All the Powers would say was to look for a Red File and that the key to helping Rose could be found in one of those rare, restricted files. However, they refused to offer any more hints, including what file the Ghosts, Inc. staff should request from the International Paranormal Committee.
Ben, Justin and Rose had all been inconsolable. Everyone, including Tim, had been certain that the Powers would help. However, the Powers had been adamant. According to them, the present and future were cloudy and confused, at least where Rose was concerned. Their only additional suggestion was to try and find a Tactile Seer, and, if possible, one that might also have the inclinations of a Tracker. That would allow them to not only see into the past, but also tell the group where to look next.
Unfortunately, the Powers had also noted that most Tactile Seers were currently in hiding after a bounty for the capture of a Seer had been announced only a few days before. There were several “un-awakened” Seers around the world, those who had no real idea of their abilities, but contacting them now would only lead the bounty hunters right to their doors.
That news hadn’t sat well with any of them, but there was nothing they could do, really. Without more information, or possibly finding a Tactile Seer willing to come out of hiding, the search was at a dead end.
Justin had shared those choice bits of news with Tim when he’d come into the office that morning, still tried from his drive in from Blue Spring. After Ben had delivered the devastating news, Justin hadn’t been able to leave Rose. He hadn’t wanted to leave her this morning either and wouldn’t have, except he had a meeting scheduled with Mia later in the day to review the case.
Ever since he’d arrived at the office, he and Tim had read and re-read every scrap of paper that related to Rose and her case. They’d gone back over the doctor’s investigation notes, the sketchy police report and the initial case file on Sophia Hamlin. There was nothing more to be found than there had been the day before and both he and Tim were frustrated.
Pulling his mind back to the present, Justin blew out a breath and ran his hand through his hair. “I have no idea. Ben just said that the key to helping Rose was here, with us, in one of those files, not in his world.”
He could see Mia moving around in her office, pacing as if agitated, and a small knot formed in the pit of his stomach. The events of the previous morning were still fresh in his mind and he was more than a bit nervous. “I don’t know that we have enough of a case file to take to her. She wants a report – now – and I don’t have anything concrete to give her. Without that, she might pull the case and close this whole thing down, even with Sophia still in the hospital and Rose still trapped.”
After last night, Justin was becoming more and more desperate to find a way to help Rose. He was close to a breakthrough; he could feel it. The last thing he wanted or needed was his boss’s interference.
“Mia won’t do that,” Tim assured him, nothing bothering to look up from the stack of papers he was sorting through for the tenth time.
“How can you be so sure?” Justin pushed back his chair and began to pace around his desk. “She’s pulled cases for less in the past and after yesterday, she’s not in a really great mood. Especially where I’m concerned.”
Finally, Tim looked up, his dark blue eyes stormy. “She just won’t, okay? I guarantee it. Trust me.”
Justin wanted to protest but the look on his friend’s face convinced him that might not be such a good idea. Instead, he gathered up the case notes regarding Rose, including those that Tim was reading. At first, he thought Tim would protest but the other man merely pushed the papers away and turned to stare at their boss.
“Look, Jus, I know you don’t much care for Mia, but she’s not a witch.” There was a strange look on Tim’s face, one Justin didn’t know how to interpret, but it pulled at something in the back of his mind, a memory he couldn’t quite grasp. “She’ll let you see this case through to the end. I promise. Just don’t keep testing her patience.”
“As a boss, it shouldn’t be so easy to push her buttons.” Justin was tired of his friend defending Mia. After all these years, it was wearing thin, even though they were all getting along far better than they had in recent memory. When combined with his agitation over a lack of clues for Rose’s case, Justin wasn’t inclined to give his boss the benefit of the doubt that morning.
Tim, however, refused to take the bait. Instead, his face was blank, as if he was wearing a mask of careful control. “Just leave Mia to me and concentrate on Rose, okay?”
