance to her little apartment—and found the door to the kitchen slightly ajar.
“Jason!” she called, kicking off her shoes and latching the door firmly behind her. “You have to make sure the door actually shuts! Last week after you left, I found a stray cat on my kitchen counter! What if it was a raccoon?” She walked into the TV room and saw him lounging on the futon, remote in his hand, a line of beer cans on the coffee table, and a box with a few slices of greasy pizza on the floor.
“Are there even raccoons on this island?” he asked, turning from the TV to look at her.
/> She had absolutely no idea. “And anyway, the bugs. I do not need a house full of moths and mosquitoes and whatever else.”
“It’s not me. The door doesn’t catch right.”
She wondered if he had ever learned the words “I’m sorry.”
He sat up to make room for her on the futon and turned down the volume on the TV. He was watching a baseball game.
He pulled a little baggie from the pocket of his jeans. “If you came home much later, you would have missed out on this. It was really burning a hole in my pocket.”
Casey watched him clear a space on the coffee table and dump out the pot. Then he produced a rolling paper and expertly rolled a nice, fat joint.
“I shouldn’t,” Casey said, sitting back and closing her eyes. Before she started seeing Jason, or sleeping with Jason to be more exact, she hadn’t smoked pot in the all the years she’d been on the island. But Jason was basically an overgrown kid, so it didn’t surprise her the first time he offered her a puff. The problem was that afterward she always felt foggy-headed and cranky. Pot smoking was for underemployed kids like Jason, not for responsible adults with early-morning jobs.
“Come on,” Jason said, nudging her. She opened her eyes to see him waving the joint under her nose. Then he lowered his voice. “Think of how good it was last time.”
Casey felt a hot blush rise in her cheeks. Yes, last time it had been very very good. He’d gotten her thoroughly stoned and then they had done things in bed that were astonishing. The thought turned her on so much that she had to stand up and move away from him or she knew she’d cave. She sat down in the armchair in the corner and studied him. That chiseled jaw, those bright blue eyes, that washboard stomach and sculpted shoulders. She felt her resistance flagging.
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