Inside the Executive's Pocket

by Etta Faire

  As soon as she stepped back, a twig snapped and green haze circled through the trees behind us, getting everyone’s attention, like a plume of thick smoke, growing larger and larger until we were in the middle of it, almost unable to see.

  “What the hell,” Curtis said, coughing and moving forward. More bright green smoke illuminated from another spot in the forest like a movie. I couldn’t see a thing. The chainsaw went off, whirring into frenzied screeches.

  Strange noises came from all around me. The sound of a scuffle. A man’s scream. I felt the terror snap on in Sylvia’s mind like a light switch. She didn’t wait to think. She took off into the woods without being able to see through the smoke, her footfalls thumping hard with her breathing. Someone was right behind us. I could feel them. Sylvia did not turn around.

  Something hit the back of our head and we tripped over what had to be a low bush, falling hard along the dirt, the branches scraping up our leg like claws.

  She pushed her palms against the ground to lift herself up, the cold dirt shooting up between our fingernails.

  I tried to remove myself from Sylvia’s perceptions so I could maybe hear something or smell something that she wasn’t able to. Try to make sense of what seemed like instant chaos.

  But I only saw smoke, thick and odd-smelling, stinging my eyes, making it hard to breathe. The chainsaw sound was more distant now, like a low rumbling.

  “I have to get up,” Sylvia thought. “I have to get out of here.”

  Tears stung our face as we screamed for our life, throat tightening, voice barely audible. The back of our head throbbed, making us disoriented. Still, we scrambled to get up.

  That’s when I felt it, a hard blow into my side. Pain shot across our rib cage as I let out a guttural “ooomf” and rolled back onto the path.

  Another strike, this time to the side of our head and Sylvia blacked out, unconscious. She wasn’t dead. I knew because I hadn’t woken from the channeling, and I could still separate myself from her to hear things even though I no longer had sight.

  And I heard snarling.

  Chapter 25

  A Little Hazy

  Whatever it was, it was standing over me now. I could tell. The musky, dirty smell of a wild animal took over my senses. A bear. It had to be a bear.

  I tasted blood along my lip. But I tried to hone in on my hearing. I knew that was my strongest sense right now. I concentrated on it, trying to fully detach myself from my passed-out ghost to hear the footsteps and breathing around me, if I could call it breathing.

  It was more like panting than human breathing, low and animal-like. It morphed into a roar, followed by growls that grew in pitch, stretching into the night. I felt what had to be a heavy paw by my head.

  The chainsaw sound got louder then abruptly stopped, quickly followed by something large being tossed into the forest, thumping along the ground and someone else yelling and running.

  Then, I thought I heard a very loud stapler. Once. Twice. More growls, more scuffle. Branches breaking, the ground shaking around us. Everything went silent.

  I smelled the dirt, tasted it along my bleeding lip. But I couldn’t hear anything anymore. I couldn’t detect anything, except maybe low, harsh breathing. A cold, hard object pressed against Sylvia’s temple, which I figured had to be a gun.

  “No,” someone clearly said, a man’s voice.

  It was instantly met by a loud crunching-tearing sound right by my ear. Strange how sound, not pain, is usually my final sense.

  As everything went instantly black, I knew it was over. My sick, twisted Disneyland ride had ended.

  I opened my eyes to my fleur-de-lis wallpaper as I bolted up, gasping for air.

  “She was shot. I’m sure of it,” I said, taking a long inhale, trying to calm my breathing down. “I bet it was a silencer.”

  Jackson was waiting for me, again. He looked very concerned, tugging on his beard while he hovered about a foot from my face.

  “You drool a lot when you channel. Mumble too.”

  I ignored him. I took one breath after another, trying to process what had just happened. My heart still raced, my adrenalin pumping. Yet, things were already growing hazy. And my ex-husband was about as comforting to wake up to as a plague doctor.

  I grabbed my notebook from off the coffee table, and opened my laptop. “Someone said ‘no’ just before Sylvia was shot.”

  “Could you see anything?”

  “The attack happened fast. Five minutes, tops, if even. There was smoke. Lots of it. A smoke bomb but huge. Green.”

  “Could it have been paranormal?” Jackson asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “There was a lot of growling. And it did sound like a bear. I’m pretty sure there was a shifter there, a bear.”

  “Interesting.”

  “There were also these sharp, piercing stapler sounds. That’s the part I think was a gun with a silencer. If that’s the case, the incident could have been a combination of a paranormal attack and a human one.”

  “A bear with a gun, perhaps.”

  “You’re not helping,” I said. I pulled out the article I’d printed out from Rebecca’s trial that listed everything found in the Dead Forest after the attack.

  Shell casings. Trash. Clothing. Chainsaw. They were all pretty consistent with what I experienced.

  “Shell casings. Why would the killer hack everyone to pieces and try to make it look like a paranormal attack, yet leave shell casings?”

  “They probably couldn’t find them. Or maybe, like you said, it was a combination of a paranormal attack and a human one.”

  I tried to think of the items not listed that should have been there. The duffle bag and the binoculars. Probably the killer took those with him when he cleaned up the crime scene.

