by Stacia Kane
“I’m so glad you came,” he said again, looking up at the ceiling, out the windows, down at his tapping feet. “We’ve only been here three months, you know? Had the place built, moved in … It was our dream house, Kymmi and me. My wife, Kym, I mean, and our daughter, Arden. Well, you’ll meet them when Merritt gets back with them.”
“What made you move here?”
“I do a television show, The Monastery? It’s a comedy.”
“Of course.”
“And there’s been talk of a film. For me, I mean, not for the show, so I wouldn’t need to work so much, so I don’t have to stay in Hollywood. We thought, for Arden … not living there might allow her a more normal upbringing. We wanted to be somewhere less crazy, more wholesome. I told my producer I wanted to set up a studio here, film the show from here.”
She hid her amusement by picking up her bag and getting out her notepad and pen. Was he serious? Triumph City was a cesspit. She’d spent the night before examining a murdered prostitute and watching a fatal gang fight.
Then she caught herself. For men like him, Triumph City was more wholesome. He didn’t live in Downside, he didn’t even live in Cross Town or Northside. The white brick monstrosity he and his wife had built sat outside the city limits, out where the streets and houses grew wider and the range of experience grew narrower. What used to be a bustling suburbia and was just now starting to be rebuilt after Haunted Week had decimated the population and driven everyone into the perceived comfort of semi-communal living.
Just the thought of all that empty land outside the walls of the house made her feel she was being watched, not to mention that sitting in the presence of someone speeding into the next dimension was enough to set her twitching. She gripped her pen more tightly and looked up, hoping to ground herself somehow.
She was being watched. A blond woman whose pert nose was as artificial as the deep lavender of her eyes studied Chess from the doorway. The woman’s hair hung in loose porn-star curls around her shoulders, and the snug ivory dress displayed her swelling bosom and an abdomen Chess imagined she could bounce a quarter off of, but there was nothing sexy about her—no spark of warmth or intimacy, no sense that anything of interest hid behind those startling eyes.
“Kymmi, darling,” Roger began, jumping to his feet, “this is Cesaria Putnam, from the Church, she’s come to take care of—”
“I know who she is.” Kym Pyle gave her husband a look that could cut glass. “And don’t sit on the coffee table, please. I’ve asked you before.”
So much for the loving family. Maybe it wasn’t muscle and silicone beneath that soft jersey dress. Maybe it was steel and microchips.
“Sorry, sorry, sweetness. I forgot.”
Kym ignored him, turning the weight of her disapproval onto Chess. For a second Chess saw herself as this woman must: her dyed-black hair with its Bettie Page bangs, her faded red sweater and black jeans, her dusty down-at-heel boots. Nothing. No one of importance, an urchin, someone with no ancestry to speak of. Never mind that Chess deliberately sought to give that impression when she went on a case. It still stung a little.
Then the moment passed. She wasn’t here for a social visit. She was here to bust someone’s ass for defrauding the Church, and she was damned good at her job.
So she met that bitch-queen stare with one of her own and plastered a smile across her face. “It’s lovely to meet you, Mrs. Pyle. Why don’t you sit down too? I have a lot of questions.”
Kym raised a sculpted eyebrow but said nothing as she placed herself in one of the armchairs, her legs crossed tidily at the ankles.
They sat for a few minutes listening to Roger grind his teeth before Arden Pyle entered. Chess put her at about fourteen, pretty, with grayish eyes and a sullen air. A shapeless blue sweater covered her from neck to midthigh, with blue jeans below, and her bare toenails were painted black. For some reason the sight made Chess smile.
“Okay,” she said, “so why don’t you all tell me when this started. When did you first see the spirit, or the first spirit? Dates, places, whatever you can remember.”
“There’s no point to any of this,” Arden said, her tone belying the sweetness of her round little face.
“Arden dear, now you let Miss Putnam—”
“There’s no point”—Arden glared at her father—“because I know you’re faking it.”
