by Terri Grimes
“No, she’s been having some difficulty with that.”
Humph, I just bet.
“Well not to worry then. I think I may have found just the place of your dreams.”
“Oh really?”
“Yup, you bet. My cousin and I just left there and are headed over to your place right now, if you’re at home, of course.”
“I’m just finishing up on the evidence review. I’d love to have you stop by, you know that, Gertie. What’s your ETA?”
“ETA?”
“Estimated time of arrival,” he said with patience.
“Oh. We’re maybe five minutes away. Is that too soon?”
“No, not at all. But, Gertie?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t you think we should cancel tonight’s investigation since your cousin is here?”
“No, I’m fine with going ahead with it.”
“I’m sure you are.” He laughed. “It’s your cousin I’m worried about.”
“Don’t be worried, oh ye of little faith. You’re forgetting we Sugarbaker’s come from sturdy stock,” I said with a flourish repeating the phrase my grandmother had said to me in the bathroom.
“Okay, we’re still on for tonight then and I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
“Sounds great. See you then,” I confirmed, closing the flip phone with a snap.
~ * ~
It was no more than four minutes later that I raised my hand to knock on the heavy metal door to Sam’s condo, but before I had a chance to make contact the door opened. A smiling Sam greeted me. If the damp tendrils of hair at the back of his neck were any indication, he had recently showered. He had a nice clean smell of soap and juniper berry shampoo. I wouldn’t have taken him for a juniper berry shampoo sort of guy. But for him it worked. I took in a deep appreciative sniff.
He stood back, allowing us to enter. He looked at Lori, clearly waiting for me to introduce my cousin. Before I had a chance to even open my mouth, she pushed past me, flashing a flirtatious smile at Sam.
“Hello, I’m Lori, Gertie’s cousin.” She thrust out her hand along with her chest.
“It’s so nice to meet you. Gertie has said such nice things about you,” Sam said, accepting Lori’s out stretched hand and pumping it hard a couple of times.
“Flattery will get you everywhere.” Lori batted her lashes.
I just shook my head behind her back, a gesture that didn’t go unnoticed by Sam, if the quick wink he shot me was any indication.
“Your timing is impeccable,” he said, looking in my direction.
“Oh? How so?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and smirked. He had the look of the cat that ate the canary. “I’ve just been doing a little bit of work while you ladies have been lunching and shopping or whatever it is ladies do.”
“Yeah? What aren’t you telling me?” I probed.
“I think you’ll like this,” he said, his arms still crossed. “I’ve spent the better part of the morning weeding through the DVR tapes and voice recorders. You’ll be surprised at what we’ve got.”
“Bring it on, Cowboy,” I said with a broad grin. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Sam led us into his home office. “You ladies may want to sit for this one,” he said, gesturing toward the two leather chairs on the opposite side of his desk. He sat behind his desk after seating us. He double clicked on the software program he used to clean up sounds recorded on his digital voice recorder.
He set the scene up for us. “Remember when you thought someone was in your house and I came rushing over?”
“Yes,” I said, afraid of what I was going to hear.
“Wait,” Lori interrupted. “Someone was in your house? Just what the hell has been going on here, Gertie?”
“Calm down, Lori. It wasn’t like that at all. I just thought I heard a voice in the house that day. Sam went all through the house and there wasn’t anyone here but me.”
“Humph.”
I waved a dismissive hand. “Let’s just hear what he caught, okay?”
Lori slumped back in the chair and crossed her arms over her chest. Her lips were tight and thin and her displeasure apparent. While I appreciated her concern, her watch dog attitude wasn’t helping any.
“What you may not know, Gertie, is that I took my voice recorder with me when I went through your house that day.”
I lifted a brow. “Why would you do that?”
“Call it an investigative hunch or whatever. I don’t know, I just had a feeling that day.” He pointed a finger in my direction. “Admit it, you thought it was paranormal that day too.”
