A Ghostly Charm

by MJ Fredrick

  She shook her head. “I can’t feel anything different.”

  He cupped his hand around her elbow, stroked his thumb over her upper arm. “It kind of throws you the first time you learn what’s out there.”

  “There’s an explanation.” But she didn’t sound convincing, even to herself.

  “Maddy-“

  Roger and his wife stepped forward. “We’re going to the inn. My wife can’t bear the thought of staying here tonight.”

  “Why?” she asked the older couple. “I mean, you didn’t learn anything new, right? You already knew the house was haunted, you already knew people died here. What’s changed?”

  “Seeing them. Hearing their voices. The blood,” Sarah said with a shudder, clearly terrified.

  Mal nodded. “Yeah, all right.” Mal released Maddy and rested his hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “Go ahead. We’ll meet up tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know if I can even do that.” She ducked her head, not meeting his gaze, and hurried out the front door.

  Mal turned, blowing a breath out through his teeth, and scanned the rest of the group. Maddy watched the muscles in his jaw work.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, just wondering if maybe we should all call it a night and go back to the inn.”

  Then his expression changed, a conscious effort to mask his emotions, which only aroused Maddy’s interest. Before she could think of how to prod, Justin beckoned him to the hallway outside the parlor.

  Mal glanced over his shoulder to make sure none of the tourists had followed him to the hall. He was not reassured by the wild look in Justin’s eyes. Yeah, Justin was the believer, but.... “What the hell is going on here?”

  “I have no fucking idea.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I mean, I’ve seen that stuff online, right?”

  Justin jabbed a hand toward the parlor where the cameras were still the focus of attention. “But I’ve never seen it in person.”

  “You didn’t do that?”

  “No. Hell.” Justin shuddered. “That shit was real. The voices... I wouldn’t know how to sync them up like that.” His eyes rolled back to Mal. “This shit is for real.”

  Mal pushed back his own shudder at the idea. He didn’t believe this shit. His sister’s interest in the occult and Justin’s interest in his sister had given him the idea to start this gig. He figured they’d make some money by bringing people to the island to her new age shop business with his tours. He thought his clients probably understood his wink to their beliefs. They probably didn’t suspect the stuff he and Justin set up to give them their money’s worth, because they made a point of being subtle. Well, maybe the blood coming through the floor was overkill. Usually subtle, anyway. The EVP would have been a nice touch, if he’d thought they could do it.

  Only they hadn’t done it, and Justin looked freaked out of his mind. Mal clapped him on the shoulder. “You need to pull it together. Can’t have you freaking out in front of the paying customers, all right? Can you keep it together?”

  Justin started to nod when the doors to the parlor slammed shut.

  Chapter Two

  The two men whirled toward it. Justin lunged forward and pulled the handles. They didn’t budge. Mal added his strength. Nothing.

  “Maddy! Open the door!” he shouted.

  “I can’t!” Her voice was just on the other side of the door, tight with tension.

  He should have known she would be right there.

  And then, on the other side of the door, the unmistakable snick of a shotgun being loaded.

  “Move back!” he shouted, but his words were drowned by the sound of a shotgun firing. Again. And again.

  Fear choking him, he stepped back and kicked at the handle with all his strength. The vibrations ran up his leg, but the doors didn’t budge. Two more blasts propelled him against the door again. This time, he felt the door give, but no result.

  “Justin!” he shouted, and Justin added his weight to Mal’s as they threw themselves against the door in tandem. The doors flew inward.

  Maddy stood back from the door, frozen, her hands out to her side, but safe. Safe.

  Heart still pounding, Mal stopped himself from dragging her into his arms. He gripped her arm with one hand, slipped the other beneath her hair, tilting her face up to his, running his thumb over her jaw. The scent of her distracted him for a moment, warm and spicy, just what he would expect. And that clouded him long enough to delay recognizing that it wasn’t fear in her eyes, but confusion.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m fine. Why?”

  “Why?” he repeated. “The doors? The gunshots?”