Chapter Six
Not every family situation will be pleasant; not every home is happy. Your job will be to determine whether that displeasure has drifted into dishonesty.
—Careers in the Church: A Guide for Teens, by Praxis Turpin
“Arden!” Kym Pyle’s skin reddened beneath the perfect mask of her makeup. “How dare you say such a thing!”
Roger cast an anxious look in Chess’s general direction—she doubted he would actually be able to focus on anything—and said, “Arden, honey, you know that isn’t true. You’re being very unfair, Mommy and Daddy would never do something like that.”
Arden’s pretty little face scrunched itself into a glower. “Give me a break.”
“Miss Putnam, I assure you we’re not doing anything of the kind. Our daughter has a very active imagination.”
Maybe, maybe not, Chess thought. She’d have to make sure she got a chance to talk to Arden Pyle alone at some point. Not today—they’d be watching her too closely—but at some point. “That’s okay, Roger. Let’s just get back to the question, shall we? When did you first see the entity?”
“This is bullshit,” Arden said. Chess steeled herself for more delaying on the part of her parents, but neither reacted.
Instead, Kym spoke up. “I was in my work room. Embroidery. I’m putting our family tree on a tapestry for that wall.” She nodded to indicate the wall behind Chess, who didn’t turn around.
“I was just finishing my great-grandmother’s name when I realized it was quite cold, despite my sweater. So I got up, planning to call one of the staff members to turn up the heat, and …” Her hands clenched in her lap. “It was a woman. She looked terrified, and I spun around to see if something was behind me, but nothing was. When I turned back around to ask her what she was looking at—I thought maybe she was one of the staff—she was gone.”
“I saw a man,” Roger said. “In one of the guest rooms. I’d gone in there to check and see if we needed anything—we were having some friends stay that weekend—”
Arden snorted.
He ignored her. “—and I thought I’d check the bathroom of the room they’d be staying in, make sure we had shampoo and toothpaste, you know, the things people need. I didn’t see him so much as glimpse him, standing in front of the window—I think it was a man, anyway, taller and broader than a woman—but by the time I realized it wasn’t one of the staff, he’d disappeared.”
“Did you feel anything? Cold, nerves, fear, anything unusual?” Not everyone did, but then not everyone knew that.
“No. Like I said, I assumed he was staff, waiting for me, or taking a few minutes for himself. I don’t mind if they do that, as long as everything is done….” He caught Kym’s disapproving eye. “Well, I don’t. I thought it was odd he didn’t respond when I said hello, and then he just … poof, gone.”
“This happened during the day?”
“Technically, I guess. It was about five in the afternoon. But it gets dark so early now.” He shuddered. “The nights are so long.”
“And the sightings have grown more threatening since?”
Both Pyles nodded. Arden stayed as she was, with her arms folded and a bored look on her face.
“We were attacked in our sleep two weeks ago,” Roger said. “Kymmi was injured. It’s gotten worse since. We don’t shower alone. We don’t go anywhere alone at night, anywhere in the house.”
Chess shuffled through the stack of photographs balanced in her lap until she found the one she wanted. She assumed it was Kym; the image was of a woman’s toned back, covered in long shallow scratches. She held it up. “This was
your injury, Mrs. Pyle?”
“Yes. The marks are still there.”
“Show her, Mom.” Arden turned to Chess. “My mom likes to show people her body, don’t you, Mom?”
Kym looked as if she wanted to slap the girl, but she kept her composure. “Do you need to see them, Miss Putnam?”
“If you don’t mind, that would be helpful.”
Kym rose from her seat and turned around, crossing her arms in front of her to grip the hem of her dress. Chess opened her mouth to speak—she hadn’t meant for the woman to do this in front of her child—but it was too late. The dress slipped up, displaying Kym’s silky thong and the lean expanse of her back, interrupted by a bra strap in matching pink.