I tried to hide my smile.
“Well?” he prodded.
“Okay, I felt that way too.”
“He said, she said.” Lori stamped her foot. “Not to be a party pooper, but can we just hear whatever it is that you want us to hear?”
“Sorry, Lori,” he apologized.
I mouthed a sorry to her as well.
“This EVP was caught in your upstairs bathroom, Gertie.”
My stomach did a flip. I knew whose voice he may have caught.
“Pardon my ignorance, but what’s an EVP?”
We both turned to look at her.
Sam’s tone was patient as he explained, “EVP stands for electronic voice phenomenon. What that means in the paranormal community is that an entity’s voice has been captured on a voice recorder. Had we heard the voice with our naked ears we would call it a disembodied voice. Otherwise, it’s an EVP.”
Lori blinked. “A ghost can talk and a voice recorder can hear it but we can’t. That doesn’t make sense to me. How can that be?”
“Voice recorders can pick up sounds made at a higher frequency than what our ears can hear,” I explained.
“Ghosts sending us messages from beyond on voice
recorders. This is crazy,” Lori bemoaned. I laid a hand on her arm in an attempt to comfort her. She gave me a grateful look.
“Are we ready, ladies?”
We both murmured, “yes.”
Sam pressed the green arrow with a click of the mouse. Static filled the air at first. Then, we heard it. It was unmistakable and distinct.
Use the medallion, Gertie.
I opened my mouth but Sam shook his head, motioning with an upheld finger for me to be quiet for a moment.
After several seconds of static, we heard the voice again.
Kill the bastard with love, the voice said.
I turned to Lori, who stared back at me with a look of shock on her face.
“Gertie,” Lori said. “That voice.”
I nodded. “I know. That’s the voice of our dear, sweet, much departed grandfather.”
Twenty Two
I headed down the hall to the guest room and knocked on the door. There was no answer so I knocked firmer.
“Coming,” I heard Lori call through the closed door. A moment later, the door opened and a bleary eyed Lori squinted at me in the bright afternoon sunlight streaming through the lace curtain covered window at the end of the hallway.
“Sorry about disturbing you, but you did say you wanted me to wake you up by four o’clock.” When we had returned from Sam’s earlier that day, she had pled exhaustion and gone to her room to take a nap. I wasn’t sure how much of her fatigue was from jet lag and how much was from the stress of dealing with the paranormal.
She covered her mouth with one hand and yawned. “That’s okay. I did need to get up.”
I headed downstairs with Lori trailing close behind. While I was more comfortable now that Lori was in the house, I still wasn’t all that thrilled about hanging out upstairs.
I went into my home office, leaving Lori in the kitchen. In the midst of our ghost hunting endeavors, I still had a job to do. One of the unique things Timmy had done when he came onboard with my fledgling web design company when we graduated college was to put each client on a monthly maintenance retainer. They paid a monthly flat fee regardless if they
needed updates or not. What that meant was that most companies went out of their way to make sure they had updates every month so they would get full use out of their monthly retainer fees. The work wasn’t difficult, but it was time consuming.
I had been working for about twenty minutes when I heard footsteps nearby and turned around to see Lori walking into the office.
“Whatcha doing?” she asked, her mouth full of buttery toast, the crumbs of which were falling on my keyboard as she leaned over to look at the computer’s monitor.
“Just finishing some routine maintenance for one of my client’s websites.” I leaned in close to the keyboard, drawing in a deep breath and blew as many of the toast crumbs out of the keys that I could.
“You would think they would come up with some sort of application that could update websites automatically,” she said, chewing as if her life depended on it.
“They already have. It’s called the Gertie and Timmy application, otherwise known as job security.”
“Point taken.”
I pushed my leather chair back from the desk and looked up at my cousin. “What’s up, Lori?”
She gave me a warm smile. “I never could get anything past you could I, Gertie?”
