“Soy latte?” Casey said, grimacing, as he approached the counter.
“Perfect,” he said, stepping to the side of the register and stooping to study the pastry case. He tapped his lip thoughtfully and then tilted his head up toward where Casey stood at the cappuccino machine. “Do you have anything vegan?”
Of course he was vegan. He probably also only ate organic, non-GMO foods grown on farms where they played classical music to the crops instead of fertilizing them. She had a case full of delicious, homemade, interesting pastries, and he’d rather have some kind of gluten-free, no-sugar-added, sawdust cookie. He was one of those health-nuts who thinks he’s smarter than all of Western Civilization. She gestured to a hutch against the wall where she had a couple of shelves of packaged cookies, bars, and snacks, with cheerful, hand-drawn labels proudly proclaiming, “Vegan!” “Nut Free!” “Gluten Free!” She knew she had to cater to all tastes, but that didn’t mean she had to learn to use a whole new set of ingredients to bake for every new fad.
“Thanks,” Brett said, winking and walking over to the case. He came back with a granola bar and set a ten dollar bill on the counter. As Casey made change, he asked, “Do I need a Wi-Fi password or anything?”
“We went over this yesterday,” she said. “No Wi-Fi.”
“Right, you don’t share your Wi-Fi, but maybe you could make an exception for me,” he said, glancing around the café. “I mean, normally, I’d set up my phone as a hotspot but there’s no cell reception here.”
This guy was unbelievable. No Wi-Fi meant no Wi-Fi. “I strive to encourage a true vacation, where people can unplug and unwind,” Casey said.
“Yeah, well I’m here to work, so.” He pocketed his change, dropping the coins in her tip jar.
Cheap, she thought. He should have at least left a one.
“The hotel gives guests Wi-Fi access,” Casey said, crossing her arms.
“I work better with some background noise. I want to be around people, get a feel for the place.” He ran a hand through his hair and puffed up his cheeks. “Damn. Rosetta may have underestimated the difficulties of working here.”
Casey shrugged. She was enjoying seeing his disappointment. He was the type of man who had an answer for everything and who believed he could charm his way through life, but take away his toys, and he lost his cool facade in an instant.
“What you need,” Casey said, “is to get back in touch with the finer things in life.” Without thinking, she pulled a plate with the one remaining cinnamon bun from the pastry case and held it in front of him. In the back of her mind, a little voice was saying, Casey, what are you doing? But she ignored it. Instead, in her best sultry voice, she said, “Unwind. Take it easy. What do you have to do that’s so important, anyway?”
He looked at the pastry and then at her. “Temptress,” he said. “You are evil.”
“On the house,” she said, and then she realized she was actually batting her eyes at him. What had come over her? Fatigue must have been making her delirious.
“Did you make these?” he asked. He looked as if he might actually drool.
“Yes. And they are fantastic.” She felt exhilarated and wicked. She was so tired she felt a little drunk. She wondered if she should call Kim to come in for the afternoon so she could duck out early.
“My girlfriend would shoot me,” he said, taking the plate.
Girlfriend. The word broke the spell. Here she was seducing a man (whom she did not even like, she told herself) with baked goods and meanwhile his health-nut girlfriend was at home being self-righteously vegan and awaiting his return.
“Yeah, well, enjoy,” Casey said, turning away and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hands.
God she was tired. She should have tried harder to sleep last night. She was never going to make it through the day like this. And what was she doing, flirting with this asshole while Jason was probably still sleeping upstairs? She had to get her key back from him. That situation had definitely outlived its usefulness.
When she turned back toward the counter, Brett was still standing there. He had a mouthful of cinnamon bun and he was studying her.
“Man, that’s good,” he said, wiping a bit of frosting from his lip. “So what’s with the tattoo?” he asked.
“A souvenir of my youth,” Casey said, glancing down at her left arm.
“It’s interesting,” he said, blowing on his coffee and squinting his eyes at her. He leaned over across the counter.
“When did you get it?” he asked. He looked as if he was resisting the urge to reach out and trace his hand along her arm.
“When I was seventeen.” Casey pulled her arms in, covering the tattoo as best she could. It was a pose she was used to. The tattoo was engraved on the skin of a woman who had had an utter inability to imagine herself ever being older than she’d been the day she’d first been inked. And even though it had been twenty years since then, most days she still felt like a foolish teenager.
She glanced at the clock and wished Brett would go sit down and leave her alone. She needed to call Kim and get her in here before the noon ferry so she could go sleep. The gust of energy that had turned her into a seductress had evaporated and now she felt raw and vulnerable, as if she had offered him her soul with that cinnamon bun, and all he’d wanted was the tasty treat. She was being irrational, she knew, and she couldn’t imagine why she was letting herself get so worked up over a guy she did not even really like.
“I got a tattoo on my twenty-first birthday,” he said. He patted his right shoulder with his left hand. “Giants logo. So stupid. I keep thinking I should get it removed or something but you know, who has the time?”
“Anything else I can get you?” Casey asked, thinking that surely he would take the hint.
