The Departed - J A Templeton

by J. A. Templeton

  We waited until we heard the television in the bedroom turn on.

  “Okay, time to spill about Johan,” Cait said the second she heard the door shut.

  Cassie frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Megan lifted a brow. “I saw you get into his car after school.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cass said, brushing a curl over her ear.

  “We’re just giving you shit,” Cait said. “Hey, I’m not judging. Just admit that you’re tappin’ that ass.”

  She pressed her lips together. “Well…we’re having fun together, let’s just say that. There’s no expectation—from either of us.”

  I didn’t want her to get hurt, and I knew how much she liked Johan.

  “Anyway, this weekend,” Cait said, scooting her chair closer to the table. “What time are we heading up the hill?”

  Megan cleared her throat. “I don’t know if I can make it.”

  Cait narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

  “I’m scheduled to work at the library and I really need the money.”

  I didn’t doubt that for a second, and given Megan’s fear, I wondered if it might not be better if she stayed home. However, apparently Cait didn’t feel the same way. She shook her head. “That’s lame.”

  “Just because you’re all into it, Cait, doesn’t mean that everyone else is.”

  Cait glanced at Cass. “What about you. Are you bailing, too?”

  “I’m free Saturday.” Cass put on some lip gloss and pressed her lips together. “Just promise you’ll have me back come Sunday morning, in time for car shopping.”

  “No one’s making any promises.” Cait sounded so serious that it took the mood down a notch. “I think only people that want to go should go.”

  “We’d be down to just the two of us then,” I said, almost adding the word “again”. “Well, and Kade and Shane. If Megan doesn’t go, then I seriously doubt Milo will.”

  Megan didn’t say a word.

  Cass leaned back in her chair. “I just don’t know how safe it is to go searching for this ghost.”

  “We’re searching for her grave so we can bind her spirit to it and finally give us all some much needed peace.” Cait sat up straighter and folded her hands together on the table, all business. “We have a good idea where the grave is, so it shouldn’t take too long.”

  “Maybe I’m just not as brave as you are.” Megan sounded irritated. “This scares the shit out of me. Maybe I’m afraid of what she will do if we’re all out in the middle of the forest where apparently she and her buddies practiced dark magic. And what if we fail and then things really start to escalate? I know I mentioned it before, but I have to think about my brother. He’s so little. Is this going to start affecting him?”

  I honestly didn’t have the answer to that question. I wish I did. I knew one thing—I wasn’t going to force any one of my friends to go searching for Laria’s grave.

  Chapter 12

  Friday night the storm came in. Thunder and lightning rocked the inn, and I braced myself for the evening ahead. From what I’d read, spirits manifested from energy and a storm would leave a charge in the air.

  Great. I could hardly wait. I had hoped that at least one friend could spend the night, but Mrs. MacKinnon was obviously not too sure about having her daughter stay again two weekends in a row, not to mention she was probably on to the fact that Cait liked Shane, which didn’t bode well for any future sleepovers with me.

  Megan had to work, but I figured it was just as well. I didn’t want her going when she was so uncomfortable about it. She had been through enough already.

  The football game had been canceled due to the weather, but the coach had called a meeting to run through some video on their past game instead.

  I packed items for tomorrow, including the nail and hammer, and I’d looked up a few extra blessings I’d found in a book Megan had brought to school yesterday. I’d typed them word for word and printed them out.

  Miss Akin had gone to bed early, saying she was anxious to dig into her latest feel-good mystery series. Waiting to hear from Kade, I organized my drawers, and when I saw my camera, I pulled it out and walked to the window and pulled back the drapes. I remembered the last time I’d stood by the window when it was dark and how Laria had been hanging upside down staring back at me.

  My heart hammered in triple time as I snapped pictures of the hillside and the castle. The lightning became more intense, and for the next ten minutes I took nearly two hundred pictures.

  I focused most of my attention on the castle. When the lightning let up, I closed the drapes and fell into the chair.

  I scrolled through the pictures. Many of the images were too dark, but when the lightning had hit just right, the entire frame was filled with light.

  There was one particular picture that intrigued me—a bolt of lightning above the sky, directly behind the castle. The lights were on in nearly every single room, and the ground lights were on, as well.

  Frame after frame, different colors emerged, and then one photo made my stomach clench. The castle was cast in red, and in the yard there were what looked to be a group of about six people standing by a tree.

  The next frame was the same, but in the frame, along with those six people was a body hanging from a tree.

  My blood turned to ice.

  I had to get a better look. I rummaged through my desk drawer, looking for the camera cord that would hook to my dad’s computer and bring up the pictures so I could get a better idea of what I was looking at rather than on the camera’s two by three inch viewer.

  When I didn’t find the cord there, I went to my closet and sifted through the junk boxes that had been put up on the very top wooden shelf. Standing on the tip of my toes on my vanity stool, I went through each, wading through my sixth grade diary and nostalgic memorabilia. I was on the last box and losing hope that I still had it, when I finally found a few different cords. One looked promising. I tried the small end and it slid into the camera. “Yes, we have a winner.”