  Unwilling to release her, he looked over his shoulder at all the other guests standing in a half circle, staring at him.

  Unharmed.

  “Mal, what gunshots?” Maddy asked.

  He turned back to her, still not wanting to let her go. “You didn’t hear them? There were, what, six shots?” He looked to Justin for confirmation.

  Justin nodded, eyes wide.

  “Mal.” Maddy closed her fingers around his forearm. “We didn’t hear anything.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. The doors slammed shut and you started yelling and kicking at the door.” She looked past him at the damaged door, the splintered wood. “I don’t think your lease covered that.”

  “None of you heard them?” He scanned the room, looking for an answer to what the hell had just happened. Everyone seemed as stunned as he was, more by his reaction than the gunshots.

  “Maybe it’s time to go to the inn,” Maddy suggested, drawing back.

  Hell, if she hadn’t already thought he was a freak, she did now. But maybe she was right. They needed to get out of here, regroup. Maybe then he could figure out what was going on.

  ****

  The next morning, Maddy stepped out of the five and dime with her new flashlight dangling in the plastic bag and she looked across at the McDavid House. She couldn’t stop the tremor that ran through her, wouldn’t admit that it was fear. She wished she trusted Mal enough to get him to come with her, but he would just try to derail her investigation to discover where the blood had come from last night.

  Her investigation. If she wanted to go overseas and cover a real story, she should be able to crawl under the porch of a haunted house.

  Squaring her shoulders and zipping her NYU hoodie, she headed across the street.

  The house was in good shape except for the doors Mal had damaged last night. It was obviously a darling of the historical society.

  So they probably wouldn’t appreciate her breaking away some of the latticework to get underneath the porch.

  And once she was there—eew. There was something to be said about working for a luxury magazine. No spiders, no webs, no...whatever kind of bugs those were. Millipedes?

  She tied back her hair back and flicked on the flashlight. She found the crawlspace opening, over in the corner, covered by a ton of spider webs. If anyone had gotten in, they hadn’t come this way. She cleared away the webs, cracked away the covering. But it wasn’t called a crawlspace for nothing. Even if Mal had come with her, he couldn’t fit. With a deep breath, she dove in.

  Ugh. Nasty, nasty, nasty. Okay, no one had been this way for a long time. Which meant Mal knew a better way to get in here and hadn’t told her. God, he was something, so calculating. There was nothing real about him. Everything he did, he planned out ahead. The only “real” things she’d seen were his shock after he kicked in the parlor doors.

  And come straight for her, making sure she was safe. She was certain that hadn’t been an act. And it had been pretty sweet.

  But everything else was calculated to fool people and seduce women.

  Seduce her.

  She pushed the thought away and concentrated on what she was going to find in here. And what she was going to do with it. Would she take it to the tour, or ju
st to Mal? If she debunked them mid-tour, she’d have to leave.

  Initially she wanted to debunk the tour so she could leave and get a new, cover story worthy experience. Now, she just wanted the truth. What she would do with it remained to be seen.

  She knew the parlor was to the was left of where she’d entered. When she reached the area under the parlor, she was gratified to see the area was clear. Someone had been down here. But she couldn’t find any trace of the “blood,” either on the floor above, or the floor below.

  She should have come down last night. She should have insisted. Of course anything dried up overnight, but she had hoped to find some residue in the cracks on the floor.

  She nearly shrieked when she heard the footsteps on the floor above her, and when her heart finally stopped drowning everything out, she recognized two male voices.

  Mal and Justin. Unfortunately, she couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  Rats.

  She wanted to know what they were doing here. Could she get out of here without them hearing her? Should she try to go out the way they had obviously gotten in, or go back the way she came in? She didn’t want to turn around, and maybe if she followed the clean tunnel, she wouldn’t get lost. She started forward, praying she didn’t sneeze and give herself away.

  Above her, the men carried on a conversation and it drove her nuts not to know what it was about. Were they talking about how they manipulated everything last night? To dismantle their props? They hadn’t been able to do it last night.