Instead he said, “Actually, yes. I was hoping you’d be my guide. I want to explore the island, and I’d like a local to show me the ins and outs.”
Casey blinked.
“Any chance you’re free tomorrow?”
Behind Brett, the door of the café opened and shut and a loud family, parents and two small children, entered. Tomorrow was her day off. Had Rosetta told him? She said, “Oh, I don’t—”
“Say yes, and I’ll get out of your way,” he said, winking. “You’re the boss here, right, so you can decide to have the day off if you want?”
Why did men like Brett think they could get whatever they wanted by winking and flashing a smile? And since when could bosses take the day off willy-nilly? For a sophisticated-looking guy, he didn’t seem to know too much how life actually worked. But it was her day off tomorrow, and wouldn’t Rosetta be delighted to hear she had been spending time in the company of a handsome, age-appropriate man?
“Fine, but don’t expect me to bring you any free baked goods,” Casey said.
Chapter 20
St. Nabor Island, South Carolina
Randy went over the video from the hallway three times, pausing it on anything that might be anything, rewinding, replaying, slowing the playback, but the fact was there was nothing there, nothing but Angela shaking, crouching on the floor, crying, pleading with someone or something to stop. He had pinned his hopes on finding some clue in the tape as to what she had experienced. At another investigation a while back, they were able to corroborate the testimony of an eyewitness to an ill-intentioned spirit by catching peculiar and inexplicable orbs on camera.
After the second playback, he had to mute the audio. It was too terrible to listen to Angela’s whimpers and cries. And that was a shame, because if he could have isolated and enhanced the audio, maybe he could have discovered an irregularity there. If only she’d been able to hold in her vocalizations, but that was an unfair thing to wish for. She was grieving and afraid. She would have to be superhuman to sit through whatever was happening out there without making a sound.
Flipping through the files on his computer, he decided he could skip the footage from downstairs. Nothing had happened there. That was ob
vious. Instead, he found the files they’d recorded from the garage. If there was any hope of getting Angela some proof to support her experiences, it was in those files.
There was no time to watch or listen to it all. He started with the video, advancing the recording to about ten minutes before Angela heard the noises upstairs. Sometimes, watching tape of empty rooms in the dark like this, Randy wondered how security guards could work the night shift for years on end, sitting in a room somewhere watching CCTV. Talk about torture. He watched the timestamp on the video, each second an eternity, until he was nearly at the moment when the activity in the hallway began. Then he forced his eyes off the clock and tried to focus on the whole rest of the picture at once.
There was a trick to it. You had to let your eyes unfocus in order to take in the whole screen and not only one focal point in the room, and yet you had to stay alert so that any movement would catch your eye. At even the slightest disturbance, you hit pause, rewound it a few seconds, and then watched again, more carefully this time, trying to make out what had caught your eye.
Randy let the tape play for a full ten minutes beyond the moment he’d interrupted the haunting upstairs. Nothing. Not even a wayward dust mote drifting before the lens. He watched a second time to be sure.
Frustrated and exhausted, he backed up the video again and then he queued up the audio from the garage so that the two were synchronized. Close enough anyway. He listened to the gentle white noise of nothingness and half-heartedly watched the still garage, so still that the only suggestion that it was a video and not a photograph was the time stamp counting the minutes and seconds.
He wanted there to be something, anything, to warrant another visit to the house. There had been too many people. Barely enough recording devices, but too many bodies. Perhaps if it was just he and Angela, the two of them alone, he’d hear it, too. He knew this was ridiculous, though. She had said her friends who stayed with her after the funeral hadn’t heard it.
Investigating a ghost of someone so recently deceased had made this feel more urgent than any investigation he’d ever done. Seeing Angela’s distress the night before, his old resentment of her had faded. He wanted to help her through her grief, and the investigation could do that.
Every moment he had spent with her, she had become more beautiful in his eyes. She was pretty by any standards, but she was the sort of pretty that at first seemed distant, untouchable. Her grief made her human, and her vulnerability made her irresistible.
At first his attraction might have been about conquest, a desire to say he’d had Angela Ellis, a childish desire to brag on the playground, but not anymore. He had seen enough of her to know that she wasn’t some stuck-up, mean girl. Maybe she never had been. Maybe she’d been a follower, which was bad, but forgivable. Whatever the case, she had been nothing but kind and humble since she walked into the meeting last week. And he wasn’t a self-conscious nerd anymore, either. He was successful, confident, and good-looking. Why shouldn’t he be interested in a girl like Angela?
When he thought of her, he imagined holding her, kissing her, running his hand through her hair, and then he felt guilty. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking this way. He hardly knew her. She had just lost her mother. She was in a crazy place in her life. Undoubtedly she was not interested in romance right now. How could she be? And if he did try to turn this into something intimate, wouldn’t that be taking advantage of her fragile emotional state? And that was the problem. He was a good person. Good people did not take advantage of the delicate emotions of others.
And yet he liked her. He really liked her. He liked the light, gold-flecked brown of her hair, and the swirly, many-colored hazel of her eyes, and her short, slender arms, and—
A sound on the recording snapped him from his thoughts. His thumb stabbed the keyboard to pause the video and then he clicked the mouse to drag the audio back a few seconds. He brought the volume all the way up, slowed the playback time, and pressed play.
