What She Inherits

by Diane V. Mulligan

  “I still think we need to take it slow,” Randy said when Angela reached for the button of his jeans.

  By midnight, they were cuddled in each other’s arms on the bed, Randy’s laptop beside them showing the video feed from the empty hallway. Angela’s eyelids kept drooping. She was nearly asleep when Randy lurched beside her, pulling his arm out from under her and grabbing the laptop.

  Angela sat up slowly. She hadn’t heard anything. “Did you see something?”

  “Shit,” Randy said to his computer screen. He was speaking in a whisper. “Come on, show yourself again.” After a minute, he pressed a series of buttons and then tilted the screen toward Angela.

  “Watch,” he said, pointing to the corner of the still image on the screen. He pressed play and Angela watched. A few seconds into the playback, Randy whispered, “There, there,” and pointed to something Angela couldn’t detect.

  He froze the image and said, “Did you see it?”

  “See what?”

  “There was a blur, like a shadow passing. Here watch again.”

  He backed up the video and played it again. Angela still wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing. He played it a third time, in slow motion, and Angela nodded hesitantly. Yes, she could see some kind of shadow.

  “There’s nothing out there to make a shadow like that,” Randy said.

  “Are you sure?” Angela asked, trying to work out if this was true.

  “If there were, we would have been seeing shadows pass all night. This is different.”

  “What do we do?” Angela asked.

  “We wait and watch.”

  Wide awake now, they brought the other laptop with the garage video stream up onto the bed, too. Another half hour passed with no motion, no sound, and then they heard it. Not footsteps, this time, but a gentle rattling sound from the direction of her mother’s study. Angela clutched Randy’s arm. Randy tapped at his keyboard and switched to the window of the video from the study. They had been recording that room, but not watching it, as nothing had ever happened in there before. Not that they knew. They heard the rattle again, a sound that was like the roll-top being slid in its track but too quiet. The video, however, showed nothing.

  “You hear it, right?” Angela asked.

  He nodded.

  He heard it! She had a witness! Angela could have wept from the relief. She wasn’t crazy. Someone else heard the sounds, and saw that there was no physical explanation for them. But her relief was quickly supplanted by fear, because if Randy could hear it, then it was getting worse, wasn’t it?

  Then they heard a sound repeat three times in succession—the lid of the desk being shut. The slap of wood on wood and the shake of the roll-top, but muted as if it were happening far away or under water. Angela’s heart hammered. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. She hung onto Randy’s arm for dear life.

  “I think we should go into the room, see what happens,” Randy said.

  Angela shook her head and bit her lip. She couldn’t. She couldn’t do that again.

  “I can go without you.”

  “No!” she said, speaking above a whisper for the first time since Randy noticed the passing shadow. She couldn’t stand the thought of being left alone, even for a minute.

  “Shh,” he said. “I’ll be with you. In the past, as soon as someone else showed up, the voice stopped, right? So if I’m with you, probably nothing will happen at all.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Angela asked. She hadn’t realized just how terrifying this would be, coming back again, and with only one other person. Having the whole team here made her feel brave, but now she felt only panic.

  “We might catch something on video, some more motion, the shadow fleeing when we enter or something,” Randy said. “You can hold onto me the whole time, but I need to bring the camera. Sometimes we can capture images in still photographs that we can’t get on video.”

  He stood up, and despite the perfectly comfortable temperature of the room, Angela shivered. Randy rummaged through his bags, producing a camera which he slung around his neck, and then came back for Angela.

  “Your mother wouldn’t hurt you, would she?” he asked gently.

  Angela shook her head. Reluctantly, she took his hand and got up. Then they went together into the hallway. They inched their way to the study without seeing or hearing anything strange, but they both felt it when they entered the room—a rush of cold air that seemed to drop from the ceiling and pass through them. Unable to contain herself, Angela shrieked aloud.

  And then she heard it. The voice again, harsh, shrill, strained, “Angela. Go back to bed, Angela.” Repeated over and over, faster and faster, overlapping, filling her brain as if the voice was coming from inside her.

  She threw her arms around Randy’s waist from behind and buried her face in his back. She didn’t know if he could hear it, too, and she didn’t care. She just wanted it to stop. Randy extricated himself from her grasp, and then he turned around and took her arms and said, “It’s okay. There’s nothing here.”

  “The voice,” Angela said, her own voice strangled with fear.

  “You hear it now?”

  She nodded.

  “Right now?”

  She pressed her face into his soft t-shirt and squeezed her eyes shut as if that could also block out the sound.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s okay. It wants you to go back to bed, right? So let’s go back to bed.”

  Randy guided her back to her bedroom and shut the door behind them. He sat her on the edge of the bed, and then he looked around the room, and said, “Shit.”

  She looked up at him, blinking through her tears. “It’s okay,” she said weakly. “It stopped.”

  He pointed to the laptops on the bed. The screens were black.

  Part Three

  Chapter 25

  St. Nabor Island, South Carolina

  Randy tapped the touch pads on each of the computers. Nothing. He checked the power cords. They were plugged in securely, but no indicator lights flashed on either computer. They were dead.

