Once Haunted, Twice Shy (The Peyton Clark Series Book 2)

by H. P. Mallory

  “You reuse these things?” someone asked, his tone decidedly offended.

  “Yep, sho’nuff!” Prudence responded, before addressing the entire crowd again. “To reuse the tomb, the seal must first be removed, then the human remains are separated from what’s left of the coffin. The remains are either pushed to the rear of the vault, or dropped in the bottom of the tomb. Then the tomb is ready for its next occupant!” There was a round of oohs and aahs and I was among them. “You’ll get some time in a bit to walk around and count how many people are buried in any one vault. The most we’ve ever come across is thirty-seven.”

  “Wow, that’s a lot for a one-bedroom tomb!” I said as I smiled up at Ryan. He just glanced down at me and smiled back, pulling me into him as he kissed the top of my head. I allowed myself to melt into him, Drake be damned.

  “Okay, so now we arrive at the portion of our tour where we talk ’bout ghosts!” Prudence continued, her voice suddenly wavering as if she were playing the part of an apparition. “I will start off by tellin’ y’all that most cemeteries aren’t as haunted as people like ta think. Other places like houses an’ buildings usually have more haunts than a graveyard does. If you think ’bout it, it makes sense. Who dies in a cemetery?” Prudence might as well have been under a spotlight, considering how attentive her audience suddenly became.

  “Usually ghosts want ta haunt the places that meant the most to them in life, or the places where they met their tragic ends. Now, that bein’ said, keep in mind the sort o’ deaths that this cemetery has seen—lots o’ epidemics like yellow fever. In fact, there were so many deaths from yellow fever in the late eighteen hundreds that people would just pile their dead outside the cemetery gates. Now that seems a pretty bad way ta go if you ask me!” A few people laughed, ending the audience’s stupor and illusion that Prudence was an actor performing before an audience of expressionless mannequins. She took a deep breath and reached into another hidden pocket in the folds of her skirts, producing what looked like a miniature tape recorder. “Now this is a recordin’ I’ve compiled o’ all the instances of EVP I’ve encountered ova the years.” She took another breath. “Anyone know what EVP stands for?”

  “Electronic voice phenomenon!” someone answered jubilantly.

  Prudence nodded. “That’s right! So here, ladies an’ gentlemen, for yer listenin’ pleasure are some o’ the EVPs I’ve recorded with mah paranormal society right here in this cemetery.” Everyone took a few steps closer when she clicked the recording on. I could see people straining to hear voices or whatever she captured on tape. The majority of blank faces told me no one could pick up whatever it was we were supposed to hear. As for me, all I heard was what sounded like static. “You hear that?” Prudence called out.

  “No!” a man yelled. “I couldn’t hear a thing!”

  “I did!” the man’s wife responded before she elbowed him in the ribs as if to say she didn’t appreciate his outburst. “The voice clearly said ‘We’re stuck!’”

  “That’s right!” Prudence said while nodding emphatically. “If you listen real close, you’ll hear the other voice answerin’ yes when I asked if it was okay for us to be there. An’ on the last recordin’, you’ll hear the voice say ‘Where’s my bed?’” She took another deep breath and I thought she’d actually hit “play” on her recorder so we could listen for ourselves, but she didn’t. Instead, she smiled broadly. “Now, I have some very interestin’ news for y’all. Ova the last couple o’ days, I been hearin’ all this crazy stuff from mah fellow tour guides ’bout the spirits o’ N’awlins actin’ up way more than usual . . .”

  “What?” someone asked while Prudence suddenly nodded violently. My stomach was already beginning to flip-flop.

  “That’s right. My fellow ghost-guide friends have been talkin’ ’bout seein’ all sorts o’ stuff an’ hearin’ stuff on almost every tour. That rarely ever happens, I’m tellin’ ya.”

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, as my entire stomach instantly plummeted down to my toes.

  “What’s wrong, Pey?” Ryan asked as he wrapped his arms around me.