“Fine,” Justin grumbled, though he still wasn’t completely sure that Mia would allow him to finish the case. He knew he should be thankful and far more contrite than he was. After all, she’d basically given him a free pass for his actions yesterday, telling him earlier that if the Alternate Reality people wanted a neat, orderly group, then they had to look elsewhere. Ghost hunting and the paranormal was an unpredictable business. Sometimes, unexpected things happened.
Deciding that he needed to face the issue head on, Justin took one last quick glance at his notes and then marched across the office to Mia’s office. She waved him inside without even a knock on the door, throwing him momentarily off balance.
“Something wrong with the case, Justin?” she asked as soon as he’d settled into one of the visitor’s chairs. “Did something else happen with Rose?”
For a moment, Justin didn’t say anything. He simply studied Mia, who looked anything but calm and collected, the way she normally did. However, she wasn’t being openly hostile either. Deciding that he had nothing to lose, he jumped into his case report.
“We’re at a dead end, even after yesterday,” he confessed and brought her up to date on the events of the previous day, including Ben’s nocturnal visit bearing bad news. “There isn’t much here to go on and nothing I can use to tie to a file number. The Powers are no help either.” He also told her about the possibility of a Tactile Seer, but they both agreed they didn’t want to risk someone’s life unless they were completely certain the person could help them.
Justin felt rather proud of himself for even suggesting that they not look for a Seer. He took it as a sign that he was more conscious of using people than he had been only days before.
“The Powers told Ben that the key to helping Rose is in these papers gave us, but I’m just not seeing it. Neither is Tim.” Justin shot Mia a dark look as if she’d suggested his work wasn’t up to par, even though she hadn’t. “But I don’t care what you or anyone else says. We’re going to help Rose, or I am anyway. Even if I have to quit.”
Mia was quiet for a moment, her eyes studying him, as if trying to see through him or at the very least figure out what was going on in his head. Then, as if drawing on some kind of inner strength, she settled herself. “You don’t have to do that, and I would never force you to make that kind of decision,” she finally said. “We can help Rose and even if we can’t, I won’t allow you to quit.”
“You threatened to fire me a few days ago,” Justin reminded her. “What’s changed?” He knew he was pushing his luck, but he couldn’t help it. Something about Mia agitated him to no end, even after her unexpected kindness yesterday. Some habits were hard to break, he supposed and he wondered if that’s what his reaction to his boss had become – a habit.
Instead of immediately replying, Mia turned her head as if to study the peeling paint on the old walls. Justin knew she was searching for money to repair the old building, and she’d pinned all of her hopes on the deal with the AR channel. Again, he wondered exactly what kind of burden Mia was carrying and then decided that, for the moment at least, it wasn’t his concern.
Watching her, Justin tried, for the first time in years, to view Mia through objective eyes. He tried to see her as others might, something that Rose had suggested last night. When he did, what he saw surprised him.
Mia wasn’t really a cold, unfeeling bitch, he decided. She was, well, he couldn’t really define what she was. Haunted was as close as
he could come to what he was seeing and even that was clichéd. Like all of them, he decided, Mia had layers upon layers of secrets. Hers, he sensed, stretched far beyond just Ghosts, Inc. Instead, they seemed greater than anything he could imagine, as if she carried the weight of the world on her small shoulders.
Something inside Justin shifted and while he might not exactly have conjured up mounds of warm and fuzzy feelings for his boss, suddenly, she seemed smaller, more human. In fact, she seemed, if anything, a little scared. He didn’t understand that and he didn’t pretend to. For now, it was enough that he could see her as something more than a monster out to make his life miserable.
It was a start. It also gave him an idea.
If they managed to help Rose, then maybe he would see what else he could do to help the organization. He turned down literally dozens of requests every year for interviews, photo shoots and even once to be a part of a pin-up calendar of ghost hunters. Maybe if he took a few of those jobs, he could turn the money over to Mia to help her repair the building or buy new equipment. He was, after all, a large part of the reason that the AR deal was in jeopardy in the first place.
