Beginning
“I swear that this is the dumbest thing we’ve ever done,” Gabi complained to her brother Alex as they cautiously passed through the dining hall of the old abandoned monastery. “The next time you and your friends lose what’s left of the gray matter in your heads and want to explore an allegedly haunted island, make sure you forget you know me!” she scolded in a loud whisper.
“I thought you liked being scared,” Alex reminded as he slowly panned his video camera from one side of the dusty, capacious room to the other and finding nothing more than cobwebs and deep shadows unwilling to reveal their secrets. “Besides, it’s not like there’s really anything here other than dust, bats, small animals and wild imaginations.”
Gabi smacked Alex’s shoulder with a hard slap that pushed him forward with a jerk.
“What the hell was that for?”
“If you didn’t think that you’d encounter a ghost then why did you agree to come half way across the world and drag me with you?” she questioned with a second, even harder smack.
“Because I’ve always wanted to visit Italy and neither one of us had to pay for the trip,” he said then glanced back at her, though he could barely make out the shadow of her face. “And you also wanted to come out this way too so stop complaining.”
Gabi didn’t say anything but instead hunkered closer to her older brother’s shoulder and followed him through the dusty dining hall.
“You know, I never would have thought that this part of Italy could be so cold,” she finally complained, though more to calm her nerves than to make conversation; about the only time she ever engaged in small talk, especially with family or friends, was when she was extremely nervous. “I mean, I know that it’s just spring, but it feels like the frigging arctic.”
“I told you to pack a warm coat,” Alex lectured without showing an ounce of fear, “but like always you didn’t-”
The sound of shuffling feet in one of the dark corners abruptly stopped his lecture and halted both of them in their tracks.
“What was that?” Gabi questioned in a whisper so slight that Alex barely heard her.
Alex shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted and trained his camera on the deeply shadowed corner from where he thought the sound had emanated. “Probably just another wild dog.”
“That sounded like sh-shoes, n-not paws,” she pointed out, still afraid to talk above the slight whisper.
“How would you-”
Again the sound shut both of them up.
“I want to get out of here now,” Gabi said, this time allowing her voice to raise enough to be heard without straining on Alex’s part to hear.
“Chicken,” he goaded, though to be honest, he was glad that his sister suggested they leave. Since the moment they heard the sound the first time, Alex had the feeling that something wasn’t right – and his sister was right…it was too damned cold.
“Now!” Gabi demanded as she grabbed his arm with an iron grip that rivaled any vice he had ever used in shop class.
“Fine,” he agreed with feigned reluctance. “Just let me scan the room with the camcorder one more time and snap a couple of stills before we head out.”
“Make it fast,” she demanded further.
Alex continued to feign reluctance, but after he snapped the last picture then panned the camcorder around one last time, he was happy to be leading his sister out of the massive room.
“Hey Alex, it’s Joe,” his radio squawked.
“Yeah, what,” Alex said as they passed through the massive set of double doors and stepped outside. The air grew suddenly and considerably warmer and both he and Gabi were relieved to feel the slight breeze on their faces. Until then, neither of them had realized just how stagnant and stale the air had grown inside the old refectory.
“I think that we’re done here. We haven’t found anything in either the bell tower or the hospital wards, and the map that the vender in Naples sold us was wrong…we couldn’t even find the mass grave. Paul found something in the crematorium though.”
Alex was almost afraid to ask, though he didn’t want to seem like a wimp in front of his sister, especially when all of this was his idea. “Maybe we should head over there.”
“Not unless you have a fondness for bats…and a lot of them.”
Alex wasn’t sure if his laugh was out of relief or amusement after his and Gabi’s own perilous adventure through the refectory. Probably both.
“Besides, there isn’t time. We’re headed back for the boat now. We only have another half hour before it takes off with or without us, and while I hate to say this out loud, because you know I love this kind of shit, but I don’t want to be stuck on this island for another twenty hours before the next boat is scheduled to drop by.”
Amen to that, Alex thought. “We’re on our way.”
Alex put his radio away to find that his sister had already started down the path that led to the small, dilapidated dock where the speedboat was tied up and waiting for their return. Neither of them said a word as they headed down the path that led them through the overgrown, two hundred year old rice fields. Alex wasn’t sure what Gabi was thinking, but he knew his sister well. She did like being scared, but what happened up in the dining hall, though seeming innocuous enough, scared the hell out of her and while he would never admit it aloud, it scared the hell out of him too. She was right when she pointed out that the shuffling sounded more like shoes and not animal paws, and when he did the final sweep with his cameras, he was sure that he’d seen a shadow.
Something else he was unwilling to admit was that he’d seen anything in the first place. He knew that if he told the others down at the boat what they’d heard and what he thought he’d seen, they would run for the dining hall at Olympic sprint speed no matter how much waiting for the next boat to come along bothered them. And all he wanted to do was get him and Gabi the hell off the island.