  “She noticed it too,” I said, my eyes widening as fear began to penetrate my psyche. What did it mean? What could it mean to have the paranormal side of New Orleans suddenly seem as if it had sparked back to life? And why was I so freaked out about it? Just because New Orleans was in a cosmic tailspin didn’t mean that the entity previously haunting my house would suddenly start up again . . . right?

  Of course it didn’t! The entity was long gone, having been successfully exorcised by Christopher and Lovie. It went “where the goblins go, below, below, below,” to quote the refrain of a Munchkin song from The Wizard of Oz.

  “Ma minette, you must stop this constant worrying!” Drake said. “S’il vous plaît! You are making yourself nauseous; do not forget that I feel every wave of it as well!”

  “I can’t help it!” I yelled back at him. “Why, all of a sudden, does it seem like all the spirits in New Orleans are becoming activated?”

  “I cannot say,” Drake answered. “But the only spirit you must concern yourself with no longer resides in our home. Therefore, you have nothing to fear or worry yourself about. It is all quite unnecessary.”

  I took a deep breath, but it didn’t make me feel any better. Instead, I resigned myself to paying attention to Prudence.

  “Now, the recordin’s I’m about ta play for y’all only occurred within the last two evenings, right smack here in this cemetery. Again, I was with mah paranormal society an’ along with the EVP recordin’s we took, we used EMF meters, an’ took loads o’ digital photos, an’ even a video. An’, ladies an’ gentlemen, we caught somethin’ o’ ghostly origin with every device we used!” There was a round of gasps in response. “There were more orbs in our photographs than I ever saw before an’ we caught all sorts o’ wispy white images on the video camera when we played the footage back real slow.” Another round of more audible gasps. When Prudence clicked “play” on her recorder, I took a few steps forward, leaning inward with my right ear as I closed my eyes. I was trying to separate the ghostly voices from the static of white noise in the background. I didn’t have to concentrate very hard though.

  “It comes!” The voice sounded robotic and slightly muddled, but it was clear enough for me to easily make out the words. I felt like my enormous lunch was about to revisit me in a most unkind manner. I had no time to recover, however, before the static returned, increasing steadily before it dropped again.

  “It said, ‘It comes’!” someone yelled out.

  Prudence nodded, wearing that now familiar irritated expression of impatience. “Please don’t comment out loud. There are so many words that come through, one right after ’nother, an’ I don’t want you ta miss any o’ them.” She clicked “rewind” on her recorder and the thing made a scratchy, high-pitched, and most annoying noise. “What I’ve captured here is truly unbelievable!” she finished, clicking “play” again.

  “Save us!” The next voice that came through sounded as if it could belong to a woman. It was immediately followed by a much scratchier, much harder to hear voice. I couldn’t make out exactly what it said.

  “That one was, ‘Make it stop!’” Prudence said quietly with a quick glance down at the recorder, presumably anticipating the next voice.

  “The second day” came across so clearly, I gulped loudly without even realizing it. More static, and then a huge thud that sounded like someone just dropped a piano off a four-story roof. Half the people listening intently jumped back, obviously in shock, which I found slightly humorous.

  “I’m not sure what that was,” Prudence admitted. “We didn’t drop anythin’ durin’ the recordin’ an’ there weren’t any other audible sounds that any o’ us noticed. Now listen for this one.” She grew silent as the static on the machine increased tenfold and a very weak voice called out, “Must hide, must hide!”r />
  Prudence clicked the recorder off and sighed. “Now let me remind y’all that everythin’ you just heard was ova the course o’ the last two nights. I got more EVP recordin’s just in the last two nights than I ever got here in years!”

  “That’s amazing!” someone said while the rest began talking amongst themselves. I was so astonished, I couldn’t say anything.

  “Was there more?” a woman asked while the man next to her, presumably her husband, muttered something about Prudence making the sounds on the tape herself just so she could use them for her tour. His wife elbowed him in the side and he was quiet after that.

  Prudence nodded. “There was more, but we couldn’t really make out what was said. Sounded like names possibly.”

