EVP stands for “electronic voice phenomenon.” You just hold out a recorder and talk to thin air, asking if any spirits who might be there would like to speak with you. Then you play the recording back and listen for responses. She wasn’t expecting to get any results, but she also didn’t want to leave any stone unturned. Plus, the EVPs were a great set-up for the camera installation.
What we couldn’t tell anyone yet was that if we proved the chessboard was haunted, we would also prove Myrtle was lying. And what would we do with that little bit of explosive information? We didn’t have a clue.
Is it any wonder that I couldn’t sleep that night?
Usually on a Saturday evening, Chase and I do something together, but he was up in the mountains checking out some hikers who were getting a little too close to one of the Shevington entrances. It was doubtful humans could get through the warding spells, or would even know to try, but The Valley hadn’t remained hidden for centuries based on shoddy security.
Sometime around midnight, I wandered downstairs to the basement to work out.
No, not like in a gym. A magic workout.
My practice focused on gaining control of my powers preparatory to extending their reach and focus.
Myrtle kept trotting objects out of the archives for me to read with my psychometry. She always knew the right answers, which I hit about 90% of the time.
But my telekinesis — moving things with my mind — and channeling energy needed work.
We set up a sort of target range for both. But in different locations. Telekinesis proved to be an indoor sport. Darby found a random assortment of objects of varying sizes and weights and lined them up on a shelf. He marked off distances for me with lines on the floor. I picked something on the shelf and concentrated on making it come to me in a straight line before sending it back to the shelf. My accuracy improved steadily, and I discovered that working on telekinesis calmed me. To get the power to work, I had to direct my thoughts to a quiet place in my mind and stay there.
Channeling energy, which you can read as “hurling energy bolts,” required more room and fewer flammable objects nearby. That particular trick we work on in the big meadow up in The Valley. Unlike telekinesis, channeling energy depletes me. After half an hour, I’m ready to eat everything in sight and go down for a long nap.
That night, Beau came out of his bachelor pad and watched me levitate an old oil lamp off the shelf and bring it toward me, settling it perfectly on the floor.
“Brava!” he said, clapping his hands. “You have expanded your range to fifteen feet!”
I dropped a sort of mock curtsy and said, “Thank you, kind sir.”
“May I see an example of your abilities with energy?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, Beau,” I said reluctantly. “I might burn the place down.”
“That is not at all what I have heard,” he said. “Why do you not light the lamp now that you have moved it within reach?”
Yes, I admit it. I am the kind of gal who responds well to dares and Beau knows it.
Looking down at the lantern, and narrowing my vision to the wick, I called up that small, bright spark I’ve discovered dwells deep in my being. I envisioned turning the spark into a compact, perfectly formed flame. As I concentrated, the fire materialized a few inches over my palm. Very gently, I blew it toward the lamp and watched as it floated downward settling itself on the wick, which caught and glowed brightly.
“Oh, my God, Beau,” I whispered. “I did it!”
The Colonel came over to me, leaned down and picked up the lamp. He held it aloft in his left hand. “You have, my dear, created a light into the darkness,” he announced with mock solemnity.
“I don’t know about that,” I laughed, “but I do know I need to sit down. That was a lot harder than it looked.”
Beau held out his right arm. I took it and allowed him to escort me gallantly to one of the chairs by the fireplace.
“What are you doing up this late?” I asked.
He sat in the chair opposite me and crossed his legs and regarded me gravely. “I have been reading a most disturbing tome,” he said.
“Really?” I said, thinking he must have been reading about the war that took his life. “What upset you about it?”
“The 1919 World Series,” Beau replied, sounding genuinely aggrieved.
Trying to be as sympathetic as I could over a 96-year-old scandal, I intoned mournfully, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”
Beau’s face lit up. “You are aware of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the shocking betrayal of the national pastime in the name of filthy lucre?”
“Not exactly,” I admitted. “I just saw Eight Men Out.”
“Ah, I understand,” Beau nodded. “The motion picture made in 1988. It is on Miss Tori’s list of baseball films we are to view, but we have not yet reached that title.”
“What did you two watch last night?” I asked.
“A rather shocking presentation entitled Bull Durham,” Beau replied, coloring slightly. “Mr. Costner is quite forward with his language, but I confess to finding Miss Sarandon oddly beguiling.”
I mentally ran through the monologue from the “I believe” scene in the movie and burst out laughing.
Still blushing, Beau looked uncertain for a minute, and then grinned. “The 21st century truly is quite remarkable in its candor,” he said. “Miss Tori continues to exhort me to ‘loosen up,’ which would appear to be rather necessary as a strategy for avoiding cardiac failure.”
Can you guys appreciate why I love Beau Longworth so much?
He’s kind, insightful, understanding, unswervingly loyal — and starting to display a real sense of humor. His newfound baseball obsession came as a surprise until I learned the sport became popular because of the Civil War. Beau heard about the new game being played by northern regiments before his death, so when Tori showed him Field of Dreams Beau’s curiosity was piqued.
