by JL Bryan
“Can you capture all these ghosts?” Anna asked, and Dale rolled his eyes and swigged his beer. Being drunk seemed to numb him to the seriousness of their situation. Or else he was just unhappy with the quality and speed of our service.
“It will take some time and research,” I replied. “The problem is that this was a boarding-house for about thirty years, and a lot of these ghosts might be transients, people who were just passing through town. That makes them hard to identify, and it’s much easier to trap a ghost if you know something about who they were in life. That’s why we captured Mercy so easily. Anyway, we’ll comb through the police records and obituaries again to see what we can find, but that’ll take a while.” I was disheartened to think of how much more time it would take to clear the place out, ghost by ghost.
“How long is a while?” Dale asked.
“As soon as we can, Mr. Treadwell. We’ll dig into the research today. I’d like to set up another observation for this evening, with every camera we have watching every corner of the house. There’s so much going on, I need some kind of overview of what’s happening here. We’ll watch the house all night and see what we can find. I promise you, we’ll get rid of these things as fast as humanly possible.”
Neither of them looked particularly pleased by what I was saying. I couldn’t really blame them.
A high-pitched scream sounded from upstairs.
“Lexa!” Anna was on her feet immediately, followed by Stacey and me. Dale was half-rolling, half-leaning out of his chair when we left the room.
By the time I made it upstairs, Anna was already carrying Lexa out of the hallway bathroom, wrapped in a large towel. Anna had moved with superhuman speed, the way mothers can when their children are threatened.
Lexa was bawling and sobbing, her face pressed against her mother’s neck.
“What’s wrong?” Anna asked. “Lexa, what happened?”
“It got me,” Lexa said. “I was just taking a bath, and it grabbed me. It hurt.”
“Where?” Anna asked.
“My leg.” Lexa raised her red, crying face, then lifted the edge of her towel. Three red scratch-like marks ran from her lower thigh to her calf, and they were growing darker and redder by the second.
“Did you see what grabbed you, Lexa?” I asked.
“No. I only heard it.” She lay her cheek on her mother’s shoulder. “It was a man. He laughed when he did it.”
I walked past them into the bathroom. The bath was full, and an issue of Seventeen magazine lay on the tile floor beside it. I saw bottles of liquid soap and shampoos that had toppled over into the bath, but nothing else out of the ordinary. The room wasn’t especially cold. Whatever had attacked her didn’t seem to be in the room anymore.
When I stepped out, Dale had arrived, and was sort of trying to comfort his daughter by patting her on the shoulder. Stacey was trying reassure the girl, too, but I don’t think she was making much progress.
“I don’t understand,” Dale said, shaking his head.
“Mr. and Mrs. Treadwell, you may want to spend the night somewhere else until we can fix this,” I said.
“We don’t have anywhere to go,” Dale said.
“We can find a hotel,” Anna told him.
“That’s expensive. For how many days?” Dale looked at me.
“I can’t say for sure, but we’ll be as quick as we can.”
“It’s too much money.” Dale shook his head, and Anna gave him a look so sharp and angry I’m surprised it didn’t leave welts on his face.
“We’re going to a hotel,” Anna insisted. She carried her daughter into her room. “Come on, Lexa, let’s pack our bags.”
Dale watched them go, then turned to look at me. I expected him to make some more remarks about how much all of this was costing him, but now I saw sadness in his eyes and droopy frown.
“Listen, my severance package…” he began, then shook his head and start over. “Most of what we’ve got is tied up in this house. I lost my job, and Anna wanted to do this, so…what I’m saying is, we can’t afford to move. We can’t afford for this bed and breakfast idea of hers to fail. We’ll be busted.”
He looked helpless, almost like a child. I thought of their luxury cars and the pricey designer clothes Lexa wore. This was a family accustomed to easy prosperity, not ready for the rug to be pulled out from under them. Dale had a sad, anxious look, a man worried about failing to provide for and protect his family.
“I’m sorry.” I patted him on the arm. “We’ll take care of the ghosts. We will. You just take care of your wife and daughter, okay?”
He nodded, sniffling a little.
There wasn’t much else Stacey and I could do without our gear, so we left soon after that. Dale gave us keys to the front and side doors in case he and his family were gone when we returned.
We drove back to the office, pulled in through the garage door at the back, and started loading gear. It wasn’t exactly pleasant to unload the whole thing that morning only to reload it in the afternoon. My arms ached.
As we were getting started, Calvin wheeled out of his office. A young man walked beside him, with dark hair and those glasses with the black hipster frames. He was somewhere around my age. He looked kind of cute, actually. I hoped he was a new client.
“Ellie, Stacey, meet Jacob Weiss,” Calvin said.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Weiss,” I said in my best meeting-a-client voice. I held out my hand and he shook it. “How can we help you today?”
“I’m, uh…” He shifted awkwardly on his feet and looked at Calvin.
“Jacob is the psychic I’ve been telling you about,” Calvin said. “I called him in to assist on the Treadwell case.”
I wanted to punch or kick something, or maybe just scream and tear at my hair, dramatic stuff like that. Calvin had sprung the psychic on me like this because he knew I was too polite to complain about it right in front of the guy. I hate Calvin sometimes.