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong in this city—terribly, horribly wrong.

  Later that afternoon, a cold and blistery wind raced through the streets of New Orleans, leaving whorls of windswept leaves and street debris in its wake. The sound of scraping branches against the windows in my house reminded me of nails on a chalkboard so, in response, I increased the volume way up on the television in my guestroom. However, I still couldn’t focus on True Blood. Instead, my mind was assaulted by images of Lafayette Cemetery as stories about Emile and the newly awakened ghosts of New Orleans occupied my mind.

  “La cacophonie!” Drake sounded in my mind; I imagined the French meant “the cacophony,” but didn’t bother checking. “Ma minette, please turn the volume down on that infernal contraption!”

  The television seemed to be the only technological innovation that Drake wasn’t impressed by. Most likely it was because he’d gotten used to seeing them in his house for the last fifty-plus years when the previous owner lived there. I sighed, grabbing the remote and turning the volume down. I felt my hair stand up on end as soon as the scratching of the tree limbs on the windows assaulted my ears again. As if that alone wasn’t enough to make me claw my face off, a steady rain began to fall, the fat drops plopping against the windowpanes in between the screeches of grating branches. But despite the New Orleans wind and water torture, I could admit I was still happy I’d moved from Los Angeles, even if the Californians were experiencing seventy-degree weather at the moment.

  Our little adventure today, first to Commander’s and then to the graveyard, had managed to absolutely do me in. I was beyond exhausted and even a little bit nauseous, which I attributed to the anxiety that was now flowing through me, and set for full steam ahead. Earlier, Ryan had invited me over to his house for the evening, but I’d declined. I did so not only because I didn’t feel right being alone with Ryan when he still didn’t know about Drake, but also because I was too exhausted to want to go. All I wanted to do was crawl into my jammies and morph into a couch potato—or a bed potato, as the case may be.

  “Ma minette,” Drake continued as I inwardly sighed, secretly wishing I could tune him out and tune True Blood back in. “I would like to speak to you. Would you kindly oblige me?”

  Figuring Sookie Stackhouse and the gang were now a lost cause, and hoping a conversation with Drake would keep my mind off the reanimated ghosts of New Orleans, I closed my eyes. I attempted to drift into the dreamscape that exists between this plane and the next.

  It took me a few seconds to get my bearings, but when I did, I found myself sitting in a plush leather chair the color of milk chocolate. I could smell the remnants of a cigar, the rich, sweet odor still lingering in the air. Its faintness suggested the cigar must have been put out a long time ago.

  “I didn’t know you smoked cigars,” I said as soon as I saw Drake. He was leaning against a stunning baby grand piano in the style of Louis XIV. It looked like it was carved out of cherry or some other dark and exotic wood. The legs of the piano were striking—they were carved, sculpted, and finished in gold leaf. On the top of each of the three legs was the head of medusa, but the legs themselves were modeled after those of a lion.

  “On occasion,” the handsome man responded. He was dressed in what I imagined was casual dress for his time period: dark pants with a blue collared shirt and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I tried not to stare at his muscular, tanned forearms, dusted with a light covering of dark, wiry hair, because I found them incredibly sexy. Forcing my eyes upward, I took in his charcoal-gray vest, which made his whole ensemble a bit dressier than it otherwise seemed. Drake’s hair was parted on the side and appeared glossy in the low lights of the music room. Sometimes I had to remind myself that he was a ghost because on occasions such as these, when he seemed so real, when the whole dreamscape seemed real, I had to prod myself to remember what was true in reality and what only existed in my head.

  “Where are we?” I asked, glancing around myself as I tried to make sense of the space. Two matching leather club chairs sat in front of the exquisite piano, which stood before a bank of picture windows.

  “My music room, ma minette,” Drake replied with a little smirk that meant he thought the answer was pretty obvious. So we were still in my house, only I was seeing it in a different time period, as it would have appeared while Drake was still alive. He turned toward a side table that stood between the two club chairs and approached it, lifting up a decanter containing an amber-colored liquid. He reached for one of two square glasses that were sitting in a leather tray on top of the table and poured a glass of the decanter’s contents. He glanced back at me and raised a brow in question. “Ma minette?”