  The trash might have been significant, too, but not much was listed in the caption other than fast-food cups, so I had to squint my eyes and stare at the grainy photo, hoping for patterns to emerge like words in an ancient shifter book.

  “I do know Sylvia was shot. Her body must’ve been staged. I also know Rebecca was wearing a dress, and likely found the key to her locker in her friend’s pocket. Or, around her body.”

  I googled the green smoke and found a possible answer immediately.

  “Military smoke grenades. Probably more than one.”

  Jackson looked at the screen. “Looks like what you described.”

  I watched several videos on them. Kids pranking their parents. The different colors. Someone describing the boobytraps you could do with them, using tripwires. It was a smoke grenade, all right. Probably with one of the tripwire techniques.

  “And at least one of the members of the club was a Vietnam vet. Paul Gelling.”

  The photo I was looking at on my laptop showed the many parts of the grenade, and the part known as the lever looked suspiciously like one of the pieces of trash. Apparently, the lever is the thing you have to make sure you hold into place once the pin is pulled because it’s designed to pop off and activate the grenade.

  It was what military personnel often referred to as the spoon. But, it was too blurry to know for sure if the photo was showing one. I wondered if I could ask my boyfriend to let me see the evidence box on this.

  I’m not sure who, what, or how many people had been involved in this attack, but it was beginning to seem pretty calculated.

  The stairs creaked and I looked up. Jean shuffled down them in a shapeless white nightgown, her thick arms exposed. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said, looking around to see who I was talking to, like she didn’t know I was talking to my ghost. “Just going to get a warm glass of milk.”

  I closed up my notebook and laptop. “It’s okay. I’m just working on my case. Channeling with ghosts and discussing things with them.”

  “Have you been up all night?” she asked.

  I nodded, but didn’t dare check the time.

  “And ghosts are really worth it?”

  “To each thei
r own,” I said to the woman who had travelled all the way to Landover with a bag full of sticks to scare a vampire.

  Chapter 26

  Trade Offs

  It was meant to be a joke, but I was pretty sure my boyfriend thought I was a psycho. I handed him a stained tupperware container full of heated-up frozen pizza then plopped down on his couch the next day before work.

  “You made me lunch,” he said, like that was a question.

  “It was the least I could do. You’re always surprising me with homemade meals.”

  He closed the lid before sitting next to me because the man had a rule about food in his living room.

  “I’m still saying no.” he said.

  “To what?”

  “To whatever this is a bribe for.”

  I pulled my curls up into a bun, the room suddenly feeling warm to me. This was not the way I expected this to go. “I just want you to take a peek into the evidence box of the 1978 incident.”

  “No.”

  “I channeled with Sylvia last night. I relived the incident with her.”

  He studied my face while his hands mindlessly played with the tupperware lid. “And? What was that like?”

  “Confusing. Green haze. Large stapler sounds that I’m pretty sure were bullets. I know she was shot, in the head. But, I think there was more than one person involved in the attack and I need to check things over.”

  “Then, you’ll have to do it without my help.”

  I knew it was because of the rumors that this had been a paranormal attack. He wasn’t about to confirm or deny anything.

  He went on. “I told you a long time ago I’m not going to help you on your cases. It’s out of the question and only happens in books.”

  I looked over at the closet when he said the word “books.”

  He seemed to notice. He looked down at his watch. “I have to go to work soon. We’ll talk about this later. But thanks for the… pizza.”

  “Later,” I repeated. “You said we’d talk about the sacred books later too. Well, this is later. Let’s talk about them, now. I can read On Sacred Grounds and probably the other books too, and this is as good a time as any to prove that to you.”

  His face dropped. “How did you know the name of that book? I never told you that.”

  “Because I read it off the cover,” I said.

  The tupperware fell from his hand and landed on the couch. He never even checked to see if it spilled open. He just stared at me.

  “I don’t want you to prove this to me ever,” he said, letting out a sigh. His longish thick brown hair accentuated the rigidity of his chin. “Just don’t tell anyone you can read it, or that you even know it exists. It’s dangerous.”

  “Then why’d you leave it laying around?” I said.

  “I didn’t know you could read it.”

  I bit my lip. “Well, you should’ve mentioned all of this sooner. I already asked Knox about it.”

  “You… what?”

  My boyfriend’s voice rarely rose above a mellow tone, even when we got into our worst arguments. But this time, it rang off every wall.

  “Why in the hell did you do that?”

  Oddly, I felt more defensive than worried. “Probably because you don’t tell me anything, ever, so I have to figure things out on my own. Honestly, if this is a problem, it’s clearly all your fault for not believing me and for being so secretive about everything.”

  He stood up and looked at his watch again. “I have to get going. The police from upstate are leaving soon. And I’ve gotta meet with Caleb about the volunteer deputies for summer.”

  “Sounds official.”

  “Stop talking so much about things, Carly.”

  That was familiar. Why was everyone saying that to me?

