Near the apple tree, I found a headstone slightly different from the rest. A carved cherub’s face gazed out over the name Nicole. She’d been ancient when she passed away — ninety-five years old. Born in 1855.
I stared, wondering why the tableau seemed… grotesque. It took me a moment to realize the cherub wasn’t looking straight out or down. His sightless eyes were gazing to the right, at the headstone beneath the apple tree.
I skirted branches and a large, decorative boulder covered in moss and lichen. This headstone was more vague than the rest:
R
1850-1875
The fact that this individual didn’t warrant his or her entire name on the headstone seemed significant, but damned if I knew how.
A breeze ruffled my hair, and apple branches knocked together beside me, drawing my attention. I started, realizing there was something hanging on the trunk of the tree.
Everything seemed to stand still as I walked beneath the low hanging branches, moving closer to the tree trunk. It was a heart-shaped plaque, worn smooth by time and the elements. The one word inscribed on it was nearly rubbed away by the weather, but I could make it out: Ian.
No headstone? I thought, wrapping my arms around my torso. It was cooler in the shade. Goose bumps raised on my skin as the sensation of being watched grew stronger.
I felt him over my shoulder, just the lightest sense of a person, ethereal and faint. I somehow knew if I turned around, I wouldn’t see him and the feeling would fade.
So instead, I asked, “Why no headstone?”
For a long minute, I thought he wouldn’t answer.
Then, two words in my head that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. No body.
Chapter Four
“I’ll call you later,” I told Madison as I climbed from her car outside my apartment building. It was still drizzling, which was fine by me. I needed to catch another five hours of sleep at least. That was better done on cloudy, rainy days.
I leaned down to peer through the door, one hand braced on the hot metal. “Let me get with Vespers and see what she thinks. I think we’ll need to run an investigation.”
Madison doubtfully lifted a pale eyebrow. “Investigation? Like those ghost shows with the electro-what readers?”
I stared at her. “Yes, Madison. With electro-what readers.”
“I don’t know if Jacob would be okay with that.”
“No, you don’t know if Jacob would be okay with Vespers. I can read between the lines.” I sighed. Vespers Malone might not have been what one would call normal, but she was my lifelong best friend. Madison just didn’t like the way Vespers dressed. Or talked. Or refused to shave and wear makeup.
I took my sister’s silence for agreement.
“It’s not like we’re on a TV show,” I assured her. “We’re just freelance. We’ll come in, do some readings and take some recordings, and then analyze. It might help us to understand better what we’re dealing with.”
“If you say so, and as long as nothing ends up on YouTube.”
“If you be nice to Vespers, I won’t post videos of your underwear.”
Madison bared her teeth at me and took her foot off the brake. I barely had time to shut the door before she was gone.
I turned to mount the concrete steps, walking into the cool shadow of my apartment building. I’d been renting for several years, and the place was home. It was an old building: red brick and guarded by gargoyle heads that spewed water onto unsuspecting passersby on rainy days. Two floors with eight apartments, some larger than others. My next door neighbor’s place had three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. Mine had a bedroom and a kitchen/living room combo. Luck of the draw, I suppose. Or luck of the paycheck.
I shoved my key into the ancient, nearly rusted-out lock and listened to the familiar tumble of pins before I shoved on the door with a shoulder. It scraped across the marble floor, shifting with agonizing slowness. Ah, home.
The foyer was always a bit dirty, but I suppose that was to be expected when twelve people constantly came and went on a variety of work and family schedules. I checked my watch and found it was just after ten, so I zipped by the mailboxes and picked up my daily bunch of junk.
I took the steps two at a time, glad to be home. I was starting to feel woozy on lack of sleep, which was probably why Bernie looked like he had three heads.
“Hey, Boss.” He sucked in a lungful of smoke and let it out in a single stream. Bernie Ludbetter was seven-foot, three-hundred pounds with the reddest nose I’d ever seen. He was in his requisite neon yellow Hawaiian shirt and bare feet beneath his Bermuda shorts. I always joked with him that he belonged in Key West strumming a guitar and belting out Jimmy Buffett tunes. Lord knows why he stayed in Tory.