  “You ever have trouble with that outlet?” he asked Angela, bending to look at it. Maybe they tripped the circuit somehow, although that didn’t really explain the lack of life in the computers, because their batteries had plenty of juice to keep them running.

  Angela shook her head. She was standing in the center of the room, white as a ghost herself.

  “I’ve heard of shit like this happening before,” Randy said, getting up and stepping back over to Angela. “It’s okay. I’ll sort them out later.”

  “It’s not okay! It’s really bad!” Her voice was shrill and Randy could see that she was likely to burst into tears again at any second.

  “Let me just grab a few things and we’ll get out of here. I can come back for the rest tomorrow,” he said. He gathered up the computers and led Angela down to the car. They didn’t need to stay all night. They had all the proof they needed that something was definitely wrong in that house.

  In the morning, Randy puzzled over the computers. After a few experiments, he found the problems. The batteries were fried and would need to be replaced, as were the power cords. Once he removed the failed batteries and used a spare cord, he got them both running, but all of the recordings from the night before were wiped.

  Until now he had considered whatever was happening in the house to be benign. After all, Angela swore it was her mother, and she had a good relationship with her mother, but sending a surge of electricity to blow out the computers was a clear threat.

  They had to get into the desk. That much was obvious. They had to get into the desk in the daytime. Angela said even when she was home alone nothing ever happened in the daytime. But something about the previous night’s events bothered Randy. The sounds they heard from the desk—those weren’t warning sounds. Those sounds seemed to beckon them, as if something wanted them to open the desk. But then when they got into the room, Angela heard the voice again, telling her t
o go back to bed. It didn’t make sense for the thing—whatever it was—to lure her out only to scare her away. If it weren’t for the sounds—last night from the desk, the other nights of the footsteps in the hall—she never would have gotten out of the bed at all.

  What if, he wondered, there were two spirits at play here? If the voice, with its anger and frustration, was her mother, then maybe the other thing was someone else, perhaps her brother. She said that she hadn’t felt his presence in a long time, but now she was effectively an orphan, so maybe he knew she needed him.

  Randy thought back to the pictures they’d seen on the Facebook pages of Angela’s lost family members. Her brother had been in some of them. Maybe he was tired of the secrets their parents were keeping from her.

  They had to go back to the house. They had to investigate again, but this time, no computer equipment. This time, they needed help from someone who could communicate with the dead. They needed Calliope Savidos.

  ***

  Randy expected Angela to resist his request that they go back to the house again, but she didn’t. She agreed, and she said the sooner the better. For the second night in a row, they drove together in the evening to the quiet street full of big homes tucked back from the road, a home so new that no one would imagine that there could be any lingering ghosts there.

  Angela looked like she hadn’t eaten in days. In fact, Randy hadn’t seen her eat anything in the many hours they’d spent together in the past week. Tonight, he knew, would be the game changer. Tonight she could get some closure. When he thought of the way she’d kissed him the night before, he felt the strongest urge to gather her up in his arms and take her out of here. The way he felt around her—he had never felt such a crushing desire to protect someone in his life.

  He’d spent all of his middle and high school years protecting himself against the casual cruelty of pretty, popular girls like Angela and had a well-developed sense of suspicion that kicked in whenever a girl like her approached him, even now, even knowing he was no longer that scrawny little nerd with the big ugly glasses and braces and comic books in his back pocket. He rejected girls who exuded the confidence of high school prom queens in advance, so they never had a chance to reject him. And now here he was, head over heels for a girl who represented everything he hated—phoniness, superficiality, pettiness. Obviously, Angela wasn’t really those things, but he still had moments of doubt when it felt like this was all some elaborate practical joke.

  And then he saw the fear and vulnerability in her eyes when she turned to him for reassurance and he knew, she wasn’t faking anything. This was no prank. She trusted him, and she needed him to trust her. Still, they had to take things slowly. There was no reason to rush the relationship and every reason to take their time. The ghost investigation, though, that was time sensitive.

  Together they went around the house and gathered up the cameras and microphones they’d left in place the night before. Then they sat in the den watching TV, not really talking, just waiting.

  Calliope arrived at eleven and greeted Randy with enthusiasm. She was a tall woman with wild black curls, gaudy makeup, and flowing clothing. She wore a ring on every finger, bangles on her wrists, several necklaces around her neck. In others words, she fully fit the stereotypes her customers had of psychic mediums. Randy had known her long enough to expect her theatrics, but he also knew she was the real deal. People saw her and their expectations fell because she looked like a cartoon character, but then they witnessed her at work and they became believers.

  The first thing she did upon entering the house was to embrace Angela, pulling her in so that Angela’s head nestled between her substantial breasts, and holding her close for several minutes before letting Angela go.

  “Do you hear ghosts often?” Calliope asked.

  Angela frowned and shook her head. Why would she hear ghosts often? What other ghosts could possibly want to talk to her?

