by JL Bryan
She and Lexa both watched me closely. So did Stacey, who’d stayed quiet during the interview because she was still learning the process. Anna and Lexa looked worried; Stacey was barely able to hide her excitement.
“It sounds very possible to me,” I said. The family didn’t strike me as particularly crazy or ghost-happy. It’s a little awkward when you meet new clients and part of your job is assessing whether or not they’re completely in touch with reality. I got my degree in psychology to help me work with ghosts, but it’s handy when studying potential clients, too. “Can you show us the places where you’ve had activity? The door, the stairs, maybe Lexa’s room?”
“This way!” Lexa said, shoving herself out of her chair as if eager to get things moving.
“Do you mind if Stacey takes some video, Mrs. Treadwell?” I asked. I nodded at Stacey, who was already opening her camera bag to grab her video recorder. “It’s part of the process.”
“Of course.” She gave me a tight, fake smile. “And you can call me Anna.”
As we left the room, Stacey was on the balls of her feet. She probably felt what I felt—there was something wrong in this house, a sense that the shadows were too dark and the air too cold and heavy. Stacey was probably thrilled about that.
Chapter Three
Anna began our tour with the downstairs kitchen and living room, explaining how they’d started with the bathrooms and kitchen to make the caretaker’s apartment livable.
“Everything was a wreck at first,” she told me. “We brought in new appliances, of course, and we had to scrub and re-stain all the woodwork…the floor’s new, obviously…we have contractors in and out all the time.”
I nodded politely while she demonstrated the drawers and cabinets, and how they opened and closed and had shelves inside them. She brightened up as she talked about her struggles with picking new cabinet pulls. It seemed to calm her down, so I didn’t interrupt.
Finally, we walked down the short hallway and faced the door. Anna’s chatty smile faded into a quiet frown. Lexa stayed behind her, crossing her arms and glaring at the door.
“It looks like a serious security door,” I said, stepping close to study the three bolts. “Is it thick?”
“A few inches, I think,” Anna said. “It’s a bear to haul it open.”’
“It would take a pretty strong draft to do that,” Stacey said.
“I wonder why somebody would put this here,” I said.
“We think somebody used to rent out rooms here,” Anna said. “In the main house, each bedroom has a lock with a key. The master suite on the third floor was cut up into rooms that can be locked against each other.”
“But you don’t know for sure?” I asked.
“The realtor didn’t know much about the house’s past, but it looks that way to me,” Anna said. “Somebody lived in the east-wing apartment and rented out the bedrooms. Maybe he didn’t trust his tenants.”
“That’s something we’ll have to find out.” I knocked on the door, then reached for the closed deadbolt. “Do you mind if I open it?”
Anna and Lexa looked even more pale. Anna attempted to speak twice before she managed to say, in a very reluctant voice, “Go ahead.”
I grasped the cold, rust-speckled iron knob. I pulled, and it scraped heavily against its housing, reluctant to move. I had to grit my teeth and wrench it hard, and it finally slid open with a shriek.
“Creepy,” Stacey said, smiling behind her camera.
“Shh,” I told her. “I just want to test the door.”
The door’s curved handle was also heavy, cold iron. I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled hard.
The heavy door opened onto a dark hallway, much of which had been stripped down to studs for remodeling.
“I don’t think a breeze would nudge that door open,” Stacey mentioned again.
“No,” I said. “The lock and handle are both iron, though. Highly conductive.”
“What does that mean?” Anna asked.
“Ghosts are dense electromagnetic energy,” I said. “It may be easier for them to manipulate conductive materials.”
“So we should change the lock?” Anna asked.
“It could help a little, but I want to learn more before I start giving advice.” I peered ahead into the dark main-house hallway. “Do you ever see or hear anything strange in there? Besides this door opening?”
“Sure, some creaking and settling at night,” Anna said. “We don’t go over to the main house after dark. We work over there during the day, but of course we’re making a lot of noise then, hammering and sawing….Plus, I like to blast music when I work.”