“They didn’t call me pit bull Gertie back in the day for nothing, you know.”
“Oh, I know all right,” she smirked. Then her expression grew solemn. “I just wanted to tell you, I’ve booked a seat in first class on the nine o’clock flight back to Sacramento tonight.”
“Is it the paranormal investigation? Because if it is I can have Sam stop the whole ball of wax right now. It wouldn’t be a problem at all,” I insisted.
“No, no, it’s not that at all,” Lori said.
“Then what is it? Why are you leaving so soon? You’ve only just got here.”
“Gertie,” she said in a voice full of love and warmth as she knelt next to my chair and held my hands between hers. “We both know why I came here. For whatever reason, Grandpa wanted me to come back here and help you find those medallions. My part in this whole mess is completed now. The rest is up to you.” Releasing my hands, she straightened and stood.
She was right. I admired the courage she had in being able to
see that her part in this was over. I stood up and embraced her, giving my cousin the biggest bear hug I could muster.
“It’s time for me to go and you know that I’m right, Gertie,” she said in a voice muffled by my hair, which her face was burrowed into. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought I heard a muffled sob in her voice.
“I know, Lori.” I gave her a final squeeze before releasing her. “Now get your butt up those stairs and make your bed before you go. I know how bad you are about that.”
She giggled. “I have to leave something for my favorite cousin to remember me by.”
“Yeah, just be sure to leave something. We both know how things have a tendency to jump in your suitcase.” I feigned a look of menace.
She wasn’t buying it. “Now, Gertie Sugarbaker,” she joked. “You know I would never take anything that you didn’t offer me. So wipe that thought right out of your head, missy.”
“Maybe I should stop buying Mexican products,” I mused.
“Pardon me? What do Mexican products have to do with anything?”
“Obviously I’m buying from the same stores that sell Mexican jumping beans because my stuff has a way of jumping into your suitcase. You know, those infamous Hermes Mexican jumping scarves and those sterling silver Mexican jumping dessert forks.”
Lori gasped in indignation. “It’s not like you’d ever use those dessert forks. And I do have the matching teaspoons and salad forks, not to mention the cheese knife.”
“Yeah, only because they jumped into your suitcase the last time you were here. Must have been that Mexican jumping silverware.”
No fighting, girls.
Goosebumps rose on my arms. “I’m not going crazy. You heard that too, right?”
Lori squeezed my shoulder. “Goofy maybe, nuts for sure. But crazy? No, I don’t think so.”
I smiled at the faith my cousin had in my sanity. She was my bud and no matter what, she had my back, just like I had hers.
“What I don’t get is why, after all this time would our grandparents come back from the other side?”
“Be calm and think for a minute. It’s very clear. that is Grandpa speaking to you and Grandma is speaking to me. Can’t you see? They’re trying to help us get this creepy thing out of their house, Lori. They lubs us. Even in death, they’re there for us.”
“And I lubs you,” Lori said, using our childhood word for the extreme affection we’ve always had for one another. “Now, I’ve got some dessert forks to wrap in bubble wrap before I leave.” With that, she chucked me on the chin and gave me a wink before turning and walking out of the room.
I watched her retreating figure. I knew I should be counting the rest of the silver and the linens before she left, but for now, I just wanted to enjoy the few short hours my cousin had left in my house.
Twenty Three
The house seemed empty without Lori. She hadn’t let me drive her to the airport, opting instead for the same sleek limo that had dropped her off. Although it had only been an hour since she had left, I’d already stripped the sheets on her bed and stuck them in the washer. I figured I might as well do some much needed cleaning while I was at it and had dusted all three bedrooms on the second floor and the study. I had just put the vacuum cleaner back in the hall closet when I noticed how dirty and dusty my clothes were.
“Maybe if you’d clean more than once in a blue moon,” I mumbled as I attempted to brush away the dirt smears on my shirt.
