“Hence the cheap,” Donato answered, unconcerned. “My friend at the management company has agreed to a short-term lease. If you decide to stay, well, the rent is negotiable. I’ve, ah, got another friend who does ritual cleansings if you need one.”
“What about exorcisms?” Brent muttered.
“Who are you helping?” Bobby asked, pure steel in his voice. “Your friend or us?”
“Hopefully both,” Donato answered, meeting his gaze without so much as a blink. “Real estate is at a premium around here, close to Boston and Salem. On short notice, with no references or credit check, this is the best I can do for you. Take it or leave it.”
Bobby and I both looked at Brent and back to each other. We weren’t too afraid of whatever else might go bump in the night. After all, we’d mostly be up and about, sleeping during the day when any spirits from the asylum would most likely be off-duty. But the non hemo-sapiens, they were another matter, and it looked like Brent was going to bear the brunt of things. Unfortunately, Donato had a point about our options, which were going on nil.
“Ulric mentioned a murdered girl,” I said into the sudden silence. “It didn’t happen here, did it?”
I watched Donato extra closely this time, waiting to see if he’d give anything away, but, if anything, he actually seemed to relax. “No. That was back in Salem by the Old Jail. One of only a handful of murders in Salem in the past hundred years.”
“How did she die?” Marcy asked.
“Strangled with her own necklace,” he answered.
Marcy’s hand went to her neck as though with sympathy pains. “Did they catch the guy?”
“Not yet.”
This time the look that got passed around was a little more all-inclusive, but Brent settled it with a shrug. We’d give things a try. What choice did we have?
“Any chance you can hook us up with new IDs?” he asked Donato.
“I’m not a magician.”
Brent cocked a brow at him.
“Not that kind anyway. I don’t think I’m going to be much help to you there, but I’ll put out feelers. I’ll be subtle.” Said the man in the poufy shirt.
We left Eric to talk terms, and the rest of us went to explore the other rooms. There was one off to the right—an eat-in kitchen, as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard—and three to the left—two bedrooms and a bath, all painted builder’s white, which was dull enough to scare anyone off, ghosts or no. Brent poked his head back out into the living room.
“It gets worse,” he announced to Eric. “There’s only two bedrooms. No beds, but there’s a mattress up against one wall.”
“We’ll give that to the girls,” he answered. “The boys’ll have to bunk down in the other room.
I was about to lodge a protest when Bobby piped up. “Gina and I will take the couch.”
“Dibs on the mattress!” Marcy called, ducking back into that room and pulling Brent in with her.
I socked Bobby in the arm for not thinking of it first.
3
Besides the haunted apartment, Donato had one more trick up his sleeve—some potential job leads. I always thought I’d be walking a runway or, given my lack of stature, a hand or foot model at the very least … or neck. I had a pretty, swanlike neck, especially for someone my size. It was probably why Bobby’d felt the need to gnaw on it at that fatal after-prom party. Tour Guide of the Damned had never even popped up on my radar as a job prospect. But Ulric moonlighted at a place called Haunts in History, and apparently there were positions available.
The next night, when Bobby and I presented ourselves to Kari-with-a-K at Haunts, she instantly proclaimed that we’d do, handed us each a garment bag from a rack in her shop, and sent us off toward the changing area. Haunts was located in the same mall as the Morbid Gift Shop and specialized in old-timey photographs by day and ghost tours by night. Bobby and I had to wait out the last of the picture-taking tourists already occupying the dressing rooms to get all retro. If the costumes fit and we could look the parts, I guess we were hired.
My eyes grew wide as the first tourist emerged from behind the privacy curtain, and I turned to Bobby in whispered horror. “Oh no, I am not going around looking like the Sun-Maid Raisin girl!”
My voice must have risen at the end, because Bobby slapped a hand over my mouth, which did nothing to ease my panic. He let me go as the tourists cleared the area, shooting us none-too-certain glances like we might just possibly bite. Which, of course, we might.