Trying to behave as if this weren’t creepily inappropriate, Chess stood up to look closer. The scratches had faded. No longer the angry, puffy wounds in the picture, they were thin and scabbed over. “This happened two weeks ago?”
“They didn’t want to heal,” Roger said. “We tried everything. They’ve only just started to get better.”
“Actibac?” Chess asked, unable to resist.
“Yes, how did you know?”
“We get injured a lot, so we keep up on stuff like that.” She resumed her seat, hoping Kym would get the hint and lower her dress, but it took a good thirty seconds before the woman finally let the thin fabric slide back down over her body.
“See, I wish I’d known that, we could have just called the Church and asked them, wouldn’t that have been good, Kymmi?”
Kym gave him a tight smile, but her gaze stayed focused on Chess.
If that bitch thought she could make Chess uncomfortable, she was wrong. Chess allowed herself a tiny eye roll as she looked away and grabbed her Spectrometer. “Okay, why don’t you give me a tour of the house? Show me where the sightings and attacks have taken place? We’ll see what we can find.”
The Church operated a few living museums for the benefit of its employees; Chess especially liked the synagogue one, with instructors wearing those little hats they used to call yarmulkes. The Pyle home reminded her of one of those museums, as intensely and carefully decorated as the living room she’d already been in, and as impersonal.
They trooped up the graceful, winding staircase into a long hall. Windows at each end were blank white holes covered with blinds. Any light they might have let in was rendered useless by the bright electric bulbs at short intervals down the hall’s length. It must have cost a fortune to keep all those bulbs burning.
Ten rooms, including the master suite, Arden’s room, a computer room, library, and separate spa. The rest were guest bedrooms, unique only in their nondescript colors.
Chess’s Spectrometer gave off the occasional blip as she followed the Pyles through each guest room and bathroom, but not frequent or strong enough to give her any information. She took careful note of the layout. If the Pyles weren’t sleeping at night, it would be next to impossible to sneak in after dark and use her Hand of Glory to deepen their sleep so she could investigate. Of course, with all that security, paying an after-dark visit would be difficult whether the Pyles slept or not. She had a feeling their security didn’t. Maybe Merritt …?
No. Even if it were the sort of thing she could ask, she couldn’t ask. Trusting him would be foolish. A year or so of shared history didn’t make them friends.
“Roger,” she asked, interrupting him in the middle of showing her where he’d seen the ghost of a young man coming out of one of the bathrooms, “do you know where the boundaries of the original house stood? The one where the murders took place?”
“As far as we can tell—the foundation had been filled in and the walls demolished before we bought the land—the north walls aligned where our bedroom is. But from the measurement estimates we got from the surveyor, that house ended just after this room.” He indicated the doorway. “We haven’t seen any ghosts in that part of the house, not yet, anyway.”
“Have you been sleeping there?”
The Pyles exchanged glances—even Arden, who hadn’t spoken a word throughout the tour.
“We just haven’t been sleeping at night,” Kym said. “In any of the rooms.”
“Arden stays with a friend some nights,” Roger added. “And Kym and I stay in the living room.”
Chess nodded. She could probably use a warding spell to keep them off the top floor while she investigated up there, but it would make things more difficult. If she could even figure out a way in.
They headed back up the hall toward the master suite, the last room on the right. Chess had expected grandeur. She hadn’t expected the bed to be quite so bargelike, a slab of mattress covered with silk sheets. She definitely hadn’t expected to see hanging over it an enormous painting of a naked Kym. Was this what Arden meant when she said her mother liked to show off her body?
She certainly seemed to be enjoying it. Lying on her side on what looked like a fur rug—how original—with one hand demurely not quite covering the pale curls between her legs and the other thrown back behind her head. A lovely piece of work, Chess had to admit, but still … No wonder Arden was so grumpy, having to compare her own developing figure to the best body money could buy.
That was one problem she herself hadn’t had to deal with. Of course, in her case it would have been an improvement to be worried about how she measured up to the naked women she saw, rather than worrying about what they planned to do to her or make her do to them that time, but …
“The night you were attacked in here,” she said, “what exactly happened?”