First, however, they had to help Rose.
Just when Justin was going to repeat his question, Mia turned back to him. “I’m not sure what changed.” She gave a small shrug. “Perhaps it’s me or perhaps it’s this building and its ghosts.”
She picked up a pen from her desk and Justin noticed a rather pensive look on Mia’s face. “We’re a team; we need to stick together,” she told him, surprising him greatly. “The people I hired, I picked for a reason.” She looked at him and her eyes were, well, sad, Justin supposed, if he had to pick a word. “Never forget that.”
“Even me?” he asked, slightly surprised by this small crack in what he’d considered Mia’s impenetrable armor and his earlier indignation long gone. Maybe they were both changing. It was a nice thought.
She nodded and looked away again. “Even you.” Putting the pen down, she steepled her fingers in front of her. “This job is dangerous, Justin. We all know that, even if we like to pretend otherwise. Someday, one of us might not come home and the rest of the team, the core team, needs to be strong enough to carry on if that happens.”
Justin frowned, now completely confused. “Are you sick or something?” He couldn’t imagine anyone other than Mia leading the Ghosts, Inc. team.
Shaking her head, Mia rose and began to pace. Apparently she wasn’t as calm as she’d wanted Justin to believe. “No. I’ve just learned some very disturbing news about something called an Artemis Book. It’s something that I wasn’t aware of before this morning. I need to figure out what to do with that information before it’s too late.”
She shook her head when Justin seemed poised to ask another question. “I’ll tell you and the rest of the staff about it when the time is right. Or at least when I know what all of it means.”
It wasn’t the answer Justin particularly wanted to hear, but he supposed that it would have to do. “So what do I do about Rose?” He switched back to the topic at hand, feeling it was a bit safer than whatever was causing Mia’s melancholy mood.
Biting her lip, Mia picked up the case file and glanced through it. She frowned. “Have you looked at Doctor Baker’s complete files? This indicates that he had additional paperwork that he didn’t hand over to Ben, though I have no idea why.”
Justin moved to read the file over Mia’s shoulder. “No,” he replied. “I can’t find those papers. Blue Spring’s public records room was destroyed in a fire. Rose told me. Every thing was lost.”
Mia tapped a nail on her chin thoughtfully. “Did either you or Tim talk to anyone at the local historical society? There might be additional copies of those records. Even if Doctor Baker refused to give them to Rose’s grandfather, in all likelihood, copies of them were kept elsewhere.”
“No, we didn’t” Justin admitted, ashamed he hadn’t thought of it.
“That’s the next place I’d look.” Mia brushed away Justin’s embarrassment, leaving him even more astounded than before.
“I’ll get right on it.” Justin was ready to race out the door, but Mia’s hand on his arm stilled him. He didn’t remember her ever touching him before and it was somewhat of a shock. Her hand was firm, but still gentle and suddenly, Justin had the impression that the touch wasn’t just out of empathy. Mia had another motivation. Still, he didn’t move and allowed Mia to be the one to break the contact.
“Let Tim go look for the report.” When Mia finally released Justin, her words were soft, almost a whisper. “Go be with Rose. It’s where you should be right now. Trust me. And send Tim in on your way out, please.”
More confused than he’d been before, but not willing to question his good fortune, Justin headed for the door. Before he got there, however, he realized he’d forgotten Rose’s file. Turning back to get it, he caught Mia as she seemed to wince in pain.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. In a few short moments they’d come so far in their working relationship and he didn’t want anything bad to happen to her.
“Just go. Don’t worry about me.” Her voice was laced with a trace of exhaustion Justin hadn’t noticed before. “And leave the file. Tim will need it.”