  He went to his kitchen and I followed. He put the tupperware in the fridge, turning back around to face me. “I spent years going to Sacred Language school in high school. This stuff is boring and hard to read. It takes me forever to find the relevant passages and then it makes no sense even after I translate it… How in the world was I supposed to believe you when you said you could read it?”

  “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter now,” I said. “I can. Not sure why.”

  “What did Knox say when you asked him about it?”

  “Not much.” I ran my hand along the apartment’s formica countertop. Totally smooth and clean, not even a few grains of salt or some cracker crumbs. “I saw him at the barbershop, of all places. So, I asked him if he could find me a copy of the book, and he said he’d look. He gave me his number…”

  Justin ran a hand along his face.

  I swallowed hard, but continued. “When I called him, I told him to forget about it. I told him I heard about it in town and I was just curious about it, but I didn’t need it.”

  Justin took a long cleansing breath. He went to the closet and quickly pulled out a jacket before I could get the wrong idea and think he was getting a book. “I think it’ll be okay. It’s just not something you should go announcing all over town, if you really can read the book.”

  “Still don’t believe me, huh?” I said, pointing at the closet. “Bring out the book and I’ll prove it.”

  “I told you I don’t want you to prove it.”

  Once again, I didn’t listen to him. “The page you had it opened to the day I saw it was about a road.”

  His face dropped. He began talking but then stopped himself. He shuffled back around, kind of like a stiff zombie, and faced the closet again. He checked his watch, but draped his jacket across a dining room chair and opened the closet again.

  This time, he brought out the thick red leather book.

  “If you really can read this, I can’t let you. Only certain people are meant to.”

  “You should know by now you can trust me.”

  I said that on purpose. I knew he didn’t trust me. He knew all sorts of stuff about Bobby, the grouse foot, the strange shifters in town pretending to be police (and might also be police, who knew), but he never told me a thing.

  He set the book on the table and opened it to a bookmarked page. “I read this page the other day,” he said, pointing to it. “So, I know it’s a pretty safe passage. Here.”

  My big chance. I hustled to the dining room table, trying to hide the excitement from my demeanor. But my heart raced into my throat. He was trusting me, with a meaningless passage.

  I casually looked at it. At first the characters looked strange, English but not English. I turned my head to the side and squinted, allowing patterns to emerge, for my mind to blank out and settle down. Justin watched me the whole time, letting me know this really was a test.

  “This is a letter from an exiled princess,” I said after a minute of him skeptically watching me. “She is desperate to return to her kingdom. People are telling her that her brother, the king, put her there, outside the borders of safety, but she refuses to believe it. I will not believe this is your doing, Robert. You would not place your blood in harm’s way. Something-something about how a king’s word should mean more than this…”

  He closed the book up. “How. On. Earth? That was very fast too. You didn’t stumble over the meanings of words like should, could, or would. Over the tenses of the feminine royal.”

  I would’ve been busy patting myself on the back over my new found skill, but Justin looked terrified. Like I’d just announced I was Satan.

  I refused to let his “are-you-Lucifer” face get to me. I needed to stay focused. “Maybe, we should look at this together sometime.”

  His expression didn’t change. “Carly, I love you, but…” He stopped talking, like he’d replayed his own words in his head and decided not to go on.

  I almost lost my focus too. We hadn’t officially said those words to each other yet, and this wasn’t exactly how I pictured it happening for the first time. This was an “I love you, but I’m pretty sure you’re Satan” kind of a declaration.

  I pretended not to notice, and
he continued, a little red-faced now. “I hate to be blunt, but this is none of your business. You’ve already done more harm than good by talking to Knox about it, and this conversation is ending.”

  “You say this isn’t my business. But, what if it is?” I said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, just spitballing here, but what if the reason I can read this book is because I’m supposed to read this book? I know you don’t trust me on much. But you can’t deny there are some weird things going on here.”

  He opened the closet, ready to put the book back. “That’s an interesting theory, but my parents trusted me with their sacred books, and I’m not going to betray them.”

  “What if by not letting me see them, you’re doing more harm than betraying trust? This has something to do with the prophecy…”

  His face lost all its color, letting me know I was onto something.

  I went on. “Bobby’s disappearance is somehow written in one of those books, huh? I’m guessing that’s what you don’t want me to read. I’m also guessing this is what the cops at the bed and breakfast are really here for.”

  “This isn’t something that concerns you.”

  “Why? Because I’m not a bear? I’ve been nothing but honest with you. The grouse pin. The fact I can read your books. The fact I told Knox. I’m not the one hiding stuff.”

  He put the book back on the top shelf and grabbed his jacket from the chair. We were done, once again. Or maybe not.

  I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and searched through my photos, stopping on the ones of Rebecca’s paintings. “Maybe this will convince you. Is this in your book? Because I also have this same photo in a scrapbook at Gate House.”

  He took my phone, almost dropping it when he saw the photo of the man in the plague mask.

  I stood by him, pointing to it. “Rebecca Torrance painted that. She was the lone survivor of the incident in 1978.”

  I could almost see the cartoon wheels going in his head. “So the lone survivor of your case in the Dead Forest is drawing pictures of the… this person? Tell me about her, and what you’ve figured out about your new case.”