  “What is it?” I asked, narrowing my eyes on the glass as I watched him swirl the libation around.

  “Ne jamais faire confiance à une femme qui ne connaît pas son alcool,” he responded with a secretive smile.

  I frowned. “And that means . . . what exactly?”

  He smiled even wider, looking much younger than his thirty-some-odd years. His smile made me smile because it was so charming and boyish. “Never trust a woman who does not know her alcohol.”

  “Ha-ha,” I answered while wondering what made me think Drake was charmingly boyish and, worse, why I couldn’t seem to stop staring at his forearms. I shook my head and mentally berated myself, figuring I must be ovulating. “Luckily for you, prohibition happened after you died.”

  He nodded and clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, then sighed as he shook his head. “Perhaps that was one benefit to my untimely passing.”

  As a rule, Drake and I didn’t really discuss his “passing.” I sensed he wasn’t fully comfortable with it, so I figured I wouldn’t press him on the details and didn’t mind not knowing the specifics. For all I knew, dying was probably a very personal experience. Maybe the deceased didn’t enjoy sharing the details regarding their particular exit from the earthly realm with those who couldn’t understand it: the living. “So will you tell me what you’re drinking?” I pushed. “Or do you want me to guess?”

  “Whiskey, mon amour,” he responded with a slight chuckle. “And the offer still stands if you’d fancy one.”

  “No chaser?” I asked, sticking out my tongue as I shook my head. “A big no-can-do-but-thank-you to that one!”

  “Very well,” he answered, replacing the lid on the decanter and facing me again. He cleared his throat, his eyes on mine as he took a sip and licked his lower lip suggestively. I wasn’t sure why, but I suddenly felt uncomfortable. Maybe it was the way he kept looking at me . . . There was something raw and primitive in his gaze, something totally unapologetic. Sometimes, Drake seemed capable of channeling sex itself.

  “So if you have a music room, you must play?” I demanded as I glanced over at the exquisite piano and then raised my brows at him.

  Drake grinned. “Bien sûr. Of course.”

  “Okay, then play me something.”

  He grinned even more broadly. He definitely enjoyed playing the part of impressive. “What do you fancy, mon chaton?”

  I wouldn’t consider myself a classical music con
noisseur by any stretch of the imagination but I did appreciate it all the same. At the moment, though, I was drawing a blank. “I can’t think of anything,” I admitted.

  “I have one in mind,” he said immediately as he placed his glass of whiskey back on the table. “I do not know why, ma minette, but it reminds me of you.” He sat down on the piano bench and closed his eyes for a few seconds before he started playing a tune that I somehow recognized. I didn’t say anything as I tried to place the soft and haunting melody.

  “I know this,” I said finally. “But I can’t remember the name of it.”

  “‘Scarborough Fair,’” Drake answered, still facing the piano.

  “That’s right,” I said as I started humming along with the notes coming from the piano. I shook my head as I watched his fingers pour over the keys in a flourish of sound. “You’re such an enigma, Drake.”

  “Comment cela? How so?” he asked as he continued to play.

  “Everything about you!” I answered as I shook my head again, completely floored as to how and why Drake was the way he was.

  “Example, ma minette.”

  “Okay, I don’t imagine most policemen know how to play the piano.”

  He nodded. “I became an officer because I felt the need to protect those who cannot protect themselves, ma minette. Though I will admit I was not raised to follow that path.”

  “That was going to be my next point. I can’t imagine your officer’s salary would have afforded you the likes of this place?”

  He chuckled. “Of course not.” Then he finished playing “Scarborough Fair” and turned around fully to face me. “I inherited quite a large fortune, ma minette. My family was very well to do.” So that put one of the Drake mysteries to bed. The man in question stood up and lifted his unattended glass of whiskey, taking a sip as he studied me. “Any other questions, ma minette?”