As a bona fide 19th century gentleman scholar Beau knows how to research. Half a dozen baseball movies and a stack of books later, he’s picked his team of choice — the Red Sox, because he just couldn’t bring himself to support a team called the Yankees — and he started watching clips on YouTube. All in all, he’s catching on to the 21st century just fine, but those moments when he runs smack into the culture shock wall are downright adorable.
I would have taken Beau for more of a Julia Roberts kind of guy than Susan Sarandon though. I decided for the time being he didn’t need to know about her role in Rocky Horror.
Having Beau in corporeal form did present a few initial problems. Myrtle solved the matter of living quarters by creating a furnished bachelor pad for Beau to the right of the stairs down in the basement.
Tori instantly ordered a new set of clothes for him on Amazon so they could at least go out together and shop without Beau looking like a Civil War re-enactor. The shopping wound up being pretty funny. Beau came back laden with bags, ranting about the “shocking cost of daily necessities and the abhorrent state of taxation” in the United States version 2015.
In private, Tori told me they spent a total of $350, a sum that almost did Beau in.
“The worst part was trying to find him a dip pen and ink,” she said. “He’s going to have to get that stuff online from now on. I am not taking him into that cute little stationery store in the mall again.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Let’s just say the card rack was a little too much for him,” she grinned. “He can’t fathom our ‘oddly incongruent sentimentality directly adjacent to lewd innuendo.’”
“You want to run that by me in English?”
“Hallmark cards versus birthday cards with bare-chested men,” she explained.
That’s when she launched the “loosen up” campaign that seemed to be bearing fruit judging from the grin Beau shot me over Bull Durham.
While we were talking, Darby hurtled past us on his new yellow bicycle. He’s Myrtle’s library nerd on call and wo
rks for hours down in the archives cataloging God knows what.
“The lad is certainly enjoying his new mode of conveyance,” Beau said. “I do wish, however, that he would employ the attached signaling device.”
He meant the bell, which would have helped enormously but I couldn’t complain. Darby’s two-wheeled hot rod status originated with one of my bright ideas.
It takes an hour to walk from the lair to The Valley’s portal. I’m all for getting in your cardio, but by the third or fourth forced hike, I suggested to Tori that we bring our bikes downstairs.
When we did, Darby’s eyes went round with amazement.
“Oh, please, Mistress,” he pleaded, “may I have a horse with wheels for feet?”
After a couple of weeks of artful wheedling, Tori caved and drove over to Wally World. She came back with a kid’s bike complete with a bell and streamers on the handlebars.
“Isn’t that a girl’s bike?” I asked under my breath.
“Technically,” Tori replied, “but that’s the one he wanted.”
The one he wanted?
“Darby went with you?” I asked. “You took him into Wally World? Have you lost your mind?”
“Compared to most of the Walmartians, Darby looks completely normal,” she said. “Besides, he was in invisible mode and I was wearing my Bluetooth, so it didn’t look like I was talking to myself.”
That made me feel a little better. “So why did he pick this one?” I asked
“Because it’s yellow,” she said, smiling. “He said it’s the color of the sun when it laughs.”
That’s Darby - a loveable blend of aged wisdom and youthful innocence. That first day, he rode his new bike in happy circles looking as excited as any kid on Christmas morning.
“Well, he’s certainly got the hang of it already,” I said.
“He does,” Tori observed drily, “but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
Her skepticism was well-founded. The basement immediately became a potential hit-and-run zone.
Beau and I watched Darby careening by, the basket on his bike filled with books.
“Does he ever not work?” I asked Beau.
“He and I both appear to share nocturnal habits,” Beau replied.
It had never occurred to me to ask before. “You don’t need sleep?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “that aspect of life was not returned to me.”
“So what do you do down here at night besides read about baseball?” I asked.
“I have begun to keep a journal again,” he said, “a kind of companionship denied to me in my post-mortem existence. You, on the other hand, are not quite so given to nocturnal wanderings. Is there something weighing on your mind, my dear? I would be quite happy to serve as a sounding board should you need one. ”
I think of Beau as a second father. I wanted to talk to him about the cup, the chessboard, and Myrtle, but I couldn’t take the risk. When we come down the stairs into the basement, we’re in a place called the “in between.” It’s a different level of existence, a sort of transit system connecting realities — and it’s Myrtle’s home.
“I’m fine,” I said, smiling at Beau. “I just can’t sleep.”
“Well, then,” he answered genially, “I shall keep you company until Morpheus chooses to grace you with his presence.”
The Greek god of dreams didn’t put in an appearance until 3 in the morning.
That’s when I said goodnight to Beau and stumbled off to bed, shoving my cats — Zeke, Yule, Xavier, and Winston — out of the way to make room for myself on the queen-sized bed.
It was sometime after 9 o’clock the next morning when I stepped outside to find Chase photographing Fish Pike’s body. Those six hours were the last decent sleep I would get for several days.
