Delayed Departures

by Terri Reid

  He looked confused, and Mary had to bite back her laughter. “I’m sure it’s just my memory,” she said with an apologetic smile. “Pregnancy just messes with your mind.”

  “Oh, okay,” he replied, obviously still confused.

  “Well, good luck with that meeting,” she said. “I hope it’s everything you could wish for and then some.”

  He smiled back at her. “Well, thank you,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

  Mary walked slowly to the table and sat down, chuckling under her breath.

  “What did you do?” Bradley asked, knowing the smirk on his wife’s lips all too well.

  She smiled innocently at him. “Nothing,” she said with a grin. “Okay, I might have mentioned to the ass that I was surprised he was in paranormal research.” She waited until Bradley took a sip of his Diet Pepsi. “Because for some reason I thought he worked with phones.”

  Bradley spit his drink back into his cup. “That was rude,” he said as he laughed and choked at the same time.

  She sighed happily. “This is a great day.”

  Ian joined them at the table. “Well, I’ve spoken with Kathi, and she’s simply delighted to have us give a wee presentation at the end of the conference,” he said. “I told her that people would be talking for months about what we discovered, if not years.”

  Mary smiled. “Years. I’m sure it will be years,” she said.

  “Okay. You look like the cat who just lapped up the cream,” Ian said. “What’s up?”

  “Soda?” Bradley offered Ian before Mary could start.

  She glanced over at Bradley and shook her head.

  “What?” he asked, feigning innocence.

  Unknowingly, Ian popped the tab on his can of soda and took a sip. “So?” he asked.

  Mary explained the first part of her conversation and, just to be fair, waited until Ian had taken a second sip before she finished with, “Because for some reason I thought he worked with phones.”

  A spray of soda flew from Ian’s mouth, cascading down the front of Bradley’s shirt. Mary looked from one man to the other. “Wow,” she said sarcastically, holding back her laughter. “That didn’t work out at all the way I thought it would.”

  Bradley stared at his wife for a moment, then stood up, grabbing a paper towel and blotting the soda on his chest. “Excuse me,” he said. “I think I need to go to the men’s room.”

  He was only six feet away when he heard the laughter explode behind him, and he had to increase his own stride to make sure they couldn’t see that he was laughing just as hard as they were.

  “Oh, I’m a terrible wife,” Mary said, gasping for breath as she wiped the tears off her face. “I really should go get him another shirt.”

  “You know, Kathi is selling Haunted Rockford t-shirts,” Ian suggested.

  Mary thought about it for a moment, sighing softly. “He does look really good in t-shirts,” she said. “Especially black t-shirts.”

  “What is it with women and black shirts?” Ian asked.

  Mary shrugged, hiding her smile. “I have no idea,” she said, slipping out of her chair. “But I think I’m going to go buy Bradley a shirt.”

  Stanley and Rosie came to the table a few moments after Mary left. “Where’s Mary?” Stanley grumbled.

  “Well, good morning to you, too, Stanley,” Ian said.

  “Good morning, Ian,” Rosie said. “How was the rest of your evening?”

  “Splendid. Thank you for inquiring,” he replied. “Rosie, if you’re interested, Mary just left to buy Bradley a t-shirt. He had a slight accident with the one he was wearing.”

  “A grown man ought to be able to wear the same clothes throughout the whole day without changing ‘em,” Stanley grumbled. “What’d he do? Spit up on it?”

  “No, Stanley,” Bradley said from directly behind him. “Someone spit up on me.”

  Startled, Stanley quickly turned around. “Well, iffen a man sneaks up on another man, he’s bound to hear something he don’t want to hear,” he said.

  “Only if that man is you, Stanley,” Ian said. “Only if that man is you. Speaking of men, where’s Dee?”

  “He’s with a couple of my officers at the station putting together the presentation,” Bradley said. “I thought he’d be safer away from the crowds.”

  Ian nodded. “Yeah, especially as some of those crowds get nervous.”

