by JL Bryan
"What about the kids?" I asked.
"Maybe her kids were abusive, too. Who knows?" Stacey shrugged. "But she probably didn't kill her own kids, right?"
"We can't rule out anything yet." I thought of the ghost who had put Calvin in his wheelchair. In life, she'd conspired with a doting admirer to kill her own husband and her kids, too. She hadn't really been the maternal type. After death, she'd stalked generations of children, taking the forms of their worst fears, feeding on the emotional energy she stirred up in them.
"Then this ghost could be a nasty one," Stacey said. "A double black widow who also just happened to murder her children along the way. Seems like she'd be able to do more than whimper in the shed."
"Such as hanging out in the nursery, smashing things," I said. "We don't know which of those ghosts is Hannah."
"Could she be both of them?" Stacey asked. "Split-personality kind of deal?"
"It's possible, if her living personality was fragmented, too. She could have a dangerous, evil side and a guilt-ridden side, each one manifesting separately now that there's no pesky living body to hold the two personalities together. Or it could just be two different ghosts."
"Thus ends the first movement in the history of your client's property," Grant said. "Now, if you would please attempt to eat something, Ellie. The baked goods are of high quality, regardless of the intrigue that led to their purchase in such absurd quantity."
"All right, all right." I picked up an oblong lemon cookie encrusted with sugar crystals the size of gaudy costume diamonds. The end I nibbled tasted fine, but I was in no mood for food. "There. I ate some."
"You should try the sandwiches," Stacey said, just before chomping into her second tuna-filled croissant. The engraved silver sandwich tray had been concealed under a matching dome.
"I'll take a doggie bag when we go. Anything else, Grant? More tales of death and tragedy at the property?"
Grant had more, but nothing stood out that I hadn't learned about before. The original house had burned in 1889, to be replaced by another one, built by the unrelated Johnson family. Ten-year-old Eliot had choked on a marble, and his younger sister had died of illness. Then the Hendricks family, whose four children had died of assorted illnesses during the 1960's, the husband dead of a household accident.
Theresa Hendricks, from whom Mackenzie had purchased the house, was still alive, but in a nursing home and was not well. Grant gave me the contact information for her nursing home in Dublin, Georgia, about two hours away.
"She did not take my phone call," Grant said. "The nurse told me she rarely speaks at all, and never on the phone. She is not particularly lucid."
"We'll have to speak to her," I said. "She lived in that house for decades. She has to know something. And you've given me plenty more to read through here." I gestured at the folders filled with photocopies of old land deeds and correspondence. "This is an amazing amount of stuff, Grant. Thank you."
"My secret is in failing to sort, label, or prioritize those documents in any way before passing them to you. It saves time."
"That's okay, Ellie loves doing that stuff," Stacey said. "Sorting, organizing, labeling..."
"I'm sure it will be great fun," Grant said.
I sipped tea and waited while they chatted about an upcoming folk-art-and-food-trucks festival at the park across the street. I was in more of a thinking mood than a talking mood, and there was plenty to think about.
Chapter Nineteen
I dropped Stacey at the office so she could grab her car, then she could go home and sleep. I drove the van home so I could head straight back to the client's later, hopefully avoiding any contact with Kara or Nicholas for the entire day ahead. Leaving my Camaro at the office might lull them into a false belief that I'd be back soon.
Back at my apartment, I checked on my cat. Bandit never seems to care if I happen to disappear for two or three days, as long as the food and water never run out. I'd recently bought him a miniature pet water fountain so he could pretend to be drinking out of the sink all the time. If I plug that in and scatter some catnip before I leave, he seems pretty happy.
If only all my relationships were that simple.
Unable to sleep, I paced in my dark apartment. The thick blackout curtains kept it like midnight inside, a solid barrier against the hateful sunlight beyond. Hunting ghosts can mean living like a vampire. I suppose the more time you spend in the world of the dead, the more like them you become.