I nodded, eased the door closed, and slid the deadbolt back into place.
“These are the stairs where you hear footsteps?” I pointed to the staircase. Lexa nodded, with a deep frown on her face.
“Those are the only steps in the east wing,” Anna told me.
“Let’s check them out.” I ascended the stairs slowly. They were made of beautiful dark wood, surrounded by matching paneling on the walls. The Treadwells had already hung family pictures here, showing their little family at younger ages, as well as posing with others I assumed to be family friends and relatives. I wondered if the household ghost felt annoyed at this territorial marking by the new owners.
A huge antique chandelier dripping with crystal hung at the landing. I had to turn around to climb the next flight of steps up to the second floor. The wood squeaked and groaned beneath my shoes.
“Lexa’s room is the first door you see,” Anna told me as I reached the upstairs hall. Like the downstairs hall just below it, it was oddly short for its width. There was no door at the end of this one, just a blank wall where the east wing had been severed from the main house.
I stopped in front of Lexa’s bedroom. “Lexa, can you show me where you saw the lady?”
“She stops right here.” Lexa slowly opened the door. “She stands right here and watches me in bed.”
Her room was particularly nice, spacious with a high ceiling, a queen-sized bed, a brick fireplace with a hand-carved mantel, and a row of narrow medieval-style windows. It was painted a shade of yellow that seemed like it was trying too hard to be cheerful and sunny.
I asked Lexa to describe the ghost woman again, and she mostly repeated what she’d said earlier—ragged dress, dead face with some decay, hair like dry straw. I nodded, quietly checking her story for consistency. One old cop trick I’d learned from Calvin: people who are telling the truth tend to keep their story consistent, while those who aren’t tend to change and embellish the story each time they tell it. I always like to ask witnesses to recount their experiences a few times over, just to check.
“What do you do when you see her?” I asked Lexa.
“I just stay there and keep quiet,” Lexa said, nodding at her canopy bed, which was occupied by a large stuffed bear in a tuxedo. “I’m too scared to close my eyes and I’m too scared to yell for help.”
“Does she say or do anything while she’s here?”
“No. But she doesn’t like us. She wants us to leave.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I can tell by how she looks at me.” Lexa shrugged. “By everything she does. Slamming the door open and trying to scare us.”
“Has she ever hurt anybody?” I looked from Lexa to Anna, but they both shook their heads.
“Listen, Lexa,” Anna said. “Why don’t you show Stacey your room for a minute?”
Lexa gave her mother a suspicious look.
“Oh, good idea!” Stacey agreed. “And you can tell me more about the ghost…” Stacey’s warm, smiling attention seemed to relax Lexa a little bit, and Lexa led Stacey into her room.
I looked at Anna, wondering why she’d wanted to send them away. Anna took my arm and led me into the master bedroom. The windows were open, and I could hear Anna’s husband outside, barking orders at the roofers in his Chicago accent.
“He thinks
he knows everything,” Anna whispered. She led me past the king-size bed. The polished antique furniture was mostly heavy, dark wood. A few bookshelves had been nailed to the wall, but that project looked half-completed, with nails and sawdust on the carpet below. It looked like they’d put in new carpet before renovating the walls—not the smartest choice.
Anna took me into the spacious master bath. The tub was Jacuzzi sized, and there was a separate shower stall tucked into the corner. A big picture window overlooked the dense, tangled greenery of the back yard. A little sunlight seeped in through the wide glass pane, but the canopy of leafy, twisted limbs outside seemed to absorb most of the light before it ever touched the house.
I shivered. Despite the seeping sunlight, the master bath was much colder than the master bedroom. I waved my hand in front of the air-conditioner vent, but no air was blowing out.
“It’s cold, isn’t it?” Anna whispered. “It’s not just me?”
“No, it’s not.” I crossed my arms, feeling a little ill. “This room doesn’t feel right.”