  Mary came back to join them and handed Bradley the shirt. “It’s my fault it got stained,” she said. “So here’s a peace offering.”

  Bradley held up the shirt and smiled at her. “It’s black,” he said with a slow wink.

  “I know,” she replied, winking back.

  “Good grief,” Stanley muttered. “Get a room.”

  “What? And miss all this fun?” Mary said. “No way.”

  “What fun?” Rosie asked.

  “Just watch,” Mary replied.

  Kathi climbed onto the stage and walked over to the podium. “Good morning,” she said, greeting the crowd. “I’m so excited to see so many of you back here today for our second day of the conference.”

  The crowd applauded politely.

  “As you know, the conference ends today at two,” she said. “We will just have two more presentations. The first one, this morning, by the Supernatural Scholars Association who beta test Mystic Meters equipment. They are the only crew, to my knowledge, that actually got good paranormal data from the asylum.”

  Mary leaned back in her chair. “Did you know that their acronym backwards is ASS?” she whispered to Bradley.

  “Behave,” he whispered back.

  She grinned. “Just pointing out a fact, that’s all.”

  “So, let’s welcome the folks from SSA,” Kathi exclaimed, and the crowd erupted into another volley of polite applause.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  The man who had buttonholed Mary stepped up to the podium wearing a fake smile with his designer polo shirt and khaki slacks. “Hi, I’m Lance, and I’m the lead investigator with SSA,” he said, nodding and smiling at the audience. “I’m going to be showing you some amazing examples of paranormal phenomena that was only made possible by the use of the equally amazing Mystic Meters.”

  Ian leaned back in his chair and turned to Mary. “Well, the ghosts trapped in the asylum might have helped just a wee bit,” he whispered. “It’s hard to have amazing paranormal phenomena without them.”

  She grinned and nodded. “Amazing?” she asked with a smile.

  He nodded. “Aye, amazing.”

  “So, I’m just going to start the slides,” Lance said as he turned, remote in hand, toward the projector. Suddenly he jumped and looked around. “What the…?”

  Mary and Ian leaned forward in their chairs.

  Lance smiled sheepishly at the crowd. “Sorry. I felt something,” he said and then tried to point to the projector again. This time the remote went flying out of his hand across the stage.

  Looking around, his eyes wide, Lance scanned the stage. It was only then, when Lance moved, that Mary saw Gwen standing behind the large man. She glanced at Ian, who smiled back at her and nodded.

  “Oh, honey,” Gwen said. “You don’t mess with my son.”

  Lance scurried across the stage and bent to pick up the remote. Gwen moved up behind him and pushed, sending Lance sprawling onto the floor, the remote spinning over the edge of the stage.

  Ollie walked over, picked up the remote from the floor and stepped up onto the stage.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he whispered harshly to Lance. “You’re making us all look like a laughing stock. Have you been drinking?”

  “No. No, something pushed me,” Lance insisted.

  “Get up and start this presentation,” Ollie ordered, shoving the remote into Lance’s hand, “before I find someone else to lead my sales team and you can go back to stocking shelves at Radio Shack.”

  Obediently, Lance stood and walked back to the podium, clicking the remote for the projector
on the way. He weakly smiled at the audience again. “Sorry folks,” he said. “Let’s try this one more time.”

  Gwen looked out at Mary and Ian and smiled. “Should I leave him alone for a while?” she asked.

  They both nodded at her.

  She shrugged. “Okay, then,” she said, turning and glaring at Lance. “But I’ll be back.”

  Nervously looking over his shoulder every few minutes, Lance started to show pictures of the inside of the asylum. “We started with the lobby,” he explained, “but found no evidence of activity there at all, which is often the case in an entrance area.”

  Bradley turned to Mary. “Yeah, that’s what we found,” he said sarcastically.

  “Here we decided to use our old infrared cameras alongside the new state-of-the-art, Mystic Meter IRED9000 camera,” Lance explained as he moved to the next slide. “You can see in this side-by-side exposure that our new, state-of-the-art camera really exposes the entity.”