“Didn’t Mal threaten to evict you if he found you smoking in the hallway again?” I asked, unlocking my door.
Bernie shrugged, his belly jiggling. “Mal’s all talk.”
“You said that about the mural, too,” I reminded him.
Some of the artsier tenants had decided the foyer needed a pick-me-up. I could see their point: seventy-five years of accumulated grime had a tendency to weigh heavily on people who lived there. However, no one saw fit to ask Mal, our surly, well-to-do landlord, if he was okay with a paint job.
Needless to say, the four involved ended up paying out of their own pockets to paint over with beige what had been a beautiful mural.
Bernie tapped his nose. “Touché. Gladys is making lasagna for dinner. Wanna eat with us?”
“Aw, thanks,” I told him with a grin. He knew the way to my heart. “But I’ve got plans with Vespers. Maybe tomorrow?”
He nodded. “You off to bed? We’ll keep it down.”
“Thanks.” I pushed open the door.
“Oh, hey, tell your roommate to not play the music so loud before nine,” Bernie yelled.
“Will do, Bern. See you later.” I locked the door behind me, cutting off Bernie’s smoke and the ambient noise of someone else’s television blaring.
Stepping into my apartment was a different experience from walking into the building itself. I worked hard to get it that way. My foyer was painted in a warm forest green, and the scarred, darkened hardwood floor was covered by several fluffy circular rugs. I hung some of my favorite shots from different investigations along both sides of the hallway — a view from the top of an abandoned warehouse outside of town, a shot of my favorite haunted house in Savannah, the frightening visage of a statue on a mental institution in northern Georgia. To someone else, they probably came off as a macabre display, but for me, they were a personal scrapbook of where I’d been. Where my power was at its finest.
Saoirse met me in the hall. Her Look spoke of flaming death and dismemberment, so before I even put down my messenger bag, I went straight for the kitty food. Feline goddess thus appeased, I crossed beneath the archway into the six-by-six space that marked my living room, complete with overstuffed love seat and little else, and opened the door to my bedroom.
I yanked the curtains closed and breathed a sigh of relief into the dim room. I contemplated calling Vespers and leaving her a message about what had transpired that morning, but I’d see her for dinner. She was likely asleep, anyway.
I stripped off my boots and blue jeans, and crawled into bed in my tank top and undies. My pillow was soft and smelled like my strawberry shampoo.
“So, was it really haunted?”
After living with it for so long, I shouldn’t have been startled, but without fail, the disembodied voice got me every time.
I shrieked — only a tiny one — and sat up. “Jesus, Sherrie. Rattle some chains or something.”
Sherrie floated above the chair, legs crossed as if she were reclining on it. She was my involuntary “roommate,” and she’d been dead for sixty years.
Most spirits existed between planes, not quite of this world but not quite out of it, either. They were the ones I sensed, the ones who normal people merely glimpsed o
ut of the corner of their eyes on dark, stormy days. They passed between this world and the next, completely out of their control where they went at any given time. I called them Shades.
Sherrie, on the other hand, wasn’t a Shade. She was an Earthbound.
Earthbounds weren’t so ethereal. Anybody could have seen Sherrie if she wanted them to, and there was little she couldn’t do except breathe. She was fully of this world, she just wasn’t quite so “living” anymore. I didn’t know the semantics of it — why some spirits passed on to the other side and disappeared entirely, why Shades remained as veiled images of themselves stuck in-between, and why some remained Earthbound.
“Bernie respectfully requests that you not play the radio so loud before nine a.m.,” I told her, sinking back to the pillow.
“I didn’t have it up that loud,” she argued, drifting forward to hover over me. “He’s so sensitive.”
“I think he’d have more to say about it if he knew you weren’t just my roommate, but a dead girl,” I said wryly.