  Or maybe they were like her, looking for answers about what had happened here.

  No. Nothing happened that they didn’t cause.

  She saw a light and crawled toward it. Oh, no. The exit was a door that dropped down. When she pushed it open and looked in, she saw it wasn’t the basement where Mal had taken her last night, but a root cellar. And the only way out was straight down to the dirt floor.

  A drop like that could break her ankle, and she’d be stuck here. No one knew where she was. No one would know where to look for her.

  She could bang on the floor above and summon Mal to help her get out of here.

  No. She couldn’t. She just wouldn’t allow herself to break an ankle.

  As she squeezed through the hole, wondering how either of the men had managed it, she held herself up by the elbows, her feet dangling. She looked down. She was about five feet off the floor.

  She couldn’t do this.

  “Well, well, well. Look what we have here.” Mal’s voice beneath her gave her a jolt, and she froze as she heard him move closer.

  And lift up the hem of her hoodie. His fingers traced the circular design of the tattoo on the small of her back, the one she’d gotten on a whim in San Francisco.

  “Nice,” he said.

  “Do you think you could help me?” she asked through her teeth.

  He stepped into her field of vision, grinned up at her. “Sure.” He moved beneath her, facing her, and hooked a leg over each shoulder.

  “Don’t be a pig.”

  “Okay, fine.” He turned around, closed his hands over her thighs to balance her. “Go ahead and let yourself down.”

  Cautiously, she lowered her weight to his shoulders, releasing her grip on the wooden frame one hand at a time, transferring her hold to his head.

  “Geez!” He jerked his head to the side, out of her grasp. “Watch the hair, will you?”

  She reached up to grasp the frame again and wobbled on his shoulders. “How am I supposed to get down from here?”

  “See, here’s where my original plan would have worked out. I could hold onto you while you climb down me.”

  “God.” She grabbed onto his hair again, tugging on purpose. Then slowly, she swung one leg over his shoulder and shifted to slide down his chest. He closed an arm around the back of her knees, shifted to the backs of her thighs. She adjusted her grip on him, clutching his shoulders, but keeping her face turned away from him, knowing he’d be watching her.

  And then her hoodie zipper snagged his belt buckle.

  “Great,” she muttered, continuing her descent, her thighs rubbing along his, until her feet rested on his boots and her hoodie rode up her belly. She eased back to look at their locked clothing. He braced his hands against her back as she struggled to untangle them.

  Struggled because his hips were pressed against her bare belly, and there was no doubt how their proximity was affecting him. Recognizing his arousal made her hot and fumbly as she fought not to let her fingers drop below his belt. No telling what she might encounter.

  “Here, let me,” he muttered, and reached down to unfasten his belt.

  “Am I interrupting something?” Justin asked from the stairs.

  Maddy jumped and Mal swore, but they were still hooked together. Once his buckle was unfastened, she moved back and yanked her sweatshirt down, refusing herself the pleasure of watching him buckle his belt.

  “Told you I heard something,” Mal told his friend calmly.

  “What are you doing here?” Justin asked, descending the stairs to stand before her.

  Smoothing her hands down her jeans, she lifted her head, pretending more composure than she felt. “Looking to see where the blood went.”

  “Did you find it?” Mal asked.

  “No. But you knew that, right?”

  “Maddy, you have to take some things on faith.”

  Mal reached up and brushed away a spider web caught in Maddy’s hair. She whipped around to look at him.

  “Cobwebs,” he told her, drawing his hand away before she could bite it off. “You’re filthy. How did you get in?”

  “Under the porch like I told you I was going to.”

  “Dirty that way.” He rubbed his thumb over her forehead, then her eyebrows in brisk movements.

  She reached up to catch his hand and didn’t release it until he looked at her. Even then, she let go slowly.

  “I want answers, Mal.”

  “I can’t give you any.”

  “Why not?” She swept a hand through her own hair and cringed at the cobwebs that still clung to her.