A pang of guilt hit him when he realized just how much money Joe and Paul had put into this trip just to come up with nothing, but every instinct he had told him not to go back, and for the first time in his life, he was damn well going to listen.
CHAPTER ONE
At six on a Wednesday morning, the only people on the track were the members of the track team and as one of their coaches, Jorden Mason was only too happy to join them. The weather was perfect. The late spring temps were already starting to climb into the upper sixties to the low seventies, though she knew the weather would not remain so accommodating. By her second period class it would probably be eighty, and with the forecast calling for a high of ninety-six, she was going to get her running in now. It was a good thing that she taught the water polo and swimming classes in the afternoon; the pool was inside and at least she and her students would be well protected against the typical, So-Cal heat.
Just one week of school left and she was counting the days. She did love teaching and being around for the kids, but in the last month or so she’d found her thoughts consumed by her second job and research for it had her up late at night and looking forward to a trip overseas. It was her hope that they would be able to leave in no more than three weeks, after graduation and clean up, though she would have to convince Matt and the others in the firm that it would be a trip worth taking. Somehow, she didn’t think that it would be an easy sell – at least as far as Matt was concerned.
As Jorden continued her run along the quarter mile track, she allowed her thoughts to drift. She began to wonder how and why she’d ever gotten into ghost hunting, though she didn’t wonder long. It was an event that changed her life in more ways than one. It happened when one of her students came to her in
a dream to tell her goodbye. At first she thought the dream was a manifestation of her worry for the boy, for whom she’d been battling for more than a year, nearly to the point of losing her job. The environment in which he lived was abusive – primarily by his father who beat him and then by his mother who chose to look the other way.
Eric Ferris, her student, would often show up to school with bruises over his body, many of which were reported to Jorden by other students who were in the locker room with him, and Jorden reported the suspected abuse three times. Instead of an investigation into the abuse, however, an investigation into Jorden herself was initiated.
If not for the overwhelming testimony from the students in her PE classes as well as several other teachers, including Tony Thomason, the A/V supervisor for the school, she would have lost her job. Eric Ferris’s father was a member of the school board, who was known for cutting back on school programs such as art, music and physical education to put more emphasis on basic programs such as English, math and history. Before Eric ever ended up in Jorden’s class she’d had problems with his father, Harrison. Still, until it was brought to her in the form of an official investigation, Jorden had no idea that Eric’s father was the same Harrison Ferris who was trying to butcher the physical education program in the district. She only knew that Eric’s father was beating the crap out of his son and would probably get away with it.
Of course, when the kid came up missing, things started to change. Mister Ferris simply stated that his son ran away from all of the negative attention, but when Eric appeared to Jorden in her dream, she knew otherwise, and she went to the cops. She’d be damned if she let the son of a bitch get away with killing his son.
Jorden didn’t plan to tell the cops that she’d seen Eric’s ghost in a dream and that’s how she knew he was dead, but rather planned to report his disappearance. It was then that she learned about the runaway report filed by his mother and father. Jorden lost it and had to be taken from the main office of the precinct by one of the detectives present at the time, Matt Connelly.
Like any cop should have been, Matt was comforting, though to her surprise, not condescending. It gave her a false sense of security and she blurted out the fact that she’d seen and talked to his ghost.
Like any good cop, he didn’t take her word for it and she didn’t blame him, though when his body showed up in the woods behind the town’s landfill, he went back to her for more information.
Eventually, they were able to get enough evidence to put Mister Ferris away for battery, but were never able to prove that he killed his son. He was out after four years and Jorden hadn’t seen or heard from him or his wife since.
Good riddance…almost. He had two more kids and she couldn’t stop from worrying.
A year later, she saw Matt again. She was surprised when she found him walking with the aid of a cane. Her heart sank when she learned that he’d been shot then surprised when she learned that he’d gone into business for himself as a private investigator.
Of course it was inevitable that the topic of conversation turned towards Eric’s ghost and he couldn’t help but ask if she had seen any ghosts since. She didn’t know if he was serious or not, but chose not to lose her temper. It was a good thing, because he was actually serious.
After a short time, the two of them began making idle plans to form their own ghost hunting society and a few months later it became a reality. Jorden suspected it was more for him than it was for her. He’d complained about the idiocy of some of his “cases” and he needed a break from time to time. And of course she did too.
Since that moment five years ago, Jorden spent all of her summers working part time as an investigator/researcher for Matt’s PI firm, and as far as So-Cal Paranormal went, they actually took off and had built a solid reputation in the southwestern United States. Of course all of the team members would have liked to expand their operation, but SCP was a second job for everyone in the group and the money wasn’t there. None of their investigations brought in any income seeing as they never charged for them; Matt said that it was to keep their objectivity clear, but to be honest, she knew that Matt didn’t charge people who couldn’t afford to pay, and most of their cases came to that. There were times when some of their clients would give them something simply for providing them with a thorough investigation, regardless of what they may or may not have found.