After a couple of seconds he heard it: a sound like air whistling through a loose window casing or a gap under a door, steady, high-pitched (lower in the slowed version, but high when he sped things back up to normal). It lasted only four seconds.
He jotted down the time elapsed on the recording, and then clicked back over to the video. He’d have to use the video time stamp to approximate the time the sound had occurred. He nudged the video back, back, back until the time elapsed was the same as the audio and then checked the time stamp. A little math, some cross-referencing, and he was sure. The noise coincided with the moment he’d gone into the hallway to interrupt Angela’s terror.
That was something. Randy slapped his palm against the desk, backed the video up a smidgen more, and then hit play. At exactly the right second, he hit play on the audio so that the time elapsed on each was identical, and then he peered close to the screen, watching and listening and hoping to catch some visual he had missed before that accompanied the whistling sound. He repeated this little game four times, but he found nothing.
Well, he had the audio. That was a start. He would need to listen to the rest and see if it happened again, of course. There was the possibility that it was in fact a breeze coming in around the edges of the garage doors or something, but the time was exactly right. What were the odds that a breeze had gusted up at the precise moment that he turned on the hallway lights and interrupted Angela’s encounter with the voice? It hadn’t been a gusty night. This was the first piece of proof.
Exhilarated, he called Angela and made dinner plans, but he didn’t tell her what he had found. He wanted to tell her in person, see her relief that they were finally getting somewhere.
When he hung up the phone with her, he called Bill.
“I don’t know, man, it’s a long shot. How long did you listen? It could’ve been the wind,” Bill said, when Randy explained what he’d heard.
“Obviously I have to listen to the rest to rule that out, but I think we’ve got something here,” Randy said, exasperated. He’d expected a more positive response.
“I don’t know, dude. I sat there all night and I saw jack squat except for one very freaked out chick.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“I believe she believes she heard something.”
Randy backed the audio up and played it again. Each time he was more certain. Whatever it was, it wasn’t natural. It was some kind of paranormal something. The fact was, if he was going to reinvestigate, he needed Bill or he wouldn’t have enough equipment to record everything he wanted to capture. “If I go out there again, would you be up for it? Maybe just me and you and her.”
“This is because you’re into her.”
“Come on, don’t be like that. She’s an old friend, and I want to help her,” Randy said, but he didn’t like thinking it was so obvious that he was attracted to Angela. If Bill had noticed, everyone must have, including Angela. He hadn’t known he was so transparent.
“Send me the files. Let me check them out and then I’ll give you my answer.”
That was good enough. Randy was certain Bill would agree when he listened to the recording.
That evening, Randy pulled into the parking lot of Antonio’s, feeling more nervous than he cared to admit. On the one hand, the sound on the recording was good news—suspicious activity that gave him confidence that something paranormal was happening. On the other hand, Angela hadn’t even wanted them to investigate the garage, so finding activity there might feel more like bad news to her than good news. He wanted her to be happy, to be impressed, even, to want to spend more time with him, but he started to realize that her reaction was likely to be far more complex, and certainly thrilled was the wrong word when you were talking about someone’s mother’s ghost. He sat in the car until he saw Angela pull into the lot, and then he strode to the door in a manner he hoped exuded confidence.
As Angela approached him, he could see that she looked exhausted. Her face was drawn and there were dark circles under her
pretty eyes.
“Did you get any sleep?” he asked, once they’d been seated in a quiet corner. He had forgotten how romantic the atmosphere inside Antonio’s was and felt a bit self-conscious about the choice. This girl was doing a number on his head.
She shook her head.
“Shit. I’m sorry. Maybe the whole investigation was a mistake. It’s too soon,” Randy said. But without the investigation, he’d have no reason to see her, so he sincerely hoped she disagreed.
“I have to sell the house,” Angela said.
Randy wondered if this was her way of agreeing, as if she was saying, “The hell with it. I’m selling and moving on,” but then she went on.
“If I don’t figure this thing out now, I’ll never know. I mean, I don’t hear the voice when I’m at Grace’s, so it’s not following me around.”
Randy smiled reassuringly and reached across the table to take her hand. “Well then, I have some news.” He had planned on saving what he’d uncovered for after dinner, but she said that she wanted answers, so why wait?
She looked up at him uncertainly.
“I heard something on one of the recordings.”
“You heard her?” Angela’s eyes were wide. She looked relieved but also afraid.
“Not the voice, no,” Randy said. “I heard a noise, though, and the timing matches up with your experience.”
“So there was someone or something in the hallway? You have proof?”
Randy bit his lip. She was excited, as he had hoped she’d be, but now he saw how paltry this bit of evidence was. “It wasn’t in the hallway,” he said. “It was in the garage. It was right at the moment when I interrupted you in the hallway.”
Angela frowned and withdrew her hand from his grasp. She leaned back, looked away, and considered this. “What kind of noise?”
He tried to describe it, to make it sound significant, even though he knew as he spoke that it sounded ordinary and unimpressive.
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