  I raced down the steps to my dad’s study, making sure to close the blinds on my way past the window. I hated how his computer faced the wall, so your back was to the door. My mom had always had a thing about facing a doorway so she could see who was entering the room. I completely agreed with her wanting to see who was walking in.

  I moved the monitor slightly, so I could at least see any movement in the doorway from the corner of my eye. I plugged in the camera and it immediately started downloading pictures.

  I watched expectantly as the pictures flashed before me.

  When the last photo finally appeared, I went back to the very first one. The photos of the hillside were still pretty dark. I hit the editing button that brightened the page and looked closer.

  One by one, I went through the pictures. It wasn’t until I came to the pictures of the castle did the entire feel change. The first dozen pictures the sky was lit up, and then the hue of the pictures started changing to a reddish tone and the figures started appearing in the photos.

  There was the suggestion of movement from the castle’s courtyard toward a tree, where someone was strung up and hanged.

  If I wasn’t mistaken, I had cut beneath that same tree, or damn close to it.

  Bile rose in my throat.

  My heart pounded hard against my chest as I brightened the photo and zoomed in on the figures.

  Oh my God.

  I felt the blood drain from my face. It was still a distance away, but there was no mistaking the long hair of the woman hanging in the tree or the long gown.

  My attention turned to the people who had participated in the hanging. All were men. My gaze was drawn to the castle, and specifically to the window where a silhouette of a person stood in the upstairs window.

  My mind raced. That room had been where Margot Murray had been staying during her visit.

  A creaking sounded behind me and I let out a gasp.

  “Hey,” Sh
ane said, as he slid his backpack off his shoulder. He was soaked to the skin. “What are you doing?”

  I rested a hand against my chest and tried to relax. “I took some pictures during the lightning storm.”

  He walked over to me, leaned over my shoulder. “How come it’s red?”

  “I don’t know…but that’s not the most interesting thing about the picture. Take a closer look. In fact, let me start from the first frame.”

  Intrigued, he leaned in closer. Frame by frame he watched, and when I got to the frame where the sky turned red, he tensed.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  “Are those people?” he asked, pointing to figures appearing in the courtyard. Sure enough, frame-by-frame followed their progress to the tree. They were huddled up together for most of the frames, until the final few pictures where they strung Laria up.

  “You’re shitting me,” he said, leaning in even closer. “Is that someone hanging?”

  His eyes went wide. “Oh my God, you actually caught her hanging on film.”

  “A hanging that happened over two hundred years ago,” I said. “I didn’t just take this picture by chance. I felt like I needed to take pictures of the hillside and the castle during the storm.”

  “I had read about residual energy of Gettysburg soldiers being caught on film. Looks like you have something similar happening here.”

  “Did you look through all the pictures?”

  “I did, but the ones at the castle are the only ones I saw anything in.”

  He flipped through the pictures a few times. “Would you mind getting me a pop?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to, but I went anyway, running to the kitchen. I flipped on every single light as I went along.

  I grabbed the pop and ran back into the office. He was now sitting in the chair and he looked over his shoulder at me. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know if I should show you.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, setting the pop beside him.

  “Look at the final frame. Picture one ninety-three.”

  I kneeled down beside the chair and moved the mouse to picture one ninety-three. I sat back on my heels and squinted. The castle was barely in frame. It was taken directly out my window. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

  “There’s a reflection. Do you see it?”

  At the same time he lifted a finger to show me the outline, I saw it. The hair on my arms stood on end. I was in the photo, holding the camera to my face, my image reflected back at me in the glass. And directly behind me stood someone.

  Laria, pale as I’d ever seen her. Her eyes were almost hollowed out, and she looked nearly skeletal. Her hair and clothing were wet and she had a hand on my shoulder.

  Had I felt anything while I’d been taking those pictures? How had I not felt that?

  I glanced at Shane. “This has got to stop.”

  He enhanced the picture further, and as he brightened it, we both gasped. Another figure stood in the room. Randall Cummins, along with several dark cloaked figures.

  “I’ll never sleep tonight,” I said, knowing that image would haunt me for the rest of my life.

  “I’ll crash on your floor.”

  I nodded. There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to decline that invitation.

  He unplugged the camera and handed it back to me, then saved the file onto a USB drive. We couldn’t keep these on Dad’s computer; he’d freak out if he saw them.

  Actually, there was a part of me that wanted him to know.

  Chapter 13

  Saturday morning I woke at seven o’clock to rain pounding against my bedroom window.

  Great. Just what I wanted to do—trudge miles uphill in the rain.

  Apparently the storm hadn’t let up. I went to the window and opened the drapes. There was so much fog, I could barely make out the incline of the hill, and forget seeing the castle.

  “Oh shit, is it raining?” Shane asked, sitting up on his elbows.

  ‘Oh shit’ was right. “Yeah, it’s really coming down, and the fog is so thick I can’t see past our backyard.”

  He let out a groan, stretched and stood. He walked to the window, looked out at the torrential rain and glanced at me. “No way we’re going out in this fog.”

  I’m sure my friends would be elated they wouldn’t have to go out in the crappy weather.