“It was dark.” Roger looked as though he might have been coming down a bit; his eyes weren’t quite so glassy. “I don’t remember falling asleep or even waking up. Just … just hearing it, movements in the room, and Kymmi screaming, and I couldn’t seem to feel my hands … and it laughed and screamed.” His eyelids fluttered, blinking back tears. Chess reminded herself the man was a professional actor. “It was terrible.”
Kym herself was silent. Chess made a mental note to search for her private financial records. The file contained statements from several accounts, but they were all joint accounts. If Kym was looking for a good way to end the marriage and get as much money as she could, faking a haunting could be an effective, if roundabout and chancy, way to do it.
It was also a very public way, one that could end Roger Pyle’s career.
She studied the rest of the room in a slow, careful sweep while the Spectrometer beeped quietly from its new holster around her waist. Two dressers, two bedside tables with ornate handles on the bottom doors. Everything in the room had a twin, a mirror image of itself. How imaginative of Kym. If she hadn’t married whom she married, Chess thought, she probably would have been one of those women who hung plaster ducks on the walls and collected painted plates.
The Spectrometer found a steady beat while Chess paced the floor, speeding up by the bed, slowing down by the window, finally beeping faster outside a closed door on the right-hand wall. She glanced up.
“Bathroom,” Roger said.
Chess went inside.
No, Kym Pyle was not a woman with a lot of inhibitions. The window in the bathroom had no blinds or shades; cold white light spilled over the marble tub and floor and filled the mirror to Chess’s right. In summer it might have been pretty. Now it felt sterile, and hushed like a cemetery.
Something of life was in the room, though. The Spectrometer continued beeping, the high-pitched sound bouncing off the marble until it sounded more like one long continuous whine and Chess’s heart started pounding. Whatever noise her boots made on the shiny floor was lost while she walked this way and that, trying to determine the source of the beeps. Trying to find the ghost. Her shoulders tensed. She was not alone in this room, she knew it. Dead eyes watched her from a place she could not see. Her skin crawled and tingled, her tattoos warming, waiting for it. Whatever it was.
But nothing happened. After a few minutes she started to relax. The Spectrometer’s beeps didn’t h
ave to mean a ghost was present, just that one had been—and there were ways, illegal ways, to fool even the Spectro. She didn’t see how any of those could be used here—there wasn’t much room to hide them—but still …
She shook her head. It was not time to start thinking of this as a real haunting yet. She was spooking herself. A bad move. Time to get going.
It wasn’t until she turned around to leave that she became aware of the smell. It had been there almost from the moment she stepped into the room, but subtle, almost undetectable. The minute she caught it, recognized it, it grew stronger still. Death. Decay. Rotting things, squirming things buried in the earth. Everything foul and wrong hid inside that smell, was caught by it and transmitted to her through it.
She still felt safe enough; even her tattoos had stopped tingling. But the odor remained, wafting through the air like a whisper. She checked the tub drain, wondering if perhaps the scent came from inside, but it was no stronger there than anywhere else.
That left the double sinks below the mirror. Her feet moved as if through mud. The smell was all she could think of, all she could focus on; it blurred her vision, made her ears ring and her head hurt.
The sinks were white, gleaming and pure in the dark green countertop. Chess thought the smell might be stronger there but couldn’t be sure. She was beginning to doubt she would ever breathe fresh air again. The thought of all the bacteria that must be carried in that smell, the thought of plagues and epidemics, made it almost impossible to check the other sink.
She didn’t have to. Movement caught her eye. She turned automatically and saw a cockroach crawling over the lip of the sink, its horrible black body an abomination against the spotless marble. Another appeared, and another. Chess forced herself to take a step closer, being careful to keep her body away from the counter itself, and saw movement in the drain, heard the dry rustle of scabrous exoskeletons rubbing together.