Sherrie had been extremely pretty in life, or maybe it was a side effect of being dead. Her honey blonde hair was always perfectly in place, falling in fifties-style waves to her shoulders. She had creamy skin, pale green eyes, and wore a black-and-white polka-dotted dress with short sleeves over sensible heels. She was born in the twenties, and died at thirty-two. Mal, our landlord, was her grandson, though she’d never known him in life. Her only daughter was twelve when Sherrie dropped dead of an aneurysm.
“Well? Is your sister’s home haunted?”
I nodded, tucking the covers under my arms. “Something hinky is going on there.”
Sherrie rolled to her side, propping her head up in one hand. It used to freak me out when she did this, laying in the air well above me as if she were lounging beside me. Now I barely noticed. “You’re not sure?”
“I’m just… confused.” I remembered the warmth of the fireplace, and the peaceful, protective embrace of the area near Madison’s laptop. But that landing was an enigma. “It’s almost like there’s two signatures for one person. But I don’t know how that could be. Do you?”
Sherrie pursed her lips, her gaze unfocused. She’d been around a long time and had an excessive memory to pull from. It was like she just checked out when she was searching for information.
I remained silent, watching her chew at her bottom lip.
Finally, she returned. “Nothing. I’m sorry.”
I chuckled. “I don’t expect you to know everything, Sher. It’s too bad you’re stuck here and can’t go with me to see if you can unravel something.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” Sherrie groaned. “Some days, I am so bored.”
“Do you need me to pick up some new books?”
Her eyes lit up. “Could you? Please?”
“Of course.”
Sherrie began to hum, her cool fingers swiping gently at the hair on my forehead. I liked when she mothered me; maybe because my own mother had always been closer to Madison, maybe because I knew Sherrie needed to do it to soothe the hole in her heart where her daughter had once resided. I couldn’t imagine continuing to exist, knowing your family was so close but out of your reach.
That thought led me back to the ghosts of Horeland.
“Hey, could you make sure I get up early?” I murmured. “I want to do a little research on Horeland Estate.”
Sherrie nodded. “Yes, darling. Rest now.”
My eyelids couldn’t support themselves any longer. I drifted to sleep, still tasting that distinct ghostly essence from Horeland Estate.
The plaque. Ian.
No body.
Chapter Five
My ghostly roommate was wonderful, and I loved having her around, but there were a few things in the world that completely distracted her. One of them was soap operas, and another was talk shows.
So it was six o’clock before I awoke on my own accord to find Sherrie hovering over me guiltily.
“Mark murdered Sally,” she told me in greeting, her eyes wide. “And then they talked about it on The Gossip.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I could piece together why she didn’t wake me up. Some hunky heartthrob on her soap opera offed his lady love, and the catty ladies on a talk show went nuts. Just another afternoon on daytime TV.
“It’s fine.” I stretched, dislodging Saoirse from her perch on my pillow. “I should have time after the investigation tonight to surf the net.”
I grabbed a shower, fed my cat, then left to meet Vespers.
Starbucks was packed, partly because it was a Friday evening and school was out, but partly because it was only one of two coffeehouses in Tory. Heavenly Beans, our local coffee shop, was Vespers’ place of employment, and usually full of obnoxious literary sorts. We didn’t have a lot of bars or nightclubs — though we could rock out some barn parties — so coffeehouses were the place to be seen.
I waved to one of my cousins — hugely pregnant with her first kid — and stopped to chat with my parents’ neighbor, before I finally lugged my laptop and camera bag to a table in the corner.
Vespers was notoriously late for everything, so I settled in with a Caramel Macchiato and a breakfast sandwich to upload my pictures from last night’s investigation. I kicked off my sandals and propped my feet up on a chair beside me, opening my email as I waited for the memory card to sync.