  “I’ll text my friends. Will you text Milo and Richie?”

  “Done,” he said, sending the texts off with lightning speed, and a second later he grabbed his pillow and blanket. “Since we’re not going, I’m crashing for a few more hours. You all right in here alone?”

  “Yeah, thanks for staying with me.”

  “No problem.” He had one foot out the door. “We’ll have peace, Riley,” he said, sounding more confident than I felt.

  I snuggled under my covers, texted my friends and Kade, and waited for them to respond. Within five minutes all had written back. Kade said he’d be coming by this afternoon. I texted him back and told him to bring his laptop. I was anxious to share the pictures I’d taken.

  When he showed up at one, he had Cait with him.

  Shane downloaded the pictures I’d taken onto Kade’s laptop. Cait actually jumped the second she saw the pictures of the hanging. “No way.”

  Kade controlled his emotions a little better. He glanced at me, and I clearly saw the concern there. “So is this like residual energy that was feeding off the storm? I read that traumatic events can be imprinted into the surroundings.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It could be.”

  “Check this out, though.” Shane brought up the final picture, and Kade leaned in closer. At first he didn’t see anything. Then he sat up straight, his eyes wide. “What the hell…”

  If anyone still had any question that I was haunted, this picture would eliminate that.

  Cait leaned closer. “I don’t see what you’re talking about…”

  Shane pointed it out and she put her hand to her mouth. “Oh my God.”

  Maybe it hadn’t been the best idea to show them.

  Kade set the laptop aside and reached for me. I sat down beside him and he slid his arm around my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. “We need to make it to the hill. We’ll go tomorrow.”

  “If the fog is bad, we can’t go,” Shane said. “I mean, let’s face it—if we can’t see two feet in front of us down on the valley floor, then what would it be like in the hillside forest?”

  He had a valid point.

  “Are we overlooking something here? I just don’t want this affecting you any more than it already has,” Kade said, looking at me. “It’s not fair.”

  I loved that he cared so much.

  Downstairs the front door opened. “Kids!”

  “Dad’s home,” Shane said unnecessarily. He glanced at Kade. “Dude, you’d better put the computer away before he sees it. He’s kind of a dick about us having computers in our rooms.”

  “I wondered why neither you nor Shane had laptops,” Cait said, following Shane to the door.

  “Let’s just say that Dad working in the computer field hasn’t exactly been to our benefit. We’ve never been allowed to have computers in our rooms, and we can only use the family computer in his office. Nothing sucks worse than having your Mom or Dad walk in when you’re Googling po—,” Shane’s gave shifted to Cait, who watched him with lifted brow, just waiting for him to finish the sentence.

  Shane grinned sheepishly.

  Kade cracked up and my heart missed a beat at the sound. I loved hearing that laugh, seeing that smile. I just wanted to crawl into bed with him and not wake up until tomorrow.

  But that definitely wasn’t happening, especially with Dad home.

  We walked single file out of my room and down the stairs. Shane stopped short of the last step, and glanced into the parlor.

  Da
d was home…and he’d brought company.

  Cheryl.

  My stomach dropped to my toes. What the hell?

  Dad’s overnight bag was sitting in the entry, and so was a ridiculously expensive-looking suitcase. What was she doing—moving in?

  “Hey kids,” Dad said, nodding at Kade and Cait. “You remember Cheryl…”

  Kade squeezed my hand. “Of course,” I managed, and Shane made a grunting noise.

  “Hi, I’m Cait.” Cait stepped forward and extended her hand. “I’m Riley’s friend.”

  “And my friend, too,” Shane said, and Cait blushed.

  Dad lifted a brow at that remark.

  “Nice to meet you, Cait,” Cheryl said with a warm smile.

  I nodded to Kade. “This is my boyfriend, Kade.”

  Kade glanced at me and grinned. I think he liked the boyfriend label. He walked over to Cheryl and shook her hand. “It’s a pleasure.”

  “The pleasure is mine,” Cheryl replied. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead.

  “I’ll ask Miss Akin to make us an early dinner. Cait and Kade, if you’d like to stay, you’re most welcome,” Dad said. Surprisingly enough, he actually looked like he wanted them to stay. Maybe he thought we’d play nice that way.

  “Thanks,” Kade said. “I’ll give our parents a call and see if that’s okay with them.”

  ***

  The dining room was dimly lit and Miss A had gone out of her way to make the room cozy and inviting.

  Dad and Cheryl sat down, and I took the seat furthest away.

  Shane gave me a look that said “kill me” and took the seat across from me, forcing Miss Akin to sit to Dad’s right once dinner was served. Cait sat to Cheryl’s right, and put her napkin on her lap. She stole a sympathetic glance at me, while Kade squeezed my thigh beneath the table.

  Cheryl asked a million questions of Cait and Kade. It was very obvious she was nervous. Truth be told, I was more nervous than anyone. It was tough to make eye contact with her. I hadn’t really just stared at her. I’d been too pissed in Edinburgh and preoccupied with the dream I’d had about Kade and Dana. Sitting at the dinner table was a bit different.