  “Because we don’t know what’s going on,” Justin said.

  “How can you not? This is your show.” She pivoted toward Mal, whose jaw was tight, hazel eyes shooting daggers at his partner. “So you made up everything.”

  Mal inclined his head. “We set up some stuff, like the blood on the floor, but we didn’t make up the voices or the doors slamming or the gunshots.”

  “I’m supposed to believe that.” She covered her hurt with more attitude. She hated the feeling of disappointment, not because she believed in ghosts, but because she wanted to believe in Mal. And he was nothing but a fake.

  “How could those voices be on all those cameras and Mr. Sawyer’s digital recorder?” Justin asked.

  “Because it wasn’t Mr. Sawyer’s digital recorder. It was yours. Okay, that aside, if you’re making all this stuff up, I don’t get why you’re telling me.”

  Mal’s frustration was palpable. “You knew.”

  “I suspected.”

  He shifted to look at her. “You heard us talking.”

  “You think I was eavesdropping? I didn’t even know you’d be there.”

  “But you heard us.”

  “That’s what all this is about? You thought I overheard you talking?”

  The men exchanged a look.

  “So you didn’t just decide to bring me into your confidence. You thought I already knew.”

  “Come on, now, Maddy. You’re a reporter who’s been trying to debunk us from the beginning. You aren’t exactly the first person we’d come to with this,” Mal said.

  “But here’s the thing, Maddy,” Justin said. “We didn’t set up everything you saw. The blood, yes. The knocking, yes. But the voices, the gunshots—we can’t explain it.”

  Mal leaned forward. “Look, if we can find out why this is happening, we can stop it.”

  “Why? Isn’t a ghost t
our with, you know, real ghosts, better for business?”

  “And uncontrollable,” Justin said. “What if someone gets hurt?”

  She sighed. “So you’ve done this tour before and nothing has gone wrong, right?”

  Both nodded.

  “Same houses, same everything, right?”

  They nodded again.

  “But not the same people. Your guests are different, right?”

  “Right. Right!” Mal’s expression brightened. “So someone in our tour is making it happen. But why?” Maddy lifted a shoulder. “I’m not sure, but I’d look at your ghost groupies first.”

  “Our what?” Mal blinked.

  “The three girls. They like you, they want you to succeed.”

  “But they’ve been on the tour before. Why do it now? And how?”

  “Because now you have a reporter on the tour. If they want to make you look good, what better way than to make people believe there are real ghosts on the tour?” She trailed off, realizing what she was saying. For the girls to manipulate the equipment without Mal and Justin’s knowledge would take thought and planning. And what did the girls stand to gain? “Have you been trying to get one of those Travel Channel or SyFy shows?”

  Mal started to shake his head, but Justin looked sheepish. Mal turned on his friend.

  “What? You did? I told you I’d do this because it meant I could stay close to home.”

  That was interesting.

  “I want to actually find ghosts,” Justin said stubbornly. “We have the equipment, I have the knowledge, you have the looks and personality. We could be better than those plumbers.”

  “Only there’s no such thing as ghosts,” Mal said sharply, nostrils flaring.

  Mal stepped back. “Look, let’s get out of here. I didn’t sleep, my head’s going around and around. All right? We’ll just table this for now.”

  Like that was going to happen. Maddy planned on questioning those girls. But now her prime suspect was Justin himself.

  ****

  Maddy had a productive afternoon Googling.

  When she met the others for dinner in the inn dining room, though, neither Justin nor Mal were there. She joined the other guests, Joyce, Sonia and Vivan, Rosemarie Sawyer and her husband Mick, and the Baldwins, Liz and Dennis, and ordered dinner. Just as well that the ghost tour leaders weren’t there. Maddy had learned too much and she still had to process it. As she suspected, Joyce was an aspiring actress, according to her blog. Wouldn’t it be nice for her if she could be on Mal’s show? Between her and Justin, Maddy had her suspects.