As he moved back into the bullpen and sent Tim into Mia’s office, Justin nearly tingled with the anticipation of seeing Rose again. However, a thought niggled at the back of his mind. What, exactly, had Mia done when she’d touched him on the arm? It was clear to him that she’d done something, but he had no idea what. Admittedly, no one knew what paranormal talent, if any, Mia possessed. Deciding that further rumination on that topic could wait until after Rose’s case was solved, Justin made his way to the building’s parking garage.
When Mia had bought the building a few years ago, rather than put money into renovations and restoration immediately, she’d instead concentrated on converting the sub-basement receiving area into a parking garage. Besides being practical and a long-term cost saving measure, she’d also reasoned that having a secure area to park their equipment vehicles was a good idea. Although safety in the downtown area had vastly improved within recent years, there were still some unsavory elements that would be attracted to vans full of high-end electronic equipment and cars fully loaded with the latest GPS technology.
Within minutes, he was pulling out of the downtown area and speeding along the highway towards Blue Spring, nearly half an hour south of town. The drive did him good, allowing him time to settle his thoughts. He’d been so restless and agitated lately, even before Rose had come into his life, and he didn’t know why. He wanted to blame it on Mia’s hot and cold personality, as well as the constant media pressure and the stress of his job, but he knew that wasn’t completely true.
Yes, having the paparazzi follow him when he was out at night or going to a case was a pain. He was also annoyed that, as of today, he’d had to park his beloved Mustang, at least for the time being, so that the photographers wouldn’t be able to follow him as easily. It was an order, not a suggestion, Mia had given him when he’d arrived at work that morning. As for Mia, she was, well, whatever she was and he wasn’t going to change that. Perhaps Tim could, but not him.
No, the restlessness came from some place deeper inside, a place he had long refused to acknowledge even existed within him.
Justin knew he had very little to complain about. He had a good job in a city he liked, without having to be a part of the corporate grind. He was blessed with a wonderful family back home in Virginia, including parents who supported his career choice, even if they didn’t completely understand it and both a brother and a sister who thought he had the coolest job ever.
The ladies loved him and he was never without dates or lacked an invitation to one of the city’s hottest new clubs. He’d been on the cover of Personality magazine, along with several other nationally recognized ghost hunters for an article about “the popularity of the paranormal in the modern world.” Hell, the
y’d even beaten out the current crop of reality TV stars for that cover.
In short, his life was perfect. So why did he feel so empty all the time? Why did he feel as if part of him was, quite literally, missing? He knew the rage and anger he often felt sprang from that same lonely place and he didn’t like it. It was the same place deep inside that drove him to use people, particularly women, for his own ends. He’d made a start with Mia that morning, refusing to find a Seer and put that person’s life in danger. However, it was just a start and he knew if he wasn’t careful, he could easily slide back into old habits.
As he drove down the interstate towards Rosewood House, Justin became more and more certain that those feelings were linked to his time as James and the loss of Rose. From what he’d seen of his memories, via Callie, he’d come to the conclusion that they weren’t really linked to either his life as William Colton, the breaker boy who’d died an early death in the mines or as Paul McGinn, the weary laborer who’d at least lived to middle age.
Exiting the highway, he carefully navigated the twisting roads until he came to the turn off for Blue Spring. Though it was mid-day, the traffic was light and Justin felt himself relax the closer he came to the small town
Tall, ornate buildings soared around him as he followed the main road into town, indicating that at one time, wealth and prosperity had abounded here. Passing through what would have been the business district, the center of town lay before him, and as always, he was struck by the meticulous planning that had gone into everything.
A quaint park sat in the middle of a traffic circle surrounded by impressive multi-story stone buildings that had once housed everything from banks to hotels. The town nestled against a hill and off in the distance, Justin could see sunlight striking the man-made series of small waterfalls that were fed from Blue Spring Lake just beyond. Created from hand-cut stone, the series of eight small waterfalls helped to control the water rushing out of the lake and prevented the town from flooding.
Ghosts Of Lovers Past Page 18