6
All of that is why I couldn’t . . . or wouldn’t . . . go to The Valley with Chase and Festus. After our talk on the old bus-stop bench, Tori and I went back to the store and got to work setting up the surveillance camera. We decided to concentrate on the chessboard since it displayed the highest level of activity.
The video feed went directly to Tori’s laptop, so she had me on a ladder angling the camera at the board to get the best view while she learned to use the controls to zoom in and record. When everything was arranged to her satisfaction, Tori went down for a nap since she planned to stay up late watching the screen.
I desperately needed some normal time after being up half the night before, discovering Fish Pike’s body, and quarreling with Chase. He and Festus weren’t back yet — or if they were, Chase hadn’t called me - - so I went upstairs to zone out with some Netflix. I fell asleep on the couch and was still there at 2 a.m. when furious knocking at the door awakened me. I stumbled to the door and found Tori standing there in her pajamas jumping up and down with excitement.
“What?” I said, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“You have to come downstairs and see what I just recorded,” she said breathlessly. “You’re not going to believe it.”
Still half awake, I followed her downstairs and into her apartment. I struggled to focus on the laptop screen as she played the video. The reversed black and white night vision image started out showing nothing but the chessboard sitting on the table with all of the pieces arranged in their correct places. Then, something that looked like a pile of sticks settled in front of the picture and stayed there for several seconds. That woke me up.
“What the heck is that?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Tori said. “I've been staring at that damn board ever since I woke up from my nap. I was getting sleepy again, so I decided to take a shower. When I came back out and looked at the feed, that’s what I saw.”
She pointed at the laptop. The sticks were gone, replaced by the stationary image of the board — with all the major pieces moved aside and the pawns arranged in a pattern.
“Play it again,” I said.
This time, I watched the whole thing closely. The strange bundle of sticks came down in front of the lens, stayed there for about two minutes, and then seemed to draw itself away to reveal the reconfigured chessboard. There was only one, inescapable conclusion. Someone or some thing had watched us install the camera, waited for Tori’s attention to be diverted, covered up the lens, moved the chess pieces, and then uncovered the camera.
That wasn’t the work of a residual haunting.
We definitely had an uninvited guest no matter what Myrtle said.
After the third time through the video, Tori suggested we go out to the espresso bar and have a look around for ourselves. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The reaction surprised me. You’d think after finding witchy powers and doing battle with an evil sorceress a gal might not be scared of what goes bump in the night.
You’d be wrong.
My anxiety DEFCON level hovered somewhere between “convict-with-a-hook campfire story” and “I am so out of here.”
While I scrambled to come up with a plausible reason why we should lock the door and wait for the sun to come up, Tori gave me the look.
“I am not going out there by myself,” she said, making it clear this was not a subject up for debate.
Great. The “two cowards are braver than one” theory.
Which didn’t stop me from saying, with great maturity, “Fine, but you’re going first.”
Tori leaves a nightlight plugged in beside her front door. A sea of distorted black shadows stretched between that weak pool of light and the unearthly glow of the streetlights at the front windows. The inventory and furnishings that looked so innocent by light of day loomed ominously around us.
“What if that roach came back?” I hissed in Tori’s ear, making her jump.
She hesitated for just a fraction of a second before hissing back, “There’s two of us. We can take a cockroach.”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
We crept a
long the wall, the floorboards creaking under our feet. The store is not a great location for a stealth op. If the bogeyman — or Jason with the hockey mask — was waiting for us in the espresso bar, they knew we were coming.
The darkness magnified the sound of Tori’s hand brushing along the wall searching for the switch. When she found it and flooded the espresso bar with light, we saw nothing but the usual collection of tables and chairs.
No looming monsters.
And even better, no cockroaches.
“Well, okay then,” Tori said, “anti-climax?”
“I’m good with anti-climax,” I said, glancing around nervously. “What are we looking for anyway?”
“How should I know?” Tori said.
Feeling braver with the lights on, we walked over to the table and looked down at the chessboard. Other than the odd arrangement of the pieces, there was nothing strange about it. Even with my nerves on high alert, I couldn’t help but admire the golden wood edging the squares and the elegant lines of the pieces.
The rest of the place looked completely undisturbed. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an open crossword puzzle book. The pencil lay angled across the page as if someone had just put it down and walked away.
Tori took out her phone and snapped a picture of the chessboard.
“That’s a good idea,” I said, “maybe we can figure out if there’s a pattern to the way the pieces are being moved.”
“Way ahead of you on that one, Jinksy,” Tori said, handing me the phone.
I thumbed through about a week’s worth of pictures. Each one showed a different arrangement of pawns. As I looked at them, an idea occurred to me.
“This is going to sound a little crazy,” I said, “but do you think there’s any chance the pawns are supposed to be music notes?”
“I wondered the same thing,” Tori said.
Still holding the phone, I compared the picture on the screen with the current position of the chess pieces.
Witch on First: A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 4 (The Jinx Hamilton Novels) Page 6