I wanted to protest that we didn’t need any help, but it was kind of hard to make that case at the moment, with everything going wrong.
“The Treadwells have a multiple haunting,” I said.
“Let’s talk in my office,” Calvin said. “Psychics aren’t supposed to get advance information.”
Sounded good to me. No reason to feed the supposed psychic a bunch of info he could just regurgitate later.
When the door was closed to Calvin’s office—a place lined with bookshelves crammed full of bundled clippings, file folders, and other paper randomness, plus overflowing cork billboards, like those serial-killer nests you see in movies where the killer collects all the evidence of his crimes—I said, “We don’t need a psychic. Things aren’t that desperate yet.”
“Just tell me what happened today.”
I quickly recounted what we’d seen at the house.
“It sounds like you could use a little extra help,” Calvin said. “Just take him on your observation tonight. He can’t hurt anything.”
“He can get in the way.”
“You’re a pro, you can handle it,” Calvin said.
I sighed. “Whatever. Do you still have that OxyContin prescription?” I knew he’d been taking it for pain at one point.
“I do, but I try to avoid using it. Why?”
“Got a couple extra for me?”
“Has the case got you down that badly?” Calvin had an amused smile.
“No, it’s bait for the junkie ghost. He seemed like the most dangerous one there—I’ll bet he’s the one that smashed apart Anna’s medicine cabinet. It would be nice if we could remove him, at least, while we try to figure out the rest.”
“All righty.” Calvin opened a desk drawer and rummaged through it, then found a brown medicine bottle and handed me a pair of pills. “Don’t take ‘em all in one place.”
“Ha.” I turned my back on him and walked out the office door.
“You,” I said to Jacob, who stood with his hands in his pockets, like a kid wai
ting for instructions. “Help me load up the van. Stacey, I want you to read through all the information we have on the Treadwell house.”
“I already did that,” she complained.
“Do it again. But first, call up the former owners of the house and see if anyone will talk to you.”
“I already did that, too. Nobody called me back.”
“Try again.”
“Why don’t any of them want to talk, anyway? I don’t get it,” Stacey said.
“That’s normal. Most people who encounter a haunting want to forget about it. Plus, there’s the guilt.”
“Guilt?” Stacey asked.
“Imagine you’ve bought a house,” Calvin said, “And later discovered it was inhabited by a dangerous or scary ghost. Now all you want to do is sell the house and escape the situation. Will you tell potential buyers about the ghost?”
“I see what you mean.” Stacey shook her head and walked over to my cubicle, where there was a land line and stacks of photocopied information from the library and Historical Association, plus files sent over by Calvin’s friends at the police department.
Jacob and I loaded all the equipment that would fit into the van—cameras, microphones, traps, the stamper, and other gear. I spoke to him very little beyond giving instructions, since I didn’t really want him there in the first place. If he didn’t like my cold attitude and wanted to leave, that would be great with me.
But the goofball just kept smiling while he worked, as if eager to help lift the heavy stuff. I had to admit it was convenient to have a guy on hand for the van-loading portion of the afternoon.
As we were finishing up, Stacey ran over, more or less hopping on the balls of her feet. I’d been vaguely aware of her voice as she used the phone at my desk. I knew from experience that calling former property owners to ask them about a ghost was typically a lot like throwing yourself against a brick wall again and again. The mansion had gone through a number of buyers over the past few decades, so she’d had a lot of calls to make.
“What are you so thrilled about?” I asked her.
“I got one!” Stacey beamed. “She’s willing to talk. The staff never gave her my last message, I guess.”
“Who is it?”
“Guess.”
“Do I have to?”
“Aw, no fun.” She raised her eyebrows. “Louisa Marsh. She said she’ll tell us whatever we want to know if we go see her.”
“Captain Marsh’s grand-niece?” I asked.
“Technically, her father was Captain Marsh’s grand-nephew,” Stacey said. “I don’t know if that makes her the great-grand-niece or what, but she’s willing to chat.”
“Good work, Stacey!” I said. It was a nice break. If we were going to speak with one former owner of the house, we couldn’t do better than Louisa, who had lived there for thirty years. “When?”
“I set it up for tomorrow afternoon. She insisted we speak to her in person, though. It’s kind of a drive, but…” Stacey shrugged.
“No, that’s great.” I slammed the back door of the van. “And we’re all done here.”
“So, do we go to the haunted house now?” Jacob asked.
“No, we don’t go right now,” I said. “What kind of experience do you even have, Jacob?”
“I’ve been training with Hattie Gardener. She lives off the coast of South Carolina, on one of the Gullah islands.”
“She’s a good woman and a strong psychic,” Calvin said. “She doesn’t travel much anymore, though.”
“Okay. Well, Stacey and I have had a long day, so we’re taking a dinner break,” I told him. “You can drive separately and meet us at the Treadwell house later. There’s no extra room in the van, anyway.”
“Whatever you want,” he said. He looked nervous.
I told Calvin good-bye, then Stacey and I drove away.
“He seems nice,” Stacey said. “You don’t like him, though, do you?”