  Calliope asked for a tour of the house, and they showed her around, detailing what they’d witnessed so far. As Randy had done the night before, she explored the desk, but she was slower and more methodical about it, placing her hands flat on the roll-top and closing her eyes as if the desk might communicate to her, peering at the drawer-handles up close, getting down on her knees to look into the space where the chair fit. If she gleaned anything from this, she didn’t say.

  They went back downstairs to the kitchen and sat at the table. Calliope needed to ask Angela questions to prepare. Randy could see that Angela was hesitant to reveal anything, but he reassured her. This wasn’t like having one’s fortune told. Calliope needed to know about the people she would be communicating with. She wasn’t going to spin the details Angela gave her to pretend she could talk to the dead, Randy reassured her. Reluctantly, Angela spoke. She explained about her father’s illness, her brother’s death, her mother’s perfectionism, and her recent discovery of relatives she never knew she had.

  Randy hadn’t yet told Angela of his theory about two presences in the house. In fact, he had tried not to talk about the investigation all day in the hopes that she’d be able to relax a little. Now, though, he had to speak. Calliope needed to know what he thought. He cleared his throat.

  “I have a theory to run by y’all.”

  Angela looked at him, surprised. Calliope gestured for him to speak.

  “I think there are conflicting spirits at work here. One, maybe her brother, who wants Angela to know something, and one—her mother, I think—who wants to make sure she doesn’t find out what.”

  As he explained his idea, Calliope nodded agreeably, but Angela stared at him, slowly shaking her head.

  “That can’t be it,” Angela said, when he’d finished.

  Randy thought he had explained it all clearly. It was hard to see what she might be objecting to. “It makes sense, though,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Angela said. She bit her lip. She looked like she wanted to say more, but then she just shook her head, shrugged, and looked away.

  “Well, my dears, isn’t that what y’all brought me here? To find out? Randy’s theory is nice, and if it has any truth to it, I’ll find out.” Then she stood up, gathering her notes, and said she needed some things from her car.

  Alone in the kitchen, Randy tried to get Angela to look at him, but she was obstinate in her refusal.

  “All that stuff about Ryan,” she said, “I don’t know. I used to say his ghost watched over me, but that was so long ago. It’s like I can’t trust those memories. What if I made it all up?”

  And Randy thought he understood. Angela doubted her own stories of her brother’s ghost. Of course she did. She had been a kid when all that happened, and now looking back her mind wanted to find logical explanations. That was only natural. Faith was always tested by doubt.

  “It’s okay,” Randy said.

  “I just wanted people to think I was special, you know? Everyone else had brothers and sisters, and I didn’t, but if I was going to be different, I could at least be special, right?”

  Randy made a face to suggest that she was being silly. She had never need to prove she was special, she was born a cool kid.

  “I didn’t mean to lie,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know now if something happened, and then I embellished it, or if I told the stories so many times I started to believe them, or what.” She looked pathetic and cute.

  “All that was a very long time ago, and anyway, kids are very intuitive. Maybe you should give your memory more credit.”

  A look of relief washed over her face. “I feel like no one ever believed me,” she said, and then she let out a sad little laugh. “My life isn’t usually this melodramatic.”

  “The thing is,” Randy said, “we need to figure out what’s happening now, and whatever happened in the past, I really think it’s not just your mother in the house, because I heard that stuff last night, too. I haven’t heard the voice that you hear, but I heard the desk. I saw the shadow.”

 
Angela nodded solemnly.

  “Come here,” he said, drawing her in. He rested his cheek on the top of her head. He could smell the fruity scent of her shampoo.

  They heard Calliope open the front door and dropped their embrace like kids who had just been caught by one of their moms.

  “Interrupting, am I?” Calliope asked. “Let’s get started then.”

  Chapter 26

  Devil’s Back Island, Maine

  Brett sat at the desk beside the open window of his small hotel room, watching the sun dip behind the mainland across the bay. He wanted the deal to work out, for his own sake and for Rosetta’s, but he would have to start from scratch in designing the resort and conference center, because the usual models just wouldn’t work here.

  Most Sweet Water Resorts sat on wide, flat beaches with long stretches of sand, but here the beach was a small cove nestled in cliff rock. Usually, Sweet Water properties were large, high-rise hotels with fine dining restaurants surrounded by condo villages with their own pools and snack bars. To do anything like that here, they’d have to buy the whole island.

  How could he interest Charlie in doing something so unlike their typical set up? He was way out on a limb here, and it seemed like the branch might break at any second.

  But the island was gorgeous. There was no denying that. It was pristine, quiet, and timeless. Those were the features he would have to use to his advantage. This wouldn’t be the typical beach-and-golf arrangement. For one thing, there was definitely no room on the island for a golf course. But they could cater to the sailing and deep-sea fishing set. Offer chartered sailboat cruises, dolphin cruises, fishing excursions, that sort of thing.

  And entertainment. They’d have to have a steady stream of live entertainment. Or maybe they could package it as a couples resort. Adults only. That might work. All people wanted at couples resorts were big beds, soft sheets, swimming pools, and places to sunbathe. They could do that here.