“The Sun-Maid Raisin girl?” he asked quietly as they left. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think she’s supposed to be a Quaker.”
“Yeah, and—?”
“And Salem was settled by Puritans.”
“The difference would be?”
“As far as I know, the Quakers never hung anyone for witchcraft.”
I blinked. So we were expected to be not only stylistically challenged but murderous as well. Go us!
“Come on, Gina, you’ve worn worse,” Bobby cajoled.
I had, actually—specifically, a black vinyl dress that had melted into my body on our last mission for the Feds. It had nearly become one with my skin. I shuddered. “Not helping,” I told him. But I ducked inside the dressing room all the same. Maybe I could find a way to work it. I mean, guys seemed to have a thing about librarians and Catholic school girls. Could Puritans really be that far off?
I pulled up the plastic wrap on my costume. Oh yeah, worlds apart.
Beneath the garment cover was a white granny gown under a dirt-brown skirt and bodice. Oh, with a matching white bonnet. That made all the difference. I scowled at the costume and I swear it scowled right back.
“How’s it coming?” came an overly cheery voice from outside. Kari-with-a-K.
“Almost there,” I called back.
I peeked out to see Bobby already in his pilgrim suit or whatever. He had a yuck-brown shirt with a wide white collar, short-pants with a buckle just below the knee, and hose covering his calves. Somehow, all that brown made his eyes look even bluer. Or maybe it was something about the lighting.
“Hey, no fair you getting to show more leg than me,” I said.
Bobby caught my curtain and pulled it back for a look. “No fair that you’re not already stripped down and getting into your Sunday best.”
“Make up your mind. Which way do you want me—stripped down or suited up?” I started to unzip my jeans and shimmy them down my hips while he watched.
“Is that even a question?” Bobby’s eyes and even nostrils flared.
I started to pull my shirt over my head, and Bobby backed out before … well, before things could get crazy. Most guys would have stayed for the show. I liked to think he was afraid of being overcome with lust in a public place at the very sight of me. Probably, though, it was his own Puritanical streak and thoughts about appropriate behavior and other such humbug.
When I stepped out, he was swinging a little half cape over one shoulder and finishing off the look with a wide-brimmed hat.
“You’re about the sexiest thing since Harrison Ford in Witness,” I told him.
“I think they were Amish.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. I knew he couldn’t help himself, but sheesh.
Kari swooped in on us without warning. “Let’s take a look!”
Her eyes went cartoonishly wide at the sight of us, and she actually clapped her hands together like a little girl who believed in fairies. “Perfect! You look almost like the real Mary Warren, though she could never have let all that gorgeous hair flow free. With you it would be almost a crime to contain it,” she said, tucking a few stray locks of jet hair up under my bonnet, though the rest tumbled down my back to my waist. “And you!” She studied Bobby like she wanted to eat him all up. “Gorgeous, even if you are kind of the villain … the dreaded Sheriff Corwin.”
Bobby looked as sick as I felt. “But … really? Couldn’t I be Giles Corey or one of the good guys?”
“Fe
w enough of them,” Kari said, the light in her eyes dimming. “No one in Salem wanted to stand against the accusing girls. The few who dared suggest they might be lying wanted to beat the truth out of them. Besides,” she said, her smile creeping back, “Old Giles Corey was eighty when he was accused. You’re hardly that, m’dear. Come on, there’s a tour about to start. Ulric can show you the ropes. No, no, don’t change. You’re perfect the way you are.”
Bobby was such a white knight, I could tell the Sheriff Corwin thing weighed on him.
“Don’t worry about being a baddy,” I whispered. “I’d let you interrogate me any time.” I had to stand on my tippy toes to reach his ears. He was kind of magnificently tall, like six-foot. My old friend Becca back home had always complained that short girls got all the tall guys. I preferred the word “petite” to “short,” but as far as I was concerned, all the best things came in small packages … diamonds, charm bracelets, rings and things.