As I paced, I flipped on a couple of lamps and read through bits and pieces of the history we'd assembled so far, between Grant's research and my own. Birth and wedding announcements, printed in tight, blocky type on copies of faded newsprint. Letters, obituaries, death certificates, most of it handwritten.
The troubled history of the property did seem to begin with Captain Gibson and his wife Hannah. After that, the house became unsafe for children, who always seemed to die at a young age from accident or disease.
Few photographs survived of the Gibson/Carlisle clan. I found one yellowed photograph that might have been a wedding portrait. Captain Gibson stood, older than his bride, a fine-looking man with a fine-looking neck beard. His face was stern, but they all looked like that in the old photographs before everyone started smiling in their pictures. His young bride Hannah was on his arm, also looking nineteenth-century serious, her nose upturned and her lips full, a beauty from an impoverished background who'd attracted a wealthy older man.
A later picture showed Hannah seated with her three children, another man standing over them. This must have been Daniel Carlisle, her second husband. He was a thin, monocle-wearing man with a much less threatening countenance than the old captain's. He dressed like a banker in a fine dark three-piece suit, which he'd likely paid for with the dead captain's money, and had a stack of books in the photograph with him. I remember Grant saying the man had worked as a printer and had been arrested for forgery years before he'd become Hannah's second husband and stepfather to her children.
I didn't have any blinding new insights as I swam through the age-old information. No sudden connection leaped forward to make the whole case crystal clear. If there was something important for me to see, my brain was too tired to pick it out.
Though Hannah's children and servants had died in a fire that destroyed the house, I couldn't find any connection to my personal undead firebug, Anton Clay. The case kept reminding me of him, though. So many innocents dead in the fire. Maybe he'd been stalking Hannah, or the young servant girl in charge of her children.
Stacey had sent me audio and video clips of any eventful recordings we'd captured so far. As usual with these cases, most of the footage just showed odd shadows or movement in the nursery, nothing definitive.
Again and again, I replayed the footage of the tiger-cub mobile, watching as it spun, watching as the whole crib shunted aside, pushed by unseen hands. I watched our baby doll rise slowly and then fly into the wall, as if hurled there in anger. I listened to the recorded bits of lullaby, still unable to decipher the words. They sounded like I should have understood them, but I didn't.
Surrendering to my wakefulness, I gave up on sleep and drove the forty minutes up to the hospital where Michael lay. His sister wasn't there to tell me to leave. Maybe she was back at school.
A couple of Savannah firefighters were there in the waiting area, keeping up their small rotating vigil for Michael. They seemed more welcoming to my presence than Melissa had been.
"Any updates?" I asked them before going in to see Michael.
"He's still breathing," replied Brad-or-Bret, whose named actually turned out to be Brend. Short for Brendan. I think. "Besides that, no news."
"Which is sometimes good news," added another firefighter, a massive, broad-shouldered guy named Cherry. I guessed it was a nickname based on his ruddy, freckled appearance. Though I suppose his parents might have been huge fans of The Outsiders.
"Any word on...brain activity?" I asked.
"The do
ctor said Michael had some, but it was minimal," Brend said.
"So basically the same as he was before the accident," Cherry said, looking down at the cards in his hands. Brend elbowed him for the joke.
"Is anybody helping Melissa?" I asked. "Is she just staying at home by herself?"
"That's what she wants," Brend said.
"Aw, she's a tough kid." Cherry waved a dismissive hand. "Been through worse. Like me. When I was her age, I hitchhiked from Shelbyville, Tennessee, all the way to—"
"Nobody cares," Brend said.
"—Toledo," Cherry finished.
"Her parents are gone," I said, and they nodded. "She's never been alone. She's always had him." I glanced down the green hospital corridor, toward Michael's room, the final destination I was still avoiding.
"She still does," Cherry said. "Mike'll be fine. Always is. I've seen him do worse. Been through worse myself. When I was Mike's age, I rode a shaky old rustbucket of a bike all the way from Pittsburgh—"
"You should probably talk to her," Brend said to me. "Female to female. That kind of thing."