A sudden tug on her arm pulled Jorden from her thoughts and she looked to her side to find one of her students staring at her.
“Are you all right Miss Mason?” the girl asked with a worried look on her face.
Jorden was confused and looked at the young woman. “I’m fine. Why?”
“It’s just that you stopped running and were just standing in the middle of the track. We thought that something might be wrong,” she said and glanced back at the team of cross-country runners who were finishing up their morning trek through the surrounding neighborhood with a lap around the track.
To say that Jorden was a bit embarrassed would have been an understatement. She hadn’t realized that her thoughtful reminiscing had stopped her, though she imagined it could have been worse; because she hadn’t been paying attention she could have easily run herself straight into a fence or goalpost. “I’m fine,” she assured. “Just looking forward to summer vacation.”
The girl, Leslie Cooper, smiled and nodded. “So am I. I can’t believe that I’m graduating in just a couple of weeks.”
Leslie went on to explain her plans for the summer and for college in the fall. Jorden couldn’t help but feel guilty; in spite of the fact that she should have been paying attention all she could think about was how to convince Matt to take the hunt overseas.
The late spring heat wave was made only more unbearable by the windshield that turned the car where Matt sat into a sweltering greenhouse. It was bad enough that he’d been parked across the street from a house that held a cheating husband with his mistress, but his car had been acting up recently. He knew if he sat with it running and the air conditioner on, it would only be a matter of time before the engine blew up along with giving his position away to the lying, cheating bastard. Not to mention the price of gas – that alone was enough to make him want to ride his bike, no matter how impractical in his line of business.
At best, all Matt could do was sit with his windows open and hope that the ocean breeze would pick up soon, though after the last two hours of hoping he was about to give up, and he didn’t just mean in cooling down.
Matt knew the bastard was in the house; he’d seen him go in and even got a picture of him getting a cordial greeting from the young woman at the door. This slimy bastard was slick and smart, and Matt knew that if he was going to catch him doing anything nefarious, he was going to have to get dirty on this one.
With a roll of his eyes, knowing that what he was about to do wasn’t the smartest thing, he grabbed his camera, locked up his car, and headed casually across the street. It helped that the house was next to the beach, it was hard to pass for a lost tourist in the “hood”.
Matt took a quick look around the quiet street and when he saw no one, he quickly ducked around the side of the house. The backyard was amazing, thick with tropical foliage that surrounded a waterfall emptying into a pool. It sure beat the crap out of his ten-by-ten, fenced in patch of grass that led from his duplex’s small, four-by-four concrete porch.
Now he knew what was taking so long; his quarry was sitting fat and happy in the hot tub, though his girlfriend was nowhere to be seen.
Just as he started snap a picture, a head emerged from beneath the churning waters and Matt thought that he had finally earned his paycheck. Of course that was before a hand on his shoulder squeezed tightly and pulled him out of the bushes. Before he could turn around to defend himself his ass was on the ground and a bully, bear of a man had his camera in pieces.
“You’re trespassing,” the man growled.
Matt wasn’t small by any means – at six-three and
weighing over two hundred and twenty pounds he was rather intimidating himself, but the man looking down on him was as tall as an NBA center and built like a sumo wrestler. The tattoos painted over his deeply tanned, bald head only enhanced the menace behind his dark brown eyes and Matt was reminded of a snarling bull looking down on a fallen fool in the streets of Pamplona. Somehow he didn’t think that he could appeal to the man’s decent side. The beast was hired muscle and probably wouldn’t give a rat’s ass that the man in the Jacuzzi was married and had a kid.
Knowing that the man looking down on him could probably kick his ass didn’t daunt him. He was unwilling to give up his quarry, who had yet to be deterred from the Jacuzzi, and Matt did the first thing he could think of. “Je suis perdu. Voulez-vous s’il vous plait aidez-moi?”
The man looked at him as though he were looking at a six eyed, eight-legged, purple monkey rather than a lost tourist looking for directions.
“Je suis un touriste. Ou est…Beverly Hills?” Matt asked with the best French accent he could manage, all the while praying that the French he had learned in high school was accurate enough to fool the man if he did manage to speak the language.
The man continued to stare down at him, though this time his look more resembled that of a man looking at the slimy remains of a dead cockroach on the bottom of his expensive shoe.
When the man continued only to stare, Matt slowly stood up, picking up his camera along the way. “Beverly Hills?” he questioned again with his heavy, fake accent.
“Get out of here you stupid foreigner!” the bully sneered with a shove that hurled Matt to the front of the house and back on his pride.
Aside from having an athlete’s build himself and being a man who lived to check other large men into the boards in his beer-hockey league in the winter, common sense won out over his temper and he nodded. “Merci,” Matt said as cordially as his reluctant gut would allow. Yeah, thanks for nothing.
The Haunting of Isola Forte di Lorenzo Page 1