Bobby smiled and kissed my upturned nose, stroking a hand down my free-flowing hair. I shivered—because he was Bobby and it felt good, not because he was playing a hanging judge and I had the sudden sense of someone walking over my grave. I wasn’t in it, anyway.
We stepped with Kari into the midst of the tour group that had formed while we were getting all ridiculously retro. The folks at the back turned to look at us, and Bobby and I nodded, but they quickly faced forward again as Ulric called them to order, except for one woman who raised a camera. I quickly pulled Bobby to me, as if I had a secret to tell him, averting our faces. I wondered whether our costumes would show up in the photo without us, or if the whole shot would go wonky, or what.
“Hear ye, hear ye,” Ulric was saying. “The seven p.m. Haunts in History tour is about to begin.” He must have been standing on a soapbox or something, because he towered above everybody else, and his voice carried back to us. “Your guide, Philip English, at your service.” Ulric gave a theatrical bow, and I thought I heard a sigh from somewhere in the tour group. “I’m here to take you through the trials and tribulations—natural and, most especially, unnatural—that befell Salem and its surroundings in its darkest days. The year was 1692 … ”
I looked over at Bobby, thinking to ask him who Philip English might be, but he shushed me, concentrating on Ulric’s speech, probably already memorizing it word for word. I was going to need CliffsNotes, and maybe even a cheat sheet, but it was a pretty good spiel. And Ulric had just the right voice for it, smooth and rich like dark chocolate, but sliding right over you like silk. For a standard-issue human, he definitely knew how to weave a spell.
“Follow me, if you dare,” he continued, “to some of the historical hot spots of the most haunted town in America. But keep your wits close and your loved ones closer.”
He leapt off his soapbox to a collective gasp from some of the girls up front. His half-cloak flapped and settled dramatically about him. Oh, Ulric had it all right. Stage presence, sex appeal, it. I caught Bobby checking me out for my reaction and so crossed my eyes and stuck my tongue out at him. His eyes crinkled cutely at the corners before he turned to follow the crowd. It was like Ulric was the pied piper and we were all his rats. No, wait, I didn’t like that analogy at all.
He led us out through the back doors of the mall and off to the right, and then left, where we stopped in front of a bunch of buildings that had been, I deduced from Ulric’s talk, lifted from various places about town and plunked down together to form the Peabody Essex Museum complex. I tried not to snort when he got to the part in his spiel about how people should aim their cameras here or there, where paranormal activity had been spotted. Still, Ulric managed to catch my gaze across the crowd, as if he read my mind. He shot me a wink, and I could feel Bobby bristle beside me.
“When you check your pictures,” Ulric continued, “you might spot what we call orbs. Look for floating lights where there are no light sources. These orbs are the spectral energies left behind, particularly in the cases of traumatic or sudden death.”
“Like that girl who died the other night?” someone called. “Has she been spotted?”
At the interruption, Ulric looked like he’d like to trigger a traumatic event on the spot, but he gave the man a smile halfway between charming and predatory and said, “It often takes such spirits time to pull themselves together. But once they do, they seem unwilling to disperse again. I have some examples here”—he held up a flexible binder I’d only just noticed he was carrying—“of orbs that have been captured on film.” He flipped to the first page and held the book over his head for everyone to see. “In some cases, you can begin to make out faces in the enlarged orbs.” He flipped to another page to demonstrate his point.
I could see pretty well from where I stood, given my super-enhanced vampire vision, but it took a better imagination than I had to make out features within the glowing ball in the picture. Or, wait, was that a girl?
“I think my mind’s playing tricks on me,” I whispered to Bobby, low enough to be sure that no normal human could hear.
“Hey, we’re vampires,” he whispered back. “Who’s to say what’s possible? Donato certainly seemed to believe there was something haunting our apartment, and Brent was spooked.”
I gave him a look, but didn’t say anything else because we were moving on, down a walkway just past the museum and over to the Witch Trials Memorial and the Old Burying Point cemetery.
“I bet Brent would pick something up here,” I said when we stopped again.