"—to Ontario. Just me and my backpack. Had some cheese and crackers in there. Water bottle, too. Jansport."
"Right," I said. "I only wish she wanted to talk to me."
"She doesn't like you much, huh?" Cherry asked. He was tapping an unlit cigarette on the plastic arm of the cheap waiting-room chair, packing down the tobacco for later. He seemed unable to sit still, and he kept glancing impatiently at the cards in Brend's hand.
"Not since...this happened." I looked again in the direction of Michael's room. "I don't blame her. Michael was with me at the time."
"We're still not clear on that, either." Brend leaned forward, his lips still smiling but his eyes going a little cold. "You said a ghost?"
"Yeah," I said.
They both looked at me, neither of them quite so friendly anymore. I could have tried to explain the details—that he'd been possessed by a ghost who was stalking me, then I'd summoned a horseman ghost to strike him down. I'd saved myself at Michael's expense. I had very likely saved Stacey and our client's daughter Corinne, too, but I couldn't say that supplied a lot of comfort at the moment.
Right about then, with the guys glaring up at me, I found the extra motivation to start walking on, down the bleach-scented hallway to Michael's room. The door was open, and the lights were off except for one fluorescent panel just inside.
It's a thing you see so often in television and movies that it has a weird familiarity when you actually experience it in real life: the person you care about lying there in the bed, hurt and unconscious, the future completely uncertain. The hospital room was quiet. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.
Michael lay on the bed, unmoving, as people do in these situations. His eyes were closed, his brown hair singed close to his head by the heat of Anton Clay's ghost. He looked too small, too weak. Though he was broad-shouldered and more than six feet tall, he seemed like a helpless child in that hospital bed.
"I'm sorry," I said. The words sounded weak and useless as they hung in the air, going nowhere. "I told myself I'd keep you out of all this, and I didn't."
Slowly, I reached out a hand and touched his chest. My fingertip traced the long, twisting scar etched by the Hessian horseman's sword after I'd summoned the horseman ghost to protect me.
"You're coming back," I said. "Right? You have to come back. Not for me—forget me. You know your sister's all alone. She's waiting for you."
Michael didn't stir, not that I'd expected him to. He was breathing slowly, his heartbeat low and regular. I leaned close, nearly kissed him on the lips, then wondered if it was still my place to do that, after what I'd done. I kissed his cheek instead.
I spent a lot of my life on the border between life and death, usually fighting against things that belonged on the other side but kept trying to come back. I tried to keep the monsters over there, in the darkness.
This was a different kind of gray area between life and death, though. There was no telling which side Michael would end up on, or if he would just stay on the borderlands for years to come.
I sat with him for a long time, feeling horrified and helpless.
After a few hours, Stacey started to text me. It was time to get moving again. We had trespasses to commit, data to collect, evil souls to lay to rest.
"Come back to us," I said to Michael, squeezing his hand. "We all need you."
Then I turned and left him lying alone in that dark room, which suddenly seemed to feel like the interior of a crypt—and I've been in my share of them, looking for secrets and bones. I shivered and tried to shove that feeling away as I went back to work.
Chapter Twenty
My phone dinged a few times on my drive over to Mackenzie's house, where I was supposed to meet up with Stacey for the evening. I don't text and drive—haven't you seen the public service ads?—so this meant I was not forewarned.
A hulking black cargo van sat outside the client's house. PSI. The van was unreasonably large, I thought, almost like a windowless miniature black RV. It was the kind of vehicle that retired grandparents might use to tour America, if they were also undead creatures who needed to avoid all sunlight during the day. It wasn't exactly inconspicuous, not like our smaller blue cargo van, which looks like it could belong to anybody's cousin who's just stopping by to help move furniture.
I parked on the street and finally checked my phone.
Little Nicky's here, Stacey had texted, since she'd arrived a few minutes before me. He's strutting around being annoying.
Thanks for the warning, I shot back, then sighed and walked up to the door.