I sighed. There was nothing to do but put on a clean shirt. I tossed the dirty shirt in a pile in the corner, my dusty jeans following soon after. I dug a clean pair of denim jeans out of my dresser drawer and a long sleeved tee shirt. Goosebumps rose on my arms when the chilled air met my exposed flesh as I stood there in my bra and panties.
Drop the panties, a voice whispered into my ear.
Startled, I turned as a sharp whoosh of breath escaped my lips. There was nothing there. As I pulled the clean sweater over my head I told myself I was just imagining things. I must be. I had to be!
I stuck one leg in my jeans and for the briefest moment thought I saw a shadow pass to my left out of the corner of my eye. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up as if electrically charged. The air had a heavy, thick feel to it. I saw no one as I perused the room. But it was apparent I was not alone in my bedroom.
As I tugged my jeans on with one hand, I punched in Timmy’s cell phone number with the other. “Answer,” I whispered. “Answer your damn phone.”
When the call went to voice mail, I flipped the phone closed with a frustrated expletive. “Shit!”
I shoved my feet into my sneakers and rushed out of my bedroom, down the staircase and out the front door, not even taking the time to lace my shoes.
Even as I cursed the entity, I knew I was angrier with myself. That was my house I had just left. I knew I should have stayed and stood my ground. I should have made a stand.
Instead, I let a demon, a pathetic demon at that, drive me away. Now here I was, walking the streets, afraid to go back home. A fine mess. A bloody fine mess. For a moment, I thought about calling Sam but then discounted it. I remember the last time I called him when I’d heard a disembodied voice. He hadn’t been able to find anything. It wasn’t like we all didn’t know who was doing these things. But like Sam said, I needed to pony up and make a stand. Much easier said than done.
I stopped.
What the hell was I doing? Was I that much of a coward that I would give my grandparent’s home up without a fight? Sam was right. I needed to reclaim what was mine. Is this what being a demon hunter was all about? Making a stand and telling the demon you weren’t going to take any more from it? Was my grandmother right? Did I truly have the power in me?
Instead of standing on the sidewalk berating myself for not standing my ground, I did the unthinkable. I turned heel, marched up my front steps and turned the knob on the front door.
The moment I stepped into the house, I smelled him. The air hung heavy with a mixture of burning charcoal briquettes, Limburger cheese and unwashed ass. It was a distinct and far from pleasant odor. He must have been laying in wait near the living room, knowing I wouldn’t be able to stay away long.
My eyes watered from the stench. As I stepped into the living room, my heart caught in my chest because even through watery vision I saw the shadows at the far end of the room move.
My cell phone rang, startling me so bad I jumped. Looking down at the display, I could see it was Timmy.
“Thank God, it’s you,” I said as soon as I flipped the small phone open.
“Hey, what’s up? Is everything okay?
“Yeah, everything is fine.”
“You sure? You sound a little funny and not in a ha-ha kind of way.”
All at once, right out of the blue, I knew what I had to do. It was like an epiphany had hit me square between the eyes. I knew my path.
“I can’t chat, Timmy. I have to go up into the attic right now.”
“The attic? Why are you going in the attic?”
To banish a demon, I wanted to tell him.
“Just looking through a few old things up there,” I lied.
I heard Timmy’s gasp over the phone. “You know, I’m only a couple of blocks away from your house. Since it is still sort of early in the day...”
“At eight o’clock in the evening?”
“Honey, anything before midnight is early. Anyway, the sun hasn’t fully gone down.” He hesitated.
“Uh huh. Yeah, go on,” I prodded. “I don’t know what it is you’re about to say, but I can already tell it’s a bad idea.”
Timmy tittered. “It’s a known fact that ghosts do that whole chain rattling, haunt thing during the hours after midnight.”
“So?”
I could hear his excitement over the phone. “So, early evening, while the sky still has a faint lightness to it, is the perfect time to go up in your attic and hunt for your grandma’s flapper dress!”