“I didn’t want to scare Lexa, and I know Dale would just call me crazy, but…” Anna took a breath. She gestured toward the shower stall, which was walled with clear panes of glass. Not much privacy there, especially when you considered the giant picture window just across from the shower.
“Did something happen to you?” I asked her, speaking as gently as I could.
“Two nights ago,” Anna said. Her voice was so soft I had to lean in to listen. “We’d been doing cabinets and painting all day—I like to do the painting—so I thought I’d have a long, hot shower before stumbling to bed. I was exhausted.
“In the middle of the shower, everything turned cold,” Anna said. “First the water, like the water heater had conked out, which is totally possible since Dale installed it himself. Then the air got cold. I could feel the temperature plunge. I opened my mouth to yell at Dale, and that’s when the lights turned out. So I’m standing there in the dark, freezing, with my hair full of shampoo.
“I called out to Dale to see if he’d turned off the light by accident, or maybe as a prank, but Dale doesn’t really do pranks. I called for him a few times, but nobody answered.
“I washed out my hair as fast as I could in that freezing water, then I turned it off. I opened the shower door and sort of felt along in the dark until I found the towel rod.
“After I wiped my face and opened my eyes…that’s when I realized I wasn’t alone. Someone else was in the room, but it wasn’t Dale. It wasn’t Lexa, either. It was an adult woman. She stood right there, like a solid black shadow in front of the window. She was facing me, and she wasn’t moving at all.” Anna wrapped her arms around herself, and I could see goosebumps all over her.
“Can you describe her a little more?” I asked.
Anna shook her head. “She blocked out most of the moonlight. I could sort of see her hair—stringy, messy hair like dry straw…sort of like a crazed drug addict’s hair, you know? She was staring right at me.”
“What did you do?”
“You’d think I would scream, right? But I didn’t. I could barely catch my breath. I couldn’t even move, except for my knees. They wouldn’t stop wobbling. I just stood there and clutched my towel and stared back at her.”
“How long did that go on?” I asked.
“I don’t know—a few seconds, a minute? It felt like a long time. And she still didn’t move at all. Then she spoke to me. Just a whisper, and I heard it right in my ear. She said…” Anna swallowed, then spoke in a harsh whisper: “She said, ‘Leave this house.’ That was it, just three words.
“When I heard her voice, I screamed. I could move again, so I ran to the door and pulled it open.” Anna demonstrated by opening the bathroom door and gesturing into her bedroom. “The light was on in there, and it didn’t feel cold at all. Dale was just lying in bed with his reading glasses and his new issue of Motor Trend.
“He jumped up, and I told him there was someone in the bathroom…The lights flickered back on just as he came in here to check. He acted like I was crazy. She was gone.”
“That sounds pretty upsetting,” I said, looking over the picture window. “I don’t see any way someone could sneak in or out of here…the windows don’t open…”
“Exactly. So, do you think I’m crazy?”
“I think something is obviously happening in this house.”
“Me, too.” Anna seemed relieved. “Do you think it was the same woman Lexa keeps talking about?”
“There’s no way to tell yet, but maybe you should discuss that with her.”
“I don’t want to scare her.”
“She’s already scared,” I said. “I think she’ll feel better if she knows she’s not alone, that you’ve seen things, too. Especially since your husband doesn’t seem to believe any of it.”
“Maybe I’ll talk it over with her.” Anna hurried out of the cold bathroom. The bedroom beyond it had to be ten or fifteen degrees warmer. “Should I tell Dale about it first?”
“Tell Dale about what?” Dale leaned in through one of the big, open bedroom windows, apparently taking a break from harassing the roofers. “This better not cost a heap of money, Anna.”
“There’s no charge for the initial consultation, Mr. Treadwell,” I said.
“Yeah, right.” He stepped in through the window.
“Is there anything else you wanted to show me?” I asked Anna.
“That’s the worst of it,” Anna said.