Ulric was talking about how the various stones of the memorial represented people who’d been killed in the witch trials—nineteen people hanged, one pressed to death, and over a hundred accused and imprisoned, the youngest being little Dorcas Good, who was only four, but the daughter of an accused witch and seen to carry a small snake in her pocket, a sure sign of conspiring with the devil. He went on about the historical figures buried in the cemetery and more about orbs.
This time, his spiel was interrupted by a gasp up front
—a teenaged girl swore she’d captured a picture of one of the orbs. An older friend with her swore that her camera had gone dead, refusing even to open though she’d charged the battery earlier that day.
Bobby wandered around, looking at the various stones and avoiding the cameras, until we got started again. It was another quarter hour before we came to the piece de resistance—or one of them, because Ulric promised that yes, we would get as close as was allowed to the location of the recent murder. We were at Hale House, the site where the remains of the infamous Sheriff George Corwin were buried after his corpse had been stolen by Ulric’s current alter-ego, Philip English. English had held the body hostage against Corwin’s estate, insisting he be paid back for the property that was seized when he was accused of witchcraft.
“This,” Ulric said, making eye contact with the girls up front who were hanging on his every word, “is one of the primary places people have reported encounters with the deadly sheriff. People describe a cold, dark weight compressing their chests and squeezing their hearts, or ghostly hands around their throats, or tugging at their feet as if to end their death dance on the gallows.”
Oh, he was good. I nearly felt it myself. I didn’t have to breathe, so no worries there, but the pressing on my chest … the feeling of being watched and studied. I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder for … something. I didn’t find it. Not that I expected any different. Still, the creepy feeling just wouldn’t go away.
“This place always gives me the creeps,” Ulric said, echoing my thoughts. “It’s as if Old Sheriff Corwin is still out looking for rowdies and rule-breakers.”
“Have you ever experienced anything yourself?” a man asked. It seemed to be the same one who’d spoken up earlier about the murdered girl. Now that the group had shifted over the course of the walk, I could see him—deeply weathered skin, a dark close-cut beard, baseball cap, navy blue wool jacket with brown leather sleeves, and a matching navy ball cap pulled low with a fighti
ng turtle logo front and center.
He could have been anyone, but he wasn’t. He was someone specific … someone I recognized. I just didn’t know who. I half-hoped he’d look straight at me and half-hoped that he wouldn’t, in case I was just as familiar to him.
Who’s that? I mind-spoke to Bobby, afraid that even a whisper might draw the man’s attention.
Bobby looked quickly over to me and back. Why? Who do you think he is?
I huffed. Do you recognize him or not?
Not.
I relaxed. It was probably just one of those cases where someone reminds you of someone else, like an actor or your Uncle John. And then it hit. I knew where I’d seen this guy before. The weight on my chest was probably dread. He was from that ghostbuster-type reality show, Ghouligans.
Crap. We weren’t in danger of exposure from recognition. We were in danger of a lot worse. If he noticed us. He didn’t have a camera or crew with him, so maybe he was just scouting things out, like for some future episode. No instruments meant he’d have no way to tell we weren’t your garden-variety tour guides. By the time Ghouligans got around to filming, we’d be long gone. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully?
Ulric was winding up, and I tapped Bobby’s arm to pull him into the shadows with me as I mentally gave him the bad news.
Never seen the show, he told me. Do they ever find anything? Like hard evidence?
My old friend Becca had been the Ghouligans addict, but the couple of times she’d convinced me to watch with her, their sightings had been pretty sketchy, I thought. Heat signatures and noises you could just barely make out if they were magnified, like, a thousand times and slowed down or sped up or filtered for effect, but if you were a true believer you’d find it totally convincing. Becca had. I told him as much.
Nothing to worry about then, he replied. He sounded soothing, which so had the opposite effect on me.
He was right, though, right? Why was I so on edge? Maybe Brent had nailed it and there was just something about Salem. Or maybe Ulric’s tour of terror was psyching me out.
Fangtabulous Page 3