  He picked up a flashlight laser pointer and pointed it at the screen. “Here, with the old meter, you see a slight distortion next to the wall. Actually, most paranormal investigators would overlook that phenomena because it is so minute, but with the state-of-the-art IRED9000 camera, the clarity is increased and you can discern the lurking specter.”

  “Points for the use of lurking specter,” Ian whispered. “It sounded very scary.”

  The slide show continued with Lance droning on about the difference between the old equipment most of the people in the room used and the new, state-of-the-art equipment offered by Mystic Meters.

  “This is like an infomercial,” Bradley whispered. “I bet he’s said state-of-the-art a hundred times. I wonder if this is what Kathi was expecting.”

  Mary glanced over at Kathi, who was seated at the Haunted Rockford booth, and saw that her face held a look of both concern and impatience. “Well, Kathi is one of the most patient people I know,” Mary said. “And she is not looking very pleased about this presentation.”

  “Well, not to worry,” Ian whispered back. “Our presentation should light up her day.”

  “Finally, the last piece of evidence I want to share with you is an EVP we got near one of the back hallways of the asylum,” Lance said. Mary, Ian and Bradley all sat up a little taller in their chairs and listened.

  “It’s a little distorted, which is to be expected even when you use state-of-the-art…”

  Mary, Bradley and Ian mouthed the words along with him.

  “…equipment,” Lance finished.

  He pressed the button, and a loud, static-filled recording started to play.

  “If you listen closely,” Lance said, “you can hear a man’s voice calling ‘Mary, Mary.’ We are starting to research it, but we assume he was calling for his wife.”

  A cold chill ran down Mary’s spine, and her stomach knotted. She turned to Bradley and Ian. There was no humor in their faces either.

  “He’s been waiting for me,” she whispered, her voice tight with apprehension.

  “Aye,” Ian agreed. “And I’m hoping his spirit is still contained behind those walls.”

  Mary shivered. “Me, too,” she whispered. “Me, too.”

  Chapter Fifty-five

  “How are you feeling?” Bradley asked Mary as they walked outside the conference center on the grounds of Highland Community College. The wind was brisk, but the sky was bright blue and the sun was shining. “If you’d like, I can drive you home and Ian and I can finish this whole thing up.”

  She smiled up at him and shook her head. “No. I really want to be here when Dee and Ian give their presentation,” she said. “I want to see Ollie and Lance get exactly what they deserve. So, how is the search warrant going?”

  Bradley smiled. “As a favor to me, Alex Boettcher and his team are slowly taking apart the hotel rooms of both Ollie and Lance,” he said. “And if they don’t find the weapon or the laptop in their rooms, they’re coming out here to search their cars. Alex said he’d let me know as soon as he found it.”

  “That’s perfect,” Mary said. “I love it when the good guys win.”

  “Can we talk about last night?” Bradley asked. “About what happened to you?”

  A shudder of unease rushed through her as she remembered the terror she’d felt in the asylum. She really didn’t want to talk about it or relive the feelings from the night before. But, it was obvious that Bradley still had some questions, and perhaps, in the light of day, it wouldn’t be as bad as she imagined.

  Finally, she nodded. “Okay, let’s talk,” she said.

  He led her over to a bench that was sheltered by a garden wall and was a private place where they could talk and not be disturbed. She sat down, and he sat next to her, taking her hands in his own. “I want you to know that I would never hurt you,” he said, meeting her eyes.

  Confused, she shook her head. “I know that,” she said.

  “Do you really believe it?” he asked, and she could see the worry on his face.

  Slipping one hand from his grip she lifted it and placed it against his face. “Oh, sweetheart, I trust you with my heart and my soul,” she said. “I know that you would rather die than do anything, anything at all that would hurt me. I totally trust you.”

  “Last night,” he started, then stopped, clearing the emotion from his voice. “Last night when I touched you, you screamed in terror. At my touch.”