"—tell you, it's a pleasant town," Nicholas was saying. He stood in the kitchen with Stacey, who leaned back against the counter, shaking her head, arms crossed. The Hoff, still in his indoor sunglasses, rummaged through our client's refrigerator and brought out a bag of ham from the deli drawer. "Cheery. I don't see why Kara hates it here so much. But then she strikes me as a possible brutalist, aesthetically, don't you think? Probably loves massive gray concrete and ice, like her cities back home."
"Hey, the other chick's here," the Hoff said, fishing out a slice of ham and dropping it whole into his mouth.
"That's me," I said. "The other chick. What do you two want?"
"Whoa, you could be less hostile, Ellie." He shoved a second piece of ham into his mouth.
"There's bread, you know," Stacey said. "And plates."
"Nicholas?" I looked at him, crossing my own arms. "We have an investigation to run here."
"And I am now, technically, the supervising investigator," he said.
"What?"
"I said 'technically.' Obviously I'm allowing you to have your own head for now—"
"To have my own what?" I asked, cutting him off.
"It's a horse term," Stacey said. "It means he's letting you do what you want. Until he feels the need to take the reins."
"Is that what you're here to do, Nicholas? Take the reins?" I asked.
"I'm simply providing oversight."
"Yeah, we're just gonna have a quick look around," the Hoff said from the refrigerator. He was now dipping a third slice of ham directly into a mayonnaise jar. "Make sure you've wired up the gear correctly, you know, it's all pretty technical..."
"Our gear is wired up fine," Stacey said. She's the tech manager, so naturally she bristled.
"Hayden is actually the technical supervisor on this case, too," Nicholas said. The very tips of his lips curled up, as if he knew how much this might annoy her and had chosen to enjoy it.
"What?" Stacey snapped, looking at Hayden the Hoff, who saluted her with a finger slathered in mayonnaise. A blob of mayo flew up and splatted onto the molding behind him. "I do not need a technical supervisor," Stacey said.
"Again, that's just official, for the company paperwork," Nicholas said. "I know both of you ladies are quite capable of operating independently. That was part of the appeal of purc
hasing your firm in the first place."
"Well, right." Stacey sounded a little mollified. "As long as you recognize that."
"Nonetheless, Hayden will need to inspect all the instrumentation you've set up in the house, to ensure it has been done properly."
"Excuse me?" Stacey stiffened up, un-mollified again.
"Oh, yep." Hayden took a long chug of almond milk directly from the carton Mackenzie had left behind. "Got to check your work. Come on, we'll get those cameras fixed up right." He wiped his milky mouth on his forearm and picked up a heavy black electrician's bag from the floor. "Where's the biggest install? Upstairs?"
Stacey cast me a deeply annoyed look as Hayden started toward the front stairs.
"Meanwhile, you and I should discuss a few administrative details of the case." Nicholas kept his sky-colored eyes locked on mine, unblinking, as if trying to hypnotize me like Kaa in the Jungle Book movie. I gathered he meant for us to speak privately. That hardly sounded appetizing.
Hayden whistled and called for Stacey, which made her turn red with fury.
"You'd better go with him," I said. "Don't keep the Hoff waiting."
"I'm only going so I can make sure he doesn't screw up our gear. He'll probably get Miracle Whip all over the infrared lens." Stacey stalked after him.
"Is there a good place for a discreet conversation?" Nicholas asked me.
"Why? You don't want your buddy listening in on us?"
"That is part of it." He didn't seem to be joking. Now I was a little intrigued, despite very much not wanting to feel that way.
"We can go outside." I led him to the small courtyard, with its little gardens and high brick walls. He closed the door carefully behind us, then glanced at the windows upstairs, as if checking to make sure they were closed.
"As I was telling your assistant, it really is a lovely little city you've got here," Nicholas said. His eyes passed over the antique brickwork and ornate peaked windows of the house beside us. "Charming. Quaint. My own town used to look like a bit like this. I've seen pictures."