Our usual routine was to investigate one night, analyze for two. It was easier when the third member of our ghost hunting trio — Trevor Labarre — was home, but he was in Panama City for a buddy’s bachelor trip so Vespers and I were flying solo for the first time ever. I wasn’t entirely sure the two of us could analyze everything in two nights, not to mention dealing with Horeland Estate and a booking on Albert Street.
Which was another reason not to wait for always-late-Vespers. I plugged in my headset and settled the cups over my ears, adjusting the volume to a comfortable level on my Mac, then pulled up the audio analyzation software. It was a neat program. Trevor had coddled it together seemingly from twine, spit, and espresso, but it was lifesaver. It was able to mark every actual audio experience from the slightest whisper to the biggest boom in a full track, which meant no more sitting and listening to all eight hours of audio. Instead, we zoomed immediately to the pinpointed audio marks.
I zoned out. The first was Vespers and me coming into the room, asking questions in the hope someone would answer. I would also have the handheld tape recorder we were carrying at the time to listen to. We faded away, and I clicked on the next tick mark. A bang. I marked the time it happened, and the length of the sound, then pulled out the notebook we’d used during the investigation to make note of any sounds we’d made. There it was — 10:22, dropped camera, 2nd floor, Adam’s bedroom. This particular audio recording had been running directly beneath that room.
I moved on to a whooshing noise. I closed my eyes and held the headphones tight to my head, replaying the sound over and over. It sounded like… sizzling? Cold water hitting a hot pan. But the sound wasn’t right. That would start strong and fizzle out. This was more of a start-slow-reach-crescendo-fade-out. Then it hit me: a car on a wet street. It had rained last night before we started the investigation, and the house had sat on a neighborhood street that likely had traffic.
Vespers startled me out of my theorizing, tossing herself into the chair across from me. She had her silver-blonde dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail, putting on display the pretty Celtic knot-work tattoos that twisted up either of her ears. The maxi-dress she wore was turquoise tie-dye, and she had a leather thong substituting as a necklace. With her high, broad forehead and slightly tilted eyes, Vespers was an all-natural knockout.
“Here.” I offered her the headset.
She took it, wooden bracelets clanking together as she settled it over her ears, then nodded. I played the whooshing.
Vespers didn’t miss a beat. “Car. Wet street.”
I nodded. “That’s w
hat I thought. Of course, it took me longer than three seconds to come up with an explanation.”
Vespers grinned, throwing her own camera bag over the back of her chair and handing me the headset in the same motion. “You’re the psychic in this operation, not the brains.”
“Did you get enough sleep?” I asked, eyeing the Chinese dragon winding up her arm and shoulder. “It looks less red than it did.”
“I drenched it in A&D and took some painkillers. It was on fire after being under that rain coat all night.”
“I think you took the bandage off too soon.”
Vespers smirked. “This ain’t my first rodeo, sister.”
Which was an understatement. There was little of her body that wasn’t covered in tattoos, while I had a grand total of none.
“What are you working on?” she asked, pushing her coffee aside as she reached for her bag.
“Audio from the living room. Nothing yet, but I haven’t gotten very far.”
“I’ll start with the video from the same room.” Vespers extracted her laptop from her backpack and opened it.
“Hey, how would you feel about helping me investigate my sister’s new house?” I asked before she had a chance to boot up the video player.
Vespers cringed. “Would she be there?”
I shook my head in irritation. Vespers and Madison had never seen eye to eye on anything, and particularly not when it came to me. “I’m sure I could convince her to get Jacob to take her somewhere for the weekend.”
“I’m guessing this wouldn’t be a paid gig.”
“Nah, I’d make her pay. It’s not like she’s hurting for money. She married the Georgia equivalent of fucking Rockefeller.”
“Their bedspread is probably made of mint-condition hundred-dollar bills,” Vespers agreed.
“We’d have to fit it in now, before we start the next investigation on Monday.”
Vespers gave me the stink eye. “Albert Street tonight, and no time off, then.”
“I’ll owe you one.”
“A big one?”
His Haunting Kiss (His Kiss Series Book 1) Page 3