  He looked away from her for a moment and then met her eyes again. “When Jeannine disappeared, people kept wondering if she’d run away from me,” he said, “if, because of my job, I’d been harsh or abusive. Most of them never even considered another possibility. They only saw me as a uniform, a uniform they perceived to be a symbol of persecution.”

  Her hand slipped from his face down to his chest, and she kept it there over his heart.

  “I know you, Bradley Alden,” she said firmly, although tears filled her eyes. “I have seen you under the best and the worst of situations. I’ve seen you dive into a freezing cold river to save a child. I’ve seen you sacrifice your own safety to help others, strangers whom you’d never met, but you still helped. I’ve seen you have snowball fights with children, make Rosie blush with your compliments, and charm all the little girls in Clarissa’s class. But I’ve also seen you serve justice to those who break the law. I’ve seen you stare down men who tried to hurt others. I’ve seen you shoot someone and kill them, not because it was something you wanted to do but because it was something you had to do.”

  She leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on his lips.

  “You are a hero. You are my hero,” she said. “You are everything I have always looked for in a husband and…” she paused, laid her hand over her stomach and looked down for a moment, “the best example there could be for our son.”

  She lifted her eyes and met his, pouring all of her love into her gaze. “I trust you. I love you. I adore you. And my life would be empty without you,” she said. “Believe me.”

  He smiled down at her. “Thank you,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I do.”

  She grinned up at him. “And bonus, you are the sexiest man in the world.”

  His smiled widened as he leaned down and pressed a kiss to her lips. “Yeah, well it’s only because I’m married to the sexiest woman in the world,” he whispered. “I love you.”

  She sighed happily and melted into his arms. “Same here,” she whispered. “Same here.”

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Mary and Bradley hurried down the sidewalk, hand in hand, and reached the front of the conference center when the police car pulled up. Bradley glanced around the area and nodded. Then the officer driving the car got out and went to the back door to help Dee exit.

  “Thanks,” Dee said as he pulled his gear out with him. “Thanks a lot.”

  “No problem, sir,” the officer replied. “Good luck with your presentation.”

  “Mary, why don’t you go inside the lobby and meet us there,” Bradley suggested, and
then he added. “Maybe check around and make sure it’s secure.”

  “You’re just saying that to get me inside,” she whispered to him.

  He looked down at her and nodded. “Exactly.”

  She walked the fifteen feet to the entrance and went inside. The double doors that led to the cafeteria area were already guarded by uniformed police officers, and the stairs going up to the second floor had an officer at the bottom and on the top. She shook her head and smiled. “Glad I can be so useful,” she muttered to herself.

  With Mary safely inside the building, Bradley moved to one side of Dee and the assisting officer to his other side, and they quickly moved with him into the building. “I can’t wait until I don’t have to have an armed escort,” Dee said, and then he looked at Bradley and the officer. “No offense.”

  Bradley smiled. “No offense taken,” he said. “I know what you mean.”

  Mary joined them, and they went upstairs to the conference center. Ian was waiting in the lobby for them. “Do you have it?” he asked.

  Dee grinned. “Yeah, and it’s real good,” he said, and he shook his head. “I’m just sorry I can’t be up there presenting it with you.”

  “Well, I’d rather not have you as a sitting target,” Bradley said. “Especially as the guys from Mystic Meters figure out what’s going on.”

  Just then Bradley’s phone vibrated. He picked it up, read the text and smiled. “My good friend Alex just found the gun stuffed in Ollie’s suitcase,” he said. “He’s going to test it for a ballistics match with the bullet we dug out of Mary’s office floor, but he says it’s the same caliber as the one we got.”

  “This is good, right?” Dee asked. “I mean, if they got his gun at the hotel room, he won’t have it with him now.”

  “Unless, you know, he has another one,” Mary suggested.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” Dee said with an audible swallow. “Okay then, I’ll stay at the table.”

  Ian nodded. “Good plan,” he said. “They won’t shoot me because they think I’m going to buy a bunch of their product.”