“It’s not even him. I don’t like Calvin springing things on me. And I don’t like working with psychics.”
“Why not?”
I took a breath. “Well, there are three kinds of psychics: those who are genuine, those who are fake—some of them don’t know they’re fake, though—and the ones who are kind of in between. They may have some abilities, but they aren’t reliable. In the modern world, we have good scientific tools for finding ghosts. We don’t need to call in the witch doctors.”
Stacey nodded, taking that in. “So you don’t think he’ll help us?”
“I think he’ll get in the way. That’s one reason I wanted him to drive himself there. We’ll let him do whatever he wants so I can tell Calvin we cooperated. Then we send him home before the real work begins.”
“All right. Where are we eating? I’m starving.”
Chapter Nineteen
When we arrived at the Treadwell house, it was almost dusk. The family was gone.
Anna had left us a note wishing us luck, and Lexa had signed it, too. Nice girl. I hoped we could make her house safe for her.
When Jacob arrived, we led him in through the front doors instead of the side door. As far as he could see, the house might well be uninhabited, especially when his first sight of the interior was the graffiti-covered foyer with the shattered second-floor balustrade.
He, Stacey, and I each carried an armload of equipment. Stacey would be setting up cameras while Jacob toured the house gathering his psychic impressions, or at least making stuff up.
“Okay, that’s weird,” he said, just a few paces inside the hallway. “There’s like a fading echo in here. There’s really no spirits in this room, but there was something here.”
Stacey made wide-eyes at me. Lucky guess, I mouthed with my back to him.
Stacey gave an exaggerated shrug.
“Set something up in here,” I told her. “Just one camera.”
“Thermal or night?”
“Surprise me.”
“So, hey, Jacob,” Stacey said, while assembling a thermal on its tripod, “How did you get into being a psychic? Was it just always a thing for you?”
Great. Stacey was going to make small talk, totally wrecking my cold-shoulder approach to making Psychic Boy choose not to work with us.
“Hattie says I had to be born with it,” Jacob replied. He was strolling the edges of the room, taking in the doorways, the rotten windows, the profane juvenile-delinquent scrawl painted on the walls. “She says I must have learned to close the door as a boy, but I don’t remember anything like that. Maybe I closed the door and blocked it out. My father definitely wouldn’t have believed me if I’d started talking about ghosts.”
I waited near the parlor door, my arms crossed. Stacey seemed to be taking her time.
“So what happened?”
“There was a plane crash about a year ago,” he said. “I didn’t die. Five of us lived. Just five. When I woke up in the middle of the Alps, still buckled into my seat, you know, I saw a crowd of people standing around me, talking. Then I saw their bodies all over the snow.” Jacob shook his head. “I’ve been putting up with the spirits ever since. It’s not what I wanted. I’m an accountant, I’m supposed to be studying for my CPA exam, not…whatever we’re doing here.”
“That’s terrible!” Stacey looked up at him and stopped working. “Were any of your family or friends on the plane?”
He shook his head. “I was flying alone. I was going to meet some friends in Italy, but I had a layover in Berlin, and the plane from Berlin to Rome went down in the mountains.”
“Wait, I remember that on the news. Only like five people…” Stacey trailed off. “I’m sorry. That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, I’m really sorry to hear that,” I said.
“I wouldn’t mind if we stopped talking about it,” Jacob said, and she nodded.
We walked through the parlor and into the dining room, while Jacob kind of mumbled and nodded to himself. I held a digital voice recorder in one hand to take notes for me, and a
flashlight in the other because it was already very dark inside the house.
Jacob raised his head, and his ears perked up like an alert dog’s. He ran the rest of the way across the dining room, then rolled aside the door to the smoking room.
“Right here,” he said, walking into the middle of it. “I can hear music, maybe a scratchy phonograph…men are talking. They’re drinking, smoking, playing cards, dice…the dice are made of elephant ivory, he’s very proud of that…” Jacob closed his eyes.
“Who’s very proud?” I asked.
“The man at the center. Huge man, with a huge beard. They’re all his guests. The men are inebriated, and there are women, too, but not their wives…they’re more like. Oh. Wow.” Jacob removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t know it was going to be that kind of party.”
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Yeah, describe it in detail,” Stacey added, with a wicked grin.
“They’re prostitutes. No other reason they’d be doing that with these fat old men.” Jacob’s eyes opened again. He strolled by the fireplace, with its elaborate scrollwork, still nodding to himself. “Yeah. I can smell the smoke, the perfume…can’t you smell it?”
“Not personally.” I nodded at Stacey to set up a night vision camera here.
Jacob had another strong reaction when we walked through the kitchen. He grabbed his stomach, nearly doubling over, and winced in pain.
“Jacob?” Stacey put her stuff down and ran over to put an arm around him. I hurried over.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Ugh. A woman, with a pain in her stomach. I think it killed her. I think she died here. Or she started to die here, and finished up there, in the master bedroom.” He pointed toward the ceiling. “They carried her up there. The servants or whatever.”
“She died in the house? Do you know her name?” I asked.
“No idea. A small woman, dark hair…very religious…”