“Are you still talking about that light going out in the bathroom?” Dale asked. “I told you, Anna, we’re still repairing the electricity. It’s all a big rat’s nest down at the fuse box. Stuff’s gonna happen.”
“And I told you I saw somebody in there,” Anna said. “A woman.”
“Oh, right. The ‘move out now’ lady. We aren’t moving out, so she better give up.” Dale smirked and shouted into the bathroom, his hands cupped around his mouth. “Hear that, ghost lady? We aren’t moving!”
“Don’t make her mad,” Anna whispered, and Dale just snorted and shook his head. He walked past us and clambered on down the stairs, and turned on the television to watch a golf game. He must have been exhausted from all the minutes he’d spent watching the roofers work.
“Do you think you can help us?” Anna asked me as we walked into the hall.
“She says they can!” Lexa said, dashing out from her room. Stacey followed behind her with the little video camera, and she gave me an apologetic smile.
“There must be something we can do, right?” Stacey asked. She was blushing—she’d overstepped her bounds a little bit, and she knew it. I was supposed to be the one who determined whether the alleged haunting needed further investigation.
Fortunately for Stacey, she was right this time. I did think something nasty had moved into the Treadwell house.
“Here’s what I would like to do,” I said. “Let’s schedule a night when Stacey and I can stay over. We’ll do a full observation of all the hotspots—video, audio, thermal, electromagnetic frequencies. We’ll have cameras in the hallway, the stairs, and of course the door that keeps opening…” I led them downstairs as I spoke, then I gestured at the heavy security door with the deadbolts. “I’ll probably camp out in your hall to keep an eye on that door.”
“Maybe we could rig a camera on the other side, too,” Stacey said. “You know, in the main house over there? We might catch the ghost coming or going.”
I nodded. “And I’ll look into the history of the house and see if we might find a cause for a haunting. Maybe some clues to the ghost’s identity, if we’re lucky. It’s so much easier to trap ghosts when you know who they are. What do you think, Anna?”
Anna and Lexa looked at each other.
“Can we start tonight?” Anna asked me.
“Let me check my schedule…” I opened the calender app on my phone and pretended to look through it, even though the only appointments were meeting with the Treadwell
s this morning and my kickboxing class at four in the afternoon. “We could come back around seven or eight.”
“Yes!” Stacey said, grinning and nodding like a goofball. She was eager to catch a ghost. “I can start the set-up right now, if you want…” She looked between Anna and me.
“We’ll have plenty of time when we come back,” I said.
“And then you’ll get rid of the ghost?” Lexa asked.
“First we have to know what kind of ghost we’re dealing with,” I said. “But, yes, Lexa. We’ll get rid of this ghost even if we have to drag her out by her hair. You’re going to be perfectly safe.”
For the first time since I’d met her, Lexa smiled.
Chapter Four
“Full apparition with multiple witnesses, psychokinetic disturbances…sounds promising,” Calvin Eckhart said. He sat at the scuffed wooden worktable in our office, which was actually more of an industrial space out on Telfair Road. Not exactly a central or historic spot—our next-door neighbor is a car-crushing place—but building and maintaining ghost traps has elements of heavy industry, so Calvin rents his space away from the more populated areas.
Our clients rarely come to the office, anyway. We mostly do house calls. It’s not like they can bring their ghosts to us.
There’s a semi-professional-looking area out front, with some actual carpet, a few old chairs for visitors, and few dog-eared magazines that are even older than the chairs. The largest area is the workshop in back, where we were eating lunch. Here, the floor is bare concrete and power tools hang on the walls. There are coils of copper wire and a big blue Paragon kiln for glassmaking.
I’d brought Calvin some pork fried rice from Happy King China. I’d ordered myself some of their vegetables, but more importantly, I had a large Styrofoam cup of sweet tea. Happy King China has the best sweet tea in town. Not many people know that secret.
Calvin’s dog, a droopy-faced bloodhound named Hunter, sat under the table sniffing fried-rice aroma with his super-sensitive nose.
